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LANL Warning About Radioactive Trees
coryboehne writes "KOB-TV in Albuquerque is reporting that Los Alamos National Labs is warning personnel who are cutting trees in a canyon east of Los Alamos that some trees in the area might be radioactive.
The canyon, known as Bayo Canyon, was formerly known as Technical Area 10, and was used for weapons testing from the 1940s until 1961. A full summary of Environmental Direct Penetrating Radation in the Los Alamos area is available from the LANL Meteorology & Air Quality Group"
/me puts on tinfoil pants
Radioactive tests were only done for the good of humanity. No harm can come from them. Hagve they not learned to duck and cover?
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Do said trees have radioactive squirrels?
So are these considered to be weapons? I mean chop the thing down then drop them out of a plane, or strap an engine on it and you have a wooden missle.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
"Charmin Ultrasoft Disinfectant Radioactive Toilet Paper for the ultimate in clean"
The first signs that alerted KOB-TV to this phenomenon was when reporters were strolling through then canyon, the trees were giving them strange looks...
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
Child: But Dad, I'm afraid of the dark.
Father: Oh, you don't have anything to worry about.
Child: How come, Daddy?
Father: Well you see son, our house was built with radioactive trees, so the entire house is like a big night light.
Child: Is that why my hamster got cancer?
Father: No more questions, time for sleep.
No, think of it as a self-illuminating christmass tree !!
think of the money on electricity you'd save !
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
Aren't those more commonly known as "arrows?"
If you didn't get it, read this script.
Gee...they used to just spray the trees with a noxious spray....I guess that didn't keep the tree theves away.
-ted
It's not too hard to tell the difference between normal and radioactive trees. The radioactive ones talk and throw their apples at you. The others don't.
*DrugCheese rants*
Before someone marks this as funny, would a forest fire be an extream hazord because of the radioactivity?
Let's not forget that recently the Los Alamos area was on fire from forest fires.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
The last couple weeks I have been knee deep in research about nuclear testing working on my web site (Buy a nuclear testing shirt! My kid's gotta eat!)
The only test I can think of offhand that was in New Mexico was the original Trinity bomb that was set off pre-Hiroshima.
There were, however, several criticality accidents at Los Alamos, and several "downwind incidents" in Nevada around the same time.
See the "history" page on my site for a description of the Army SL-1 that went critical in Idaho in the 60s. That's one I didn't learn about until recently, and apparently it was a pretty hot one too. The more I research into this, the more amazed I am about the amount of contamination there is scattered around the US, and on the islands we ran tests on.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
When I worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the late '80s, we had a stand of trees (poplars, I believe) between the main road through the heart of the facility and a research reactor building. I used to walk right by these trees every day to get to the cafeteria. One day, the sidewalk on that side of the road was blocked off, and several men, wearing bunny suits and wielding chainsaws, were hard at work felling the trees. By the next day, even the stumps were gone.
We've had our share of radioactive frogs too, some with some, shall we say, unique anatomy. Once, on that same main road, one of these unfortunate amphibians wandered underneath the tread of one of the facility's vehicles. Again, we see the bunny suits, this time with sprayers full of this black, sticky foam. Down the road every so often, you'd see a bunnyman either spraying or scraping an already-encapsulated piece of frog from the road where the contaminated tire had deposited it.
Maybe they can make glow in the dark furniture out of those trees?! :)
You're still talking about a few hundred millirem per year... only about twice what you'd receive from the sun at the same elevation. You need about 50 REM in the space of a few hours to alter blood cells. Inhaling the smoke would lead to slightly higher dose rates, but in that case the smoke will kill you long before the exposure does anything to the living tissue.
I was looking for radioactive spiders, and all I got was this bunch of trees...
C|N>K
But...
When combined with the power of ATOMIC energy, man and ant become...
Someone you trust is one of us.
Just wait until the Entmoot gets finished and they ...
oh. the book isn't real is it?
:wq
This is why treehuggers are typically bald!
Today, on sale now! Get your very own Christmas tree that doesn't need lights! Watch your tree glow a festive green at night and feel the warmth of it as you sing the carolling favourite, "Walking in a Nuclear Wasteland"
.sig: It's what's for dinner.
I've lived in Los Alamos for most of my life.
There are a lot of alarmists in the area that like to point at things like this and jump up and down and make a whole lot of noise. Granted, there is likely some valid scientific proof to this warning (because they probably wouldn't have issued it if there weren't), but that's all that this is. It's just a reminder to the crews that are working in the area to be careful--they're still allowed down there to clean up if they like.
This is a pretty regular thing for the area. The press gets wind of some sort of memo and the whole thing gets blown out of proportion. Things that should really only be semi-major events (like the Wen-Ho Lee case, for example) get turned into media circuses.
I understand the need for caution and scrutiny but seriously, people, let's keep it appropriate.
This memo is just a warning. It may come from a big, bad, government entity with some secret sleazy conspiracy agenda out to poison our kids or drug the masses or keep the real truth from getting out, but it also comes from an organization staffed with many of my good friends--people that I trust to oversee this type of work and set off alarms if something really bad is going on.
I'd recommend traveling to D.C. if you want to read between the lines.
I recall hearing many years ago about changes in the trees (maples and birches, I believe) near Chernobyl after the accident there. If memory serves, the trees underwent some abberant type of polyploidy resulting in their leaves increasing in size up to 300%. The result were trees with enormous leaves.
A quick google search of chernobyl polyploidy tree brings up a handful of good bibliographic links. I am not a biologist (nor do I have access to all of the references). I do suspect that there is a great deal of additional related information on the effects of the continued radiation on the environment.
Bill : "Hey Jack, does that tree look funny to you?"
;-)
Jack : "What do you mean Bill?"
Bill : "That tree has 72 branches."
Jack : "So?"
Bill : "That one only has 71."
Jack : "Wow. Think the radiation did it?"
Ah who cares. Maybe it'll turn out to mean more paper for the rest of us!
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Gozilla
Mothra
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Jerry Farwell
Learn from the past ... these trees can only hurt us!!
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
5 rem is the maximum allowable occupational total effective dose equivalent (10CFR20.1201). Assuming that you don't work in a nuclear plant or other facility licensed to use radioactive materials, then 10CFR20.1301 applies instead:
These limits don't apply to radioactive trees, of course -- at least not these radioactive trees, since they don't arise from licensed activities.
Do note that dose as low as you postulate is unlikely to have harmful effects, particularly because the dose would be spread out over time. These are the effects from acute doses of radiation of varying intensities:
As you can see, a non-acute dose as low as would be expected from these trees really shouldn't harm anyone.
1. Cut down radioactive trees
2. ???
3. Profit!
I think I actually have an answer for #2...
2. Make glow in the dark paper...
a honking great radioactive sharpened *tree* hurtling toward you as an *arrow* you go right ahead.
I will duck.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
any place where there was at some time in its history a possible outflow of radioactive material, the plants will be contaminated. At least its not like hanford where the Tumbleweeds are sometimes radioactive.
But these are all well known. The reason they issued the warning was because the western bark beetle killed something on the order of 80% of the trees in that canyon's mouth in a single season. (No that's not an exageration) . Given the horrific forest fires that burned about 4% of the homes in town, there is a great deal of preventative tree cutting going on. far more than in any other rear with lots of new loggers. An they are cutting trees in areas they traditionally would not have access too. Hence the public warning.
now give it a rest. Hey want to know the good bit about radioactive contamination? you know exactly where it is and how to find it. Unlike for example, chemical contamination. The main thing that is different about los alamos and say your neighbor hood is that we actually know where the contamination is. PLus when we do have a spill it gets cleaned up. I recall a photo in the news of two guys in moon suits cleaning up a chemical spill of ethylene glycol in a parking lot (bottle dropped from fork lift). Front page news. Mean while that same day probably 500 people in chicago city flushed their car radiotors and dump a few thousand gallons of ethylene glycol into the river.
new stories like this suck
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I used to work at LANL for a short period of time, back in TA 35 (at the time, working on the SSC detectors). They're somewhat strict about their rules on radiation, and who can go in what areas. The building I was working in was T-shaped, and one of the top pieces of the T (the opposite one from my office) fell within the specified distance from an old tritium dump site. It was well posted that NOONE was to be in that wing without the proper training and badging. When my work required that I go down into that wing for a bit, I had to go to a different radiation safety class and get new radiation badges so that they could measure exposure. And that part of the building was only barely hot.
Having family that lived in Los Alamos for many years, and an uncle who worked at the labs as well, LANL was always very good about keeping people apprised of any possible issues. Los Alamos started off as a company town, and it still very much operates that way. If you don't work at the labs, you work for a business that supports the people who work for the labs. Everyone knows plenty of people who work there, and the town and the labs are very much dependant on each other.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
There is a common belief that 'going critical' is synonymous with a meltdown, or out-of-control chain reaction or manifold other bad things. This is, however, false.
A nuclear reactor is a device which creates chain reactions to amplify the effects of neutrons. The neutron multiplication factor describes whether the number of neutrons present in the core is increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same. Based upon this, the following are defined:
Therefore: 1) A reactor must be critical to maintain its power. 2) A reactor must be supercritical to increase in power. Criticality and supercriticality are normal states for a reactor. It's prompt criticality which is bad.
Welcome to the future; America's past nuclear development can and will haunt us further. Look at the old USSR for an example of the failures of a large nuclear regime. Submarine reactor cores were ejected into rivers! Full liquid waste canisters were dumped in fields! If the Soviet regime hadn't fallen, the public would've likely remained ignorant of the contamination level that existed.
Who cares about trees? The buildings worry me. In the USA, we do know that there are many buildings that are probably contaminated and are sitting in company and government inventories, and are also in an abandoned state. Like all those factories rusting away in the Midwest, the true costs of owning them won't become apparent until the cleanup must occur. And this doesn't encompass the full scope of the problem on military sites. Try finding out about their hazardous waste problems. What we the public do know is a result of conscience, luck, closings and re-use. Sometimes a military man gets a conscience; a reporter gets lucky; or a site is torn up and exposed during closure or transfer of ownership. Then we can get a glimpse at what it Really Going On there.
And people worry about Yucca Mountain. We've tiny Yuccas -- Yuccatesimals? Microyuccas? -- in too many locations to allow Yucca to become a preponderance of worry for us.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
A couple years back I had the pleasure of going on a lengthy tour of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and their cleanup efforts.
I think people would freak out if they realized how careless the gov't has been with nuclear waste.
For instance, the underground tanks they stored certain types of waste in were set up in a series. When tank one fills up, it spills over into tank two. When tank two fills up, it spills over into tank three. When tank four fills up, it spills over into the ground.
Oh, and the tanks were only meant to be used for 20 or so years and they've been used for more than twice that.
Then there's the waste that's being stored in what amounts to coffee cans.
This is all right next to the Columbia River incidently. Want a glass of water?
Do you like acid rain, deforestation, and resperatory ailments. Then close down the nuke plants. Then you'll either have to switch to coal, hope for a miracle, or change your standard of living (sorry now 1000 watt Itaniums for you instead you can freeze in the dark.)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Doubt that would work in the places that really matter, though - Asian deforesters probably don't care.
When I was a teenager, my father (a nuclear physicst) took a group of boyscouts on a merrit badge "expedition", we were "prospecting for uranium".
Back in the bad old days, there were tests done using mock-up weapons equipped with DEPLETED uranium (U-238). The experiments consisted of a fairly authentic weapon with a real primary (the high explosive part which "squishes" the fissionable materals together.)
The weapons did NOT have real uranium, rather U-238 (the stuff they use on armor piercing shells.) When they detonated the mock-up, the weapons usually blew all apart throwing chunks of U-238 all around the country-side.
My dear old dad, being a wise-ass, took us out with several geiger-counters looking for the U-238.
As I recall, we found a rock which seemed "hot", we began digging under the rock, getting closer and closer to the source of what seemed to be setting off the counters when my dad told us to stop. Not because of the radiation, rather the damn rock was likely to roll over and crush the lot of us.
He ended our field trip by letting us push the rock over into the hole we had excavated; great fun.
also people who work in those areas wear Dosimeters. SO they KNOW for sure that people are not being exposed. Even the town dump is ringed with dosimeters. What about your town. Got any dosimeters? Lots of industries produce rad waste. to name a few: phosphate fertilizer plants, (old) ceramics, coleman laterns, glow in the dark exit signs, hospital isotope waste and manufacture.... For example, the dosimeters in our town have gone off lots of times. One time was a vet disposing of radioactive kitty litter (radioactive iodide is used as a medical treatment). Another time my neighbor set of the alarm because he was wearing pile (patagonia) jackets which if you did not know collect Radon gas that accumualtes in poorly vented closets in many parts of the country. Another time a load of radioactive steel manufactured in mexico drove through town on its way elsewhere. (the mexicans plant hat recycled and melted down a hospital cesium canister. Many steelworkers and truckers in the US and Mexico received high doses, something like a dozen people at the steel plant eventually died of exposre related illnesesses.
So the good news about living in los alamos is that we know we're no being irradiated cause we monitor it. You dont know and there are lots of ways you could be exposed. for example do you know where the steel rebar in you concrete walls came from? Are you breathing radon?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is where the trees grow legs and start a bloody crusade to rid the soil of human meddling, right?
If I remember correctly, some scientists will develop an airborne spray to stop them.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
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"Yes?"
"Right Away!"
"As you wish"
"Stop Touching Me!"
"Don't you have a kingdom to run?"
Sorry, I played a little too much Warcraft II when I was in high school...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I have lived in Los Alamos my whole life. I have mountain biked in Bayo Canyon many, many times. It's an absolutely beautiful spot. I wish I could show you a photo or two. The trees don't look funny, the ground isn't hot and I have suffered no poor effects.
The lab (LANL) has fenced off a few areas, but I do trust that the canyon is generally safe. I bet spokesman Jim Rickman is basically telling the facts straight, too. He's a good man.
Moral of the story: this isn't really news. Look at how small the story on the local TV station is. This is less news than the time the garbage dump radiation detectors got set off (by the poop of a cat undergoing anti-cancer radiation treatments, not by the lab).
Oh, and the high tritium levels in the water must make it taste so clean and fresh.
I've had a lot of problems with inhaling allergens during burning season. Sucking in sagebrush particles whilst the farmers were burning gave me 3 months of nasty symptoms. I'd imaging that sucking radiative tree smoke right into your lungs etc might be a little worse than solar radiation, isn't out external dermal layer intended to protect the more sensitive internals?
Smokey the Bear says, "Only you can..."
... someone call an ambulance? Now?
Oh geez, he's puking, and his hair is falling out
[raises hand]
What the heck is an "extream hazord"?
If you meant extreme hazard, the answer is no: I live upwind of Los Alamos.
I was wondering this a week or two ago and well Im too lazy to research so Ill just ask.
How long does an area stay "hot" after a nuke goes off?
Examples:
How long after Aug 6 1945 was Hiroshima safe from a radiation standpoint?
How long until areas that had LOTS of bombs dropped on them be safe?
What about more modern bombs. If one were to take a top of the line bomb from the US and detonate it, how long until the area would be safe for humans again?
Also, what does one do if a nuke goes off anywhere near them, other then kiss their ass goodbye? What can you do to avoid radiation poison? I always thought the key was to stay away from metal since that becomes contaminated quickly, but hell if I know.
Blame the movie Sum of all Fears for this curiosity. To ruin it for you, when the nuke goes off and it shows this big shockwave, I figured anything that gets hit by that is going to be contaminated. In my head this means you are going to get cancer sometime soon.
Also, slightly related, can someone explain the EMP to me? I thought Sum of all Fears really fucked that one up but some people have said the EMP is really weak and doesnt travel very far. In another movie, Broken Arrow, the EMP goes out for Miles and Miles. In True Lies, they land the planes and shit before the nuke goes off for which I assume was to avoid an EMP related crash.
Oh, assume all detonations are ground detonations, but if you know the answer for atmosphere that would be cool too but how high up?
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
We were REALLY stupid back in the early atomic days...its not a surprise that there are still radioactive tress...hell...LANL still has SH*TLOADS of transuranic waste waiting for shipment to permanent storage facilities (WIPP?).
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
Fuck. One thing that has always scared me is a fear of death from radiation poisoning. AFter watching K19 and then reading this, I think Im going to be vomiting. Sad that movie got pan'd in the theatres cause those radiation scenes were just oogy.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
OMFG I AM GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111
Seriously, as you can see from my other posts, radiation death scares the living shit out of me. How would I go about getting a portible one of these things?
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
One thing they did look at was radioactive materials. The bathroom where I worked got shut down because of radiation in the walls from the 1950's. Nothing that was really dangerous, but they were so hyper that they checked everyting.
Back after Chernobyl went boom, I noticed (since it was only a couple of months after), that many weeds that normally reached as high as my hip, were instead towering over my head (I was 5'8 or so at the time, when I was 16, and living in New York, the Bronx). Just wondering, have anyone else living in the northern latitudes noticed similarly unusual plant growth?
As I recall, the radioactive cloud apparently covered the entire northwestern European continent, but was almost ridiculously downplayed in the US (sorry, if contamination is enough to quarantine planes and kill reindeer herds, I doubt it drops to 0 with just over a day's travel in the jetstream).
Just wondering since we're on the subject of radiation, the US itself is largely contaminated with fallout from the bomb tests, as was recently uncovered over the last few years.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/beetle/bio-squirr el.shtml
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Its just me, or this sound like a good idea? Just spread some rumors about dadly trees, that poison people when you cut them down and people will be afraid of cutng them. :-D
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
For the time being, I live in Finland and it seems that the goverment is dealing with similar issues. Some radioactive stuff is moving around, and often it originates from the former USSR.
There are radiation monitors at the border. Several times a year a load of steel or something similar is sent back, as it contains something radioactive. The Russians living on illegal metal trade steal junk from the old Soviet dumps, and sell it. They are not worried about the radiation.
There are also plenty of environmental 'nuclear bombs' ticking in the old Soviet. I'm expecially worried about the ones in Estonia (see e.g. nti.org which contains plenty of info on these and similar issues). The Sillamae pool contains wastes of uranium ore processing and in Paldiski there is a pool of nuclear waste from two naval training reactors. Should the pools break, that would practically destroy the Gulf of Finland (which I see from the window of my office). The Sillamae pool contains so much uranium nitrate that even the nitrate part is problematic. And it's leaking...
Estonians can't afford the cleanup alone, so Finland and other rich states around the Baltic Sea are paying a large part of the bill. The Estonians will be dealing with the Soviet cleanup for decades. The non-nuclear mess is a longer story. (as an example: in some areas the water in wells is flammable, as a result of careless fuel handling in airbases).
We also have a bedrock containing plenty of uranium, so radon is a big problem is some areas (most of the houses are not properly vented to save energy). In the worst places, the drinking water contains also plenty of other natural radionuclides.
all i can say is "Who cares?". the local news here is always desperate for a story. if it rains it's a story. if it snows it's a story. if a traffic light is down it's the lead story. you might say it's not the most exciting state in the union.
a longtime friend (14 years) who recently completed his masters in nuclear engineering has taken many opportunities over the years to enlighten me about the joys of nuclear power. he has worked on projects at los alamos and sandia labs and although not technically a rocket scientist he did help design a nuclear powered rocket engine. i've found the easiest way to push his buttons is to scream "no nukes!!!" because he is perhaps a little too sensitive to the the negative stigma most people attach to nuclear energy. my neighbor worked on the manhattan project and when he and my friend get together it's obvious that the nuclear programs in place today are vastly improved over guidelines in place back then. in fact my neighbor has mentioned that if his team had the same guidelines in place back then that there wouldn't have been any atomic bombs at all. my personal opinion is that there are many many threats will all face each day that are probably more dangerous than some trees in a canyon in los alamos will ever be.
the fact that the trees even made the news is just further proof that we have a lot of time on our hands here. when my friend was attending unm a story broke out about "contaminated radioactive waste" that was "piled up" near a storage shed in los alamos. in reality it was a pool (by design) of slightly radioactive water, probably used for cooling... basically you could drink a glass and go on with your life. apparently a lot of concerned people in santa fe were worried their children would soon be coming home from school with three toes and extra appendages soon unless the toxic dump was "fixed". so now it's all over the local news. my friend's professor took the class on a field trip armed with geiger counters to take some readings. they measured near the "toxic waste dump of child killing doom!", they measured various other points in and around los alamos, then they took a few readings around the plaza in santa fe where they had stopped for lunch. it turns out the hottest thing they found all day was a nice big sculpture smack in the middle of the plaza. (plaza being the town center and located such that most residents would be around it regularly and tourists virtually guaranteed to eat next to it =)
Think about it; Glowing trees can provide street or pathway lighting in remote areas without the need for any sort of electrical feed.
;-)
What an energy-saver!
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
This has nothing to do with radioactive trees which may or may not require special protective measures for people who will be exposed if they work on them. Cutting, sanding and burning may create hazards that don't exist when you are simply standing next to these trees.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There is probably more than 300GW of nuclear power being generated on earth. As a whole, the excess heat generated adds up to terawatts.
As I said in my original post, it's not a big thing. I was picking the nit that nuclear plants are nearly zero-emission - they're not. Heat and water vapor, remember?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Spening public money is not easy to do. The greatest threats must be fixed first, but there's a huge difference between public perception of threats and reality. Studies on waste sites have been made and there are priority lists. Then some loud mouth comes along and asks you if you want a glass of water. Uggg, the long chain of reasoning and risk assesment goes out the window.
Do me a favor and help the folks monitoring water quality. When you see an adverse trend then you can smugly say, "I told you so," and propose ways to fix the problem. Alamism hurts everyone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Remember a few years back when there were those claims about an increase in Leukima and brain cancer around the golf course there? They did pretty extensive studies and evaluations.
Further, half the people in the area wear dosimeter badges. You technically aren't supposed to wear them home, but everyone does. So I can guarantee that the area is monitored very closely.
Don't get me wrong. There obviously is a lot of waste in the area. Back when I worked there they were cleaning up a field because in the 40's they'd simply driven some trucks in a dug out hole and buried them with their waste. But the lab was cleaning up pretty heavily in preparation for the Tiger Team evaluations back in the early 90's. They've continued since then. If you compare Los Alamos to most other DOE sites it comes out near the top in dealing with environmental issues.
Further, despite the cries of people in Sante Fe, I think that most people at the lab are very ecologically aware. People do have concerns about the area and tend to be disproportionately involved in my opinion. Sometimes you end up with odd situations as well. For instance my supervisor who was doing some classified work on nuclear explosions was also a member of Earth First. (We had some rather interesting discussions on this to me paradox)
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Thanks for bringing this my attention, I did some more reading about it and am intrigued. I know i read an account of a journalist visiting the exclusion zone in the last few years, and it painted a much starker picture; I'd like to figure out what that was about. And I suppose the point should be made that whether the exclusion zone is fit for human habitation is an open question, and even if it is the necessary expenses in reaction to the explosion of #4, such as containment, cleanup, evacuation, lost productivity, mental anguish to those who had a reactor catch fire in their backyards, and the loss of that 1 gigawatt of energy production are cumulatively quite high, and should be included in the calculation of how much nuclear energy costs. Granted we might well decide it is stil worth it, balanced against alternative methods of energy production, and that we'd never build reactors as hazardous as the Soviet design (still in operation elsewhere?), but there are still significant excess costs. I recetly discovered one third of my home state Virginia's electricity is nuclear; and 70% of France's!
Thanks again. Although I may be less worried about the long-term exposure to low-level radiation, such that things like radon mitigation are not worth so much investment, I don't think I'll go for the idea that people who breathe radon are healthier, until a mechanism for it is suggested that implies the effect is more than statistical noise.