From: jgd@dixie.com (John De Armond)
Subject: Re: Nuclear Power and Climate Change
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 93 01:03:51 GMT
Organization: Dixie Communications Public Access.  The Mouth of the South.

louis@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Louis Schmittroth) writes:

>I agree that one of the options which has to be taken seriously by the
>environmental community is nuclear fission reators.  

>But how are we to proceed.  A first step here would be to quit calling
>us names, and realizing that there are deepseated fears of reactors
>even among otherwise rational people.  I tried last night to convince
>a couple of friends that Chernobyl could not happen with a Candu type
>reactor, or for that matter with any of the reactors designed outside
>the former Soviet Union.  I failed...  There was nothing that I could 
>point them to for reading.  Where is the non-doctrinaire, non-PR
>type of literature explaining the benefits of nuclear power to the
>general thinking public?

Here is the crux of the problem.  Fear of the nuclear genie has become
religious in nature in that people who hold the fear are absolutely,
positively convinced the danger exists even in the face of no hard
evidence at all.  And they tend to grasp at random and/or unrelated
events and rationalize their fears with them.  Fearing Western nuclear
power because of Chernobyl is an example. (Quiz of the day:  Was the
explosion at chernobyl a steam explosion, a nuclear explosion or something
else? Bonus point:  What was the triggering event?)  

I see the debate to be quite similar to that on abortion.  There is really
no middle ground and no room for compromise amongst the combatents.  Our 
leaders, presumably wiser than the public opinion under the Constitution, will
ultimately make a decision that will please some and piss off others.

I think the future of nuclear power will have to be addressed in the same 
way I personally address the abortion issue.  I personally tuck my private 
religious beliefs away where they belong and analyze only the aspect that 
involves the government people's private lives.  As a libertarian, I see no
authority for the government to be involved in the issue in any 
capacity.  

In a similar vein, our leaders, when the decision is finally forced upon
them and procrastination and posturing becomes impossible, will have to
examine the technology on its merits and will determine that no other
practical source of energy is available that is as clean.  Accompanying new 
construction will have to be an education program to aid in deprogramming 
peoples' baseless fears of nuclear power.

>As a start, is there an accessible book on Three Mile Island which 
>examines without prejudice the claims and counter claims of radiation
>damage to the surrounding population?

Someone else mentioned a booklet from GPU that I've not seen.  The short 
answer is there was no measurable radiation to the population.  Neither
off-site instrumentation nor fairly extensive radiological monitoring
of the population detected anything.  Committed doses have been 
computed from the inventory of mostly noble gas released but these
are subject to fairly massive error terms.  

I worked on a few projects at TMI that lets me state this with
authority.   One, I supervised the installation and testing of
the Reuter-Stokes environmental monitoring system around TMI. 
This is a series of very low level radiation monitors all linked
by dedicated phone lines to a central monitoring point.   They
used high pressure ion chamber detectors capable of detecting 
microR/hr levels. These were installed fairly soon after the
accident to augment the existing air sampling systems.  No rise
in background, not even a microR/hr, was noted.   

The second area was my work with licensing the last year of my
presence at TMI.  I left as the plant was coming back on line
again.  I saw most every radiological issue that went through
licensing including all the public's claims of the various evil
things GPU supposidly did to them.  One of the more humorous
items was the farmer that claimed a GPU-labeled helicoptor
swooped down in the night and stole his contaminated cattle. 
That  GPU didn't have one large enough made it even more funny. 
 
Last is my involvement in the radiochemlab at TMI.  WE did a pretty
major upgrade to the chemlab so they could analyze soil and water
samples with greater sensitivity.  It was important for us to be 
able to identify the source of any radioactivity found in the environment.
Fallout from the plant would bear the signature of the destroyed core
in that the ratio of Cs-137 to Cs-134 and the ratio of Pu-238 to Pu-239
is highly dependent on the history of the core and the neutronic conditions 
when the core was shut down.  Thus, one can tell whether a sample
came from a given core based on spectral analysis AND can tell power
reactor fallout from defence reactors and/or weapon fallout.  We analyzed
a number of samples of old weapons fallout but none from the reactor.

I don't know if it is available to the public or not but most of the 
technical information developed during the recovery was reported 
internally to GPU on a vehicle called the TDR or Technical Data Report.
There are several thousand of them and I have about half of them in my
library.  The topic matter ranges widely from detailed radiation maps
inside TMI II at various times to the different remote experiments
done during cleanup to environmental measurements.  These are generally
written by the engineer or scientist who created or recorded the data
and are not cooked in any way by GPU.

John
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