74 of 99 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good to know., May 12, 2008
If one believes as dogmatic truths even half of the erroneous information in this book, the sometimes religious opposition by some to nuclear power is understandable. Caldicott does a great job in reassembling in one single book about all the untruths about nuclear technology which have been spread around for decades. I think it is the main merit of this work, hence 2 stars.
The main theme is that all « official » information, be it from nuclear organisations, national agencies, international bodies like the United Nations, is propaganda which tries to minimize the dangers and averse effects of nuclear power, and tries to advocate erroneously positive images of this industry.
I only point out a few of the many pertinent erroneous statements.
CO2 production
According to Caldicott, the current fuel cycle brings about 1/5 of the CO2 exhaust of equivalent oil consumption (1/3 for gas is about 1/5 for oil) (p 6). But there's a simple argument that shows the claim wrong. 1 kg of natural uranium costs about $130,- and delivers the energy equivalent of about 10 000 kg of oil. According to Caldicott's claim, extracting this 1 kg uses (today) already 1/5 of this « oil equivalent », so 2000 kg. But that's 13 barrils of oil at each more than $100,- ! So an uranium mine uses for more than $1300,- of oil just to extract 1kg of uranium, which is then sold for 1/10 that price, namely $130,-...
Enrichment
On p 10 it is stated that uranium enrichment is a huge CO2 producing activity. In France, in Pierlatte, there is a COGEMA factory that produces enriched uranium for about 100 1GWe reactors, and uses the power of 3 reactors. So 1) it runs on nuclear power, not using fossil fuels doing so, and 2) it only uses 3% of the «production capacity », hence only diminishing nuclear efficiency with 3%.
Tritium and C-14
Caldicott claims that the effects of these two radioactive materials « are not yet understood » (p 13)
However, tritium is a material with low radiotoxicity, and the limit on annual intake is given to be around 1 G Bq for ingestion, and around 10 T Bq for inhalation.
For C-14, this is around 30 M Bq for ingestion, and 30 G Bq for inhalation. C-14 is also produced naturally in the atmosphere by cosmic radiation (that's why one can use C-14 dating of archeological objects!).
Breeder reactors
On p 17, it is stated that breeder reactors have yet to be realised, while there have been build about 20 of them world wide. The first one was the EBR-I, in 1954, and the French Phenix reactor which started out in 1973 is still in operation.
Radiation and cancer
On p 44 she states « it is generally accepted that many cancers in the past and in the present are caused by background radiation ». But under the linear no threshold model which she uses, background radiation can account only at most for 0.6% of death causes, while cancer in general is about 20% of death causes. So about 35 times more cancers are of non-radiative origin.
p 45 Cancer is on the rise and Caldicott suggests that is because we pollute the environment with « chemicals and radioactive materials », but nevertheless, the main dose increase we receive is from medical diagnosis, and is still 10 times smaller than the background (and nuclear power accounts for still 100 times less).
p 62: The argument « plutonium is so carcinogenic that the half ton of plutonium released from the Chernobyl meltdown is theoretically enough to kill every one on earth with lung cancer 1100 times over if it were uniformly distributed into the lung of every human being » is as pertinent as the claim that the world ocean contains enough water to drown every human being 100 billion times over if the water were distributed uniformly into the lungs of every human being. The observable fact that this Chernobyl plutonium didn't kill many people after all.
Three Miles Island
p 70 a picocurie is equal to 0.037 Bq. It is stated that some milk was found to contain 21300 picocuries per liter, which amounts to 780 Bq. Now, I-131 has a limit of annual intake of 900 000 Bq to remain below the legal dose limit (1 mSv). This means that 1 liter of milk is less than 1/1000 of this annual limit, and hence corresponds to a dose of 1 microsievert, or 0.1 millirem. Caldicott puts this erroneously to 0.3 rem, 3000 more than the real dose.
Global warming
p 86 EdF got permission to raise the river water above the allowed temperature (simply because the inlet water temperature was already much higher than usual), this in order to be able to continue to operate the steam cycle, which produces waste heat. A coal fired plant, or a biofuel powered plant would have had exactly the same condition for functioning. But Caldicott presents it as if « the reactor was overheating » and one needed to « dump hot secundary water in the river ».
Meltdown
On p 96, when doses in mid-Manhattan are calculated to be of the order of 200 to 300 rem with peaks of 1500 rem. These are doses that are tens to hundreds of times higher than were the actual case in the actual Chernobyl accident in the nearby town. The highest doses received are estimated to be 70 rem, but far most people in the nearby town received doses of a few rem.
Gen III and IV reactors
On p 129, it is stated that gen IV reactors are so complex that no country can develop it by themselves and that they will at earliest be there in 2045, while this contradicts the already existing Superphenix build in France in the 80-ies (which is very close to one of the gen IV designs) and while France planned to have a new prototype up and running in 2020.
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51 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
She's Soft on Coal, December 9, 2007
Readers looking for an objective look at nuclear power will not find it here. The author's hysterical and passionate fear of radiation pervades the discussion. Caldicott does get most of the major issues on the table, but she distorts the facts badly: she repeatedly condemns the cost of nuclear power and praises solar even though solar clearly costs more than nuclear (and she ignores the large roll that anti-nuclear activists have had in driving up the cost of nuclear power through law-suits and licensing delays); she does not like government assistance for new nuclear power, but tax credits for wind power are just fine; she complains of nuclear power plants' need for cooling water (which has caused some river-side plants in France to shutdown temporarily during a recent drought) but ignores the same need in geothermal plants; she criticizes the large amount of energy it takes to build a nuclear plant even though solar voltaic plants are similar; and she says we don't have enough affordable uranium to grow the industry (only a century worth at the current usage rate) even though government reports say that a small increase in price would enormously multiply the accessible reserves; and she totally ignores the very promising thorium-cycle breeder reactor types, which like all breeders turn nuclear power into an in-exhaustible resource via their miserly fuel use and have no nuclear bomb useable materials in the waste, but unlike some plutonium breeders (which she does discuss and dismiss) could potentially meet or beat today's prices, would avoid creation of long-lived radioactive waste, and would have much lower risk of a severe accident.
But worst of all, she totally conceals the enormous environmental damage and loss of human life caused by the coal industry, and the enormous difficulty and expense we'll face if we try to phase out coal without using nuclear power. How could any evaluation of the risks of nuclear power fail to compare this risk to that associated with coal which produces more that half the USA's electrical power? Caldicott offers a wildly optimistic world view, powered by wind, solar power, and other renewables. She apparently has chosen not to listen to the often repeated statement by experts that these sources can supply at most about 20% of our power because they are intermittent (with the exception of geothermal, but most of the affordable geothermal is already in use). Even reaching the 20% level requires either energy storage using big hydro (which most parts of the U.S.A. do not have) or plentiful natural gas (which is quickly becoming a depleted resource in the USA) for use in cost-effecting "peaking" plants and with compresses air energy storage systems (which boost the efficiency of natural gas fired generation). Hydrogen-based storage is possible of course, but with an optimistic round trip efficiency of about 50%, it will likely be two to four times more expensive than electricity from coal, so it will be a tough sell in the USA. Renewable energy is a wonderful thing, but it cannot compete economically with coal, so ultimately a "no" to nuclear power is a "yes" to coal.
With all of that said, she did have some useful points: our nuclear plants are aging and need to be replaced one way or another; new plants should be more robust against terrorists; the nuclear industry (like any big business) can sometimes get too cozy with the government. There's room for improvement, but nuclear power is still a good answer.
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