The Post has now given more media attention to damaged Japan nuke plants than to the entire rest of the earthquake, tsunami, etc. event. I suspect lots of media worldwide act similarly. Yet, the tsunami was vastly more harmful. As MIT’s Josef Oehmen
>There was and will not be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors. By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.
I think this post offers a different lesson in rationality at this point, given recent events.
MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering group has a website based on Oehmen's post (which they've taken over and tweaked for technical accuracy) that is also a good source of well-vetted information.
I am currently following World's Only Rational Man as my primary site for technical information on this accident. He's a domain expert, a "health physics technician" with, evidently, lots of training in power plant accidents and much real experience.
I can't even point to a key post there; just start at the top and read down.
Or if you'd prefer bottom up, start with "Incalculable Danger". "Incalculable", of course, because at the time, the danger of wide-spread devastation seemed too small to get out of the noise.
But I'll give the man this: he started out being absolutely confident the danger was incalculable, to apologizing to Japan for being lulled by "ten thousand" "shrieks of ”wolf”... over twenty-five years–with never, ever an actual wolf".
And still, still, he is remaining calm, reporting each bit of bad news, showing how this fits in with his experience and training, emphasizing that so far, the real disaster, the earthquake and tsunami, "the hand of Poseidon", has killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, while nobody has yet died at Fukushima.
Still: Lack of a death toll aside, he says he "feels like we're witnessing a war."
You know the old trope, “fire is a living thing”? Hollywood uses it regularly in movies like Backdraft, crazed arsonists whispering intently about their beloved.Fire is hypnotic, but I never found it “living” even as a little pyromaniacal child. And I sure don’t see life in radioactive decay.But damn it, this feels less and less like a response and more like a war. A series of battles with an implacable foe. We win on one front and our enemy opens another.Now who knows, as I write this the good guys be routing that enemy on all fronts. But ever since the explosions in the fuel pools–more about them here–Fukushima has been like no emergency I’ve ever been in or even studied.
Many, many links to useful, informative resources. Well worth the time.
Speaking of bias, it's worth noting that rating systems such as the INES scale bring their own biases. For example, the INES scale caps out at 7. So even if your plant does a complete meltdown and spews large clouds of radioactive steam for a few decades, it's still an INES 7 event like Chernobyl. In my view, the ratings system is deliberately set up to encourage people to think that there won't be anything worse than Chernobyl. That's a very substantial bias right there.
Also there are three separate subrankings (according to Wikipedia) for off-site, on-site, and defense in depth degradation. The INES ranking is based on the highest of these three. So it is possible for two nuclear accidents to have the same level, but one be significantly worse because it achieves the same level in all three categories.
It is also my understanding that nuclear electricity is not economical in the USA. Additionally lately Natural gas prices have been falling IMO we will not need nuclear electricity for a long time. The longer we wait the better the technology.
Urging someone "to be rational" often indicates a desire for them to accept your axioms and scope rather than any irrationality on the part of the opposing arguer.
brazzy indicated the future risk and death toll possibilities require continued attention and you (JL) urged him to be more rational on the grounds of current death tolls. Your both being rational but you're not arguing about the same thing. What has happened thus far at Fukushima does not sufficiently limit what may happen in the future (and to which rationality is less useful in predicting).
If your version of rational behavior resulted in fewer resources (media coverage, emergency resources, attention) being invested the situation which later resulted in an even greater disaster than rationality doesn't really do you much good. And in the short run diminishes the value of "rational" behavior
One can also rationally question the value of INES disaster ratings in regards to the future economic impact to humanity. It might not be useful, but it can certainly be rational.
Rationality is a basis for argument and coming to a shared conclusion, not an end in itself. Rationality is relativism if you don't accept the same axioms and argue at the same scope.
John Horgan has a diavlog with Rod Adams on the issue here. John is worried, Rod is complacent. Since Rod is a big nuke-booster, I adjust my assessment accordingly.
That's a fair point Jess. I guess my use of the phrase "completely wrong" was, well, wrong in itself. My comment was more to show that 1. Oehmen has no claim of expertise on this matter just because he is from MIT, and 2. It seems that Robin fell prey to automatically assuming this guy knows what he is talking about just because he is from MIT. Otherwise why say "As MIT’s Josef Oehmen explains..." instead of just "As Josef Oehmen explains..." I may be wrong, but it certainly seems like Robin put "MIT" in there specifically to show that this guy should be taken more seriously than others -- even if it was subconsciously done. I wonder if it was just some random guy's blog as opposed to a MIT-er that Robin would have made this same post.
I read that on a German news site (I think spiegel.de, but can't find the article right now). Kudos for checking sources. The French rating seems to be verifiable though - and keep in mind that France has the world's highest percentage of power coming from nuclear energy[1], so they're about as far away from being rabit anti-nuclear environmentalist scaremongers as you can be without reagularly battling Captain Planet.
Note that he said "will not be" - making a prediction that was clearly not certain when he made it. And it's interesting how you're already moving the goalpost from "no release of radiation" to "no-one gets dangerous exposition except the people working in the plant".
As for the rype of reactor: that the only reactor failure that led to a large area becoming irradiated *so far* did so mainly through burning graphite rods does not mean that's the only way that can happen. If containment fails and the melted core reaches ground-water, the result could be similar. Or maybe not. We don't really know because it hasn't happened yet. Right now, the most worrying prospect actually seems to be not the melting cores but the spent fuel stockpiles - which are not secured nearly as well as the cores.
Not sure about Finnish authorities, but this story quotes three experts, including president of France's nuclear safety authority, saying that it's already INES level 6, with two of them saying the situation may reach level 7.
Just in case anyone is too lazy to follow JB's link: that Salon article does not actually show that anything about Josef Oehmen's post (which Robin Hanson quote's) was wrong. It all comes down to what's considered a "significant" amount of radiation. The Salon article quotes the NY Times in saying that the 'Fukushima Daiichi plant released "a surge of radiation 800 times more intense than the recommended hourly exposure limit in Japan," leading to the evacuation of 750 workers.' Which of course just means that, at it's worse, the exposure upped the residents' annual radiation exposure by 10%, which is probably equivalent to taking a few extra airplane flights. To me, that's not "significant" in the context of a once-in-a-century Tsunami and talk of a nuclear disaster, but it's all semantics. (I think it would be "significant" if these exposures were happening daily, for example.)
Other than that, the Salon article just belabors the point that, while Josef Oehmen is in fact a MIT scientist, he doesn't have expertise in nuclear power, which he doesn't claim but which might be mistakenly assumed be a reasonable person.
brazzy, on what do you base your claim that the Finnish nuclear safety authorities are giving the situation at Fukushima an INES rating of 6? I looked up their website (http://www.stuk.fi/index.html) and the only INES level I found there was the 4 that the Japanese themselves assigned.
Note that he said "significant" release of radiation.
All the scaremongering and the rest in the media, even the evacuation zone, none of that tells us there has been a "significant" release of radiation.
I assume, when someone with a scientific background is talking, that they use words like that deliberately; so we must decide what "significant" means.
It plainly does not mean "measurable". So what does it mean?
I imagine it means sufficient to cause serious environmental or personal harm to people who are, well, not actually working in the power plant.
I still haven't seen any actual reason to believe that has occurred - note that the (politically reasonable) paranoid reaction of the Japanese government is based on avoiding the possibility of anyone getting the regulatory-maximum allowed dose for pregnant women and children, ever, by any means.
That does not suggest that the amount of radiation released is what is "significant" by the above definition.
(And that you imagine you can GET to a "Chernobyl" from a non-graphite-moderated reactor, even if the core *completely melted*, suggests that the problem here is not in his article, but your understanding of the issues involved.
Even if there was a literal "Chernobyl" there, which is impossible due to the sort of reactor involved, it would not kill more people than the tsunami has - for the same reason the real Chernobyl didn't, even accounting for population density.
Almost all the long-term deaths from Chernobyl [not the immediate ones from acute radiation poisoning from the workers and military personnel fighting the fire, or those killed in the initial explosion] were due to the Soviet government not telling anyone to not eat contaminated food and the like in the area immediately near the reactor.
Chernobyl as a giant killer is, even with that taken into account, a creation of folklore, not fact.)
>There was and will not be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors. By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.
I think this post offers a different lesson in rationality at this point, given recent events.
I meant to add:
MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering group has a website based on Oehmen's post (which they've taken over and tweaked for technical accuracy) that is also a good source of well-vetted information.
I am currently following World's Only Rational Man as my primary site for technical information on this accident. He's a domain expert, a "health physics technician" with, evidently, lots of training in power plant accidents and much real experience.
I can't even point to a key post there; just start at the top and read down.
Or if you'd prefer bottom up, start with "Incalculable Danger". "Incalculable", of course, because at the time, the danger of wide-spread devastation seemed too small to get out of the noise.
But I'll give the man this: he started out being absolutely confident the danger was incalculable, to apologizing to Japan for being lulled by "ten thousand" "shrieks of ”wolf”... over twenty-five years–with never, ever an actual wolf".
And still, still, he is remaining calm, reporting each bit of bad news, showing how this fits in with his experience and training, emphasizing that so far, the real disaster, the earthquake and tsunami, "the hand of Poseidon", has killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, while nobody has yet died at Fukushima.
Still: Lack of a death toll aside, he says he "feels like we're witnessing a war."
You know the old trope, “fire is a living thing”? Hollywood uses it regularly in movies like Backdraft, crazed arsonists whispering intently about their beloved.Fire is hypnotic, but I never found it “living” even as a little pyromaniacal child. And I sure don’t see life in radioactive decay.But damn it, this feels less and less like a response and more like a war. A series of battles with an implacable foe. We win on one front and our enemy opens another.Now who knows, as I write this the good guys be routing that enemy on all fronts. But ever since the explosions in the fuel pools–more about them here–Fukushima has been like no emergency I’ve ever been in or even studied.
Many, many links to useful, informative resources. Well worth the time.
Speaking of bias, it's worth noting that rating systems such as the INES scale bring their own biases. For example, the INES scale caps out at 7. So even if your plant does a complete meltdown and spews large clouds of radioactive steam for a few decades, it's still an INES 7 event like Chernobyl. In my view, the ratings system is deliberately set up to encourage people to think that there won't be anything worse than Chernobyl. That's a very substantial bias right there.
Also there are three separate subrankings (according to Wikipedia) for off-site, on-site, and defense in depth degradation. The INES ranking is based on the highest of these three. So it is possible for two nuclear accidents to have the same level, but one be significantly worse because it achieves the same level in all three categories.
It is also my understanding that nuclear electricity is not economical in the USA. Additionally lately Natural gas prices have been falling IMO we will not need nuclear electricity for a long time. The longer we wait the better the technology.
@JL
Urging someone "to be rational" often indicates a desire for them to accept your axioms and scope rather than any irrationality on the part of the opposing arguer.
brazzy indicated the future risk and death toll possibilities require continued attention and you (JL) urged him to be more rational on the grounds of current death tolls. Your both being rational but you're not arguing about the same thing. What has happened thus far at Fukushima does not sufficiently limit what may happen in the future (and to which rationality is less useful in predicting).
If your version of rational behavior resulted in fewer resources (media coverage, emergency resources, attention) being invested the situation which later resulted in an even greater disaster than rationality doesn't really do you much good. And in the short run diminishes the value of "rational" behavior
One can also rationally question the value of INES disaster ratings in regards to the future economic impact to humanity. It might not be useful, but it can certainly be rational.
Rationality is a basis for argument and coming to a shared conclusion, not an end in itself. Rationality is relativism if you don't accept the same axioms and argue at the same scope.
mjgeddes,I share your point of view on this, I think of it as outlier rationality since we're so deviant from the central tendency POV.
You might be sympathetic to how I see almost all public planning discourse, as debates about rival death cult social aesthetics.
John Horgan has a diavlog with Rod Adams on the issue here. John is worried, Rod is complacent. Since Rod is a big nuke-booster, I adjust my assessment accordingly.
Quoting JL
"You are obviously biased against nukes.Note the title of the site, overcoming bias"
Robin, how many times has that one been used? :)
That's a fair point Jess. I guess my use of the phrase "completely wrong" was, well, wrong in itself. My comment was more to show that 1. Oehmen has no claim of expertise on this matter just because he is from MIT, and 2. It seems that Robin fell prey to automatically assuming this guy knows what he is talking about just because he is from MIT. Otherwise why say "As MIT’s Josef Oehmen explains..." instead of just "As Josef Oehmen explains..." I may be wrong, but it certainly seems like Robin put "MIT" in there specifically to show that this guy should be taken more seriously than others -- even if it was subconsciously done. I wonder if it was just some random guy's blog as opposed to a MIT-er that Robin would have made this same post.
I read that on a German news site (I think spiegel.de, but can't find the article right now). Kudos for checking sources. The French rating seems to be verifiable though - and keep in mind that France has the world's highest percentage of power coming from nuclear energy[1], so they're about as far away from being rabit anti-nuclear environmentalist scaremongers as you can be without reagularly battling Captain Planet.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
Note that he said "will not be" - making a prediction that was clearly not certain when he made it. And it's interesting how you're already moving the goalpost from "no release of radiation" to "no-one gets dangerous exposition except the people working in the plant".
As for the rype of reactor: that the only reactor failure that led to a large area becoming irradiated *so far* did so mainly through burning graphite rods does not mean that's the only way that can happen. If containment fails and the melted core reaches ground-water, the result could be similar. Or maybe not. We don't really know because it hasn't happened yet. Right now, the most worrying prospect actually seems to be not the melting cores but the spent fuel stockpiles - which are not secured nearly as well as the cores.
Not sure about Finnish authorities, but this story quotes three experts, including president of France's nuclear safety authority, saying that it's already INES level 6, with two of them saying the situation may reach level 7.
Just in case anyone is too lazy to follow JB's link: that Salon article does not actually show that anything about Josef Oehmen's post (which Robin Hanson quote's) was wrong. It all comes down to what's considered a "significant" amount of radiation. The Salon article quotes the NY Times in saying that the 'Fukushima Daiichi plant released "a surge of radiation 800 times more intense than the recommended hourly exposure limit in Japan," leading to the evacuation of 750 workers.' Which of course just means that, at it's worse, the exposure upped the residents' annual radiation exposure by 10%, which is probably equivalent to taking a few extra airplane flights. To me, that's not "significant" in the context of a once-in-a-century Tsunami and talk of a nuclear disaster, but it's all semantics. (I think it would be "significant" if these exposures were happening daily, for example.)
Other than that, the Salon article just belabors the point that, while Josef Oehmen is in fact a MIT scientist, he doesn't have expertise in nuclear power, which he doesn't claim but which might be mistakenly assumed be a reasonable person.
brazzy, on what do you base your claim that the Finnish nuclear safety authorities are giving the situation at Fukushima an INES rating of 6? I looked up their website (http://www.stuk.fi/index.html) and the only INES level I found there was the 4 that the Japanese themselves assigned.
Note that he said "significant" release of radiation.
All the scaremongering and the rest in the media, even the evacuation zone, none of that tells us there has been a "significant" release of radiation.
I assume, when someone with a scientific background is talking, that they use words like that deliberately; so we must decide what "significant" means.
It plainly does not mean "measurable". So what does it mean?
I imagine it means sufficient to cause serious environmental or personal harm to people who are, well, not actually working in the power plant.
I still haven't seen any actual reason to believe that has occurred - note that the (politically reasonable) paranoid reaction of the Japanese government is based on avoiding the possibility of anyone getting the regulatory-maximum allowed dose for pregnant women and children, ever, by any means.
That does not suggest that the amount of radiation released is what is "significant" by the above definition.
(And that you imagine you can GET to a "Chernobyl" from a non-graphite-moderated reactor, even if the core *completely melted*, suggests that the problem here is not in his article, but your understanding of the issues involved.
Even if there was a literal "Chernobyl" there, which is impossible due to the sort of reactor involved, it would not kill more people than the tsunami has - for the same reason the real Chernobyl didn't, even accounting for population density.
Almost all the long-term deaths from Chernobyl [not the immediate ones from acute radiation poisoning from the workers and military personnel fighting the fire, or those killed in the initial explosion] were due to the Soviet government not telling anyone to not eat contaminated food and the like in the area immediately near the reactor.
Chernobyl as a giant killer is, even with that taken into account, a creation of folklore, not fact.)