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The Cold War's Legacy of Mutation
fm6 writes: "Not surprising, but still pretty sobering: Russian communities downwind from cold-war-era surface testing sites are experiencing 50% increase in mutation rates. I'm reminded of Terry Tempest William's term: Virtual Uninhabitants."
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/maps/
t s. html
http://rex.nci.nih.gov/massmedia/Fallout/conten
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Evolution !=mutation. Sorry man, more mutations usually does indicate an increase in the speed of evolutionary change. IF mutations and random change of some sort is happening a certian small percentage of those mutations will be more (or less) useful for furthered survival of that organisms genes. The more mutation that occurs means that there is a better chance of a "good" mutation happening. Especially considering how rare a "good" mutation is. While most mutations will be bad an increace in mutations usually means an increace in ALL mutations, useful and detrimental. The really detrimental ones die off without passing on thier genes. Most traits and mutations dont ultimately matter and may or may not be passed on depending on other traits that organism has. (A non-useful mutation of a third nipple doesn't stop Marky-mark from getting laid.) And that one in a million benificial mutation that can also be passed on is evolution.
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
Just as a matter of note, the water used to cool (American, commercial) reactors does not mix with the water used to moderate the reaction... eg, the water in the cooling towers never passed through the reactor vessel and is not radioactive, did not absorb neutrons, or anything like that.
The water used in the reactor vessel passes through a heat exchanger and transfers the heat to another cooling system, and that's what ends up in the cooling towers. You'll never touch 'steam heated by uranium', it's 'steam heated by other steam'.
Not all reactor designs are so safe. Be glad you live in the US. In former Soviet states, some reactors use liquid sodium as a moderator (at least, they use it in nuclear subs). I don't know all that much about power plants, but I've been told that this is very scary when it breaks.
So forget the radiation, a more immediate effect than radiation is 'thermal pollution' - eg all that heat has to go somewhere, and in coastal areas, putting it back in the ocean basically kills the ecosystem deader than the radiation ever could.
Hazards of an industrial civilization... but most of us would be dead already without it.