Having grown up in Russia and personally being in contact with a few people affected by the Chernobyl fallout, it's a bit hard to take someone who tries to diminish the impact of that accident to this degree.
Yes, maybe the UN report showed such a small number of confirmed fatalities, but I have a sneaky suspicion that they based it mostly on data collected by the Soviet Union. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust any data that came from an authoritarian government, especially one run by a bunch of Russians, especially one that collapsed 20 years ago (likely destroying countless incriminating documents in the process), especially concerning a deeply embarrassing incident such as Chernobyl.
The public may be overreacting to the nuclear threat posed by the Fukushima reactors, but this seems like a subtle attempt at rewriting history.
(I wouldn't be surprised if there is a UN report 20 years from now proving that Saddam Hussein did indeed win re-election with 99% of the vote.)
Not to mention that they covered up the Chernobyl accident for I can't remember how many days before even bothering to tell the locals that they're in danger.
In the nineties, families in the country around where I grew up, here in Ireland, hosted children from Chernobyl every summer, so that they could breath clean air and eat clean food. I've also seen documentaries about birth defects in the years after the accident. Perhaps there weren't too many fatalities, but a lot of lives were very badly affected by the radiation and a lot more people died due to slow, radiation induced diseases. For example, in the reports, how many people who died of cancer or other diseases since were counted?
So, I agree with you - downplaying the dangers of radiation is careless and playing with peoples lives.
A good friend's wife spent a good bit of time in Belarus recently (well, 2006-2007), primarily assisting children still affected by the Chernobyl disaster. The stories she told of kids powering through cancer would reduce most men to tears. Really amazing what's still going on over there, to this day. The incident at Chernobyl might have occurred in the Ukraine, but it was not the most affected. Sad, even if I am a highly pro-nuclear guy.
I believe most of the radiation was literally rained down on Belarus, so they got a much much worse dose of it than the Ukraine did.
From what I've read, the Soviet government used cloud seeding to force the radiation to be rained down on Belarus because they wanted to prevent it from reaching higher populated areas like Moscow. Unfortunately, afaik, they never told the Belarusian people about it so they never had a chance of evacuating beforehand. Its pretty sad.
... children still affected by the Chernobyl disaster. The stories she told of kids powering through cancer would reduce most men to tears.
You can go to hospitals anywhere in the world and hear exactly the same stories. Kids get cancer. It sucks, but it's a fact of life. Is there any evidence that these cancers were caused by Chernobyl?
- Between 1970 and 2001 thyroid cancer incidence rates in Belarus increased from 0.4 per 100 000 to 3.5 per 100 000
among males (+775%) and from 0.8 per 100 000 to 16.2 per 100 000 among females (+1925%).
- The relative increases in areas with ‘higher exposure’ from the Chernobyl disaster exceeded those in ‘lower exposure’ areas with marked increases in thyroid cancer incidence rate ratios among both genders and in all age groups.
- The largest increases were observed among people from ‘higher exposure’ areas ages 0-14 yr at time of diagnosis,
suggesting that a high prevalence of pre-existing iodine deficiency, in combination with unique susceptibility among
younger people, might have contributed to potential carcinogenic exposures to the thyroid.
- The magnitude of increases observed is remarkable given the relatively limited time interval since Chernobyl ...
By comparison, the total incidence of cancers among males aged 0-14 in SEER areas in the USA (representing 28% of the population, per their website) is 149.5 per million, and for females aged 0-14 is 128.7 per million. Thyroid carcinoma is at 0.9 per million in males, and 2.9 per million in females[1]. So, while they had a higher rate than in the USA even before 1970 (4 per million for males and 8 per million for females), I would be extremely doubtful that the increase in numbers is just due to an increase in diagnosis because doctors are expecting to see cancers.
Its not just cancer. A lot of children there have been born with severe[1] birth defects since.
[1] For example, heres a documentary on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fCCVU4y7oE Note that I don't know how accurate this particular documentary is and I haven't watched it all, but I have seen others with similar content. WARNING: don't watch if you're not prepared to see severely deformed children. Its not very nice at all, really :(
Sadly, very much so. A massive portion of the radiation went into Belarus, and they're still dealing with the results to this day, although things are finally dropping. I asked the same question, and she showed me a bunch of good evidence, although I have none on hand. Wish I did, rather than just telling a story.
I've heard of depleted uranium, but depleted plutonium is new to me.
Googling a bit, I think you mean depleted uranium, but perhaps wrote 'plutonium' because one of the problems with depleted uranium is that it is (often?) contaminated with plutonium. Just guessing.
Still, 36 hours in a very high radiation environment is a very long time. also, I'm not sure how long the people in Chernobyl itself were there before being told something was wrong.
Hell, the soviet union didn't admit anything was wrong until a couple of days after, when the radiation was noticed by engineers in Sweden[1].
Have you seen the actual numbers of this, and seen them put into perspective? I'd strongly recommend looking at http://xkcd.org/radiation/ -- he puts the data into an easy to relate to format.
The biggest problem with that chart is that it mixes different time scales, which it only indicates in the text, not in the visual comparisons.
Take one of the ones that measures an hour's exposure and multiply it by 24. Or a day and multiply it by 365. Suddenly the visual comparisons look much, much different.
As mentioned in the BBC article though, doing that kind of math does not lead to an accurate result, due to the fact that your body is constantly healing. It's the bursts of radiation that are most damaging.
Yeah, this was one of my big complaints with that. However, it's not prevalent enough to disregard it. It's by no means scientific, but I think it gives a good high level orders-of-magnitude view, largely.
Yes, I mostly understand the scale of radiation we're currently dealing with in Japan, and it's mostly on the "safer" side. However, my issue is with taking an accident that deformed countless children, caused countless cases of cancer, and in general completely devastated the lives of (hundreds of) thousands of people - and essentially using it in a "How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb" argument to get people to calm down. Yes, there is a level of overreaction any time a nuclear accident takes place (Japan, TMI come to mind), but I wish people wouldn't gloss over the suffering of so many people in order to make their point.
It was a great tragedy. But neither was the the number of deformed children nor the number of cases of cancer "countless". There have been put numbers on it [1].
- UNSCEAR claims 6000 cases of cancer.
- IAEA claims 4000 deaths
- Greenpeace claims 200,000 deaths
- IPPNW claims 10,000 - 50,000 cases of cancer
- New York Academy of Sciences claims 985,000 deaths
I would hardly count xkcd as a scientifically factual comic. Besides, as waterlesscloud said, he mixes up timescales (or in some cases uses simply uSv's, which, I hear, makes no sense without a timescale. Ie 5 uSv = wrong, 5 uSv/hour = ok).
In that case, what were you referring to when posting the chart: Fukushima or Chernobyl?
If Chernobyl, the article mentions only a small number of fatalities, but I've read in many places over the years that thousands of people (especially in Belarus, who got the worst of it) have since died from cancer and other radiation induced diseases. I've also seen documentaries about the many sick and deformed children that were born since, because of their parents high exposure to radiation.
Finally, when I was growing up, I saw many affected children first hand, as a lot of families in my school at the time would host children affected by the accident during the summer.
If you were referring to Fukushima, I agree that it doesn't come close to Chernobyl (that we know of, at least), but the linked article makes Chernobyl sound "not that bad" too, which I cannot agree with.
The idea that we have a sufficient quantity of accurate data about Chernobyl to make sweeping claims about its impact on people living there, including how many died as a result, is frankly idiotic. We do not and never will have such data.
This is a pernicious meme that frequently recurs on this board. Reject it.
(The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, has occurred in the open within the context of a reasonably free society, so it may provide us with data that proves useful for future nuclear accidents.)
While we can't make claims about totals, I think we can make some sweeping claims about relative harm.
Namely, that taking Chernobyl in its proper context (one nuclear plant out of many) and even taking Fukishima to be an event of similar magnitude, nuclear power plants still present significant advantages over coal from a pain-and-hardship caused per watt-hour generated.
No one's arguing that nuclear power is safe. However, I'd rather have the last unprocessable nuclear waste from a generation of reactors buried in a well-shielded container under my house than live downwind from a coal power plant. Ideally of course I would like neither, but the fact is millions of people live downwind from coal power plants, and that is a much bigger problem than Fukishima. That problem could be mitigated if as those coal plants die they are replaced with modern nuclear reactors. Yes, it will cause other problems, but these will be smaller when taken in aggregate. (Even if they are more dramatic when they happen.)
I wouldn't take the absolute numbers seriously either. But I think, after so many investigations and 20 years worth of post soviet health statistics, we can reasonably assume that the effects were not as bad as initially feared.
Also, your argument could be turned on its head. If there hadn't been the kind of secrecy and attempts to cover up what had happened, way fewer people would have been affected.
That said, I'm not a big fan of nuclear because I don't like making commitments for thousands of years. A lot can happen in that timeframe. Wars, corrupt regimes, a collapse of our entire industrial society, etc.
The idea that we have a sufficient quantity of accurate data about Chernobyl to make sweeping claims about its impact on people living there, including how many died as a result, is frankly idiotic. We do not and never will have such data.
There has been an unprecedented effort by the international
community to assess the magnitude and characteristics
of the health effects due to the radiation exposure
resulting from the accident. As early as August 1986, a
widely attended international gathering, the “Post-Accident
Review Meeting”, was convened in Vienna. The resulting
report of the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group
(INSAG) contained a limited but essentially correct early
account of the accident and its expected radiological consequences
[I31]. In May 1988, the International Scientific
Conference on the Medical Aspects of the Accident at the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant [I32] held in Kiev summarized
the available information at the time and confirmed
that some children had received high doses to the thyroid. In
May 1989, scientists obtained a more comprehensive insight
into the scale of the consequences of the accident at an ad
hoc meeting convened at the time of the 38th session of
UNSCEAR [G15, K25]. In October 1989, the former Soviet
Union formally requested “an international experts’ assessment”
and, as a result, the International Chernobyl Project
(ICP) [I5] was launched in early 1990; its conclusions and
recommendations were presented at an International Conference
held in Vienna, 21–24 May 1991 [I5]. Many national
and international initiatives7 followed aimed at developing a
better understanding of the accident consequences and in
assisting in their mitigation. The results of these initiatives
were presented at the 1996 International Conference on One
Decade After Chernobyl8 [I29]. There was a broad agreement
on the extent and character of the consequences.
...
The objective of the present annex is to provide an
authoritative and definitive review of the health effects
observed to date that are attributable to radiation exposure
due to the accident and to clarify the potential risk projections,
taking into account the levels, trends and patterns of
radiation dose to the exposed populations. The Committee
has evaluated the relevant new information that has become
available since the 2000 Report, in order to determine
whether the assumptions used previously to assess the radiological
consequences are still valid. In addition, it recognized
that some issues merited further scrutiny and that its
work to provide the scientific basis for a better understanding
of the radiation‑related health and environmental effects
of the Chernobyl accident needed to continue. The information
considered included the behaviour and trends of the
long‑lived radionuclides in foodstuff and the environment in
order to improve the estimates of exposure of relevant population
groups, and the results of the latest follow‑up studies
of the health of the exposed groups. The effects of radiation
on plants and animals following the Chernobyl accident are
discussed separately in annex E, “Effects of ionizing radiation
on non‑human biota”. Other effects of the accident, in
particular, distress and anxiety, and socio‑economic effects,
were considered by the Chernobyl Forum [W5] but are
outside the Committee’s remit.
The Committee, in general, bases its assessments on
reports appearing in peer‑reviewed scientific literature and
on information submitted officially by Governments in
response to its requests. However, the results of many of
the studies related to the Chernobyl accident have been
presented at scientific meetings without formal scientific
peer review. The Committee decided that it would only
make use of such information when it could judge that the
results and the underlying work were scientifically and
technically sound.
Yes, that's right: Working from outside of the USSR, they convened a group and produced an admittedly limited account of the incident. Three years later, when the Soviet regime finally requested (limited) help, and they did their best. A decade later, they revisited the issue, and made the decision not to use the results from many other studies that had been attempted, because they weren't necessarily scientifically rigorous.
That was probably right decision, and I find it entirely plausible that they did great work given the enormous limitations that they faced, but there is only so much you can do when the authoritarian regime standing in your way happens to finally disintegrate, years later.
People are worried about cancer from electricity, phones, microwaves, terrorists, etc. Silent/Unseen killers are the scariest kind, almost as if it's a good bogeyman.
Japanese can resolve this hysteria after seeing economic costs. However, the governments in lawsuit prone countries will go out of their way to make it very safe in almost everything. eg low speed limits, many speed bumps, background checks, etc. Otherwise the government would get sued for not doing enough, affecting the budget.
governments control the courts; they exempt themselves from liability for things all the time. for instance: try suing the cops in the US because they didn't do enough to protect you.
Wrong, this happens all the time. For example, municipalities pay out all the time to the Westboro Baptist Church when local police are unable to defend them from the people they are intentionally enraging. (This is how WBC makes their money.)
I think that the 'horrible' part is that the public at large is more than willing to act scared of it, but will make no attempt (and in some cases will actively resist attempts) to increase their understanding of the thing that they are so afraid of.
Perhaps the authorities are to blame for this problem. They are far from open about the issues and the plant has a long history of record falsification and other shenanigans. Now we get to read about a faulty initial installation of the steelwork with a botch job repair.
The author points out the solution for storing nuclear end products, its quite brilliant! 100m under a pro-nuclear persons house! Problem solved!
Maybe those who think nuclear energy is very green might join the author? I am sure we can find a few 10,000, and then we have room for all that nuclear waste.
The media overhyping things is nothing new and doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean nuclear power is safe, for example. Unfortunately, real journalism has all but disappeared from the world, to be replaced by what we'd refer to as trolling or link-whoring online.
I am sure there are many people who would not mind at all. Hold an auction for an amount per month would be paid to live there, so that people are compensated for the perceived risk.
Who is "we"? If the the author speaks for himself, I have no objection against him moving to Fukushima or buying a house close to another nuclear power plant. I'm sure there are people willing to sell and the price for real estate in those areas has most likely dropped considerably in the last few decades.
I wouldn't be so sure about your implication that nuclear power plants reduce property prices: "In each of the seven regions, housing and real estate values have benefited from the operations of the nuclear facilities: total property values, assessed valuations and median housing prices have often increased at rates above the national and state averages. In each local area, housing prices were several times higher than prior to the opening of the nuclear facilities, and there is evidence that in Barnwell, proximity to the nuclear facility may actually increase housing values.[1]"
For apparently no clear reason, nuclear power plants are often built near the border. Usually people on the other side of the border usually don't profit in whatever way from the power plant. The situation may be different if you live on an island.
There seem to be a small group of people who want to play the contrarian game and claim that people are overreacting to the potentially huge damage the contamination (as opposed to radiation) that Fukushima is going to result in.
It's easy to be holed up safe in Oxford and claim radiation is not an issue. Why doesn't this gentleman volunteer to assist at the plants if he thinks radiation is no danger at all.
What makes me uneasy about this kind of call is that the situation at Fukushima is ungoing, but we hear a lot of "the levels are ridiculous right now, what you're scarred of?".
The people running away or worrying about the situation don't care so much about the levels now. They care about the levels if/when shit happens, and only use the radiation seen now to check how good things are handled.
And for now it's not as if tepco's engineers, as goog as they are, are yet mastering the situation.
I think it is only reasonable to ask that avoidable civilian technology be insured against harm done by it. So: how much would this insurance cost? Cleanup, health care costs, disability payments, loss of property?
Given just a slight increase in illness rate for the sheer number of people involved can give a hard to detect but significant cost. An insurer will have to set aside enough money for the expected amount of payout. What would Warren Buffett's premiums be? Some claims will be excluded by the insurer, and the rest of the population will probably be called to for economic assistance: how much will that be? What is the opportunity cost of having half a million people cleaning up the place instead of being productive?
So yes, we shouldn't run away from radiation. We should clean it up safely, then come to our senses and stop dispersing any more of it. This technology is a dead-end for normal energy production.
A 'spokesman' has just announced in the last few hours that there are high cesium levels in leaking water that is measuring 1Sv per hour. That going to be somewhere in the depths of the plant, but living about as far away from this ad is possible is a comfort to me.
How about all those people dying from cancer years later all over Russia and Central Europe? Radiation does not kill instantly, it causes cancer, which kills years later.
Stop spreading such nonsense articles, please! Just because the immediate impact is comparatively low, that doesn't mean it's harmless.
Radiation does not kill instantly, it causes cancer, which kills years later.
Radiation is a carcinogen, yes. But it turns out that radiation is a really puny carcinogen. A radiation dosage which will probably kill you if delivered rapidly -- 4 Sieverts -- has only a small chance of causing cancer -- about 10% (and an even lower chance of causing lethal cancer).
A 10% chance of getting cancer is not small at all. It's pretty significant - thousands of products and substances have been banned for much less. The chance of getting cancer for current smokers, for instance, is said to be 10-15%. Do you think that tobacco smoke is a really puny carcinogen?
No, I don't think tobacco smoke is a puny carcinogen. Dosage matters. To get that 10% chance of cancer, you need to have what would be an almost certainly lethal dose of acute radiation.
It's easy to get cancer by smoking. It's really really hard to get cancer from radiation without giving yourself a lethal acute dose of radiation in the process.
Have you a source for that? I could well believe that the cancer risk is low and obviously is is uncommon for a dose of radiation to be large, but 'comparatively large' doses of radiation are given regularly in hospital catheter labs, CT/PET scanners. And while generally these would be in the 10-20-30 mSv range, for many patients scans are repeated regularly for long time periods, rapidly reaching the 150-500mSv range discussed in the below article. Of course this is a fractionated dose and it would be much more dangerous as a single hit. I cannot find any reference to radiation dose verses cancer risk. Somewhat supporting you is this article which discusses over estimation of dose risk. Interesting discussion too: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc073513
Unfortunately that doesn't correspond to any reading I've done on this topic. I'm pretty sure that chronic, sublethal exposure to radiation significantly increases your chance of various types of cancer.
Would you happen to have a source for this? I'm finding it hard to imagine how a study like this can even take place given that there have (probably) not been many survivors among those who have received a dose of 4 Sieverts.
There's a recent book called Physics for Future Presidents, written by a physics professor at Berkeley, which has a lot of material on radiation risks. He says you can calculate your risk of cancer from radiation by dividing your exposure by 2500 rem. The level that gives you acute radiation sickness is 200 rem.
This is called the "linear hypothesis" and is widely used. They use it in medicine to decide if diagnostic scans are worth the risk. The risk could actually be lower; some scientists think there's a threshold below which there's no risk. There's too much statistical uncertainty at low exposure levels to know for sure.
I don't know of any studies on people with such large doses of radiation, no -- but it's believed that cancer risk from radiation is proportional to the dosage received, and lots of studies have been done looking at populations in areas with higher/lower levels of background radiation.
Do you realize that official estimates in Europe hold chernobyl responsible for about 500000 deaths caused by secondary radiation effects? Do NOT play this down. Radiation kills!
Looking at all these answers it is amazing how well propaganda has worked. Alright then, go ahead and believe that radiation is not dangerous. Please try to stay clear of strong radiation sources nevertheless, if only for sentimental reasons.
Half of all wild boars shot in central Europe can not be sold because their radiation levels are still too high for general consumption because of Chernobyl.
Misclicked and really meant to downvote - your argument doesn't make any sense, because you're saying that 43 is not 'a bit' when compared to 6 million. 43 people really is only a small amount, and while it still is horrible for those involved, there are many things that kill many more people daily over which no fuss is made at all.
My point was that Hitler didn't directly kill that many people with his own hands, just like Chernobyl didn't _directly_ cause many deaths. But the consequences of that one accident and that one man went far beyond their _immediate_ impact that can be directly traced back. (In hindsight, I should have picked a different analogy ...)
Radiation has the ability to make entire areas uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Any mistakes in small countries like the UK could result in devastating effects on available land. Anything that dangerous should be handled exceptionally carefully.
Often the argument about whether nuclear power represents an acceptable risk or not is then used to argue that nuclear power is a key solution to get rid of fossil fuel (a straw man argument?), as if there are no other parts of nuclear power which should be questioned.
This particular article doesn't say so explicitly, but has links in the margin to: "Nuclear power: Energy solution or evil curse?" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12730473
Key aspects of the discussion really is whether nuclear power is safe (for people and environment) and economical. A good discussion about the economic aspects can be found at: "Cost, not Japan crisis, should scrub nuclear power" http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-17-cost-not-japan-crisi...
Stopped reading at "more people have died from the Tsunami", which unfortunately was line one. if you want to make an argument about radiation, make it - Tsunamis have nothing to do with it, I don't think they are radioactive.
The blurb at the top is not always written by the same writer as the article...
But even with that said, why doesn't it make sense to compare the number of casualties and damages between different accidents? It's a way to put things into perspective. People have in general a rather faulty sense of proportion and understanding of statistics.
This isn't an article about radiation, it's an article about fear. Our sense of fear is not rational. If it were, people in the US would be more afraid of bananas (which count as "highly radioactive" if I apply the scales used by some newspapers evenhandedly) than Fukushima. Which shouldn't count as scary at all. I just ate one, in fact, in spite of knowing that it's choc-full of delicious, radioactive potassium.
We fear things that are easy to imagine over common but hard to see risks. The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic. So the death of tens of thousands due to the tsunami will never register the same emotional impact as the picture of one deformed child from Chernobyl.
It's the same in startup marketing, incidentally. That's why they give people testimonials (stories), help them imagine the benefits, etc. This is sort of the opposite: the media is making it easy to imagine all sorts of horrible things happening due to invisible killer radiation. A few bad things probably will happen. Oh yeah, tens of thousands of people were also buried under a 12m wall of water that crushed entire towns, but there's nothing new to say about that.
Where I live it is a lot more rational to be worried about radiation than about Tsunamis.
I can't bring the Tsunami victims back alive. What could I possibly learn from the Tsunami story? That it could be dangerous to live too close to the sea, that's about it.
It's not my fault if the media tries to milk Fukushima for all it's worth (they live on fear). Still, the kind of answer you give doesn't help much. If the radiation is just banana level, why do the workers there wear protection suits? I didn't follow the stories too closely, so I suppose you refer to some measurement somewhere that made it into the news. That's a complete strawman.
What I heard is that radiation levels were rising in Tokyo's water supply, but not enough to be dangerous. Still I would consider it newsworthy that an accident 200km away that does not seem to be 100% under control affects the Tokyo water supply. The Tsunami probably also started just with a 1mm rise in water levels. And to be honest, I admit if I was living in Tokyo, I would probably still think twice about giving the water to my baby. Who knows how timely the official measurements arrive - maybe in the meantime the radiation levels rise some more (the real news is the movement in radiation levels, not any static data point).
And by the way, so far I have not heard a figure > 20000 for the number of the Tsunami victims, so I think you exaggerate with "tens of thousands" (it's horrible, nevertheless - but don't play the same tricks you accuse the anti nuclear media of).
> I can't bring the Tsunami victims back alive. What could I possibly learn from the Tsunami story? That it could be dangerous to live too close to the sea, that's about it.
They can improve seawalls and such, actually. And we can improve search & rescue operations.
> If the radiation is just banana level, why do the workers there wear protection suits?
Those don't protect from radiation very well, they're to prevent contamination. It takes several inches of lead to block gamma rays (you'd have to be Superman to move in a suit that heavy) and neutrons can activate otherwise non-radioactive elements. Alpha & beta radiation are relatively easy to block, though, but normal clothing is almost enough.
Also, it's just good engineering to take precautions. Also, near the plant, there actually are hazardous levels of radiation, it's just once you get further away that they're mostly harmless.
> And by the way, so far I have not heard a figure > 20000 for the number of the Tsunami victims, so I think you exaggerate with "tens of thousands" (it's horrible, nevertheless - but don't play the same tricks you accuse the anti nuclear media of).
I have, but who knows with the news? I've heard radiation figures from "100x normal" to "1,000,000x normal" (the LA Times had a much larger multiplier than the other papers I compared it to).
Also, remember the tsunami in the Indian ocean? Last I heard, the deaths there were on the order of 100k, if memory serves. Japan did what? 1/10th or so of that (again, depending on which numbers you believe).
I do not and cannot blame you for the media's hysteria, I'm just trying to help you not get caught up in it and to understand the real dangers that people are underestimating. Granted, you may not live in a coastal area, so you may not even have heard of seawalls before, but non-newsworthy things like improving them can save a lot of people.
But those kinds of projects will get starved for funding. So we'll end up with a lot of panicked people in California who shoot down new nuke plants in favor of coal/natural gas (the coal miners who die are in China, so there are no political consequences) and underestimate things like seawalls. California is said to be overdue for a big quake, but I hope they're wrong about that.
Nonsense, Japan already has invested a lot in Tsunami protection, they will not starve funding for that. Who says it is an "either invest in anti-Tsunami or anti-nuclear-power measures" kind of thing? And no, I don't live in a coastal area, so enhancing seawalls is not my interest or priority.
As for protection suit: contamination, why should it matter if it is only as bad as eating a banana? Your banana argument really makes no sense.
I have little hopes for nuclear power to go away, nor fossile fuel plants. I think it would be possible, but lifestyles would have to change too much (for the better in my opinion, but many people would disagree). We certainly could save a lot of power, so it would not have to be necessary to replace nuclear power plants with fossile fuel plants.
> As for protection suit: contamination, why should it matter if it is only as bad as eating a banana? Your banana argument really makes no sense.
How radiation affects one's body is a complex issue. The inverse square law also comes into effect. So something can be dangerous close up, but no threat to anyone who doesn't get close.
Ars Technica has a nice article about radiation that goes into these issues in more detail than I can:
My main point about bananas, though, is that radiation is normal. You experience it every single day, even if you don't realize it. All sorts of background radiation is constantly going through your body. Not to mention intentional exposures like chest X-rays.
It's sort of like fire, then. You can burn yourself and you should treat it carefully. You should fear it enough to avoid burning yourself, but not much more than that. It's also going to become just about as necessary to civilization as fire, soon, from the look of things.
Maybe fusion will pan out and I hope so, but people are then going to have to learn all about neutrons and why they can make normal materials become radioactive.... But maybe clever moderator designs will make it so that most neutrons are absorbed by easily replaceable things that don't become anything nasty.
A lot longer than any of our other energy sources, except maybe the sun, so fusion is a good thing to be able to manage, because hydrogen is so abundant.
However, entropy will ultimately kill the universe. Once the entire universe runs out of available energy (which it can manage without any human help), then we're screwed barring radical new physics that can give us answers like "this is how you create another universe and then travel there."
The good news is that it will take a looooooong time before anybody seriously has to worry about that.
the moron who wrote the article doesn't know what he's talking about:
>Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients every day - and a radiation dose given for radiotherapy in hospital is no different in principle to a similar dose received in the environment.
"Late side effects may first occur 6 or more months after radiation therapy is over. They vary by the part of your body that was treated and the dose of radiation you received. Late side effects may include infertility, joint problems, lymphedema, mouth problems, and secondary cancer."
That moron who wrote the article is a nuclear and medical physicist at the University of Oxford.
From the HN comment guidelines:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say;
1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Judging from your comment history, you seem to enjoy calling names more than you do providing arguments.
A counter-argument to what, exactly? You took a statement that he made, concluded that he was a 'moron who does not know what he's talk about', and then backed that summary statement up with a lifted quote from cancer.gov that had nothing to do to the original statement?
Allison's statement is accurate: a single radiation dose is similar in principle to one received from the environment. His over-arching point is that we don't regard radiation doses in the hospital as scary, taboo and dangerous, and yet we regard any environmental dose as toxic and worth panicking over. The rest of the article lays down his arguments for this view.
>Allison's statement is accurate: a single radiation dose is similar in principle to one received from the environment.
why do you repeat this utter and obviously incorrect crap?
do you really think that localized deep tissue dose has the same health effect as if it was received whole-body? Do you just happen to possess the winning combination of being uneducated and too lazy to Google things up? If you ever make you brain moving, try to think how it can be "similar in principle" when 20S deposited to healthy tissue around cancer (out of total 60-80S dose the patient receives) rarely kills the patient while 4-5S received "environmentally" during comparable period of time would almost always be lethal.
The article looks like it was written by somebody who is uneducated and has problems with logic, i.e. moron. Too bad it was written by a professional with an agenda. Intellectual dishonesty is much worse than plain stupidity and ignorance.
You post an illogical, intelligence insulting crap and become "sad" when somebody calls the crap out.
You're right - the HN debate culture has gone down. The strongest and most logical argument you've managed in the discussion on radiation doses [non]equivalency is to call me a troll.
And this is with a dose of around 20,000mSv. He recommends setting the limit at 100 mSv/year with a lifelong limit of 5,000 mSv.
I also agree shadowsun7, you could cut down on the name calling and be a bit more civilized in your comments. It doesn't contribute anything to the conversation but weakens your message.
>And this is with a dose of around 20,000mSv. He recommends setting the limit at 100 mSv/year with a lifelong limit of 5,000 mSv.
this article is a clear propaganda piece designed to evoke such primitive logical conclusions. But even primitive logical analysis by a rudimentary educated person shouldn't have missed the significant difference between localized deep-tissue dose delivery ("meat cooking") in the radiotherapy where 2-3S is delivered per session normally without any lethal risk and 25-50% lethality of 2-3S delivered whole-body (100% lethal if repeated several times during period of several weeks).
>be a bit more civilized in your comments
yep, taking an intentionally misleading propaganda by a professional for a blabbing of a moron isn't that civilized.
I am going to make a completely unscientific argument now that I know the HN readership will look down upon, but I think it captures why we can't build nuclear plants.
First, nuclear power started out as a cold war thing; they built nuclear plants because of one very interesting side-product required to build nuclear bombs. These days in those countries that already have nuclear weapons, that's a secondary concern - but this is where it came from. And for countries that don't yet have nuclear weapons, that's the reason they want to build them.
Second, the accident in Chernobyl. Hold your statistics and studies. Just pause for a moment. Think about this accident. All children all over Europe were told to stay inside for a few days. And take Iodine. Any technology that is able to cause that is not fit to generate power. In fact the only man made processes that can cause such an event are nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.
Fail safe plants unfortunately don't exist - they're not fail safe, as evident in Fukushima. Does the chain reaction stop when everything fails? No? Then it's not fail-safe. Obviously.
I am not a worrier - but when you're playing with forces that cannot be controlled with the technology we have, you have to do the smart thing and skip them for now. There's plenty of alternatives - I think the nuclear thing is a distraction from them, and kept alive by a very active lobby.
I am happy to change my opinion if you come up with a new process that's actually fail-safe, that's actually guaranteed to not leak radiation, and that doesn't produce nuclear waste.
Solar and wind energy are not reliable enough to provide base-load coverage, hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology, and really the only other option is fossil fuels.
At this point, the options literally are nuclear, or fossil fuels. And burning more and more coal for power (which puts out more radiation and kills more people than a nuclear plant, FYI) because anything less than perfection is not suitable just seems like a really, really shortsighted idea.
An alternative energy source does not need to be perfect to be worth switching to. It just needs to be better than the status quo. And nuclear power, currently, is very much better than coal.
hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology...
... and isn't any safer than nuclear power. Four people died when the Japan earthquake caused a dam to fail -- that's more deaths than the Fukushima NPP has caused, but oddly enough nobody is calling for a worldwide halt to dam construction.
I lived in Germany when Chernobyl blew. I'm pretty aware of nuclear risks. But...should we get rid of hydroelectric as well? Banqiao Dam killed 26,000 people, immediately instead of years later, and there weren't any little pills they could take to prevent it.
There have been a lot of other dam failures that killed people, too.
And don't get me started on coal. I've seen estimates that pollution from coal kills 24,000 people every year in the U.S. alone. That's not even from accidents, it's just normal operation.
So I'm not too concerned about the relative risk of nuclear plants. All modern plants are far safer than Chernobyl.
But people are working on ideas that would meet your specs. The liquid thorium reactor, for example, produces orders of magnitude less waste, which is only dangerous for a few centuries. The fuel is liquid, and if it starts to overheat, a plug melts and drains it into a wide basin to cool off. The reactor can also dispose of our existing nuclear wsste.
There are a lot of reactors which are much more dangerous than the one in Chernobyl. The ones using Plutonium, the breeders, the ones with large storage sites full of spent fuel, etc.
The Thorium reactor has a lot of problems. Engineering problems that are not solved.
Remember the German Thorium reactor, the HTR 300. It died with a whimper.
What we really don't need is giving nuclear engineers more money to create huge nightmares.
The first thing before ANY nuclear engineer could come back with another idea is to provide us with a safe storage technology and clean up failed attempts like in Asse II.
Believing that the next hundred billions on new nuclear technology will be better spend than the last ones, is just naive. Especially given that the basic question of storing the waste is totally unsolved. The US abandoned now Yucca. Germany has also no storage site. Instead the waste is piling up in totally inadequate places - spent fuel is stored in pools near reactors and in dry storage near reactors.
We don't need storage sites. If we unstuck our heads from our asses we can just burn most of the waste.
And you're talking like nuclear engineers are some sort of freaks just waiting to unleash the next horror upon the world.
The fact is that if we want to realize UN millennium goals we need more energy. If we want to help poor asians and africans, we need more energy. If we want everybody to own a Xbox, a car and a week of vacation per year - we need more energy.
Basically only obstacle in our path of increased welfare and general well being (peace also!) on the world is access to more, cheaper energy.
And newsflash - hydro, solar and wind won't cut it. They might if we build a world supergrid. But that won't happen for at least 40 years (If we had necessary tech today - it would take 20-40 years to get it built).
So what are you proposing? Or are you just washing your hands and laying off the burden from your soul?
Nuclear engineers are technocrats powered by corrupt politicians and corporations.
The US does not need more energy. The US needs to start thinking about using less energy. About every country in the industrialized world uses MUCH MUCH less energy.
If you think the US lifestyle is sustainable, then you are dreaming.
Renewable will fully power us here in Germany in 40 years or less. We have started a decade ago working on that. Checkout the progress renewable energy has made here in the last decade. This is combined with energy saving based on more efficient industrial processes, higher standards, and so on.
If you guys sit on your ass, it is not my problem.
I have for example no car. I use public transport. I live in a city where already experimental fully hydrogen powered busses are being tested in regular use. I'm also sitting in a winter garden right now which is 25 degrees celsius in March - powered by the sun...
1. I'm not from US - and I wasn't speaking about US. I was speaking about rest of the world. Which whether you like it or not wants to live american lifestyle.
2. Current american model is indeed sustainable if we manage to bring cost of energy (total cost, including intangibles) to a low enough level.
3. I also try to minimize my impact upon world by using as few resources as I can. Being economic is fine and good. But it won't solve all our problems.
4. You resorted to an ad-hominem attack upon my person you also dared to insult me by calling me fucking lazy - when all I wanted to hear from you is what kind of alternative you propose.
5. I'm not denying that substantial progress has been made in the field of renewable power sources. The problem is that its just not enough.
6. You are vehemently claiming that Germany will be completely on renewables in 40 years. Thats what green power lobies claim. Green power is also a huge industry. Never forget that.
edit: Calling an engineer technocrat just shows that you don't even understand either the meaning of the word "engineer" or either "technocrat" for that matter.
Look, the 40 year plan is an official plan of the current conservative government. If it is a huge business, well, fuck, that's the plan. We want green technology to be the huge growth industry for the next decades. Making money with that is the plan.
Technocracy means for example that engineers are the decision makers. Here in Germany the decision to invest billions into nuclear energy has been supported and promoted by engineers and scientists in all levels of government, government funded research institutes and universities and by companies using their influence on government.
This faulty advice has cost us billions and has left us with some industry ruins and fucked up attempts on storing nuclear waste.
Ordinary people are protesting against this for decades.
1. You assume that green technocracy is "better" than current technocracy. Or are you proposing that we let hysteric extremist (fascist?) wing of green take over?
2. The largest issue of nuclear power is that people who are declaratively for saving environment block any and all attempts to improve current situation. In this sense - the greens are at fault for Fukushima. Otherwise this plant would be probably dismantled 10 years ago and replaced with more modern and safer model. The same goes for nuclear waste - green is playing an extremely dangerous game of trying to prove that the problem of nuclear waste is insolvable, by obstructing any attempts of solution.
3. In retrospective - show me single plan created by bureaucrats that stood the test of time.
The greens are definitely not fascist. I think you are confusing this. Fascist is the influence of huge corporations over people. Not the influence of people over themselves.
Wow, Fukushima is caused by the Greens now? And I though it was caused by a greedy and incompetent company not willing to invest into safety.
No company would invest into a newer model. These are extremely expensive. Like 5 billion Euro in western Europe. Every electricity company is talking about EXTENDING the life of the current plants. Replacing old ones which are running with new ones is the most stupid thing an electricity company can do. What they want is getting the money from the existing plants with as little effort as possible.
Excuse me. I didn't mean to imply that all greens are fascist. And I also meant Green in the broadest possible sense - as in environmentalists of all denominations. And this context I meant the extremist faction(s) when I said fascist green extremists. Because they only have one agenda: Stop corporations. Stop Nuclear Power. Stop Consuming Carbon power sources. But I don't see an alternative proposal how to deal with everyday human existence in 21st century.
Saying renewables have loads of potential just doesn't cut it.
In US last nuclear power plant has been built in 1977. Something similar holds true worldwide (there haven't been that many nuclear power plants built since then). Nuclear power production is probably THE most regulated industry in the world (and probably state owned a lot). Newer better plants haven't been built since, guess who, didn't allow it. These old reactors should be shut down and replaced, but since coal power plants are also not allowed to be built (by guess whom) and there are only that many rivers you can turn into accumulation lakes (not to mention disastrous effect on environment - species are dying out due to hydro power). World is in this weird deadlock where we are forced to expand lifetimes of these old nuclear power stations, just to keep going.
And I'm accusing you of being disingenious by pretending that current renewable plans won't have adverse side effects. And by pretending that nuclear industry is in its current state due to greed of plant operators.
And you still haven't provided me with an alternative strategy for while we wait for renewables to save us. We have 40 years of burning coal to meet our demands for energy in front of us - whether you accept it or not. We could diminish some of that impact by building safer, better nuclear power plants.
"If we want everybody to own a Xbox, a car and a week of vacation per year - we need more energy."
We don't. That's your premise, and you argue that reducing energy consumption represents a regression. A week of vacation per year would consume less energy than someone working in many of the places I have worked. "Our demands" for energy are not realistic, valid or sustainable. We don't need more energy.
Excuse me for assuming that you are from western world.
To attain our conflicting goals of improving living conditions for entire human populace, without increasing power consumption the average westerner would have to forfeit 80% of his energy consumption.
So you're telling me that we as species are willing to "devolve" to a standardized standard of living that is somewhere in the ballpark of early 50's? If so I think you are either dishonest or severely lack perspective and knowledge of human species.
I honestly believe that finding additional power sources and utilizing them to satisfy and further expand our consumption of power is the most pragmatic, fair and painless way forward for our species.
To express myself poetically - I believe that god wants us to increase our power consumption up to the level where we will be able to consume entire star systems and beyond. I might be weird, but I also believe that single "purpose" of life is to increase entropy. Thus a perfect life form would expand its power consumption to the level where it would drain the whole universe of its energy potential.
Disclaimer: Proposed 80% is a number I pulled out of where the sun don't shine.
It is a fallacy to say that we cannot improve living conditions for the entire human populace without increasing power consumption. They are not conflicting goals.
It is a fallacy to say that the standard of living must devolve for all those in the western world to the 1950s era levels, to support improvement for the other 80% of the human populace.
You are drawing conclusions based on that fallacy to claim that I am dishonest and lacking in perspective. It is a fallacy to claim any percentage forfeit is necessary to improve living conditions.
You may believe that it is painless to find additional power sources, but the power sources you advocate have already been found and demonstrated as not painless.
Your poetic expression is utterly disgusting. What happens to your perfect life form after it has drained the whole universe of its energy potential? Or even before it has drained it, when the sun don't shine?
>It is a fallacy to say that we cannot improve living conditions for the entire human populace without increasing power consumption. They are not conflicting goals.
Huh? How do you propose increasing standard of living for 70% of worlds population that currently uses way less than you or me or our US cousins? ( Total Energy consumption per capita: US 87KWh, EU 40KWh, China 18KWh, India 6KWh, The World Average=6.6KWh). Unless you try to argue that standard of living has nothing to do with energy consumption or even that 3rd world people have higher standard of living than we do?
>It is a fallacy to say that the standard of living must devolve for all those in the western world to the 1950s era levels, to support improvement for the other 80% of the human populace.
It is? If we freeze the quota of produced energy - then we have turned energy market into a zero sum market. Thus any increase of consumption by one party is counterbalanced by decrease of another. The 50's and 80% is indeed wrong - since I just used them as arbitrary placeholders. Please don't expect me to go on a 10year research, just due to an internet argument.
>You are drawing conclusions based on that fallacy to claim that I am dishonest and lacking in perspective. It is a fallacy to claim any percentage forfeit is necessary to improve living conditions.
You haven't provided a single proof of your claims. You just keep spinning your make-believe story. Also I didn't say you're dishonest AND lacking in perspective. I said that you are either - but you might as well be both.
>You may believe that it is painless to find additional power sources, but the power sources you advocate have already been found and demonstrated as not painless.
Its your delusion that there are painless or negative side effect free power sources. Those used currently are used since in fact they (due to various reasons) ARE the LEAST painful of known options. Also for nuclear power we by now know very well what the negative side effects are (under what circumstances).
What you're lobbying for has only plans - like some very smart people predicted we would be on Mars in 40 years. I certainly believe that all solar, wind, water and trees society is possible. But we need to get by until we get there.
Regarding my belief regarding energy consumption of living beings... The whole universe is trying to equalize its energy potentials (the entropy) and life is just one of mechanisms that helps to dissipate them. So any life at all, now matter how green and how much it tries to not eat animals (instead eating imported papayas?) it will contribute to the untimely thermic death of the universe.
I don't need to argue that standard of living has nothing to do with energy consumption, it is self evident. Leave your air conditioning or heating on for 24 hours for no reason, or keep your engine running while in a tail back. Wonder at how your standard of living has not improved one iota. I propose improving standards of living by people being more efficient. QED this is not spinning a make believe story. Your figures for energy consumption also back my point up, unless european standards of living are lower than the US because of power consumption. It is the reckless waste I am lobbying against. We are not just getting by.
I never stated that there were painless or negative side effect free power sources, you are the one who stated it was the most painless way forward. The additional power sources you are advocating are nuclear. I said nothing about eating animals. The whole universe isn't trying to do anything. When the power sources you speak of are consumed by your ideal life form, is it going to consume itself? Have you ever heard that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form? Contributing to as animals do, against directly causing like you advocate your ideal form doing, are different notions.
As far as my hypothetical uber life form goes - its an thought experiment. It was never meant to go and devour all there is.
I'm well aware of conservation of energy and I wasn't talking about it. I was talking about equalization of potentials. Thats what entropy means. The tendency that our universe has to equalize energy potentials. Thats what wind is. And thats why stars shine, the ice melts etc... Because if an more stable (read equal) energy state is available - the universe will find a way to achieve it.
Just as all elements heavier the iron try to (and will eventually) fission into lighter particles and just as elements lighter than iron try to (and again will eventually) fuse together, until eventually whole universe will consist of nothing but iron atoms. That would be so called thermic death of the universe, which is valid only in some end of universe scenarios, which depend upon shape of spacetime.
Well that is definitely a minority viewpoint. Chernobyl is widely considered to be a ridiculously bad design by modern standards. For one thing, it had no containment dome at all. For another, the design caused the reaction to speed up as the fuel got hotter. All modern designs do the opposite: as fuel gets hotter, the reaction slows.
For current production reactors, that's enough to buy time but not enough to completely prevent meltdown. Some more advanced reactors can't melt down, due to this effect. Pebble beds are one. Another is the Integral Fast Breeder, which we had working at the Argonne national laboratory back in the 90s. It was so safe, they shut down the cooling system entirely, twice, and each time the reaction just quietly stopped. The reactor was also designed to be proliferation-resistant.
If you're concerned about nuclear waste, fast breeders are the way to go. Instead of using one percent of the potential of the fuel, like current reactors do, they use it all. They eat nuclear waste and depleted uranium. Clinton was anti-nuclear and shut the project down, so now instead of using depleted uranium for fuel, we shoot it at people to secure oil supplies.
Personally, I'm not that concerned about the waste. From the book Physics for Future Presidents, page 176:
"Colorado, where much of the uranium is obtained, is a geologically active region, full of faults and fissures and mountains rising out of the prairie, and its surface rock contains about a billion tons of uranium. The radioactivity in this uranium is 20 times greater than the legal limit for Yucca Mountain, and it will take more than 13 billion years--not just a few hundred--for the radioactivity to drop by a factor of 10. Yet water that runs through, around, and over this radioactive rock is the source of the Colorado River, which is used for drinking water in much of the Wst, including Los Angeles and San Diego. And unlike the glass pellets that store the waste in Yucca Mountain, most of the uranium in the Colorado ground is water-soluble. Here is the absurd-sounding conclusion: if the Yucca Mountain facility were at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the Colorado River."
Of course we're actually storing wastes on site. I'm not sure why the anti-nuclear people who shut down Yucca thought that was better. But it does have the advantage of leaving the fuel available for fast breeders.
The fast breeders are dead. Nobody is building them anymore here. In Germany the attempt to build one cost several billions and it is now an amusement park.
All children all over Europe were told to stay inside for a few days. And take Iodine.
[citation needed] I live in (western) Europe, and remember neither of these; neither does Wikipedia. Some milk and vegetables were destroyed as precautionary measures, but that is about it.
Fail safe plants unfortunately don't exist - they're not fail safe, as evident in Fukushima.
The Fukushima NPP is very old. Reactor 1 was already scheduled to be decommissioned at the end of March, in fact.
Does the chain reaction stop when everything fails? No? Then it's not fail-safe. Obviously.
At the Fukushima NPP, the chain reactions in reactors 1, 2, and 3 stopped about 5 seconds after the earthquake hit, due to the automatic SCRAM triggered by the detection of abnormal ground acceleration.
In the case the (very old) reactor design used at Fukushima, this was an active insertion; modern power plants use passive SCRAM (usually relying only on gravity) so that even if everything fails the chain reaction will still be shut down.
I mostly agree with you here, but I do think the technology has advanced since the Fukishima (or certainly Chernobyl) were built. Those plants are fairly ancient. Newer facilities have much safer designs.
What we need to do with both nuclear and conventional power facilities is close everything from pre-1985 or so. The pollution coming from the dirty, grandfathered-in (to higher pollution) coal plants in the South, for example, are very likely to kill and sicken a lot more people than nuclear power.
I mostly agree with you here, but I do think the technology has advanced since the Fukishima (or certainly Chernobyl) were built. Those plants are fairly ancient. Newer facilities have much safer designs.
I don't like commenting on things I know only a little about, however, one thing is getting overlooked when people make this argument.
The newer designs are usually PWRs which are stable by design as loss of water or power slows down the reaction. Unfortunately, they are expensive to build (billions of dollars) and have a limited life due to the challenges of containing pressure with metals exposed to radiation. This makes them barely economic over their lifetime at todays energy prices.
The UK has allowed the planning and building of new PWRs. Unfortunately, the companies involved are reluctant to go ahead without some sort of subsidy or carbon tax.
If any of the above is wrong, I'd like to be corrected. However, I feel this is a valid point that is rarely made.
Yes, maybe the UN report showed such a small number of confirmed fatalities, but I have a sneaky suspicion that they based it mostly on data collected by the Soviet Union. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust any data that came from an authoritarian government, especially one run by a bunch of Russians, especially one that collapsed 20 years ago (likely destroying countless incriminating documents in the process), especially concerning a deeply embarrassing incident such as Chernobyl.
The public may be overreacting to the nuclear threat posed by the Fukushima reactors, but this seems like a subtle attempt at rewriting history.
(I wouldn't be surprised if there is a UN report 20 years from now proving that Saddam Hussein did indeed win re-election with 99% of the vote.)