[Tuna-Fish]

> While the safety of nuclear power plants is hotly contested, no one is arguing the nastiness of plutonium.

Except everyone who knows anything about it. Plutonium is a hot topic because it's what you need to build a nuke, but the public perception that it is a significant as nuclear waste is simply completely misguided.

Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you. It oxidizes easily, and it's oxides are heavy and non-soluble, so when it is released to the environment, it just tends to fall down and stay there. There is negligible biological uptake through eating, and while there is some uptake through breathing, plutonium does not tend to stay airborne.

Various people have denounced environmental plutonium as something capable of killing billions. The toxicity of plutonium in humans is not known, simply because not enough people have died of it. There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body (and that's a long and horrible story), and there were a lot of people who worked coated in plutonium dust for a long time. Of the people who were injected with plutonium, most died of other causes. Suffice to say, plutonium is sufficiently non-radioactive that it's chemical toxicity is considered significant in it's lethality. Or, in other words, it's fine to consider toxicity of environmental plutonium as you would consider lead or other heavy metals.

To put it short, plutonium being toxic is simply not a concern as far as nuclear waste is concerned. If all the plutonium produced by civilian nuclear power was pulverized and spread in populated areas, it would not make nuclear reactors as dangerous to people as wind power. (Somewhat ironically, because of the thorium that is released into the environment while separating the REE for the magnets.) Taking all the plutonium produced in a plant and dumping it in one spot doesn't make that spot as dangerous as the ground near a typical fuel station that was in use for the period leaded gas was used.

Nuclear waste is really bad, but that's because of short-lived isotopes, which decay more often, and thus are more radioactive, and light radioactive materials, which are often soluble in water, have high biological uptake, and can stay in the atmosphere.

Plutonium needs to be tracked really closely, but that is not because it's toxic, it's because it can be used to make a bomb.

The more you know.

[comrade_ogilvy]

The other thing about plutonium people fail to recognize is that practical uranium civilian power reactors are pretty lousy at producing plutonium. The proliferation risk is non-zero, but processing spent fuel is a pretty nasty business and the amount of plutonium there is so small as to be a big expense for the small yield.

The problem with plutonium is a properly designed military reactor can take the precious U235 you might build only one half a bomb with, and generate enough plutonium to create 2 or 3 implosion devices.

That is a big reason the neighbors to Iran and NK are not panicking. NK might have a bomb or two. Iran might eventually build a bomb or two. In both cases, their expertise is limited to uranium (so far), so the number of bombs they are likely to ever own within my lifetime is very few -- their stockpiles of uranium too modest to create a larger weapons stockpile. To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback. Both NK and Iran are a million miles away from getting there; they need both much more uranium and plutonium expertise to even start an attempt.

If they believed their safety were at stake, South Korea or Japan would build 50 bombs -- they are skilled at the requisite technologies. Likewise Saudi Arabia would write a check $100 billion and acquire a nuclear stockpile of their own -- their defense expenditures are so astronomically high that a modest cut to their conventional forces over a decade would foot the bill.

[_b8r0]

There are several problems when it comes to gulf states for your anecdote.

The problem isn't a stable country like Saudi having the bomb, the problem is triggering an arms race. If Iran gets the bomb then what does that mean for Lebanon? If Iran gets the bomb what does that mean for Hezbollah? If Iran gets the bomb what does that mean for Syria?

If Iraq had the bomb in the 80s what would that have meant for the Iran/Iraq war, or the first Gulf war? Saddam Hussein may have felt that nuking Kuwait as part of a scorched earth policy would've been valid. After all, he used chemical weapons against Iran (and his own people).

I can't speak for asia but in the middle east nuclear bombs change the balance of power substantially.

[speeder]

North Korea seemly can use both Plutonium and Uranium (or something else entirely even).

South Korea kinda does not care, because they know North Korea wants the entire Korea, not half-korea and half burned slab of ground.

North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet South Korea knows they won't use it...

Japan on the other hand, IS kinda paranoic, in the last elections a new party was formed, with a militaristic and nationalistic tone (including visiting WWII shrines and reacalling WWII as the good times), and they got expressive votes, also the current prime minister proposed heavily remilitarize Japan (to irritation of China, and both Koreas), including scratch the current constitution, and use a new one that follow confucionism (instead of illuminism).

[tsotha]

>North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet South Korea knows they won't use it...

No. They have nukes because they have no chance whatsoever against the South. The North Korean army is bigger, but its equipment is antiquated, and it has no gas or live ammunition for training. The "soldiers" spend most of their time farming or working in factories. They don't have enough food to fight a war.

The South Korean military budget is 20x that of the North.

[sultezdukes]

South Korea kinda does not care, because they know North Korea wants the entire Korea, not half-korea and half burned slab of ground.

They might say that to their population, like they say that Kim Jung "Be Illing" shot a hole in one every time, but they don't really want the entire Korea, because they know they can never have the entire Korea.

[rdtsc]

Let's consider a scary scenario. Someone defects and shares with them all the knowledge, the blueprints, all the data related to handling and processing plutonium. How much closer would they be then to be considered dangerous. In other words is it just a matter of having information, or a matter of resources and money?

[djcapelis]

Resources and money for the most part. Also certain parts are simply hard to get ahold of, since they're export controlled, hard to produce and carefully watched. Knowledge alone is slowly becoming less and less of a barrier as time goes on and hasn't been so much of a serious mechanism to hold back a determined group with enough resources from doing some types of programs for awhile now.

It isn't that there aren't still dangerous secrets in the nuclear realm, but it's that the parts that are secret are more about how to make a really "good" bomb, or produce materially really efficiently. But the reality is that a group that doesn't really care about making good bombs or being particularly efficient isn't going to need as much secret knowledge as most people think.

To sum up, it really depends on what you mean by dangerous. They have nuclear weapons. That's pretty dangerous. But they don't have a large stockpile of well designed weapons, so no one is taking them too seriously and they're not what most people would consider a "nuclear power" because if they even tried to play with someone who was, they'd be so quickly outmatched they're extremely unlikely to do anything with them right now.

At least. So long as we live in an environment where if a nuclear bomb goes off, we're likely to know where it came from. The moment proliferation moves past that point is the moment we begin to have some real sticky issues and we are likely to have a problem.

In my mind, that's the scary scenario and it's why the world does a lot of work to limit the number of different parties that stores these types of weapons and has access to this type of technology.

[threeseed]

North Korea will never use nukes against South Korea. They want a reunified Korea under Kim Jong Un. And the best way to do this without killing innocent people is to do what they've attempt countless times before.

Dig a tunnel under the DMZ and send people in to capture/assassinate the key people within the government.

[sultezdukes]

North Korea will never use nukes against South Korea. They want a reunified Korea under Kim Jong Un. And the best way to do this without killing innocent people is to do what they've attempt countless times before. Dig a tunnel under the DMZ and send people in to capture/assassinate the key people within the government.

Wow, you really believe that is the best way? Or is that the best way in the demented minds of the N. Korean leadership?

[pekk]

> To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback.

Assuming that there is a clear return address on any use of the weapon. How much time do you have to determine where to send the answering salvo? This argument made some kind of sense during the cold war, but it's dangerously naive if nearly everyone has a bomb and a long-range launch capability.

[caf]

The first two devices that North Korea has tested are thought to have been Plutonium-based (the third is inconclusive). North Korea is known to have produced and reprocessed Pu at its Yongbyon complex.

[VladRussian2]

as history and physics show there is no point in testing uranium bombs.

[arethuza]

Although the Little Boy design wasn't tested before use as it was a very conservative design, there have been quite a few tests of uranium based bombs - both implosion and gun type designs.

[_delirium]

Partly because it was a conservative design, and partly because there just wasn't enough U-235 to build an extra bomb for testing. None of the U.S.'s three completely separate experimental enrichment processes were working that well, so they resorted to running them in series to get a result that was enriched enough to be used, which resulted in relatively low throughput.

[caf]

The scientists and engineers ended up confident enough in the implosion design that Oppenheimer recommended to Groves that Little Boy be dismantled and the U-235 used to build two or three implosion bombs instead.

[klapinat0r]

> The more you know.

Thanks for an insightful post.

While procrastinating for an exam a while back, I decided to read up on the Chernobyl accident. It always remembered it as a horrible accident (which it was), significantly due to the errors involved, and the massive impact it had on the victims involved.

If I read your post correctly, it should not be attributed to plutonium. Would you mind elaborating on what kind of radioactive fumes/waste this could've been?

While the number of victims may be high, the number of casualties is impossible to determine: could range from 50s to 200,000s. In either case, I assume this is due to other radioactive waste (airborne?), or am I mistaken?

[lostlogin]

I too went down the Chernobyl history rabbit hole during so-called study. It's absolutely incredible. The big thing that gets me (which seems to happen at work in rather less cataclysmic style, and in every industry all the time) is the way that every misstep was followed by those involved making the worst possible decision. Then the next thing done compounds the earlier events - often with the chain of events occurring over months. Why do people universally do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, and miss every opportunity for course correction?

[jcrites]

Potentially relevant: "How Complex Systems Fail"

http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fai...

I think the people operating complex systems are regularly making mistakes and then correcting them. When mistakes are recovered, the issue never becomes a problem, and there is no postmortem to come to our attention. It's only the cases where mistakes are made repeatedly over a long period, and the outcome is horrific, that the incident comes to our attention. It's a form of selection bias.

[dredmorbius]

It also depends on the fundamental resilience of the system, whether or not single failures compound, whether or not the fail-safes themselves have failures or faults within them, and how personnel (and management) respond in the event of failure.

Known, simple, redundant, and stable systems which tend to return to modes of stability, which don't tend to experience runaway failure modes, and whose staffs are trained in known (and unknown) failure modes, tend to work well.

Unknown designs (they or staff are new, they're poorly documented, they're acquired from vendors or through organizational acquisition, etc.), whose staff aren't trained in normal and abnormal operations, which do tend to go into runaway failure modes, whose safety or management systems themselves have (known or unknown) bugs, etc., all tend to compound failure modes.

I've had direct experience of this at several levels myself. More frighteningly, I've interviewed senior management of a nuclear facility who candidly admitted that it was poorly managed.

Realize that a 4GW nuclear power plant is producing about $360,000 worth of retail electricity ($0.09/kWh) per hour, and that downtime costs over a million dollars every three hours. Keeping that plant online and operational has a very high priority -- sometimes to the point of cutting corners to do so if short-term objectives may be met at the cost of long-term sustainability.

[marcosdumay]

In aviation, we call that the "swiss cheese model". There are holes distributed within it, and accidents happen when all the holes are aligned.

The corollary is that you must fix the holes as soon as you find them, so they won't all align in your path. And you do find the problems before a disaster, but people don't like to fix things.

[waster]

Some people do, but most are worried they'll be blamed for either the fact that the problem exists in the first place (complainers, criticizers), for rocking the boat (whistleblowers, trouble-makers), or for fixing it wrong (stupid, careless). Our system, or many, for that matter, isn't set up to reward people who find and fix holes.

That all said, there are exceptions. But pettiness and self-centeredness can so often wreck it, or at least deter people from being bold enough to face judgment or possible error in order to do the right thing.

[phlo]

If you liked "How Complex Systems Fail", you may be interested in "Normal Accidents" [1]. It's basically the long-form complete version of the paper you mentioned and packed with interesting examples.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Tech...

[rsync]

Yes. Run, don't walk, to buy and read "Normal Accidents".

Anyone involved in systems design, or running systems, needs to read this book.

[pjscott]

Part of it is selection bias -- if they hadn't done the stupidest possible thing all the time, then maybe there wouldn't have been a disaster for you to read about.

(I don't think this is a sufficient explanation, but I do think it's part of the explanation.)

[caf]

Highly active fission products - things like Iodine-131 and Caesium-137, but fissioning Uranium creates a large grab-bag of different fission products with very different half-lives and decay types.

[Daniel_Newby]

IIRC, the risks from Chernobyl were mainly from iodine-131, strontium-90, and cesium-137.

Iodine-131 has strong uptake into the body, concentrates in the thyroid gland, and is highly radioactive. It is bad news.

Strontium-90 is well absorbed by humans, becomes locked in the bones, and has a half-life of decades. It is a significant long term problem.

Cesium-137 also has a decade-ish half-life and some body uptake. The main issue with it is that reactors produce large amounts. If it was a trace product it could be ignored.

[mhartl]

This is an excellent and insightful comment. One quick note: it's and its are different words. I count ten occurrences of "it's", four of which should be "its":

    it's what you need           [correct in original]
    its half-life
    it's only mildly radioactive [correct in original]
    It's an alpha emitter        [correct in original]
    its oxides
    its lethality
    its *chemical toxicity*
    it's fine                    [correct in original]
    it's toxic, it's because     [correct in original]

[mikeash]

"In Massachusetts, 57 developmentally disabled children were fed radioactive oatmeal in an experiment sponsored by MIT and the Quaker Oats Company."

What the fuck. The bit about Quaker is really nuts.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files for anyone who doesn't feel like googling it.

[curtis]

The oatmeal had radioactive tracers in it. This is described in more detail at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Fernald_Developmental....

Everybody seems to agree that the whole experiment was unethical, but it seems unlikely that that the radiation harmed any of the subjects.

[MichaelSalib]

If everyone thought it was harmless, why wasn't it conducted on college students, the usual specimen of choice for harmless experiments? Was it just a coincidence that the researchers decided to experiment on the most powerless and defenseless subjects they could find?

[akiselev]

This is MIT, not Mengele's Auschwitz. Radioactive tracers are injected into the blood streams of millions of people every year for PET and CT scans, of all ages, which is far more harmful than radioactive tracers in food.

[PavlovsCat]

This is MIT, not Mengele's Auschwitz.

That doesn't answer the question at all. It kinda just assumes that the question isn't really interesting because of course MIT isn't like Auschwitz, even in the instance where it kinda is.

[akiselev]

For it to be Mengele's Auschwitz they'd need to perform horribly unethical experiments AND not give a rat's ass about consent.

The latter happened here, not the former.

[MichaelSalib]

Right, it was MIT, so why not use the faculty lounge breakfast cereal? Or the student center's? I mean, it was totally absolutely harmless, right?

[akiselev]

You do know how scientific studies are run, right? I can't speak to why they chose to do the tests on developmentally disabled children (possibly wanted to test effects of radiation on growing metabolism or something, without risk of stunting the development of normal children, which is still unethical) but all of your suggestions sound like the perfect storm of uncontrollable factors and useless data.

[raverbashing]

Funny, I remember some (worse) experiments done with Marines positioned near atomic bomb detonations

The glowing oatmeal seems mild

[Daniel_Newby]

Probably they wanted subjects who would uncomplainingly eat a boring experimental diet.

And suggesting that MIT students be used for radioactivity experiments is silly: they would eat their own radioactive stuff to screw with the scientists.

[mikeash]

Thanks. While the experiment still seems rather egregious, that is not quite as bad, and it's important to know the details.

Do you happen to know if anything useful was learned from the experiment?

[mseebach]

"In none of these cases were the subjects informed about the nature of the procedures, and thus could not have provided informed consent."

This - and not the plutonium - is the bad part. Your comment is completely irrelevant to argument the parent makes.

[foobarbazqux]

Of course it's relevant, he was elaborating on the experiments that OP was alluding to and expressing his shock. They aren't having a debate.

[mikeash]

Excuse me?

I'm pretty sure that the "developmentally disabled children" bit precludes informed consent, and I don't see how discussing a particularly egregious case of what was presented could possibly be "completely irrelevant".

[anonymfus]

>I'm pretty sure that the "developmentally disabled children" bit precludes informed consent

Your comment reminds me old joke: "Doctor, you forgot about anaesthesia before surgical operation!" — "Don't worry, patient is mute.".

There are many kinds of development disabilities. It was not ever said anything about mental disabilities.

[MichaelSalib]

I think you are very confused. I've spent a lot of time with developmentally disabled people and I've yet to see one that didn't have a substantial cognitive impairment. Moreover, children in general cannot consent.

[mikeash]

The third word I quoted is also important.

[joezydeco]

Christ, I used to live a block from Quaker's R&D facility in the Chicago suburbs. They never mentioned anything about radioactive research there. I bet there's all kinds of skeletons buried in the backyard. Oh wait, now there's a Gatorade workout field on top of it...

[kunai]

Radioactive tracers, not radioactive material. The media loves to hype this up.

Essentially, what you get injected in you whenever you go for a CT scan, except this was a far, far lower dose.

Stupid sensationalism.

[peterpathname]

radioactive tracers do constitute radioactive material. Stupd semantics. Ypu can choose to have a CT scan, and good for you: the scandal here is that experiments were performed without the children or their parents having an opportunity to give informed consent.

[kunai]

The amount of radiation in those tracers was no more than 0.15µSv. That's five times less than what you get by eating six bananas a day.

And I highly doubt that there was no consent beforehand. Perhaps there was excessive legalese or the parents were not notified of the tracers, but that doesn't constitute the assumption that no consent was given.

[raverbashing]

Yes, do you know what else constitutes a radioactive material?

A Banana

One of the highest amount of radioactivity in natural products.

[rsync]

"There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body"

False. The "demon core" killed two people in two separate incidents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

... and it was not injected, as you'll see.

[swamp40]

It's also impossible to track all the exposures that lead to cancer that then killed the person. A "benign" form of radiation is a hard sell these days - I'm not buying it.

[Tichy]

How is wind power dangerous to people? Because the production of wind wheels pollutes the environment? Or it diverts thunderstorms? Maybe people die in the construction of the turbines? But then, wouldn't people die in mining Plutonium and constructing nuclear power plants? Somehow my faith into that kind of number juggling to make nuclear power look good has not yet been 100% established.

[jws]

Apparently about a dozen people a year are killed installing or maintaining wind turbines, however the post in question was referring to byproducts of refining the rare earths ultimately used for the magnets in the generators.

http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf

(Solar is fairly deadly too. Mostly installers falling from roofs.)

[thwarted]

(getting off topic here...) That pdf seems to be missing one crucial piece of information: the total number of turbines installed per year (or I can't find it). A 16x increase in (documented) accidents (not all of which are of equal threat) over 16 years does sound pretty dire and damning, unless the rate of installations has been growing at a larger rate. Do you know of any resource that provides that? I can only find megawatt rate of growth (which is a useful metric too, but not as usefully comparable since the events in this pdf seem to be primarily related to installations, not the output of the installations).

Nothing is going to be completely safe. It's valuable to get accidents and events as close to zero as possible, but I suspect that's being done by increasing the denominator rather than reducing the numerator.

[jws]

Yeah, the PDF is not well written. I can't even tell if it means worldwide, or just in the UK. But it is probably accurate to an order of magnitude or so.

[MichaelSalib]

Which operational nuclear power plants generate electric power without using generators with rare earth magnets?

[jws]

I believe they use induction generators which do not use permanent magnets. I have not seen one, but that is the old school way of doing AC power.

[waster]

While we're at it, electricity is deadly. http://www.esfi.org/index.cfm/page/Injury-and-Fatality-Stati... has a list of ways in which; and http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/98-131/pdfs/98-131.pdf says an average of 411 deaths (occupational) occur annually.

In looking this up, I was struck by the avoidance of data that just says X people die annually by electrocution (of any kind), although I freely admit that perhaps my search terms were faulty. Maybe it was that time I was almost died by electrocution.

[Tichy]

Are nuclear power plants still being built at the same rate as wind turbines? Or are they mostly old ones sitting around? I suspect the latter, in which case the "accidents in construction" comparison doesn't make much sense imo. Interesting point about the rare earths.

[ekianjo]

Btw, for people out there who know nothing apart from the media gibberish on nuclear energy, the ongoing nuclear energy course by Larry Foulke on Coursera is a good place to start to better under all aspects of nuclear reactors and radioactivity.

[rorrr2]

> Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you

"if inhaled or digested, however, plutonium's effects due to radioactivity overwhelm the effects of plutonium's chemical interactions with the body, and the LD50 dose drops to the order of 5ug/kg"

That basically makes it one of the most toxic substances that we know of.

[waps]

Where does this information come from ? Wikipedia has much lower toxicity figures :

> Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Nagasaki survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed. These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results, such as Albert Stevens who survived into old age after being injected with plutonium.[91] "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."[96][97]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity

Not that I expect wikipedia to be very trustworthy on contentious issues, but still, the references do seem to lead to relatively non-political websites.