Book review: On This Earth, A Shadow Falls by Nick Brandt

Hi Jeff,

Sorry for the late reply—been out with the wife and kids to the zoo today!
[Fitting place to go in a way… and so sad to think this is the prison that awaits the animals if we destroy their real and natural homes]

Believe it or not, this is the one area where I really endeavor to keep my mouth shut. Not on zoos, on nuclear 🙂 I do that for two reasons: one, more than confidence, I have scientific certainty [as far that goes] in the merits of nuclear power and am happy to leave it that (the plants to produce it, as any plant, are limited in their operational safety only by the people that man them, and the governments that regulate them—people are always the weak link); two, I’ve learnt that debating nuclear power [I know that’s not what you’re after, but this comment may well invite it] is a fruitless task. Just better left alone.

This said, you know how I love conversation. And you’re a pal. So here we go 🙂 Your questions:

1) “Nuclear is safe; nuclear will be the end of us” –> where does the truth lie?

Actually a supremely difficult question, Jeff. But before I say why—let’s just be aware that ionizing radiation is all around us, always has been, always will be and we are radioactive ourselves. I’ve often found with my family and friends, who aren’t scientifically literate, there’s a feeling of foreign or alien-ness with nuclear power and radiation. Like we’re messing with something unnatural. Nothing could be further from the truth. The funniest thing [ultimately not funny and most trying to my patience, if I’m honest] to me is the Greens, who should be this energy’s greatest champions but are actually its greatest enemies. Beggars belief. But back to your question Jeff, it’s a difficult one because so much of the science of how ionizing radiation affects our biology is basically informed guesswork. Less than lethal doses — “LD50” etc — and which effects are which is all up in the air: the effects of radiation in this non immediately lethal domain are called “stochastic” [probabilistic in nature]. There are all sorts of effects, but typically we’re looking at long term maladies as a result of genetic degradation [degradation in a cell’s instruction set] which gives rise to cancers; but it is very hard to tie down the cause of a cancer. We’re into “there’s a 60% chance it was this, 30% it was this, 10% it was this, etc.” Yes, you can choose the most likely possibility and say it was that, but would you like the death penalty, for instance, administered like this way? Certainty, or should I say, certainty past rigorous error margins, is what we want. [and can’t get]
On the reporting of stochastic results [the probability ones] there is another spanner in the works—methodology. Great chance for human error/model error etc. “Anti” people can commission studies with the statistics loaded to report results they’d like; the “pro” camp could do the same. Please note the use of “can” and “could” there. So it’s guesswork. But all scientific knowledge — even hard mechanics [physics of billiard balls etc] — is guesswork, please take that into account.
I used to work with radiation instruments: from the very, very big ones [banks of full body detectors, a few million dollars a pop for one of them] to the small: little strips of special plastic worn in a badge to track how many neutrons pass through your body. As part of that specialism, I obviously had to learn how we measure ionizing radiation. And what I found there, after numerous courses and seminars from the HPA in England to Karlsruhe in Germany, is that we are all still learning how to measure [correctly] ionizing radiation’s effect on the human body. The human body is mostly water, so most of the basic models assume what effect [how much energy] a certain exposure of ionizing radiation would have on a comparable volume of water –> and correlate that energy transmission 1:1 onto humans. Models and our test apparatus is evolving and the ICRP [a UN institution, and despite “anti” proponents best attempts to paint the ICRP otherwise, it’s basically a collection of scientific anoraks only interested in the science and the research and the data—I know, I’ve visited their head office once. It is also full of the ambitious and self-centered PhD types, but even they aren’t the corporatist new-world-order types antis wish they were] so the ICRP now uses what it calls a “phantom,” a mock up of a human body, matched for local tissue densities and size and weight, etc., to a real human body –> this is what they do the “how much radiation imparts how much energy?” tests on, and tie it to models of dose. As I say, mk.I of the phantom was a vat of water [and it was still prettay prettay close to the newer answers!].
We can only measure from one point, practically—in real life on a plant I mean; you couldn’t have workers clad head to toe in detectors] but ionizing radiation propagates in three dimensions and from all angles: a detector on your chest is not going to detect very well something coming at your heels, etc. So the metrics for measuring radiation dose are all full of the engineer’s best friend: fudge factors. You might have a radiation detector that reads out a nice clean dose rate numeral on an LCD display; but what we have to appreciate is, that number has been calculated on the back of all this phantom stuff and the fudge factors—it’s just a guess. And that’s for radiation outside the body, hitting you. What happens if you ingest some radioactive material is yet more difficult still and while our models are radically better than anything we had even two decades ago, they are still pretty rough and ready [to my eyes]. The difficult bit is after ingestion we have two areas of confusion: how radiation affects tissue; how certain elements and molecules move through the human body. These are tiny, tiny things we’re talking about. Sometimes they diffuse the walls of tissue, sometimes they get lodged on something, sometimes they pass straight through you. Very very hard to accurately, and consistently, model.

So it is difficult to approach the word “safe” here.

Large doses of ionizing radiation are obviously not good. But we can’t very well do a test to see how much radiation it takes to kill the average person [and there are many different types and exposure routes to test]. You might get permission for that experiment [and the number of subjects you’d need] in Hitler’s Germany, but thankfully not much luck in today’s enlightened times! We have some data from the Hiroshima bombs; patchy information from Chernobyl, and so on… but in the case of the bombs we’re talking a sudden unprotected exposure to massive, massive amounts of ionizing radiation: very different and not properly comparable with the models we need; in the case of Chernobyl, the Soviet authorities actively destroyed information rather than preserve it, and the paucity of scientific-grade info there is a shame. So we don’t have much useful information at the high dose end of the scale. What we do is kill animals with radiation and extrapolate like results for the human case. There’s no reason to seriously doubt those results. At any rate, what I said stands—large doses of ionizing radiation are obviously not good for us.
There are basically no opportunities for this sort of large exposure to happen in today’s station environment—loss of containment has been reduced to being possible only by mechanical failure through ill maintained equipment, or natural disaster on a catastrophic scale. Both are more than one in ten-housand probabilities. One is human negligence; the other a feature of life on Earth. And the first one is obviously very strictly watched by a country’s enforcement authorities. If a reactor vessel fails in that way—it says a million times more about the government in the country of operation than the reactor design or the industry in general.

So people are the most dangerous thing in regards to this power source. If we were to make the argument “yes, so that’s why we shouldn’t have nuclear plants—people can’t be trusted,” I’d return that it then doesn’t make sense, considering the number of industrial accidents, deaths, environmental pollution and social damage [think indigenous peoples moved on because they live over an oil deposit, etc] because of people, to continue with other power sources, either; in fact, they are much higher up the priority list on these terms. Why aren’t we shutting coal stations down for instance? which by the way don’t put proper radionuclide filters on their exhaust stacks and so pump out a serious number of Becquerels [count of nuclear material] into the environment. Unchecked, unregulated. To give you an idea, a nuclear station would lose its site-license indefinitely if it once put out even a hundredth of the activity [nuclear activity] that coal stations routinely do. But the radionuclides in coal are what we call NORM [naturally occurring radioactive material], i.e., non-refined activity, so it doesn’t raise eyebrows [it should].

So I guess I’m asking your opinion on the whole Fukushima fallout? Is the fallout being over played by the alternative media? To some degree I imagine so, but how many cumulative events can we sustain?

Well, the media has completely lost the plot and forgotten its place in the world I think, hasn’t it. And can’t be trusted for an opinion on anything. Because they overplay everything; ignore important things, report the unimportant… they no longer flatly give us news, they give us “stories” now. The newscasters used to be boring people who were gifted with clear voices and good concentration; they are now superstars with great hair and adverts for their show. I think we have a culture thesedays of reveling in panic, one step removed. A kind of pretend game, as if we were in the middle of a crisis ourselves [a comment on how safe life is for us]. We love the panic—especially good when it’s somewhere we know or is reasonably close and we can get all dramatic and serious about it, but secretly know we’re safe and it wasn’t our back yard. I think we see the media enjoying this aspect of the Fukushima meltdown—the real story, as it always is, is the collusion of government and private business, one being undiscernable from the other. When that happens, we [the general populace] lose. Always.
I don’t keep up with alternative news, but if it is anything with a “eco” or green leaning, I’d just write off anything they do on nuclear power and Fukushima. From a technical stand point, that is.
I read the updates on it from the ICRP website—that’s the only source to trust, but I appreciate this isn’t the answer for everyone. In your case Jeff, I’d stick to your very good and noble standpoint—stay neutral, read as much as you can, make your own mind up. Then change it with more, better info.

The technical answer for how many cumulative events can we sustain is difficult for the reasons outlined above. But also because we don’t understand any lasting damage from previous disasters. There have been so few and the effects are always small in scale enough to be stochastic and therefore very tough for the biologists and statisticians to tease out for us. How many people died from cancer thanks to Chernobyl is as ridiculous a debate now as “is there a God?” or “Guns should be banned.” There is so much misinformation, bad science and bad scientists involved, I think the neutral estimate on it is now impossible.
But to give you an idea, my idea, about these disasters consider this… The toxic chemicals from the BP Gulf of Mexico spill will remain toxic for eternity, unless some kind organisms reprocess the molecules for us and make them something else and something safe. Radioactive materials can stay active for a very very long time, sometimes hundreds of thousands of years, but unlike toxic chemicals not so forever. The more dangerous nuclides are the more active [radiologically active] ones, but because of the way the physics works, the more active nuclides decay away quicker [that’s what the activity is, the atoms are changing configuration –> into different atoms, and kicking out the difference in mass and binding energy as photon energy or particles or both]. Think “the candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.” So the nuclides that people may scare us with, about how long they remain radioactive, aren’t really the ones we should talk about –> the stuff that decays quick and is very active, the fizzy stuff, that’s what we should talk about. Though we worry about both, of course. No one more than those in the nuclear industry. Genuinely.

I’ve worked in nuclear and can tell you, in my experience at least, no one is more worried about radiation — interested in researching and understanding and better mastering it — than the nuclear industry and the professionals that run it. It’s not like that top to bottom. Most of the technicians are just regular guys who wanted a steady job and lived in the area of a station. They lean a little of the science to be able to do their jobs—but rarely have an interest in it. Fair enough too. They, like everyone, though are rigorously safe. While I’m there, on the people, let me remind everyone that the immediate areas around plants are always the most pro-nuclear. Because of all the jobs and money and community [people] it brings, yes; but also for trust –> many of these stations have been running for decades, without incident, and local communities are well sold on the safety aspect. Compare this to how locals feel about fracking in their fields or chemical plants near their beaches, etc. The nuclear fuel cycle is strictly watched and regulated from refinement to disposal—it’s not water tight, not run by robots, but it’s as good a process as there is: even trivial waste, stuff that has merely passed through a reactor building, is better watched over and guarded than the gold in Fort Knox. It’s laughable that petroleum can do something like what happened in the Gulf Mexico — not even the first time a spill has ever happened in the history of petrochemicals, remember! — and does not get shut down there and then. From the perspective of people working in nuclear it’s just baffling how other industrial sectors don’t get as tightly scrutinized, when they are so obviously doing a bad job. Anyway, I’ve done the classic Tom drifteroo there…

I’m not sure how many meltdowns we can sustain. None would be my default answer, therefore.
[I’d also invite the question, how many Gulfs of Mexico can we sustain? How much more coal burning can we sustain? And when I say we, I mean the animals in Nick Brandt’s book, too.]

But just on the theme of your question, Jeff. Honestly, I think the biggest two problems are general scientific illiteracy: people don’t even know what radiation is—and I don’t mean thickos and the working class. If you know someone with a bit of science, ask them what radiation is. I bet you they um and ah and can’t give you a short sharp answer. The longer they talk, the less they know. Following from this first problem, the second: the media’s total inability to report on the sciences well. It’s shocking how many Fukushima articles were written by humanities graduates and just got things terribly wrong. And sad because that’s what sticks. Even writers with some scientific training, as the above test illustrates, seem to have basic conceptual difficulties, to my eye. And this isn’t easy stuff, to be fair. The hardest thing with being a champion of nuclear, why I won’t ever really get into it, is you need hours sometimes years to explain some of the concepts; but the audience is uninterested in dry science and demands soundbite sized information. And this is the problem, it’s a PR battle [the technical battle is won, hands down, in nuclear’s favor. No one with any scientific rigor could deny it].

So to wrap up… I’d say that it’s obviously not as dangerous as some would like us to think: the day the tsunami and earthquake hit, some plant workers on a stricken Nisseki oil refinery lost their lives in a fire; no one died due to radiation exposure in Fukushima. They still haven’t. But it’s also self-evidently dangerous stuff—the minute we’re lax, bad things can happen. Forced to choose between a petroleum fire or a core meltdown, I think we’d all take the fire [though these aren’t commensurate: how about between all the oil spill between Chernobyl and now, or the one meltdown at Fukushima? I’d take Fukushima in that case]

Anyway, I can’t afford it this month, but I’m buying this book too! Don’t let the kids and their pens near it!! 😀

P/S Cree Indian quote is truth, unvarnished. So people will probably try and neutralize it with jokes or irony or put it in the box of quaint things indigenous people say… If we could ever figure out how to live without money, that would be the age to live in!

Jeff,

A quick P/S for you. It has just struck me that I probably didn’t address your first query.

I can understand the basic premiss that nuclear energy is capable of producing large amounts of energy far more efficiently than other means that are currently available. It is relatively safe when all things go as planned, but when things go south (say Fukushima) it would seem that things can spiral out of control in major way. I guess the question I have is where does the truth lie?

On meltdowns, yeah when things go south like that, it’s not good news at all. So we don’t want that to happen. Design engineers and regulators work really hard on plans for that not happening. We can design — and we have designed — new reactors to the best possible spec to avoid this: but it takes a hell of a lot of money and time to get one of them done. Ultimately political indecision and cowardice is what gets in the way of new build. So the more common mode is to try and improve what we already have. And this is where more money and time is spent [unfortunately].
An aside: Reactors are quite similar to planes. Both aviation and nuclear are very safety oriented industries—there’s no room for error: when it does go wrong, people will die. And they both have huge fixed operating costs. Operating lifespans are similar. How long do you think a 747 is good for? About 50 years? Likewise a nuclear reactor [so you can quickly imagine there are a lot of reactors coming to the end of their working lives].

So a massive amount of thought, design, proposal and permission has gone into the operation of a nuclear plant. Engineers have thought of and designed, as far as is practicable, for every possible emergency they could think of. And it’s passed muster with the engineers and scientists working on the regulation side. This body of operating instructions and courses of action and safety measures is recorded and works as an official document, called The Safety Case. This is what a station stands on.

So when something like Fukushima happens, that’s a sequence of events so improbable and unexpected that they haven’t been catered for — or anticipated — in the safety case; and the regulators have agreed with that call.

This is the general reason that meltdowns are so very, very rare. Much more rare than plane crashes—and aviation is allowed to use “fly by wire” computer technology in their safety systems, which greybeard regulators still deny nuclear. If we had that, we’d be even safer. This gives you an idea how rigorously thought out safety cases are. It’s practically impossible to go wrong. Yet, it can and will go wrong as it did Fukushima.

Was that the fault of the reactor?
The regulators? [c.f., rubber stamping of the safety case; maintenance of the facility]
The site licensee? [TEPCO]

Bits of all three—with massive weight toward the last two. In my opinion, you can think of those two as almost the same thing. Like ex-bankers working in banking regulation… we saw what that did for economics in 2011. So TEPCO, the Japanese Government, we saw what that did for Fukushima [a fate more or less sealed when they approved the safety case, and built the plant].
Reactor designs are better or worse. I shan’t comment on the taurus design at Fukushima as I’ve never been around them much; I visited a station in Finland once which used a very similar design—originally an American spec, if I remember correctly. Might have been GE [not Westinghouse]. I worked on an AGR [Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor], a very idiosyncratic design and they only ever built two. The cooling gas on them is carbon dioxide, so just on first principles, you’re not going to get many fires with that [the designer’s biggest fear at the time, after the fire at Windscale]. AGR were a failed model, ultimately, very expensive and impractical to run, though technically excellent [high thermal efficiency and excellent safety case]. Basically an example of what happens when you let the anoraks design a station [what they did!]. They went back to practical engineer designed stations after that 🙂
I’ve also worked on the more standard reactor design: PWR [pressurized water reactor]. They are reliable and well understood: the biggest threat to the safety case there is the coolant, the pressurized water, boiling. Similar thing happened at Fukushima [loss of coolant].

Nuclear reactors [any power reactor really] are just glorified kettles. Machines for making steam. We want steam to drive turbines, turbines give us electricity. Just like there’s more than one way to skin a cat, there’s more than one way to boil up some water. So the measure to keep in mind when you’re looking at all these different generation methods and the arguments for/against them, is the cost per per volume of steam produced. And not just the financial cost—decide your own metrics, is it worth the environmental degradation for the KWs of power from the steam from burning brown coal, China’s favorite, for example? Not in my opinion.

Anyway, hope this helps a little. Once we’ve lost control of a fission reaction, that’s the ball game. But loss of control can only happen, by definition in a situation no-one has put controls in for. So thinking of every situation, and catering for it in the design is the key. When something melts down, it’s not because the reactor is unsafe, per say; it’s more likely something no-one, not even the regulators, saw coming.

Save massive natural disaster, people really are limiting factor on the safety.