Radioactive Wolves.

[MiM]

However, the gist is quite simple and is unclassified. Nuclear weapons have a few kilograms of nuclear fuel. Nuclear powerplants have tonnes of it. A nuclear powerplant like Chernobyl going up in smoke releases as much radiation and fallout as many, many bombs, because it contains as much nuclear material as many, many bombs.

No Warren, It's not that simple at all.

Firstly, of the tonnes of uranium in a reactor only a very small fraction undergoes fission, most of it is taken out again once the ratio of fissionable isotopes (mainly U-235) has become too low. Furthermore, even from Chernobyl only a few percent of the less volatile elements where released (and tens of percent of the volatiles (I,Cs,Te). In a bomb most of the fission fuel undergoes fission and everything gets released.

Secondly, the fallout from a bomb is extremely active in the first weeks, but decays comparably fast, because of a high abundance of short lived isotopes. In a reactor the isotopes with the lowest half lives (microseconds to weeks) decays away already while the raector is working, and are therefore not present in high amounts at any specific time. Thus the activity of a reactor fallout will be comparably lower in the beginning but decay away slower. There is a good graph of this in Glasstone Dolan "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons", unfortunately I do not have that at home, but I can get you the numbers by the end of the week, if you are interested.

Thirdly, the fusion stage in thermonuclear weapons produces intense fields of fast neutrons, which activate the surrounding materials. Especially a thermonuclear bomb exploded near the soil surface, will pull in huge amounts of neutron activated soil into it's fireball, where it produces nasty small radioactive particles, that significantly contributes tu the fallout of a bomb.

To sum this up. It is really hard to compare the fallout of bombs to the fallout of reactor accidents, because they have so different characteristics. This fact is often used by people who want to state a case either way.

[Warren Dew]

No Warren, It's not that simple at all.

If you actually do the math, you'll find that it is, indeed, simple. The factors you mention, some of which are correct and some of which are not, are negligible compared to the orders of magnitude difference between the sheer amount of nuclear material in a reactor versus a bomb.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

No Warren, It's not that simple at all.

If you actually do the math, you'll find that it is, indeed, simple. The factors you mention, some of which are correct and some of which are not, are negligible compared to the orders of magnitude difference between the sheer amount of nuclear material in a reactor versus a bomb.

And coverage area?

[MiM]

Warren, If we look at what IAEA says: http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/features ... -faq.shtml

"The accident at Chernobyl was approximately 400 times more potent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. However, the atomic bomb testing conducted by several countries around the world during the 1960s and 1970s contributed 100 to 1,000 times more radioactive material to the environment than Chernobyl."

If we use that last sentence, and factor in that there has been about 2000 tests, of which 500 in the atmosphere, we see that the Chernobyl release and the produce of an average nuclear test are comparable within an order of magnitude or so (at most a factor of 20).

And then remember that the biggest nuclear explosion (Zar Bomba, detoneted yesterday, 50 years ago) had an explosive yield equalling approximately 3000 Hiroshima bombs (yes, with a high yield of much cleaner fusion, but still). Actually, the original Zar Bomba design would have added a U-238 tamper (third stage) driving the yield up to 100 Mt, of which more than half would have been fission. 50Mt equals 2E17 J, which it takes more than two years for a reactor (3000MW heat) to produce. The release from that bomb would then (from a simple estimation) have equalled about 10 Chernobyls. We are very lucky they never made it.

So, yes I agree that an average reactor inventory is much larger than the yield of an average nuclear explosion, but I still claim that one should not make sweeping statements when comparing the possible (or actual) releases.

Zilla, Coverage area varies hugely in both cases depending on several factors.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yep, MiM, and that's my point. 35,000 nuclear warheads would put a wee bit more radiation in the air than all the reactors in the world, wouldn't they? And even if they overlapped this planet would look very colorful from space on the nightside for a while.

[MiM]

Yep, MiM, and that's my point. 35,000 nuclear warheads would put a wee bit more radiation in the air than all the reactors in the world, wouldn't they? And even if they overlapped this planet would look very colorful from space on the nightside for a while.

Actually, if you would ponder even more serious reactor accidents than Chernobyl, those could be comparable (but it's too late here for maths now, so I might very well be badly off there).

Maybe more importantly, I don't believe in the possibility of really getting (close to) 35000 nukes up and successfully exploding much more than I believe in such super serious reactor accidents happening an mass.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yep, MiM, and that's my point. 35,000 nuclear warheads would put a wee bit more radiation in the air than all the reactors in the world, wouldn't they? And even if they overlapped this planet would look very colorful from space on the nightside for a while.

Actually, if you would ponder even more serious reactor accidents than Chernobyl, those could be comparable (but it's too late here for maths now, so I might very well be badly off there).

Maybe more importantly, I don't believe in the possibility of really getting (close to) 35000 nukes up and successfully exploding much more than I believe in such super serious reactor accidents happening an mass.

I would be okay with predicting 95% successful launches.The President doesn't get the care those things get.

[Warren Dew]

And coverage area?

The coverage area would be comparable. Chernobyl, for example, caused cancers by contaminating milk in scandinavia, but probably had a negligible effect on Australia. The fallout plume from a nuclear weapon would typically be similar. Some very long lived nuclides get distributed worldwide from both sources, but typically at sufficiently low levels that they aren't a major health threat.

Mim, "radioactive material" are weasel words; they can refer to highly radioactive fission products or low level radioactive material such as nuclear reactor radiation shielding materials after use or the irradiated soil you mentioned before. The IAEA is trying to minimize the importance of Chernobyl relative to nuclear bomb testing.

A better comparison would be the actual cancers caused by nuclear testing and nuclear accidents. For example, most of the above ground U.S. testing occurred in the Marshall islands; all those tests combined were projected to have caused 170 excess cancers, and the results were not statistically visible in actual epidemiological data. In contrast, Chernobyl caused around 35,000 excess cancer deaths, according to a moderate estimate, including a statistically significant increase in thyroid cancers Europe wide among people who were children at the time.

Tsar Bomba, while a big bomb, was also about the size of a nuclear reactor, by the way. It's very far from typical of the average nuclear warhead.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The coverage area for each reactor and each bomb would be comparable. How many reactors are there? (Compare to 35,000 warheads.)

[MiM]

A better comparison would be the actual cancers caused by nuclear testing and nuclear accidents. For example, most of the above ground U.S. testing occurred in the Marshall islands; all those tests combined were projected to have caused 170 excess cancers, and the results were not statistically visible in actual epidemiological data. In contrast, Chernobyl caused around 35,000 excess cancer deaths, according to a moderate estimate, including a statistically significant increase in thyroid cancers Europe wide among people who were children at the time.

The density of people living in the fallout zone around the Marshall islands is . Compared to the density of people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Europe . How many cancers would we have if the test areas (for atmospheric tests) would have been in the middle of highly populated land?

Now you are bullshitting so badly that I hardly can believe it. Give your own numbers. calculations and sources instead of criticizing mine. There is plenty of information in the public domain to make these calculations, and if you are sitting on classified information, that show that there are significant faults in the public data, I guess you should get out of this discussion before someone seizes the razz server.

[Warren Dew]

Mim, you are mistaken yet again. The Greenpeace estimate for cancer fatalities from Chernobyl is 93,000, nearly three times higher than the middle of the road estimate I cited:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international ... hs-180406/

[Warren Dew]

The coverage area for each reactor and each bomb would be comparable. How many reactors are there? (Compare to 35,000 warheads.)

The coverage area would be comparable, but as I have pointed out, the radiation levels from each bomb would be orders of magnitude lower than for a reactor accident like Chernobyl.

Explode all the bombs, and you might at most be able to turn most areas into areas like those in the original wolf video: where humans fear to tread, but the wildlife flourishes from lack of human intervention.

[MiM]

Mim, you are mistaken yet again. The Greenpeace estimate for cancer fatalities from Chernobyl is 93,000, nearly three times higher than the middle of the road estimate I cited:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international ... hs-180406/

damned, you got that before I deleted it. You are correct here, but that was hardly the most impotant part in my post.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Sorry, WD, but all the estimates I've read, including the cheeriest ones, don't paint your rosy picture. And only a few of these are government sponsored, the cheeriest ones.

[Schneibster]

Most genetic defects lead to spontaneous abortion, so they would not not be seen in this kind of statistics. Neither are they too detrimental.

A couple pedantic points:

Most genetic defects are in so-called "junk" or "non-coding" DNA and produce no difference in the phenotype in near generations (recombination and evolution will expose them in the gene line later on, if ever). This is a reason for the high degree of redundancy in DNA. Such are of course not detrimental.

Most coding defects are immediately fatal, compromising important things like the development of lungs, or a brain, or an immune system, or the sugar cycle. Such are spontaneous aborts.

A very few coding errors turn out to be relatively benign; a coat color change, perhaps to a new color not before seen in that species, or extra fingers or toes, or a tail on a tailless species. These are then subjected to selection-after-birth (as opposed to before like the spontaneous aborts). Some are not even heritable since they are not present in the germ DNA, only in the expressed versions in all the other cells.

/pedantry.