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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."
Even failed plants, aside from Chernobyl, have not harmed anyone from radiation. Everyone should know that as well, but they don't.
So, a few things.
One, when you are standing "next to" a nuclear reactor, you still have all of the shielding between you and the reactor. It's not that much radiation.
Two, the article points out how NASA monitors radiation exposure of it's astronauts, but airlines don't do any such thing for flight crews. Again, this is a false comparison. Astronauts pass outside of our atmosphere entirely, while airplanes do nothing of the sort. You may as well complain that they don't provide space suits when you fly on Jet Blue.
Three, they actually do show a little real science...and illustrate that the annual exposure of a full-time flight crew while in the air is about 3 mSv. And they state that 10 days in space gets you 4.3 mSv of exposure. So even by their own numbers, the simple fact is that this isn't a real problem. Effectively, a flight crew gets 4 times the exposure to "cosmic radiation" (as they call it in the article) as a person who is standing on the ground at sea level.
Next up: Businessinsider.com exposes the "massive" amounts of radiation that high-altitude mountain climbers receive. Not only are they really high up (like real astronauts!), they don't even have a plane around them!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
If there were substantial cancer risks due to flying, the data miners at insurance companies would have already correlated their payouts on treatments for high-frequency fliers like pilots and would be raising their premiums. Insurance companies are very much on top of cancer-causing workplaces.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Everyone knows this or should.
Indeed. I remember learning this in elementary school 40 years ago. You get way more radiation by living in Colorado than by living nextdoor to a nuclear power plant.
The issue isn't radiation from being around a well-operating nuclear plant, which should be negligible. The issue is when those plants fail
This is the problem with stupid "factoids" like "coal is more radioactive than nuclear". They always consider nukes that are "operating normally", and leave out Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi, TMI, etc.
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.
Spot on!
Reading the line "tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions" my first reaction was:
Divide "tens of thousands" by the surface area of the atmosphere.
My next thought was to divide my own profile surface area (maybe 1 square meter?) by the surface area of the Earth's atmosphere (500 trillion, or thereabouts) and multiply that by "tens of thousands" to come up with the probability of getting hit by a cosmic ray.
Then I realized that the OP stated "at any given moment", and realized that you can't multiply by the number of "moments" in a flight.
The article is complete emotional bullshit.
Tenuous? there is 11 psi difference between sea level and 35,000 feet. so a one inch deep by one inch wide column of air from the ground to 35,000 feet weighs 11 pounds. How much does a square inch of aircraft skin weigh?
dose is about 1 mrem per hour, compared to 1 mrem per day on ground. still, only air crew have slightly higher melanoma rates than people who work on the ground as only proven effect (sunbathers, sun tanners and beach lovers are at much more risk), the danger to passengers is essentially zero.
The potassium chloride you find in most supermarkets (in water softener tablets and as salt substitutes) will expose you to about as much radiation as nuclear waste. And heaven forbid you have a granite countertop in your home. The radiation detectors CBP has installed at border checkpoints are regularly triggered by mundane shipments like cat litter, granite, porcelain, bananas, nuts.
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. (and living that close to a coal plant is triple that dose!)
This is one of those "Your odds of getting killed by a cow are greater than getting killed by a shark" moments.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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
I'm sorry, but most or all of these are classified as class 4 or higher on the IAEA International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
For a class 4 to be declared, one of the criteria is that it must have caused death by radiation poisoning.
What you're pointing to when saying 0 deaths is that none of the individual deaths can be proven to be due to the increased radiation. Much like the tobacco companies claimed that smoking was harmless because you couldn't prove that any individual death was due to smoking. It's just as disingenuous, and is easily refuted by statistics showing that cancer death rates have indeed gone up both in the aftermath of Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Whether one can point to any specific death and conclude that that one death was caused by it is irrelevant. The IAEA looks at the statistics.
As for your claim that one needs to differentiate the reasons for the reactors - why exactly? A reactor that produces electricity and a reactor that enriches plutonium are both reactors, with a risk of radioactive contamination. There have been accidents and releases of radioactive material in both. Quite often the same radioactive materials. And the claim was that reactors was safe, not that electricity producing commercial ones were. Moving the goal posts doesn't help.
As for your claim that one needs to differentiate the reasons for the reactors - why exactly? A reactor that produces electricity and a reactor that enriches plutonium are both reactors, with a risk of radioactive contamination. There have been accidents and releases of radioactive material in both. Quite often the same radioactive materials. And the claim was that reactors was safe, not that electricity producing commercial ones were. Moving the goal posts doesn't help..
They are different. They do not use the same radioactive materials. Uranium for nuclear energy is only enriched to approximately ~1%-4%. Weapon materials needs to be enriched to ~80%+. So they are different. They also function differently. The mechanics and physics are different. Nuclear energy is also the safest form of power including solar and wind. That is a statistical fact that the IAEA acknowledges. 4th generation reactors are even better. We are not moving the goal posts. You anti-nuclear people are moving the goal posts. 5 of those example occurred before I was even born and the last two occurred with technology older then I am.
It's just as disingenuous, and is easily refuted by statistics showing that cancer death rates have indeed gone up both in the aftermath of Fukushima and Three Mile Island.
I am going to need a credible source for that and not any of that ecowatch bs.
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.
I am going to need a credible source for that and not any of that ecowatch bs.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
http://www.thelancet.com/journ...
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.
Quit that binary thinking. Just quit it, Just because someone points out that there are problems related to nuclear reactors, especially when they fail, does not mean that they are opposed to nuclear power.
What I'm for is that not only adequate but reassuring safeguards are in place, both for production and post-production. Not from an economic standpoint with more insurance and lawyers, but from a worst case standpoint with actual physical safeguards, already existing evacuation and containment and remediation plans. Hopefully things won't go wrong, but with the numerous examples where reactors have gone wrong, more focus on what else to do when things do go wrong seems needed. Admit that there are problems, and don't let that stop us.
Because this is /., the obligatory car analogy is that hust because cars are very safe relative to horseback riding doesn't mean that we should rest on our laurels and say that seat belts and air bags and crumple zones is a waste of money, and that more research into car and road safety isn't useful.
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!