This may be a "hot" one, considering lots of people do not like anything nuclear. If you would want to know my "bias", well I have always been "pro nuclear". So if you want to take this claim with huge mountains of salts, feel free to do so.
Here is a relevant wiki article for radiation hormesis. This is a proposed effect that certain amounts of radiation exposure may even be beneficial instead of harmful as LNT may suggest.
TL;DW for folks who do not want to watch video (I have not included examples or numbers)
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Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.
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Most nuclear safety guidelines consider that there are no "safe limits" of exposure to radiation. For example, there are safe limits of some metals in our body, there is no limit for mercury or lead exposure. There is a required amount of vitamins you need, but there is also a limit beyond which they are not safe. Radiation is treated like mercury in guidelines.
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If it has no safe limits, then due to natural exposure, places with higher background exposure must have naturally higher rates of cancers developing - but the thing is, experiments and data collected does not match.
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Your body has natural means to repair damage done by radiation, and below a certain limit, your body can withstand (and arguably benefit, see the linked article) the radiation.
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Over estimating danger due to radiation leads to large scale paranoia, and leads to general public be scared of nuclear disasters, when they are not as bad ast they may seem.
And pre-emptively answering some questions I am expecting to get
- Do you support nuclear bombs? Hell no. We should stop making all kinds of bombs, not just nuclear.
Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like
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solar? - no, you still need rare erath metals, you need good quality silicon, and you need a lot of area. Until we have a big "stability" bump in perovskite solar cells, it is not the best way. is it better than fossil fuel? everything is better than fossil fuel for practical purposes.
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wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.
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hydro? - dams? not so much. There are places where they kinda make sense, for example really high mountains with barely any wildlife or people. otherwise, they disturb the ecosystem a lot, and also not very resistant to things like earthquakes or flooding, and in those situations, they worsen the sitaution.
I mean what's the hypothetical other option here? We increase the background rate in a city of 10 million people to say, 200 mSv/year for five decades and do the experiment to see if their genetics can handel it to get statically meaningful data? For all we know right now it could be fine, or thousands of people get cancer that otherwise would not have, no one has the data to know. It's a pretty unethical study.
Even if you removed all safety requirements from the nuclear industry (never going to happen) it will still be expensive, there is too much infrastructure, too many systems, control loops and moving parts. The reality is solar just wins in cost and it is probably only going to keep making headway over the rest of the generation tech out there. Given the development rate of batteries I expect solar/batteries will become the power generation standard simply though economic drivers more than anything else. I doubt it's possible to beat that gravity contained fusion, and if we ever get cheaper superconducting links, then it's basically game over for everything else.
But we will always have reactors. We need the medical isotopes, and let's be real, they will keep breeder reactors for bomb fuel.
this is not even about safety limits, the whole discussion is that currently the model says it's never safe. what that means is that all people try to avoid it. all people get scared when it goes above some arbitrarily low limits.
if we raise the limits, we also tell people that yeah there are safe limits, and there is no need to be immediately paranoid. simultaneously, it allows us to adapt some existing coal power plants to be conveerted to nuclear. that can already be done, by currently the radiation limit is very low, and ironically, coal plants emit more radiation already. if you can convert existing infra, it reduces cost.
nobody is even asking for that. we need limits. if not, people will be immediately get lazy (read industries not spending on safety for profit margins) and accidents would increase.
nuclear has a image problem. it is always presented as - better than coal, but not good for health. environmentalist dislike it for some "damages it cause to world" but the exposure is very low, as suggested in video. it needs a pr team essentially.
it does not. a centralised nuclear power plant is a lot more energy dense. a small to medium scale nuclear plant will generate more power in some amount of time, as much as a few hectare of solar plant. it is simply because solar energy generation is inefficient (20-25%) and is expensive. it does not run day and night, and power generation is not constant thorough out the year.
solar is currently cheap mostly for the same reason as plastic are cheap - we get raw materials for free. you need high quality silicon, which requires finest of sands (average beach sand does not mean the criterion). you need silver, you need electrode material (for example, nickel or cobalt). for small scale, like housing, solar is fine. you can get one for your roof. but it is not going to keep getting cheaper. it is practically at minima already. battery tech is imroving, and will do for longer, but panels are likely not going to get any cheaper until perovskite happen.
one - that is not happening (before fusion). on a morre serious note - what does super conductivity solve? super conductivity is going to make only a few things better - whenever you want to do some action against some resistive force essentially. it does not help in any situation, where forces involved are conservative (non dissipiative).
It is about safety limits in the sense that we should not be changing them to solve a PR issue. The accepted principle is ALARA. Governments do allow radiation generating devices and infrastructure usually in that framework. The PR issue is not a result of this safety framework, really it's more of an education problem. Most people will never understand radiation or statistics well enough to have a good grasp on this. But I think it is getting better. Most people I talk to take issue with the cost of nuclear more than the radiation, especially here in Aus where we have no existing industry. My understanding is even the French are struggling to keep it economically viable, especially when it's dry.
Energy density should have little to do with cost. We have a lot of empty space, and we really don't need to capture all that much sunlight even with 20% efficiency. 20% is just fine when photons from the sun are free. The true cost savings with solar is not in the panel cost, it's that a dozen people with a TAFE degree can build a 500 MW generator in a paddock in 3 months, that operates with minimal maintenance. Nothing can beat this.
Economically viable superconducting links are indeed a long way off but I would bet we see them before commercial fusion. In fact, we already have, they exist in a number of grids, mostly as tests and demonstrations. In east coast Aus, we lose close to 50% of our generated power to transmission lines. You take away transmission loss, and you can build a global grid. Aus can power the EU and NA in their nights with solar. It's never cloudy everywhere at the same time.
That's the thing. We do have the data, and we know that the current LNT standard is incorrect based on that data. That's what the video points out.
I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion. what we know is that there are people who handle it well. but we don't know if generally all people would, around the world. differences in genetics could mean differences in radiation tolerance.
What we know is that in every situation where that data IS available, people handle it well. What you're saying is "but what if there's a mystery variable that we have no evidence of that would make it a disaster."
There is very clear data showing people do not handle radiation well. Plenty of data from Japan that shows a clear correlation of increased cancer rates with increased radiation exposure rates. This data is statistically significant as there were a lot more people than usual getting cancer.
Getting statistical significant data at lower radiation levels is very hard, as the shot noise goes way up as cancer rate deltas go down to near zero. We just don't have enough data to know for sure what the correlations are, and no ethical way to get it.
Tell me you didn't watch the video without telling me.
It literally addresses Japanese cancer rates and the correlation with radiation doses.
It was in the first 5 min that he mentioned it and it's a clear example of available data that clearly shows a cancer correlation with radiation. I don't see how this could be a case of people handling it well.
Let's be very clear. I'm not saying this LNT wrong and I'm also not saying it's right, but that we don't have enough info to know one way or the other what the effects are in the low dose case. It's an area of active research where it is almost impossible to get good data.
So you didn't actually watch past that first five minutes, then, to the part where he talks about how LNT completely breaks at low dose levels and shows, with multiple sources, how low doses actually correlate with lower cancer rates than even baseline no-dose groups.
As the video points out, there already is such a city of Ramsar, Iran, though it's not 10 million people but rather some thousands or tens of thousands. It's one of the places used for these studies.
Yes, and it's a statistically insignificant amount of data with a strong genetic correlation that can't be taken out. The scientific result is we still don't know, more data is required. But how do we ever get such data?
Thousands or tens of thousands of people is not statistically insignificant.
In the case where you are trying to distinguish a shift in cancer rates at the 1 in 1000 level it is statistically insignificant, because your now measuring hit rates in the single digits and trying to distinguish that from other cancer causing factors that are probably at the 1 in 100 level or less (i.e, old people get breast and prostate cancer).
Cancer rates are not 1 in 1000. Something like 40% of people will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives.