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Living In Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone Would Be No Worse Than Living In London, Research Suggests (bristol.ac.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from University of Bristol, England: New research suggests that few people, if any, should be asked to leave their homes after a big nuclear accident, which is what happened in March 2011 following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Professor Thomas's team used the Judgement or J-value to balance the cost of a safety measure against the increase in life expectancy it achieves. The J-value is a new method pioneered by Professor Thomas that assesses how much should be spent to protect human life and the environment. The researchers found that it was difficult to justify relocating anyone from Fukushima Daiichi, where four and a half years after the accident around 85,000 of the 111,000 people who were moved out by the Japanese government had still not returned. After the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, in what was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union (USSR), the J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining. Using the J-value method, 31,000 people would have needed to be moved, with the number rising to 72,000 if the whole community was evacuated when five per cent of its residents were calculated to lose nine months of life or more.
Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol, said: "Mass relocation is expensive and disruptive. But it is in danger of becoming established as the prime policy choice after a big nuclear accident. It should not be. Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation." For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The results are published in a special issue of Process Safety and Environmental Protection, a journal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol, said: "Mass relocation is expensive and disruptive. But it is in danger of becoming established as the prime policy choice after a big nuclear accident. It should not be. Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation." For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The results are published in a special issue of Process Safety and Environmental Protection, a journal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
Does it account for the spike in sudden infant death syndrome in the areas of Japan after 2011?
http://saveie6.com/
I don't know if anyone noticed, but London was a war zone during Ramadan.
I'm waiting with interest to see what London is like from May 15 -> June 15 of next year. I predict it will be much worse, and there will have to be enormous outcry from the British people before something gets done.
Probably a bunch of populist ministers be elected on this very point (over the next year to three years), and eventually a re-formed government will step in with a heavy hand to stop it.
Interesting times.
J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining
The Life Expectancy is a statistical quantity. Reducing the average life expectancy by 8 months doesn't mean there won't be data outliers, or individuals affected with undue severity, E.G. Individuals whom will die much earlier because of the incident.
This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.
> This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.
One person saved by spending the $X relocating them matters, of course.
The two people who COULD have been saved by using that money to clean up the radiation more thoroughly instead also matter.
The 30 people who could have been saved by spending that money on traffic safety matter still more.
We have a certain amount of resources, a budget. If we have $10 billion to spend on making people safer, we then have to decide which safety projects to fund, with how much going to each project. We can't fund everything that seems like it might save some lives. Some we we wouldn't want to fund even if we had unlimited money - taking people away from their homes and communities disrupts their lives, and permanently moving people who weren't all that close to Chernobyl was worse for them than leaving them alone would have been. The strongest radioactive material released had a half-life of only eight days, so while a two-week temporary evacuation probably made sense, permanently uprooting the people in the outer perimeter was bad for them, overall.
Anway, let's consider projects that WOULD be good for people. With research, we find that some safety measures are far more effective than others, and some are far more expensive than others:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m...
To save the most lives in total we want to mostly fund projects which save a lot of lives per resource spent (we measure resources in dollars, for convenience).
The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.
If you want to join the latest American fad and become a mass shooter, you really ought to target a hospice.
None of these people were going to live more than 9 months anyway, so it's no big deal. The authorities should let you off with just a warning.
For some reason I got to talking with some of my co-workers on the nuclear emergency evacuation plans that get printed in phone books and such. We live near an operating nuclear power plant so I guess plans like this are legally required or something. The area around the reactor was separated into evacuation zones, each zone is supposed to head out away from the power plant to a specified neighboring city.
One of my co-workers mentioned that where we worked was in one zone and where his children went to school was in a different zone. He said they can take their plan and shove it, he's got his own plan. I suspect that he's not unique. If someone were to actually order an evacuation then we'd have chaos as everyone does their own thing. I suspect that the police and National Guard would be called out to maintain some semblance of order but that's just wishful thinking.
We've had evacuations because of floods before and I saw some of the mayhem from a fairly local, and visible, threat. You take an invisible and widespread threat (and quite likely theoretical threat) like a radiation release then all plans will go out the window. You'll have panicked parents punching out police officers at roadblocks so they can get to their children before the school buses them off to somewhere a county away from where the parents are supposed be. That's assuming the police even show up.
But we can't have nuclear power because we have what has been proven to be a non-issue while we keep burning coal, which also creates a much more certain (and again still theoretical) threat to the safety of children.
Oh, and the lack of new nuclear power means we keep operating current nuclear power plants decades beyond their designed lifespan. Fukushima Daiichi would likely have been shutdown 20 years ago if Japan had not stopped building new nuclear power plants.
So, we can do an orderly shutdown of these old nuclear power reactors or wait until we have to do a very disorderly shutdown. We'll have people claim we can replace these nuclear power reactors with wind and solar but how much will that cost? Wind might look cheap until we figure out that all installed capacity is not equal. A nuclear power plant can have a capacity factor of 90% and wind a capacity factor of 30%. You shutdown a one gigawatt nuclear power plant then you'll need three gigawatts of wind capacity and a Tesla PowerWall big enough to run a small city for hours. Money costs lives too, raising energy prices means less money for food, medical care, and so on.
We've known that nuclear power is exceedingly safe. This study of current practice proves that nuclear is even safer than shown before. Maybe there was a good reason to stop building as many nuclear power plants as we did in the 1970s and 1980s. Not building new nuclear power reactors now is just making things worse.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Jee wis mister wizard, the glorious as holes that built a nuclear site to minimum specâ(TM)s should have their heads hanging the 30 foot wall where 60 foot waves pass by. As for the soulless but whole from Bristol. I thought it was harder to become a professor in the U.K..
I love it when here, on Slashdot, we get these self-serving "anonymous submissions" where some obscure academic pushes their own pet ideas on something or other. It seems to happen once or twice a month anymore.
#DeleteChrome
I'm ordinarily okay with scams preying on ignorance of basic mathematics. Most of them are cons where most of the participants get what their irrational greed has earned them, and the state-run affairs like the lottery at least pour money into schools and -- one hopes -- more people who understand simple statistics. Nuclear accidents, on the other hand, affect those who know better as much as those who don't. Gamma rays will be gamma rays, after all.
When someone says that a population of 30,000 people will lose an average of 9 months of life, that doesn't mean everyone loses 9 months of life evenly. This is an average, and injuries from radiation follow a Gaussian distribution. Half of the population will lose less than 9 months, and half the population will lose more. Some will lose a *lot* more than 9 months of their lives. Many may live out their pre-accident life expectancies but do so with various impairments.
The only reason we're talking about nuclear at this point is that there is a shit ton of money invested in uranium extraction and processing and a handful of companies that stand to make billions off of building and running the plants, never mind the enormous sums that the arms industry makes off of the great powers with their wars to secure supply lines.
It's not because wind and solar aren't well on their way to supplying our needs or that we don't already have current and near-future energy storage technologies to avoid shortfalls. It's because a small number of institutional investors can make an insane amount of money from maintaining the current highly-centralized power generation business model, and there's no danger of fed up consumers cutting some or all of their profits by installing their own household nuclear reactors like there is with solar.
This changes the moment we have practical fusion power, but fission is not only a pointlessly dangerous scam, it's an entirely unnecessary one.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation.
Performing a life-saving (or avoiding life-shortening) relocation simply on the basis of whether it is "cost-effective" is a disgraceful way for a government or corporation to behave.
Apart from anything else, who would trust a government (even less: a company) to perform that life-long remediation? To keep investing in an area long after the voters have forgotten what happened there. And who is to say that the remediation would not have effects: either inconvenience, suffering or grief for those concerned.
And in any case. We are told that prevention is better then cure
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This report is bullshit, or perhaps the summary of the report failed to summarize it accurately.
Compared to what?
The last time I looked, Harrow, Kensington and Chelsea were all part of London. Perhaps the reason people born in these districts is related to economic circumstances of their lives, not environmental.
But do people in London live longer (more than Blackpool or Manchester) or shorter (4 and a half months) lives?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
So how many feral ghouls are there in London now then?
I can't imagine the public transportation in a fallout zone being better than London's. Of course you wouldn't need to commute so much if you could afford to rent closer to your job.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The rents are much more reasonable in a nuclear disaster fallout zone, but it's very hard to get a pint of London Pride bitter.
So it's probably best to stick with London, unless you're a Tory or UKIP nonce, in which case the nuclear disaster fallout zone is a far better choice, since you won't find as many SJWs there and you can be among your own kind. We're offering a free tube of sunscreen if you decide to move. We'll even drive you to the train.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...regurgitating talking points debunked earlier this week. Although at least this time you're not complaining about the high cost of nuclear power coming from government regulation. Maybe because it was pointed out that a couple hundred million in extra costs from regulation (higher seawall and better backup cooling power) could have saved Japan a couple hundred billion in cleanup costs?
Because the cost can never be justified. Didn't seem to pick up on that one.
Coal and nuclear are non sequiturs when wind and solar have lapped them in cost effectiveness, and thats allowing coal and nuclear to externalize most of their costs. Like offloading nuclear plant decommission and waste storage onto taxpayers.
Living In London As Bad As Living In Nuclear Fallout Zone
Where is the sensationalism when you want it? ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
My wife changed her name from "Jane" to "Wife" in my phone. Not everyone see's traditional labels as ownership.
So you might die, and it would cost somebody his bonus to prevent that.
It's the Ford Edsel all over again.
At the bottom of the
At least until cold fusion. Which may never come.
Learn to love Alaska
If you're Chief Mutant and you're not driving around in some sort of pimped out vehicle then you're doing it wrong frankly.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Real estate prices would be way lower than London.
My experience is that "wife" is used by women to denote ownership of their husband.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
I mean I know London is fucked with brexit.... but I didnâ(TM)t know it was THIS FUCKED!
When nuclear power competed against oil and coal, it had an advantage. But now it competes against wind and sun, and costs many times what those other and newer technologies cost. It has lost any advantage it may once have had and no offers only danger on a huge scale. No thanks.
~_~ Not tonight, dear, I have a modem.
Or maybe they wanted to make sure the comment was completely anonymous - can you tell what gender the AC is?
...tranny cow ... sodomite "marriages"
That explains it - people shouldn't be allowed to think and behave differently from you.
Interesting that comments like that are always anonymous - if you think you're correct you should be willing to put your name to your thoughts.
A bit like a colleague of mine - he believes that black people are less intelligent than white people. That makes him by definition racist, but he doesn't like being described as racist for some reason.
But it didn't. So I don't get why you whine about what regulation removal would do to make nuclear cheaper. Oh, hang on, I do. Party politics hippies and lefties like renewables so you hate them.
> The most dangerous material around Chernobyl is Plutonium.
> If it gets into your organism, you most certainly die due to it.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Plutonium is dangerous, and as far as we know it's never killed anyone. It seems that inhaling plutonium dust is more dangerous than ingesting it, because it's suspected that inhaling plutonium increases the risk of lung cancer. Without any known deaths from either it's hard to quantify that, though. There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s. There has not been a single lung cancer among them. Albert Stevens had the highest dose of plutonium ever, having been injected with it in the 1940s. He lived to 79 years old, when he died of heart failure.
> Before someone says it, the initial evacuation could not have been avoided. There was no way to know how bad the situation was going to get.
Did they have to evacuate the entire continent immediately? Obviously no. Was it unavoidable that they evacuate everyone with 500 miles, within 24 hours? Nope, they didn't do that either. 50 miles? 5 miles? 1 mile? It was prudent to temporarily evacuate the people within 2 miles of the plant fairly quickly. Nothing about it was "unavoidable", who to evacuate when, for how long, was all judgement calls based on both safety and PR.
We need a conversation about the value of ONE human life
Or with living under a solar panel. So when you moving to chernobyl, fuckstain?
(oh, by the way, unless you're being told to live in a uranium mine, why the fuck do you demand solar panel proponents live in mines, shitforbrains?)
Perhaps he's getting confused with Polonium?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People with permanent radiation poisoning can actually get pretty old. It is just not fun at all. If the primary metric is age at time of death, then that metric is spectacularly unsuitable. This looks far more like just one more attempts of the nuclear apologists to demonstrate that nuclear is actually very safe. It is not, at least not as practiced by the greedy scum currently in control of that industry.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Could we compromise and nuke London?
Statistically speaking, we could solve a big part of the climate change problem if we just killed off half of the world's population.
Policies and decision making cannot be based on statistics alone professor.
> The most dangerous material around Chernobyl is Plutonium. > If it gets into your organism, you most certainly die due to it.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Plutonium is dangerous, and as far as we know it's never killed anyone.
The Japanese might not agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm Agent Hotline in my wife's phone. She used to sell insurance and when she broke her phone (she subscribes to breaking phones, 3-4 per year) and I reloaded stuff my number loaded rather than the insurance company one.
I am Agent Hotline. I'm exciting.
Anyway, making pancakes for breakfast. And everyone has to use the bathroom...
BlameBillCosby.com
Most people don't seem to realize that, but coal plants put out a lot more radiation that operating nuclear plants!
Because natural coal contains quite a few radioactive isotopes, which then goes out the chimneys.
You can literally map cancer rates to the distance from coal plants, most of the time!
Yes, if nuclear plants go bad, they fuck up everything. That's still true.
But coal plants slowly fuck up everything in normal operation!
IQ is genetic and adoption studies kind of confirm it. Is this so surprising? After all, some genetic traits lead to larger people (Northern Europeans vs. Southern Europeans) or more fast-twitch muscles for some groups over others, why wouldn't we expect race to impact intelligence?
The author of the paper makes sure to mention that up front - it's not meant to be critical of officials at the time. It intended to provide another piece of information that officials can use when considering whether to order an evacuation when something happens in the future. During Hurricane Irma, for example, officials in Florida ordered mandatory evacuations only for the coast, which was the most dangerous place to be. Most of Florida was not evacuated because officials had learned that evacuation orders themselves cause problems and should not be made unnecessarily.
The J-value is a new method pioneered by Professor Thomas that assesses how much should be spent to protect human life and the environment.
The environment is probably a better long term investment than human stupidity. We should split them into two values and weight the environment heavier.
We'll make great pets
I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Of course you don't know everything ahead of time, decision makers make judgement calls based on the available information (and hopefully contingency plans made ahead o time). Judgement calls. Unlike what GP claims, over-reacting is neither required nor particularly frequent. "Limited information" does not mean you must evacuate the whole country, or any specific geographic area.
What we teach mayors, city managers, and other decision makers is that *because* there is limited information available when an incident occurs, and limited time for discussion and deliberation, you'll likely be far better off if you have some template contingency plans in place ahead of, and in many cases it's good for those plans to have degrees or stages. If you're an official in Florida, or anywhere along the east coast, you should have hurricane plans ready BEFORE hurricane season, when you have time to discuss and plan carefully. Those plans should have triggers assigned ahead of time "when a category 3 storm is 300 miles away, activate chapter 4 of this plan". All cities, states, and countries should have generic "evacuate an area" plans, because all may have something happen that requires an evacuation. (We teach disaster preparedness to government officials at TEEX). In our courses, we have the responsible parties practice the plans, then watch themselves on the video and phone recordings and see what they could improve. Most think they passed along information that they never actually said, that's a very common error.
Ten years after Chernobyl, thousands of people who had been forcibly evacuated still didn't have new homes. That's a failure of planning. The government should have had in place plans to be able to house people affected by some sort of emergency.
That some sort of evacuation might be needed in some part of the country was entirely predictable. The failure wasn't caused by lack of information during the event. They had years before and after to figure out how to house people affected by some sort of disaster.
The author is correct if one doesn't take ANY humanity into account. I'm sure it is less disruptive to society for a few families to watch their children slowly die of radiation poisoning. However, I doubt any of those families would agree with the author. Perhaps they should try it themselves?
London Determined to be Just as Bad as Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone
Hurr Hurr, very funny!
But, it isn't about pancakes. It is about if she is hurt and somebody needs to contact you.
She could be in the hospital, and the doctors would be making her life-and-death decisions instead of you because all they had was her phone.
They'll be able to figure out who everybody is and call you tomorrow, of course. Wouldn't you want to be there?
Personally, I think NOx is a serious problem here.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Define CF? Based on your post, I don't think you can.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Most of the radioisotopes from a coal plant are in the bottom ash. Which is only not toxic waste by act of congress. Bottom ash is technically uranium ore, it could be economic to extract.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Paris is a beautiful city. Pariasns are festering assholes that make Massholes seem relatively nice.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You clearly don't know what CF is, but are posting about it?
An emergency backup unit that runs a couple of times/year does not have a 100% CF. CF is a simple metric. Look it up, it will save you from looking like a moron in future. Too late for today.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
These comparison statistics are probably largely irrelevant to the main point of the article. They're much more likely to just be a reflection of how decades of London-centric central government policies have resulted in prolonged neglect of the already-poorer provinces of the UK. This neglect has led to increased poverty, poorer public education, health and healthcare standards.
It may indeed be possible to make a case that such environmental and cultural differences are of much greater comparative significance than local radioactive fallout. However, the way they're used in the summary is almost certainly misleading to those unfamiliar with the wealth gap between London and much of the rest of the UK (particularly Scotland and the north of England). A US analogy would be something like directly comparing (e.g.) Detroit to Manhattan.
Just a note about how life expectancy calculations work. I'm 47, my life expectancy now is +9 years higher than it was when I was 10 because of the mass of young men who die young. I've got a fairly simple rule for this sort of guff, does it sound like a good idea? Radiation leak = dangerous = reduce danger by moving people away. Yeah, makes sense vs some guy in the UK came up with an equation that quantifies how many people we should move and places a $ value of life. A whole heap of issues with this.
You have two diesel generators. ... something like 0.003 CF.
One is running 24h/365d with varying load between 85% and 95% and occasionally 100%, it has a CF of perhaps 90%.
You have a second one, same brand, same capabilities, you run it 1 day a year with 100% output it has something like 1/365 CF
Do you get now what a CF is? I don't guess so ...
If you have a country that is run only by nuclear power, but your load varies over the day from 40% (of daytime max) at night to 100% (at daytime), then more than half of your plants can not run with full power. Hence they don't have a CF of 90% or more, but just 20% or 40% or even less.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The real problem is not how to manage life expectancy in the event of an accident. The real problem is the fact that living in post modern industrialized cities is killing us.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
"We don't want to relocate poor people who live in areas we screwed up." Film at 11.
Living in London is no better than living in a nuclear disaster fallout zone?
Thanks for the response, seriously. I'm prone to things like axe wounds and spider bites (my current issue), but my wife is her real name on my cell phone (other than some additional characters the kids added to the end).
Thinking it through, responders would be able to get into her unlocked phone (no security code or anything), and the most recent calls would be myself or her parents (or someone else that knows me).
But that doesn't address your comment, I very much appreciate what you said and have emailed her regarding it.
Damn it, I want to be Agent Hotline!!!!
BlameBillCosby.com