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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.
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!
Yes, a very slight increase in cancer risk but not necessarily attributable to radiation. Prostate cancer is a risk, evidently is from prolonged sitting (truck drivers see similar risk). The problem with tying cancers to occupational or medial radiation is that the risk factors are so small to begin with, potential correlation is often overcome by uncertainty. What we do know is the risks of these types of exposures are very very low.
For example, you could put your bed 2 meters from a loaded spent fuel dry storage cask, and sleep there every night for 8 hours, your exposure in a year would be less that the annual exposure to where there is any observed health effect.
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.
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.
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!