"And no nuclear plant has *ever* killed 3500 people in one week and caused 14,000 illnesses. (link) The highest figures for illnesses *possibly* linked to Chernobyl get nowhere close."
We still don't know all the consequences that the Cs-137's going to provide. We're still not entirely sure about the Sr-90 contamination consequences either. We've never had QUITE as much spread of those contaminants over such a large area as with Chernobyl. To say that the plant hasn't killed as many people is jumping the gun on all of this. I'm not saying that it HAS killed as many people- I'm just saying we don't know much of anything yet.
Also worth noting is that various sources indicate that you're wrong about the death tolls involved with Chernobyl...
The last one lists a lower figure than the others, but I'm inclined to believe somewhere between 2,500 to 25,000 deaths (tolls ove 100k or more might be possible, but I have a hard time believing them at this point in time...) that could be attributed to the accident, based on various news and official sources of information. Not QUITE over a week's time, no. But it's not as safe as you're making it out to sound by any stretch.
"One of the biggest pushes in nuclear science is to stop treating reactors like large coal plants. Instead, small module-style reactors (say 6-10 megawatts) should be interspersed throughout the population. These reactors would require minimal maintenance and would simply be pulled and rebuilt every few years. The advantages are smaller, safer reactor designs and standardized maintenance. The disadvantages include possible contamination of heavily populated areas and fear of terrorists acquiring fissible materials. I haven't yet made up my mind how I feel about the idea."
I've noticed. One of the best, most promising designs I've seen so far is the Pebble Bed reactors. They run at higher temperatures, burn more of the fuel, and leave very little in the way of proliferable materials and minimal high and low level wastes compared to any of the other designs. The max size is typically 300MWe and they really ARE intrinsically safe from all of what I can tell, not being in the field directly. A breach would be very problematic, but not a catastrophe like Chernobyl ended up being. The fuel is contained in capsules that keep all the Actinides, etc. contained and it'd take a lot to extricate the fuel pellet out of the pebble. Breaching a reactor of this design would largely make a radioactive mess that would only require pickup and containment of the pellets and irradiated reactor components. Yes, there is a risk to populated areas having a breach, but it's not as much as something like a breach with any of the other current designs.
From our discussion back and forth, it seems we're mostly of the same mind, just that you don't see the risks being as bad as I do. It's been a pleasure discussing it with you- it's not often that someone can hold down a discussion of this nature on Slashdot.:-)
Again, you missed what I've been trying to tell you.
I'm less concerned about killing outright than shortening lifespans, making people ill decades after the fact, etc. Yes, chemical accidents can do this sort of thing, but the potentials for radioisotopes to do these sorts of things are higher.
Do not confuse my concern here. I agree with you that it's the main way to get into space (though exposing us to radioisotopes in a launch disturbs me- that IS what you just said whether or not you realized it or not...)- but we can't use what we've got right now. The designs are too damned complex (Yes, they are- they're pretty much all scaled up reactor designs from Nuke Subs. What's okay for a military rig and of a certain size isn't always going to be a good idea...) and we were only lucky with TMI- it wasn't a best case scenerio, which would be absolutely no failure, no emissions whatsoever. The risks of what will happen due to an exposure is higher than most are making of it. It's easier said than done to contain Cs-137 or Sr-90 in the environment once it's pushed out there by a reactor breach- and it doesn't take a lot in your system to ruin the rest of your life.
The same can't as readily be said of most of the chemical plants out there. Of course the same CAN be said of coal fired plants, but you're just exchanging one for the other in that situation. I'm all for scaling up the amount of fission plants, but they have to really address the concerns of leakage and aging- if they don't, they really, really shouldn't be doing it at all.
As for space access, an ION rocket, powered by a high-output fission or fusion reactor, using something benign to our environment as the propellant would be one way of boosting to orbit that I'd be plugging for. But, in order for that to work, we need a safe design for the reactor that produced the desirable output. Once in orbit, etc. you can probably use just about any thrust scheme you want to, including the one you just described.
Okay... Now that I'm corrected on part of the story, let's dig into this further, shall we?
The elements you mention are all ALPHA emitters. Most of them are actually relatively safe, although if the background level is high enough, you could have a heightened risk of skin cancer. The only really risky one is the Radon gas. It's also an Alpha emitter, but can be inhaled to expose you to a heightened risk of lung cancer. Fortunately, it pools up inside of buildings and can actually be dealt with, especially if you know about it.
With the reactor isotopes, while it only raised the radiation levels slightly, it sprayed you (Finland included...) with some rather nasty isotopes that do far, far worse things than Radon does.
Cesium-137 - Energetic Beta emitter. Half-life 30 years. Breakdown product is Barium-137 which is a metastable isotope with a half-life of about 2.6 minutes and is a Gamma emitter. Replaces Potassium uniformly in your system.
Strontium-90 - Engergetic Beta emitter. Half-life 29.1 years. Breakdown product is Yttrium-90 which is also a beta emitter with a half-life of 2.67 days. Replaces Calcium in your system and tends to concentrate in your teeth and bones.
Radon gas, you inhale it and exhale it so it's exposure to you is limited to it's time in your lungs. It is also fairly easily detected compared to the other radionuclides we're discussing. The others, on the other hand, once you're exposed to them, you tend to keep them INSIDE your body. There, they linger to wreak havoc on your systems.
Chernobyl just exposed you all to a dramatic increase in the risk of various cancers that you'd not have had the risk of, even WITH the heightened background radiation.
It's not all about radiation. It's about where that radiation comes from and how much of the radiation are your tissues actually exposed to.
Don't eat the cattle that ate the grass that was sprayed with it.
Don't eat the fruits that grew in the ground that was sprayed with it.
Easier said than done when you think about it. How do you KNOW that what you're eating wasn't contaminated with Sr-90 or Cs-137? Run a geiger counter over everything to see if it's hot before eating it? That's really nice.
I suspect my understanding of Sr-90 was wrong, but it IS a beta emitter and it's rather easy to accidentally expose yourself to it if you're talking a reactor accident. Containing it once it's out into the world sprayed across 4 or more countries isn't an option... Even moreso with Cs-137.
People that keep dismissing or downplaying the risks involved with the current generation of fission power plants either are selling something or just have their heads in the sand. Honestly.
Coal's been in use for far longer than Uranium and Plutonium. To compare the number of people killed at this point is risky (and irresponsible) as your sample size for the latter of the two is far, FAR too small.
Compare what the current actual risks are as opposed to "who got killed" and you'll see a different picture. We still don't have a handle on it in any stretch of any sensible person's imagination. I'm not against researching it (and they ARE doing that, by the way...) but I am against wholesale adoption of it at this time- the risks to environment and people (and that's more than just deaths caused by the technology- you should always consider all the risks, not just whether or not it'll kill you outright...) are just too great for what poor control we have over it. A release has dire consequences- ones you keep downplaying just because few have been killed. What if you lose 10 years off your lifespan because of it instead? Was that a good trade? I don't think it would be. And, that's exactly the kinds of things we're talking about here- you don't know how many people were killed because many of the things caused by the radioisotopes don't show up for years after the exposure. There could really be much more deaths with Chernobyl and TMI than we know about because nobody will attribute the death to the cause because it was a silent one.
They can't say a damn thing about any of this in Germany- or face nasty fines and jail time for the regional execs if they DO say anything of the sort.
Don't think for a moment that you Brits have a monopoly on that one- people in the States seem to have our fair share of the same thing going on lately. It's part of why in the Hell our government has gone so far astray of late. Apathy knows no countries and knows no race.
Anyhow, I think I know what causes the moaning and groaning about things being so bad and doing nothing about it... It's a sense of not being able to do anything about it yourself. It's hard to gather up and bitch about something being wrong when you tell yourself that you can't make a difference- and individually, for the large picture, you can't. But enough of you get together, you can force changes- the problem is convincing enough people that you have enough people that think alike and have a valid complaint about something.
Can't change the weather though... That one you're stuck with- nature of where you are and all. I can remember going to Scotland for my second honeymoon and the fog in Edinburgh being so thick that you really could barely see your hand in front of your face not more than a yard distant. And rain... Well, it off and on rained on us- about once a day except for the day we went to Iona we had to deal with drizzle or outright rain for at least half the day.
Perhaps I overstate them slightly, but in consideration to things that do long-term damage, I'd rather err on the side of caution. The fact that you understate things is concerning to say the least.
Most of the "dangerous" (Sadly, this is a rather relative term- the truely dangerous chemicals tend to be things like nerve-gas, etc. and these are rarely released in an accidental manner...) chemicals break-down quickly and the byproducts of the break-down typically aren't as dangerous as the original chemical- typically, for most of the chemicals out there, it's an initial exposure risk. In the case of radioisotopes from a fission reactor, on the other hand, the dangerous substances can be lurking around for decades or centuries and they can zap you, oftentimes in a bad way, without being anywhere near lethal levels- moreso than most of the more dangerous chemical compounds. For radioisotopes, it's an initial exposure risk AND a long-term exposure risk.
To say that it's any safer than coal fired plants at this point or any point in the near forseeable future is really picking one evil for another.
I'm all for people researching into whether or not it can be made clean (Pebble bed reactors look REAL promising, but not proven out yet...), but until someone thoroughly proves out a small-scale design, they shouldn't be allowed to do ANY other designs in production. They're nowhere near safe enough- the risks of a failure are moderately high, terrorist attack potential is really high (Lots of damage, little effort compared to other mass destruction attacks...), and the stakes are at least slightly higher than almost any chemical plant.
We're only guessing that Synroc will do what they think it will for containment of waste. We've not been around for Millions of years- and they claim that it has contained Uranium, etc. for that length of time on the website from your provided link.
I have little confidence in anyone making such claims, even accidentally on a website.
Where the He-3 on the moon comes from is the Solar Wind impinging it into the regolith on the Moon's surface. At some point, I'm sure we'll come up with something else, but it'll slowly replenish itself over time.
...not of a US/German design. More of an original design that worked well and they thought they could shave part of the safety in the design off because they thought it was overdesigned to begin with. Look at it this way- we're still working out things, and "lack of understanding" can be applied to us as well. Three Mile Island was a near-miss that we got lucky with.
So far, the pebble-bed reactor design seems to be the safest of the fission designs to date. It shouldn't have issues of meltdown or similar, but it still has containment breach risks involved with it's design- and most of the same hazards that are involved with a meltdown/explosion of a current reactor design. The saving grace would be that it would be in a much more restricted space than if we had a catastrophic meltdown occur in a reactor. If we were to seriously embrace fission power around the world, something akin to that design would have to be done for the reactor- but only after it's been thoroughly proven out. We don't know all of the issues involved with a pebble-bed yet; there could be some unforseen hazards, as there were with Chernobyl.
He thinks things like Strontium and Cesium exposure is not a bad thing. He's read a few things showing the instant deaths and not considered for a moment the long-term effects of what happened. Don't confuse him with the facts- his mind's made up, you know...
Your body readily replaces the Calcium you're currently using with Strontium. There, the beta emitter is a good way to get Leukemia. It's also carried in the milk of mammals that eat anything contaminated by it.
Cesium tends to replace Potassium in your electrolyte balance. It too is a fairly long-lived beta emitter. It, too shows up in milk.
Both are produced in a reactor. Both have nice and nasty decay products that produce Gamma Radiation. Both are readily absorbed in your body.
Just because they're beta emitters and in moderately small quantities does not make them any less hazardous or problematic in the environment.
This one's from an official Chernobyl information site. Click on figure 10 to get a feel for the radiation distribution. The first part of the time after the accident was where most of the radiation release occured. Note that it's blowing in the general direction of Norway...
This one is a chart indicating the levels of Cesium-137 on the ground as a result of Chernobyl. To put this in perspective, Cesium is a VERY nasty element and all of it's isotopes are very unfriendly to all life on this planet. It's a beta emitter (meaning it's radiation is very damaging inside your body, but clothing, etc. will generally protect you from it's effects.)- however, having said this, it's decay product, Barium-137, which is a gamma ray emitter with a half-life of about 2.6 minutes. Cesium-137 produces the most energetic decay product with the longest half-life of approximately 30 years. Cesium-137 is a particularly NASTY substance for living organisims as it tends to replace the Potassium in your electrolyte balance. Think of all the rather unpleasant things that this stuff will do to you when it does that- it's a ticking timebomb, waiting to go off.
This is JUST touching on Cesium contamination, which will still be about for a little while yet- many years after the accident. It doesn't go into any of the other contaminants from the accident. Iodine-131 and other Iodine isotopes were also massively dumped into the environment. While short-lived, they won't kill you outright unless you're exposed to quite a bit all at once. However, they get into your system in minute quantities and dramatically increase your risk for Thyroid Cancer. Enough exposure and it's almost a certainty- and it won't show for years to come.
Then there's the one we all know about. The one that people worry about (and they should...). Plutonium. This one's rather tame compared to the others, really. It's an Alpha emitter. It's fairly radiotoxic, but only if you ingest or inhale it. Now, having said this, it was sprayed all over the place and covered everything with a dusting of this element wherever the radioactive cloud blew. If you stir it up, you can inhale or ingest it without knowing you did so. Inhalation of it will expose you to hightened risks of lung cancer. Ingestion at the levels in question is held to be relatively "okay"- only a slight increase in the risks at worst. It's going to be lingering around for some time- the half-life for the isotopes in question is some 87+ years.
Anyone that says that Chernobyl was just an industrial accident just doesn't understand what exactly happened and what all was contaminated by it. You obviously do not have a full grasp of the situation with the way you're going on about it.
We came damned close to having our own Chernobyl with Three Mile Island. Had one or two more of the safety features failed at the same time as the ones that caused it, we'd have had a similar explosion and radioactive release.
Current designs just won't frigging cut it and calling Chernobyl just an industrial accident is really pathetic. Bhopal was an industrial accident- but the contamination pretty much subsided pretty quickly. With Chernobyl, we're going to have to deal with that contamination for EONS unless we figure out how to break it all down a lot quicker in a safe manner.
All it takes is one fuck-up to screw up rather large areas of the world for very extended periods of time with a fission power plant. Any engineer worth his trade will tell you to your face that things will break down- safeties will all fail under some conditions. You can only design in so much before nature itself will beat you anyway- and with fission power, the consequences of a catastrophic failure is dire.
(Yes, I know that others have said the same thing- but allow me to expand on this...)
When Chernobyl reactor #4 exploded, it sprayed a radioactive cloud that would have killed everyone for many hundreds of miles around the damn thing if it weren't for the prevailing wind conditions and the local fauna dissipating goodly portions of the radioactive cloud. (To put what we are talking about here in perspective, the soldiers collecting bits and pieces of the moderator debris flung from the reactor recieved their lifetime safe dosage of radiation in the 90 or so seconds they were out picking this stuff up. They all died, by the way, over the following several years with various unusual conditions- as if they were irradiated with a very high radiation dose over several months' time.)
We were lucky with the Three Mile Island incident- had it gone just a little differently, we'd have experienced our OWN Chernobyl.
While I'm all for improving Fission reactors, the risks are still WAAAAY high for when something screws up (and invariably it does...) and the ash from the current fission designs is too damn dangerous to keep about and we've got no good way of disposing of it in a safe manner.
In a closed system, yes, you can't produce more energy than is put into it. But it's NOT a closed system any more than a water wheel or a windmill (or, for that matter, your car or truck...) is. The He-3 is a fuel source and is stored energy that is liberated in a fusion reaction.
What they're talking about here is the fact that man has been unable, to date, to produce a Fusion reactor that was sustained that liberated more energy from the fuel than was put in to IGNITE it.
Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.
Perhaps I should have used "regardless" or "irrespective" to be more formal and proper- but I was in a casual discussion, not an actual debate. But, you're still wrong, it IS a word all the same.
A cop can have a reasonable suspicion to stop you, but depending on what his "suspicion" is, he may be facing the prospects of a wrongful arrest charge against him- especially if the gravity of what he was "suspecting" you of was sufficiently bad enough and you were obviously NOT doing something wrong. Now, trying to PROVE this is fun, so you really, really don't want to be in that position- but the reality is always there. They have authority, yes. Should they always use it? No.
Since, as you say, you don't know what the warrant covered (I do, thank you very much- I did read the thing before making any comments...), you can't say pro or con on that. Reading the Warrant, it was pretty broad to begin with and I doubt they actually had much of any probable cause because of the broadness thereof- it'd be hard to make anything stick on anyone based on what they were searching for (it feels like a fishing expidition, more than anything else...). Oftentimes, this sort of thing is done of late to "send a message" to the actual people that are doing it- because they can't nail the actual guilty parties. This sort of thing happens often enough that people will make that comment- they're sending a message to everyone.
If this is, in fact, what transpired- THAT is what the Fourth Ammendment was put in place for in the first place.
Considering that they're not claiming Copyright infringement, but rather breach of contract and misappropriation of Trade Secrets- it's in their court filing for IBM case. A dismissal with predjudice would imply that they didn't have a case in the first place and that they made public proclaimations of infringement but could not produce anything of the sort before the Court in IBM's countersuit. This turns ON Red Hat's case, irregardless of Copyright issues between SCO and Novell- they're claiming infringement, but can't produce it. Doesn't matter whether or not they own the alleged infringements or not- if they can't prove them, they're guilty of violations of the Lanham act either way.
Slashdot Mirror
"And no nuclear plant has *ever* killed 3500 people in one week and caused 14,000 illnesses. (link) The highest figures for illnesses *possibly* linked to Chernobyl get nowhere close."
m m 0 1/04/item20010425145050_1.htm g _15_2003.htm
:-)
We still don't know all the consequences that the Cs-137's going to provide. We're still not entirely sure about the Sr-90 contamination consequences either. We've never had QUITE as much spread of those contaminants over such a large area as with Chernobyl. To say that the plant hasn't killed as many people is jumping the gun on all of this. I'm not saying that it HAS killed as many people- I'm just saying we don't know much of anything yet.
Also worth noting is that various sources indicate that you're wrong about the death tolls involved with Chernobyl...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/722533.st
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/778408.st
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/environment/20
http://www.atominfo.org.ua/news/chernobyl_toll_au
The last one lists a lower figure than the others, but I'm inclined to believe somewhere between 2,500 to 25,000 deaths (tolls ove 100k or more might be possible, but I have a hard time believing them at this point in time...) that could be attributed to the accident, based on various news and official sources of information. Not QUITE over a week's time, no. But it's not as safe as you're making it out to sound by any stretch.
"One of the biggest pushes in nuclear science is to stop treating reactors like large coal plants. Instead, small module-style reactors (say 6-10 megawatts) should be interspersed throughout the population. These reactors would require minimal maintenance and would simply be pulled and rebuilt every few years. The advantages are smaller, safer reactor designs and standardized maintenance. The disadvantages include possible contamination of heavily populated areas and fear of terrorists acquiring fissible materials. I haven't yet made up my mind how I feel about the idea."
I've noticed. One of the best, most promising designs I've seen so far is the Pebble Bed reactors. They run at higher temperatures, burn more of the fuel, and leave very little in the way of proliferable materials and minimal high and low level wastes compared to any of the other designs. The max size is typically 300MWe and they really ARE intrinsically safe from all of what I can tell, not being in the field directly. A breach would be very problematic, but not a catastrophe like Chernobyl ended up being. The fuel is contained in capsules that keep all the Actinides, etc. contained and it'd take a lot to extricate the fuel pellet out of the pebble. Breaching a reactor of this design would largely make a radioactive mess that would only require pickup and containment of the pellets and irradiated reactor components. Yes, there is a risk to populated areas having a breach, but it's not as much as something like a breach with any of the other current designs.
From our discussion back and forth, it seems we're mostly of the same mind, just that you don't see the risks being as bad as I do. It's been a pleasure discussing it with you- it's not often that someone can hold down a discussion of this nature on Slashdot.
Again, you missed what I've been trying to tell you.
I'm less concerned about killing outright than shortening lifespans, making people ill decades after the fact, etc. Yes, chemical accidents can do this sort of thing, but the potentials for radioisotopes to do these sorts of things are higher.
Do not confuse my concern here. I agree with you that it's the main way to get into space (though exposing us to radioisotopes in a launch disturbs me- that IS what you just said whether or not you realized it or not...)- but we can't use what we've got right now. The designs are too damned complex (Yes, they are- they're pretty much all scaled up reactor designs from Nuke Subs. What's okay for a military rig and of a certain size isn't always going to be a good idea...) and we were only lucky with TMI- it wasn't a best case scenerio, which would be absolutely no failure, no emissions whatsoever. The risks of what will happen due to an exposure is higher than most are making of it. It's easier said than done to contain Cs-137 or Sr-90 in the environment once it's pushed out there by a reactor breach- and it doesn't take a lot in your system to ruin the rest of your life.
The same can't as readily be said of most of the chemical plants out there. Of course the same CAN be said of coal fired plants, but you're just exchanging one for the other in that situation. I'm all for scaling up the amount of fission plants, but they have to really address the concerns of leakage and aging- if they don't, they really, really shouldn't be doing it at all.
As for space access, an ION rocket, powered by a high-output fission or fusion reactor, using something benign to our environment as the propellant would be one way of boosting to orbit that I'd be plugging for. But, in order for that to work, we need a safe design for the reactor that produced the desirable output. Once in orbit, etc. you can probably use just about any thrust scheme you want to, including the one you just described.
Okay... Now that I'm corrected on part of the story, let's dig into this further, shall we?
The elements you mention are all ALPHA emitters. Most of them are actually relatively safe, although if the background level is high enough, you could have a heightened risk of skin cancer. The only really risky one is the Radon gas. It's also an Alpha emitter, but can be inhaled to expose you to a heightened risk of lung cancer. Fortunately, it pools up inside of buildings and can actually be dealt with, especially if you know about it.
With the reactor isotopes, while it only raised the radiation levels slightly, it sprayed you (Finland included...) with some rather nasty isotopes that do far, far worse things than Radon does.
Cesium-137 - Energetic Beta emitter. Half-life 30 years. Breakdown product is Barium-137 which is a metastable isotope with a half-life of about 2.6 minutes and is a Gamma emitter. Replaces Potassium uniformly in your system.
Strontium-90 - Engergetic Beta emitter. Half-life 29.1 years. Breakdown product is Yttrium-90 which is also a beta emitter with a half-life of 2.67 days. Replaces Calcium in your system and tends to concentrate in your teeth and bones.
Radon gas, you inhale it and exhale it so it's exposure to you is limited to it's time in your lungs. It is also fairly easily detected compared to the other radionuclides we're discussing. The others, on the other hand, once you're exposed to them, you tend to keep them INSIDE your body. There, they linger to wreak havoc on your systems.
Chernobyl just exposed you all to a dramatic increase in the risk of various cancers that you'd not have had the risk of, even WITH the heightened background radiation.
It's not all about radiation. It's about where that radiation comes from and how much of the radiation are your tissues actually exposed to.
Okay then...
Don't eat the cattle that ate the grass that was sprayed with it.
Don't eat the fruits that grew in the ground that was sprayed with it.
Easier said than done when you think about it. How do you KNOW that what you're eating wasn't contaminated with Sr-90 or Cs-137? Run a geiger counter over everything to see if it's hot before eating it? That's really nice.
I suspect my understanding of Sr-90 was wrong, but it IS a beta emitter and it's rather easy to accidentally expose yourself to it if you're talking a reactor accident. Containing it once it's out into the world sprayed across 4 or more countries isn't an option... Even moreso with Cs-137.
People that keep dismissing or downplaying the risks involved with the current generation of fission power plants either are selling something or just have their heads in the sand. Honestly.
Coal's been in use for far longer than Uranium and Plutonium. To compare the number of people killed at this point is risky (and irresponsible) as your sample size for the latter of the two is far, FAR too small.
Compare what the current actual risks are as opposed to "who got killed" and you'll see a different picture. We still don't have a handle on it in any stretch of any sensible person's imagination. I'm not against researching it (and they ARE doing that, by the way...) but I am against wholesale adoption of it at this time- the risks to environment and people (and that's more than just deaths caused by the technology- you should always consider all the risks, not just whether or not it'll kill you outright...) are just too great for what poor control we have over it. A release has dire consequences- ones you keep downplaying just because few have been killed. What if you lose 10 years off your lifespan because of it instead? Was that a good trade? I don't think it would be. And, that's exactly the kinds of things we're talking about here- you don't know how many people were killed because many of the things caused by the radioisotopes don't show up for years after the exposure. There could really be much more deaths with Chernobyl and TMI than we know about because nobody will attribute the death to the cause because it was a silent one.
Nice article. Cute main page on your website.
They can't say a damn thing about any of this in Germany- or face nasty fines and jail time for the regional execs if they DO say anything of the sort.
Don't think for a moment that you Brits have a monopoly on that one- people in the States seem to have our fair share of the same thing going on lately. It's part of why in the Hell our government has gone so far astray of late. Apathy knows no countries and knows no race.
Anyhow, I think I know what causes the moaning and groaning about things being so bad and doing nothing about it... It's a sense of not being able to do anything about it yourself. It's hard to gather up and bitch about something being wrong when you tell yourself that you can't make a difference- and individually, for the large picture, you can't. But enough of you get together, you can force changes- the problem is convincing enough people that you have enough people that think alike and have a valid complaint about something.
Can't change the weather though... That one you're stuck with- nature of where you are and all. I can remember going to Scotland for my second honeymoon and the fog in Edinburgh being so thick that you really could barely see your hand in front of your face not more than a yard distant. And rain... Well, it off and on rained on us- about once a day except for the day we went to Iona we had to deal with drizzle or outright rain for at least half the day.
Perhaps I overstate them slightly, but in consideration to things that do long-term damage, I'd rather err on the side of caution. The fact that you understate things is concerning to say the least.
Most of the "dangerous" (Sadly, this is a rather relative term- the truely dangerous chemicals tend to be things like nerve-gas, etc. and these are rarely released in an accidental manner...) chemicals break-down quickly and the byproducts of the break-down typically aren't as dangerous as the original chemical- typically, for most of the chemicals out there, it's an initial exposure risk. In the case of radioisotopes from a fission reactor, on the other hand, the dangerous substances can be lurking around for decades or centuries and they can zap you, oftentimes in a bad way, without being anywhere near lethal levels- moreso than most of the more dangerous chemical compounds. For radioisotopes, it's an initial exposure risk AND a long-term exposure risk.
To say that it's any safer than coal fired plants at this point or any point in the near forseeable future is really picking one evil for another.
I'm all for people researching into whether or not it can be made clean (Pebble bed reactors look REAL promising, but not proven out yet...), but until someone thoroughly proves out a small-scale design, they shouldn't be allowed to do ANY other designs in production. They're nowhere near safe enough- the risks of a failure are moderately high, terrorist attack potential is really high (Lots of damage, little effort compared to other mass destruction attacks...), and the stakes are at least slightly higher than almost any chemical plant.
Nope.
The blast would have still lifted the roof of the containment and the surrounding building- and we'd still have had the fallout, etc.
We're only guessing that Synroc will do what they think it will for containment of waste. We've not been around for Millions of years- and they claim that it has contained Uranium, etc. for that length of time on the website from your provided link.
I have little confidence in anyone making such claims, even accidentally on a website.
Where the He-3 on the moon comes from is the Solar Wind impinging it into the regolith on the Moon's surface. At some point, I'm sure we'll come up with something else, but it'll slowly replenish itself over time.
...not of a US/German design. More of an original design that worked well and they thought they could shave part of the safety in the design off because they thought it was overdesigned to begin with. Look at it this way- we're still working out things, and "lack of understanding" can be applied to us as well. Three Mile Island was a near-miss that we got lucky with.
So far, the pebble-bed reactor design seems to be the safest of the fission designs to date. It shouldn't have issues of meltdown or similar, but it still has containment breach risks involved with it's design- and most of the same hazards that are involved with a meltdown/explosion of a current reactor design. The saving grace would be that it would be in a much more restricted space than if we had a catastrophic meltdown occur in a reactor. If we were to seriously embrace fission power around the world, something akin to that design would have to be done for the reactor- but only after it's been thoroughly proven out. We don't know all of the issues involved with a pebble-bed yet; there could be some unforseen hazards, as there were with Chernobyl.
He thinks things like Strontium and Cesium exposure is not a bad thing. He's read a few things showing the instant deaths and not considered for a moment the long-term effects of what happened. Don't confuse him with the facts- his mind's made up, you know...
As is Cesium.
Your body readily replaces the Calcium you're currently using with Strontium. There, the beta emitter is a good way to get Leukemia. It's also carried in the milk of mammals that eat anything contaminated by it.
Cesium tends to replace Potassium in your electrolyte balance. It too is a fairly long-lived beta emitter. It, too shows up in milk.
Both are produced in a reactor. Both have nice and nasty decay products that produce Gamma Radiation. Both are readily absorbed in your body.
Just because they're beta emitters and in moderately small quantities does not make them any less hazardous or problematic in the environment.
Click on figure 12 on the Chernobyl info link... Got to preview more often...
You're just looking at things and seeing what you want to see...
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Do you know WHY the background radiation levels are higher in Norway than Chernobyl? It's actually very simple, really...
Because the prevailing winds dissipated the deadly cloud out into the direction of Norway and beyond...
Here's a few links for you to digest...
http://www.chernobyl.info/en/Facts/Contamination/
This one's from an official Chernobyl information site. Click on figure 10 to get a feel for the radiation distribution. The first part of the time after the accident was where most of the radiation release occured. Note that it's blowing in the general direction of Norway...
http://www.grida.no/db/maps/prod/level3/id_1219.h
This one is a chart indicating the levels of Cesium-137 on the ground as a result of Chernobyl. To put this in perspective, Cesium is a VERY nasty element and all of it's isotopes are very unfriendly to all life on this planet. It's a beta emitter (meaning it's radiation is very damaging inside your body, but clothing, etc. will generally protect you from it's effects.)- however, having said this, it's decay product, Barium-137, which is a gamma ray emitter with a half-life of about 2.6 minutes. Cesium-137 produces the most energetic decay product with the longest half-life of approximately 30 years. Cesium-137 is a particularly NASTY substance for living organisims as it tends to replace the Potassium in your electrolyte balance. Think of all the rather unpleasant things that this stuff will do to you when it does that- it's a ticking timebomb, waiting to go off.
http://www.stoller-eser.com/FactSheet/Cesium.pdf
This is JUST touching on Cesium contamination, which will still be about for a little while yet- many years after the accident. It doesn't go into any of the other contaminants from the accident. Iodine-131 and other Iodine isotopes were also massively dumped into the environment. While short-lived, they won't kill you outright unless you're exposed to quite a bit all at once. However, they get into your system in minute quantities and dramatically increase your risk for Thyroid Cancer. Enough exposure and it's almost a certainty- and it won't show for years to come.
Then there's the one we all know about. The one that people worry about (and they should...). Plutonium. This one's rather tame compared to the others, really. It's an Alpha emitter. It's fairly radiotoxic, but only if you ingest or inhale it. Now, having said this, it was sprayed all over the place and covered everything with a dusting of this element wherever the radioactive cloud blew. If you stir it up, you can inhale or ingest it without knowing you did so. Inhalation of it will expose you to hightened risks of lung cancer. Ingestion at the levels in question is held to be relatively "okay"- only a slight increase in the risks at worst. It's going to be lingering around for some time- the half-life for the isotopes in question is some 87+ years.
Anyone that says that Chernobyl was just an industrial accident just doesn't understand what exactly happened and what all was contaminated by it. You obviously do not have a full grasp of the situation with the way you're going on about it.
Sometimes I'm too damn literal for my own good... :-)
Blame it on being a Scientist and Engineer.
We came damned close to having our own Chernobyl with Three Mile Island. Had one or two more of the safety features failed at the same time as the ones that caused it, we'd have had a similar explosion and radioactive release.
Current designs just won't frigging cut it and calling Chernobyl just an industrial accident is really pathetic. Bhopal was an industrial accident- but the contamination pretty much subsided pretty quickly. With Chernobyl, we're going to have to deal with that contamination for EONS unless we figure out how to break it all down a lot quicker in a safe manner.
All it takes is one fuck-up to screw up rather large areas of the world for very extended periods of time with a fission power plant. Any engineer worth his trade will tell you to your face that things will break down- safeties will all fail under some conditions. You can only design in so much before nature itself will beat you anyway- and with fission power, the consequences of a catastrophic failure is dire.
Chernobyl.
(Yes, I know that others have said the same thing- but allow me to expand on this...)
When Chernobyl reactor #4 exploded, it sprayed a radioactive cloud that would have killed everyone for many hundreds of miles around the damn thing if it weren't for the prevailing wind conditions and the local fauna dissipating goodly portions of the radioactive cloud. (To put what we are talking about here in perspective, the soldiers collecting bits and pieces of the moderator debris flung from the reactor recieved their lifetime safe dosage of radiation in the 90 or so seconds they were out picking this stuff up. They all died, by the way, over the following several years with various unusual conditions- as if they were irradiated with a very high radiation dose over several months' time.)
We were lucky with the Three Mile Island incident- had it gone just a little differently, we'd have experienced our OWN Chernobyl.
While I'm all for improving Fission reactors, the risks are still WAAAAY high for when something screws up (and invariably it does...) and the ash from the current fission designs is too damn dangerous to keep about and we've got no good way of disposing of it in a safe manner.
In a closed system, yes, you can't produce more energy than is put into it. But it's NOT a closed system any more than a water wheel or a windmill (or, for that matter, your car or truck...) is. The He-3 is a fuel source and is stored energy that is liberated in a fusion reaction.
What they're talking about here is the fact that man has been unable, to date, to produce a Fusion reactor that was sustained that liberated more energy from the fuel than was put in to IGNITE it.
That was rather funny- and apropos.
Perhaps I should have used "regardless" or "irrespective" to be more formal and proper- but I was in a casual discussion, not an actual debate. But, you're still wrong, it IS a word all the same.
A cop can have a reasonable suspicion to stop you, but depending on what his "suspicion" is, he may be facing the prospects of a wrongful arrest charge against him- especially if the gravity of what he was "suspecting" you of was sufficiently bad enough and you were obviously NOT doing something wrong. Now, trying to PROVE this is fun, so you really, really don't want to be in that position- but the reality is always there. They have authority, yes. Should they always use it? No.
Since, as you say, you don't know what the warrant covered (I do, thank you very much- I did read the thing before making any comments...), you can't say pro or con on that. Reading the Warrant, it was pretty broad to begin with and I doubt they actually had much of any probable cause because of the broadness thereof- it'd be hard to make anything stick on anyone based on what they were searching for (it feels like a fishing expidition, more than anything else...). Oftentimes, this sort of thing is done of late to "send a message" to the actual people that are doing it- because they can't nail the actual guilty parties. This sort of thing happens often enough that people will make that comment- they're sending a message to everyone.
If this is, in fact, what transpired- THAT is what the Fourth Ammendment was put in place for in the first place.
Considering that they're not claiming Copyright infringement, but rather breach of contract and misappropriation of Trade Secrets- it's in their court filing for IBM case. A dismissal with predjudice would imply that they didn't have a case in the first place and that they made public proclaimations of infringement but could not produce anything of the sort before the Court in IBM's countersuit. This turns ON Red Hat's case, irregardless of Copyright issues between SCO and Novell- they're claiming infringement, but can't produce it. Doesn't matter whether or not they own the alleged infringements or not- if they can't prove them, they're guilty of violations of the Lanham act either way.