Friday 19 February 2016

Bulletin of the Atomic Pseudo-Scientists?

Just when you thought they couldn't get any nuttier, the BotAS top their previous record by publishing this loony called Lutz Mez. The author of this drivel, on why nuclear power causes global warming claims

THIS COMMENTARY WAS MADE UNDER THE EXPERTS ON NUCLEAR POWER AND CLIMATE CHANGE
(his capitals). The same repeats the myth of climate change due to Kr-85 from nuclear power.
Krypton 85 is produced in nuclear power plants and released on a massive scale in the reprocessing of spent fuel
This hypothetical risk is something I looked at 3 months ago and found there could be as much as 23.27 kg per year of krypton-85 leaking into the atmosphere each year. Not quite a "massive scale". Maybe, at most, 371 kg in the whole of earth's atmosphere. Kr-85 has no effect on climate at all. My back of envelope calculations were overestimates because krypton is a heavy gas (relative to atmospheric gases), so stays closer to earth's surface.

So 0.37 tonnes of Krypton-85 in the atmosphere, with a half-life of 10.756 years. The theoretical risk to climate is not caused by radiative forcing but by its decay, when it makes two charged particles. This is actually no risk at all because there's so little of it. On average it takes 10.756 years to make these charged particles. On Earth, the lightning frequency is approximately 40–50 times a second or nearly 1.4 billion flashes per year and the average duration is 0.2 seconds made up from a number of much shorter flashes (strokes) of around 30 microseconds. An average bolt of negative lightning carries an electric current of 30,000 amperes (30 kA), and transfers 15 coulombs of electric charge and 500 megajoules of energy. There's not really any risk from a small amount of new charge which will soon be discharged by lightning. No climate scientist has written seriously about the risk for 30 years because the risk does not exist.

Yet anti-nukes continue to mine this paranoia with a number of anonymous websites inventing krypton-85 risk out of thin air. The fact their postings are anonymous is surefire evidence to me they know they're lying.

So if Lutz Mez knows we know he's faking it, why does he continue? He's just rallying his troops.

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