Slashdot Mirror
Greenpeace Breaks Into French Nuclear Plant
dotancohen writes "Greenpeace activists secretly entered a French nuclear site before dawn and draped a banner reading 'Hey' and 'Easy' on its reactor containment building, to expose the vulnerability of atomic sites in the country. Greenpeace said the break-in aimed to show that an ongoing review of safety measures, ordered by French authorities after a tsunami ravaged Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant earlier this year, was focused too narrowly on possible natural disasters, and not human factors."
I'd like to see how that "measurability" was established, considering that scientists can't even figure out if minor increase in radioactivity is net negative or net positive, as there are different factors at play, which represent both directions.
Oh, you're probably referring to stuff like being exposed to elements for prolonged time, having to eat dirty food, and so on. Bad news: that was earthquake and tsunami. They also killed over thirty thousand people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
There was this really funny research on survivors of people who were putting out Chernobyl fires. Of those who survived the ordeal and a couple of months after it (when most people who got lethal dose died), there was a greater portion of them alive now then there was of general population. This was (at least partially) attributed to significant increase in health checks of the rescue crews, which allowed medics to find many problems and fix them rather then have them evolve into something incurably lethal (as is the case with many cancers).
So should we now state that Fukushima accident will likely increase life expectancy of the workers who were fixing it like it was in Chernobyl. We'll know in a couple of decades.
On the contrary, I've never seen so many guns as during any of my trips to Europe. Particularly in airports, trainstations and around tourist spots. I think they're more paranoid than we are about the whole terrorism thing.
And I can promise you, the farm I lived on briefly in France had a few firearms on premises. If I remember correctly, the Swiss have among the highest percentage of armed citizens you'll find.
Don't let your TV spoon-feed you generalizations about very large and diverse places. They're often wrong.
It's worth noting that not only was there a major change, but there also is an issue of significantly increased checks for cancers commonly associated with irradiation (but which may or may not be caused by radiation), which in turn results in more findings of said cancers and ironically, more people that survive those cancers as they are found early enough to be able to treat them.
Real killer in the territory around Chernobyl, and across all former USSR members is alcohol, and it's also by far the biggest factor in the shortening of life-spans (observable also by remarkable difference between average age of men vs women).
What I find astonishing about Fukushima is learning that we've decided to keep nuclear waste in a manner that is not failsafe. That we need to actively cool.
That is possibly the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. It's not like it's an infinite amount of heat.
Spread it out, pour some iron on it, and put in some giant heat sinks or something.
Christ, it's like everyone is an idiot or something. 'Hey, this generates a set amount of heat per second, forever, and if it ever gets above a certain temperature it will melt through things.'. 'Herp derp, let's pump water past it. There's no way that could go wrong.' 'Maybe we could rig it where it just distributes the heat to the air or the ground or something, which would only fail if the sun started consuming the earth and heated the atmosphere up massively?' 'Nope, takes too much space. Water pump, that's the plan!'
I understand reactors having problems when shut down, but the waste? Seriously?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?