Skip to main content

Web Site Siting: Radiation Answers

By
One of the scarier things one can contemplate happening is being irradiated, and anything so scary is going to be riven with taboo and fear-driven misinformation - popular culture, never shy to amping up fear, shows victims being baked from the inside, developing ghastly sores, rapidly sickening and dying. Dispelling fears surrounding nuclear energy has been an uphill but mostly successful battle, but radiation and its effects...

So the site Radiationanswers.org is a welcome taboo buster. The site was created by the Health Physics Forum, which describes itself thusly:

The Health Physics Society is a non profit scientific professional organization whose mission is excellence in the science and practice of radiation safety.

What is valuable about the site is that it does not sugar coat its subject matter or try to spin away concerns about radiation. Instead, it contextualizes them so what may be considered fearful and what need not be feared are given their proper due.

Here's how their press release puts it:

The HPS undertook a year-long effort to create a site specifically aimed at providing radiation information to the public because of comments from U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Dale Klein that the radiation industry “has not been sufficiently proactive in educating the public about what is a real danger and what is not.”

The Citizen’s Guide to Radiation is authoritative, scientifically accurate, and understandable in addressing questions being asked by the public about radiation. It was created with guidance from advisory groups such as the American Medical Association, the Electric Power Research Institute, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors, Inc., the Interagency Steering Committee on Radiation Standards, and the Center for Construction Research and Training (formerly the Center for Protection of Workers' Rights).

As that list of groups suggests, the most important factors in this site's creation is that it be thorough and truthful and that it can be trusted to educate without institutional or corporate spin. This mirrors NEI's approach to discussing the world of nuclear energy and it is always greatly appreciated when others adopt the same approach (NEI provided a grant for the site, but did not control its creation.) Pay it a visit and see what you think. If you have feedback to make it better, it would surely be welcomed by the Health Physics Forum.

Comments

Robert Hargraves said…
I would think this site should have some discussion of BEIR VII. Its lack strains credulity.
May 21, 2008 at 9:15 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
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...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...
6 comments
Read more