:: gia’s blog ::

I’ve been pinged for a ‘green meme’ in a blog post entitled ‘The Greenscam Part II’. I’m supposed to “write about the ways in which [I'm] consciously “green”, and also the things [I] know [I] should do in a more ecologically friendly way but don’t.”

First, what I find interesting is how being green has become fashionable. Bruce Sterling’s ‘Viridian Manifesto‘, which when I read it was one of of those ‘wow!’ moments, was the first time I ever heard anyone say that being ‘green’ required the wealthy to find it a desirable way to live. He suggested that energy meters needed to be seen as ‘luxurious’, solar and wind power should be sold at a premium to only those who can afford it and that ‘fouling the air’ when we turn on a light “should be considered the stigma of the crass proletarian”. (When I met Bruce Sterling at LIFT a couple years ago, I told him how important the Viridian Manifesto was to me. A year after that, he and I talked about nuclear power for which he is a supporter, albeit a reluctant one.)

I’m not new to the whole environmental thing, which is why when I’ve been attacked and talked to like an idiot by people when talking about green issues it really makes me angry. It also makes me angry when people who hardly know me, and certainly don’t listen to me, claim that I have ‘entrenched beliefs’ because I support nuclear power. Actually, I’ve been told that when you look in the dictionary for ‘un-entrenched beliefs’ there’s just a picture of me there. I’ve not seen that myself, but it sounds right. I am ALL ABOUT questioning ‘beliefs’ which means that my views change. I allow them to change based on facts and information I learn. What I don’t do is blindly follow something I heard 30 years ago, continue to believe it without question and only look to other believers for information which validates my belief. That’s “religion”. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that everyone’s going mental about the fact that we’re going to get some new nuclear power plants built in the UK. Apart from believing the inaccurate information relayed by the media, I suspect the reason some people are against nuclear power is that they don’t understand things like risk or radiation.

I thought I would use the opportunity to re-post some of the articles I wrote for the Potential Energy project I did 18 months ago (Here are all of my articles)

This one is about RADIATION and was originally posted here on May 30, 2006.

Radiation is the one thing that scares most people about the whole idea of “nuclear”. Radiation Sickness, Radiation Burns, Radioactive Fallout… Again, I think most people’s ideas about “nuclear” were formed during the Cold War when, quite rightly, we all had a lot to fear from the threat of nuclear war. Let’s all just get one thing straight:

Nuclear Power Is Not Nuclear War.

They are as different as Jedis and Siths in ‘Star Wars’. Both Jedis and Siths use the Force. Jedis use it for good, Siths use it for evil. The Force itself is not inherently evil nor inherently good. Likewise, nuclear fission itself is not a moral nor immoral process. To approach it as anything other than amoral is as daft as believing there is some innate goodness or badness in ‘water’.

Anyway, the question ‘what exactly is radiation’ was top of my mind over the bank holiday weekend as my husband- a high-energy particle physicist at CERN- and I wandered around picturesque villages in the Pennines. While downing pints in the pub he gave me a first year physics course on radiation. This is what I learned:

Very basically, radiation is energy that is emitted in the form of electromagnetic waves or particles. There are lots of different types of radiation that you may have heard of: Solar Radiation, Thermal Radiation, Cosmic Radiation, Hawking Radiation… The most well-known kind of radiation, however, is Electromagnetic Radiation.

Electromagnetic Radiation is what allows you to listen to the radio or to quickly cook your food in your microwave oven as Radio Waves and Microwaves are on the low frequency end of the Electromagnetic Radiation spectrum.

Another type of Electromagnetic Radiation is Light – Infrared, Visible and Ultraviolet Light. Visible light is, of course, the light we see, Infrared is the type of light used in night vision equipment and Ultraviolet light is what tans our skin when we are outside.

If you’ve ever had an Xray at the doctor or the dentist, you’ve been bombarded with Electromagnetic Radiation. Xrays pass through the soft tissues of your body, but are blocked by dense tissues such as teeth or bones.

The highest frequency Electromagnetic Radiation is called Gamma Rays. Gamma Rays are produced in PET scans, astrophysical phenomena such as Gamma Ray bursts or in radioactive decay.

It’s important to point out that the boundary between what one calls Xrays and what one calls Gamma Rays can be vague – for example, a photon with an energy of 10 keV can be called either an Xray or a Gamma Ray. ALL types of Electromagnetic Radiation are photons, the only difference being the amount of energy carried by the photon.

For our purposes the only other types of radiation we need to be concerned with are Alpha Radiation, Beta Radiation and Neutron Radiation- all occur as result of nuclear fission either natural or man-made.

Alpha Radiation is essentially the same as a helium atom. The only difference being it doesn’t have any electrons. It only travels a few centimetres in the air and can be stopped by a piece of tissue paper.

Beta Radiation is the release of an electron from a neutron rich element. They have a range of a few metres in the air and can be stopped by a few millimetres of aluminium.

Neutron Radiation is made up of ‘free’ neutrons. It is a concern as it is very good at making almost everything it encounters radioactive. Neutron radiation is very penetrating, but can be shielded by water, plastic, borated metals, and concrete. No little animation, I’m afraid.

We are all immersed in naturally occurring radiation- from the buildings we live and work in, the food we eat, Cosmic Rays from space, medical treatments. Radon Gas makes up the majority of our annual radiation dose.

The levels of Radon Gas fluctuates depending on things like the geological make-up of the area or whether you open your windows or not. Simply by spending two weeks on holiday in Cornwall, you will receive more radiation in a year than you would living next to a nuclear power plant.

Too much radiation, as we all know, can be harmful…. but how much is ‘too much’ and do the different types of radiation have different effects on our bodies? My next post I will look into the effects of radiation on the human body.

Also read: Half-Term Half-Life and Kylie, Cornwall or Reactor Cores?.

On first thought, I’d say that 2007 was fairly uneventful. My past few months have consisted of me being ill and feeling like I’ve done very little other than try and get healthy again… Then, when I properly think about it, I realise that the whole year has been MENTAL!

January

Me and Charlie Brooker

I was doing lots of stuff for Sunshine and Channel4.com, saw Ben Folds in concert, the Sunshine trailer was leaked by resourceful fans and I was interviewed for Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe.

February

/Cat blog

MASSIVE Sunshine stuff, loads of Channel 4 stuff, went to LIFT where Brian spoke and my Screepwipe interview was broadcast.

March

Danny Boyle on the Sunshine set

I know the photo above wasn’t taken in March, but the month was so freakin’ mental I didn’t take any photos. I was doing 7 days a week, 18 hour days mainly for Sunshine- press and bloggers’ screenings, press interviews, cast and crew screening, Manchester screening, messageboards, emails, IMDB, generally mentalness. There was also Channel 4 stuff, a discussion I took part in at the ICA, went to Cambridge with Brian who spoke at their Science Festival… and I’ve also got ‘Milton Keynes’ in my diary on the 16th. I’ve got no memory of what that was about at all.

April

Danny Boyle, Cillian Murphy, Brian

Another insane month. Sunshine was released, screening and Q&A with Danny at the Ritzy cinema, trip to Russia for the premiere, the 28 Weeks Later premiere… and I bought some ‘Sunshine’ props and costumes. :)

May

Tiger in my face

My Sunshine props and costumes were delivered. :) Was starting to get properly frustrated with the Channel 4 stuff, was weaning off Sunshine, I went to the Arthur C. Clarke Awards nominations, did a Social Media Club photo walk with Lloyd, went to Anna and Julian’s wedding and started looking at secondary schools for my son.

June

Brian at the Star Wars exhibition

Trying to get back into life and recover generally from Sunshine insanity. Sunshine was at the IMAX, spoke at Music Tank, Daywatch screening, more secondary school stuff (including an entrance exam… yikes!)

July

Me at the Gormley exhibition

Secondary school interview (yikes!), started on the Sunshine DVD release, bit of Daywatch work, David Hoyle started Magazine again… my son was offered a place at a secondary school (yay!)

August

Brian, Mo, Benny Wong, Cliff Curtis

Sunshine DVD release, 28 Weeks Later DVD release, Daywatch, more David Hoyle at Magazine… QR Codes.

September

QR Codes

QR Codes for 28 Weeks Later, interviewed about QR on various tv and radio programmes, my son started at his new school, I was invited to talk to the Nuclear Industry Association, recorded the Nature podcast sponsor stings, went to more David Hoyle shows, saw Prince’s final aftershow gig, got properly ill.

October

CERN

Still ill. Started working on a project looking at the Ageing Population, went to CERN twice – the first time with Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnery, the second time with Quentin Wilson- took part in a Nuclear Industry Association roundtable discussion, met Arvind from Slingshot Studios.

November

David Hoyle

Lots of meetings, dinners and lunches. Ageing Project roundtable meeting and dinner… And, of course, the wonderful David Hoyle.

December

My father came to visit, I attended the Juno bloggers’/Twitterers’ screening, fell in LOVE with ‘Juno’ (you’ll be hearing more about this), started Twittering (finally), went to see the King Tut exhibition, attended the Nuclear Industry Association annual dinner, my son had his birthday, recorded a Digital Planet with Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson, more talks with Slingshot Studios, David Soul…then…

…today.

After all that, I really need to rest over the next few weeks. I feel like I’ve still not recovered from my illness properly and still need to catch up on all of the sleep I lost last spring with Sunshine… My next 10 days will consist of POWER RESTING. I won’t do any work (except for watching the pile of screeners I’ve got), I won’t worry about whether or not I’ll have any work in the new year… I will just relax in the most hardcore way…

This week, both Brian and I have articles about nuclear power in the ‘New Statesman‘. Brian’s is about the immorality of energy conservation and mine is about the PR issues the nuclear industry needs to deal with.

You can download the PDF from the New Statesman’s site.

This was written for the Potential Energy blogging project I did for the Institute of Physics in 2006. The blog is no longer working. You can view the original blog post and comments at Archive.org here. I’ve taken the links directly from the original piece. I can’t guarantee that they are still active links.

I’ve been looking into the effects of radiation on the human body and have found that radiation is measured in three different ways- the becquerel, the gray and the sievert.

The Becquerel measures how much activity there is in a quantity of radioactive material. A measurement of one becquerel means that in a particular quantitity of material one nucleus is decaying per second.

The Gray measures the physical effects of radiation or how much energy is absorbed per unit mass of matter. One gray is equal to one joule of energy deposited in one kilogram of matter.

The Sievert measures the amount of damage radiation does to biological tissue. As one gray of different types of radiation can have more or less effect on the human body, the sievert is used as a “dose equivalent”.

It’s taken me a while to get my head around all of this and even longer to try and figure out how to explain it, until I thought about the differences between punches delivered by either Kylie Minogue or Mike Tyson.

So the becquerel would be equivalent to the number of punches being thrown. The gray would be the amount of energy that has been delivered by those punches. And the sievert would be the damage caused by those punches.

The number of times Kylie or Tyson punched you (the becquerel) could be equal but that number doesn’t explain how hard either of them hit your or whether or not those punches did any actual damage.

You can easily imagine that the difference between the energy delivered in a punch from Kylie compared to a punch from Tyson (the gray) will be very different. But it doesn’t tell you anything about the difference between damage caused by 100 little Kylie punches directly to your lip and one Tyson punch to your stomach.

One Tyson punch to the stomach may send you flying and make you lose your breath, whereas 100 Kylie punches to your lip may actually split your lip and cause you to need stitches. The sievert in this case, very, very basically, measures the likelihood of damage being caused by a particular ‘punch’ taking into account the number of ‘punches’, the energy delivered in each ‘punch’ and the area of the body that ‘punch’ is being delivered.

To get an idea of what a sievert means I will give some examples of the sievert measurement and the likely damage caused.

A dose of more than 80 sieverts (Sv) or 80,000 millisieverts (mSv) is expected to cause immediate death.
50- 80 sieverts (50,000-80,000 millisieverts) death happens after a few hours.

10-50 Sv (10,000-80,000 mSv) causes acute radiation poisoning and is likely to cause within 7 days. The highest radiation dose at Chernobyl was 20,000 millisieverts which caused the deaths of 28 people within the first four months after the accident and 19 subsequently.

6-10 Sv (6,000-10,000 mSv) causes acute radiation poisoning and death is expected to happen within 14 days.

4-6 Sv (4,000-6,000 mSv) causes acute radiation poisoning with 60% fatality after 30 days.

3-4 Sv (3,000-4,000 mSv) causes severe radiation poisoning with 50% fatality after 30 days.

2-3 Sv (2,000-3,000 mSv) causes severe radiation poisoning with 35% fatality after 30 days. Nausea and vomiting is common. 50% chance of losing all of your hair with a 3 Sv dose. General illness and fatigue is very likely. Recovery can take up to several months.

1-2 Sv (1,000-2,000 mSv) causes light radiation poisoning. 50% chance of mild or moderate nausea, general illness and fatigue and with a 2 Sv dose.

0.5-1 Sv (500-1000 mSv) causes mild radiation sickness. Headache and increased risk of infection due to the disruption of the immune system.

0.2-0.5 Sv (200-500 mSv) causes no noticeable effects. Red blood cell count my temporarily decrease.

0.05-0.2 Sv (50-200 mSv) causes no symptoms.

The average annual radiation dose in the UK is 0.0027 Sv (2.7 mSv). 84% of that or 0.00216 Sv (2.16 mSv) is naturally occurring radiation from radon, cosmic rays, gamma radiation from buildings or even our food. Of the rest, 15% of the average annual total radiation dose, or 0.000405 Sv (0.405 mSv), is medical in origin. 99% of our radiation comes from natural or medical sources. The remainder of the artificial sources of radiation, 0.000027 Sv (0.002 mSv) comes from occupational exposure, discharges (from nuclear, phosphate, oil and gas industries) consumer products and nuclear fallout from nuclear testing. You get half that radiation dose on a flight from the UK to Spain.

A dose of 1 mSv of radiation is, according to DEFRA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “equivalent to an average risk of about 1 in 20,000 of fatal cancer. Cancer from all causes accounts for about 1 in 4 deaths in the UK.“.

Finally, I will point out that if you live in Cornwall, your average annual dose of radiation from all sources is a bit higher than average. It’s 0.008 Sv or 8 mSv per year due to the higher naturally occurring radon levels.

So, once and for all, can we all agree that the radiation risks posed to us from the nuclear industry are completely and absolutely minimal? If anyone is interested, however, I’m thinking of starting a campaign to have Cornwall shut down because of its obvious danger to public health…

This was written for the Potential Energy blogging project I did for the Institute of Physics in 2006. The blog is no longer working. You can view the original blog post and comments at Archive.org here. I’ve taken the links directly from the original piece. I can’t guarantee that they are still active links.

OK. OK. I was supposed to get this article up yesterday. My excuse: it’s half-term. For those non-Brits reading this, half-term is when all of the schools in the country have one week’s break. The kids are at home… with their parents…

I start every half-term full of energy, excited- ‘We’ll bake cookies!’ ‘We’ll paint pictures!’ ‘We’ll make things out of clay!’- by the end of the first 24 hours, we haven’t done a thing and half my energy is gone… and I flop into bed with a grunt a couple hours earlier than normal.

I start Day Two a little bit later than usual, still with big plans though, but before I know it the day is finished, no cookies have been baked and another half of my half of my energy is gone so I’m left with a quarter of my original energy.
By the end of the next day, half of my half of my half of my energy is gone…and so on… day after long, 24-hour day…

So, yes, I was supposed to have this article up yesterday. It’s now Friday- counting the weekend, it’s the seventh day of half-term, and my half-term ‘half-life’ is 24 hours (the amount of time it takes for half of my energy to disappear)… so, I’m now operating at one one-hundred and twenty-eighth of my original self… forgive me.

But my exhaustion has provided a convenient way of explaining another ‘scary’ nuclear-related term ‘Half Life’. My last post explained what ‘Radiation’ was and I finished it by saying that I wanted to talk about radiation’s effect on the human body. As I was looking into it, I learned about half-life and realised that I never really knew what half-life was and suspected a lot of other people don’t either so I wanted to explain that first.

As you learned in my last post, radiation is excess energy released as electromagnetic waves or particles. When an atom emits alpha or beta particles, it becomes a new element. Radiation is basically the way in which an unstable atom becomes- or decays into- a stable atom. Like a working mum during half-term, all it’s trying to do is rest… that’s all it’s trying to do.

Now, atoms decay in a completely random way. If you were looking at one Uranium-238 atom (which makes up the majority of depleted uranium), you would have no way of knowing exactly when it would decay. If you were looking at 5 billion Uranium-238 atoms, however, you would know that in 1.41 × 10¹⁷ seconds (or 4.47 billion years), half of them on average would have decayed and you’d be left with 2.5 billion Uranium-238 atoms. After another 4.47 billion years, half of those atoms (again on average) would have decayed and you’d be left with 1.25 billion Uranium-238 atoms… and so on. This is ‘Half-Life’.

Uranium-238 is only mildly radioactive – approximately one atom in every 5 billion will decay in one year. It’s an alpha emitter which means it releases an alpha particle when it decays. You will remember from my last post that an alpha particle is essentially the same as a helium atom, two protons and two neutrons, except that it doesn’t have any electrons. An alpha particle can be stopped by a piece of tissue paper.

So unlike what you hear most of the time, depleted uranium isn’t extremely radioactive… at all. Having an incredibly long half-life does NOT mean that it is incredibly radioactive. The problem with depleted uranium isn’t the mild radioactivity, it’s that, like most heavy metals, it is chemically toxic… like mercury, arsenic or lead.

But our poor decayed atom isn’t able to rest quite yet because it hasn’t become something stable- it’s become a Thorium-234 atom (notice the number 234 is 4 less than the uranium’s 238. The alpha particle it emitted has how many protons and neutrons?…). Thorium is a beta emitter (it releases an electron which can be stopped by a thin sheet of aluminium) and its half-life is 24.5 days… which means that in just under a month half of the Thorium-234 atoms on average will have decayed.

Yet, still it hasn’t decayed into a stable atom… So I don’t have to go through the whole decay chain, here it is. It shows the type of decay and the half-life of each element.

Along with the alpha and beta radiation which can be stopped by a piece of paper and some aluminium respectively, radioactive decay also produces gamma rays which are high frequency electromagnetic waves. They are pretty penetrating, but can be stopped by concrete.

Long term storage of depleted uranium is done by vitrifying it into in glass, then encasing it in steel and placing it in a concrete store underground. People are often frightened that the radiation can somehow leak out and as these things are going to be there long after the human race has ceased to exist.
Now I’ve pointed out several times the things that stop various types of radiation, but let me show you.

I have to say that after learning about alpha, beta and gamma radiation, looking at the decay chain, seeing the illustration of what stops radiation and reading about nuclear waste storage, this is the first time in my life that I am not afraid of stored nuclear waste. I may even go so far as James Lovelock and say that I’d have no issue with it being stored in my back garden.
So I hope you understand half-life a little bit more…

Interestingly, my half-term half-life is 52.731 times longer than that of Lead-214′s which is 26.8 minutes. Although, if I had Lead-210′s half-life of 22.3 years, I’d definitely have fewer wrinkles…

This was written for the Potential Energy blogging project I did for the Institute of Physics in 2006. The blog is no longer working. You can view the original blog post and comments at Archive.org here. I’ve taken the links directly from the original piece. I can’t guarantee that they are still active links.

Thanks to everyone who has commented so far. I fear that it’s going to be rather difficult for us to reply to everyone, so I’ve decided to pick (on) just one person.
Brian Ellis has commented on my post Indecision: The Graveyard of Good Intentions:

How blind can one get? Do you realise the WHO estimates that 3,000,000 tenants of this world die from diseases directly resulting from energy-related pollution each year? And countless millions others are permanently incapacitated from the same cause?

Brian, can you please define what you mean by ‘energy related pollution’? Also a citation would be useful.

I’m not suggesting that you are being misleading, but does your ‘energy related pollution’ include the estimated 1.5 million deaths the WHO attributes to indoor pollution ie ‘cooking or heating with solid fuels on open fires or stoves without chimneys’ in developing countries?

Does your ‘energy related pollution’ deaths take into account the fact that over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas in Asia, that 16 out of the top 20 polluting cities in the world are in China, that 70% of China’s energy needs are provided by coal-fired power stations and that coal burning stoves are used to heat homes (article here), that China has the highest deaths by far from urban pollution (2MB pdf) or that uncontrolled coal fires in surface or underground coal deposits generate 360 million metric tons of CO2 in China alone: ‘This amounts to 2-3% of the annual worldwide production of CO2 from fossil fuels, or as much as emitted from all of the cars and light trucks in the United States.‘. That’s just from uncontrolled coal fires…

Fact: none of these very serious problems in other countries will be helped by building nuclear power stations in the UK so using worldwide statistics on air pollution is a red herring.

There are an estimated 32,000 deaths in the UK per year attributable to air pollution – mainly traffic, industry and domestic heating. Just to get that into perspective: There are approximately 110,000 deaths per year in the UK attributable to smoking. 152,000 people die in the UK every year from Cancer (22% of those are lung cancers and will be included in the smoking deaths). 110,000 people die from traffic emissions. Though admittedly approximately 35% of CO2 emissions in the UK are ‘industrial’ ie power plants. According to a recent DTI report, however, CO2 emissions have been risen from transport and private households, but have decreased by 15% from the power sector (article here)… and then there’s the whole aviation issue…

As you all know the Sustainable Development Commission found that if the UK’s nuclear capacity was doubled it would only cut CO2 emissions by 8% by 2035. I don’t know, however, exactly how they came to that conclusion, but judging by current trends, any low carbon benefits nuclear power might bring to the table will be obliterated by the rising CO2 emissions from road transport and aviation.

Can anyone here tell me how committing to building new nuclear power plants within the next 20-30 years will help lower CO2 emissions enough so that we can halt climate change?

Can anyone tell me why the government needs to choose one way of powering our country over another? Surely, they should simply set low emission levels requirements and let the market decide which is the most efficient (and profitable) way of producing low carbon energy?

Comments cut and pasted from the original blog post
Yes – I can tell you exactly how building new nuclear power plants will help lower Co2 emissions.. Like many others you only relate nuclear power or any other form of generation to electricity generation. You need to think a little more broadly..
The energy ‘problem’ is nothing to do with electricity generation.
The big problem is actually going to be with liquid fuels which will either price themselves out of the market or become increasingly scarce. Given that it is simply impossible to produce enough so called biofuels – ethanol, bio-diesel etc – to 100% replace petrol and mineral diesel then hydrogen would seem the most likely candidate to solve the fuel problem.
It is for all sakes and purposes the environmentally cleanest option and providing we take the sensible step of burning it in internal combustion engines and not moving to fuel cell powered vehicles and spending countless billions on the unneccessary restructuring of the entire automotive supply chain then, we can implement the change fairly quickly.
But, to produce enough hydrogen we will need to introduce electrolysis systems on a huge scale and to generate far more electricity than we do now. The disadvantage of nuclear power is that effectively you can’t switch it off as you can with gas powered generators or to an extent with coal fired systems. This means though that you can use ‘offpeak’ nuclear for hydrogen generation.
This way, nuclear could make a dual contribution which would have a substantial impact on CO2 emissions because apart from its use as a transport fuel hydrogen can be burnt in central heating systems and used for most industrial processes.

Comment by Dick Winchester — May 17, 2006 @ 12:51 am

–>

Dick Winchester:

May 17th, 2006 @ 12:51 am

Yes – I can tell you exactly how building new nuclear power plants will help lower Co2 emissions.. Like many others you only relate nuclear power or any other form of generation to electricity generation. You need to think a little more broadly..
The energy ‘problem’ is nothing to do with electricity generation.
The big problem is actually going to be with liquid fuels which will either price themselves out of the market or become increasingly scarce. Given that it is simply impossible to produce enough so called biofuels – ethanol, bio-diesel etc – to 100% replace petrol and mineral diesel then hydrogen would seem the most likely candidate to solve the fuel problem.
It is for all sakes and purposes the environmentally cleanest option and providing we take the sensible step of burning it in internal combustion engines and not moving to fuel cell powered vehicles and spending countless billions on the unneccessary restructuring of the entire automotive supply chain then, we can implement the change fairly quickly.
But, to produce enough hydrogen we will need to introduce electrolysis systems on a huge scale and to generate far more electricity than we do now. The disadvantage of nuclear power is that effectively you can’t switch it off as you can with gas powered generators or to an extent with coal fired systems. This means though that you can use ‘offpeak’ nuclear for hydrogen generation.
This way, nuclear could make a dual contribution which would have a substantial impact on CO2 emissions because apart from its use as a transport fuel hydrogen can be burnt in central heating systems and used for most industrial processes.