Ted Kennedy Has Cancer – Nuclear Policy Expected to Change…
May 20th, 2008
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Senator Edward Kennedy is generally one who panders to the left-of-center portion of the political spectrum. As such, he’s generally been pretty strongly against nuclear energy. For example in 1980:
Senator Kennedy has called for: an immediate moratorium on all future licensing of nuclear power plants, a comprehensive and orderly phase-out of all existing reactors as alternative energy sources become available, and a national program to increase energy efficiency, promote conservation and develop energy resources.
Since then Kennedy has been generally opposed to nuclear energy and often criticized nuclear weapons and proliferation policies in the same breath. This is, of course, a common tactic for anti-nukes who can’t tell the difference between an H-bomb and a nuclear reactor.
He has, however, shown a willingness to go against the “Green” agenda when it affects him directly. For example, he opposed “Cape Wind” despite it being a darling of the eco-stupid movement because it would have ruined the view from his Cape Cod vacation home.
Now for those who do not know, Senator Kennedy was recently diagnosed with brain cancer. The cancerous tumor has already triggered a seizure and his prognosis does not look especially good, both due to his age and the nature of the tumor, which is reportedly quite developed. Surgery may be an option, but it is highly unlikely it could remove the entire tumor and thus if Senator Kennedy is to beat this, or for that matter, even hang in there for any period of time, his hopes are pinned on chemo and (gasp!) radiation.
Yes, radiation actually offers the greatest hope of treating an inoperable cancer. Thanks to advances in nuclear medicine, targeted radiation therapy is more effective than ever. An approach to treating brain cancer or any other deeply embedded tumor generally relies on directed gamma beams such as the Cyberknife or other gamma knife systems. These devices use either a particle accelerator or a synthetically produced radioisotope (commonly Cobalt-60) to provide high energy gamma rays. This beam is either rotated, in three dimensions or fired through multiple ports of a special shield, around the tumor such that the beam only passes through healthy tissue for a short period of time but is concentrated on the tumor, thus allowing for targeted therapy to destroy the unhealthy tissue. The newest systems use advanced robotics and an extremely narrow beam of radiation to target the tumor from multiple angles and reduce damage to surrounding tissue.
And of course, none of this would be possible without nuclear technology and nuclear reactors to produce the theraputic isotopes. Of course, medical reactors rarely come under the kind of attack from fanatical enviornmental groups that power reactors do, but in terms of waste containment and safety record, one could make a case that nuclear medicine is actually a greater risk, although still a very small one.
So Ted, ready to warm up to nuclear technology?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Good Science, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 20th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I never understood how Edward Kennedy has been supported by Massachusetts and been one of the most successful senators. Everyone knows that his only qualification is that he road the coattails of JFK, RFK and his Daddy Joe Kennedy. That’s it. His name is all he has. He was the underachiever of the family and was caught cheating at Harvard. How the hell do you get back into Harvard after being caught cheating? You have Joe Kennedy as a father, that’s how!
He a big fat joke and the perfect character to mock. He’s been a drunkard most of his life has said he kicked the habit multiple times only to find he was back on it again. He’s had more than a few drunken incidents, but only one managed to kill someone. And actually, that is really something they say you can’t make fun of because it’s a low blow and old.
Why not? He freakin killed a woman! He drove her into a river, drunk! She would be alive today if not for his drunken driving and actions afterward. Apparently he was sober enough to find his keys and get the car going and also sober enough to escape the car and get away, but he didn’t even attempt to save her! Did he try to go back? Did he grab at her or undo her seatbelt? Did he run and flag down a motorist and yell “Help! There’s a woman in my car and it’s sinking!” No, he didn’t. He didn’t even report it until after.
Anyone else would have gotten hard time for that, and rightfully so.
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May 20th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Don’t you think he got enough radiation sitting next to Senator Clinton?
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May 20th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
The gamma knife is such a cool idea.
but grr, on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_knife
I probably need to get
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Elekta_Leksell_Gamma_Knife.jpg
deleted.
But
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Gamma_knife.jpg
is federal government work and therefore free for anyone to use. Just thought I’d drop in and say something.
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May 20th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
So, why is the left, the party of global warming, still so anti-nuke? The pronuclear movement in America is an eclectic one. Many leftists as well as a significant number of centrists and rightists realize that nuclear power is the only long term answer to the issues of climate and energy security. And how is it that the antinuclear critics all give nuclear medicine and navy reactors a free pass?
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May 20th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
“Of course, medical reactors rarely come under the kind of attack from fanatical environmental groups that power reactors do,”
Apparently much of the worlds Co60 for radiation therapy is produced in power reactors, specifically CANDUs.
See http://www.atomicinsights.com/jun96/isotope.html
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May 20th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Ted Kennedy is a true politician and a career politician. He’s one of the types who never really did anything other than politics. He got elected and just sat in office for decades and only stops when he’s just too damn old to function or dead. That’s his life and he’s not the only one. A cushy wind-bag job as a legislator. These guys, once they’re in for a few terms get good at it and they’re hard to unseat. They plop their big ass in the senate and that’s where they sit.
They’re not really what I’d prefer a legislator to be. I’d rather someone who has had a life in private enterprise go and serve a few terms. I think people like that are more in touch than the kind that just eat, sleep and breathe politics their whole life.
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May 21st, 2008 at 12:17 am
Jim Baerg said:
For the record AECL’s other design, the NRU is also a big producer of medical isotopes. Work on its replacement, the MAPLE I and MAPLE II units were recently canceled. The MAPLE reactors, the first in the world dedicated entirely to medical isotope production, were intended to be capable of supplying the entire global demand for molybdenum-99, iodine-131, iodine-125 and xenon-133.
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May 21st, 2008 at 1:34 am
DV82XL said:
Um, why? It seems like medical isotopes are kinda important. Wouldn’t having new reactors with plenty of capacity for production be something you’d generally want to have?
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May 21st, 2008 at 1:37 am
I’m sure Senator Kennedy will be getting advanced radiation therapy in an attempt to battle the cancer, but my understanding is that the tumor is pretty developed and I don’t think the prognosis for successful treatment at his age and general health with this kind of condition is good. That being said, gamma beams are still probably the best shot he would have as far as a treatment. The news I have heard has not been too rosy.
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May 21st, 2008 at 2:24 am
Lord Helmet said:
Ya, well there were problems with the MAPLE design, and it wound-up with a slight Positive Void Coefficient. which means that if it lost all its coolant, and nobody noticed and didn’t drop the control rods, it would continue to gain power. In any other industry, this would have been to bad, but it wouldn’t have stopped the device from being used. However in the regulatory conditions that currently exist in the nuclear sector,this was not going to happen, and they pulled the plug.
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May 21st, 2008 at 2:31 am
DV82XL said:
Hmm. Well that’s a real shame. I would have thought they would have been able to modify the design or add some kind of passive safety feature or something.
Are they still stuck with the one old reactor at Chalk River that’s responsible for a large portion of the short-lived isotopes for medicine? If so, I’d suggest that it would likely be a good idea to seriously consider an updated design or more than one unit because it’s an important job to have all in one basket.
Why not have a updated design of what they have or modify the proposal or something?
I was under the impression that research and isotope production reactors were relatively easy to design and build compared to the power generating kind, because you don’t have to worry about all the stress of high pressures and temperatures, containment vessels, steam generators, core effeciency and so on.
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May 21st, 2008 at 3:00 am
Q said:
They have tried for the last 17 years. Part of the problem ids that AECL is a Crown corp. (i.e. owned by the government) and as a consequence has to play by political rules. The issue that they had in January with The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) over the NRU license, and the political fallout when the head of that agency was canned, meant that the MAPLEs were doomed, as the screams of political interference still haven’t died down, and the CNSC couldn’t cut AECL anymore slack.
There is only the old NRU left to make isotopes. What is going to happen is that MDS Nordion (the AECL spin off company that is in the isotope business) will lose share and likely go under, as other producers will fill the gap.
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May 21st, 2008 at 9:46 am
Let me say as a Canadian citizen that I’m downright furious with the government over this. We had been the leader in the medical isotope business and it’s inexcusable that a large portion of the world’s medical isotopes would come from a single, somewhat antiquated reactor. As it has been stated, it is too important a job to leave to just one reactor. What if there were a catastrophic failure of it? What if there were something like a big leak in the tank? The world would experience an isotope shortage, which it almost did last year when they had it shut down for ’safety’ reasons for just a few weeks!
No, we absolutely should have more than one reactor and it should be a modern, high capacity and reliability design. Furthermore, we should have more capacity than we need by a comfortable margin so the reactors can be serviced and still have reserve. This is a no-brainer.
Designing and building such a reactor is NOT at all beyond the capabilities of AECL. Canada has a long history of building research reactors and as pointed out they tend to be less demanding than power reactors.
I would not blame the medical world for seeking out other providers of isotopes, likely Russia, the USA, France, Japan and maybe others. It still makes me sick to think of what happened with the MAPLEs. There goes our big contribution medical needs of the world, right down the crapper!
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May 21st, 2008 at 9:56 am
I believe the MAPLE design is in use in South Korea as the HANARO reactor.
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May 21st, 2008 at 11:10 am
Joffan said:
That’s right. As I said the problems with the reactors were more political than they were technical.
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May 21st, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Dogbert said:
That’s all water under the bridge.
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May 21st, 2008 at 3:27 pm
DV82XL said:
Having seen the anti-nuclear activists in action (as a State regulator of radiation), I can tell you unequivocally that they get a pass because there’s no money in it for them. Their livelihood depends on receiving donations to fight the evils of radiation. And the “fight” consists primarily of going to public meetings to whip up the locals with outlandish claims and to call everyone who disagrees a liar. There are no public meetings for nuclear medicine or navy reactors. Also, many of them believe (either through ignorance, or convenient wish fulfillment) that medical radiation is the “good” radiation, not at all like the evil nasty stuff that comes out of commercial reactors. (I once heard a representative of the anti-nuke group Tri-County CARES utter something very close to this in a public meeting about the GE Vallecitos reactor)
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May 21st, 2008 at 3:49 pm
David W said:
Thank-you. I’ve always suspected as much.
(Gee, David, we can agree on something!)
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May 21st, 2008 at 6:59 pm
DV82XL said:
Religion notwithstanding, I suspect we have more in common than not. I agree wholeheartedly with most of your comments.
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May 22nd, 2008 at 3:07 am
Teddy does not have long. I was reading about it today and it seems that the tumor is quite large and is of the most aggressive type. It’s far along and in a critical area.
I don’t think that even very advanced radiation will be able to save him. Maybe it could help, but I think it’s a long shot. If it had been detected earlier radiation could probably help but it’s gotten too far.
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May 22nd, 2008 at 4:10 am
While I agree that he’s not the most respectable senator and he’s a complete career politician windbag and a spoof of himself to the point of becoming the iconic image of a drunken political bag of hot air, I still would not wish brain cancer on the man. Sorry to hear about this. My understanding is that at his age and the fact that his health is not the best he does not have much chance even with radiation of much longer life. That’s too bad.
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May 22nd, 2008 at 10:59 am
Jim Baerg said:
Is that really true, in reference to CANDU power plants?
I know that’s certainly true of the NRU research reactor – it produces the majority of the world’s supply of Mo-99 and Co-60.
Are CANDU power reactors really used for isotope production as well?
It’s possible that this is just a mistake in the article, making reference to CANDUs where it is really referring to the NRU reactor, but then again, Rod Adams knows what he’s talking about, so that hypothesis should be considered less likely.
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May 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Luke said:
Rod isn’t mistaken, proprietary technology is used to produce the Co-60 isotope in CANDU reactors. The NRU produces Mo-99, I-131, I-125 and Xe-133.
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May 22nd, 2008 at 9:03 pm
I’ve heard of isotope production in power reactors such as standard LWR’s. Most common would be tritium production in lithium-6 containing rods. Of course, the fact that the irradiated material is in the core of a superheated and pressurized vessel that is only refueled every few months makes it a less than ideal way of irradiating materials. Also, LWR’s don’t have that good a neutron economy so there’s not a lot of flux which can be spared to use for isotope production.
Thus, I don’t think it’s that common. I know it’s been experimented with and proposed, but I don’t think it’s something which has ever been effectively deployed on any scale. Except for, as I mentioned, tritium production.
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October 6th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Kudos, just happened in. Wasn’t what I was looking for, but very fine site.
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