Article 97 of 872

Subject:      Re: Nuclear Power in Australia?   Why not?
From:         Brett Watson <watson@master.elec.uq.edu.au>
Date:         1997/01/17
Message-Id:   <wprajl18kd.fsf@master.elec.uq.edu.au>
References:   <57d02n$4lh$1@sydney.DIALix.oz.au> <5aq9ms$rsi@alpine.psnw.com>
Organization: University of Queensland
Newsgroups:   sci.environment,talk.environment,aus.politics,aus.environment.conservation,aus.environment.misc,aus.general,alt.politics.economics,talk.politics.misc




> Do you know how many hundreds of reactor-years of operational experience
> the nuclear power industry in the US has?  Or in France, which gets
> 75% of its electricity from the atom?  Do you know how many deaths
> have been caused?  One huge, disastrous accident did happen, in
> Chernobyl about 11 years ago, and the IAEA says that maybe 600 people
> died as a result.  What's that amount to, maybe two or three 737's?

From the Nov 1996 issue of Spectrum (general magazine of the
Insitution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers):

"Long-term expected effects

Roughly 85 percent of all radioactivity released in the Chernobyl
accident consisted of radionuclides with half-lives of less than a
month.  Now, 10 years later, the amount of radioactivity in the
environment is about 1 percent of the initial release.  While transfer
rates of cesium from water to fish and from soil to plants have been
rather high, Dreicer reporter," about 60 percent of the total external
doses and over 90 percent of the total internal doses have already
been received by now."  Most excess cancer cases expected in the
future, then, will be caused by past exposures.

Given that general picture, and extrapolating from the
Hiroshima-Nagasaki figures, using age- and sex-specific estimates of
risk per unit dose, the data presented by Cardis in Vienna suggests a
death toll of about 7000 in the worst-affected populations due to
Chernobyl-induced leukemias and solid cancers.  And assuming about a
million children received a thyroid dose of 500 mGy and using the
incidence rate of 0.8 percent per sievert, Williams estimated that a
further 4000 diagnoses of thyroid cancer would be expected over that
population's lifetime.  So, given a death rate of 5-10 percent among
those diagnosed with the cancer, the total expected number of deaths
from all excess cancers would come to around 7300."

The article discusses a number of other estimates, how they have
evolved over time.  There are, of course, many higher estimates, as
well as lower estimates.  More study is needed, and estimating cancer
rates is very difficult as e.g. Russia and Ukraine are only now
setting up registries.  There has also been no world-class study of
the genertic effects of the accident.

The comparison with a plane crash is very poor.  When a plane crashes
you can count the dead.  When there is a Chernobyl type nuclear
accident, the deaths are hard to count, and occur for many years to
come.

> Aviation engineering is a different bird than nuclear engineering.
> Nuclear power plants don't fly through the air at hundreds of miles
> per hour, and aren't subjected to such dangerous external, unpredictable
> influences such as icing, turbulence, inversions, and tired air traffic
> controllers in India.  It presents a substantailly different set of
> design parameters to the engineers.
> 

-- 
Brett Watson, watson@elec.uq.edu.au | 
Dept of Electrical and Computer Eng | "Veni, Vidi, Joculi"
University of Queensland, Australia |           - "I came, I saw, I juggled."