Flying in Airplanes Exposes People To More Radiation Than Standing Next To a Nuclear Reactor (businessinsider.com) 275
Traveling the skies by jet lifts us far from the hustle and bustle of the world below. From a report: But many flyers don't know that soaring miles above Earth also takes us out of a vital protective cocoon -- and a little closer to a place where our cells can be pummeled by radiation from colliding stars, black holes, and more. You can't see these high-energy charged particles, but at any given moment, tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions. Also called cosmic rays or cosmic ionizing radiation, the particles are the cores of atoms, such as iron and nickel, moving at nearly light-speed. They can travel for millions of years through space before randomly hitting Earth. These rays don't pose much of a risk to humans on Earth's surface, since the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from most of the threat.
Do the Science (Score:5, Informative)
For something like this you would be better off reading the peer [nih.gov] reviewed [nih.gov] papers [cancerconnect.com]
on the subject rather than rhetoric on an Internet forum.
Then again, it might be more important to some people to scare the public with scary factoids than to provide education. That's my observation at least.
TL;DR: Airline pilots have some higher risk of skin cancer but not other cancers. Also additional lifestyle factors are difficult to filter out from sample set.
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The more serious danger of aircraft passenger travel is the nuclear medicine routinely transported in the cargo hold, a few feet through a thin aluminum floor from male testicles, which are more susceptible to radiation damage than the body as a whole (put your nuke badge on your pant zipper instead of your chest, and you will get fired from your Nuclear-related job, as the workplace exposure limit is significantly lower in the gonads, making the badge non-compliant as it is designed to react to a specific
Do the Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again, it might be more important to some people to scare the public with scary factoids than to provide education. That's my observation at least.
Spot on!
Reading the line "tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions" my first reaction was:
Divide "tens of thousands" by the surface area of the atmosphere.
My next thought was to divide my own profile surface area (maybe 1 square meter?) by the surface area of the Earth's atmosphere (500 trillion, or thereabouts) and multiply that by "tens of thousands" to come up with the probability of getting hit by a cosmic ray.
Then I realized that the OP stated "at any given moment", and realized that you can't multiply by the number of "moments" in a flight.
The article is complete emotional bullshit.
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An imaginary number divided by a real number doesn't make it any less imaginary. "Tens of thousands" is a literary concept booty a scientific explanation.
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Then again, it might be more important to some people to scare the public with scary factoids than to provide education. That's my observation at least.
TL;DR: Airline pilots have some higher risk of skin cancer but not other cancers. Also additional lifestyle factors are difficult to filter out from sample set.
This can be read two ways. Are they trying to scare people away from planes, or impress people so they stand in front of reactors?
"What do we want to do for vacation this year honey? I was thinking we could either fly to Cancun or go stand in front of the Wolf Creek reactor."
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The latter. It's nuke industry shilling to try to stop its inevitable decline as the market turns to cheaper and cleaner renewables.
It's not the safety of a week maintained, normally operating reactor that is the problem. They just fixate on that because they have no answers to the real issues.
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The latter. It's nuke industry shilling to try to stop its inevitable decline as the market turns to cheaper and cleaner renewables.
It's not the safety of a week maintained, normally operating reactor that is the problem. They just fixate on that because they have no answers to the real issues.
The joke was that no one is likely to spend their vacation staring at a nuclear reactor. I'd enjoy a tour, but not more than an hour. Boredom not radiation.
You are correct that renewables are making a mess of the Nucfan's dreams. Even a few years ago, I believed that more nuc powerplants were inevitable, while at the same time cautioning the zealots to not be so condescending and cocksure.
I was wrong. I missed the other half of the equation, the consumption end. Having bought CFL, then LED lights, and
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The joke was that no one is likely to spend their vacation staring at a nuclear reactor. I'd enjoy a tour, but not more than an hour. Boredom not radiation.
Just start pulling out the control rods manually. It'll become quite exciting in short order.
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I doubt it's shilling for the nuclear industry, but I fully agree the idea of standing next to a reactor is completely irrelevant to the dangers of nuclear energy.
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Science is not a prayer wheel with science-y words attached.
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Yes, but reading papers is not "doing science."
If you're not reading papers, you are severely limiting your ability to do science.
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As many have pointed out, if you repeat assumptions instead of retesting them, because you found a citation in a paper and don't need to test it, then you have a house of cards where each layer of the stack is guaranteed not to have more than a 5% chance of being structurally deficient.
Though in the end if you get it peer reviewed it will still count as "science."
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Exactly how do you propose to provide protective gear to cosmic rays? The higher you are from the earth's mean sea level the greater your exposure to cosmic rays. Clearly being in a plane for a significant period of time which is much higher than normal will result in a higher exposure to radiation than being somewhere on the surface, and consequently a higher dose. This is not rocket science and has been known for decades.
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Wear a lead bucket over my head and a lead apron while in flight. (Guaranteed 100 times more effective than tin-foil).
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Exactly how do you propose to provide protective gear to cosmic rays?
That's easy! I am an air force pilot and I always wear my full body tinfoil suit when working.
Here is a picture of another pilot and myself getting in a convoy to the airport in Iraq:
http://www.absolutely-unbeliev... [absolutely...evable.com]
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This has been known for a long time. (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, you could put your bed 2 meters from a loaded spent fuel dry storage cask, and sleep there every night for 8 hours, your exposure in a year would be less that the annual exposure to where there is any observed health effect.
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Flight attendants suffer increased risk of cancer.
Only for skin and breast cancer.
Skin cancer is correlated with exposure to sunlight, but not so much with radiation that can reach deep tissue.
Breast cancer is correlated with NOT HAVING CHILDREN, something many career women do. It is also correlated with not breastfeeding, another thing that many career women do.
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This isn't news. Flight attendants suffer increased risk of cancer. Probably because of this radiation. Astronauts have restrictions on total flight hours because of cosmic radiation.
I always found it humorous that nuclear submariners had to wear dosimeters even though our doses were less than flight crews.
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Kerosene fumes
Frequent pressure changes and the effect on various vesicles and membranes
Constant disruptions of circadian rhythms
And? (Score:2)
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Hey, Dingleberry, the one from the Simpsons was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Such a Simpson's-style deathtrap that the company operating it shut it down because they didn't want to try to fix it. It was still basically new at that point, too.
Which idiot is stupider, the one is afraid of things that aren't very dangerous, or the one who isn't afraid of things that are?
Simpson's-style death traps are a real problem in the world. Luckily, smarter people than you often get them shut down before th
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'Trojan'..
What an absolutely unfortunate name for a nuclear power plant... Why not just name it 'Titanic' or 'Hindenburg' ?
been covered by xkcd (Score:5, Informative)
This is slashdot right? (Score:2)
You think the fact that flying exposes people to more radiation than next to a nuclear reactor (or usually the comparison is chest x-ray) is actually news to nerds who populate this site?
Phew, talk about slow newsday or bored editors...
Well yeah! (Score:3)
https://tinyurl.com/TF00T-RadP... [tinyurl.com]
The guy linked above is a bit nose-in-the-air (and sort of an asshole to boot), but the playlist itself pretty much outlines a great deal about radiation, both manmade and naturally occurring.
He's done quite a bit of work on it, and has actually taken a geiger counter on a plane to measure exposure.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if some of his work was at the foundation of the article itself.
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Maybe because he's not doing it by "Death by Powerpoint" and he DOES have relevant experience.
How many bananas? (Score:3)
How many Bananas [xkcd.com] equals one flight?
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In the same chart you get the answer:
Flight form NY to LA: 40 uSv
1 banana: 0.1 uSv
So... 400 bananas.
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... and since the distance is just shy of 4000 km, we get the banana-flight-distance-rule-of-thumb: 1 banana 10 flight-km
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From the same chart we can also deduce see following:
Lowest yearly dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk: 100 mSv
This is equivalent to 2500 NY-LA flights. I think few people can accomplish that in a year.
It sounds about as plausible as banana-eating your way to that dose; 1 million bananas.
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Lowest yearly dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk: 100 mSv
This is equivalent to 2500 NY-LA flights. I think few people can accomplish that in a year.
I don't think any can, unless someone's got a time machine. A NY-LA flight is 6.5 hours. Even if you flew constantly, you'll only get 1350 flights done in a year.
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They can't be compared. Bananas, when consumed, pass through your body and only as much potassium as required is absorbed. Your body maintains the correct level and keeps it away from areas that it could damage.
Radiation you get on aircraft is mostly external, hitting your skin. So it's a one-off dose and mostly causes skin cancer.
The material released from nuclear plants through accidents and bad design is stuff like Cesium. It can get into your body and sit there for decades, irradiating your organs. Unit
Typical Businessinsider.com Clickbait Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
So, a few things.
One, when you are standing "next to" a nuclear reactor, you still have all of the shielding between you and the reactor. It's not that much radiation.
Two, the article points out how NASA monitors radiation exposure of it's astronauts, but airlines don't do any such thing for flight crews. Again, this is a false comparison. Astronauts pass outside of our atmosphere entirely, while airplanes do nothing of the sort. You may as well complain that they don't provide space suits when you fly on Jet Blue.
Three, they actually do show a little real science...and illustrate that the annual exposure of a full-time flight crew while in the air is about 3 mSv. And they state that 10 days in space gets you 4.3 mSv of exposure. So even by their own numbers, the simple fact is that this isn't a real problem. Effectively, a flight crew gets 4 times the exposure to "cosmic radiation" (as they call it in the article) as a person who is standing on the ground at sea level.
Next up: Businessinsider.com exposes the "massive" amounts of radiation that high-altitude mountain climbers receive. Not only are they really high up (like real astronauts!), they don't even have a plane around them!
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Cute (Score:2)
"cosmic rays or cosmic ionizing radiation, the particles are the cores of atoms, such as iron and nickel, moving at nearly light-speed."
I especially liked that line... Sounds like something out of a comic book with evil cosmic rays that are out to get you... randomly.
What is hard to fathom is how 5 miles of tenuous atmosphere can be better than the aluminum or steel shell of aircraft. But lets not be bothered by that.
Re:Cute (Score:4, Interesting)
Tenuous? there is 11 psi difference between sea level and 35,000 feet. so a one inch deep by one inch wide column of air from the ground to 35,000 feet weighs 11 pounds. How much does a square inch of aircraft skin weigh?
dose is about 1 mrem per hour, compared to 1 mrem per day on ground. still, only air crew have slightly higher melanoma rates than people who work on the ground as only proven effect (sunbathers, sun tanners and beach lovers are at much more risk), the danger to passengers is essentially zero.
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it's not hard if you think about it, and lost of people have been bothered by it and putt the answer online so you can search for it. Its only YOU that can't be bothered.
TL;DR the pressure at the rathe earth's surface is 10 tons per meter squared, so there's 10 tons of air above you, or as much stuff an a meter of steel.
insurance companies would know (Score:5, Insightful)
I've stood next to a nuclear reactor. (Score:3)
Actually I've stared in to the 'moon pool' with the the basket exposed prior to a fuel shuffle. I hardly picked up any dose at all. The water was plenty enough shield to you from the radiation of 15 year old fuel rods. The metal skin of an airliner however hardly blocks anything.
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A guy fell in one time and they spent two days looking for a piece of clear plastic that was missing from his clipboard. I never heard what they did to him after costing them a few mil in scheduling problems, I'm sure they kicked him to the curb. My favorite story from then was when a guy got a hot particle on him and they finally had to use duct tape to remove it. It was on his scrotum so you can guess how that felt. After that anytime I went in the reactor building I took great care not to scratch my
Standing Next to Nuclear Reactor Safer than Flying (Score:2)
Or at least "Standing Next to a Nuclear Reactor Exposes People to Less Radiation than Flying in Airplanes" (I tried to copy the headline, but the subject field wouldn't hold it.)
When comparing relative risks, couldn't this same study show the safety of an operating power plant? Of course someone will bring up failed nuclear plants without discussing people dying in plane crashes.
ok (Score:2)
Expecting super powers shortly.
Lots of everyday things more radioactive (Score:4, Interesting)
Summary is terrible, risk is real (Score:2)
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What about Santa Claus? Only one polar flight per year. And he spends the rest of his time as a mercenary fighting in Somalia.
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Maybe. Maybe not. (Score:2)
It depends on which nuclear reactor you're standing next to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Average (Score:2)
My physics prof used to say: (Score:2)
"I'd rather live on the fucking roof of a nuclear reactor, than within 3 km radius of an equal power output coal fired plant".
As I learned about the heavy metal produced by coal fired plants, I find myself in ever more agreement with him.
More to come from Captain Obvious (Score:2)
Tomorrow: Water is wet
Making a case for hyperloop (Score:2)
The long-term solution for radiation exposure from flight may be a race between Hyperloop and artificial magnetic fields for aircraft and space vehicles.
Veritasium did a piece on radiation (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
His conclusion was that smoking alone does more damage from ionizing radiation exposure to radiation of any other sort.
Remember a 4 hr flight is about like a Dental Xray (Score:2)
http://spaceweather.com/cosmic... [spaceweather.com]
But I remember the analysis was that up at cruising altitude (35k ft +) the dose you'd get going from the cosmic radiation penetrating the inside of the cabin in about 4 hours of flying was like getting a dental xray's dose of rads. Now there is a huge industry powerful industry that would be threatened by data like this becoming widely sprea
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Not news (Score:2)
Especially true on really long polar flights (Score:2)
I think people forget that with today's modern jet airliners capable of flying over 7,000 nautical miles easily, these long-range airline flights--especially over the higher northern latitudes--can expose passengers to quite a lot of radiation. Good examples of this: New York City to eastern Asia, Tokyo to western Europe, and continental USA to Dubai. With flight times of 10 to 16 hours, the exposure could be considerable.
Yes it's a problem (Score:2)
And no, handwaving won't solve it.
This might:
http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/... [hplusmagazine.com]
When pilots start wearing clothes manufactured using BNNT, you know there is a solution.
Or perhaps airplanes should just store water in their upper skin. This would have the other benefit of making low speed crashes safer (less risk of fire).
Re:Why is this being posted now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even failed plants, aside from Chernobyl, have not harmed anyone from radiation. Everyone should know that as well, but they don't.
Re:Why is this being posted now? (Score:4, Interesting)
not sure if clickbait or fear-mongering.
Go eat a banana then get tested for radiation. Bananas are an excellent natural source for Potassium, which is naturally radioactive.
Radiation Dose Chart [wikimedia.org]
According to that chart, a banana is about the same dose as living within 50 miles of a normal reactor for a year. (and living that close to a coal plant is triple that dose!)
This is one of those "Your odds of getting killed by a cow are greater than getting killed by a shark" moments.
Banana Equivalent Dose debunking (Score:5, Informative)
not sure if clickbait or fear-mongering.Go eat a banana then get tested for radiation. Bananas are an excellent natural source for Potassium, which is naturally radioactive. Radiation Dose Chart [wikimedia.org] According to that chart, a banana is about the same dose as living within 50 miles of a normal reactor for a year.
You are aware that the idea of a "banana equivalent dose" has been thouroughly debunked, right? The net increase of radioactivity exposure from eating a banana is: zero
"The Potassium-40 in bananas is a particularly poor model isotope to use, Meggitt says, because the potassium content of our bodies seems to be under homeostatic control. When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40. The net dose of a banana is zero."
(source: https://boingboing.net/2010/08... [boingboing.net] )
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You are aware that the idea of a "banana equivalent dose" has been thouroughly debunked, right? The net increase of radioactivity exposure from eating a banana is: zero
"The Potassium-40 in bananas is a particularly poor model isotope to use, Meggitt says, because the potassium content of our bodies seems to be under homeostatic control. When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40. The net dose of a banana is zero."
(source: https://boingboing.net/2010/08... [boingboing.net] )
I don't know if the famous "banana equivalent dose" is correct, however it is obviously not zero. Unless you pee while eating bananas, of course.
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When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40.
Not true unless you poop out an exact equivalent dose of potassium while you're eating the banana.
If you don't poop while eating then there's more potassium in your body until you do.
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not sure if clickbait or fear-mongering.Go eat a banana then get tested for radiation. Bananas are an excellent natural source for Potassium, which is naturally radioactive. Radiation Dose Chart [wikimedia.org] According to that chart, a banana is about the same dose as living within 50 miles of a normal reactor for a year.
You are aware that the idea of a "banana equivalent dose" has been thouroughly debunked, right? The net increase of radioactivity exposure from eating a banana is: zero
I was subject to yearly whole body count for heavy metals of radiation. Have you eaten bananas in the last week a question asked (false positives I assumed).
Coleman lantern mantels (Thorium) were a lot of fun. Many who spent the weekend camping couldn't get past the radiation detectors.
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Meggit hasn't considered that the rate constants for physiological reactions are often influenced by the relative mass of the constituents. Meaning, all other things constant, a molec
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There has also been significant harm to the population around Fukushima as a result of the response to the accident. It can, reasonably, be argued that the population should not have been evacuated; but in that case, the population dose while small, would have been
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OTOH, has either of these impacted society? Fuck no, other than to allow a bunch of whiny extremists to block development of SAFE nuclear, and leave us stranded with OLD reactors that really need to be replaced. And not with Wind, solar, coal, or nat gas.
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Well, are you talking about acute radiation sickness or cancer?
Some workers at Fukushima were exposed to over 200 mSv of ionizing radiation, which is well below the level where you'd expect to see acute symptoms but well above the proverbial cross country flight. There is significant scientific uncertainty as to whether the so-called "LNT" (linear-no-threshold) model of radiation exposure risk has any validity for dosages under 100 mSv.
In a nutshell, a cumulative 200 mSv exposures from a 100 cross countr
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Re:Why is this being posted now? (Score:5, Informative)
Kyshtim was a weapons production facility in the USSR. [wikipedia.org]
Sellafield was a weapons production facility located in Great Britain. [wikipedia.org]
Idaho Falls was a military experiment that killed 3 people from a steam explosion not radiation. [wikipedia.org]
Jaslovske Bohunice was due to a leak of carbon dioxide not radiation [wikipedia.org]
Three Mile Island resulted in 0 dead.
Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture was the result of an explosion from bad procedures at reprocessing plant. It was not at a nuclear power plant. [wikipedia.org]
Fukushima resulted in 0 dead from radiation.
Why are anti-nuclear people disappointed to learn that nuclear power hasn't killed more people? Given the realities of climate change it is immoral to oppose nuclear power.
Re:Why is this being posted now? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but most or all of these are classified as class 4 or higher on the IAEA International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
For a class 4 to be declared, one of the criteria is that it must have caused death by radiation poisoning.
What you're pointing to when saying 0 deaths is that none of the individual deaths can be proven to be due to the increased radiation. Much like the tobacco companies claimed that smoking was harmless because you couldn't prove that any individual death was due to smoking. It's just as disingenuous, and is easily refuted by statistics showing that cancer death rates have indeed gone up both in the aftermath of Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Whether one can point to any specific death and conclude that that one death was caused by it is irrelevant. The IAEA looks at the statistics.
As for your claim that one needs to differentiate the reasons for the reactors - why exactly? A reactor that produces electricity and a reactor that enriches plutonium are both reactors, with a risk of radioactive contamination. There have been accidents and releases of radioactive material in both. Quite often the same radioactive materials. And the claim was that reactors was safe, not that electricity producing commercial ones were. Moving the goal posts doesn't help.
Re:Why is this being posted now? (Score:4, Insightful)
As for your claim that one needs to differentiate the reasons for the reactors - why exactly? A reactor that produces electricity and a reactor that enriches plutonium are both reactors, with a risk of radioactive contamination. There have been accidents and releases of radioactive material in both. Quite often the same radioactive materials. And the claim was that reactors was safe, not that electricity producing commercial ones were. Moving the goal posts doesn't help..
They are different. They do not use the same radioactive materials. Uranium for nuclear energy is only enriched to approximately ~1%-4%. Weapon materials needs to be enriched to ~80%+. So they are different. They also function differently. The mechanics and physics are different. Nuclear energy is also the safest form of power including solar and wind. That is a statistical fact that the IAEA acknowledges. 4th generation reactors are even better. We are not moving the goal posts. You anti-nuclear people are moving the goal posts. 5 of those example occurred before I was even born and the last two occurred with technology older then I am.
It's just as disingenuous, and is easily refuted by statistics showing that cancer death rates have indeed gone up both in the aftermath of Fukushima and Three Mile Island.
I am going to need a credible source for that and not any of that ecowatch bs.
Why are anti-nuclear people disappointed to learn that nuclear power hasn't killed more people? Given the realities of climate change it is immoral to oppose nuclear power.
Re:Why is this being posted now? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am going to need a credible source for that and not any of that ecowatch bs.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
http://www.thelancet.com/journ... [thelancet.com]
Why are anti-nuclear people disappointed to learn that nuclear power hasn't killed more people? Given the realities of climate change it is immoral to oppose nuclear power.
Quit that binary thinking. Just quit it, Just because someone points out that there are problems related to nuclear reactors, especially when they fail, does not mean that they are opposed to nuclear power.
What I'm for is that not only adequate but reassuring safeguards are in place, both for production and post-production. Not from an economic standpoint with more insurance and lawyers, but from a worst case standpoint with actual physical safeguards, already existing evacuation and containment and remediation plans. Hopefully things won't go wrong, but with the numerous examples where reactors have gone wrong, more focus on what else to do when things do go wrong seems needed. Admit that there are problems, and don't let that stop us.
Because this is /., the obligatory car analogy is that hust because cars are very safe relative to horseback riding doesn't mean that we should rest on our laurels and say that seat belts and air bags and crumple zones is a waste of money, and that more research into car and road safety isn't useful.
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No.
It is a level 4 if one person is killed form radiation OR there is a release of radiation that will affect local populations with effects not greater than local food contamination controls OR fuel melt / damage to fuel that has more than 0.1% of the total core weight leak from containment OR release of high amounts of radioactive material in containment that also have a high probability of public exposure.
As for differentiation - A reactor that produces electricity is run by people and inspected by the
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Once you do prove the link between radiation and cancer, make sure to contact the Nobel people to claim your prize. You will be the first to have proven this link btw.
H. J. Muller Jr. [wikipedia.org] received the Nobel prize in physmed in 1946 for just that.
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Minor Quibble- otherwise I very much appreciate your post-
The SL-1 incident in Idaho- When you're standing on top of a reactor that goes prompt critical to 20 Gigawatts, you're going to die whether or not there is a steam explosion. One of the victim's bodies was so contaminated that they were putting off a radiation field of 500R/hr- a certainly lethal dose if you spend any amount of time next to him!
Afterwards a stuck-out rod became part of the design consideration- at no time could a single stuck rod cau
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The first 3 were for weapons production and military research, not nuclear power generation. The 4th and 5th released no radiation outside of the plant. The radiation involved in TMI was insignificant and left no contamination. (Look closely at those "studies", they're right up there with the nonsense stories of radiation turning cows inside out). The 6th did indeed kill 2 people. As you say with Fukushima. Though note that during the careful monitoring of populated areas after the accident, the one that ra
Re:Why is this being posted now? (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone knows this or should.
Indeed. I remember learning this in elementary school 40 years ago. You get way more radiation by living in Colorado than by living nextdoor to a nuclear power plant.
The issue isn't radiation from being around a well-operating nuclear plant, which should be negligible. The issue is when those plants fail
This is the problem with stupid "factoids" like "coal is more radioactive than nuclear". They always consider nukes that are "operating normally", and leave out Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi, TMI, etc.
Re: Why is this being posted now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Only Chernobyl caused any significant harm. And nothing about the accident had anything to do with normal operation.
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And nothing about the accident had anything to do with normal operation.
Oh, then I guess everything is alright and nothing actually happened, then ?
Wasn't the meltdown at Chernobyl caused by the people in charge of the plant doing just about everything they could to intentionally cause a meltdown, including disabling all of the safety controls?
or to TMI
Did any radiation or radioactive material get outside the plant?
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Wasn't the meltdown at Chernobyl caused by the people in charge of the plant doing just about everything they could to intentionally cause a meltdown, including disabling all of the safety controls?
They weren't trying to cause a meltdown. They were conducting a test [chernobylgallery.com] of the system designed to keep the reactor core cooled in the event of an emergency shutdown.
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But people are more scared of nuclear power than public ownership of guns, because some people two hundred years ago said it was ok to own guns...
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... than have died worldwide in nuclear accidents in the past 20 years.
You are cherry-picking. If you go back further, your claim is no longer true.
The anti-nukes are saying that nuclear disasters are potentially very bad, not that they are frequent.
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Never trust an EE with a soldering iron. The guy in charge of the emergency cooling experiment at Chernobyl was an EE. He was apparently killed, never seen after.
There are no technical means possible he couldn't have disabled. What he needed was a clueful boss.
Yes, I'm an EE and own torches, guns, several soldering irons, a chinesium hot air rework tool and an arc welder. I'm allowed to talk shit about other EEs, it's expected.
One big difference (Score:2)
Indeed. I remember learning this in elementary school 40 years ago. You get way more radiation by living in Colorado than by living nextdoor to a nuclear power plant.
One important difference. There is essentially zero chance of the amount of natural radiation in Colorado changing. Living next to a nuke plant carries a small-but-not-zero chance of the amount of radiation going up substantially. Just ask the folks living near Chernobyl or Fukashima. Nuclear power has a pretty good safety record but when things go wrong they can go very wrong. To pretend that nuclear accidents aren't a serious concern is foolish.
That said I'll take the risk of fission power over coal
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Probably because any coal plant operating normally but under the same regulation as nuclear would be shut down and added to the list of radiation accidents. They would all appear above TMI in severity.
Re: Why is this being posted now? (Score:2)
No even if you add all nuclear accidents and add dropped nuclear bombs on top for shits and giggles, coal power production not only have killed more people but has released more radioactive radiation as well.
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coal power ... has released more radioactive radiation as well.
Bullcrap. Nearly all the radiation in coal is from thorium, which remains in the ash. If you count ash as "released", then you would need to count all spent nuclear fuel as "released" as well. Also, thorium is not biologically active, does not bioaccumulate, and is nearly harmless in normal concentration. It is common not only in coal ash, but in almost any other rock was well. There is about a gram of thorium in every cubic meter of the earth's crust.
There are plenty of good reasons to oppose burning
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Bullshit to your bullshit.
Most coals average between 1-4 ppm Uranium. That's 1-4 grams of Uranium per ton of coal burned. Some coals are as high as 20 ppm leading to 20 grams per ton burned. I don't happen to remember off the top of my head how much Uranium is the relatively inert non-fissile ratios that are very low radiation, but I am sure that there is at least a few mg of the higher radiation U isotopes being released per ton as well.
Not to mention that studies that have shown that there is an elevated
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In many areas the amount of natural radiation coming from the ground is higher than what you can get by standing at the fence around a nuclear reactor.
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Shielding if you get a partner of size to be on top?
Possibility of conceiving an X-men superpowered mutant?
Re: Mile High Club (Score:3)
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It's called Radiation Hormesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There are various alternative theories, like Linear No Threshold
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's possible that DNA damage is a bit like bit errors - a small number can be corrected but a large number cannot, which would mean the Linear No Threshold model would exaggerate the danger of low levels of radiation by extrapolating from very high levels.
Like most things of this nature it's become something of a political football with anti nuclea
Re:Miss Mash is a RETARD Club (Score:5, Informative)
The main problem is we don't use the fuel we can scavenge from so called "depleted" nuclear fuel. We have reactor designs that are safe and can burn depleted fuel while producing both usable fissionable isotopes as burn byproducts and much shorter half-life isotopes as "waste" ( and heat which can be turned into energy the same as just about any other reactor, as well as the "waste" being fuel for another reactor too). But those isotopes can be "weaponized", so the answer is to just bury the used fuel after stripping out whatever usable isotopes you can from it.
Hell we have reactor chain designs that could virtually eliminate waste from the nuclear chain, leaving behind barely radioactive stuff similar to the amount of radiation mine tailings put out. Unfortunately they all depend on the first and second tier reactor designs that can produce "weapons grade" fissile material. This material has properties that make it a great choice for reactors too: it's stable in known configurations, it doesn't have much if any impurities that would cause spontaneous fission I.E. unstable fissile element isotope contamination, and it's a cleaner decay chain due to knowing exact mixes of exact isotopes - with little variations from contamination from same element undesired isotopes.