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Low-Level Radiation May be Mutagenic
The Night Watchman writes: "According to article on BBC news, scientists have determined that low doses of radiation can indeed cause alterations in human DNA that are then passed down to future generations. Apparently there was an 'unexpectedly high increase' in genetic mutuations in children born in the area after the Chernobyl disaster." This may shake up the scientific community, which has relied on studies of Hiroshima survivors to evaluate the long-term consequences of radiation exposure.
Internal sources are referring to radio-nuclides that are inhaled/ingested. Of the 4 types of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron), alpha and beta are not nearly as damaging to a person's health as gamma/neutron until it is inhaled or ingested; then it can POTENTIALLY cause serious damage. -Network Fiend (Can't currently log in...)
Thank goodess I've still got 4 more clones left, comra... er, fellow troubleshoote!
(Paranoia ROCKS!)
low level is like 500 mrem/year. those workers problably got that amount in an hour.
Solar and wind are CHEAPER in the long run. You are comparing apples to oranges. If the solar/wind infrastructure were here already, as coal is and nukes I would be cheap AND effiecint without producing waste. www.ucsusa.org STOP CHEYNEY AND HIS NUKE/COAL BULLSHIT!!!
Every time a nuclear plant has a problem, nuclear power is designated the horror of all horrors. (BTW, remember the incident in Japan a couple of years ago? It's not just Chernobyl and TMI.)
Nuclear power was originally touted as being extremely clean to produce. No visible fumes of smoke pouring into the atmosphere made it appear wonderful. But then people started to realize that all the radioactive waste needs to be stored. And despite what everyone says about the leakage levels being below recommended exposure rates, no-one wants a waste dump in their backyard.
Another problem is the high maintenance costs. Roughly 20% of all nuclear reactors are currently out of service, even if only temporarily, due to issues of safety or maintenance. That's in the US, Britain, Japan, etc. I forget the exact numbers, but out of 103 stations in the US I think something like 22 are currently out of action. Radiation does take a bit of a toll on the actual power station.
There's definitely a political issue in the perception of nuclear power safety. France isn't a very big country, after all; but they also don't make it illegal to save power by hanging your washing out to dry in the sun, as do some of the home-owners' associations in the US.
There again, France is also the country that sent armed agents into New Zealand to bomb the "Rainbow Warrior", a ship used by Greenpeace to protest their nuclear experiments in the South Pacific (specifically Mururoa Atoll), and, after they'd been caught and convicted of terroristic acts that killed a man on board the ship, welcomed the agents home with promotions, medals, and parades through the streets.
Nuclear Power plants are extremely complex systems. They are so complex that it while one, or perhaps two failures or problems with a reactor or a cooling system can be predicted, found, and dealt with, the possibility exists for the INTERACTION of 3 or more failures or facors causing a completely unforseen catastrophe. In fact, the nature of these interactions is such that workers at the plants are completely incapable of determining that a particular series of failures will end in catastrophe, as the speed and seeming unrelatedness of the incidents prevents a detailed analysis. The engineers who designed the plant would also be incapable of predicitng, in advance, that this type of interaction would cause catastrophic failure. This has happened time and again not only in the nuclear industry, but in aircraft, chemical processing, coal plants, and air traffic control systems. Essentially, the problem with nuclear power is that there must be 0.0 accidents, as each accident has the potential to be a catastrophe on the scale on Chernobyl. However, Complex System Interaction theory clearly demonstrates that it is impossible for all potential problems to be identified and dealt with in time to prevent and incident. It is not acceptable for a nuclear plant to have any kind of errors/problems, EVER. That is why people resist them. When an airplane crashes as a result of ATC system errors, your children don't get cancer, and you don't have to avoid the area for a million years. It's not that they have more accidents than other forms of power, it's they they have accidents PERIOD.
I'm not for building new NUKE plants. The half-lives of isotopes in spent fuel are still a problem and techniques like neutron bombardment of nuclear waste brings it's own problems.
Fusion reactors envolve high temperatures, which still generate long lived radio active wastes from reactor components. Besides, they've spent billions and 40 years trying to sustain a fusion reaction and are no closer than they were in 1960 to a practical solution.
The government should start a new "MANHATTEN" type project to get Solar Power Towers in large quantities going ASAP. They can be put in areas of high sunshine and low biodiversity - deserts of the southwest, or anyplace else a community would like to put them, eco-terrorists not withstanding. Release the Oxygen and pipe, bottle, adsorb the Hydrogen.
Also, part of the new MANHATTEN project should be the improvement of Hydrogen fuel cells to make them viable as power sources for automobiles.
Safety?
When the public thinks of Hydrogen they do a knee-jerk and think of the Hindenburg disaster. It odd that when they think of Fossil Fuels the Valdez seldom comes to mind, and neither do the several refinery fires. Hydogen is safer than petroleum products, like gasoline. Gasoline is heaver than air and creeps across floors and may encounter ignition points, leading to flash backs. Hydrogen rises into the air and escapes, far less likely to encounter an ignition point. The temperature of the flame front of Hydrogen combustion can be lowered in internal combustion engines or turbines by injecting water vapor, thus preventing oxides of nitrogen from forming, and improving the efficiency.
The only thing that has prevented this technology from becoming mass produced and hence as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels is the lack of forsight by by the last six presidents, and Big Oil lobbying of congress.
See http://www.oilcrisis.com/hubbert
Being in bed with Big Oil makes the current president less than supportive of a national solar power initative.
In 1970, while nuclear power was still a political possibilty, I was asked by the University of Wyoming to lead a team of advanced JR College science students into the Shirly Basin to look for Uranium pollution of the environment coming from the open Uranium pit mines. We found none, but I did notice that the Big Players in the nuclear industry at that time were the very same Big Oil, and companies like Westinghouse - Babcock, who made pressure vessels. They had their hands around the throat of nuclear power in anticipation of letting go of oil, but the protests and rollbacks on new startups prevented the transfer.
The problem the Big Oil companies have is that they can't METER sunlight, and they can't control access to it, like they do with fossil fuels. That is why they are fighting solar power. An immediate 'cottage' industry would arise, which in my opinion would be a good thing because it would spread the Government grants amoung smaller companies and away from multi-national, unaccountable BIG Oil and similar corruptions of Free Enterprise. Instead of keeping new solar power technology secret it should be made public domain and unpatentable, because it would be funded by public monies. Further, researchers who work on government funded projects should be prevented for at least 20 years from filing patents on technologies that arise from their work on publicly funded projects, so we don't have a repeat of the Human Gnome fiasco.
Solar Power is the GPL of the energy industry. Look up Solar Power Towers on the web and see how easily they could be geared up to community levels, or higher.
http://www.eren.doe.gov/csp/csp_tech.html
I've got bad news for you. Nothing in the world is perfectly safe. The reason the Nuclear industry starts spouting off numbers like 1 in 10^6 is because that's how they designed the reactors in the first place. Thus far the most convincing arguments against nuclear power that I've seen is the possiblility of a terrorist acquiring weapons grade plutonium from a breeder reactor, but it seems easier for that terrorist just to loudly proclaim that they hate the US and have radical arab extremist groups just hand him all the bombs he'll ever need.
Well, maybe it's not that simple, but I've always liked the idea of dismantling the worlds nuclear missiles for use in breeder reactors, turning the weapons of mass destruction into the power source of the future. It would be just like the early nuclear proponents said it would be!
Plus the handling procedures wouldn't be that much more complicated than the ones currently used to decomssion missiles.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'd be interested in that too.
I had two seperate regimens of radiation treatments over the course of 2 years.
And what about drugs like Vincristine or MP6 that mess around with the actual cell division and replication of the DNA while your on it?
Take Radiation and nasty chemicals at the same time and what does that do to a person?
Does anyone know where a peer-reviewed journal article about this could be found? As important as the News Media is for diseminating things like this it is important to remember that what the journals say is much more important and folks like the BBC often get it wrong. (I have no idea if they did here)
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Well, I took chemistry in High School ;)
The danger you're talking about and the danger they're talking about are two different things.
You're talking about an external dose of radiation - energy. Most of which is stopped by your skin, or in the case of a nuclear engineer, most likely, their radiation suit.:)
In the case of these workers, they didn't have enough respirators and protective suits. Someone posted a link a few months ago of a site that was a tribute to these liquidators, a tragic story of human heroism. Men were sent into a highly radioactive part just to snap a photograph, and come back, and die from the high single dose.
But many others inhaled dust, got dust on their clothing, on their skin, dust got on their food, etc.
Smoke is in-effect, dust. Or soot, if you prefer. The Chernobyl disaster was a fire. A graphite fire. Lots of soot. Lots of radioactive dust. these elements, the nuclear fuel, decay byproducts, got converted into soot, or dust, inhaled, or otherwise ingested, and remained in the body. Some of that "radioactivity" will remain hot for thousands of years after the person dies and is buried in the ground. These particles lodge in tissues, and continue to emit radiation, to internal organs, unprotected by clothing, skin, filters, or lead underwear.
Most of this, as you say, results in cells causing cancer. But if any of it gets down into the gonads, affecting the gametes (the cells that produce sperm - see, I took High School Biology too!), then all the sperm that are produced after that point will contain mutations. Once the DNA is affected, all subsequent generations spawned off of that DNA is also affected.
One of the worst bits, and the thing responsible for bone cancer, is Strontium-90, which is chemically similar to Calcium. If it settles on grass, cows eat the grass, it binds into the milk chemically where Calcium would otherwise. Then the kids drink the milk, and here and there, in their bones, will be bonded Strontium-90 atoms where calcium would be otherwise. The adjacent bone matter will be radiated over a period of time, directly, by these Sr-90 atoms.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Argument against:
If done properly. . .
Nuclear power can be done safely, but you need to take extreme measures to ensure that incidents like chernobyl NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER happen. Of course, we're only human, and there's really no way to guarantee that. There are things like natural disasters, terrorism, and simple human error.
So if you enter into the "nuclear game", you must acknowledge at some point that there is a risk you are taking that a disaster can possibly occur. Accepting that it will not ever possible occur is a leap of misguided blind faith in "human ingenuity".
Once you accept that there is a risk, you now have to gauge how big of a risk, and when it comes down to it, it's a matter of money. How much money do you invest in engineering the plant - how many safety precautions do you take against earthquakes, or what have you. (remember the volcano that appeared suddenly out of nowhere in South America? one day, a flat field. 30 days later, a 1000-foot cinder cone). How many armed guards and how much security precautions against terrorism. And what does all of that cost? And how much can you sell the electricity for on the market? If you build a plant, you increase supply, lowering demand and the commodity's value. (which is why I don't believe that commodity economics ought to be applied to every little human need).
At some later point, mister power-company CEO has to decide whether it's a profitable venture, how much money must be spent beefing up the plant, and how much profit can be made selling the commodity.
So it's a balance: risk to the public that these accidents could occur, versus money in the CEO's golden-parachute fund. Hmmmmmm - which will it be?
Public safety?
New Lexus?
Hmmmmm? man, that's a tough choice.
This is why I am opposed to the use of nuclear power. The immediate effects of a disaster, and the unforseen future effects. These risks are not very patalable, no matter how much the engineers say it's safe. No matter what nifty new design they come up with. Virtually no risk, is still a risk. And this kind of risk is just plain unacceptable.
And before you go off telling me I'm a fan of coal-fired plants, I'm not. I don't think that we currently have a good answer for that one.
I'm not sure what the solution is to our growing power needs. Even Solar, Even Wind, have their drawbacks making them unpalatable. But ever more palatable than nuclear fission.
Maybe the answer is; the Matrix.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
occasionally annoying meltdown?
We're talking entire family lines affected for every future generation, by genetic mutations.
They're not talking about super-powers.
They're talking about, possibly higher risk of cancer, or being born without hands, or blind, or mental retardation, or haemophilia. For generation after generation, people will be born, live, and die, robbed of the possibility of having a normal life, being a huge burden on the social welfare system, and medical system. We don't have any freaking clue what this is going to cost humanity as a whole. What happens when two mutants breed?
People are being blinded by the carrot of "profitable power generation" and "cheap electricity" dangling in front of their faces. They don't see the quagmire they're being led into.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't think that anyone is saying that the low-level waste coming from coal fired plants doesn't affect those downwind.
We finally know what the effects of short-term internal low level exposure can do.
What coal-fired plants cause is more of a long-term-internal-very-low-level of exposure. The amount that is released from coal-fired plants on a daily basis is probably not measurable. But a town existing downwind from one over a period of 20 years, how could it not be affected?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's a news story, not a scientific paper.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
you idiot.
First, you used quotes on my phrase "extreme measures", but you misspelled "extream" twice. If you're going to use quotes, quote accurately. Don't try to make me look like a moron when it's YOU that can't spell.
Just because Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen doesn't mean that other plants, even the famed and VERY over budget Diablo Canyon plant in California, are 100% safe. I'm not saying Chernobyl is an example of how all nuclear power will be. I'm saying that it's a great example of a worst-case scenario. Such scenarios are likely going to be rare with "properly engineered" "modern design" reactor plants. But NOBODY can say that there is NO chance that this scenario could possibly happen again. It has nothing to do with the size of the chance. It's the size of the damage. Play with a rubber-band, you can snap your fingers pretty good. Play with a gun, and you could blow your brains out by accident. You're much more likely to snap your fingers with a rubber band, it doesn't have a safety. But even with a safety, locks, background checks, people still get their heads blown off by accident. Unfortunately, shooting a rubber band at a felon wont stop them, so guns ARE a necessary evil.
If we can gather electricity from sunshine, with a 0% chance that an accident will happen that will cause all of the decendents of the people unfortunate enough to have to leave near the plant to have damaged DNA, doesn't that make more sense than nuclear fission technology?
Why not?
Because solar COSTS more. Therefore, profit margins are narrower. It's not the preferred method of generation. It's not that it's not feasible. If we switched to a 100% solar generation technology TODAY - manufacture of solar panels would drop the cost down somewhat, down to a point where many more people would likely opt to put them on their own homes, instead of relying on central generation and distribution. That's obviously not a palatable strategy for the energy companies.
So we all basically decide that a certain amount of risk is "assessed" lower than the benefit of electricity being cheap. (and let's face it, versus solar, *reliable*). But the risk has been reduced to a number on a peice of paper, based on information from limited and/or flawed studies, which do not take into account ALL of the costs an accident could potentially raise (like the social and medical fallout from large groups of genetic mutations - for an unspecified number of future generations). In fact, there is no way to estimate that cost. So they guess.
You want your "risk assessment" based on that?
And the NRC, while it is a ferocious beast with long, sharp fangs, which has pretty much rendered nuclear energy not economically viable in the US, it all depends on the current political climate. As soon as that climate shifts to the right a tad, you'll see more conservative appointees, and regulations relaxing, and that ferocious beast rolls over on it's back to get it's tummy rubbed by PG&E. At that point it sure as hell DOES have a lot to do with a choice between a new Lexus versus Public Safety. There's nothing any whining environmentalist, or biting scientific study about the effects of low level radiation can do about that. It may not happen with this administration, but as soon as there is a REAL hiccup in petroleum supplies, you can bet your ass that the environment WILL change, and regulations WILL be relaxed, and people will be BEGGING for a nuclear plant to be built in their backyards, like, yesterday, fuck safety.
And finally, in my last paragraph, I TOLD you not to imply any comparison with coal-fired. I disfavor coal and nuclear equally. Neither are a good, viable, sustainable solution to our power problems. (Neither is conservation, unless that's linked with population control measures).
But you went ahead and said that I "should be more in favor of nuclear plants than coal plants".
you idiot.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
erm - replace "nuclear engineers" with "nuclear technicians" - that's what I meant.
Is it not true that workers in the factories that produce and handle fuel, in some areas, wear lead-lined suits?
That's what I meant by "nuclear engineers" - obviously, I meant "technicians"
The article does talk about "low levels" - and what it should have stated (I guess it did, just not clearly enough) was "relatively low levels" - relative to a nuclear blast from an atom bomb.
Relative to living outside of a plant working inside a plant, very very high levels.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
yeah.
And the Titanic was "unsinkable".
*After* the accident, I'll explain it to you how it happened. But I'll tell you, it would likely be caused by a lapse in maintenance, or an unforseen fault in the design. Hindsight's a bitch at 20/20.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I called you an idiot because you misquoted me, and you specifically brought up the one lame argument (nuclear is better than coal) I told you was a waste of time. Had nothing to do with your opinions.
Then you call me an Environmentalist (and by association, a lunatic), and then you complain about the ad hominem.
I did not say that energy companies know how to make cheap solar panels. I said that with a wider production, they would become cheaper - implying that economies of scale would kick in. Maybe not cheap enough to make them "economically viable", but certainly cheaper than they are today. People who invested in solar panels for their homes would be insulated from the current commodity-market wackiness that raised electricity-generating costs by a factor of 10 in California this year.
They're not going to come up with a leasing plan because people can go to independent companies and buy the panels for themselves and live "off the grid" if they want.
I'm sorry that your "risk assessment" tells you that nuclear power is "safe enough". To me, if there's any chance, no matter how small, that a disaster of Chernobyl-proportions COULD happen (even though a "modern" plant has a much smaller chance than a Chernobyl-style plant), that's too big of a chance. The consequences, not the risk, are the factor here.
And wrt Greenpeace and the NRC: when money comes into play, the conservatives, and even moderate liberals, and probably even extreme liberals, will all gladly sign their souls away to PG&E to maintain their way of life. When the price of electricity is at the point where our very economy is threatened (and it's almost at that point now), you can bet that the bottom line is, money talks. Greenpeace is not as well-armed as the National Guard, if it comes to that.
Coal vs. Nuclear: I really really really hate Nuclear. If it makes you happy, I really, really, really, really hate coal. Strip mining and acid rain suck.
And I didn't quote you because, frankly, this discussion is too deeply buried for anybody else to give a crap about now.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
From what I know, much of the knowledge about how radiation effects humans comes from studies of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during WWII. From these very high levels of radiation exposure, studies found that there was basically a linear relationship between the amount of radiation you received and the chance that you would get cancer. From this comes the "linear, no threashold" model of radiation exposure and the thought that all radiation, no matter how little, runs the risk of causing health problems. Most government regulations of radiation exposure is based on this linear, no threshold model.
There are other people who feel that the linear, no threshold model is seriously flawed when dealing with low levels of radiation. They point out that radiation is a natural part of world, and the amount of radiation you are exposed to varries widely depending on where you are. For example, people living in Denver get much more radiation than those living in San Francisco because of their higher elevation. Also, when life first started to evolve on earth, the background radiation levels were much higher than today. The basic claim is that the body can usually deal with low levels of radiation, and it is only when you pass a threashold and overload it, that you start seeing a linear increase in health problems.
Trying to determine if there is a threshold and how low levels of radiation really effect people is a hot area of study. Unfortunately, you can't ethically expose people to levels of radiation that might cause problems, so studies of Chernobyl survivers are of particular interest.
There is actually another group of people who think that low levels of radiation is good for you. These people believe in something called "radiation hormesis". These people are generally considered idiots and quacks by most other people who study radiation.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
The head of this project, Professor Charles Xavier said to the press: "we are obliged to help this poor children!".
His colleague Eric Magnus Lehnsherr could not be joined for comments.
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
I recall one incident of one hard drive being misplaced for a while (and then found in the facility).
But even if that were true... has anyone stolen nuclear materiel from those labs? If not, your point is pretty much moot, because there isn't gonna be much secret information floating around a power station.
But hey, a little hyperbole at the expense of reason and accuracy never hurt an argument, right?
That in and of itself is not inherently evil, I think... your idea of simply encouraging people with real genetic problems to adopt instead of giving birth seems reasonable, at least on the surface.
But consider this: at some point, you have to write definitions. What defines a "demonstrably-problematic mutation-induced condition"? Is hereditary heart disease on the list? How about bad eyesight? Is it just things that we can't currently treat, and if so, is that really fair? After all, it took us a while to come up with eyeglasses, but we've pretty much got that problem effectively licked.
When you start governing fundamental biological functions (for instance, breeding), you'd better be very, very careful about people's rights. In fact, it's probably best to stay away from any laws that allow some to breed, but not others. (IMHO, a blanket law that limits the number of children a family can have is a different issue... that's a reasonable attempt by a nation to keep its population in check.)
I think it's also important to note that genetic problems are very often selected out socially. If a mutation causes a deformation, or causes obvious medical problems, quite often (for better or worse) the person bearing it simply will not find a willing mate.
We've done relatively well without skimming the gene pool... why start now?
Heinlein predicted that the long term effects of low-level radiation would cause problems. It was in Waldo, his story about broadcast power.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Seems like he was right on the money again. But what can you expect from the guy who invented (conceptualized?) the waterbed ... in 1962.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Oh well, at least it will kick-start biodiversity.
What would be a Ukrainian version of Godzilla?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Thank you for the explanation. I was begining to think it might be becuase the media jump on anything 'radioactive' or 'chemical' and start fearmongering, especially if it fits the agenda.
I wrote parts of this stuff
As a former Reactor Physics Engineer at a UK powerstation I get very irritated by the BBC's irresponsible anti-nuclear scaremongering.
Nowhere on the article are the actual doses quoted. People who cleaned up Chernobly are not or were not exposed to "low levels of radiation" or "low radation doses" by Western standards. They were fried.
In this country the legal annual dose limit is 30 mSv (30 millisieverts) with a much smaller percentage allowable internal dose. The actual dosage to the most exposed workers at the Sellafield reprocessing plant is in the 10-15 mSv range per year, lower than the 20+ mSv ailine cabine crew recieve.
I wish someone would post the actual doses here, whether external or internal, lifetime dose, dose rate, natural background etc.
The BBC loves to stir up the publics' fear of nuclear power and reinforces their ignorance with their own biased tabloid style journalism.
If you want to find out the facts about radiation doses, medical effects, and radiological protection, visit the NRPB website:
http://www.nrpb.gov.uk/
Rant mode off.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
As for the Chernobyl disaster, that was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. No containment dome, and no decent safety measures to minimize the possibility of an explosion and meltdown. Note that when Three Mile Island had its core meltdown just about all of its radioactivity was still safely confined inside the containment dome.
..... power.
The problem with nuclear power is that it has so much
Thus if you have a slow meltdown, a containment dome will hold most of the mess inside. But if you have a nuclear explosion, there is no way any man-built structure will hold everything inside.
That's what happened at chernobyl. There was an explosion. Maybe a western containment dome would have been able to withstand the explosion. Maybe not.
Different incidents, different results.
Oh, and wasn't the root cause for both accidents the same? Operators doing exactly the wrong thing for something that should've remained a minor problem? (iirc, Chernobyl accidently shut down, and restarting it without the proper procedures is, well, dangerous. At 3 mile island a stuck meter caused them to think the pressure was high, leading the operator to reduce the pressure by venting the fluid. This eventually caused the pressure to go dangerously low. )
Roger.
1. Ok. The number is not zero. It's just less than other forms of energy. It is, in fact, lower than Solar energy. (In fact, solar energy is not very safe, because installation tends to be dangerous. People fall off roofs.)
2. But coal is the main alternative. Realistically, if we don't build nuclear, we will build coal.
3. No, I mean that knowledgable people don't really worry about waste disposal anymore. Encapsulate it in glass beads, store it an a saltmine. Or whatever. People who oppose nuclear power for other reasons use this as a scare tactic. In fact, the more sophisticated anti-nuclear folk have actually abandoned this tack and now concentrate on transportation to the disposal site as the big problem.
4. We can demonstrate that potential disposal sites have not be breached with water for millions of years.
5. Quite untrue. It is far cheaper than photovoltaic, for example. It is capital intensive, which makes it unpalatable. If you use unrealistically short plant lifetimes, as is the standard practice, then nuclear appears expensive. If you use realistic plant lifetimes, which appear to be several times the original planned lifetimes, nuclear is quite cheap.
6. ENIAC didn't tell us much about the reliability of computers, or the cost, or the size.
Nuclear power has the problem that it shares a word with "nuclear bomb." It also has the problem that widespread use would practically eliminate limits on use of power. The "environmental" movement views a chronic shortage of power as a good thing because it forces a lifestyle more in keeping with their agenda.
(An amusing demonstration of this was the cold-fusion flap a few years ago. In the early days after the announcement, several prominent environmentalists publically bemoaned the apparent availability of lots of cheap power, because they *wanted* limits to growth.
This is a very good summary of most of the specious arguments against nuclear power.
1. Chernobyl tells us as about as much about the safety of a modern nuclear plant as the ENIAC tells us about the capabilities of modern computers.
2. The results of Chernobyl were "catastophic" only because they were sudden. A large coal-fired plant kills a few hundred people per year, year after year, decade after decade. Nuclear plants kill zero people year after year, actually releasing less radiation than a coal plant. Three Mile Island was a "disaster", but actually saved thousands of lives compared to building equivalent capacity in coal-fired plants.
3. The problem of "what to do with the waste" is purely political. There are many solutions that put it out of harms way for thousands of years.
4. Nuclear power is not one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity. It has a high startup cost, which makes it politically unpalatable. Once in operation, it is one of the cheaper ways to generate electricity. And, of course, there is a practically unlimited supply of
fuel.
Actually, one thing that hurt nuclear power in the USA is the fact that every nuclear powerplant is a custom-built unit. That tends to send costs soaring, to say the least.
The Department of Energy should have followed the French model of nuclear powerplant construction, which meant standardizing on a single plant design; this drastically reduces costs and makes it easier in terms of operator training and determining safety issues.
As for the Chernobyl disaster, that was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. No containment dome, and no decent safety measures to minimize the possibility of an explosion and meltdown. Note that when Three Mile Island had its core meltdown just about all of its radioactivity was still safely confined inside the containment dome.
As for storing radioactive waste, there are places in Texas that are excellent for this purpose. Thanks to the petroleum industry, we have knowledge of extensive underground salt domes in geologically stable areas that are candidates for nuclear waste repositories. And salt is an excellent radioactivity absorber, too.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Thank you for the correction! :-)
What really happened at Chernobyl was that in their stupidity they let the entire uranium/graphite pile overheat, and the result was a massive conventional explosion that blew off the roof of the building where the reactor was located. It also caused a massive fire that spewed out smoke loaded with radioactive uranium dust particles.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
You obviously know a grand total of zero about nuclear powerplant design.
All Western nuclear powerplants use a very heavy containment dome design that is so strong that a Chernobyl-level explosion of the reactor rods would wouldn't even make a scratch on the structure of the dome. Even today's precision-guided munitions would barely crack the dome itself, as the Israelis found out when they attacked the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.
When Chernobyl exploded, if the reactor was inside a Western-style containment dome there would have been just about zero spewing of radioactive uranium dust. But it wasn't, and the explosion literally blew off the roof of the building where the reactor was located and started a major fire that spewed radioactive uranium dust for many kilometers around.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
What it means is that they have injested radioactive particles (stuff that is an alpha/beta/gamma emitter), that are radioactive themselves. This is much more dangerous then external radiation, as the affects can last a lifetime.
Byron
Haven't comics been telling us this for years? I suppose it's good to have some scientific proof of it though. Didn't everyone pretty much believe radiation caused mutations anyways? Even if they wouldn't make your eyes shoot lasers, or give you super healing or such...
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
If you are concerned about radiation, you should support nuclear power. Coal fired power plants release much more radiation, in the form of Uranium and Thorium, into the environment than nuclear power plants. That doesn't include all of the other nasty stuff that is produced by burning coal.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
X-men mutations are not due to radiation, you're confusing them with Spider-man or the Hulk, etc. (non-mutants).
- sigs are for wimps.
Also, there is waste from the production of solar poweer - chemical waste from producing solar cells. You'd be surprised how nasty production process for solar cells is. And hydro power leaves waste, too. The environment around hydro plants is wasted.
As Heinlein said, TAANSTAAFL! (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!)
...
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
Tell that to the salmon.
...
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
This has the information content of "it's easier to kill yourself by drinking too much water than most doctors thought".
Clean burning fossil fuel plants don't solve the main problem with fossil fuels - finite supply.
What good is clean burning if you've got nothing to burn?
Too bad people (USians in particular) have such an irrational fear of anything nuclear...
C-X C-S
Yeah, of course I haven't been affected by the power outages either. Neither has my employer, or many of the people I know. Not because of solar, because we are in Los Angeles served by LA DWP. Last I heard DWP has more than enough power for the area it serves. In fact they are making a lot of money selling to Edison and PG&E. They did not sell off any of their power plants, they didn't believe the deregulation scam I guess.
I live in Los Angeles and have not been hit by a power outage in over a year and a half. The last one lasted about 20 minutes and I think was caused by my mostly incompetant apartment manager.
Q.
Please don't look at Cal as an example that conservation does not work. PG&E and Edison sold off a lot of their power plants. They reduced their power generation capability because of broken deregulation plans, thinking they could just buy the power needed on the open market. Had those two companies not sold any of their plants Cal would be fine.
:)
Los Angeles has not been and will not be effected by the blackouts because the LA DWP chose not to deregulate. They have all their power plants and have been making a crap load of money selling their excess power to the morons who supported broken deregulation. Poetic justice.
Regardless I am all for building new nuke plants. I am also for real deregulation, not this half assed creation of Cal.
Q.
The article specifically talks about studies of people *working* on the cleanup at Cherynobyl, so you *might* assume that the "internal radiation" under discussion is the result of inhaling radioactive dust... *but* if you read the article and were actually paying atteniton, you'd realize that the closing quotes are not from the scientists who worked on this, but rather: "Richard Bramhall, of the Low Level Radiation Campaign" Which is to say, that the BBC (as is not unusual for news stories about nuclear power) chose to give the last word to an alarmist activist, who may or may not know all that much about what he's talking about.
Brief editorial: I like political activists. I'm glad they exist. But they are not great sources for accurate information, and traditionaly anti-nuke activists have been some of the worst.
Actually CRTs do give off gamma and xray radiation. Xray and radiation machines used to work (and some may still do) by accelerating electrons across a few KeV or MeVs of potential and then slamming them against a metal target. CRTs work by accelerating electrons across a few KeVs of potential and then slamming them against phosphors. The some of the energy becomes gamma or xray radiation depending on the energy of the electron. However the levels aren't very high and the lead in the glass blocks a bit of it.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
That's what I learned in high school physics back in '83 anyway.
The oversimplified version
Send a beta partical hurdling through a cell and every once in a while it will smack the DNA and break it in half. Every once in a while that DNA will recombine into a single strand that's different than it was before. A very small number of those will be viable (a mutation).
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
Maybe this story is just to prepare people for the results of the massive use of depleted uranium shells in the Balkans and the Gulf..
None of those countries should need electic lights for a while.
when you're up to your arse in alligators, it is difficult to remember your original job was to drain the swamp!!!!!
It is true that in their actual operation fission plants produce little air polution, but if you factor in all emissions from the plant construction, mining, transportation, waste-processing and decommissioning processes, the emissions are not inconsequential. Granted, they are still probably better than most coal plants, but still pretty bad.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Having worked at a conventional power plant (fuel oil/gas turbine) run by the Air Force, I can attest to the fact that there's a significant amount of sensitive, if not secret, information at such a facility.
In fact, for security reasons, much of the infrastructure of such as plant is considered sensitive. You don't want terrorists to know which walls are load-bearing, or which conduits could control the turbines, etc.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
there as and will never be a successful engineer in politics.
Depends, I guess, on what you consider as successful.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer.
I was always wondering why my father is so healthy. He is a Nagasaki survivor. I know a couple more people who are extremely healthy. I was wondering if they survived because they were extremely healthy or they were healthy because they survived.
My father told me that he has about a half of white blood cells of average. Could anyone explain this?
The next question would be if I am a mutant...
Anyhow, I think you're right.
I always get into fight with my girlfriend when we talk about anything nuclear. She is a German and I am a Japanese, a son of Nagasaki suvivor. I grew up exposed to the experiences and learned quite a lot, I guess.
As such (or despite that), I am rather pro-nuclear. OTOH, my girlfriend is just scared of anything nuclear. ;P
But it seems that the concensus after 56 years is that the children were not more affected than their parents.
A little sad side of this whole nisei thing was that some second generations wanted to have the same benefit as the first generation survivors who get any medical treatment for free. (They have certain ID that you can show on trains and at hospitals.) For them, parents' exposure to the atomic bomb may not affect their helath was not quite welcome. :(
I thought that my being relatively smarter might have something to do with it :P I also wished I had some supernatural power :)
By the way, the first movie ``Godzilla'' reflected the Japanese' fear of atomic bombs. As you may all know, Godzilla was a mutant lizard.
From the article: "There are several indications in the report that the real problem is internal radiation."
The article contrasts a hiroshima style massive external radiation burst vs. these Chernobyl defects which are from internal radiation. What does that mean? I thought all radiation was from an external source?
Don't believe me? Fine, consult any nuclear physicist. The problems with conventional nuclear plant design have to deal with a) transfer medium, b) shielding and c) control. Liquid lithium in a gravity fed tank deals with all three. That the programs existed and were canceled under the Clinton administration are objects of public record. No trust in me required.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
You're actually thinking of breeder reactors, a diffferent animal. They took plutonium in, produced power and more plutonium, some even being capable of purifying it slightly. You are correct with your timelines for breeders. I was referring to a different type of reactor which didn't produce commercial quantities of power. It was called a nuclear furnace. It's sole function was burning long half life material. Basically, bombard it with a heavy enough dose of radiation and the material transforms from long half-life material to short half-life material. The energy dissipated is too unstable to produce power from commercially.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Back in 1992, there were two programs running at Argonne National Labs, near Chicago. The first was a fail-safe nuclear plant. It used liquid lithium as the transfer medium, with a gravity fed tank. The lithium protects against leaks, you can't cause a meltdown and when it retires, the reactor seals itself in. The second was a reactor that "burned" long half-life radioactive material and reduced it all to 50 year or less half-life material. That is MUCH easier to store, not requiring million year storage.
What happened to both programs? The Clinton administration killed both of them, supposedly at Al Gore's insistence. I was asked to refute the VP's evidence. In one word, his reasoning was crap. Working prototypes of both reactors existed, they performed as advertised and were truly safe. But they were "nuclear" so Al Gore wanted them killed. Pure lip-service environmentalism. I was there, I performed the analysis, I reviewed the documentation.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Yes to both. Mostly, however, I'm just ranting.
- Rev.
So your telling me that 100,000 years of the waste being so toxic we have to store it in a big fuckin hole in the ground, is safer than anything we got? You better remove your CIA implant.
Yup, I'm saying that exact thing. Consider:
Coal-generated power releases both greenhouse gases *and* (as another poster pointed out) low level radioactive materials.
Hydroelectric dams lead to the release of large amounts of methane, again a greenhouse gas.
Gas & oil have the same problems: dirty emissions that aren't just problems for the greenhouse, but are also stinky.
Clean sources such as solar and wind powered generators just do not produce enough power to meet consumer demand.
More efficient vehicles and appliances will *still* not curb the global increase in demand for power. Remember, you have China and India who are both moving up, up, UP into the new technological era, and that's over 2 billion peoples that are going to want power sockets. That's something along the lines of 20 gigawatts of increased demand. *At best* increased efficiency of powered items will only lower this demand by 1 or 2 gigawatts.
We can either a) chose not to build more power plants and have the problems California is currently suffering through go global, or b) be smart about it. Nuclear seems the smart choice.
- Rev.Well, here we go again. The powers that be have decreed that nuclear power is a Good Thing(tm), so now we have the forces opposing them are ramping up their efforts to show why this is not the case. I expect to see an increase in similar studies throughout the Bush/Cheney administration.
Personally, I'm still all for nuclear power. There just seems to be this weird yin/yang thing that governs the generation of power, and nuclear power seems to be the one that -- when done properly -- causes the least harm. Coal plants put massive quantities of shit into the air, windmills & solar arrays don't generate enough to be worthwhile, and hydroelectric dams a) dessimate vast sections of land, and b) let off crazy amounts of methane from decomposing vegetable matter.
So RAH for nuclear. It's cheap, lasts a long time, and apart and aside from the occasionally annoying meltdown, it's perfectly safe.
- Rev.
The mutations of at least Professor X and the Beast were caused by their parents' exposure to radiation. Maybe some of the others also, but I distinctly remember those two.
X's parents were scientists working on the first A-bomb tests; Hank McCoy's dad was a nuclear power plant operator who got exposed while stopping a runaway chain reaction.
(Just a couple of the billions of useless facts running around my brain...)
GargGarg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
(I'm not up on this stuff, but) wouldn't that be bad for big oil?
JMR
(Not saying AlGore was any good either, he was just Ocidental with the media aghast instead of Halliburton with a strangely-silent news media, IMO.)
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
"Scientist recently discovered that radiation causes genetic mutations. These and other groundbreaking discoveries in the pages of the medical journal 'Duh'."
Oh well, at least it will kick-start biodiversity.
Hmm. I seem to be letting my humor get excessively dark.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
Turtle power!
(Sorry... with all these X-Men references, I had to bring Donatello, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and Raphael into it. Don't forget Splinter. Or Bebop and Rocksteady. Or any of the other mutants in the comics/cartoon.)
Few things terrified me as much as installing a new ceiling fan for my wife.
Respect electricity, and you won't have problems:
1. Turn the power off at the breaker and the switch.
2. Before touching bare wires, test them with a voltmeter or other tester.
3. If you can do it (and especially when working around high voltage), place one hand in your pocket when working - don't let a path be across the heart.
4. If this isn't possible, and you are only working with low voltage, wear a pair of dishwashing gloves, one size smaller than normal (to still have good "feel").
Typically, if you do 1 and 2, you will be pretty safe. Do number 3 if you are paranoid, or working with high voltage projects (ie, Tesla coils and such). Do number 4 if you want to be perfectly safe (however, only do number 4 if you are _not_ working on high voltage projects - dishwasher gloves will not help).
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It is interesting that people always talk about the "risk associated with nuclear power" since the risk has been studied ad-infinitum and is well known. But fail to look at the risk compared to things in their every day lives.
Nuclear still remains the second cheapest and least environmentally impacting form of large scale power generation.
NRRPT/RCT
Nevada's still fighting to stop being the primary waste dump, AFAIK.
I cannot speak for the others, but I am opposed to the proposed nuclear waste dump because I don't want other people's garbage. It is as simple as that - people should take care of their own garbage, and not just ship it somewhere else. Maybe then they would think a bit before creating the garbage in the first place (this goes for ALL garbage, nuclear or not).
As for nuclear power, I would welcome a few plants around here. Hell, we could sell power to California and reduce the tax dependence on gaming. There's plenty of room out here in the desert. There is even a nice salt flat just five miles down the road from me - build a plant there
if you want!
All I demand is that the plant be a MODERN design, not some shit death-trap like the Soviets built, or the obsolete ones mandated by our brain-dead Atomic Energy Commission...
A dingo ate my sig...
Why would nuclear phycisists know anything about the effect of radiation on the human body?
Anywhere on earth you are already in low level radioation. Naturally. This is the environment life has evolved in here, and it's highly unlikely that something like this would be damaging to life. Some think a little radiation is even good for life, but I don't think that's proven.
Was it really any worse than the worst case refinery accident or dam burst? You're welcome to apply these very high standards to nuclear energy, but only if you apply them uniformly to other energy sources.
In you final paragraph you seem to say you're opposed to pretty much any existing means to generate energy. Fine. But that makes your view useless for the purpose of deciding how to actually produce electricity in the real world. "None of the above" is not an option.
OK, so you're saying that an exposeure to a ``CONTINUOUS, LOW LEVEL of ionizing radiation'' is good for health.
I may be a slight net gain, under some circumstances, for a well-nurished otherwise-healthy adult. But don't go out and get a daily X-ray in the hope I'm right. IANAMd B-) Just don't sweat it if you live in Denver, work in a granite building, or are an airline pilot.
(But if you were downwind of Hanford or Chernobyl when they had releases, especially if you were still inside your mother at the time, sweat it BIG time.)
I was always wondering why my father is so healthy. He is a Nagasaki survivor. I know a couple more people who are extremely healthy. I was wondering if they survived because they were extremely healthy or they were healthy because they survived.
Probably the former. There are other mechanisms that attempt to suppress or kill off cells with damaged DNA, or to abort foetuses that have too much DNA damage. But losing a bunch of cells is normally not optimal, even if you luck out and ALL the remainder are healthy.
One of the surprises of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is how thoroughly the radiation-exposed survivors recovered. (Of course they were sick as dogs while the damaged cells were dying off, essentially everybody who was pregnant aborted, and there is a higher incidence of cancer and other problems later. It's just that they was not anywhere near as much long-term health problems, or sterility, as were expected early on.)
Being atom-bombed is NOT a Good Thing.
My father told me that he has about a half of white blood cells of average. Could anyone explain this?
Probably lost a bunch of bone marrow stem cells and memory white cells (which recognized they'd been damaged and committed apoptosis - "programmed cell death", or had their surface antigens changed and were killed by their neighbors.)
The next question would be if I am a mutant...
We're all mutants. You just might have a couple more recent mutations than the rest of us. B-) If so I expect they'll get sorted out in a few generations. Figure that most of 'em were already sorted out, in the form of brothers and sisters who weren't born. B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is the important bit:
...
"These results indicate that low doses of radiation can induce multiple changes in human germline DNA."
... the germline cells are there, packed with chemicals that prevent mutations (antioxidants for instance). Most of this is to *prevent* mutations that occur through malicious chemicals. Radiation doesn't really work that way. It will just penetrate through and nock of some basepares from the DNA
However, most of the damage done by radiation is done by the creation of free radicals, which then damage the DNA by chemical reactions. So antioxidants are quite effective (though not perfect) at stopping radiation damage.
The antioxidants are "expensive" nutritionally, (and humans evolved with less nutrition than is available in developed countries). So there's a feedback process to adjust their levels to limit free radical damage to an acceptable level without draining sometimes-scarce resources useful elsewhere. The bulk of free radicals in a cell come from the mitochondria (the cell's own "power plants").
As evidenced by cancer rate vs. environmental radiation exposure, the location of the "thermostat" is such that if the cell is exposed to a CONTINUOUS, LOW LEVEL of ionizing radiation the free-radical scavenger production is increased so much that the net result is LESS mutation. Up to the point where free-radical scavenger production maxes out, continuous low-level ionizing radiation is actually a net gain. (The same is also true of certain free-radical producing chemicals - again with the continuous low-level caveat.)
The problem with Chernobyl is partly that the level was NOT low, but mostly because the level was not CONTINUOUS. A short-term exposure to a high level of radiation is NOT equivalent to the same amount of radiation spread over years for a number of reasons, and a very big one is that the damage takes place before the levels of protecting chemicals can be raised.
So finding damage to DNA in stem cells of people who were brought to Chernobyl to clean up, and thus suddenly exposed to a high rate of ionizing radiation for a short time, is no surprise, and has no bearing on the expected effect of long-term exposure to low levels of background radiation.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The people in the Chernobyl area INGESTED radioactive material where it became deposited in various parts of their body (radioactive Iodine usually builds up in the thyroid for example). Unless Research scientists, radiotherapy professionals, and airline staff are ingesting radioactive materials on a regular basis I don't think they have anything to worry about...
You talking to me? Your reply, if it was one, wasn't indented from mine so it looks like you replied to yourself. In any case it appears that you're replying to me so here's my properly submitted reply.
:-P). As far as your quote, I wasn't trying to make you look like a moron. I quoted the whole paragraph for crying out loud. You can't get much more fair that that! I was simply pointing out that Chernobyl is nothing like any modern power plant that would be designed today and that making comparisons about it's saftey as compared to a modern plan is dishonest and, well, bullshit.
/. It's not like my post was a flame or anything, I was just commenting and offering constructive criticism about your post. If you want to see a response with flame by all means send me a personal email and I'd be glad to respond off /., but I won't be enticed into one on-line.
First, why do all environmentalist (and I can only assume you are one given your statements) seem like raving lunatics? Why call me an idiot just because you happen to disagree with my opinions and statements? Why take things to a personal level? I didn't think my statements were personally offensive. Sure I said that your statement comparing modern nuclear power plants to Chernobyl was "bullshit" and gave specific examples of why I thought so, but this wasn't a personal attack. Clam down a little and take a deep breath.
Now for a point by point, if that's how you want to handle it.
I do not put much emphasis on spelling correctness or grammar. I've corrected people in the past for obvious errors, but I refrain from doing so now because it's too easy to make errors myself. I wouldn't want to be a hipocrite now (and I can almost garentee that's misspelled but I'm not going to look it up
Chernobyl is not a great example of the worst case scenario because no plant of that type would ever be allowed to be built today. It's a great example for the whole history of nuclear power, but not something to use as measuring stick for making future decisions. It would be like taking the risks and exposure rates people received when they were first experimenting with X-rays and floroscopes and using that as a reason for never, ever, getting a moderm X-ray in your life. No teeth X-rays, no arm X-rays when you break your arm. No chest X-rays when you get shot and the bullet is logged in your chest but they don't know it it's too close to a vital organ to operate. Not only that, but being against ANYONE getting X-rays because they are harmful to the radiologist, doctors, and micro-organisms that are in the X-ray rooms. See how rediculous it sounds? I'm not saying that new nuclear plants now would be completely safe. I am saying that it's wrong to compare them to Chernobyl.
So you're saying that the energy companies know how to produce cheap solar panels and that they are just holding back because they want to protect their natural monopoly? I think they would be much smarter than that. How about leasing or renting the solar panels instead of selling them? That way the can still charge people a monthly fee for their technology and still maintain their profits. After all, if they didn't actually sell their solar panels it's not likely you'd be able to cook one up in your back yard.
That's what risk assessment is all about. I see no other way of making an intelligent choice than listing out all possible scenarios and grading each one to come up with a grand total that, to me says nuclear power is "safe enough."
Oh come now. You really think greenpeace and the other groups out there would let the NRC become some fluffy play tiger just because natural gas cost too much to be used for electricity production? I give them more credit than that. Besides, there is new technology out there that makes nuclear power more safe and efficient than even the latest plants built in the USA. The tough NRC regulations are actually now much easier to comply with than they were in the past, so there's little incentive to bend or break rules.
Well, I really don't care what you think you TOLD me to think or not! My last paragraph stated that in my opinion you SHOULD be more in support of nuclear power than coal power instead of disfavoring them equally. Or, to put it in possibly more acceptable terms, you should really hate nuclear power, but you should really really hate coal plants.
And finally, you didn't have to call me an idiot again just because you disagree with my opinions. Heck, if you can't take the criticism then you shouldn't post on
Oh, This is really really the last comment (and CONSTRUCTIVE criticism). If you want people to understand your comments better you should quote people. I didn't quote anything of yours in my reply and see how confusing it is? Quite a bit different than my original reply, which quoted a large part of your original message. I don't know if you didn't respond to my message because you didn't want me to notice you replied to me, because you didn't want me to get additional karma (which I don't give a diddly about anyhow), or you don't know how to properly reply. If you had replied it would have been much more simpler to cut and paste my message into the comment box thereby making this whole discussion easier to follow.
You should know what you are talking about before you make such statements. Chernobyl was basically a reactor in a swimming pool with a warehouse shell built around it. It had no containment building like all western reactors do. It had no failsafes or any of the other safety measures that all western reactors have to have. It's amazing that it didn't go critical sooner than it did, and it's completely the old USSR's fault that the "accident" happened. It's an accident that just could not have happened in the USA, France, Germany, or any other modern nation utilizing nuclear power. Most environmentalist and wacos (and no, not all environmentalists are wacos) point to TMI (Three Mile Island) as a horrendous example of how dangerous nuclear power can be. However, TMI only released a small amount of radioactive gas into the air and did not have a large leak. It simply could not have had the huge explosion and contamination like Chernobyl.
;-) although we do know they were nuclear in nature. Then he worked for Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Maryland as their head of dosimetry as a nuclear physician. He also designed the emergency plan for the surrounding areas in case of a problem. It's on the back of every phone book in the southern Maryland area. One of my brothers worked refueling nuclear power plants across the USA. One of my other brothers works in the Virginia shipyards as their certified nuclear physician. He was invited, but didn't go, to Chernobyl for a post clean-up visit. So I guess you can say that nuclear power is in my family. No, I have no formal training in nuclear physics or their effects on the human body, but I would hazard to guess that the lectures I received all throughout my childhood from my father and brothers are a match for any college professor's. I was interested in the subject and actually asked for these long lectures, if you can imagine a kid asking his father "Dad, tell me the difference between Alpha, Beta, and Gamma radiation again and how each radioactive isotope either usually passes through or gets integrated into the human body in specific places when ingested." So while you may have quite large experience in biology in general, I don't think you know that much about nuclear power plants in specific. Scare tactics don't work for people properly informed with knowledge.
As far as waste, most reactors now store their waste locally. There's nothing wrong with that and it is completely safe. As far as the containment buildings on modern nuclear plants, you could actually fly a Boeing 747 into one and it would not crack the containment seal. Quite a bit different than Chernobyl, no? And as far as cost your wrong. Nuclear power is one of the cheapest sources of power available, if not the cheapest. I think the numbers are something like $3 per killowatt whereas natural gas is over $300 dollars per killowatt. That's right, over 100 times the cost of nuclear power. And unfortunately a heck of a lot of electricity is generated via natural gas in the USA. How barbaric! Burning gas to heat water to create steam to turn a turbine. Natural gas should be used to heat homes and cook nice fresh red meat, not create electricity.
And where do I get my information from? Why do I believe I know just a bit more than you do about nuclear power? Because my father served in the Navy for 23 years and towards the end worked as a special assistant to President Johnson doing things he can't tell us about
This sort of mutation seems to be the only sort of evolution that our species will be able to achieve.
Consider that through our ideals of compassion and medical advances, etc. people with "undesirable" genetic traits (not just hereditary diseases) survive. Their problem genes are not removed from the gene pool and are passed on to subsequent generations. There is not more survival of the fittest.
Genetic modification through gene therapy would be one method of eliminating bad genes as well. although giving people extra abilities (strength, speed) would be deemed "unethical" and experiments would be shut down.
If our society survives for a few more thousand years, geographic adaptations that various people have acquired will be diluted. These adaptations are things like skin colour and facial features. The dilution is a result of our ability to travel anywhere on the planet and to survive there independant of our heritage.
Eventually, there would be very little to distinguish European people from African, Asian or anyone else. They would just be people. Unfortunately, I don't think bigotry and racial persecution will disappear; they'll just take on a different form.
What's interesting is that their parents got away from Chernobyl before conception -- IOW, the embryos were NOT exposed to the same level of radiation as the parents. This at least somewhat suggests that radioactivity affected the germ plasm of the parents.
That is, exposure to radioactivity -- even relatively low levels -- may not only hose the person exposed, but also his or her descendants, and their descendants, and their descendants...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the opposition comes from people who are against anything that could possibly help a nuclear weapons development program.
Others complain about waste -- how recyclable IS that stuff from an advanced design, and what does one do with the rest? Nevada's still fighting to stop being the primary waste dump, AFAIK.
A third bit is that there's no requirement to do research before forming an opinion...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Chernobyl proved to be a case of bad design and bad procedures. West-built reactors, for instance, were designed with an eye towards such details as fail-safes and other safety measures... meaning that there's a huge difference in magnitude between a Chernobyl-class event and, oh, TMI.
You wouldn't compare the safety record of the Corsair with a Saab, would you? Neither are Chernobyl and, say, CANDU reactors all that similar...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
...Trust no one (except the Computer). And keep your laser handy, folks -- mutants may be around.
Presently unregistered mutants are hereby ordered to report to the nearest terminal for Mutant Self-Incrimination, followed by arrest and execution by INTSEC.
The Computer is Your Friend.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
---
Didn't you learn anything from watching the X-Men?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The only unexpected negative consequence was an unusually high rate of thyroid cancer in children, but this is not a true low-dose effect because the thyroid efficiently concentrates radioactive iodine. Fortunately, thyroid cancer is relatively benign and there have only been four deaths from it.
Furthermore, a closer reading of the latest scare study shows that those exposed were not in the low dose group! They were workers at the facility after the event - those who were involved in cleaning things up. There is lots of evidence that low dose radiation is not as dangerous, per milli-severt, as high dose radiation. The linear dose-response model that is used by environmental agencies shows way too high a risk at low levels. This results in ridiculously low level requirements on nuclear plants - levels which, btw, coal burning plants exceed every day!
A hypothesis on the nonlinearity of the dose response is that it DNA is self-repairing, it may take near-simultaneous hits on the same DNA to defeat that mechanism. Simple statistics shows that the odds of this, relative to radiation dosage, are far from linear.
Does anyone remember the extremely high numbers of excess deaths expected from Chernobyl? To date, it has killed fewer people than a medium sized commercial airliner crash - and Chernobyl was a worst-case meltdown. Almost all of the deaths were among workers immediately after the event who received very high doses.
Chernobyl was an uncontained reactor with a positive coefficient - loaded with graphite which burned once the temperatures got too high.
And finally, if you really are worried about radiation, take a geiger counter in an airplane. You will watch the background level climb dramatically as the aircraft climbs. When I did this, it went from 26 clicks per minute to many hundreds - and I live in a high-background area.
The only good weather is bad weather.
...just tell me what isotope I need to mutate myself to gain super-powers!! That's all I want.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
The long answer is that radiation treatment increases your risk of cancer to some extent (as do many chemotherapeutic drugs, by the way). But that's not really a major concern when you already have cancer. The risk of a cancer cell surviving and causing a relapse is much greater.
But in truth, mutations happen every day inside your own cells. Do none of you remember high school Biology? When the DNA splits into its two components and duplicates itself (which is a beautiful example of the Perfect Design in the universe) then sometimes the DNA is copied incorrectly; Instead of Adanine and Thymine creating a pair, the Adanine couples with a Guanine accidentally. This is known as a mutation, and is usually completely harmless.
The fact that radiation causes mutations in cells should not be surprising; they happen on their own anyways. It's the connotation that comes from using the word "Mutant" that scares me.
------
That's just the way it is
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. They protest and bitch and moan when they have blackouts and vote you out of office. They protest and bitch and moan when you charge them the premium rates for relatively clean sources of energy like natural gas, wind and solar. And they vote you out of office. They protest and bitch and moan about the pollution when you set up those coal plants (I seem to recall the filters and smokestacks get readioactive too, somehow.) and vote you out of office. And they protest and bitch and moan and vote you out of office if you even think the word "nuclear".
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But your electicity bills will be $500 a month.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
or it will turn us into Radioactive Supermen like I saw on Futurama.
Until recently Science Fiction's take on evolution has been unbelievably . . . well, stunningly dumb.
Yeah, you need a source of mutation, but there's the immense and convoluted matter of selection.
Evolution is not a force; it is not a law of nature; it does not have a tendency or a direction or a "destiny." It isn't "driven" by anything as simple as radiation.
Evolution is an emergent phenomenon resulting from the interaction of complex, changeable organisms with a complex, changeable environment which includes other complex, changeable organisms.
Boiling down to "ongoing low-level doses of radiation as the cause of evolution" is way goofy. That model won't float.
Well, I could go on and on about this. Go read _Darwin's Century_ by Eiseley, and Full House and Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould, and The Origin of Life and Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson.
Taking those in should go a long way to cleaning out the gunk that build up in your head after reading Niven or Heinlein.
Stefan
Protective suits stop Alpha radiation in addition to preventing contact with or inhaling of Alpha emitters. They prevent contamination by all radioactive materials as well (beta and gamma emitters), though the beta and gamma radiation itself will go right through the suit.
I'm probably entering this discussion far too late for this to actually be seen, but oh well...
disclaimer:I do have a physics degree, and I worked for 4 months for AECL, who design and build the CANDU reactors, but I'm not a "nuclear physicist"
Nuclear power, if done properly, is very safe. The Chernobyl accident was a combination of bad reactor design, lack of operator training, and plain stupidity.
Background info: Nuclear reactions can do three things depending on their surroundings, what we call the moderator: they can die out, they can induce a chain reaction which is self perpetuating, or they can go critical and become a run-away reaction. Nuclear power obviously wants the self-sustaining chain reaction and uses a combination of moderating fliuds and coolants to achieve this.
The Russian reactors use graphite as the moderator. This is a really bad design choice because when there is insufficient coolant, you get a run-away reaction. Very bad.
The Chernobly-4 explosion occurred because, even though the reactors were known to be unstable with low power levels, the crew decided to test how long the turbines would continue to run in the event of a main power failure. This test was to run prior to a routing maintainence shutdown, but they took the automatic shutdown procedures off line, lost too much coolant, and the reaction went critical. Then they couldn't shut it down. Plain stupidity, combined with a bad design.
Contrast the CANDU reactor (there are other safe designs, but this is obviously the one I know most about). The moderation material in a CANDU reactor is heavy water. When you lose coolant with heavy water as a moderator, the reaction stops. Power failure, the reaction stops. With a heavy water design, there is no possibility of a critical reaction as there was with Chernobyl. And you can use the uranium straight from the mine, at natural concentrations, so there is less chemical processing involved and the fuel is a naturally occuring material.
It really is the safest and most environmentally freindly choice we have today for energy production. Wind and solar are the only ones that would be better, but our technology for these things right now is far too inefficient (I read somewhere last year that you would have to cover all of New York State with solar panels just to power New York City. Not practical yet I'm afraid). With a properly designed nuclear plant, you get no air pollution, ground pollution, no interference with wildlife habitats, etc. It is expensive, but you have to chose your evils, and I'd rather pay a little more for power and avoid the environmental nastys you get with hydro or coal.
This story is completely useless since it uses two equivocal and incompatible defintions of "low" (at the beginning the story implies that "low" levels of radiation cause mutations, but later it implies that levels of radiation that cause mutation is lower than previously thought, which could still be a very high level of exposure).
They don't give the damn exposure data. Why can't they just give a rough range of the exposure that the people in this study faced?
We need error-detecting and correcting DNA. Someone get on this.
Low levels of radiation can lead to mutations -- so what??? Low levels of any number of things can lead to mutations, but chance is involved, and probabilities. This has the information content of "you can kill yourself by drinking too much water."
If we keep using nuclear sources of energy and every once in a while, an "accident" happens and irradiates everyone, evolution will eventually "select" humans who are resistant to mutation due to radiation. As they say, what doesn't kill us will only make us stronger. :)
There are actually bacteria with quadruple-redundant DNA. They can survive 12,000,000 rads, have been found inside water-pool type nuclear reactors, and apparently evolved in the Artic.
I did always think that X-men was for real :)
m
Right.
Just to let you know, here in Colorado there's an area above Denver's aquifer where tons of radioactive and toxic waste was clandestinely dumped. Gee, how did that happen?
There is more information on this aviable at http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/coalm ain.html.
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In your reply to my post, you neglect to notice three points 1) Chernobyl was a very OLD design, and as someone previously mentioned here, it would be like comparing a corsair with a saab. There are designs for nuclear powerplants that use the WASTE it produces to AGAIN produce more nuclear power from it, reducing the costs and hazards from the toxic waste 2) Nuclear power is expensive per megawatt compared with other power plant designs, however, it produces an AWEFULL lot of energy, more than any coal or natural gas power plant 3) It is not true that France uses nuclear because it can't use anything else. Even if it had small coal or natural gas reserves, it could buy those from other countries, etc. The main reason why they use it is because its non-polluting and produces a lot of power.
You can't expect us to take a dicussion about nuclear energy from 1975 seriously. There have been many advances in nuclear powerplant designs since then.
I understand that there are a lot of environmental activists that strongly oppose the use of nuclear energy, however I would very much like to know what their main arguments are.
It is true that Chernobyl was a humanitarian/environmental disaster of global proportions, however I feel that since that incident, nuclear power has been stereotyped as a devil energy souce.
First of all, Chernobyl was a very old (one of the first designs, if not the first "production" design) nuclear power plant of the soviet era. Today besides the stigma arround nuclear energy, many advances have been made to nuclear energy powerplants, and there are designs of powerplants today which produce reclyclable radioactive wastes.
Look at France. France produces, as far as I can remember (don't take my numbers for granted) 70% of its engery with nuclear power plants. Although their designs are much more modern than the Chernobyl design, they are not of the type that produce very little recyclable waste. I often feel that this is the case becasue research and development into nuclear energy power plants is avoided because of all the environmental PR hassle.
I would be very interested to hear from some Nuclear Physisists out here that could enlighten us a little further on nuclear power energy, and how safe it REALLY is. France doesn't have an energy problem, and I think this is largely due to its heavy use of nuclear power plants.
I can understand there must be a lot of pro-nuclear energy publicity coming out of the current Bush administration - since they probably feel that this is one of the ways to curb the energy problem in the US without creating too much polution from it.
Again, I would love to hear some hard facts from Nuclear Physisists about the dangers and advantages of the current or potential nuclear power plant designs.
The /. article title: Low-Level Radiation May be Mutagenic is pretty misleading. The article concerned a study of people who cleaned up after Chernobyl. I wouldn't exactly call that "low level radiation". The focus of the study was to see if somatic DNA was being affected by the radiation, making the offspring of the cleanup crew have a greater rate of mutation than normal. The study results were pretty scary, but this is not something that was unknown.
Enigma
Enigma
There is this very legit product from ShieldWorks. Check out their catalog
And there is the world famous Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie
It of course depends on what is the most important body part to protect as far as you are concerned. These mostly focus on protecting the brain. (Not that is is being overused by some folks)
Other people may want to investigate protection for other body parts.
There is a business plan in here someplace folks.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
All this talk about nuclear power plants causing harm really doesn't bother me that much. Nuclear energy is dying due to the negative and dangerous image of it. Citizens who would rather have less effecient coal power plants in their community because they are safer.
:-)
Now what do you all think about the levels of low level and perhaps even high level radiation from cell phones? What scares the shit out of me is constant cell phone use by just about everyone. They emit a shitload of radiation that some studies show to cause cancer. THey are in my opinion a far more of a threat then nuclear contamination. I remember an article here on slashdot that stated that mice have lost something like %40 of their short term memory when exposed to cell phone radiation!
Is this true?
My question is, do cell phones emit dangerous low level or high level radiation? I suppose it will make no difference considering your sticking a high energy microwave reciever and booster to your skull! People at work think I am a nut because I have never used a cell phone before and I do not plan to ever use one in the future.
I am wondering if this study takes into account other types of radiation such as electro-magnetic and microwave which both make up cell phone emmisions. Some small studies which are small and inconclusive support the idea that cell phones can cause not only brain tumors but genetic defects in children from users. However due to the cost of such a large experiment with a few thousand users we will never know for sure. I know the amount of children being born with learning disabilities and autism are on the rise and considering the envirnoment on average is getting cleaner, I wonder if low level radiation could have any influence. I know monitors and even lcd screens emit radiation and many people stare at them for 18 to 12 hours a day.
I do not mean to sound paraniod or anything but the statistics do make me wonder. I will keep my huge monitors of course but count me off in using cell phones.
For you slashdoters who use cell phones remember you could be doing damage to yourself. Also if you have a cell phone it means your boss could call you anytime.:-)
This is a another huge reason why I won't use them. If you leave work wiht a cell phone, your basically taking your office wiht you. Your boss can call you anytime and demand that you show up for work, and you are really just on call.
That is the reason why you should avoid cell phones. Also annonying friends and in-laws can call you anytime, anywhere. I don't get it? Why would anyone want this?
http://saveie6.com/
Cell phones are far more dangerous to the average person because we have alot more people who use cell phones then work at nuclear power plants.
I remember a link here on slashdot a few months back which showed that mice when exposed to cell phone radiation lose large portions of their short term memory when exposed. Also our environment is generally getting cleaner over the years but the amount of children with learning dissabilites and sevre disorders like autism are on the rise. I believe since chemical waste dumping is going away that the disorders must be caused by excessive radiation exposer to things like cell phones, power lines and maybe even computer monitors. Perhas it could be related to diet as well. Studies are being conducted as I write this to determine if excessive cell phone can cause brain tumors and even long term memory damage. Nuclear I believe will go away as time progresses. Only the military will probably use it in 50 years from now.
http://saveie6.com/
This is not actually true. The male germ stem cells for instance divide very frequently. The female stems cells divide (in mammals anyway) before birth and then stop.
Of course its not clear what you mean by "life span". The germ line cells are immortal anyway.
"here is no redundancy in germline cells, one cell makes one organism"
This is also untrue. Many organisms are diploid. We have a mother and a father! Hence two cells make one organism!
"one kidney cell doesn't really define life and death for the whole kidney)"
Unless of course the one cell turns out to be cancerous and then it can kill the entire organism.
"if a skin cells start getting mutations in a gene thats only used in a liver cell, it is still a great skin cell."
Expressing the wrong cell at the wrong time, or in the wrong place can be pretty disasterous for the functioning of those cells. It can often be worse than a cell failing to express something.
"So far lessons in biology "
Perhaps you should work on the biology a little more?
Phil
I suspect although I am afraid that I do not know for sure, that most of radiotherapy has been assessed for its side affect risks by clinical trials on those treatments. This is rather than by calibrating them against the existing data on low level exposure.
In short I suspect that this data will have little impact on the assessment of risk from radiotheraphy.
I think that area that this sort of data will have the biggest impact on is those people who are regularly exposed to low levels of radiation. Research scientests, radiotheraphy professionals (ie the nurses, technicians and doctors), and maybe airline staff will find the rules and guidelines of safe practises may come down over time. Although they probably would have done so anyway as people tend to get more worried about risks rather than less.
Phil
The first two categories may well be doing so, depending of course on what sort of work they are doing. Airline staff of course do not ingest radiation. Nevertheless the levels of exposure to low level radiation for external gamma ray radiation were calculated partly on the basis of the Hiroshima and other similar data, if memory serves me well. The data is calibrated for radiation type based on high level exposure data where you can collect statistics without large population data. So this data may, eventually, have an impact on the levels that are held to be safe.
Whether people have anything to worry about or not is of course a different matter.
Phil
I don't think that you gave any examples. What you said was to my mind confused, poorly worded, and most wrong. In some cases your statements (about "lifespan" for instance) were fairly meaningless. Some were wrong. Maybe you think that pointing out that two germline cells are often required to produce one organism is picky, but I consider it to be important.
"It is just an indication that you are not very clever "
I don't think it was an indication of very much, other than my willingness to use a cheap shot. As you ended your note with a cheap shot also I conclude that you likewise willing to use cheap shots.
Phil
Remember "Bat Boy", I had nightmares from that picture for years!
Now that's journalism
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
They are referring to ionizing radiation, that includes strong beta emissions, and x-ray to gamma ray frequency photons.
actually not totally correct (on the protein training part).
For example, ever wonder why during DNA replication you use RNA primers to start the sequence?
You've probably been taught that that was because DNA Polymerase "could not initiate de-novo nucleotide polymerization" and required an RNA primer, because RNA polymerase can do so.
Ever wonder why evolution chose that case? I mean wouldn't it be more energy efficient if you skipped the whole RNA primer initialization? It takes substantial energy to replace nucleotides.
Here's the most recent hypothesis:
DNA Polymerase becomes more and more accurate at base-pair matching the longer and longer it processes the same molecule. If it was able to start without a primer, it would take longer to "train", and would make many more mistakes than it already does.
Maybe this is the only exceptional case where an individual protein alters structure during substrate interaction, but I doubt it.
However you are correct in describing positive and negative feedback.
Actually, I attended a research seminar at the University of Connecticut Health Center, where someone else had shown that low-level doses of radiation actually "trains" the DNA-repair enzymes to be able to fix damaged DNA more accurately and with more efficiency. It was shown that if you subjected cells to low levels of radiation over a long period of time, and then exposed them to high levels, fewer cells mutated than if naive cells had been exposed to high levels of ionizing radiation without the "pre-treatment".
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
Yeah, the half-life of some the waste is 20,000 years. So all that Plutonium being generated will decay to a somewhat safe level, in, um 300,000 to half a million years. The government will keep an eye on things til then.
BTW, we could easily supply enough electricity for the entire nation using wind. It wouldn't power our cars, but neither does nuclear electricity. Better turbine technology and mass production have dropped the wholesale production cost of wind electricity to around 3-4 cents a kwh. The 'wind belt' (where average speeds are highest) runs from the Dakotas south to Texas - convienently aligned with the center of the US population. It might give the farmers in that part of the country something to do when they have pumped the Ogallala aquifer dry and find they cant grow wheat or corn there without irrigation!
The "advances of modern man" haven't derailed evolution. Most bacteria are evolving rapidly to overcome antibiotics, and we are lucky to be one step ahead of them. The fact that smallpox has been eliminated might be an evolutionary victory of humans over the virus enemy, except that smallpox isn't really extinct- freeze dried virus still exists, and somebody might dig up a frozen caveman and reignite the battle.
Hurricane Andrew taught Miami a lesson about adapting to the environment - it is still necessary. Yes, we humans can wipe out plants and animals and otherwise make a fine mess when we get distracted by our many strange ideas, but we never left nature or evolution.
dynamo
Whilst this is neat & all that's there's proof of DNA mutation through radiation, but there's no details on the resulting effects of that mutation. Did anyone grow an extra arm, x-ray vision, etc.?
/*drunk.. fix later*/
They found "an unexpectedly high increase" in mutations among children born after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Scientists also say that there is evidence that those people who have stuck their hands in a fire, have recieved burns. Scientists also report that scientists will continue to investigate the obvious.
Murphy's Law of Copiers
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
And I hardly think that the levels experienced during the cleanup would be considered low level, or at the very least not comparable to the levels found in sound radiation.
Murphy's Law of Copiers
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
We use to work with radioactive iodine and phosphorus more often then I cared to, and had to wear the appropriate gear - including a radiation badges. One got left in the hood for some reason or other, and it was a little hotter than normal.
Anyhow, a week after one of the new grad students starts working with our group, one of my cohorts picks up a Geiger counter, adjusts the sensitivity, and says, "lets check to see if your thyroid is doing OK". With one hand he placed the badge near his neck and moved the GC close enough to make a delightful pops.... The look on his face was priceless. Oh... did we get into the doghouse for that one....
Anyhow, true low-level radiation is pretty safe. The cleanup crew at Chernobyl would not be dealing with levels I would call "low". Electricity scares the hell out of me, however. Few things terrified me as much as installing a new ceiling fan for my wife.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Hiroshima survivors seem to have done very well for themselves, having used their mental and physical resources to the maximum, without much of natural resources in the land. And if the mutations have such a positive effect then slow radiation is welcome.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
I'm sure if Darwin were still alive he would be happy to hear that his theory of evolution is not being killed by the advances of modern man. With man no longer having to adapt to his environment, and instead grossly defiling the environment to his needs, why the hell would we need to evolve? Maybe the natural order of things has not been as thrown off as we might think. Our environmental "enhancements" championed by our ever improving technology may have it's repercussions yet! Why do we ever think we can out do mother nature?
So, yeah, there were cows born around Chernobyl with six legs and things of that sort, and we knew about this right after the accident, with practically the first litters of animals born in the area. Doesn't it stand to reason that what applies to farm animals will probably apply to humans, when it comes to radioisotope-base mutagens? What I really want to know is- Are my kids going to be mutants because I stared at a 19" monitor in a cubicle all day for fifteen years?
they basically tell you that small somatic doses of radiation are practically harmless
Of course the TELL you that! Would anyone volunteer to work with them, only for college money, if they said "well... we won't give you much radiation, but it will be enough to mutate your gametes and cause your kids to come out with 3 eyeballs."?
Just playing devils advocate here... not like the government ever lies to us... right? :-)
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
Without them, we as a species wouldn't be here, of course. The problem is, we have derailed the mechanism by which members of the species with marginally adaptive or marginally maladaptive mutations are selected (or not). Children born with truly horrendous and fatal mutations do, indeed, still die off and that particular mutation vanishes, but for the borderline ones, we're increasingly encouraging and supporting reproduction by people who probably oughta keep their marginally-maladaptive mutations to themselves.
What do you think: would this report help start a dialogue that could return some sense to reproductive and fertility policies, particularly in Western countries and most specifically the US, encouraging people who have genetic diseases or demonstrably-problematic mutation-induced conditions not to reproduce, but to adopt instead?
Or, will it just make people paranoid about all sources of radiation, including that big thermonuclear furnace that flies across the sky every day, to where we just hide in caves (breathing radon, of course)?
Please pipe all comments which contain the terms "eugenics," "Mengele" and "Hitler" to good ole /dev/null... that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm getting at is, if the mutagen is that pervasive, is there a way we can figure out to USE it for our own purposes instead of just getting hosed randomly by it?
Turtle
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Hate to break it to you, but there are lots of forms of low level radiation that don't mutate DNA. Some of them include, Radio waves, lightwaves, Alpha, Beta, and Theta brain waves (yes they are all EM radiation), low level infrared, and sound radiation.
None of these are known to cause mutation at low levels.
also I think the major suprise is that the mutation didn't show up in the person(s) exposed, only in children concieved after exposier.
Sometimes the answer is not as obvious as one might think...
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
I figured you were sadly misinformed, but I guess your just a bad comedian.
At least we both agree that the article shouldnt use the term 'low-level radiation'
RA7
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
"Nuclear" scares people. That's why MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Images) are called that, the original acronym was NMR, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Doctors thought that would be too scary for patients and the public, so they dropped the "nuclear".
I thought that's why people like "feeder plants" but think nuclear power is going to kill them. (The word "reactor" is also taboo.)
I don't think many people think about things that scare them. They certainly don't study them or have an open mind.
People are wondering about increased cases of cancer and other such health problems in modern industrialized society, and I have to think--isn't it just a very real possibility that the problem is this utterly pervasive low-energy radiation?
Or maybe more 70 year olds are dying of cancer today because they didn't die of polio when they were 5 or pneumonia when they were 18 or of that heart attack they had when they were 50.
Besides people have been bombarded by various forms of radiation from natural sources since the first human, don't you think mother nature has developed some defenses against mutations in that time. Guess what she has. Your body has a number of defenses against the harmful effects of low level radiation. That is not to say noone ever suffers any harmful effects, but the incidence is quite low.
Would you really propose to eliminate all of the modern benefits of electricity, radio & television, computers, cell phones, etc... to eliminate a 1 in 10-100 million chance that they could harm you at some point in your life. If so, you should certainly stay far away from any automobiles, since your risk of bodily harm from these is much higher.
We need not look for exotic explanations for rising health problems like cancer, because the most probably explanation is the constant exposure to EM radiation in unprecedented amounts. And as for your assertion that the chances of health risks are so small, that's just stupid, since no studies have been done or could be done since the modern world is pervaded with these high levels of low-energy EM particles. Think before you write.
O.K. Let's think a bit. According to the American Cancer Society (www.cancer.org) safety standards are usually set conservatively due to the difficulting in extrapolating from high dose experiments in animals to the low-doses typically encountered by humans. "For cancer safety standards, only increased risks of one case or less per million persons over a lifetime are usually acceptable."
At the same time, non-ionizing radiation has been studied extensively, yet from the same website:
"Electromagnetic radiation at frequencies below ionizing and ultraviolet levels has not been shown to cause cancer. While some epidemiologic studies suggest associations with cancer, others do not, and experimental studies have not yielded reproducible evidence of carcinogenic mechanisms."
The absense of any repeatible evidence that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer, suggests that the probability of cancer due to non-ionizing radiation is quite low. Probably much less than the 1 case in a million guideline stated above. Therefore, my statement that your odds of getting cancer from non-ionizing radiation are in the 1 in 10-100 million range is probably quite reasonable if not an overestimate of your chances.
By contrast, clear links have been established between cancer and a large number of environmental factors including: Tobacco and alcohol, various chemicals (eg. benzene, asbestos, vinyl chloride, arsenic), obesity, ionizing radiation from x-rays or radon gas, UV radiation from the sun, Viral infections (HIV, Hepatitus B, etc.) and many others.
It is not reasonable to assume that non-ionizing radiation is responsible for the increased incidence of cancer, just because EM levels have increased during the same time period. There are many other factors which show a stronger relation to the increased incidence of cancer and which have been shown to be contributors to cancer. Therefore, the probability of getting cancer from non-ionizing radiation is most likely quite low.
Not so fast. It is true that loss of coolant in a CANDU will not cause a runaway reaction. But that doesn't mean there isn't any risk; the problem is xenon flux.
As a CANDU shuts down, the neutron cross-section changes so as to produce xenon by transmutation. If the shutdown is not carefully controlled, this xenon can accumulate as bubbles, which act as an insulator preventing heat dissipation. It is possible under this scenario for superheated material to melt through containment and escape into the atmosphere.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
It should also be added that (a) germline cells have a verly long lifespan and therefore have more time to mutate. And (b) there is no redundancy in germline cells (one cell makes one organism, whereas one kidney cell doesn't really define life and death for the whole kidney). Plus (c) if a skin cells start getting mutations in a gene thats only used in a liver cell, it is still a great skin cell. If a germline cell gets any mutation at all, it will have an effect, as every cell in the resulting organism (i.e. child) descends from this germ cell. So far lessons in biology
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
This is the important bit:
"These results indicate that low doses of radiation can induce multiple changes in human germline DNA."
Mammals (including humans) have 'special' cells that have very low degradation in DNA. Normal cells are mutated all the time. This is not a problem as the DNA can take an enormous amount of mutations without changing its function (in fact, in a gene every third base can pretty much be changed at random without the gene product changing one bit). So, you don't want to make new organisms out of skin cells. Therefore the germline cells are there, packed with chemicals that prevent mutations (antioxidants for instance). Most of this is to *prevent* mutations that occur through malicious chemicals. Radiation doesn't really work that way. It will just penetrate through and nock of some basepares from the DNA. Remember: once a basepair is changed, the cell can never again figure out what the correct base was! Anyway, if you are exposed to a large amount of radiation, it can only be expected that the germline is effected as well.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
I've spent 4 years working in reactor chemistry, and over the 4 years have recieved 492 mrem of ionizing radiation exposure. When you train in a nuclear frield (I did with the US Navy) they basically tell you that small somatic doses of radiation are practically harmless. The real danger lies in a large chronic dose. We were always told that once a cell was radiated, for things could occur. The cell could have a good daughter, a bad daughter, a dead daughter, or no daughter. One of those things is not like the others, it's the bad daughter. It's cancer. Statistically if you are exposed to 1000 mrem (with data collected from Chernobyl) you increase your risk of cancer 0.06%. I would be curious to see if scientits will say is a dose that could change your DNA.
It's interesting that the article talks about genetic mutations but does not address any physical or mental abonormalities that may be a result of the genetic changes. I think we'll be learning a lot from the survivors and their decendents. In comic books when you get struck by lighting you get super powers like super-speed or lighting hands. In reality it just hurts, a lot.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
Well, they are talking about fundamentally different kinds of radiation here, aren't they? Electromagnetic radiation is generated by your monitor, tv, radio, powerlines etc in all sorts of bands, be they microwave, x-ray, visible light etc. I seriously doubt that your monitor or cellphone is giving off significant amounts of the particulate radiation associated with fission, gamma particles and such.
Unless I've been misinformed, of course. I had always assumed that the term 'radiation', even though general, just throws the fear of God into people.
The level of danger from any radiation exposure depends on at least three things: 1. dose (the article talks about that) 2. area 3. duration The fact of the matter is, whole body exposures are far more lethal and mutagenic, than concentrated ones. So, for instance, if you irradiate a person externally over most of his body with 6 grays, he has a high (something like 35% in Chernobyl) chance of dying. In radiation therapy, patients are often given 30Gy, to one spot, and do just fine (i.e. don't keel over). Note also, that different organs react very differently to radiation. As a rule of thumb, where cells divide often, radiation is most dangerous. Thus, skeletal muscle and such can deal with much more than core organs and reproductive organs. Check out Merck's page on the subject for a good initial overview (there are more nuances in reality, as always ... :))
"I am just a customs officer; but I, too, wish to understand what is going on" -- Bertold Brecht
Ok I might be stupid but here's my question anyway. Does this have an effect on those of us who have had radiation treatments from cancer? Any doctors in the house
***I GOT NUTHIN***
No, most of that stuff is fundamentally the same. It varies only in the energy levels. IIRC, UV radiation (from the sun) is about the start of the ionizing zone, which is what you have to watch out for.
Oh yeah, power line emmisions are different; they are electrical fields, not EM radiation.
Reboot macht Frei.
The objection that this post alludes to "The powers that be" and "the forces opposing them" in a manner that could be taken as U.S. centric can easily be countered by pointing out that the fossil fuel industry at least is clearly multi-national.
If we're going to be giving advice to the moderators, I'd give his post a ten; it has a nice beat, and I can dance to it... --MarkusQ
Transmutation, either accelerator or reactor based, of long-lived elements into shorter-lived elements is currently under research and is showing much promise. We can also "burn" elements such as Plutonium in reactors.
http://people.diamtech.com/hughesj/masters.html
Sure, gamma rays and x-rays aren't all that pervasive, but I have to wonder... Lower-energy forms of radiation are considered safer because they usually don't interact with matter in such potentially damaging ways. Notice the term *usually*--every once in a while, low-energy radiation can and does cause a reaction usually associated with high-energy particles.
Just think of how pervasive that radiation is, though. People are wondering about increased cases of cancer and other such health problems in modern industrialized society, and I have to think--isn't it just a very real possibility that the problem is this utterly pervasive low-energy radiation? I mean, think about it--you can get how many channels of radio and television broadcasts from any given point? Your cellphone is able to receive as well as send data in almost any open space and most closed ones? Your pager works no matter where you stand? Think of all that pervasive electromagnetic radiation and how it passes through your body *all day every day*. How many trillions of EM waves is this over time? And absolutely none of them ever interact in a negative way with any particle in your body, ever?
I find that hard to believe. Yes, the chances of any low-energy particle doing harm are infinitesimal. But mulitply that by the inconceivable number of EM waves penetrating through your body at any given moment, and--well, it is a very real possibility that they could be the cause of quite a bit of cancer, and possibly other health risks.
Makes you think, eh?
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I am not talking about 70 year olds. Cancer rates are up in all age ranges. Check with the CDC stats if you don't think so.
And yes, of course we haver natural defenses against low-energy radiation, since it is present naturally. But is it present naturally to the extent it is today? NO! There are low energy EM radiation streaming through your body constantly from birth to death, from every single local radio and TV station and from shortwave radios, cellular phones, beeper signals, etc. I could not begin to estimate the number of particles/waves each day. It is millions, billions, or trillions? I don't know, but I do know that if I sat any television, radio, cell phone, etc., right where my body is now, I'd be able to pick up enough EM radiation at any given instant to transmist many channels of video data, many more of radio and shortwave radio and CB radio, cellular frequencies, etc. That's quite a lot if you think about it that way, my friend--and every instant of every day it pours through your body. Most of it doesn't interact with you at all. But clearly some of it does--simple physics dictates that there will be a percentage of interactions.
I never said I propose getting rid of it. It's useful. I'm not an extremist. I'm just pointing out that modern life does cause cancer, and probably other ailments. We need not look for exotic explanations for rising health problems like cancer, because the most probably explanation is the constant exposure to EM radiation in unprecedented amounts. And as for your assertion that the chances of health risks are so small, that's just stupid, since no studies have been done or could be done since the modern world is pervaded with these high levels of low-energy EM particles. Think before you write. No one knows what percentage of cancer and other such that EM causes, because there could be no control groups for studies. But as a betting man, I'd wager the incessant exposure to countless low-energy EM does in fact cause many cases of cancer.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus