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Radiation Not As Hazardous As Once Believed
HeavensBlade23 sends in an article from the German site Spiegel Online about mounting evidence that nuclear radiation may not be as deadly as has been widely believed. The article cites studies by German, US, and Japanese researchers concluding, for example, that fewer than 800 deaths are attributable to the after-effects of radiation in over 86,500 survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. Other surprisingly low death rates are reported in studies of Chernobyl and of a secret Siberian town called Mayak, devoted to producing plutonium, that was abandoned after a nuclear accident in 1957.
In Soviet Russian, radiation...wait.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Apparently this is just an attempt by a Utah company to increase holiday sales. Sigh.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
courtesy of Burns' Atomic Power! "We light you up!" is our motto!
Smithers, pay the good Scientists for their efforts!
and the offspring of the survivors just happend to be looking a little bit funky....
It says 'only' 800 deaths resulted, but last time I checked there were plenty of fates worse than death, and severe radiation sickness is probably one of them.
A-Bomb
Nuclear radiation will produce sterility in men. I know this as it happened to my uncle. Who knows what other diseases might show up that don't necessarily produce immediate death.
So far 301 have died of lung cancer," says Jacob. "But only 100 cases were caused by radiation. The others were attributed to cigarettes."
So heavy doses of radiation still have a decently high probability of causing nasty side effects. The quote I provided illustrates what I have concluded from this summary. You can downgrade radiation from supermegaultra, don't-go-near it danger to megaultra, don't-go-near it status. Radiation is still dangerous. This study was just a refinement of probability.
I got a catholic block.
Can still mess you up pretty bad. Radiation sickness, cancer, etc, still don't sound like a great time to me, so I'm going to continue to stay away from excess radiation.
Mutant fauna and flora damaged by the Colour of Outer Space are actually quite cuddly.
I'm not suprised to see studies like this coming out. With renewed interest in fission power as a clean (emissions-free) energy source, a big hurdle will be changing the public perception and fear of radiation. But, if something gets changed people are going to have all kinds of conspiracy theories about industry leaning on the government to change regulations so they can make $$ at the expensive of people/environment. There are many honest dangers with radioactive sources, but most of those that get used in labs aren't that harmful unless you do something stupid like eat them. I'm all for a critcal re-evaluation of radiation standards.
But this is slashdot so i'll never rtfa.
Liberty.
That means I can now brush my teeth with radium, and have, gasp, *Glow In the Dark Teeth!!*. On second hand, are you SURE this stuff isn't as dangerous as they say??
I've just exposed myself to 15000 REMS of radiation. It looks like these guys were right. I just feel a bit warm an
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too.
Ok, thousands of people were exposed at Hiroshima, and we have a breakdown of what they died of. Boy, these people are healthy. Where's the weird cancers which people die of now and then? Where's the skin cancer? Prostate? I suspect an incredible scrubbing of data. Only cancers they decide are radiation-related are listed. And they're deciding.
There might be something to this, but I smell a grossly twisted study which eliminates complexity and debatable data by wiping it away with a sweep of a pen.
The people of Belarus would likely disagree with this...
But we still get just as many superpowers right?
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
will come in ...handy!
This reminds me of that news program where the journalist debunked 10 common myths like "underpaid teachers" and "Chernobyl was not so bad." I don't remember the name of the guy, but he runs a regular show on one of the major TV stations. I only wish I could send this report to many Chernobyl veterans and their kids who would say otherwise.
My uncle was in Chernobyl right after the crap hit the fan in 1986. He went in a young man with good health and came back on a partial disability due to radiation. No, radiation did not kill him but it rendered his eyesight useless. When my cousin was born it was found that he lacked a good immune system due to effects of radiation as well. With all this crap my family considers itself to be lucky. We did not have to watch our loved ones dying from the inside. The Soviets did a great cover-up preventing most Western media from accessing the people and the territory until things were hanky panky. What many people did not see was the kids born after the disaster and increasing cancer rates. You know things are pretty crappy when you have routine cancer checks in middle schools. How many American schools consider this to be yearly procedure? I remember a woman telling a story about her husband. She had to spent all of her savings on vodka and moonshine in order to calm her husbands pain and let him die without screaming. Oh yeah, save those jokes about drunk Russians: The guy did not drink until his muscles started to fall of the bone. Finally you may take a look at the effects of radiation on Kazakhstan. After years of being used as a Soviet nuclear testing ground, the country has plenty of polluted land. Perhaps the authors of this report want to buy some prime real estate in the land of Borat?
I don't doubt that we will find out more about radiation as we go on; however, it is silly to think that nukes (be it peaceful or military) are a joke. It is a serious business with serious side effects.
I'm all for re-examining scientific data to glean new meanings from it but, golly-gee willikers, what a stunning coincidence that this oh-so-new interpretation of the data should come out right about the time the country is considering shifting to nuclear (away from greenhouse gas-emitting coal).
See, "Denmark, Something Rotten In."
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
"Only" 800 deaths from the after-effects of Hiroshima bombing, because 140,000 already died by the end of 1945, half of them on the day of the bombing. Oh, and thousands more died from the after-effects according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
Plus, even if one doesn't die from the after-effects, they might have become vegetables, etc. People who think radiation is safe should go live in Chernobyl.
A fast cowboy since 2007
When me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet.
Art Schools Dietzilla
that not a single death among the 86500 survivors has been caused by radiation ;)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Time to move to Nevada and take a mud bath. Funny how the more expensive oil is, the less dangerous radiation is.
Slashdot recently covered the fact that the first new applications in 30 years for nuclear power plants were recently made in New Jersey. I expect to see more articles written whose purpose is to minimize the risks associated with nuclear power generation and to emphasize its benefits. Anyways, that my little conspiracy theory :>.
Disclaimer: I am in favor of nuclear power.
Of similar interest, living in New Jersey, there have been much debate about the high childhood cancer rate amongst children born in and around Toms River, NJ. There was even a settlement from the case, and some dye company who was dumping chemicals paid a settlement (without admitting liability). However, the study done by the State of New Jersey concluded that there is no single factor that caused the higher than usual cancer rates, so like radiation, we don't really know all the reasons that people get affected by various things.
I believe our bodies, based on our genetics, and even environmental factors, are more or less able to deal with different types of "pollutions". Some people may be able to handle higher levels of radiation than others, some may be able to deal with higher level of chemicals than others, etc. Just as some of us can stand colder weather, hotter water, or those who have higher pain thresholds.
http://www.oobject.com/category/radioactive-products/
The whole tone of the article can be summed up here:
See there, not so bad! "Only" nine people died. The 3991 others did not mind having their thyroid glands removed at all. All is well that ends in useless pain and suffering.
This article makes me sick.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
"...As if radiation has ever killed anybody"
-Marie Curie
Badass Resumes
Did they really? I mean... really?
Scientific studies have generally failed to show is unusual rates of this kind of disease in areas affected by Chernobyl fallout. The one clear health effect has been the increase in thyroid cancer. If the Soviet government had have distributed and used the iodine tablets available to it, or stopped the distribution of contaminated milk, even that may have been avoided.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
how did marie curie died ??? She didn't explode materials with radiation.. she was doing experiments for so long with radiation materials.
This reminds me of that news program where the journalist debunked 10 common myths like "underpaid teachers" and "Chernobyl was not so bad." I don't remember the name of the guy, but he runs a regular show on one of the major TV stations.
Probably John Stossel at ABC in the US...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Seriously, why did that get modded "Troll"?
The article was refreshingly in-depth and it covered both sides of the issue - surprising, considering most ./ articles are not much more than short blog rants. I do wish it had pointed readers to an online location of the studies cited, but the reports are verifiable. I was aware of cooperative studies done after WWII by the US and Japan, among others.
My gut reaction is to accept the information presented as reliably true. I have two reasons for this. First, this was published to a German site. I trust a German site slightly more than your average dot-com because of the competing forces at play in the current US 9/11 mindset. The Bush "gubmint" wants you to cower in terror every damn day fearing random acts of violence by brown people (Appropriate thanks to George Carlin). The more peaceful side of the US continues to try to reassure the public that much of the terror threat is FUD (which it is - seriously, we've been at the Orange terror level for months, meaning "High Risk of Attack". No attacks, no highly publicized failed plots to garner support for the omnipresent Orange. I doubt the FBI/CIA/DHS is doing THAT well). I admit the US has its enemies, and that fact should not be discounted. It's true that someone may someday use a nuke (or more likely a dirty bomb) in an American metropolis. But if this was posted to an American website, I would have a harder time accepting it at face-value, rather than subtle "fear not" messages by pro-nuclear lobbyists. That said, as an American citizen in a metro area, I'm happy to see that moderate radiation may be tolerated by the body better than expected, and i am also in support of more nuclear power plants in the US. Nuclear power done right releases less radioactivity into the air per year than a coal plant...and probably less than the pack of cigarettes I'll finish tonight.
Second, the effects of short-term radiation exposure are typically exaggerated, in my non-professional opinion. A chest X-ray for example, is roughly equal to 10 days' worth of background radiation dosage; fewer if you live 5000 feet or more above sea level. Not bad considering your heart and lungs are the target of a quick 120,000 electron-volt blast (Linkage). Cancer treatments can exceed 10 MeV. Granted, I'm talking about reasonable short-term exposure, something less than 3 or 4 Greys for a one-time worst-case scenario. I'm not going to argue that pulling a Spock and walking into a reactor for a while will leave you anywhere near healthy.
I think long-term radiation exposure is where we need to concern ourselves. For example, Marie Curie handled radioactive material with little to no protection for nearly 40 years, before dying of anemia in 1934. This can be partly attributed to the fact that much of the radiation she was exposed to was alpha radiation. However, long-term exposure to radium (which is over a million times more radioactive than uranium) and its byproducts, including radon gas and ionizing beta particles most likely led to her death. Gamma radiation is much more harmful, with the ability to knock base pairs out of DNA. Even the most loved radiation of all, UV, that elixir of youthful bronzed skin, has been shown to cause harm. But no one gets carcinoma from a single sunburn, or a single tan. The most deleterious effects add up over time, but are not caused by forgetting to slide the lead suit over the family jewels during an X-ray at the dentist.
Saying that only 800 or so out of 86,000 survivors died of radiation-related illness is not enough for me. How many showed non-fatal illness extending beyond 1 year of exposure to the bomb? What was the change in infant and child mortality 5/10/20 years after? How did the population histogram change over time - were elderly affected more than children or vice versa? How much radiation WAS deposited to the environment after the detonation of Fat Man/Little Boy -- accident at Chernobyl -- accident at Three
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
I don't know if I would trust the state of NJ more than I would trust the Soviet government that was present in 1986. To be honest with you, may be in 50 years we will know 1% of the true effects. Remember how cocaine was legal in the United States?
One of my most exciting moments of my childhood was the rain of April 26th, 1986. I was walking from the hospital when it started raining and I got soaked by the time I got home. Several days later we were told to throw away the clothing used on that day and take a long shower because a chemical plant not so far away had a problem. Cool huh? As somebody who was under 10, it was "it!" I was a part of something that the government asked me to do. It felt great until my mom got a call from my grandmother: My uncle was traveling to Belaja Tserokv' (White Church) with a his chem-bat (chemical forces battalion). My grandma was a nurse and she suspected that something was going on since they tons of firefighters were shipped to the area. It was highly unusual to send that many people for a small chemical spill at a nuclear plant. I will skip you the stories about carefully re-adjusted radiation meters given to the soldiers and other tricks that were used to keep public away from the information about the real aspects of the accident. Everything was "peaches and cream" according to the top brass. My uncle delivered cement to the reactor thinking that they were putting down some important fire. Only later we were told about the nuclear disaster and its impact. During the times of Perestroika this became more public and we finally realized what has hit, but it was too freaking late.
I would like to come back and visit the ghost areas. Many areas of Belarus and the Ukraine (Belarus was hit the hardest due to the North-Western winds) became ghost towns. It is a lot like what you can find in the prominent historic parks of the U.S.: Whole towns are there, but no people want to live there for the exception of an occasional squatter. You may see a Western tourist here and there and that is about it. Whoever thinks that radiation is not damaging needs to get their head examined. Yes, a direct death from the exposure may be unlikely, but I'd rather not wait for the long term effects. Honestly, I have seen that stuff and it is not pretty. I'd take a bullet over slow death any time.
First, I'm sorry for your loss, but nobody's saying that radiation isn't dangerous - just that it's not as dangerous as people make it out to be.
It'd be like saying 'You're 200% likelier to die of lung cancer if you smoke', then researchers come out and say 'No, it's only 100%'. Keep in mind that it's still the worst nuclear power* disaster in history.
In the ensuing decades, up to 4,000 cleanup workers and residents of the more highly contaminated areas died of the long-term consequences of radiation exposure.
4k deaths isn't exactly small, but to put it into perspective, Bhopal, a chemical disaster, killed just as many in a far shorter period of time, and the land involved is still contaminated, much like Chernobyl.
Yes, there were many other illnesses. You can get the same stuff with chemical contamination as well. The trick is to be sane about dangers - IE don't let dangerous substances out into the environment.
*Heck, the reactor was used for plutonium breeding purposes for weapons processing, so you could technically put it into the weapons category - responsible for the vast majority of radioactive pollution in the world today.
I don't read AC A human right
I've seen a slide show of some of the worst Chernobyl cases, and I could barely look at the projector screen. Children had enlarged tumors, craniums, malformed arms, limbs... these children are living fates worse than death.
Madam Curie = Radium came
In the beginning, radiation was fantastic stuff that only had the effect of whitening your teeth. From 1970..2005, the "safe levels" have only fallen. Now some new guy says otherwise. Gee. I wonder how long his evidence will last?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yep! That's the mo-fo. His special that day made laugh... I stopped watching ABC since then :)
It's only mostly deadly... mostly deadly means partially harmless!
[signature]
The fish were so much bigger in the pond that the Brownsferry plant used water from... Made for some good eating...
Radiation gave Mr. Burns a healthy glow - now you can have one too!
Ah, "nuclear radiation"... everyone is an expert 'cause they heard somewhere, read somewhere, had a friend somewhere...
I swear that the only subject more afflicted with "everyone is an expert-itis" is traffic law. Anyone care to point to the part of the Highways Act that defines a "rolling stop?"
Three Squirrels
...they've studied areas with high background radiation like Colorado and found that they have lower cancer rates than areas with low background radiation. Was this study adjusted for age-related migration? The likelyhood of cancer slowly increases with age. But old people tend to prefer warmer climes like Florida or Arizona. And they don't ski as much as younger people. So the aveage age of Coloradians is probably lower than many other states, and thus the likelyhood of cancer is therefore probably lower.Ah yes, the "this study is wrong because it contradicts my personal experience" argument. That one never gets old. Yeah it sucks that your family has health problems, but do you really not understand statistics at all? Wtf.
J. Frank Parnell: Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
But there's extensive research being done today which seems to be indicating that low-dosage radiation is not only non-lethal but can actually be beneficial.
I saw recently a (BBC?) documentary about ongoing research into the effects of radiation exposure. Basically we have *more than enough* evidence of the effects of short-term high-dosage (the upper/right side of the curve) but damn close to zero data regarding the lower/left side of the curve.
The does seem to be evidence that in some cases ongoing exposure to (relatively) low-level radiation (but still higher than "generally accepted" levels/"normal background" levels) is actually beneficial.
There was some village (Israel/Palestine/Middle-East 'ish') where the natural background radiation was something like two-hundred (200) times "normal" levels. The people there were perfectly normal, fine and healthy. In fact, researchers found the villagers were more healthy than normal/average for some diseases/conditions.
From Memory: I think the science is currently leaning towards the theory that even with radiation (which previously we thought that *any* was bad), "a little" can be good because it basically prompts the bodies natural response to damage/injury (eg in the same conceptual way that an innoculation helps prevent disease) .
Not that I'm pushing "radiation is good", but there's more than enough evidence to show that we clearly do not fully understand all the implications of exposure to radiation, especially when it comes to ongoing low dosage exposure over long time periods.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Just because the article says radiation is considered less harmful than before, doesn't mean they are saying it is not harmful *at all*.
less harmful != harmless
Your emotional response coupled with arguments not related to the subject at hand are detrimental to a logical debate on the subject.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Ah yes, the old anonymous coward post. That never gets old. These studies have been done and re-done many freaking times. If you're into statistics, look into the WHO studies related to thyroid cancer in pre- and post-Chernobyl Belarus.
Your comments are no better than a Godwin argument. You are actually trying to say that if the researchers don't say that Chernobyl is infinitely bad, then they must be saying it was perfectly OK? And, working in the lending industry, my wife has seen W-2 from literally thousands of teachers. They make pretty good money for a part time job.
"Radiation is not so bad for you!"
This message is brought to you by the Chinese Elf Association, makers of such fine toys as Glow in the Dark Aqua Dots.
No. It's responses like the ones given here that show you how most people overly perceive the dangers of radiation exposure. Can radiation kill you? Yes - but so can a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. I'm not saying that point the article is necessarily right, but you can't say the conclusions are dead wrong. After all, the data we have are limited. On a side note, it's terrible that issues like this stir up irrational fears about using nuclear power and radiation exposures. I'm sorry, but do you realize you receive less of a dose going by a nuclear plant than your neighborhood coal plant (from radioactive isotopes burning along with the coal)? Or that there are people living in regions of the world that receive 30+ times the yearly dose as you or I in America (thinking of Iran in particular). And don't even think about pointing out with what happened with TMI or Chernobyl. We're not talking about the same generation of reactors (or even the type of reactor). Plus, you can't finger a single death (or even illness) from TMI; and as for Chernobyl, did you know the idiots turned OFF multiple security systems (on purpose) when the accident occurred? We lived at such low doses - we have no idea if radiation is damaging at our levels. We simple take what we know from mind boggling high doses, and draw a line down for the effects for low doses. It's a linear no-threshold hypothesis. Yeah, stay away from radiation when you can, but don't go overboard with it. Odds are, the only time you're going to worry about acute radiation sickness is if someone decides to drop a nuclear bomb on your head - and in that case, you might already be too busy vaporizing to bother worrying.
The quality of the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breath has fallen drastically since the 40s and 50s. Radiation may not be as "dangerous as we thought" but our body's ability to fight off damage and heal itself has decreased enormously. Our bodies need good food, water, and air to function optimally, which includes the ability to resist the effects of radiation.
Getting leukemia and all sorts of cancers for the rest of one's life does not seem as bad as dying, but it's still pretty horrible. Many might not have died, but we've all heard the horror stories of how miserably they live with diseases, etc. Maybe we shouldn't focus on the mortality rate, but on the life quality of those alive and how they lived.
News Flash: Japanese less likely to die from U.S. bombs
It is available it tons of refereed journals. If you'd bothered to plug any of the referenced individuals (Who are the people running Germany's equivalent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) you find hundreds of people (including these guys) have devoted their careers to the statistical analysis of the atomic bomb survivor data.
:/
For example:
The Validity of Risk Estimates of Leukemia Incidence Based on Japanese Data. HH Rossi, AM Kellerer - Radiation Research, 1974 - JSTOR
Indications of the neutron effect contribution in the solid cancer data of the A-bomb survivors - AM Kellerer, W Rühm, L Walsh - Health Phys, 2006
I am a radiation scientist, and this report is not surprising. Radiation is hazardous, but not as hazardous as the public percieves it to be. Personally I'd take irradiation hazards over chemical hazards any day of the week. Informed people tend to agree on this subject
What I am disputing is your assertion that they were definitely caused by Chernobyl.
Thyroid cancer sucks, and I would prefer that nobody got it (though, of the cancers to get, it's one of the least lethal and most treatable).
My points on thyroid cancer threefold: 1) that it may have been avoidable even given the accident if authorities had acted promptly, 2) it's the only disease for which there is good statistical evidence for increased prevalence after Chernobyl, and 3) compared to the number of Ukrainians who die in car accidents (roughly 4000 annually, I believe) and from tobacco smoking, the health effects of Chernobyl are at most a piddle in the ocean.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Tell that to Louis Slotin. . .
This just in... republicans deemed less susceptible to radiation than other life forms. The committee for safe radiation strongly advises republicans to go roll around in radiation, as the glowing effects can be quite beneficial.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
My grandfathers marine unit walked through the crater at Hiroshima, and almost to a man they died of lukemia, he was the last one, seem healthy as an ox, then got lukemia at 76 and passed away.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Everyone knows that radiation poisoning is actually a misdiagnoses of a ninja killing. I have a funny suspicion they will find my body tomorrow dead by radiation pois
So I have always been able to bathe in the stuff without the fear or tumors and hair loss? Wait until I tell China!
I seem to remember something about flouroscopes being used as a "fun" way to measure your child's shoe size. I also remember there being a problem with radiation leakage, especially in the direction of the unlucky child. I think the results of high exposure there have proved to be the opposite results of the article.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
I don't believe the nuclear industry is necessarily behind a story like this. Not when they have every politician with a bank account in their back pocket.
Today I was reading Helen Caldicott's book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. Some of the sentences have these little numbers at the end, and if you look in the back of the book they seem to match up with references to these things called "scientific journals".
There's more to it than radiation sickness. "The situation post-Chernobyl is a medical emergency, unique in the history of pediatrics. Most of those affected have has their thyroids surgically removed, but a person cannot survive without the hormones produced by the thyroid gland, so these children and adults are dependent upon receiving thyroid replacement tablets every day for the rest of their lives. Should a catastrophic situation such as a war impede their drug supply, they will die." She says the cement sarcophagus at Chernobyl is cracking. The accident is not over.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Why can't people get it into their heads that the human body has an anti-oxidant, DNA repair and immune system, that combats the effects of ionizing radiation - that the risk of ionizing radiation at low to moderate levels is overstated. Yes, there is mounting peer reviewed evidence. Think ... wounds heal, infections are fought off and a suntan protects against UV radiation. Forget all that Cold War scare mongering that made the nuclear stockpile scary. It is likely, that below a certain level the body can repair damage done by ionizing radiation faster then it is caused.
The 11,000 member American Nuclear Society states : "It is the position of the American Nuclear Society that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support the use of the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis (LNTH) in the projection of the health effects of low-level radiation."
IANA Radiation Researcher, but this may be what you were looking for (and did not expect to find).
334 more deaths due to solid cancer than expected for a population that size (table 2)
87 more deaths due to Leukemia than expected (table 5)
Studies of the Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors. Report 12, Part I. Cancer: 1950-1990
Donald A. Pierce; Yukiko Shimizu; Dale L. Preston; Michael Vaeth; Kiyohiko Mabuchi
Radiation Research, Vol. 146, No. 1. (Jul., 1996), pp. 1-27.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-7587(199607)146%3A1%3C1%3ASOTMOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G
The results are sort of summarized at http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa2.html (although the numbers don't quite match)
"Those people didn't die from radiation! They died of exposure when their skin fell off!"
or else!
brought you "Your Friend, the Shark!" Darnit, I can't find that particular Bloom County comic anywhere!
Cyanide is not dangerous in 1 part per quadrillion.
10 x Force of gravity is safe if only exposed for 15 milliseconds or less.
5 billion lumens is safe , if your not looking at it directly.
100 tons of Freight falling out of the sky is safe as long as you are not in the way.
Radiation is safe as long as you can do cell repair or/and radiation shielding or/and "magic" force field like the EM field
around the planet earth. No EM Field : Earth is dead. Literally.
200 db of sound is safe if only exposed for 1 picosecond. [ cannot verify this, and I don't want to try ]
Fire is safe as long as your not the one being burned.
Smoking is safe as long as you have a body with STRONG immune systems [ some people smoke, NEVER get cancer, just some ]
As someone once said : The weak will perish.
Radiation will kill some people. Just like some people scare themselves to death.
Conclusion : everything is dangerous. Depends on the situation. Depends on how much energy is involved.
Depends on shielding/repair systems/defense systems/offensive systems/etc/etc.
I wouldn't volunteer to be an A-bomb survivor. But I don't want to find out the HARD way if
I am sensitive to that kind of radiation.
I listened on the www.democracynow.org that Bush is the member of a religious group, which believes that soon there will be an Armageddon on Earth.
That at least 2 billion people will be killed and there will be rivers of blood.
But after that there will be the Heaven on Earth. They believe that all this is in bible. The leader of this group travels around the world with 3.6 meters high cross.
Realistically it can be done only with nukes. Gosh! They are starting it.
Unless you mind that third tentacle growing out of your abdomen.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
If you were a Russian peasant farmer who was forced to live in marginal lands around nuclear waste dumps in the USSR, indeed, radiation wasn't very dangerous to you--something else was likely going to kill you first.
Furthermore, the kind of phrasing is rather vague: "only 800 deaths attributable"--that doesn't mean that only 800 deaths were caused by radiation, it only means that those were the deaths that they actually identified among the cases they looked at. And that's only one specific accident involving one particular kind of nuclear waste.
There is nearly nothing you can infer from this about the safety of nuclear materials in general, or at your risk of adverse effects from radiation exposure.
I'm still not about to mess with the shit.
Remember how cocaine was legal in the United States?
You know that a large number of people in the US want cocaine to be legal again, right?
In fact, the Democrats make it a large part of their party platform in many states & cities (not nationally).
It is important to realize that the radiation deaths at Hiroshima were mostly caused by direct exposure to the radioactivity of the bomb blast itself, NOT from "fallout" as most people commonly believe. This is due to the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were airbursts of the weapons - they detonated 2000 feet or more above the surface. When this happens, the atomic blast destroys more buildings and causes more destruction over a larger area than had the bomb been dropped to ground level. This was intentional, as the goal of the bombing was to inflict as much damage as possible. But the side affect of this was that very little fallout was generated. Typically fallout is created when an atomic (or thermonuclear) weapon explodes in a ground burst. In a ground burst, the soil, rocks, building materials, etc. that are not vaporized are turned into ash that becomes radioactive due to the direct exposure. The ash is then swept up in the mushroom cloud and dispersed over a wide area. Chernobyl was far and away more dangerous with respect to fallout, because the radioactive core burned and spread really bad isotopes that would not happen to such a great degree with either a ground or airburst of a nuclear weapon. But then again, as has been pointed out, Chernobyl was an example of a bad idea gone worse - a flawed design, with no pressure dome, and human operation intentionally creating a dangerous situation not fully understood. Modern, Western nuclear reactors could never have the same kind of accident...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
It's time to blame
- bush
- republicans
- the illuminate
- big nuclear
- big business
because they want to make money off nuclear power since they funded the study. Greenpeace told me so and they never lie....er, embellish either!They didn't say radiation is good for you, didn't say you should shower in it, just that studies of effects don't jive with reports.
Now can someone come up with a REAL reason that this study is bunk? Maybe some REAL connection between nuclear plants and the research group?
it causes all sorts of cancer and leukemia.
How many babies were born around chernobyl with horrendous birth defects?
You can take your "radiation not so bad" report and shove it up your ass.
They're using their grammar skills there.
What about the kids fed radiation in school lunches in the 50's, 60's..? that should be public info now too.
Isn't it illegal to use the "N" word on Slashdot? I thought this was a "no nukes!" "no nukes!" "no nukes!", zone.....
Next thing you know you'll be talking about clean, cheap, inexhaustible energy that's totally independent of foreign resources..... NOT!!
In your last statement, "Personally I'd take irradiation hazards over chemical hazards any day of the week.", are you basically saying that we are in more danger from chemicals than from radiation?
:)
:) I guess in some parts of the world (like Iraq) the concerns are more of getting shot.
Like, me, Average Joe, on an average work day.
I shower with a dozen compounds I can barely pronounce, brush my teeth with almost as many.
I hop in my chemically induced car (plastic and chemically treated leather interior), which is powered by the explosive liquid fuel stored in the 16 gallon tank in the back (ignoring the 5 quarts of oil, and one lead acid battery wrapped in plastic)
I go to my work, which if I lived in California, would have a tag on the outside of the building which says "This building may contain chemicals and/or other substances known to cause cancer..."
Don't forget my chemically treated lunch (to preserve freshness and coloration)
We'll pretend that I haven't smoked a half pack of cigarettes through the theoretical day.
Hmmm, I think you get the idea.
The alternative is a radiation hazard. I have yet to be to a site where a dosimeter is even recommended. No nukes have ever been dropped anywhere near me. No radioactive incidents. No spent fuel rods falling off of trains. No satellites crashing into my back yard.
I guess as average Joe, the worst radiation hazards are the non-ionizing radiation from power lines and computer monitors (ahhh, not even touched here), and the speck of it in my smoke alarm.
I totally agree, there are enough hazards to worry about on a daily basis. One of my biggest concerns is getting into a car accident, or a slip and fall accident in my own bathroom.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
That makes the rate at which I kill off brain cells with booze and weed seem pretty tame by comparison.... I'd say this calls for a celebration! Care to join me in a belt of scotch?
If a report with the same manner of bonafides came out said we are all going to get cancer and die from global warming, you'd be slathering praise on it.
But this one seems to support what the green's can't abide, nuclear power, so it's all suspect now.
Where is your support of the scientific process now eh?
Wildlife is returning to Chernobyl and surviving due to the lack of mankind in the area. Obviously, diversity and levels are down below pre-kaboom, but the wildlife is managing. My unscientific and Business background is telling me that it's probably related to lower lifespans and less time for each individual animal to develop cancer. Long-term effects are yet unobservable, but will most-likely be pronounced.
But don't confuse the aftermath with the immediate consequences of the meltdown. How anyone can say that those effects are not as hazardous as we believed last week had better have some damn good and robust statistics.
If it's any consolation, I would say that the "putting down some important fire" part was true and that the cement he delivered saved many lives. Sealing the reactor was important - though insanely dangerous - work.
Yeah, part time. Let's see, 7:30 AM to 3:00 PM, then extra-curricular duties, lesson planning, grading papers, and taking the continuing education courses required of them at their own expense. Yeah, any job that takes only 70 hours a week out of 168 is definitely part-time. Then, of course, there's the three months of the year the kids are out. Only one and a half to two and a half months of which are, for teachers, typically taken up by meetings, room setup, conferences, and often teaching summer school. So they really only work that 70 hours about 45 weeks a year after you figure in breaks during the school year. Nobody else gets vacation, personal days, holidays, and sick days of course.
Then of course there's the fact that it's wonderful to deal with disrespectful pukes in the classroom, parents who think the school should favor their kids over order and education, crony school boards selected from the parents of the students with little or no training in education as bosses, and administrations willing to sacrifice any teacher's career to keep the district from getting a bogus lawsuit filed against it.
Hell, for $45k that's cake!
</sarcasm>
Jay P. Greene's little yellow article only accounts for time spent in the classroom. Who the fuck do you think does all the work for a teacher outside the classroom? Nine months at seven hours a day is only the time the teacher spends instructing the kids. Do you really think they just show up and wing the whole thing? He also has a nice little blurb about retirement benefits being so nice. Hell, I interviewed for a teaching position, and I'm sure I'd have plenty of retirement money saved after 40 years or so considering the district requires the teachers to place 11% of their pay directly into the fund. Where he sees over $30 an hour someone who knows any teachers personally can easily see about $14-$17 an hour, which is quite competitive with managing a shift at McDonald's but not so much with the nuclear engineers he's talking about. Oh, and since when does it take a Master's to fight fires? Most school districts require one or a set amount of work towards one of beginning teachers or require one within a few years of starting.
The nationwide average starting pay for a teacher with a Bachelor's degree is about $31k, BTW, if you can find a district that accepts a Bachelor's without at least 12 additional credit hours.
For a little more realistic picture, try on for size any one of these pages. This blog post at Education and Technology is especially nice for the comments.
Oh, and at what point are most programmers, opticians, radiology techs, factory workers, and biologists regularly responsible for the health and safety of 30 minors (whom they often are not allowed to even discipline) at a time?
First, not all radiation is considered equal. You really have to look at ionizing effect. The most hazardous radiation is alpha particles which are emitted inside your body (for example, as a result of Polonium 210, Plutonium, Strontium 90, etc consumption, inhaling radon, or other forms of exposure). This is dangerous because an alpha particle steals 2 electrons pretty much from the first molecule it interacts with. They can't penetrate the skin but if released inside the body, they are pretty horrible. Furthermore, since this causes an electrical imbalance, I am not sure that antioxidants help much at all here.
Beta particles, gamma rays, etc work by transfer of energy to electrons, breaking covalent bonds. It is more or less the same process by which you get a sunburn or sunlight bleaches pigments.
Now having said this, most radiation (aside from a nuclear accident) from a power plant are in the form of gamma rays. Yes, they are harmful, but most of the radiation from a coal-fired plant is in the form of radioactive isotopes and in particular alpha emitters like thorium and radon. Even from a radiation standpoint, coal-fired plants are far more costly than nuclear ones (and I do support nuclear as an alternative to coal once the need for such plants has been minimized).
Also I would point out that the studies have been building for a long time that the long-term effects of one-time exposure to radiation are not as high as we had thought (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, etc). However, it is hard to get from there, given the experience with Radium in watch dials, to either the idea that long-term exposure to radiation is safe or to the idea that there are no risks from exposure to a single incident.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"... and we just don't know where it can be safely stored for 30,000 years."
Oh please. Research the term "half-life", and then get back to me when you have half an education. Anything that's going to be seriously radioactive for 30,000 years is going to be an alpha emitter. Whose highly dangerous particles need massive shielding between you and the source, like that provided by, say, a piece of paper. Rule of thumb: highly energetic equals extremely short half life.
There are two problems in the quoted fragment: The use of "we" and the use of "safely". We, because with people like you in the picture it's obvious that WE don't have a clue. Safely, because everyone who's against it defines "safe" as zero risk, when NOTHING in this world is zero risk. You're at risk from a meteorite bashing your brains out while you sleep. Are the odds against it? Yes. Is the risk zero? No.
Last time I checked, I believe it's said that in 10,000 years all of the material of which speak so alarmingly would still be radioactive. Well, at least as radioactive as the raw ore from which it came. You know, like rocks? Which we've had buried in the ground unshielded, leaking dangerous trace amounts of radioactively into our groundwater supplies for a few billion years or so. I tell you, someone should DO something!
Not to belittle this, but we've had two major, ultimately worst-case radiological events occur: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet, both of those sites are habitable today. Millions of people live there, work there, play there. Let's repeat that. Two atomic BOMBS.
And you want to bitch about the "dangers" of a material fused into glass, tucked behind shields, and buried in a fucking mountain?
Dude, you ought to pay LESS attention to the nonsense. You've been brainwashed by too many b-grade science-fiction movies with giant radioactively mutated spiders/scorpions/bats.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
anybody we know thinking of building more Nuclear reactors?
At least that is the way I have always understood it. IANANP or a physician, but every bit of information I have seen on the matter emphasizes not inhaling radioactive dust/gas or consuming something contaminated. The 4,000 thyroid cancer cases caused by Chernobyl was in children that consumed cow's milk contaminated by iodine 131 fallout on the grass the cattle ate. A very nasty business indeed. Clearly a high acute dose, about 1000 times background level, can be lethal in a small percentage of cases, but if short term low-level exposure was dangerous people would die all the time from flying on commercial airliners, where you get about 200x background exposure.
... people are bold.
The article forgot to cite all the people who became superheros after exposure to radioactivity and radioactive animials. I would say that was a perk. What about them? Guess it is still classified.
Coal is nice, it's organic and you can hold it in your hands and touch it.
Nuclear is just plan scary. It's done by little bald guys in clinical white uniforms. We don't understand nuclear.
However, don't you think renewables are better than both fossil fuels AND nuclear power?
Yes of course, but the number of windmills, etc. needed to meet our energy needs is ridiculous. Plus, everybody seems to be in favor of wind power bu nobody seems to want it in their own back yards. "They're ugly, put them somewhere else" they tell us.
The problems with clean power generation aren't technical, they're political. Keeping the status que, bad as it is, is the easy route, so that's what's happening.
No sig today...
Accelerated thorium does hold some promise for using high grade waste as a fuel material and we are more likely to see something like that than another fast breeder. It was ultimately the problems with reprocessing that killed the Superphoenix project - nearly all of the processing had to be done remotely which turned what looked like trivial problems into complex engineering projects.
It's the cancer, blood poisoning, and nervous-system failure resulting from radiation exposure that's deadly. I mean, the only way I can think of offhand to kill someone with radiation is to microwave them.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
What you're talking about is called "radiation hormesis."
We have more or less only one good epidemiological set of data for various-dose radiation--atomic bomb survivors. Those data are extrapolated to low doses, and that's a large part of the data set from which the current "radiation damage" model (the LNT or "linear-no-threshold" model) is derived (actual survival of cells is predicted by a different model--the LNT model is for radiation effects on a person). Since the LNT model is the most widely-accepted standard in the field as far as I've seen (medical physics student), the hormesis promoters have the burden of proving the protective effect.
The parent is right in that we don't have a good understanding of what goes on at low doses of radiation, and we don't have a model backed by strong empirical observation either. Radiation protection, however, is founded on the principle of keeping doses as small as is reasonably possible, and it's irresponsible to try to wave around that small doses MIGHT not be as harmful as people currently think. I would say that radiation science still basically wants to say that there is no lower threshold for radiation damage, and thus that there is probably not a hormesic (hormestic? I don't know the adjectival form of hormesis) effect. It doesn't really need to be stated that we don't know a lot about low-dose radiation--you start from the assumption that you don't know a lot about it until you can prove that you do. Right now, all we can prove is that it's pretty likely that if damage is linear, then low-doses are bad too.
"The shaken inspections aren't mandated by the manufacturers, they're mandated by the government: "
:)
/, competition going on? Oh!! Wait... I pulled down a pair of 5's with this one, didn't I. Like anyone cares. Not sure why you'd do that - all this right & wrong stuff. Ouch. Ok, except...
:)
'mandated' was your word. Not mine. SORRY? What did I miss?
I said "car inspections at intervals designated by the manufacturer and (ahem) backed by the govt." You simply echoed/confirmed what I said...thanks. The 'ahem' directed at the Japanese govt. can be taken as 'pushed'...similar as your 'mandated', no? This one belongs in the 'right' block, as long as you're keeping score. And again, thanks for backing me up
You seem to be applauding the heavy-handed maintanance schemes as being good for the consumer, environment, etc. While also applying a subtle shade of self-promotion by positioning yourself as an expert on Japan. What's that all about? Is there a
I'm hinting that what is really at work in this example, is typical Japanese logic. They can't resist folding it back on itself. If their cars were as good as they claim (the best!!??!!), the correct application of (Japanese) manufacturer 'pride' and emphasis on quality would be to play down the need for maintanance. "This car is so good, there is no hood to open. No service needed - ever."
But what we see in practice is just the opposite (self-effacement), with the govt. getting involved and pushing their agenda, which is "Do all this inspecting, opne-hooded, safety/green stuff because we say so and it is our job to say so!" A prime example of a Japanese Catch-22 if ever I saw one. And... If you really were the expert you hint at, you'd have noted that.
Thanks for the update(s) - I'm sure things have changed a bit since I lived there
I know fuck all about Nuclear energy (Or much else) to be honest but here is what I'm thinking.
If we use traditional methods of producing electricity by using fossil fuel and other polluting way it will cause global warming, sea level rising etc. etc. etc. End of the World, blah blah blah.
Now with Nuclear, it will/might cause people to die in an accident and affect human (and flora and fauna?) genetics of those living and not yet born.
Or we can take the economic plunge and go the way of Wind Turbines and all that other good alternative energy crap they shove down our throats.
It seems to my uneducated mind that nuclear, while dangerous, is less dangerous the the Global-Warming-End-of-the-World scenario and easier to implement then alternative forms of energy generation (Cost, R&D, Land, mass-production etc)
...probably because it isn't mentioned in the article.
The matter under investigation here isn't whether radiation is harmful or not. No-one is suggesting otherwise. What is being looked at is what the effects of low levels of radiation are. For half a century the received wisdom has been that even minute levels are dangerous. What's not usually mentioned is that that's based, not upon evidence, but upon extrapolation. All the hard evidence about the effects of radiation is based on high levels of exposure. If all that evidence is placed on a graph, you can draw a straight line through the points - the more you're exposed, the more likely you are to die. And that line points pretty much back at the start of the graph - i.e. "no exposure, no radiation deaths". All of which is good, solid science, so far.
Now comes the dodgy bit. The line for high-level exposure may point back at the start of the graph, but what actually happens back there is a guess. If the high-level relationship holds true all the way back, then any exposure to radiation is dangerous. But there's been just about no evidence until recently for what actually happens at those levels. Everything we've heard has been an assumption - that the relationship does go all the way back. But that doesn't have to be the case, and there's mounting evidence that it isn't. This study, and others like it, seem to suggest that living cells cope perfectly adequately with raised but low levels of radiation. As such, it and the others like it may have quite a bit to say about how we need to handle radioactive materials. They need to be viewed with caution, but if the suggestions they're making are right, then they will make a big difference to all manner of matters involving low-level radiation - so they also need to be taken seriously.
The German Police will be pleased.
From TFA:
About 4,000 children were afflicted with cancer. Less well-known, however, is the fact that only nine of those 4,000 died -- thyroid cancers are often easy to operate on.
Great!! Having cancer and not dying of it is really something everyone should try!!
No, thanks! I'd rather keep my thyroid where it is!
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
H. L. Mencken
is that humans are more deadly to wildlife than nuclear fallout.
I wouldn't call that reassuring.
So did I get this thing right; exposing myself to radiation is afterall more likely to give me superpowers than death?
Sure, the number of deaths are low. But it's the long term effects such as birth defects.
Also 200,000 mothers decided to abort as they were concerned about the effects on their children:
http://www.atomicinsights.com/apr96/effects.html
Also, food was contaminated, so it was hard to get clean food. That only made the problem worse.
No real need to worry then. And what a nice coincidence that these insights come just at the time when nuclear power is getting lobbied as a wonderful climate preserving technology for the future.
We are looking forward to a bright nuclear powered future just like in the fifties again. Thank you Mr. Atom!
The problem with the title, and the (generally well researched) article is that there is an implication that somehow our previous knowledge about the risks of radiation were wrong. The real problem is that people have an 'all or nothing' attitude to ionising radiation, where any exposure will lead to certain death/mutations/ethereal glowing. The truth is a lot more mundane, radiation is just (another) potential carcinogen that we are exposed to from a variety of sources. The more you are exposed to, the greater the risk, but the knowledge of the magnitude of exposure is key to the knowledge of risk of death.
/. article on 'new super scanner' from earlier today). As with all risks, we have to balance the benefit - which in the case of a diagnostic CT scan can be huge. CT scanning anyone who has a headache isn't a good idea, though...
The studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors have not been able to attribute individual cancers to radiation, rather they look at the statistics of cancer induction in the studied population, and try to work out how many of them are in excess of what one would normally see. It's a massive exercise in statistics! As a result, the estimates of the risk from unit exposure to radiation have been changing over the years, and if anything they have increased rather than the other way round (although the latest figures play down the effect of genetic factors, where radiation effects are seen in the next generation).
The stories of mass deaths from the radiation doses resulting from nuclear weapons and Chernobyl were over-hyped, and this is where the 'radiation less dangerous than once believed' headlines come from. If you were to work out the effective dose to all the people involved, which is a very difficult task, hopefully you'd get approximately the correct number of excess deaths due to radiation. The probability is (my guess) that in both cases, the large doses went to a small number of individuals. Thousands or millions more people would get lower doses that while not risk-free, were not something that was likely to kill a large number.
To add to all this, there are the problems of uncertainties of radiation risk at low doses - a number of studies have shown mild benefits, but this is a very controversial area.
At the moment, (by far) the largest radiation doses people are exposed to are from diagnostic medical exposures - x-rays, and in particular, CT scans (see the
You see this is the problem with the anti-nuclear moment. They have become so obsessed with ending everything that contains a nucleus that they see it as acceptable to dismiss any science to the contrary as "biased".
I used to do research on the biological effects of ionizing radiation and we knew decades ago that most of the commonly held views of radiation exposure stem from 1950's vintage sci-fi movies. Not helped by later movies like China Syndrome, which had all the scientific accuracy of The Matrix. The anti-nuclear movement is one actor in a parade of misinformation.
One thing that challenges even knowledgeable people was that in population dosimetry studies the low dose groups would consistently out-live the controls. A little bit of radiation exposure was frequently better than none at all.
I always thought it was funny the public idly tolerates 500 people dying on the nation's highways on the average weekend but would chain themselves to a fence to protest a nuclear power plant in their state. I'd live next door to a nuke plant, provided it wasn't down wind from one of the old Russian carbon-core reactors. Your lifetime exposure would present a lower risk than a single trip to grandma's over the holidays.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
From TFA:
"From the standpoint of Russian citizens' groups, which are currently suing for compensation in the courts...."
And official reports now say radiation is not so dangerous. Coincidence, or an attempt to lower payouts?
This seems kind of like the old riddle about the plane crashing on a border - where do you bury the survivors ?
Most people focus on the border and merrily come up with ways to decide where to bury the survivors. The survivors meanwhile are not relishing the prospect of being buried alive.
"that fewer than 800 deaths are attributable to the after-effects of radiation in over 86,500 survivors of the Hiroshima bombing."
Hey - what about all the ones that were not survivors because the radiation killed them ?
Just a thought ?
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
So Chernobyl, Nagasaki, etc. didn't cause the number of deaths we might have thought. Your point? Neither does acne, psoriasis, scabies, paraplegia, or (in North America) AIDS. But living with the the problem can sometimes be worse than dying from it.
A.C.
To have a tentacle or two, particularly forward facing and prehensile would be an excellent optional add on to the current human model. Imagine the advantage of being able to grab a straw or napkin while using both "standard" grasping appendages to carry your tray of food and drink? Imagine being able to unlock and open your car door, your apartment door, or frankly your zipper while carrying baggage? Slashdot types in particular would be able to use a mouse or touch screen without repositioning the hands away from the home row keys.
I'm in favor of this additional appendage. Bring on the radiation. We'll deal with the giant killer roaches and occasional city-wrecking prehistoric monster-lizard as unfortunate by-products.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
This is why statistics are often useless BS. When it comes to environmental impact, and lives affected, a photo is worth a thousand reports. I partly agree with people who say that nuclear power is the sane alternative vs. coal etc. However, I challenge anyone with a mature conscience to look at photos of Hiroshima or Chernobyl and say that we're truly ready to have that kind of thing in widespread use.
Think of it as reducing ones available options. Having easy and cheap energy allows us to achieve things that we never could before. With easy energy the potential is there to create things that do improve your quality of life.
Reducing access to this energy reduces our potential to do things. With less energy available we will find that certain appliances may no longer be economically viable (maybe clothes driers or air conditioners since they both use large amounts of energy). Sure we can live without them, but taking the option away doesn't make our lives better.
You can try and claim that maybe this would be a good thing "I sincerely believe that quality of life can be *better* with less consumption", but its very hard to see how making energy more expensive could make ones life better. Maybe one could believe "television makes families talk less, it would probably be better if we watched less" or "reducing travel promotes building friendships within communities and strengthens local bonds", but the choice should still be left in the hands of the individual responsible and by trying to deny cheap energy (if there are other options available) to promote your lifestyle viewpoint seems to be contrary to the kind of freedom we're used to.
Not if you find ways of achieving the same result while using less energy.
I have difficulty reconciling an eyewitness account that "most of my classmates died" with the idea that radioactivity is surprisingly benign. The article is like concluding that the people who survived the concentration camps are surprisingly healthy and rather fortunate, in fact, to have participated in an informal experiment in calorie restriction.
Renewable fuels suffer from several severe problems the green's don't want to see. The first is that farming is mining. Yes a farmer mines his soil. The process is exceptionally environmentally damaging. A typical farm loses about 5,000 or more pounds of material to erosion every year per acre. (Hectare conversion is approximately 5600 kg/hectare) The farmed items remove another 100 or so pounds per acre every year. The best soil recovery rates are below the 100 pounds per acre line.
All energy sourcing has problems including wind power. Wind power alters weather and precipitation. NOTHING is "clean" or nice like supposed by some.
Nuclear power emits trivial amounts of nuclear pollution generally and appears to have little other problems yet it causes massive thermal pollution. There is no free lunch here. Nuclear is probably the best we have in the currently available options list. Yes even solar has problems.
There are other options coming in the future but even the Zero Point energy is not without problems. Unlimited energy is an unlimited problem unless used wisely and within the confines of the system you work.
The best example of the damage of renewable fuels in current times is the Ethanol production of the USA. This has already caused a 3:1 rise in the cost of food for the poor of the world. This is causing massive damage to the environment as well. The USA can live independent of the world and with renewable fuels. The rest of the world may not be able to live with that solution.
For the advocates of coal, there is a serious problem. The Geology of Coal has made it a virtual Nuclear Waste Dump. A typical large coal fired power plant will send up the stacks in the soot radiation equal the that of a nuclear reactor's entire content every few years. There is no "Clean Coal."
The best suggestion is where possible to reduce demand by doing our work more efficiently. The demand situation of our grids says that we must end incandescent lights. The demand situation also demands the end of CRT computer and TV devices. The situation also demands the end of many other on going losses. The end of biodegradable items is one such change that must happen. Biodegradable was developed to cause more demand for oil products. It works. The demand situation demands attention to Automated Driving to reduce human behavior induced waste. This goes on and on. There are many good suggestions.
Finally attention must be paid to the causes of human population growth. Specifically the fact that tyranny and poverty cause population growth. Nations with freedom and prosperity do not over populate.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Suppose a single radioactive decay had a 1/P probability of giving you lukaemia. If you had two decays, then this might give you 1/P from the first particule, plus (1-P)/P chance of missing the first particle but being got by the second one. If P is small then (1-P) is virtually 1.0, and you have about double the chance. So you have about double the change with double the dose.
However, consider ordinary black-and white film. Each grain requires about 5 points of damage in the crystal structure before the crystal can be reduced by the developer. If your exposure probablility is P, then the chance of getting a dose of 5 or more wouold be P*P*P*P*P. The exposure would go as the fifth power of the light level. If P becomes large, then we cannot approximate (1-P) to 1.0 any longer. Put a bit fancier, you are going from Poisson statistics to a normal distribution.
In the simple film example, we have argued that the probably if a grain being developable goes as the fifth power of the light level for low doses. We can argue for models where you need N separate absorbtions to create the critical level of damage, and the probabliliy of critical damage will go as the Nth power for very low doses. The most pessimistic model is for N=1, where a single particule does the job, and the probability goes down linearly. We can't come up with a sensible argument for using only half a particle, and the damage going as the square root of the dose, so linear is the most pessimistic model. There are models where we assume we can continuously repair a certain low level of damage, and when we exceed that level, then the incedence may locally rise faster than the liner model. However, the whole curve will lie under the linear model if we assume we do not repair ourselves at all.
Normally, we do not do experiments on large numers of people to work out how dangerous radiation is. Where we have accidents, we try and reconstruct the doses people had, and extrapolate from the high dose figures to low doses. When we do this, we usually assume the linear model, because that is the most pessimistic one. We then can try to see if the theory holds by looking at lower-level doses - like people who live on granite, or take a lot of aircraft fights, or have been x-rayed. If we were badly out in our original assumptions, then we ought to be able to detect a significant increase in leukaemia incedence in airline pilots, or people from Cornwall. If we don't see anything significant, then we gues that the linear model was perhaps too pessimistic, but we do not have any indication by how much. If the real relationship is the square or the cube, then the low dose statistics may be tiny. However, we cannot safely assume that, and we don't.
We would hope to have a large difference between the worst case for the calculated risks and the actual effects on large populations at low doses. The only way we can know for certain is by giving a lot of people a known low dose of radiation, and we don't want to do that. Things are as they should be.
For every ounce of radio active substance Chernobyl blew into the sky, it blew tons of other nasty things like heavy metals and benzine like compounds. For nearly any spot where radio active substances are found in higher than normal quantities, you will find lots of other odd and very toxic substances.
Okay, so I got this idea before my morning coffee has fully kicked in. But two years ago I read a brilliant article by Paul Graham about the relationship between the press and the Big Public Relations Machine. Graham pointed out a New York Times article about the "return" of the business suit that looked a lot like ones in USA Today, CNN.com, Business Week and other outlets. He played Follow the Money for a little while and wouldn't you know it, the articles' "facts" came from an industry trade association. And ain't it weird how all these "industry experts" were suddenly available at the same time? Ever since then, when the media start trumpeting "evidence" that just happens to match somebody's financial or political profits, I get nervous.
Look at what Western mainstream media was saying about Iraq before we invaded. Gosh-oh-golly, don't it look a lot less like investigative journalism than a conduit for somebody's press releases?
And now we see an article where "industry experts" are telling us the radiation from Hiroshima didn't have long-term effects. Are we seeing some preventative PR in advance of a nuclear strike?
Like I said, tinfoil-had-grade paranoia. It's probably bullshit, but maybe that'll teach me not to take my meds on an empty stomach.
This is not my sandwich.
The actual blast may not have killed that many people in Hiroshima, however, the radioactive fallout, black rain, and lingering radiation have caused at least 30,000 people to die. Not to mention the hard to ascertain numbers of people who went homeless and starved to death. On top of that, if radiation was not deadly, why did the men who were sent into Chernobyl to shut down the reactor core never come back alive?
A study funded by a gun manufacturer has determined that guns very rarely harm anyone. Experiments have verified their theoretical calculations that, when a gun is fired off in a random direction, only a tiny percentage of the bullets hits anyone.
(I tried to think of an automotive metaphor, but couldn't come up with a good one.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Not Kerry. Carter. Same party. Same environmental policy. Different dumbass.
I agree, sorta. I'm a Republican and I can't stand Carter. He was certainly wrong about many things, and his killing of breeder reactors and fuel rod re-use was among them, however, he was also pretty darned right about promoting nuclear power.
When TMI happened, Carter went there, to illustrate that it was perfectly safe. At that moment, Republicans actually jumped the pro-nuclear boat and hopped onto the anti-nuclear bandwagon, and used the moment to show that Carter was being irresponsible, doesn't have a clue, even though Jimmy, as one of Rickover's boys, probably knew more about nuclear power than just about anyone. As a result of this moment of bipartisan acord between the loonie left and right, nuclear power was killed in America, and Reagan actually never advanced it.
This is my sig.
A couple of mythbusters interns covered this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3pKagV26c8
Yeah, radiation's just great, if you don't mind having kids with harmful mutations. And nothing kewl like teleportation or turning their body into osmium steel.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
It's about time that the so called 'intelligent design' people realised that we are really poorly designed - not enough hands, poorly designed back that gets all sore, easily damaged head stuck on top, limited lifespan, vision that we need to augment with telescopes and microscopes, lack of telekinesis - the list goes on.
About the only thing that is just right - boobies.
go tell that to the tchernobyl children and parent
that's just like in the 50's when they said pesticide was not dangerous and they sprayed kids with it just to show that it was not.
I'm pretty sure all those dead people agree with the statement that radiation is not so dangerous.
You can't take the sky from me...
Property is theft.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/08/30/btsc.chance.nukes/index.html
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Apparently the study was based on two results: Dead or not dead.
Since the subjects in question are not dead, radiation is indeed safe!
A 10 min walk will get me to a commercial street with lots of stores for most of my needs.
You can't take the sky from me...
We have to give people radiation in order to answer clinical questions. If I can screen 1000 people to catch a deadly disease that will affect 1% (10 people) but give .1% of them cancer (1 person) than I have saved 9 lives. If I give 2% of them cancer (20 people) I have killed 10 people for nothing.
Sounds callous I know but these are real-life questions MDs have to deal with and these decisions have to be made one way or the other.
So much as the arm growing out of your forehead.
Seriously - liars can figure - and these liars are out to sell you "limited nuclear war" and "cheap nuclear power". File this with "cakewalk in Iraq".
Look what the radiation and chemical toxicity effects are from even "depleted" Uranium:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/
Remember: Uranium is named for Uranus - don't play with stuff that comes out of Uranus!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
You make some pretty sweeping claims about the stance of Greenpeace. Do you have sources? Quotations? Anything other than rhetoric? About Greenpeace or your supposed Path to Energy Plentifulness
As someone who works in the domestic energy industry in the U.S. I find your claims hard to believe without a shred of evidence. And your slamming of 'Kerry' as the 'guy who ruined everything' makes me think you haven't actually examined the issue in too much depth.
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Consumption is what drives economies forward.
No, consumption is what drives our current economic model. While not a good model, Communism was not driven by consumption. In our current economy, though, we measure our health by the increase in sales. Which is not sustainable.
The cost of conservation at a level that would make a real environmental impact ... would severely impact quality of life in every nation that attempted such measures.
'Quality of Life'? By that do you mean a life being constantly polluted by heavy industry and oil-dependent transportation? My quality of life would not be negatively impacted if I had to spend some additional money because I didn't want my air to be smoggy - but I'm not given that option. The Green Movement is about fighting for that freedom; the freedom to say, 'Gosh, a clean environment is more valuable to me than mere money or stuff.'
Let us compare fuel efficiencies. In a 'smart' economy, which would you want to use more? Personally, I think that you'd want to get some actually efficiency in there; thus weight it towards things like trains, and away from things like cars. Well, do we support that philosophy in our society? We do not. Instead, we pay far more for our road infrastructure than we do for our train infrastructure, subsidizing it with taxes left and right - taxes which are paid for by everyone, not just the people who utilize the roads. Of course, therefore, the roads get used more. In situations where tolls are exacted, there is a far greater likelihood for people to seek out and utilize alternative transport - such as buses, carpooling, trains and so on.
Of course, this represents a 'tax' on cars, and we hate taxes. All taxes. Period. Except that for some reason we accept the hidden tax over the obvious one, even if that hidden tax ends up costing us more because we are not only taxed for the roads, but for the egregious cost of the environmental cleanup they require, the vastly larger amount of fuel they require and the huge amount of overseas investment in oil infrastructure, transport and security they require.
It is true, the oil magnates probably would suffer a significant impact to their 'quality of life' if we started using transportation more intelligently. But my money is on the average person's quality of life increasing, and the impact on their wallet decreasing.
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I agree with absolutely everything you say... for a good teacher. My wife is one, she volunteers to run detention, she spends countless hours grading and working on curriculum in her off time, and she spends her summers revising curriculum and taking classes to be a better teacher. She may have a lot of days "off" but she puts more hours per year into her job than I do.
However I don't agree with what you said for lazy teachers. Unfortunately there are not a few of these. These folks will coast through the system. Their extracurricular involvement will be the easiest least time consuming option they can find, they will take the minimum extra education necessary to maintain their degree, and they will make sure they have no grading to do outside of school, including having kids grade each other's papers in class.
Like many areas in life, there are the good ones, who are under paid, and the bad ones who are overpaid. Also it depends on the subject. History and Art teachers make the same as Science Math and Technology teachers. For their respective industries, History and Art teachers are going to do so much better than their professional counterparts, while science, math, and technology teachers are going to do much worse. My wife could make more if she entered the industry, and she'd probably put fewer hours into her job, but she loves teaching. Some states were going to try to offer subject matter based pay (competitive to their respective industries) but it was shot down by unions.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Part of my family are farmers in South Eastern Poland. Chernobyl was in Spring, all the crops failed, instead of summer it was fall. Imagine brown leaves in June. Then my grandmother got bone cancer, another relative skin cancer, then multiple relatives and more cancers. My family had no history of cancer before that. Everybody got sick and no one really could say what the diseases were. Some are dead, some are still effected to this day (for example my cousin in his thirties in diapers), some seem to have gotten better.
Another interesting aspect is that so many went bald, even my aunt-in-law.
Perhaps the authors of this report want to buy some prime real estate in the land of Borat?
Great. Let's use the movie "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" as evidence for our scientific discussions. You can debunk lots of myths using that movie, like the whole "Bears in ice-cream trucks will eat little kids" myth.
I mean, if we can wipe out a buttload of people with minimal risk to terraforming the area shortly after decimation, we'd be set!
I can see it now! Central Iran with our own Glass bowl skating ring!
I looked into both wind and solar power for my home.
Wind power is only good if you live in a location where you have sustained decent wind. Surprisingly, most of America doesn't have this. So as much as people say "Wind power is the answer," it only is if you live in the right location.
Solar is too expensive right now and difficult to be dependent upon in any northern region. The amount of solar cells needed to get off of the grid was nearly enough to buy another house. But if solar cells ever get cheap, then we can talk.
You automatically lose for citing Wikipedia as a source.
...suffocation from incessant puking as a result of radiation poisoning kills people.
The number of hours you claim teachers spend working is absolute BS. A teacher in their first couple of years might spend a good deal of time working out lessons, because they don't know what they are doing, but if after the first year or two, a teacher is spending hours a day making lesson plans, then they are simply incompetent and should not be allow to teach. Education simply is not changing that fast. After you have a system that works, future years should be little more than tweaks to what you have already been doing. While I will give you that classrooms with compositions do require time for grading, most classes taught simply do not. Most grading is done by 'teachers aids'. These are students who get credit for grading other students papers. Even when they are not, teachers are give a couple of periods a day to do things like grading.
So, two and a half out of the three are for the teacher? I'll cry you a river. Really, considering the massive exaggeration you put into other areas, I have to doubt that they eve spend two weeks in meetings and continuing education. Of course this if further highlight by the fact that you included summer school. That is one of the classic lies. Summer school is a second job. For you to include that is no different than talking about a 9-5 factory worker getting a second job as a security guard, and claiming being a 9-5 factory working is a 16 hour a day job.
So, basically, your exaggerations are big enough to just be lies.
I followed your links, and they tell the same lies that you repeated here. One even starts out with a personal attack on the researchers they disagree with. Another one basis it's comparison on what a Manhattan lawyer makes.
As for your description of how crappy being a teacher is, well, lots of jobs are crappy. Lots of people have to work for management that is clueless. This isn't the first time you have read slashdot is it? If you really think that kids are "pukes", then you would be an idiot for going into that field in the first place.
Look, public schools are broken. We all know that. Paying teachers outrageous salaries is not going to fix that. The problem is that the public school system is broken at every level. It starts with the parents, it includes the teachers, faculty, school boards, and moves through state government, and ultimatly includes the President of the United states, when he refers to the smart kids as "The Nerd Patrol".
Sure, public education was a good idea, and in theory could be fixed, but it won't. The problem is that it has become a big money grab. Very few people are willing to stand up and say. Enough money is being spent on education. The average per student spending on education is $6000 a year. Multiply that by the 30 students you referenced earlier, and you have 180000 per classroom. That's not counting the money that comes in from other areas, such as teachers buying supplies, parents buying supplies, and fund raisers. Where is the money going?
So, I don't think that teachers are the sole problem with schools, but the low wages are simply lies that help add to it.
I find it interesting that you call it the 'gravity' problem, as though we should all stay on the ground, and not use airplanes, because they were hard to conceive of in the first place. Gravity made solving the airplane problem difficult. Balloons, planes, helicopters - none of these were trivial solutions.
Nor is creating a sustainable environment or economy. But it can be done; and there are plenty of people working to make the theory a practical reality. We are by no means 'stuck' with the structure we have; only our conditioning to accept the status quo suggests that we are. Come on! We're humans! We make tools out of things that were clearly not meant for that purpose originally. Opposable thumbs and pattern-recognizing fore-brains let us do all sorts of neat things.
You claim that inertia prevents us from changing 'any time soon'. But while inertia is a powerful force, it works both ways; things at rest tend to stay at rest, and things in motion tend to stay in motion. China, while it is adding on cars by the fistful, is also designing sustainable cities from scratch. Is this cheap? No. Is it possible? Yes. Just like it is possible for us to retool our cities in piecemeal to achieve those same energy goals; to decentralize consumer outlets, decentralize the power grid, rethink water management, rethink food processing, rethink every aspect of our society that causes us to think we're 'stuck' with what we have.
If you don't like it, change it. The solution cannot reasonably come in the form of a holy grail. Nuclear energy is nice, but it's not going to solve all your problems, much less all of our problems. And while you're at it, recognize that as the transportation infrastructure we have becomes progressively more expensive, it will become progressively less supported. Parts of the country will die; clinging to them is not a wise move. Rolling with the punch and modifying how you live so that it's not a problem is, on the other hand, a solution.
While you're at it, put in your own greywater system.
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> The article [on nuclear radiatio effects] cites studies by German, US, and Japanese researchers
Well, at least they're not quoting Genoshan, AIM, and Star Labs researchers anymore.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I recognize that many places in the US are relatively sprawly, but I don't accept that that in and of itself is a reason to encourage cars as our sole, or even primary means of transportation. You give an example: 40 miles from your work? Personally, I don't see why you'd spend an hour each way to get to work. I would have to have a flipping amazing job to do that. And even in that case, I suspect that I would do what I had to do to live closer.
But more to the point, if you don't insist on better public transportation, it's not going to be provided. You have to be willing to vote for it and to pay for it, but it can be created. We are under a cultural assumption (I suspect 'driven' by certain industries...) that the car is simply the best solution so we should get used to it. Yet we lived for millenniums without cars - only in the last century have we really geared towards cars. Is there a particular reason to, though? Even in the US many people live in places and situations where it is entirely not needed. In our biggest city it's even considered foolish to use a car. Why are we still gearing for that, then?
More to the point, why are more urban centers not gearing for other things? Most of our population is, in fact, urban: 75% in the United States. There is, in my opinion, why we aren't spending money on mass transit infrastructure in at least a 2:1 ratio.
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I find it quite Ironic that our universe is so big that we have never even seen the edge of it using modern telescopes and stuff, and we are floating around on a pebble in a huge universe and all there is is like flaming crap that will burn up entire lifeless worlds made up of toxic garbage in a LIMITLESS VOID and we are here discussing where to put some toxic garbage...
... that Germans love David Hasselhof.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
In the right hands, nuclear power can be wondrous. In the wrong hands you get stuff like this: http://todayspictures.slate.com/inmotion/essay_chernobyl
What I found unsettling about the FBR was using sodium for cooling. They required argon inerting systems, among other features. The Russkies had FBR in subs (IIRC) that were cooled with lead. Shutdown and startup was, uh, somewhat problematic. ...Lorenzo
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
Huh? HUH?
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
An object the size of the human body is always being bombarded by a combination of radioactive decay and cosmic ray secondary particles. The almost obligatory encounter in education with the little yellow radiation survey meter, unchanged from the 1950s, shows the typical click, click, click click click, click when nothing seriously radioactive is present in the immediate area, implying there's only the occaisional event. That is very misleading as it is a rather insensitive measurement over a mere fraction of a cubic inch. An oscillocope trace of a body sized sensitive detector looks more like the oscilloscope trace of heavy metal music group's sound track.
While it's theoretically possible that a single radioactive event could start the chain of events leading to a genetic mutation or some virulent cancer, neither are likely at all with essentially zero probability. Once the immediate danger of susceptability to a severely weakened immune system is over, there is little left in the way of damage or danger. Otherwise, green skin and tenacles would be fairly commonplace and tgi fridays would ressemble the bar in the first star wars movie.
"This is why statistics are often useless BS. When it comes to environmental impact, and lives affected, a photo is worth a thousand reports."
This is truly the stuff that idiocy is made of.
Not As Necessary As Once Believed
If you manage to eliminate Arsenic from your diet completly you will die.
Arsenic like most other elements is required for some protein operations.
Now we need pico-grams a day rather than the micro grams for most other metals and if you get too much it will destroy the large protein complex responsible for the citric acid cycle in mitochondria but you DO still need a tiny bit.
FYI
Well, I was in Kiev(65 miles from Chernobyl) at the time. My father was in the civil defense at his factory, so he measured radiation levels in the beginning of May, 1986. The levels were about 2-5 times above normal. Higher levels were registered near pools of water. All in all it was no big deal, the main danger was radioactive Cesium and Strontium absorption in the body. This was counteracted by Iodine supplements given mainly to children. Granted, Kiev(a city of 2.8 mln people) was spared by the North-Western winds during the critical period of first 3 days after the event. I remember that my father had one of those personal dosimeters, he left it at home with us. I though it was broken because it was steadily showing "0" on the scale. My dad said:"If this thing starts showing anything we should all run like hell." Just as a precaution children were sent out of the city starting in May and through the summer of '86.
My sister, cousin, and several of my friends are teachers. I know how much time they spend working outside the classroom, and you are full of it. One prep period is usually allowed a teacher. That's the length of one class, or about 50-55 minutes in a non-block schedule. They often have to eat their lunches with the kids one or two days a week and supervise them, and on the days they're not in that rotation they often get about as long as their students -- half an hour maybe -- for lunch. If an hour to an hour and a half a day worth of breaks is excessive, then a great many office people are given excessive breaks.
If you really believe that a teacher doesn't grade papers, you're kidding yourself. A "teacher's aide" isn't typically a student, either. They're typically full or part time employees of the school who help with special needs kids or with supervision of particularly large classes. They're service personnel more than educators. If you know of a middle school or high school class that doesn't have essay questions and topic papers that need grading by a teacher, then that teacher's not doing what they should.
Three to six credit hours is pretty common for a public school teacher to carry while working. For teachers who do not yet have a Masters, this is mandatory and at their own expense. This is typically done during the school year.
Conventions, cleaning the rooms, organizing materials, and staff orientation typically do take a week or two. Staff meetings over changes in curricula, student discipline, extra-curricular chaperone assignments, and changes to school policy do happen before or after classes and in the summer. Did you think the students were somehow included? Many smaller schools make sponsoring or at least chaperoning some extra-curricular activities mandatory. It's highly encouraged at bigger schools, and they might get some extra money but it's certainly not $30 an hour for the time involved.
Summer school differs from district to district. Some districts include these classes in the regular pay scale. Some pay extra, but at a rate published alongside the regular pay scale. You can bet the figures for yearly pay in the reported data include the pay in the averages, though. After all, that's part of the teacher's contracted work for which their taxes would be reported.
Yes, lots of jobs are crappy. Most government jobs that require a Bachelor's or Master's degree are not particularly crappy.
I don't think of kids in general as "pukes", but enough public school students are complete little anti-social twits that all the teachers have to deal with those kids in addition to the decent ones. You deal with jerks everywhere, but nowhere other than the public schools do you see the type of intimidation of adults by kids as when spoiled brats threaten to have mommy talk to the school board, which includes daddy.
The local school board and its usual fill of students' parents is perhaps the biggest problem in the public education system. If the community is not so interested as to have people run for the board who are for all of the kids and not just because their own kids are in the schools, then perhaps the local rule school district should be a thing of the past. Perhaps ballots for school board should disclose the name, grade, and school assignment of the candidates' children. The board members should at least recuse themselves from dealing with issues involving their own children or their children's teachers directly.
Most of the money spent per student does not go to the teachers. There is building maintenance, utilities, books, computers, legal defense funds, insurance, principals, secretaries, janitors, vice principals, guidance counselors, district superintendents, regional superintendents, state boards, bus payments and maintenance, bus fuel, and bus drivers. And that's even assuming things like sports equipment, cafeteria workers, cafeteria food, and more are covered by the modest fees involved or booster clubs.
A large portion of the
"If an hour to an hour and a half a day worth of breaks is excessive, then a great many office people are given excessive breaks."
Right in your first paragraph you lose credibility. I never said that an hour and a half is excessive. You are trying to use a strawman argument, and show that you know you are being dishonest. In fact, most office jobs have exactly an hour and a half. Of course, most office workers are not paid for the hour they spend eating lunch. If you feel that the amount of time given for lunch is unreasonable, perhaps you should check your ethics, and start speaking up for the students who are limited to that amount of time for their lunch also. I'm sure that you can direct me to old posts where you decried the horrid treatment of students for their short lunch breaks right?
"A "teacher's aide" isn't typically a student, either."
Here you lose credibility again. While there certainly are professional aids, at least up until recently, schools regularly gave students class credit for helping teachers with their work. I will concede that teachers unions might have negotiated this away in an attempt to get a wider spot at the education money trough, as it has been 4 or 5 years since I have been around any jr high, and high school students in quantity, so cannot say that I have heard any talking about it recently.
"If you know of a middle school or high school class that doesn't have essay questions and topic papers that need grading by a teacher, then that teacher's not doing what they should."
More credibility lose. Your actually claiming that PE teachers and Algebra teachers are not doing there jobs if they don't assign essay questions? Get real. Besides that, your arguing that teachers are being abused with low wages even though you claim they are not doing what they should.
"You can bet the figures for yearly pay in the reported data include the pay in the averages, though. After all, that's part of the teacher's contracted work for which their taxes would be reported."
Yet again credibility lose. No, you can not bet on this. That is the statement of a person that is just making stuff up to try to support his case. The stats on teacher pay is generally not going to include second jobs, which is what summer school is. A summer job as an EMT would show up on taxes too, but that certainly isn't going to be included in the reports.
"Yes, lots of jobs are crappy. Most government jobs that require a Bachelor's or Master's degree are not particularly crappy."
Now, we are getting to the crux of things. There is obviously some sour grapes that teachers are not getting as sweet a spot at the government money trough.
"I don't think of kids in general as "pukes", but enough public school students are complete little anti-social twits that all the teachers have to deal with those kids in addition to the decent ones. You deal with jerks everywhere, but nowhere other than the public schools do you see the type of intimidation of adults by kids as when spoiled brats threaten to have mommy talk to the school board, which includes daddy."
Unless you are in some tiny backwater village, this is going to be a minor problem. There are just going to be too many teachers for for the few kids that are related to the school board to have a major impact. Besides that, let me just say, welcome to the real world. Kids get jobs at their daddy's companies too. Guess what, same problem. You again lose credibility by complaining about the reality of life, like teachers are somehow singled out when they have to deal with the same crap that other people do. Of course, you could be showing your disrespect for minors by implying that they somehow should be judged by a different set of ethics than adults. This of course makes you lose more credibility. I have yet to see teachers complaining about having one school per district. This would alleviate them of the problem, as most of them would not even have a
I for one, bow to our new "Soviet punchline" overlord.
.
- aqk
F U
Of course minors should not be treated by a different set of ethics than adults. That's your own strawman. Does it prove you know you are being dishonest? Thanks for yet another ad hominem attack against me, because I really appreciate how it helps discredit you.
Children should be treated a bit differently than a grown, educated, and professionally qualified person with the duty of supervising them. One child's word should not be taken over one teacher's word without some evidence to back it up. The child is not legally liable for lying, has no significant assets to lose if he was liable, and traditionally strikes out at authority figures like the teacher simply for the reason that it is a position of authority. That makes the single child less credible, and many teachers have been sacked for exactly the word of one student with nobody else corroborating and no evidence. That's not a difference in ethics, but a difference in the reliability of the people involved.
You still keep implying I'm a teacher, and that I'm pointing fingers at other groups within my own field. I am not a teacher, and I've made that quite clear. Sure, there are problem teachers. There would be fewer problem teachers if the job could be improved and retain better candidates. Notice I said "perhaps". That's a sure sign that I wasn't claiming to be certain. In my experience as a public school student many years ago, the parent-run school board was a big problem. It's not just for reasons of nepotism and favoritism, but because the parents -- even the ones willing to see past their own kids -- are typically clueless about how schools should work, yet are in charge of the district except on a few issues.
If the reality of life is nothing to complain about, then what else is there to try and change? I'm not going to give up on the real world and focus all my attention on the problems of some fantasy world. I'm sorry if you work for CCP or something, but the real world is all that's really worth struggling to change that makes a real difference at the end of the day.
Why in the world would you think a job as a teacher is not going to show up on reports for earnings of teachers? Again, I'm not sure how familiar you are with how this works, but many districts don't consider it an extra job. They, as I said, have additional pay available for teachers who agree to summer school in their original contract for the year. It's the same job with the same paychecks, and those paychecks just get slightly larger if one teachers summer school.
Algebra teachers do assign long work problems in which the reasoning behind the answer must be shown. The language is that of mathematics, but the "showing your work is mandatory" grading of high school mathematics very much takes a qualified person to properly grade. Further, it takes as much time and often teachers assign partial credit to partial solutions, just as a languages teacher would assign some credit to good supporting arguments in an essay question. Math classes often have many more exercises to grade than other classes as well.
As for PE, yes, on occasion a PE teacher will have to grade essay questions. Sports rules, workout guides, and more have been used for this. They also have to supervise the kids when they are physically active and directly competitive, deal with injuries, supervise kids when bullies have victims at their most vulnerable, must make the most day-to-day planning changes of any teachers due to weather and equipment availability, and are often the coaches for extra-curricular athletics. Some districts won't hire a PE teacher without agreement to work with sports teams as well, but I'm not sure how common that stipulation is.
You can say with certainty that something won't be included in reports, but I can't say I'm willing to bet it is? What kind of double standard is that? Aren't you the same person who pointed out that kids and adults should adhere to the same ethics and be treated under the same code of ethics? So what is it about me that you