http://www.davidmiliband.defra.gov.uk/b ... x#comments
Dr David Lowry wrote:Last weekend I attended an international conference in Stockholm, Sweden, where arguments for and against the Swedish nuclear strategy were presented by radiation protection and nuclear waste managment officials, and countered by various environmental and technical groups such as FMKK and MKG.
One of the surprising points raised came in a presentation by Gunnar Lindgren of Milkas (Milj?r?relsens k?rnavfallssekretariat)- the Swedish environment movement's nuclear waste secretariat - when he argued that the emission of one radioactive gas from nuclear operations, is a possible contributor to acceleration of climate change.
The gas in question is Krypton-85, the release of which has risen some 200,000 times since 1945, whilst carbon dioxide releases over the same time period has increased a substantial, but much smaller, 30 times globally.
He asserted that Krypton-85 could be responsible for creating mid-ocean perturbations, triggering much bigger storms and hurricanes such as Katrina that devastated the coastline of America's Gulf shore, New Orleans included, in August 2005.
I am no atmospheric scientist, but have heard this argument over the impact of increasing krypton-85 releases, put forward by Dr Peter Taylor at a Conference on the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp) at Sellafield, held at Liverpool University in 1988.
Thorp's operators, BNFL ( now managing the reprocessing plant under contract for the atomic quango, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority) were told to build into Thorp during construction in the 1980s a krypton-85 filtration plant, but they declined to do so due to excessive costs. Could that decision be proved very short sighted?
It may be counter-intuitive, but just maybe going nuclear might exascerbate climate change, not mitigate it, as the IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)scientific panel has argued today (4 May) in Bangkok in Thailand.
I suggest that anyone wanting to follow-up this issue further contact MILKAS directly - they have several very good English speakers - at informilkas@gmail.com, or telephone : +46 31 42 46 64, or visit their web site at www.milkas.se
Dr David Lowry
environmental policy and research consultant
Stoneleigh
Surrey
