I have always maintained that it is no mere coincidence that the Nips got nuked twice in WW2 and later come out with a plethora of atomic monsters, headed by Godzilla.
Rich irony then that the Fukushima reactor was a commercial US jobbie and not a home grown one or a russ or french design.
It is with no wonder or surprise that I see that the blogosphere is rich with ongoing stories about Fukushima, and indeed elevated ambient levels of radiation across the US mainland.
I enclose again an image I have posted before, image is a link to full size version.
I was just reading a piece about a medical doctor in the USA who told a patient that he thought the recent increased levels of thyroid problems in children in his practice was related to Fukushima.
Really?
Might as well ask the guy in the Godzilla costume, it would be as relevant, accurate and scientifically sound.
As in, the medical doctor is far more qualified than the guy in the Godzilla costume to diagnose and treat thyroid illnesses in children, that’s why one has a licence to practice medicine of children and the other one doesn’t, but both are equally unqualified to state anything at all about radiation sources, spread, exposure and poisoning, which is why neither of them are licensed to practice nuclear engineering.
It reminded me of a party I was at a while ago, there was a senior nuclear medicine guy there, and a guy who had recently retired from the UK nuclear industry, and who had even worked at Dounreay (one of the now defunct UK fast breeders) where “worked at” meant one of the top scientists who still isn’t really allowed to talk about anything much.
The Dounreay guy is someone I always make a point of talking to on the rare occasions we meet, so anyway, we were all there, and certain metallic isotopes came up, namely caesium (bad, if you are a blogosphere type) and thorium (good, if you etc etc) and talk of thorium pebble bed reactors and so forth.
What is really all boils down to in truth is this;
1/ there are several different sorts of “radiation”, when talking about nuclear radiation, rather than just the electromagnetic spectrum, you tend to not get just the one sort from isotope X, you tend to get a mixture.
2/ broadly speaking, if you want to generate power, you want heat, because broadly speaking (there are exceptions to every case) a power plant is just a big kettle and steam turbine, you just use nukes to boil the water instead of coal or oil or gas.
3/ broadly speaking, ionising radiation is easier to shield than gamma rays etc, broadly speaking a couple of sheets of paper will stop alpha particles (electrons) but beta particles (protons and neutrons etc) are much nastier because they change what they hit, shame if that is human tissue, and they penetrate paper like it wasn’t there, and of course gamma rays are the proverbial light through a window when it comes to mere matter.
4/ broadly speaking, the more heat you want, and you want a *lot* to make a decent sized kettle, the more energetic and prominent all the above are, and all of the above are really by products of the heat you want, they are *not* the method used to heat the water in the kettle, the nuclear material does that, it is simple thermal conduction that does 99.99% of the water heating in the kettle, the trouble is if you put the kettle directly on to this nuclear hob, the beta radiation, which is really proton and neutron bombardment, tends to make the kettle radioactive, and the water in it, and the gamma rays won’t be too healthy either, so 95% of reactor design is all about letting the “good” heat energy out while keeping the “bad” radiation in.
So anyway, this party, the nuclear medicine guy was talking about there is more thorium than we could ever use, free energy, blah blah blah, so the Dounreay guy says sadly it is not as simple as that, *I* can tell you how a plane flies, I literally could not design one from scratch to save my life, but nuclear medicine guy isn’t having any of it, and starts blabbing.
Dounreay guys tell him, I am sure you are eminently qualified in your field, which is nuclear medicine, and if I have cancer I’d be delighted to be treated by you, but your knowledge of nuclear physics is actually considerably less than zero, because the 0.01% of the subject that you are aware of, and have some expertise in, leads you to think you know enough to even have an opinion about the other 99.99% of the field, and my good man, you do not.
BTW I have had long talks with Dounreay guy, very interesting man indeed, building nuclear kettles is no problem whatsoever, so in theory there is as much energy there as we could ever want, the problem is the kettles get radioactive themselves, and so you need a system for dealing with that scrap, even that isn’t a problem (see banana in the chart above) the problem is the system that deals with that scrap will eventually itself become contaminated, and people have unrealistic demands about THAT layer that make the whole thing a non starter.
Commercial fusion power plants? I asked him. He said we couldn’t build another Dounreay today even if we wanted to, and a fusion plant would be to Dounreay as Dounreay is to a small commercial GE reactor. Look at steam, boilers started on land, eventually they got good enough to go in ships, eventually they got good enough and small enough to go in locomotives, building a fusion plant today is like trying to build a steam powered aircraft.
We aren’t smart enough, hence ITER and CERN etc.
This, however, isn’t about the future of nuclear power.
This, is about Godzilla, which is the monster created to embody all our fears, and all our fears are based on ignorance, and there are none more ignorant on any given subject than those who have some level of skill and knowledge in another field, and who assume their competence in that field is any kind of positive factor when it comes to any other field, when in fact it is a strong negative indicator.
My original trade was marine engineering, and I sort of drifted into IT 30 years ago, my skill, competence and experience in those fields is the worst possible indicator of my ability to make any sort of judgement whatsoever about for example aircraft design and flight, even though many of the same tools, fasteners and physical laws and materials are at play.
Subconsciously, we all know this, we are out of control, literally, it has been hundreds of years since it was possible for one man, even a genius, to know as much of 50% of everything that was known.
Hence Godzilla, *because* they got nuked, the monster under the bed and in the shadows that was never seen in our nightmares became flesh and walked in daylight for the Nips.
Fukushima, Chernobyl, 3 Mile, Nagasaki…. shit happens.
The very definition of evolution, whether it be biological or scientific or technological, embodies the fundamental principle that for every birth there is a death, and it is this birth and death transition that allows the evolution to happen.
The only other option is extinction as a species, and the game itself will carry on without us, we can play, or not play, but we do not own the ball, the field, or make the rules.
Even if ALL the worst case blogobullshit about Fukushima holds true (or man made global warming H^H^H^ climate change, etc etc etc) so what?
Compared to all the other shit going down on a daily basis all over the world, it’s just another thing, not even a very big thing, unless you happen to be one of the unlucky ones.
It’s just lost in the background radiation, eat a banana a year, live within 50 miles of an operating nuke power plant for a year, or sleep in a bed with two other prople for a year, all the same doses of radiation. 0.1 uSv
Fly from NY to LA once, or live in a stone brick or concrete building for a year, same dose. 70 uSv
Live in your own body (internal radiation from the Potassium isotopes in your body) for one year, or one week in Fukushima exclusion zone, same dose. 390 uSv
etc etc
Meanwhile you’re eating phthalate wrapped foods, smoking, drinking, crashing cars, falling down stairs, rock climbing, riding pushbikes in the city traffic.
Godzilla>
Give me a fucking break, the REALLY scary fucking monster is ignorance, coupled with decisions made pandering to or exploiting it.
Hey afor, mind your definitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_particle
And both will change what they hit, alpha particles have a large chance of knocking some protons loose or creating some other radioactive isotopes, while beta particles generally dick with other electrons.
Comment by Digger Nick — January 4, 2014 @ 4:43 pm
Grin… I am now going to invoke the “broadly speaking”, and hide..lol
I am NOT a nuclear physicist, I know I don’t know shit.
Comment by wimminz — January 4, 2014 @ 4:48 pm
This post touched some raw nerve, the bungle up concerning alpha, beta, and gamma particles notwithstanding. I believe there is a huuuuuuuuuuuge problem with medical doctors, at least here in the US, namely nobody checks on how current their knowledge is. An airline pilot has to be rigorously recertified every six months; a truck driver every two years. However, a medical doctor who got his license, say, in 1970, may still be allowed to practice medicine without anybody checking on how current his knowledge is. (The influx of worthless wimminz into medicine, thanks to quotas, compounds the problem, but I am not discussing this here.)
So, you may have some screwball who specialized in radiology, got his license in 1970 (back then “radiology” was nearly synonymous to “X-rays”), and because he is considered a radiologist his now-worthless license permits him to expand to gamma cameras, which were virtually a laboratory curiosity in 1970, a totally different animal (it requires the injection of a minute quantity of a radioactive tracer—the chemical element depends on the targeted volume—into the patient’s body; look it up). I have personal experience with such screwballs. In my case, I realized the bigshot, highly-compensated radiologist had “blinded” the gamma camera. Very fortunately, though, he was trying to scan a calibration standard, called Jaczak phantom (look it up), but had that phantom been a real patient, he would have most certainly overdosed him!!!! Try explaining to a screwball like him the rudiments of nuclear instrumentation, such as paralyzable and non-paralyzable detectors, which was applicable in my case; it’s like the proverbial talking to a brick wall. Such screwballs can maim and kill people. Modern technology is wonderful, but it must be used by the knowledgeable only.
I have also heard of hushed-up fuckups in “prestigious” research centers where, for example, the medical technologist could not tell the required μCi (I guess they still use prehistoric units; the proper SI unit is the Bq) from mCi, thus overdosing the unfortunate patient with radioactive iodine (the tracer), wiping out his thyroid. From my experience, “medical physicists” usually are rejects of real physics.
Comment by Tim — January 4, 2014 @ 9:13 pm
See, two things, no, actually, three, though the first two are related.
1/ To anyone who has studied nuclear physics, it is obvious from my post I never did, I couldn’t have made such a fundamental flaw (I looked up my old textbooks, the correct data was there, clearly I never actually LEARNED in, and in the interim it got blended)
2/ I read your post / comment and know what you are saying, but don’t really understand the reasons / examples, I guess it is a potassium iodide / iodate thing? As in sounds close enough to the non expert, sounds utterly different to the expert.
3/ Following on from that, I can give you 1970 radiologist examples in my field, indeed I have done on this blog, and I know 99.99% of people who read this blog don’t even see them, because they lack the specialist knowledge in common to realise what is being said… and I could in private share similar stories from other people in other fields, that they have told me.
Since I talked about planes in the post…
Air France 296
Comment by wimminz — January 4, 2014 @ 9:33 pm
OK, my apologies. Let me make myself clear(er). The patient is injected with the radiopharmaceutical (tracer), which spreads through his body via the blood stream. The gamma camera through collimators (which basically usually select trajectories of gamma rays—sought-for byproducts of disintegrations of the radioactive nuclei of the tracer—out of the patient normal to the detector surface) picks up part of that radiation and forms an image. (The detectors have flat surfaces, so the problem reduces to reconstructing a 3D object from its projections.) You may find more on gamma cameras on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_camera . A gamma camera requires significant number-crunching capability, so in 1970, to use my example, the usual way to form an image was driving the X, Y, and blanking inputs of an oscilloscope with an attached photographic camera set to infinite exposure. (This treatment was not meant to be exhaustive.)
On the issue of iodine now. As you know from your chemistry classes, the elements are classified with respect to their atomic number (number of protons in their nucleus). Another number, called mass number, shows how many protons AND neutrons an element has in its nucleous. Elements with the same number of protons (atomic number) but different number of neutrons (different mass numbers) are called isotopes. As the chemical properties of an element are determined by its atomic number alone (which determines the number of electrons in the outer shells, which are really the only ones participating in chemical reactions), two isotopes have the same chemical properties, but one of them may have too many neutrons (too high a mass number), so it could be unstable.
Such is/was the case with 131I (iodine with mass number 131). Now, iodine loves to congregate in the thyroid. So, the idiot technologist who confused the μ with the m prefices injected the patient with one thousand times more 131I than necessary for the scan, that 131I ended up into the poor guy’s thyroid, and the thyroid was fried.
As 131I is a byproduct of nuclear reactions (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131 and remember that unlike nuclear reactions, chemical reactions leave the nucleus of the participating atoms intact), potassium iodide pills flood the body with stable iodine nuclei (iodine atoms in ionic form), which are harmless, but nonetheless congregate in the thyroid. That way, the thyroid becomes saturated with stable iodine nuclei and is likely to absorb the unstable 131I.
I hope I have made myself clear(er) now. Again, my apologies if my post caused any confusion. My intention was not to show off; I just wanted to highlight a pervasive problem with some examples. Thank you for your posts, which become vehicles of exchanging great ideas.
Comment by Tim — January 4, 2014 @ 11:15 pm
much appreciated, stuff like chemical “stability” of isotopes, I guess I was kind of aware of it, but the example you just gave was a bit of a light bulb moment..
Re the iodate / iodide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_iodate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_iodide
I also recall chemistry etc is very much a lego process, similarly shaped molecules nesting in appropriately shaped receptors in other molecules and all that jazz, but similar shapes is why unexpected and wrong things can bond to those receptors and cause medical issues.
So “potassium” isn’t active, it gets flushed, and so the “radiation treatment” does nothing but saturate the thyroid with “safer” iodine, it doesn’t really treat radiation at all, and it floods the thyroid with iodine, which isn’t ideal, and it doesn’t do much for the rest of the contaminated body.
Correct? ish? lol
Comment by wimminz — January 4, 2014 @ 11:37 pm
To the best of my knowledge, yes, you are correct. I am not a biologist. Neither am I licensed to offer medical advice.
Comment by Tim — January 5, 2014 @ 12:00 am
“To the best of my knowledge, yes, you are correct. I am not a biologist. Neither am I licensed to offer medical advice.”
thanks for that.
all seems a bit “well, freddie was killed in the explosion, but thanks to modern medicine we have managed to keep his cock alive…”
Comment by wimminz — January 5, 2014 @ 12:15 am
anyone ever game a radioactive wimminz?
Comment by Joe — January 7, 2014 @ 9:30 am