Your fist assertion is a blank assertion that may be axiomatic to you, but certainly needs defending to me. (Incidentally, I am human, just in case you're doubting that you need to consider my opinion.) But even so, your second assertion does not necessarily follow from your first.
To mis-quote Hobbes (I think), "no species is an island / complete unto itself" ; every species, including ourselves is part of an ecology, that of Earth. Interdependence is a characteristic of all ecologies that have been reported on (of which I am aware), so I would argue that a valid (to you) basis for caring about the rights of non-human animals would be self-interest in the long term survival of the human species.
(Note that I am wearing my traditional "geologist" hard-hat when I am looking to the long term - let's say a million generations instead of our mere tens of thousands to date.)
Is that a firm enough beginning to justify having the argument?
This has been tested in court with the car rental places that have you sign and authorize a final bill, then charge you later (without specific authorization) for parking tickets or speed cam tickets sent to them later.
The law, or rental company policy, may differ in your country to mine, but every time I've hired a car (lesseeeee.... 5 countries on 3 continents) I've read the contract before signing it and seen the authorisation for such charges. (OK, in Russia I had to get it translated for me, but that only took an hour or so.)
I have never had such a charge made against me though. "Not getting caught" being the first rule of driving, at least in my book.
That is the only "ID" they are allowed to check, to keep the process simple and fast, and encourage users to use it.
Again, country and time dependent. In Russia, because I couldn't provide my internal passport (didn't have one ; not Russian) I had to pay with cash. But I gather that is just what happens when you're not in Moscow or St Petersburg - if you're the first non-Russian they've seen, you expect weird things.
No Slashdotter can resist the sense of superiority that comes from correcting a trivial math error.;-)
The number of Slashdotters who resisted correcting your trivial maths error is not less than one. I didn't correct it, and nor, I note did you. (And you certainly knew about the latter, if not the former.)
First is the abundant wildlife, with rabies affecting a large part of the population.
This is generally the case in Russia and the former Soviet Union. My first rabies jabs were for going to work in Azerbaijan. My second batch for working in Tanzania. My third round for working in Siberia. By the time I went back to Africa, the recommendations had changed so that I was considered "protected" for life. (Rabies jabs are not a perfect vaccination, but they greatly improve the likelihood of surviving treatment.)
Supposedly the bottom of the Pripyat lake is badly contaminated; if water levels fell, wind would carry contaminated dust.
The lake is in the bottom of a river valley, just upstream from another large lake. Short of the sudden (and wholly unexpected - trust me on this, I am a geologist) emergence of a new volcano, just how are you going to dry the lake out?
If you'd read the paper cited (OMG! Check Original Sources! The gods of journalism are spinning in their graves!), you'd not use the word "prevent". You'd use something more like "delay for around a half century".
The geological evidence (oh, that dirty, dirty word!) is that the atmospheric response to peta-tonne injections of carbon dioxide takes on the order of 100,000 years. (That's not a model result ; it's an observational result calibrated against 21,000, 41,000 and 100,000 year Milankovitch cycles recorded in magnetostratigraphy. Just in case you have problems with models.) A half-century delay in releasing CO2 is not going to be much help.
That the trees aren't rotting, even after 30 years, is as visual as it gets
You're about the 30th person to mention this little trope, and as with the previous 29, you've plainly not read the article you link to. I'll give you the link again, so that you might just possibly do yourself the honour of reading what you link to, so that you can avoid looking quite so thoroughly like someone who doesn't read what he links to. It is actually a pretty basic skill in sciences and other nerdish occupations.
Have you read it now?
Did you see the bit where they put some numbers to the actual results. Did you see the bit where that said that in the most contaminated areas leaf litter loss was reduced by 40% ; that's a 40% decline, not a 100% decline.
Oh, I'm sorry, I accidentally linked to the original abstract, not to some overblown puff piece written by some click-baiting journalist looking for a scary headline in the confidence that no-one will actually read beyond the headline. The paper title that the authors chose to use is "Highly reduced mass loss rates and increased litter layer in radioactively contaminated areas", which conveys a slightly different impression to "Oh My Invisible Pink Unicorn the Fucking Sky is Falling!" or whatever the original trope was.
Now, I'm not going to claim that a 40% reduction in decomposition rates is insignificant. It is quite a substantial result. But it's also one data point in a steadily changing scenario. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, dose rates would have been much higher (particularly because of the iodine-131 radiation), and that does seem to have had a major effect immediately after the accident. But as the radiation levels have declined, the area is being re-colonised from outside areas (and of course, adaptation of the resident populations to higher radiation)), and as radiation continues to decline the differences between high and low radiation areas will also continue to decline.
In fact, I'd make a prediction : by the time another half-life of caesium-137 has gone by, the differences in decay rate between high and low radiation areas will have disappeared into the statistical noise. You'll note from the news articles and the paper linked to above that there's a 20% variation between litter loss rates in the lowest-contaminated sites studied, so you've got a signal to noise ratio of about 2 at the moment, and that is only going to go down. (Processing the backlog of under-decayed material might take another half-life or so, depending on background decay rates.)
The fieldwork was done in Sept 2007 to July 2008, so just over 20 years after the accident. So I'm revising my above prediction to having negligible difference in decay rates between low and high radiation areas by about 2030.
Since a large part of the original article and this whole thread is about at best shoddy if not out-right biased journalism, you might have thought it would be a good idea to actually watch out for shoddy if not out-right biased journalism in stories people link to. It's the sort of thing I'd rather expect of the nerds and scientists that this site thinks are it's audience.
Then of course, there's the alpha emitters you eat everyday in the form of potassium from bananas, salt substitute, and other potassium based compounds.
Check your facts. Potassium decays to argon by electron capture or positron emission, or to calcium by beta decay.
What we DO know, is that abnormal amounts of flammable biomass is accumulating in the area. A forest-fire could cause huge redistribution of radioactive materials.
Now that is probably the most useful comment in this thread.
I don't accept your assertion that there are significant changes in the ecology of the area, but that is reasonably assessable. (I wonder, for example, where their control area is - the region which they're comparing the Exclusion Zone to, to determine what is normal and what is abnormal. They have another 100-odd sq.km of industrial land in a river valley which they've abandoned somewhere? With appropriate levels of pollution from the industries.)
And, to be honest, it's also something that is manageable. Cutting fire breaks is not new technology. Burning scrub as part of forest management is something that goes back to the Stone Age, literally. Yes, they're additional costs, but [shrug], cleaning up fuck ups costs. Which is why avoiding fuck ups is high on any rational business's mind.
The way that I read that translation is that you're not allowed to SELL any such product which has a level of contamination above the set standards, and they're not actually saying that they expect mushrooms, meat, milk from the fall out affected areas to exceed those limits.
Typical civil-servant-ese way of saying nothing in a way that sounds like saying something. Sir Humphrey would be proud.
10450 days after the accident is 1303 half lives, so about 1/ 2^1300 of the original amount of iodine remains. That's between 1/ 10^325 and 1/10^433 (because 2^3 Say there were a million tonnes of iodine-131 produced (a considerable over estimate, being around the mass of the plant and the ground it's on). That's a cube around 60m on edge of solid iodine. that's 7.6 million moles, or around 4597709923664122137404580152671.8 atoms. In that case, there would be around one 10-to-the-300th of an atom left from your original million tonnes.
There is no iodine-131 left from the Chernobyl incident. Not even one atom. The last atom died decades ago.
Smoking entails a risk. So does exposure to elevated radioactivity. And guess what, so does walking.
A better example, since absolutely everyone does it at least once a minute, is breathing oxygen. Oxygen is flat out poisonous. Increase the partial pressure of oxygen in your environment above 2.5 and you'll be lucky to survive the day. Go above 2.6 and you'll be lucky to survive to your next meal ; above 2.7 and you've an hour ; above 2.8, minutes. Obviously there's some personal variation, but not a large amount.
Most people aren't good at understanding risk. Or accepting it, for that matter (disclosure : smoker and scuba diver here!)
broken hips are a very significant morality risk for the elderly.
Do the numbers. the only radioactive process that significantly changes the mass of an atom is alpha emission, spitting out 4 "atomic mass units" at a pop (beta emissions spit out about 1/1800 a.m.u. per emission and gammas about 1/1000 a.m.u. per megavolt of emitted energy). Caesium-137 can only be a daughter of a nucleus of mass 137+4*n and atomic number 55+2*n (2 protons per alpha particle). So to get to uranium (atomic number 92) you need n = (92-55)/2 18.5
Oh. Already we know that we can't do it with alphas alone ; you've got to have one (or an odd number not less than one) beta decay in the chain.
How long would the chain be? For 18 alphas and one beta, we'd have a initial mass number of 137+(18*4) = 137+72 = 209. So we're on 55+(18*2, alphas)+1 (beta) = 55+36+1 = 92 protons (uranium) and mass 209. Uranium-209. Doesn't exist. The lightest, and least stable uranium nucleus is U-232 (half-life 69 years).
today, yes. because there is a significant use for uranium. At the time that the Saxony/ Sudetenland mines were working, they were mainly mining for silver. (As a geologist, that strongly hints to me that there would have been a lot of associated lead and copper, which would have come out as part of the mining and smelting processes. Once you've gone to the expense of digging a hole and hauling the (mixed) ores to surface where you can sort them reasonably well, you might just as well smelt them.) The pitchblende ("ore with a pitch-like appearence") was a waste material which would normally be piled up. Occasionally you'd process a batch because some paint manufacturer wanted some of the nice green pigments that the chemists can make from pitchblende - less poisonous than the arsenic-based greens, but you get your arsenic for free from smelting the silver, so that's a cheap mineral. The glass people sometimes want some of that uranium too. But otherwise, pitchblende was a waste product.
Until some mad Polish bint in Paris ordered a couple of train wagons of the stuff.
unusual-in-the-environment metals, such as cesium, that have long-lived radioactive isotopes
Biochemically, cæsium is extremely similar to potassium (which is, of course, radioactive ; good luck living without it). You might, by luck, be able to find something that is relatively good at concentrating cæsium compared to potassium. But there's no biological reason that I can think of for any organism to have selected for such a concentrator, cæsium being such a rare metal compared to potassium.
they'd have to go via Kyiv, and those planes won't be empty.
Well, not strictly. If I were to go there (from the UK), I'd consider routing to Moscow (more flights, more economical) then get a train to around Ð'ÑÑнÑÐ, go over the border into Belarus and on to Ð"омÐÐÑOE, then probably have to drive the last 20-odd km from there.
Most of the restricted area is to the north of Chernobyl, in Belarus. (That was where my wife was working when the balloon went up.) So starting from ÐsÑfÐб isn't necessarily best.
Yeah but they're all god-hating libtard satanists who drive black helicopters for the Illuminati New World government who've been trying shut me up since I got anally probed by the aliens in their base in Area 51 but they'll never keep me qui %$&*£^%*%^*%^(^(^
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Exponentially? I'm not so sure. I think it'll be a Poisson distribution. They're somewhat similar, but very definitely not the same.
Your fist assertion is a blank assertion that may be axiomatic to you, but certainly needs defending to me. (Incidentally, I am human, just in case you're doubting that you need to consider my opinion.) But even so, your second assertion does not necessarily follow from your first.
To mis-quote Hobbes (I think), "no species is an island / complete unto itself" ; every species, including ourselves is part of an ecology, that of Earth. Interdependence is a characteristic of all ecologies that have been reported on (of which I am aware), so I would argue that a valid (to you) basis for caring about the rights of non-human animals would be self-interest in the long term survival of the human species. (Note that I am wearing my traditional "geologist" hard-hat when I am looking to the long term - let's say a million generations instead of our mere tens of thousands to date.)
Is that a firm enough beginning to justify having the argument?
But then you'd have to buy her a Palaeontologist Barbie to go with it.
Oh, people have noticed that little train-wreck ahead, have they. That'll be nice.
Nobody is doing anything about it, of course?
The law, or rental company policy, may differ in your country to mine, but every time I've hired a car (lesseeeee.... 5 countries on 3 continents) I've read the contract before signing it and seen the authorisation for such charges. (OK, in Russia I had to get it translated for me, but that only took an hour or so.)
I have never had such a charge made against me though. "Not getting caught" being the first rule of driving, at least in my book.
Again, country and time dependent. In Russia, because I couldn't provide my internal passport (didn't have one ; not Russian) I had to pay with cash. But I gather that is just what happens when you're not in Moscow or St Petersburg - if you're the first non-Russian they've seen, you expect weird things.
The Capitalisation Inquisition are hunting you down.
The number of Slashdotters who resisted correcting your trivial maths error is not less than one. I didn't correct it, and nor, I note did you. (And you certainly knew about the latter, if not the former.)
Q.E.not-D.
You don't have driving insurance? Or did Obama introduce that requirement too?
This is generally the case in Russia and the former Soviet Union. My first rabies jabs were for going to work in Azerbaijan. My second batch for working in Tanzania. My third round for working in Siberia. By the time I went back to Africa, the recommendations had changed so that I was considered "protected" for life. (Rabies jabs are not a perfect vaccination, but they greatly improve the likelihood of surviving treatment.)
The lake is in the bottom of a river valley, just upstream from another large lake. Short of the sudden (and wholly unexpected - trust me on this, I am a geologist) emergence of a new volcano, just how are you going to dry the lake out?
For certain values of "ever" that may approach the geologically significant. (I am a geologist, but I don't play one on TV. Yet.)
The geological evidence (oh, that dirty, dirty word!) is that the atmospheric response to peta-tonne injections of carbon dioxide takes on the order of 100,000 years. (That's not a model result ; it's an observational result calibrated against 21,000, 41,000 and 100,000 year Milankovitch cycles recorded in magnetostratigraphy. Just in case you have problems with models.) A half-century delay in releasing CO2 is not going to be much help.
You're about the 30th person to mention this little trope, and as with the previous 29, you've plainly not read the article you link to. I'll give you the link again, so that you might just possibly do yourself the honour of reading what you link to, so that you can avoid looking quite so thoroughly like someone who doesn't read what he links to. It is actually a pretty basic skill in sciences and other nerdish occupations.
Have you read it now?
Did you see the bit where they put some numbers to the actual results. Did you see the bit where that said that in the most contaminated areas leaf litter loss was reduced by 40% ; that's a 40% decline, not a 100% decline.
Oh, I'm sorry, I accidentally linked to the original abstract, not to some overblown puff piece written by some click-baiting journalist looking for a scary headline in the confidence that no-one will actually read beyond the headline. The paper title that the authors chose to use is "Highly reduced mass loss rates and increased litter layer in radioactively contaminated areas", which conveys a slightly different impression to "Oh My Invisible Pink Unicorn the Fucking Sky is Falling!" or whatever the original trope was.
Now, I'm not going to claim that a 40% reduction in decomposition rates is insignificant. It is quite a substantial result. But it's also one data point in a steadily changing scenario. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, dose rates would have been much higher (particularly because of the iodine-131 radiation), and that does seem to have had a major effect immediately after the accident. But as the radiation levels have declined, the area is being re-colonised from outside areas (and of course, adaptation of the resident populations to higher radiation)), and as radiation continues to decline the differences between high and low radiation areas will also continue to decline.
In fact, I'd make a prediction : by the time another half-life of caesium-137 has gone by, the differences in decay rate between high and low radiation areas will have disappeared into the statistical noise. You'll note from the news articles and the paper linked to above that there's a 20% variation between litter loss rates in the lowest-contaminated sites studied, so you've got a signal to noise ratio of about 2 at the moment, and that is only going to go down. (Processing the backlog of under-decayed material might take another half-life or so, depending on background decay rates.)
The fieldwork was done in Sept 2007 to July 2008, so just over 20 years after the accident. So I'm revising my above prediction to having negligible difference in decay rates between low and high radiation areas by about 2030.
Since a large part of the original article and this whole thread is about at best shoddy if not out-right biased journalism, you might have thought it would be a good idea to actually watch out for shoddy if not out-right biased journalism in stories people link to. It's the sort of thing I'd rather expect of the nerds and scientists that this site thinks are it's audience.
Check your facts. Potassium decays to argon by electron capture or positron emission, or to calcium by beta decay.
Now that is probably the most useful comment in this thread.
I don't accept your assertion that there are significant changes in the ecology of the area, but that is reasonably assessable. (I wonder, for example, where their control area is - the region which they're comparing the Exclusion Zone to, to determine what is normal and what is abnormal. They have another 100-odd sq.km of industrial land in a river valley which they've abandoned somewhere? With appropriate levels of pollution from the industries.)
And, to be honest, it's also something that is manageable. Cutting fire breaks is not new technology. Burning scrub as part of forest management is something that goes back to the Stone Age, literally. Yes, they're additional costs, but [shrug], cleaning up fuck ups costs. Which is why avoiding fuck ups is high on any rational business's mind.
They do?
Oh, hang on - you have a TV system that is funded by advertising?
How sad. Can't you get a better country, or government, or just leave them to die in the dirt or something?
Typical civil-servant-ese way of saying nothing in a way that sounds like saying something. Sir Humphrey would be proud.
There is no iodine-131 left from the Chernobyl incident. Not even one atom. The last atom died decades ago.
A better example, since absolutely everyone does it at least once a minute, is breathing oxygen. Oxygen is flat out poisonous. Increase the partial pressure of oxygen in your environment above 2.5 and you'll be lucky to survive the day. Go above 2.6 and you'll be lucky to survive to your next meal ; above 2.7 and you've an hour ; above 2.8, minutes. Obviously there's some personal variation, but not a large amount.
Most people aren't good at understanding risk. Or accepting it, for that matter (disclosure : smoker and scuba diver here!)
BOGGLES!
Oh. Already we know that we can't do it with alphas alone ; you've got to have one (or an odd number not less than one) beta decay in the chain.
How long would the chain be? For 18 alphas and one beta, we'd have a initial mass number of 137+(18*4) = 137+72 = 209. So we're on 55+(18*2, alphas)+1 (beta) = 55+36+1 = 92 protons (uranium) and mass 209. Uranium-209. Doesn't exist. The lightest, and least stable uranium nucleus is U-232 (half-life 69 years).
today, yes. because there is a significant use for uranium. At the time that the Saxony/ Sudetenland mines were working, they were mainly mining for silver. (As a geologist, that strongly hints to me that there would have been a lot of associated lead and copper, which would have come out as part of the mining and smelting processes. Once you've gone to the expense of digging a hole and hauling the (mixed) ores to surface where you can sort them reasonably well, you might just as well smelt them.) The pitchblende ("ore with a pitch-like appearence") was a waste material which would normally be piled up. Occasionally you'd process a batch because some paint manufacturer wanted some of the nice green pigments that the chemists can make from pitchblende - less poisonous than the arsenic-based greens, but you get your arsenic for free from smelting the silver, so that's a cheap mineral. The glass people sometimes want some of that uranium too. But otherwise, pitchblende was a waste product.
Until some mad Polish bint in Paris ordered a couple of train wagons of the stuff.
Biochemically, cæsium is extremely similar to potassium (which is, of course, radioactive ; good luck living without it). You might, by luck, be able to find something that is relatively good at concentrating cæsium compared to potassium. But there's no biological reason that I can think of for any organism to have selected for such a concentrator, cæsium being such a rare metal compared to potassium.
That's only an issue if people are still trying to do the same type of emergency shut down tests on them as went so catastrophically wrong in 1986.
Still not having seen this Beta thing - is it any better?
Well, not strictly. If I were to go there (from the UK), I'd consider routing to Moscow (more flights, more economical) then get a train to around Ð'ÑÑнÑÐ, go over the border into Belarus and on to Ð"омÐÐÑOE, then probably have to drive the last 20-odd km from there.
Most of the restricted area is to the north of Chernobyl, in Belarus. (That was where my wife was working when the balloon went up.) So starting from ÐsÑfÐб isn't necessarily best.
Yeah but they're all god-hating libtard satanists who drive black helicopters for the Illuminati New World government who've been trying shut me up since I got anally probed by the aliens in their base in Area 51 but they'll never keep me qui %$&*£^%*%^*%^(^(^
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