The Diane Rehm Show

Japanese government credibility? Probably no worse than US governement credibility with regard to the FED, BP spill, Katrina disaster, or investigations into 9/11.....So who can you trust? The media seems to play the same record over and over. Remember the days before corporate news?

The concern is not with the short-term impact of contamination with radioactive isotopes, but with the long-term concentration of long-lived isotopes in the food chain. Radioactive cesium released at Chernobyl can still be found in livestock in Western Europe today. The reactors were subject to a loss of coolant accident, an unprecedented event in the industry. A moratorium should be called for this reactor design.

Read more here:
http://brainmindinst.blogspot.com/2011/03/ionizing-radiation-mind.html

Low dose radiation can induce genes to protect high dose of radiation damage.

What are these radioprotective genes or proteins or pathways?
Will these radioprotective genes also protect us against ageing?
How do these protective genes regulated?

Identification of these radioprotective master control genes will be essential for new drug screening (discover new drugs for protection of bone marrow and germ cells from damage or mutation triggered by radiation).

We can't control the the wind but we can adjust the sail.

I was excited to hear reference to Thorium reactors on the Diane Rehm show today, but I felt the guests were somewhat dismissive and uninformed about this promising nuclear technology. they cited a few reasons for not being excited about Thorium reactors:

1. Thorium reactor designs exist only on paper

----They don't. There were experimental designs in the 1960s that built test reactors with viable designs at Oak Ridge National Labs in Idaho.

2. Uranium reactors are better-understood and have more refined designs, but even they have drastic reliability problems. So, reliability problems in Thorium reactors are still a big problem.

----This argument is bad reasoning. We don't judge reliabliity of internal combustion engines based data on external combustion engines, do we?

I'd really like to see more thoughtful, incisive coverage on Thorium reactors on NPR.

Thanks!

Thanks for the correction. Didn't check location of ORNL.

Errors aside:

I don't think anyone should be building more std. U235 reactors. As we've seen, they accumulate a lot of waste and have dangerous accidents. I live downriver from Hanford, WA and it's a reminder of the obvious problems with the nuclear status quo.

That said, I would have to say I'd welcome a molten salt thorium reactor built nearby. It's really a different thing altogether. What happened in Japan might never have happened with such a reactor.

That's one problem that with the public perception: We're lumped into "pro-" or "anti-nuclear". Most don't operate under the assumption that there are more subtle and involved positions in the debate than whether or not to scrap the entire concept of fission power.

Nuclear isn't a monolithic thing, or an ideology (or at least, it shouldn't be). It's a set of tools that can be molded to meet our needs, and as such we need to make decisions about what to do with this tech from a dispassionate perspective. If our tools are causing us problems (and in this case, they certainly are), then something needs to be done.

But what to do? Some people want to abandon nuclear altogether and say "we're done." And in some cases, that's a wise decision. Nuclear is expensive and we need to invest in renewables in some places where there's better return. Others advocate that we decide how best to improve nuclear with science and engineering, so that future generations won't have as much to fear from them. I fall into the second group (although I think it's really not a clear dichotomy).

I agree with your point about the private sector not being the best agents for nuclear dev. When public interests and the environment are disregarded (as they can be with private energy), consequences are dire. Just look at Deep Water Horizon!

Caller Simon from West Palm Beach cited a Livermore report on the effects of radiation, implying that no matter how low the dose it would eventually do one in. He either hadn't read the part about how we humans have lived since our inception in a blanket of low-level radiation or he was cut off before he could mention it. One of the results of that history is an immune system that is able to cope with exposure to small amounts of radiation, even when it is repeated. Thus, at the low end, unlike what was suggested on the program, the likelihood (probability) of disease or death resulting from an exposure falls off more rapidly than the dose. This is not to suggest that one should expose oneself to radiation frivolously but to say that people shouldn't panic over vanishingly small exposures.

Caller Mark of Bedford, Texas, complained about the nuclear fuel "waste" "our generation" will leave behind because of our use of nuclear energy. One reason it is problematic in the United States is that the nimbies, led by Harry Reid, won't let DOE complete the national repository. Mark also claimed that "we" exhibit a lot of hubris by leaving the materials behind for generations to come. I think that Mark, and the many people I've heard express the same idea, are the ones that exhibit the hubris. They seem to think that science is at its zenith today, that scientists and engineers a thousand, five hundred or even fifty years from now won't be able to invent superior ways to deal with, or even use, the "spent" materials. And, by the way, since Jimmy Carter decided we wouldn’t reprocess the used fuel we discard it after using only a few percent of the readily available energy it contains. That’s real waste!