Episode: 521
Title: HPR0521: Talk Geek to me Ep 07 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0521/hpr0521.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 22:23:32

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Thank you.
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Hello and welcome to talk geek to me episode
zero seven the eighth talk geek to me so today we have a special show lined up for
you today today I'm going to I'm going to explore a non-computer technology
and the topic is somber I want to see how far of a departure from computer
technology works for our show here so today I want to give you my take on
nuclear power and since the topic is so somber I'm going to not do the show
as segments I'm going to I'm going to make a straight run for it because what I
did was I got interested in in the wildlife coming back to the Chernobyl site
after the Chernobyl nuclear accident after the human population had to be
evacuated I found so interested I read a whole slew of nuclear books and I
I freely admit that this will not be an unbiased probe and what can I say I
live near one of these I could be one of the unlucky 8,000 people who die
waiting for an evacuation bus that never comes so the topic is sombers I
want to do segments because I don't want the somberness of the topic to be
associated with all the little segments I do however I'm also not prepared the
same time to give up my little bi-weekly or fortnightly dose of electronic music
I'm just going to go straight through this one and then at the end I'm going to
stick on the closing music which from podsafeaudio.com is Stion STIN the name of
the track is 2.003 001 nice little bit of electronic I hope you like it and I
hope you check out the website for the show talk geektme.us you can send me
feedback at dg at deepgeek.us I'm particularly interested in knowing how it
floats to deviate from the topic of computers and you'd be doing me a great
service to drop me a note on that matter but the shows web page is talk geektme.us
where there's a variety of feeds and formats as well as the script for each
and every show so please let me know how this strikes you so we only have one
thing to offer you today my little from the heart on nuclear energy so without
further ado let's just get right into it the purpose of this discussion is to
examine the current propaganda effort of the nuclear energy industry to put
forth the idea that nuclear energy is green the nuclear energy industry would
like you to believe that their energy is better than fossil fuel method for
creating energy because they want you to believe that their form of energy does
not have a carbon dioxide footprint in order to examine this idea we will have
to have a long look at exactly what it takes to produce nuclear energy and
examine all the trade-offs whether they be any kind of waste a number of other
quality of life factors in order to get there we'll have to have a look at the
origins of nuclear energy and assess the risks involved also nuclear energy has
its roots in the effort to manufacture nuclear weapons in order to end the
world war two what we are talking about here is how to build a bomb a nuclear bomb
is a bomb that create that is created by bringing it together in the
visionable radioactive material to create a nuclear reaction which in an
uncontrolled state is a blast but in a controlled state is a slow burn the
mechanics and I speak theoretically here is that to create an uncontrolled blast
you bring enough radioactive materials suddenly together in order to create
the blast in order to create the slow controlled version of the nuclear
reaction you create a core with a number of control rods which are made of
a neutron absorbing material as well as the visionable material the presence of
the control rods keeps the reaction from occurring when the rods are removed
to a certain extent the reaction occurs the first important thing to take away
from this is that both devices are essentially bombs but one is created in a way
that it goes well for at once and the other isn't the proof of this statement is
that the removal of all the control rods creates a nuclear explosion with a
nuclear reactor the slow burn creates several things but the first and most
obvious thing it creates is heat which is honest to create steam which turns a
turbine that makes electricity after heat is used to turn a turbine it must be
gotten rid of this excess of heat is thermal pollution at the nearest nuclear
power plant in May the heat is dumped into the river my nearest power plant uses
two million gallons of water an hour and creates a hot runoff constantly into
the local river the next thing created is radioactive gas each reactor of my
local nuclear power plant creates two steam discharges per week this discharge
is considered to be safe by the government the last pollution created by the
nuclear process is nuclear waste the burn fuel contains unexplained radioactive
uranium during the nuclear reaction some plutonium the substance you need to
create better nuclear bombs was created this plutonium can be extracted and
raised in purity to make better atomic bombs while the unused uranium can be
extracted and raised in purity to create more fuel for nuclear reactors nobody
does this unless they need the plutonium for weapons manufacture as the
extraction process is too hazardous this waste is stored temporarily until it
can be in tune in a radioactive waste dump while nuclear power plants and
nuclear weapons have been around for decades there are no dispose of facilities
for this kind of waste so it continues to sit there temporarily I'm making
air quotes with my fingers and for the mic temporarily at the nuclear plant the
second kind of nuclear waste is contaminated concrete when nuclear power plant is
put into its low power testing phase all the concrete around the core becomes
irradiated this radioactive concrete is supposed to be disposed of by burial at
the state level but in actuality most state nuclear dumps are not big enough
to receive such a large amount of concrete while the nuclear industry made a
big deal of dismantling a plant in Pennsylvania this in this manner once you
count all the power plants that were entombed at the Hanford Reservation entomant
becomes the much more normal method of nuclear power plant disposal with
entomant you demolish the non radioactive ports of the facility and in case the
remaining radioactive places in fresh concrete where they stand forever this
brings us to the second two facts that should be remembered about the nuclear
power plants all nuclear power plants are nuclear waste dumps and all nuclear
power plants are munitions plants so this is processed better than fossil fuel
initially it looks like the carbon dioxide that is given off by an oil or
coal plant is so undesirable that maybe you would think so however nuclear power
plants actually have quite a CO2 footprint when you consider the effort at
mining uranium and purifying uranium when you consider these two phases you see
what has really happened is the pollution has merely been shifted to another
place most of the good rains of uranium are located under Indian reservations
with some local Indian working in the mines suffering a variety of cardiopulmonary
diseases boy about by breathing potentially radioactive dust tons of ground
have to be extracted from the earth in order to extract uranium from it this
sort of mining uses heavy equipment which belches carbon dioxide which is the
first waste produced by the process the second waste is fannings left over
for the mining process this left over debris is left strewn about the
mine site and some cases of this debris being used in concrete has created
buildings which were radioactive themselves these fannings really should be
entombed the buried themselves but they are not because that would increase the
course of mining so they are left at the mine site which becomes another
radioactive waste site little consolation is that the side is really surrounded
by American Indian reservation the rough uranium is then transported in led
Sheila trucks to a processing plant these Sheila trucks run on diesel fuel the
uranium is then put through a chemical process to raise the purity of the
uranium the plants that do this at least in the U.S. use coal power plants to do
this coal power produces CO2 also the chemical process produces chlorofluor
carbons which cause a worst greenhouse effect in carbon dioxide then the
purified uranium is trucked to the power plants finally there is a core
component at the nuclear power plant that is usually on a backup diesel generator
but if that isn't it must be on the traditional power grid that component is
the ECCS the emergency core cooling system this part is essential to a nuclear
power plant because it is the part of the plant that shifts the plant down
during a nuclear accident it must be powered by something besides the plant it
is protecting because it only comes to play if that reactor malfunctions
the Chernobyl accident is a result of testing whether or not a plant can power
the ECCS without external power the experiment failed thus we see there is
quite a greenhouse effect to nuclear power it is merely shifted if uranium gets
rare enough and we have to mine poorer veins then the greenhouse gases for
mining and purification will match that of traditional fossil fuel power plants
if the veins get even poorer than that the rain mining must cease as there'll
be a net deficit to produce energy this means that there will be more
expand fuel and fuel burned to make the energy than the energy made by burning
the mine uranium this brings us to the older promise made by a nuclear
industry that nuclear energy can produce power two cheap to meter in a
hindsight it looks like what they were thinking in the past involved the
reprocessing of spent fuel to create fresh fuel so what makes this
volatious the problem of waste disposal is roughly a 30 step process that
produces tanks upon tanks of liquefied nuclear waste the problem is that the
liquid makes the storage of the waste even more difficult first there is the
issue of the so-called temporary storage of nuclear waste at the plant level
after this many decades no real permanent nuclear waste dump has materialized
now the spent South Waste is stored dry and drums suspended water commonly
called pools within the nuclear industry now the South Waste has been waiting
for decades for the for a high level nuclear waste site to be constructed
and during that waiting process guess what the nuclear industry discovered
about the water in the pools surprise surprise liquid tends to leak these
pools at these power plants are slowly leaking and they are doing this near
rivers not to get too far from the topic at hand which is reprocessing is that
the chemicals used to make the extraction reusable nuclear substance after
irradiation cause a real soup of radioactive chemicals that are disastrous
when leaked this soup is not only highly poisonous and highly radioactive it is
also corrosive which means that eats the tanks themselves back at the hand
food reservation where the nuclear industry had its birthplace half of the
tanks that hold irradiated waste chemicals are leaking people downwind of this
toxic output are suffering a myriad of problems due to the leakage of this
material into the groundwater as well as the Columbia River as matter of fact
the hand food reservation is the only current environmental disaster we have
these days in the states I should say major disaster that makes an
irresistible segue because guess who is picking up the huge cleanup theft
for an effort that's right the federal government which is funded by the
taxpayers hold this thought I just have to switch back and finish up about the
reprocessing of nuclear waste so you know India's a nuclear power these days you
know how that happened that's right they got their needed plutonium from their
nuclear program from a Canadian design manufactured nuclear power plant of a
design called the can-do reactor another reason against reprocessing the method
by which we are supposed to get quite a full fuel is that creates a race not
unlike the nuclear arms race a race to keep up with other countries stockpiles
of plutonium which represents an ability to manufacture nuclear weapons does
it not strike you as odd dear listener that we have a system where we basically
give nuclear technology to other countries because the nuclear industry wants
to sell nuclear power plants in order to make money so they say in effect we
will sell you the technology to make a lot of energy nuclear power but you
agree not to use the technology to make bombs only to make electric of course
the other country says okay but really when you know that all nuclear power
plants make the precursors to nuclear bombs is it really safe to assume that
there might not be an ulterior motive to the purchase of a nuclear power plant
by another country lastly about the reprocessing since we have nothing but so
called temporary storage for it guess where the nuclear waste processing
processing plant needs to be that's right on the campus of the nuclear power
plant itself think about it transporting radioactive stuff is hazardous in and
of itself when the Chernobyl plant had a meltdown they evacuated the nearby
city of Pripyat via bus and their panic the engineers who were meeting with
the military who did the evacuation forgot to advise them to change the tires
on the buses 10 miles away from the evacuated cities the bus tires tracked
radiation all over the streets of the city of Kiev when a concrete street is
radioactive your only real choices are to repay or overpay them we have
a guy where we work but he has a little trademark he answers some questions by
asking back you tell me so I need to use that here what is worse the accident
in the reactor the accident with the sound waste the accident with the liquid
waste leaking or the accident during the process of extracting more fuel you tell
me you know it's hard to believe as I write this script that I actually had a
fear of how it's going to make my segues but they seem to be flown I think I
should stick to this natural flow as I have so much to say what shall we
discuss first accidents that are accidents or accidents that happen on
purpose which is called nuclear terrorism let's start with accidental
accidents further in order to create a taxonomy of possible accidents we will
subdivide accidents into reactor type as well as non-reactor accidents non-reactor
accidents or accidents that happen because you have a reactor but they don't
happen within the reactor they are the leakage of radioactive material at all
with associated problems we've already seen that there are routine gaseous
emissions from nuclear power plants that are considered safe what is safe well
if I were to go to the hospital and say you know my alarm hurts give me an
x-ray please they will tell me no because we need to minimize any exposure to
radiation because the hospital considers any any unnecessary exposure to
radiation to be hazardous to your health that is why they make a doctor
authorized each x-ray and that is why the x-ray technicians stand behind a
led shield as he takes an x-ray looks to me that the phrase safe exposure means
something different at the hospital than it does at the power plant now I
don't mean to put myself as an expert nuclear I know what I know is results of
my personal unstructured research as such I need to say that the complexities
of radiometry the measurement of radiation is beyond me there are measurements
for the freestanding radiation how much radiation has been absorbed how much
radiation is being emitted but let me do my best by focusing on one measurement
the RAM which represents an absorbed dosage of radiation in your body a RAM
is really quite a bit of radiation but a one-time dose of 100 grams is
non-clinical even though it produces blood changes 100 to 200 grams will
produce illness but not fatal 200 to 1000 grams will produce illness with quite a
real possible fatality and any one-time exposure over 1000 grams is always fatal
the problem with radiation is this when your body absorbs radiation your body
tends to store it in places within your body radioactive iodine is stored in
the thyroid radioactive strontium in the bones and radioactive plutonium in the
male is typically found the testes of the male that's right the nuclear
testing in the late 50s left super fine plutonium particles in the atmosphere
and if you are male living in the continental United States you have some
trace amount of plutonium in your testes however it is not a lot for if it
were plutonium is so poisonous you would die radiation is not detectable
except by special precision instruments the real problem blarish right now
this thoracic cancer brought about by the teenager's thyroid being radioactive
the afflicted youth need to have thyroid ectomies and to take replacement
hormones for the rest of their lives so these one-time exposures are really
theoretical anyway and could be used by asking will I die after a nuclear
accident let's go back to that x-ray technician in the hospital he has on his
show device called a decimiter and it measures if he accidentally received
radiation you can buy a type of these devices that does not need centralized
processing like his for a little under a hundred US dollars an electronic one
cost about five hundred dollars that x-ray in the hospital costs you ten
milligrams that is a thousand of a REM exposure your normal limit as a
civilian is one hundred milligrams per year if you work in a nuclear power plant
your limit is five grams so when there is an accidental radioactive discharge
how safe is it I disagree with the nuclear industry I think if my hospital would
like me to have none I think that even the so-called safe weekly degastings of
nuclear reactors are unsafe let alone the potential for slightly radioactive
road around the nuclear power plants with the rubber-tired vehicles tracking
radiation away from it these discharges leave light radiation in the grass
from there it can sink into well water be picked up by livestock even raise
the possibility of radioactive milk coming from livestock no thanks I don't
approve not at all then there is the matter of accidental releases I have a
friend who told me one day at a park near Indian Point plant he witnessed the
Hudson River was covered with dead fish he actually witnessed the accidental
release of a few hundred gallons of radioactive water into the Hudson River my
friend also told me that he had a rare cancer once I think it's not polite
to speculate to him that they may be related let's turn our attention to
accidents in the core of the reactor there are two kinds there are the loss of
current accidents and the react and the radiation excursion accidents loss of
current refers to meltdowns such as three mile island radiation excursion refers
to when radioactive material is blown out of the reactor as in Chernobyl some
nuclear advocates say that core accidents can only happen about once every 10
thousand years well let's see there is Chernobyl there's three mile island a
bizarre one the military plant Ohio and one in the half dozen or so on the
half of the reservation that's four and a few decades that I know of in this
country alone doesn't sound like not one ten thousand years now the Ohio
action this one is notable just for how bizarre really is while trying to
initiate a nuclear plant a soldier caused a meltdown the resulting explosion
caused a great deal of force which caused the soldier to be impaled upon a 12
foot long control rod being blown out of the reactor core the soldier was
impaled against the ceiling as he was bathed in radioactive steam while it took
several days to bring the reactor under control his radioactive remains are
interred in a lit coffin that is sealed by the Atomic Energy Commission three
mile island the nuclear industry calls this one quote partial meltdown unquote
that is supposed to make it sound better it was actually like a 50% meltdown
calling this a partial meltdown is like saying your daughter is a little bit
pregnant Chernobyl in Russia the suits as to say the management not the nuclear
physicist decide to test the idea that the ECCS might be able to be powered by
a turbine spinning down during a nuclear accident which occurs entails a shut
down of the nuclear process the failure is famous for they committed the
Cardinal sin of disabling the emergency core cooling system which would have
come up on diesel and shut down the plant tree and thoroughly the result was an
explosion of radioactive radioactive material the fallout as far as France and
Alaska USA and that brings us lastly to the little matter of nuclear
terrorism our audience is international so I won't be going into details
however in my research I discovered that traditional plants have a real
Achilles heel to them so without giving away that info let me explain what an
Achilles heel can be like in the Vietnam war reused helicopters and Vietnamese
archers archers learned how to take them down with bows and arrows their Achilles
heel was the rotor which when hit by an arrow will cause it to crash there is
something similar in attacking a nuclear power plant a certain specific attack
will cause a meltdown 108 minutes later I now and I know that in an earlier
section I asked you to hold the thought of the hand for the reserve plan of
being a federal project but this is really related to the concept of nuclear
energy being cheap currently the nuclear industry is considered too hazardous
for private investment is therefore funded by a variety of grants these grants
which do not include the cost of any civilian power plant cleanups or
tuments amount to about 15 dollars per kilowatt hour which is a lot now
perhaps these grants to develop nuclear energy could instead be diverted to
develop renewable forms of energy maybe then renewable energy would be more
advanced furthermore nuclear plants are further covered by liability limiting
special federal laws so if your house gets permanently irradiated you will
have no financial recourse this situation is cut by the fine print of home
owners insurance and the power utility not being liable not to mention the
course of bearing or entombing redirect waste at the site of the mining well that
concludes my presentation on nuclear power I hope you found it interesting feedback
always appreciated dg at deep geek that us thank you for listening to my show
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