Dr. Ruzic's Energy Academy
Dr. Ruzic's Energy Academy
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Professor David Ruzic and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign deserve credit for putting together this series of energy-related lectures.
First: YouTube Channel Link. Subscribe. It’s free.
There are some 50 videos. I have created the following playlist in an order that makes sense to me. It builds from fundamentals and then addresses more complex topics as we go.
1. Who is Prof. Ruzic and why is he posting so many energy-related lectures?
2. What is Energy?
3. Nothing New Under the Sun:
4. Stardust.
5. Chemical Energy
6. Nuclear Fission. Now we're talking!
7A. Electrical Energy:
7B: Electrical Energy is a Service, not a Source of Energy.
8. What is a nuclear reactor?
9. Fission Redux.
10. Alpha - Beta - Gamma Radiation
11. Background Radiation.
12. How much radiation is too much? BTW, there is a huge market for Health Physicists. If you're looking for an awesome career, this is a good one.
13. Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Power (must-see for everybody on the planet):
14. The Uranium Fuel Cycle.
15. Uranium Enrichment.
16. Nuclear Power Economics (large scale). Imagine wrecking a fleet of 17 paid off reactors that were making €20 - MWh power. Financing is a big advantage of small modular reactors.
17. Low-Level Radioactive Wastes. Recall that Japan is extending its reactor fleet beyond 60 years.
18. Spent Nuclear Fuel. (It’s mostly not waste).
19. Recycling Spent Nuclear Fuel. SNF has + 90% thermal value. The fuel assemblies are just worn out. Only problem is that fresh uranium is dirt cheap.
20. Gen III and IV Nuclear Reactors. Passive Safety! Containment! High Temperatures. Fast reactors. Merry Christmas. One pound of uranium in a fast reactor has enough thermal energy to power the outrageous energy consumption of the average North American—for 100 years.
21. Natrium Heat Storage. @cal_abel invented this but gets no credit because he made it public domain when publishing his PhD Thesis. Bill Gates took it up.
22. What about Chernobyl? Won’t ever happen again.
23. Health Effects of Chernobyl. Recall that some 3 million people die every year because they have to burn cow dung and such to eat cooked food.
24. What about Fukushima? Recall that the reactor closest to the epicenter survived unscathed-Onagawa-and that the J government is extending the operational life of its reactors beyond 60 years.
25A. What about Three Mile Island?
25B. Three Mile Island cont.
25C. What engineers learned from Three Mile Island? Recall that some 250k children under 5 die every year because their parents cook food with cow dung and such.
26. Small Modular Reactors.
27. Modular Micro Reactor. This is really promising on scale.
28. Wind - Solar. Even if we pretend that 1 MWh of wind-solar (Floober) is the same as fuel-hydro power (Uber) and ignoring the sheer materiality of (non)renewables - it’s not a drop in the ocean.
29. The Diesel Engine - why casting it aside is absurd.
There is a problem with health physics. The problem is that what they are taught is based on nonsense. The nonsense comes from: A. The 1940's when Rockefeller pushed through the linear no threshold (LNT) model into regulations. B. An old paper from the 1950's by the then most eminent geneticist, J.B.S Haldane. He estimated that the dose of radiation required to double the natural mutation rate (doubling dose) was 0.05 Gy(221). That 0.05 Gy level is the current limit for nuclear power plant workers cumulative exposure per year. That estimate was based on studies done on plants, under the assumption that plant cells acted the same, but the most definitely do not.
So, what is the correct dose required to double the natural mutation rate? After the atomic bombs dropped on Japan the first surprise to the Manhattan Project physicists was that so many people survived intense radiation exposure. So right after the war, a 51 year study was started. The study ran from 1946-1997 and included over 31,000 children of survivors of irradiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This study shows that the mutation doubling dose of radiation is at least 2 Gy and is probably 4 Gy or higher(216). Even for women who were pregnant when they survived exposure to near fatal doses of radiation, no significant effect was seen. No effect on children was seen after 62 years for either cancer or genetic disease(222). A similar result was seen at Chernobyl. The children of Chernobyl workers who were exposed to high levels of radiation while cleaning up the plant and survived did not show more mutations than normal(223).
Radiation standards for pregnancy are based on theoretical assumptions that fetuses are more sensitive to irradiation, but external radiation is less of a problem during pregnancy than after the child is born(224). In studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki children, birth defects were not correlated with radiation exposure in utero. The same was true after Chernobyl. Prior to birth, a fetus can recover from most damage without scar, which is why in utero surgery is the best time to repair a defect.
216. James V. Neel. Genetic studies at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission – Radiation Effects Research Foundation: 1946–1997. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1998;95:5432-5436 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9576899.
221. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane. Genetical Effects of Radiation from Products of Nuclear
Explosions. Nature 1955;176(4472):115 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1955Natur.176..115H.
222. E. J. Grant, K. Furukawa, R. Sakata, H. Sugiyama, A. Sadakane, I. Takahashi, et al. Risk of death among children of atomic bomb survivors after 62 years of follow-up: a cohort study. Lancet
Oncol 2015;16(13):1316-23.
223. L. A. Livshits, S. G. Malyarchuk, E. M. Lukyanova, Y. G. Antipkin, L. P. Arabskaya, S. A.Kravchenko, et al. Children of Chernobyl Cleanup Workers do not Show Elevated Rates of
Mutations in Minisatellite Alleles. Radiation Research 2001;155(1):74-80 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11121218.
224. Kirsten B Moysich, Ravi J Menezes, Arthur M Michalek. Chernobyl-related ionising radiation exposure and cancer risk: an epidemiological review. Lancet Oncology 2002;3(5):269-279 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12067803.
Yes, I've been watching his videos for quite awhile. Very well done, although he avoids the very large political side of the energy debate. Mostly it is political, the science part, as with Covid, has been ignored, replaced with dogma (i.e. "...we're the Government experts, we tell you what is true, we tell you what is false, so shutup and listen, serf...")