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Flying in Airplanes Exposes People To More Radiation Than Standing Next To a Nuclear Reactor (businessinsider.com)
Traveling the skies by jet lifts us far from the hustle and bustle of the world below. From a report: But many flyers don't know that soaring miles above Earth also takes us out of a vital protective cocoon -- and a little closer to a place where our cells can be pummeled by radiation from colliding stars, black holes, and more. You can't see these high-energy charged particles, but at any given moment, tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions. Also called cosmic rays or cosmic ionizing radiation, the particles are the cores of atoms, such as iron and nickel, moving at nearly light-speed. They can travel for millions of years through space before randomly hitting Earth. These rays don't pose much of a risk to humans on Earth's surface, since the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from most of the threat.
For something like this you would be better off reading the peer reviewed papers
on the subject rather than rhetoric on an Internet forum.
Then again, it might be more important to some people to scare the public with scary factoids than to provide education. That's my observation at least.
TL;DR: Airline pilots have some higher risk of skin cancer but not other cancers. Also additional lifestyle factors are difficult to filter out from sample set.
This isn't news. Flight attendants suffer increased risk of cancer. Probably because of this radiation. Astronauts have restrictions on total flight hours because of cosmic radiation.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
These sorts of statistics have been covered by XKCD
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Kyshtim was a weapons production facility in the USSR.
Sellafield was a weapons production facility located in Great Britain.
Idaho Falls was a military experiment that killed 3 people from a steam explosion not radiation.
Jaslovske Bohunice was due to a leak of carbon dioxide not radiation
Three Mile Island resulted in 0 dead.
Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture was the result of an explosion from bad procedures at reprocessing plant. It was not at a nuclear power plant.
Fukushima resulted in 0 dead from radiation.
Why are anti-nuclear people disappointed to learn that nuclear power hasn't killed more people? Given the realities of climate change it is immoral to oppose nuclear power.
not sure if clickbait or fear-mongering.Go eat a banana then get tested for radiation. Bananas are an excellent natural source for Potassium, which is naturally radioactive. Radiation Dose Chart According to that chart, a banana is about the same dose as living within 50 miles of a normal reactor for a year.
You are aware that the idea of a "banana equivalent dose" has been thouroughly debunked, right? The net increase of radioactivity exposure from eating a banana is: zero
"The Potassium-40 in bananas is a particularly poor model isotope to use, Meggitt says, because the potassium content of our bodies seems to be under homeostatic control. When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40. The net dose of a banana is zero."
(source: https://boingboing.net/2010/08... )
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The main problem is we don't use the fuel we can scavenge from so called "depleted" nuclear fuel. We have reactor designs that are safe and can burn depleted fuel while producing both usable fissionable isotopes as burn byproducts and much shorter half-life isotopes as "waste" ( and heat which can be turned into energy the same as just about any other reactor, as well as the "waste" being fuel for another reactor too). But those isotopes can be "weaponized", so the answer is to just bury the used fuel after stripping out whatever usable isotopes you can from it.
Hell we have reactor chain designs that could virtually eliminate waste from the nuclear chain, leaving behind barely radioactive stuff similar to the amount of radiation mine tailings put out. Unfortunately they all depend on the first and second tier reactor designs that can produce "weapons grade" fissile material. This material has properties that make it a great choice for reactors too: it's stable in known configurations, it doesn't have much if any impurities that would cause spontaneous fission I.E. unstable fissile element isotope contamination, and it's a cleaner decay chain due to knowing exact mixes of exact isotopes - with little variations from contamination from same element undesired isotopes.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
No.
It is a level 4 if one person is killed form radiation OR there is a release of radiation that will affect local populations with effects not greater than local food contamination controls OR fuel melt / damage to fuel that has more than 0.1% of the total core weight leak from containment OR release of high amounts of radioactive material in containment that also have a high probability of public exposure.
As for differentiation - A reactor that produces electricity is run by people and inspected by the international community. A weapons reactor is run by military personnel that let's face it, most of them couldn't get into the same training programs in civilian life if they tried... there is a reason they went into the military, and for most of them it isn't patriotism. Also it's a "government secret" so has no international oversight.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!