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Fukushima Actually "Much Worse" Than So Far Disclosed, Say Experts
PuceBaboon writes "The BBC is reporting that experts are casting doubt on the veracity of statements from both the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government regarding the seriousness of the problems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Not only are the constant leaks releasing radioactivity into the ocean (and thus into the food chain), but now there are also worries that the spent fuel rod storage pools may be even more unstable than first thought. An external consultant warns, 'The Japanese have a problem asking for help. It is a big mistake; they badly need it.'"
Be optimistic about it. if it gets any worse, we'll be able to use sushi instead of toothpaste.
Good people go to bed earlier.
As I said here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4110983&cid=44626741
Yet nobody cares about your pride except you
I don't really understand what the levels mean, anyone want to enlighten me with a simple explanation?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Any "bad" news from government should be assumed to be much worse, and any "good" news from government should be assumed to be not nearly as good. That's just common sense when dealing with an organization that takes money from you by force, promising to spend it on things which benefit you, and then turns around and spends billions each year on self-promotion.
When a corporation/government has no independent oversight and an interest in minimising the severity of a disaster the public should have no expectation of receiving accurate information.
Anyone that has lived and worked in Japan with the local engineers and agencies knows it's not a good idea to take safety statements and claims at face value. Trusting the boys with nuclear reactors is asking for incidents like Fukushima to be downplayed.
Example - the locals in our apartment building told us if there was a fire to order a pizza before calling the fire dept. and tell the fd to follow the pizza delivery guy - they now the neighborhoods much better than the authorities.
Other example - our R & D center had a super-efficient furnace that was supposed to burn trash at 900. The furnace operators decided on their own to run at lower temps so the equipment would 'last longer'...that coked up the 2nd combustion chamber. One day someone tossed a 5 gal. container of cutting oil into the trash, and when they tried to burn it, the whole thing exploded, sending thousands of confidential documents out across the neighborhood. Everyone had to run out and pick them up. The community gave our company an award for being so good at the cleanup. No mention of the explosion.
Yet another example - to be counted as a highway fatality in Japan, you have to die in the first 12 hours. This isn't how other countries tally such stats, leaving Japan to appear to be much safer.
Final example - fire drills in the company were typically over-organized. We were instructed to gather at a pre-detemined location with our assigned fire monitor, and then leave the building in order. We told them that in our country, we simply get the hell out...
I, for one, can't wait for my new superpowers!
See the articles (latest link included) by El Reg's Lewis Page :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21/omg_new_crisis_disaster_at_fukushima_oh_wait_its_nothing_again/
A lot of these isotopes are being shunted aside and stored (from which they are leaking), are useful ones. In particular, st-90 is a beta- and can be used to create long-lived batteries (20-50 years) without worrying about mechanical issues. These are ideal for putting on rovers on the moon/mars. Basically, a company should be filtering that water quickly and getting all of those isotopes out for use.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The USA did that twice. it didn't stop the Tsunami.
If you knew my digestive system, you would KNOW that yes, me eating 10 bananas is on par with Fukushima. It's just a biohazard disaster, not an atomic one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
.... now! "Fukushima is just the same as eating ten bananas, see? I saw it on xkcd!"
Radiation exists in the environment. Fukushima being worse than they're disclosing is, generally speaking, a very localized problem. There's lots of radioactive stuff in the "food chain", and only nebulous comments about potential "health concerns" in the article.
The oceans are big, and the radioactive tanks there are small. Its the radioactive equivalent of homeopathy, when you look at things on the global scale.
So, XKCD (although I don't recall the comic you're talking about ) would be absolutely correct if they're mocking the overhyped concern about the food chain.
I'm not disputing that the situation is serious, given that even TEPCO agreed to up the incident level.
But this entire article reads like a piece of tabloid trash:
"It's really bad!" says a famous anti-nuclear activist (aka an "independent consultant").
"It's even worse!" says the same activist/consultant.
"It could be bad; we don't know. We should be prepared, though," says a former regulatory official.
"Holy crap, if that first guy's assumptions are right, then we're in deep shit!" says an oceanographer.
"I didn't even tell you the worst part!" continues the first guy. "This completely unrelated thing might possibly be happening and then we're dooooooomed!!"
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Mycle Schneider only has honorary, not the actual education, and has been a WISE(an anti-nuclear group) activist in France for 30+ years. He is the person who gets consult jobs from the government when they want to appear as showing both sides.
Two versions of his Wikipedia page:
http://i.imgur.com/y2dxdFo.png
http://i.imgur.com/XUS0duU.png
We showed you how to fix this with Thorium in the early 1970s.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
...it should be keeping corporations from pulling stunts like this. It's not like you and I have the means to confront TEPCO over this.
I'm sure the Obama administration will continue to state a glass of milk has more radiation in it than what is escaping from Japan. Oh yes, and that nobody has died from nuclear poisoning. Then he will take off his jacket and bring out a napkin in each hand to wipe the imaginary sweat from his face and say we need more nuclear power to fight global warming. (While sending coal to the rest of the world and subsidizing their coal plants.)
After all this hard work, maybe take Air Force One for a spin to Hawaii. Well, not Hawaii, that is closer to the radiation.
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've been considering opening a side business called Fuk-u tritium enhanced water. Cancer patients will love it. People know that radiation also causes people to gain super powers. It will practically market itself!
those guys are woefully uninformed liars who have proven over and over they just don't get it. it's really time to cut the Japanese authorities out of it, except for writing checks, and bring in the RANET team of the IAEA to overhaul the whole containment/cleanup effort. it's really two years too late.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's been years since the event, and Fukushima still doesn't have a radioactive water processing plant. The US has dealt with this problem before, both at 3 Mile Island and some Superfund sites. Water itself doesn't become radioactive (except for tritium, which has a 12 year half life); as with fallout, the radioactives are mostly solids in the water, and can be removed and converted to smaller amounts of solid waste.
With a processing plant, they could reuse the cooling water, instead of building more and more storage tanks.
The only reason there are so many water tanks to begin with is the perfunctionary insistence that "no radiation must be released into nature". The problem is: It's too late. Any of the releases that are reported as if it were a disaster completely pale in comparison to what happened in the days after March 11th 2011.
The water from the reactor is being filtered and cleaned of Caesium and Strontium. The process is good, but not perfect. But since absolute perfection is being demanded, none of the water is allowed to be released into the environment. Hence it must be stored in thousands of tanks, safely, which is as impossible a task as the ludicrous targets for radioactivity in the water.
Those tanks are necessarily makeshift in nature. The tanks cannot be individually monitored 24/7 by a limited number of people on the ground whose time in the contaminated area around the nuclear power plant is further limited by the maximum radiation dose of 20mSv per year. Yet, the government, the media and of course the usual activist groups demand the impossible. Each for their own petty reasons.
How about asking people in Fukushima Daiichi to do the possible instead of the impossible? Clean up the water as much as possible and release it into the sea. Yes, there will be some Tritium and trace amount of residual Cs and Sr - it will be a very small fraction to what was released into the sea in 2011. This would allow the people there to concentrate on actually making sure that the core equipment is running and the site as a whole is making progress to being in a better more workable state - instead of setting up new water tanks every day and worrying about leaks.
It is a marvel all of its own that workers there were at all able to keep up with setting up all those water tanks. But you should keep in mind that this isn't actually what they should be doing. They should have concentrated to bringing the plant back into a stable stead state. This will include allowing for some minor emissions of radioactive water. Provided that this is done in a controlled and closely monitored manner, this does not pose any problem that even approaches the scale of rainwater washing Caesium from the countryside into the sea (thus being part of natural decontamination processes). It will be diluted to levels that will not be harmful to the population.
Dilution is a temporary solution to pollution. And I'm not saying this should be anything more than a temporary emergency measure. I'm very surely not advocating this to be a general way to dispose of radioactive waste. But given the circumstances, it is the most reasonable solution. You should remember that the old way of diluting pollutants was not in itself false. It was just the case that it done by everyone in ever increasing scale, to the point where dilution was perfectly meaningless. But as a temporary, local, emergency measure - instead of a permanent, global and general way of doing things - it is perfectly viable.
Nobody demanded that no oil must leak from the Cosmo Oil Refinery either and for some reason nobody demands that water below that refinery conforms to drinking water standards either, nobody asks wether any of the oil that contaminated the ground there will seep into the sea (it did and it will continue to do so) - while they do demand that the water below Fukushima Daiichi must not exceed limits for driniking water safety.
Bullshit. You're off by a couple orders of magnitude, and XKCD says just as much.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Nice rant. Have any actual evidence, Mr. AC?
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Those hydrogen explosions outside of the containment structures vaporised plutonium? How the heck did that plutonium get there, and why would it be vaporized, while, say, the structure itself wasn't vaporized? How do you know that significant (say >10% by weight) of released plutonium got vaporised? Doesn't vaporised plutonium, like, condense at room temperature as you'd expect any other room temperature solid to behave? Does it subsequently sublimate if it has small particle size? I mean, man, what the fuck, do you have nothing specific to say? Get real.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yes, the pacific Ocean is very large, but it also takes a very long time to to mix evenly.. "(hundreds or thousand+ years.)" Thus a large portion of the contamination will remain in the surface layer for generations to come. These relatively hot isotopes also tend to bio-concentrate/bio-accumulate up the food chain.
Recommendation.. "Eat low on the food chain" and avoid Meat products, especially those that were caught, or were fed fish meal products from the Pacific ocean.
The Hydrogen was formed when steam(H2O) reacted with hot Zirconium(Zr) metal tubes which contained fuel pellets (and most of the fission byproducts). Upon reacting Zr +2H2O became ZrO2(white powder), H2 was released and the tubes lost all structural integrity.
As these Zr metal tubes chemically reacted and disintegrated, the fuel pellets and the associated fission byproducts(Pu included) were released into water/steam/hydrogen mix. Thus some Pu became part of the explosive mix that later detonated, destroying the containment buildings.
While a virgin U02 fuel pellet may initially start out as a hard ceramic(tightly bonded oxide), after being inside an operating nuclear reactor for several years, a significant portion(4 to 10%) is something other than a ceramic.
Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs? It could be more valuable and revelatory if someone could point to atmospheric monitoring data and could say something like, "well, our estimates are that X Roentgen's worth of radioactive material has been released, which is roughly 3.5% the amount released when Fat Man was detonated.. or the some such like?
I mean, we need to have a frame of reference for talking about this. It's like trying to have a conversation about what constitutes a healthy body-composition and body-fat percentage when the only women you've ever seen are Parisian underwear models. Can we get a comparison to some event people are familiar with?
Why do they still not know if the spent fuel pools are leaking?
From the article:
"There is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't a crack in the walls of the spent fuel pools. If salt water gets in, the steel bars would be corroded. It would basically explode the walls, and you cannot see that; you can't get close enough to the pools," he said.
1) It is trivial to determine if there is saltwater in a pool
2) People dive in those spent fuel pools to inspect the rods. So what do they mean by "you can't get close enough to the pools?"
3) When water leaks out of a container, you can detect the water level going down. Plus, it would increase the radiation that escapes the pools.
4) If there is a concern about spent fuel pools, move the spent fuel to another site!
Can someone explain what the article is trying to say?
Wouldn't it be possible to reuse the water stored in the tanks instead of using (and polluting) more fresh water?
Exactly how is TEPCO supposed to make such a statement, as long as everybody else demands the exact opposite - namely that absolutely no contamination must take place? TEPCO would probably be the first people to make such a statement, if there was any way at all to do so without defying the demands of the government (which owns TEPCO) or that of the public (which elects the government). There isn't and so they won't.
Let me repeat, TEPCO is forced to say whatever the government is saying, in the same way that a puppet is forced to do whatever the puppeteer wants it to do, because the government owns TEPCO.
So what does the government do? Whatever it takes to stay in power. To stay in power, it must appeal to the public.That's one of the problems of democracy. This does not immediately lead to unreasonable or impossible demands. The government will only follow such policies, once a significant part of the public is making such demands (or at least appears to do so), because the government wants to stay in power.
That's the problem when there are political activists trolling all through the media making misleading and impossible demands, without anybody within the media rising to their actual task of checking their statements and providing explanatory background - instead of resorting to cheap substitute of reporting limited to "who said what" and running with the implication that it must be right because somebody held in high esteem by a lot of people said it.
Democracy breaks down when the public is ill-informed and Fukushima Daiichi is a prime example for that process.
I remember all the neglecting comments about nuclear safety. Hmm.
Now listen up!
Nuclear power is unsafe!
It is not that nuclear material can't be safely maintained or stored.
The problem is we as a human race are just not up for it.
Nuclear material is stored safely on Earth by nature, inside bedrocks, deep below in the ground.
As soon as we start digging it up and start playing with it, that is when it starts to become a real problem.
So leave it where it is!
The Russians are used to decision makers by leaders. I know the man in charge of cleaning up Chernobyl; he is an internationally renowned Nobel laureate physicist (got the prize before Chernobyl) and a frank straight-shooter. In contrast the Japanese make decisions by consensus, which leads to delay and less than the most effective solutions. Over the long run the Japanese system nay be more robust; over the short run it can be disasterous.
Don't eat any food products from Japan, especially fish, seaweed (yes, especially Sushi using Japanese ingredients); avoid Pacific food products (yes, including West Coast salmon and smoked.fish), prefer Atlantic seafood, especially European smoked salmon (lox). Spring $500 for a Geiger counter with meter that can do object measurement, not just atmospheric measurement. Be suspicious of Western US propaganda claiming an ocean whirlpool effect protects their seafood. pressure the FDA to require radiation measurement of foods or drugs of Pacific Region origin, including Western US.
"Explosions at Fukushima actually vaporised an incredible amount of plutonium."
Where's the evidence of that? Most of the emissions have been more volatile stuff (e.g., Iodine and Cesium) and stuff in solution in water (strontium-90), because that's what can most easily leak out of the containment. The release of more refractory (high temperature of vaporization) isotopes is quite small at Fukushima in comparison to Chernobyl. In fact, scientists didn't detect significant Pu until a very careful survey was done and reported about year later. The Fukushima results are several orders of magnitude lower (by about 10000x) for Pu. That matches the observed fact that the cores at Fukushima were never directly exposed to the open atmosphere, whereas Chernobyl's was literally blown to pieces and strewn across the terrain. So, claiming that "an incredible amount of plutonium" was vaporized is a bit of an exaggeration, unless you're referring to plutonium that is still trapped inside of the reactor cores and buildings rather than released into the surrounding environment, or unless you mean that any amount of plutonium released in the atmosphere is an "incredible amount" (in which case I refer you to the decades of weapons testing that strew the stuff all over the planet and are still detectable as background). It's bad in the vicinity of Fukushima inside the exclusion zones, but in concentration, total amount, and distance, it is a lot smaller than Chernobyl by every measure.
The Russian effort to contain Chernobyl was an admirable effort under much harsher conditions than Fukushima.. That led to a much more desperate approach that included shovelling the pieces of core back into the building, dumping tons of concrete, sand, and all sorts of material on there, some of which it was later determined did not help, but made things worse. Dumping sandbags on top of the thing from helicopters wasn't exactly a carefully-considered solution, although they did try to mix as much boron (neutron absorber) as they could into it. Given the situation and the many unknowns about what was going on, the way it was done is not surprising, but it did lead to a rather unstable structure that is anything but "safe as possible for the foreseeable future". You can't be serious about that when the Ukraine has been spending years building a new containment structure because the old one is leaky and in danger of collapsing. By contrast, most of the main structures at Fukushima are still intact (the hydrogen explosions were *outside* the containment), which makes the task of entombing the reactors somewhat easier and less hazardous, and it doesn't have the same kind of urgency because you don't have radioactive graphite blocks burning and large pieces of fuel all over the ground in the area. Fukushima isn't a good situation, but it doesn't justify the same kind of desperate and risky approach as at Chernobyl.
"And yet, the people around Fukushima were definitively told by government scientists that radiation below a certain level was COMPLETELY harmless."
If they were told that, then it was wrong. If, on the other hand, they were told that radiation exposure below a certain level was no worse than the kind of exposures that people accept every day when they fly on a plane, eat a banana, or just sit in a room with natural radioactivity all around them, then that would be fine. There is indeed a level of radiation below which there is no point worrying about, because we get exposed to that much regardless of what we do. That's why "background radiation" isn't zero.
The suggestion that this is some kind of experiment is nonsensical. People are studying the area to understand the risks and the best strategy for containing and remediating the area. Accusing people of participating in an intentional medical experiment on the citizens of Japan by using supposedly sub-standard containment practices is grossly offensive.
As these Zr metal tubes chemically reacted and disintegrated, the fuel pellets and the associated fission byproducts(Pu included) were released into water/steam/hydrogen mix. Thus some Pu became part of the explosive mix that later detonated, destroying the containment buildings.
But then the explosion is probably irrelevant. The Pu particulate sizes were already small enough to be carried out with the gas escaping the containment structure. I'd still like to see some experimental evidence to back up the claim that dispersing such Pu particulate in hydrogen/air mixture, and subsequently detonating it, would actually change the size of the Pu particles in such a way that they will spread farther (if that's what the AC implied). I mean, if the presumed vaporization is bad, there must be a reason why it's bad, and the only reason I see is that the particles get smaller and travel farther. Even that might be a wrong assumption - some particle size classes may have very long half-time of suspension in the atmosphere, so they may, counterintuitively, be less polluting in spite of traveling very far. They'd "never" get to the ground (or at least get there very slowly). The vaporization is besides the point, all that happens is that the Pu will recondense, as it necessarily will, on whatever condensation nuclei are around (whatever more-robust-than-Pu dust already in the air). Basically, the explosion might turn out to be a completely bogus thing to worry about.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Nuclear power is unsafe!
Absolutely it is. It just happens to be safer than the current alternatives, and a lot safer than going back to the stone age and doing without power.
Anyone who really cares about safety (or indeed the environment) should be focussed on one thing only: eliminating coal as a source of energy. Until that happens, all of this scaremongering is just a distraction.
I always chuckle when the technology crowd here at slashdot and the people leaning right on the political spectrum always seem to pump up nuclear power as the solution to our energy needs.
Sure, in theory with the proper safeguards it could be ok.. but as Yogi Berra said:
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice there is.."
And the cost for mistakes is so high and long lasting.
You are probably right about coal and fossil fuel in general. That's a slow death.
Nuclear on the other hand is a random killer, striking without warning. Kind of like a mad terrorist with access to radioactive material.
Then again, what about the wast problem. Can we administrate waste over a 10.000 year period ?
I don't think so.
Sun power is good, especially near equator.
Wind power is good wherever there is wind.
Same with water power (wind=>waves).
But i would much rather like to see the next moon project being about helium 3 harvesting.
Imagine one ton of H3 arriving at earth every month.
That would be the biggest change in energy production ever.
E=Mc^2 gives you the answer.
The more mass you convert to energy, the bigger the explosion. The unconsumed fuel is the radioactive waste that is spread about, so if you are producing waste, you aren't creating the theoretically most efficient detonation. Since the goal with most nuclear devices is to create a big explosion, most military weapons are going to be designed the be as efficient as possible. (Especially because of the c^2 portion of the equation, which says that even a little mass will release a lot of energy. Even being a little more efficient with your fuel will yield a lot more energy.)
Now you could build bombs that poison the detonation zone, but that makes them substantially less useful. For example, you can't really use them against an invader or against a enemy in close proximity. You can't use them when invading, because you are poisoning the land you are trying to take and hold.You are also getting a smaller bang for your buck, where your opponent might be employing higher yield clean bombs. (Or worse, twice as many bombs of the same yield.)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You are probably right about coal and fossil fuel in general. That's a slow death.
As soon as you say that, you've entirely missed the point. Coal - specifically coal and just coal - is a horrible nasty source of power. The pollution is bad for all involved, the mining is bad for all involved, and mine fires are as close to Hell on Earth as anyone should ever see.
Natural gas doesn't have these problems. Burns clean, and while we're still figuring out what problems fracking can cause, it doesn't hold a candle to the problems coal causes.
The total worldwide deaths ever attributable to nuclear power are just tiny (and almost all from Chernobyl) on the scale of deaths from mining coal.
Ultimately solar is the way to go. But that will take decades, and in the meantime everything-but-coal would be a vast improvement with no miracle technologies needed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm sure you saw Bennett Ramberg's paper in Annual Reviews of Energy many years ago. He was concerned about dangers from high explosives ( not necessarily sustained). When I spoke to Velikhov he said that had they had it earlier, it might have prevented Chernobyl.
Half truth.
1. It is true that "normal rate" is 1-ish per 100,000
2. It is not true that there is not MORE than 1-ish per 100,000
There are plenty of people with thyroid cancers that never manifest themselves and never cause problems. Some populations have 30% rate of thyroid nodules simply because of their genes, and nothing to do with any radiations.
A doctor told me once, if you screen carefully enough, you will find *something* wrong with almost everyone. Be that some thyroid nodule, some cysts on your liver or kidneys, some partial artery occlusion in your brain, or heart with screwed up electrical connections (at least 8% of males in the last group!)
Furthermore, it is well known that radioactive iodine exposure results in tumors being produced in the thyroid about 7 years after said exposure. That is from years and years of using I-131 to cure hyperthyroidism. (yes, it is continued to be used because there are no safer alternatives).
So, your entire poast is a half-truth. We will ONLY know that real rate of thyroid tumors because of Fukushima in about 10 years, after the 7-year peak that happens in about 5. Only then will there be sufficient information to weed out the sporadic cancers from the radioactive iodine cancers.
The event was raised from a level 1 atomic event to a level 3 (per the article, read it a couple of times I did).
Each level is 10 times more "severe" than the level below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale
Level 4 is Accident with Local Consequences; in my opinion they are at least one level too low. Given the food chain potential implications, level 5 may actually be honest, Accident with Wider Consequences.
The best people in the world need to be working on this problem until it is resolved. No other response is rational.
BlameBillCosby.com
More people die every single year simply falling off roofs installing solar panels than from nuclear power plants.
that the same folks who are pro-nuclear also tend to be anti-regulation. That's a hell of a recipe for disaster.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If Fukushima killed half the population of Japan, then on average nuclear power would be *almost* as deadly as coal.
Of one thing we can be sure. Any official report will paint as rosy a picture as possible. And by possible, I mean without immediate, predictable, credible contradiction. And by credible, I mean contradiction by those whom the officials lack the power to silence. That doesn't, in fact, lead to very many contradictions, except those between official reports and reality.
could be wrong, but I'm thinking that the core technology here was built, licencesed and or, contracted from General Electric or Westinghouse.
dumb question..... but why aren't they removing the radioactive rods or whatever from that particular site and storing them else where? or is it a giant melted mess?
Actually a very good question. And the answer is: yes, removing the fuel rods and making them safe in permanent storage is a very sensible thing to want, and TEPCO is planning to start doing this this November.
The bad news, as I understand it, and the reason why they haven't done this obvious thing until now, is that moving fuel rods is very dangerous since you don't want to get two rods too close to each other otherwise you get a criticality event (a small fission reaction). While radioisotopes can give you cancer or make you very sick, a criticality could kill you in days. And while the rods in the fuel pools aren't melted like the cores are, they have been badly shaken by the earthquake, tsunami and explosions, and they've been drenched in corrosive seawater for two years. I'm guessing that could mean that they're likely to be jammed in their framework, maybe shaken loose, possibly with their cladding decayed, some of them in pool 4 may already have burned, and all this will make handling them a very difficult and dangerous manual process.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/pgms/worknotify/uranium.html
http://m.deseretnews.com/article/250010691/Uranium-mining-left-a-legacy-of-death.html?pg=all
http://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/1992/11000/Navajo_Birth_Outcomes_in_the_Shiprock_Uranium.5.aspx
Etc
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.