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>plutonium, one of the most toxic substances known to mankind.

It has to be absorbed by the body first. Wikipedia has a reference that claims that only .04% of ingested plutonium oxide stays in the organism.

Multiply the LD50 for injected plutonium by 2500 to get an LD50 from water contamination, and you get some non-alarming numbers for toxicity. The cliche is to compare it to caffeine.

http://russp.org/BLC-3.html

Correct. Plutonium is not only less toxic than dimethyl mercury; it is less toxic than ordinary caffeine. Less toxic than arsenic or cyanide. Much less toxic than botulinus toxin or anthrax spores or ricin. The claim that one atom of plutonium would have any meaningful effect is simply laughable.

During the Manhattan Project, 26 individuals ingested plutonium, each in amounts greater than what is supposed today to be a lethal dose. By 1987, 4 of them had died - however, 10 of 26 random subjects who were adults during WW II would be expected to have died. Only 1 of the 4 died of cancer - 2 or 3 would be expected to have randomly died from cancer.

Ralph Nader's statement that plutonium is "the most toxic substance known to mankind" is only one example of the hideously incorrect and damaging false claims he has spread.

http://atomicinsights.com/1995/05/how-deadly-plutonium.html
http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/plutonium.pdf
http://russp.org/BLC-3.html
Google Books: Case Studies in Environmental Science
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf15.html

Untold thousands die every year from coal related illnesses, and there are huge environmental impacts - in the only and worst nuclear accident in US history - 0 people died. Get real, know your facts.

http://www.ecolo.org/base/baseus.htm

http://russp.org/nucpower.htm

While I can't agree with the sibling post's tone, I can understand his/her frustration that the plutonium toxicity myth continues. I suppose once these things get started they never die, particularly if the alternative is cognitive dissonance.

The standard delusional fantasy is that a pound of Pu 239 can cause 8 billion cancer deaths, plus or minus. Which begs the question, what are we all doing here? What with the hundreds of pounds of plutonium atomized into the atmosphere in the 40's & 50's.

Another thing is, I wonder if you could concentrate the "badness" of CO2 into a small enough volume that would enable you to store it indefinitely instead of releasing it into the biosphere, how nasty would that substance be? Pretty nasty I would think. But if you could, would you? I bet you would. So in fact what the Munch-style disaster fantasists consider to be nuke's Achilles tendon is actually something you would like to do with other technologies, if only you could. Funny, huh?

And finally with regard to the BWR design...once again it's the American approach of using partially enriched uranium. Which goes way back to the original decision to use that fuel strategy because you can make smaller cheaper reactors and what the hey, the U.S. has all those enrichment facilities sitting around that were built for...other things. Too bad it would be impossible to buy Candus because, well a) no enrichment facilities needed, they take natural U (if Iran really just wants to generate power they could do it without all those scary centrifuge thingies) and b) its a clever reactor structure that consists, and I'm not kidding here, of a series of tubes instead of one gigantic bucket, which makes it structurally redundant and intrinsically failsafe (did you know Canada had their own TMI event where the main reactor structure cracked and the big result was, radioactive water on the floor?) and c) you can shove fuel in one side and take it out the other while it's running and you never have down time for refueling.

But that's a pipe dream. What the US will get is unfortunately, glorified aircraft-carrier power plants, because, you know, might as well monetize some military technology that's just sitting around. More profitable that way, don't you know.

Plutonium would work much better.

Or not at all.

It is not very toxic when ingested with food or drink because of its very small probability of passing through the intestine walls into the bloodstream. Pu forms large molecules, which have great difficulty in passing through membranes.

or http://www.ccnr.org/plute_tox.html

Early studies showed that plutonium is poorly absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract and through the intact skin. From these data, inhalation or penetrating skin wounds were clearly the most important exposure routes for potential human exposure.

The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity: http://russp.org/BLC-3.html

Or be exposed to U238. A spec of dust can kill you from the radiation.

Natural Uranium contains very very small amounts of U238 so its safe to touch but dont confuse it with refined weapons or plant grad e isotypes.

I don't usually brag about myself, but when I am insulted like that I feel that I have the right to brag to some extent. I scored in the top 1% of the Graduate Records Exam (GRE), which is taken by engineering graduates to get into graduate school.

• A vapid cheerleading of Case Closed by Gerald Posner, proponent of the lone-assassin theory of the JFK assassination.
  
• An argument disputing the validity of poll results especilly amusing given his reliance on the Washington Post poll maintaining that 63% of the populace is in favor of government surveillance without a court order.
  
• A post in which he derides a former colleague for 'conspiracy theories', and denies accusations by said colleague of gerrymandering content submitted by said colleague, attributing the changes as editing for 'readability' purposes (although he expressly admits 'inadvertently' changing the meaning of the text on occasion, as well as publishing said changes without the original submitter's approval.
  

• The Myth of the Blind Watchmaker
  
• Is Intelligent Design Theory Scientific?
  
  Russ Paielli stands exposed as a right-wing astroturfer, and his posts should be weighed accordingly.
  
  And if you are so smart, I recommend you grow up sometime soon.
  
  Excellent parting shot, Russ. Worthy of Brit Hume.
  

I don't usually brag about myself, but when I am insulted like that I feel that I have the right to brag to some extent. I scored in the top 1% of the Graduate Records Exam (GRE), which is taken by engineering graduates to get into graduate school.

• A vapid cheerleading of Case Closed by Gerald Posner, proponent of the lone-assassin theory of the JFK assassination.
  
• An argument disputing the validity of poll results especilly amusing given his reliance on the Washington Post poll maintaining that 63% of the populace is in favor of government surveillance without a court order.
  
• A post in which he derides a former colleague for 'conspiracy theories', and denies accusations by said colleague of gerrymandering content submitted by said colleague, attributing the changes as editing for 'readability' purposes (although he expressly admits 'inadvertently' changing the meaning of the text on occasion, as well as publishing said changes without the original submitter's approval.
  

• The Myth of the Blind Watchmaker
  
• Is Intelligent Design Theory Scientific?
  
  Russ Paielli stands exposed as a right-wing astroturfer, and his posts should be weighed accordingly.
  
  And if you are so smart, I recommend you grow up sometime soon.
  
  Excellent parting shot, Russ. Worthy of Brit Hume.
  

The point that always seems to be missed is that elements with longer half lives are actually *less* radioactive. Duh! That's *why* their half lives are longer!

Plutonium has a long half life, and it radioactivity level is very low. It's main toxicity is chemical, and that is vastly overblown. See

The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity

at http://russp.org/nucpower.htm

http://russp.org/GVI.htm

GVI, The Graphical Voter Interface, is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for voting, suitable for use in private or public elections. Although it could be adapted for online voting, it is currently intended only for conventional "precinct" voting. For security reasons, GVI does not require that the voter have access to a keyboard. It can handle write-ins and multi-language elections, and it can automate voting along party lines. GVI can be used for Condorcet Voting and Instant Runoff Voting, which allow voters to rank the candidates in order of preference. It can also be used for Approval Voting, which allows voters to select more than one candidate.

And it's FREE in every conceivable way!

Sir, where did I say anything about God? I didn't. You just imagined it.

Like so many evolutionists, you don't have a clue about combinatorics. Evolutionists are always saying that any odds can be overcome with enough time and space. But isn't funny that that never seem to do any actual calculations. They just wave their hands and make proclamations. Spetner and others *have* done some calculations, and they have demonstrated that it just ain't so.

Without getting into technicalities, let me just try to explain this in a general way. Thomas Huxley once said something to the effect that, "given enough time, even a monkey typing randomly at a typewriter will type Macbeth." Well, not quite. It turns out that you could put a monkey with a typewriter in every cubic meter of the entire known universe for the entire estimated age of the universe, and the chances of getting past the first few lines of Macbeth would be infinitesimally small.

I never claimed that Spetner proved the existence of God. What he did was prove that, with extremely high probability, the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution is false. In other words, the idea that life began and "evolved" with absolutely no intelligent guidance has been disproven. Does that prove the existence of God? Maybe -- but I never made that claim.

In other words, I am simply saying that, from a purely "scientific" perspective, WE DON'T KNOW how we got here. What you and the evolutionists are doing is ignoring the probabilities and arrogantly claiming that you know how we got here. Yes, of course evolutionists will admit that they don't know all the "details," but they refuse to admit that they and we don't even know the big picture. In doing so, they are exhibiting a profound cultural arrogance. Someday they will be shown for the fools they are.

You claim to be a Christian, yet you have been hoodwinked by their nonsense. I can only suggest that you read Spetner's book, but your ignorance is not my problem. It's yours.

Regards,
Russ Paielli

http://russp.org/

From the article:
The substance, valued as a power source, is so radioactive that a speck can cause cancer.

Excuse me? Where did they pull that "fact" from? (Yes, the linked article is about Pu239, not Pu238, but the risks are similar.)

While the radiation is a problem - the chemical issues with Pu are almost worse. The stuff is more poisonous than Arsenic

It seems to be a myth that plutonium is very poisonous. See fx the wikipedia entry or The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity

Yes, you read that right. I hate to rain on the parade here with a dose of reality, but solar power is not nearly "clean" as so many seem to think it is. Yes, the sunlight itself is "clean", but the massive quantities of materials needed to collect and convert it to usable energy are not so clean. It turns out that solar is far and away more harmful to the environment that nuclear power.

Don't believe me? Go to my webpage, Ignorance about Nuclear Power is Killing Us and click on the link called "The Hazards of Nuclear Power" by Prof. Bernard L. Cohen. Then take a look at the table near the end of the paper.

Then direct everyone you know to the same link. Your help is needed to defeat ignorance.

If global warming is indeed caused by man, then the environmentalists who oppose nuclear power (i.e., most environmentalists, but not all) are more to blame than anyone else. Check out some Amazing Facts About Nuclear Power.

Let me start by confessing that I did not read the article. It may be very informative. Nevertheless, what always seems to get missed in discussions of nuclear waste disposal is that fact that the problem is miniscule. The amount of high-level nuclear waste generated is millions of times less than coal waste for the same amount of energy produced. And -- hold on -- the nuclear waste contains less overall radioactivity than the coal waste!

If the U.S. went completely nuclear for all its electric power, the amount of land needed for waste disposal over the next 10,000 years would be about the same as it is now for two weeks worth of coal ash!

Click here for more information.

If greenhouse gas emissions are really causing global warming, the obvious solution is nuclear power. It has other massive environmental and health benefits to boot. Read why Ignorance About Nuclear Power is Killing Us (literally).

The opposition to nuclear power will go down in history as the epitomy of anti-technology ignorance. I have compiled a few articles on the matter by the great Bernard Cohen.

Bernard L. Cohen is Professor-Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy and of Environmental and Occupational Health at University of Pittsburgh. He has authored 6 books, over 300 papers in scientific journals, and about 75 articles in non-technical journals. He has presented invited lectures in 47 U.S. States, 6 Canadian provinces, 7 Japanese prefectures, 6 Australian states and territories, and 24 other countries in Europe, Asia and South America. His awards include the American Physical Society Bonner Prize and the Health Physics Society Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award. He has been elected Chairman of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society, and Chairman of the Division of Environmental Sciences of the American Nuclear Society.

The guy who runs this Web site is a right-wing nut. Have a look around his homepage for yourself. He probably wants to advance his wacky right-wing libertarian party ideology and finds a self-interested possibility in doing so using the Condorcet method.

Chemically, Plutonium is a heavy metal and perhaps toxic like other heavy metals.

The problem with Plutonium is its radioactivity. A tiny, tiny amount can still kill slowly because Plutonium emits very energetic particles, for which the human immune system is not full prepared, and which can cause cancer.

I know the Wikipedia says that the toxicity of Plutonium has been exaggerated in the past. However, there are hundreds of millions of compounds, and if there are 1,000 or 10,000 equally as poisonous as Plutonium, it is still "one of the most poisonous substances on earth".

All of the organic compounds which the Wikipedia article on Plutonium says are very toxic break down chemically. Plutonium, however, loses 1/2 of its strength in 24,300 years. It can be difficult or impossible to remove from the environment. The toxicity of Plutonium includes the toxicity it has today, plus the toxicity it will have for a thousand generations to come.

I saw this article referenced by Wikipedia: The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity. Remember, the toxicity of Plutonium is not a "myth". What is a "myth" is that Plutonium is uniquely toxic when dispersed by other means than exploding as a bomb.

The author, Bernard L. Cohen, offers to eat Plutonium, although he must be aware that he will never be asked to do so because giving it to him to eat would be illegal.

Probably the biggest area of confusion between what the news media say about Plutonium and what Bernard L. Cohen says is that they are talking about different expected means of dispersal. The news media often discusses the possibility of someone exploding a bomb made of Plutonium in a populated area, or an explosion in a Plutonium manufacturing plant or storage facility. The toxicity of the explosion would include all the products of the explosion, of course, many of which are quicker killers than Plutonium itself. The news media are using the shorthand of saying that the people killed in a Plutonium explosion are killed by Plutonium. That is true in the sense that people understand it. People would not say the cause of death was building collapse when an explosion of a Plutonium bomb destroyed a building. They would correctly say that the risk came from the availability of Plutonium.

It is legitimate to say that the burning of coal kills more people than the use of Plutonium, but that's because billions of tons of coal pollutants enter the atmosphere. A small amount of Plutonium is safer than a huge amount of coal, except when Plutonium is used in a bomb.

It's really difficult to cover all the issues about most subjects in a Slashdot comment or even a news article. It's easy to find fault with something in most articles.

--
24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.

No reply needed. Your post speaks for itself.

By the way, are you aware that the Nazis were left wing socialists, you moron?

Ignorance about Nuclear Power is Killing Us (literally).

I'll probably get ridiculed for this suggestion, but I think that Ada 95 would be an excellent choice. It has a reputation for rock solid code. Check out my Ada page. If you don't know much about Ada, you will be surprised.

Ignorance about Nuclear Power is Killing Us

The environmentalist (and myself) would say

WHO GIVES A FUCK ABOUT DOSAGE????????

What I find amazing about this entire "global-warming" controversy is that, even if the theory is true, the clear solution is to use more nuclear power, but few of the so-called "environmentalists" who believe in global warming are touting nuclear power. Check out my web page Ignorance about Nuclear Power is Killing Us (Literally) You will find very enlightening articles by a top expert (no, not me).

I believe that the ACLU supports the free-speech rights of Nazis only because they know the Nazis are not a political threat. Neo-Nazis are a fringe group of loony-tunes, and the vast majority of people know that. If Neo-Nazism was actually threatening to gain political power, I doubt the ACLU would be supporting them. It's a PR ploy for the ACLU.

By the way, are you aware that the Nazis were left-wing socialists? You should be.

I am an aerospace research engineer, and I've published several (technical papers. I can tell you that I seldom read the papers I cite from start to finish. I'm not a fast enough reader, and I simply don't have enough time. If I did, I would have no time left for my own creativity and work. However, I do read the most important parts of a paper and at least skim over the rest.

One must understand that reading technical papers is not like reading a novel. Often they are very difficult to understand, either because the material is just inherently difficult (advanced mathematics, for example) or because it is simply not explained well. I often have to read the difficult parts over several times.

I happen to believe that the "publish or perish" mentality in academia causes many papers to be published that are not even worth reading. And the glut of papers makes the good ones get lost in the schuffle. So many technical papers are published that an engineer or scientist cannot even scratch the surface of the literature in his or her own narrow field of specialization. What good does it do to publish stuff that nobody has time to read?

Here's another little secret. Professors often don't even read papers on which they are listed as co-authors! It happens all the time, particularly for lowly conference papers. A student or group of students do some research in consultation with the professor, then they append the profs name to the paper as a courtesy. All the prof wants is another notch on his list of publications, and he couldn't care less about the quality of the paper because he knows nobody will read it carefully anyway -- and few will read it at all.

nuclear power emits no greenhouse gases.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever taken a class on nuclear energy? The "fact" that a tablespoon full of plutonium could kill every human on earth is the most blown out of proportion ridiculous fact ever. Consider this, uranium is a natural element. It exists everywhere, everywhere! ...

Actually, it's not the radioactivity of plutonium alone that makes it so lethal. It is a very powerful carcinogen because the body accumulates what it absorbs over long periods of time, although its near-insolubility in water reduces its effective toxicity to far below what many people believe. However, if it reaches the bloodstream, it accumulates in the bone marrow and in the liver, where it has a half-life of elimination of 70 and 35 years, respectively, and inhalation of fine Pu dust can cause significant alpha exposure in the ~500 days that it takes the lungs to eliminate it.

To put it simply, it's neither a massive threat nor a relatively benign substance, and it gets a lot more bad PR in the press than other, much more worthy, scapegoats.

Nuclear power is at least hundreds of times cleaner than coal, and it's far cleaner than solar too. No, I'm not kidding. Check out these articles by the great Bernard L. Cohen.

(I know this is way down at the bottom, so not likely many will read it, but I'm still interested in people's opinions. Let me know what you think.)

My Ideas for United States General Election Reform:

• Keep the Electoral College

The electoral college needs to stay. A president should be elected because he receives the support of the majority of the states, not the majority of the people in the nation. Small states and minorities would lose out considerably if the electoral college were completely abolished.

Alleged problems with the Electoral College:

Myth 1. The American people do not really elect the president

The American people, of course, still elect the president, but not directly. They never have. This is not a problem, and never has been. Some people like to point at elections in which the president has lost the popular vote, but won the office because of the Electoral College. A good example of this is George W. Bush in the 2000 election. If one were to look at a map of the United States, one would see that Bush won the support of the majority of the nation, while Gore won several pockets of large population. If the Electoral College were abolished, candidates could campaign only in these pockets of people, and win the office of the presidency even though the majority of states supported a different candidate.

Nobody argues that in a basketball tournament, the winner should be the team who scores the most total baskets combined from every game. The baskets have to be arranged to win games, just as the votes in a General Election have to be arranged to win states. However, I suggest to:

• Split Votes to Congressional Districts

The electoral votes allotted to each State corresponds with the number of Representatives and Senators each State has in Congress. Instead of the majority winner in a particular state receiving the entirety of that state's electoral votes, have one electoral vote per Congressional district and two for the state majority.

Myth 2. Your vote counts for more if you're from a larger state

The number of electors a state received is directly proportional to the population of the state. Assuming that a state has 100% voter turnout, every vote counts as an identical percent of an elector. In fact, it is the smaller states whose vote counts for more, because each state has the two electors corresponding to Senators regardless of size. The problem ensues when one state has a high voter turnout, while another has a very low voter turnout. In the latter case, one's vote is worth quite a bit more. Therefore I propose that the number of electors be:

• Representative of Voters, not Population

Using the national census, calculate the population of the United States and divide by 435 (the number of members in the House of Representatives). This will result in the number of people per congressional district. However, instead of counting basic population, count the number of people who voted in the previous general election. Then organize the congressional districts based on this information. This way, votes from states with large populations but with very low voter turn-out don't count for more than votes from states with higher voter turn-out.

Myth 3. Faithless electors can swing votes

A much-touted problem with the Electoral College, the fact that electors can change their vote at the last minute has never been a problem. In the very few times it has happened in this nation's history, not once has it even come close to changing the results of an election. In addition, the electors are generally chosen from the prominent members of the political party for whom your vote is case. That is to say, if you vote for a Republican president, you are in actuality voting for the Republican elector who has been chosen by party leaders. If your vote is cast for a Democratic president, you are electing the elector whom the Democrat party has chosen. There is very little chance that such a person would choose to go against the wishes of his party without good reason.

A bigger problem is that a president might be elected without gaining support of the majority of the nation, especially if the votes are divided among three or four parties. A form of run-off voting, such as Instant Runoff Voting or Instant Pair Runoff Voting (Condorcet), would solve this problem.

• Use Instant Runoff or Condorcet (Instant Pair Runoff) Voting

Instant Runoff Voting allows voters to rank candidates as their first choice, second choice, third, fourth, and so on. If a candidate does not receive clear majority of votes on the first count, a series of runoff counts are conducted, using each voter's top choices indicated on the ballot. The candidate who received the fewest first place ballots is eliminated. The ballots are then retabulated, with each counting as a vote for the top-ranked candidate listed on the ballot that is still in contention. Voters who chose the now-eliminated candidate have their votes transferred to their second choice candidate--just as if they were voting in a traditional two-round runoff election. This process continues until a candidate achieves more than fifty percent of the vote. However, this still encourages people not to "vote their conscience." A more effective system is the Condorcet, or "Instant Pair Runoff Voting" method.

In the Condorcet election method, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. The vote counting procedure then takes into account each preference of each voter for one candidate over another. It does so by conceptually breaking the election down into a series of separate races between each possible pairing of candidates, hence it is sometimes referred to as a "pairwise" method. If one of the candidates beats each of the other candidates in their one-on-one race, then that candidate wins. Otherwise, the result is ambiguous and an optimal procedure is used to resolve the ambiguity. Unlike our current plurality election method, the Condorcet system gives voters little incentive to falsify their true preferences.

More detailed information about Condorcet voting can be found here: http://russp.org/ElectionMethods.org/CondorcetEx.h tm.

Other thoughts to consider:

• Move the general election to a Saturday & Sunday weekend? A mandatory national holiday?
• Close all polling booths simultaneously across the nation?
• Outlaw exit polls?
• Reform campaign spending? Ban political advertising on broadcast TV and Radio?
• Create a more efficient way of checking the validity of a voter's identification and get rid of voter registration?

Thanks for your input. Please email me with comments and suggestions.

1. Winner take all per state This feature of the electoral college was deliberate design to force candidates to appeal to multiple regions. A candidate who wins 90% of CA and NY and 40% in the rest of the country is to be discouraged by the system. They have to get a plurality in a substantial number of states, instead of just winning very big in some densely populated areas. The downside is that this (deliberately) goes against "one person one vote" as it diminishes the votes of individuals in densely populated areas.
2. Indirect elections via "electors" This is just an anachronism which serves no valid purpose today.
3. Proportional representation (PR) Any time anyone proposes any kind of electoral reform, we here the same exmaples (Israeli unstable governments, extremists in power) of problems with proportional representation. Well, folks, Not all electoral reform is for PR. See following
4. Preference voting There are a variety of preference voting systems. Basically, people mark ballots giving a ranking of how they like the candidates. First choice, second choice, thrid choice, etc. While there are a variety of schemes for this sort of thing (my favorite is Condorcet), they all have the effect of selecting against candidates who are disliked by the majority. This has the opposite effect of PR.

A less emotional comparison of alternate election methods can be found here.

A less emotional comparison of alternate election methods can be found here.