I have
watched a TV programme called ‘Fear Factor.’ In the series there are
contestants who have to confront their worst fears to see who bails out and who
can fight the fear and get through. People who are afraid of heights are made
to Bungee-jump off a high bridge, and people who are scared of spiders or
insects are made to get in a bath full of spiders. In virtually all cases the
contestants later say that the fearful experience was not actually as bad as
they feared. So the fear of the fear was greater than the fear itself ‘when the
chips were down.’ This is often the case in life, that the fear of some factor
turns out to be worse than the experience itself. The human mind builds a very
scary image in the imagination. The imagination then feeds the fear. If the
picture in the imagination is not very specific or clear it is worse, because
the fear factor feeds on the unknown. This is what has happened in the public
mind concerning nuclear power over the last half century. Concepts concerning
nuclear reactions and nuclear radiation are in themselves complicated and
mysterious. Over the last couple of decades physics advances in fields such as
quantum mechanics, which is linked to nuclear processes has compounded matters
for the public. The image of strong and mysterious forces and effects is now
well entrenched. There are Hollywood movies and TV programmes about space
travellers or alien invaders who use time travel and quantum forces, and then
battle to evade the dangerous intergalactic nuclear zones. A consequence of all
this is that internationally the public is now really ‘spooked’ when it comes
to the topic of nuclear power. A real ‘fear factor’ looms over the mere word
‘nuclear.’ Newspapers love this, and really push imagery like; ‘nuclear leak’
or ‘radiation exposure.’ To a nuclear physicist like me, I look upon such
public reaction half with amusement and half with dismay. The amusement comes
from the fact that so many people can be scared so easily by so little. It is
like shouting: “Ghost in the bedroom,” and everyone runs and hides in the
hills. The dismay reaction is that there is a body of anti-nuclear activists
who do not want the public to know the truth, and the anti-nukes enjoy stoking
the fear factor and maintaining public ignorance. Let us now ponder the
Fukushima nuclear incident which has been in the news again lately. Firstly let
us get something clear. There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster. Total number
of people killed by nuclear radiation at Fukushima was zero. Total injured by
radiation was zero. Total private property damaged by radiation….zero. There
was no nuclear disaster. What there was, was a major media feeding frenzy
fuelled by the rather remote possibility that there may have been a major
radiation leak. At the time, there was media frenzy that “reactors at Fukushima
may suffer a core meltdown.” Dire warnings were issued. Well the reactors did
suffer a core meltdown. What happened? Nothing. Certainly from the ‘disaster’
perspective there was a financial disaster for the owners of the Fukushima
plant. The plant overheated, suffered a core meltdown, and is now out of
commission for ever. A financial disaster, but no nuclear disaster. Amazingly
the thousands of people killed by the tsunami in the neighbouring areas who
were in shops, offices, schools, at the airport, in the harbour and elsewhere
are essentially ignored while there is this strange continuing phobia about
warning people of ‘the dangers of Fukushima.’ We need to ask the more general
question: did anybody die because of Fukushima? Yes they did. Why? The Japanese
government introduced a forced evacuation of thousands of people living up to a
couple of dozen kilometres from the power station. The stress of moving to
collection areas induced heart attacks and other medical problems in many
people. So people died because of Fukushima hysteria not because of Fukushima
radiation. Recently some water leaked out of the Fukushima plant. It contained
a very small amount of radioactive dust. The news media quoted the radiation
activity in the physics measure of miliSieverts. The public don’t know what a
Sievert or a milliSievert is. As it happens a milliSievert is a very small
measure. Doubling a very small amount is still inconsequential. It is like
saying: “Yesterday there was a matchstick on the football field; today there
are two matchsticks on the football field. Matchstick pollution has increased
by a massive 100% in only 24 hours.” The statement is mathematically correct
but silly and misleading. At Fukushima a couple of weeks ago, some mildly
radioactive water leaked into the sea. The volume of water was about equal to a
dozen home swimming pools. In the ocean this really is a ‘drop in the ocean.’
The radiation content was so little that people could swim in the ocean without
the slightest cause for concern. Any ocean naturally contains some
radioactivity all of the time anyway. There is natural radiation around us all
of the time and has always been there since the birth of the earth.
Understandably the general public do not understand nuclear radiation so the
strangest comments occur. On an internet blog some person stated that people on
the north coast of Australia must be warned about the radiation in the sea
coming from Fukushima. Good grief! Meantime the Fukushima site now looks like
an oil refinery. A lot of storage tanks have been built there to hold water
that has been flushed through the damaged reactors to aid in cooling. Quite
frankly, scientifically speaking, the best thing to do with the mildly
radioactive waste water would be to intentionally pour it into the sea. The
water which is currently in the new Fukushima storage tanks has already been
filtered to remove radioactive Caesium. All that is left is a bit of
radioactive Tritium. Tritium is actually part of the water molecule anyway…so
what we really have is…well, water in water. The Tritium atom is a hydrogen
atom, which has two neutrons in its nucleus which is a normal but rare
variation in the hydrogen atom. Most hydrogen atoms have only a single proton
in the nucleus and no neutrons. A rare hydrogen variation is called Deuterium
and such atoms have one proton plus one neutron. Even rarer than Deuterium is
the Tritium form of hydrogen which has one proton plus two neutrons. These
variants are known as isotopes. Water is H2O and water molecules in which the
Tritium isotope of the hydrogen atom is found are molecules referred to as
‘Heavy Water.’ It really is just water, so you can’t filter it out of the
normal ‘light water.’ The Tritium heavy water is very mildly radioactive and is
found normally in the sea all over the world all of the time. This Tritium
concentration in the one thousand storage tanks at Fukushima is higher than
that found naturally in the sea, but is still so low as to pose no real danger
at all. No doubt the Japanese government is too scared to release this water
into the sea because of the howl of criticism which would no doubt follow. A
further complication is that in the last couple of weeks the press has reported
further spillage of water. These reports are such that it looks like a
continuous failure of the Fukushima engineers to contain the situation. The
latest spillage was about 400 litres of water, which is about as much liquid as
would fill four motor car fuel tanks. Reportedly, one of the one thousand
storage tanks was not totally horizontal when it was built so when it was
filled to the top some water overflowed on one side. As soon as the spillage
occurred they fixed the problem. But the rules require the incident to be
reported, even though the spillage was not of any biological consequence to
anyone, or to any fauna or flora. The Fukushima incident will continue to
attract media attention for some time to come, I imagine. It has become such a
good story to roll with that it will not just go away. However, in sober reflection
and retrospection one has to come to the conclusion that far from being a
nuclear disaster the Fukushima incident was actually a wonderful illustration
of the safety of nuclear power. The largest earthquake and consequent tsunami
on record struck an ageing nuclear power plant which was built to a now
obsolete boiling water reactor technology, and no nuclear damage resulted to
people and property in the neighbourhood. Poor management systems compounded
matters and were implicated in the failure of the cooling circuit. The reactor
cores suffered a meltdown. Due to the magnitude of the tsunami disaster there
were no emergency services able to help, they were deployed elsewhere or
paralysed because there were no roads or infrastructure available. Hydrogen gas
leaked out of a reactor, collected under the building’s roof and then exploded,
blowing the roof off in front of the world’s TV cameras. Fukushima had devices
called ‘recombiners’ designed to prevent the hydrogen build-up but they were
not working because they needed an external electricity supply. Financially
speaking and operationally speaking the reactors were wrecked, but nobody was
killed or injured by any nuclear radiation. Fukushima showed that a nuclear
power plant can take the maximum punch of nature’s brutality, and yet the
surrounding population does not fry and die as so often dramatically predicted
by the fear factor enthusiasts - See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2013/10/12/physicist-there-was-no-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/#sthash.InPbfJZi.dpuf
Source:http://www.cfact.org/2013/10/12/physicist-there-was-no-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/
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