Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...
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Secondly, I do not believe geneticists would support Dr. Caldicott's claim that a change in the DNA sequence of a single cell could cause a mutation resulting in an adverse change to a species (implied if not stated by the letter writer). Living things are constantly evolving, bad mutations are killed off by an organism's immune system. Organisms that suffer really bad mutations usually die before reproducing. One cell does not cause a species to mutate, a change is needed in a population to effect a change to a species. Or at least that was what I learned in History 101 at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. If there are geneticists out there that can enlighten us as to the latest thinking on this issue I'd really appreciate it.
1. One cell can't cause a mutation. Every cell has its own copy of DNA, and mutations occur on a genetic, not anatomical, level.
2. The likelihood of one cancerous cell becoming a tumor in its lifespan--measured in weeks--is practically zero, if not zero. There needs to be a relatively large number of cells affected. One particle or ray hitting one cell is not going to cause cancer or mutations.
3. The number of types of mutations that radiation could cause is incredibly large. The likelihood of an irrelevant mutation--left-handedness or hair color, for example--is much greater than an adverse effect.
4. We get a lot more radiation from nature than from nuclear power plants, so if these things aren't happening in nature they won't happen with nuclear power plants. People have significant amounts of C-14 in their bodies and these types of things don't happen.
5. Radiation has absolutely no effect--cancers, mutations, green vomit, etc.--until around 10,000 millirem.