The idea that coal ash is 100 times more radioactive than nuclear waste has been making the rounds among bloggers and Twitterers, thanks to a headline which makes that assertion in Scientific American online. In fact, Google the words in the headline and you’ll come up with dozens of Web sites that have repeated this statement.
The problem is that it is a profoundly preposterous idea unsupported by a single shred of evidence.
Ivan Oransky, a medical doctor, as well as the managing editor of Sciam online, former deputy editor of The Scientist and an instructor of journalism at both NYU and the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, City College of New York should know better.
Using several research studies as evidence, the story does make a convincing case that, as it says, “the fly ash emitted by a power plant . . . carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.
It doesn’t take a grammarian to parse what’s going on here. Oransky is admitting that despite what the headline says, fly ash most definitely is not more radioactive than nuclear waste. Instead, I think he is saying that if you stood next to a pile of fly ash you’d probably get a bigger radiation dose than if you stood next to radioactive waste that is adequately shielded.
Hmmm. I guess that’s why they shield the stuff — to protect people from the deadly radiation it emits. But fly ash doesn’t need to be shielded. It needs to be landfilled responsibly. (Too bad they didn’t get that message at the TVA.)
citing such illustrious sources as YouTube, Wikipedia and the Daily Mail.
AFP
Kyodo earlier reported that preliminary figures from the country's Nuclear Safety Commission revealed the battered plant had released 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive material per hour for several hours.
That calculation prompted Japan to consider upgrading the accident to the highest level -- something that has only been given to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster -- Kyodo said, citing unnamed government sources.
According to the International Nuclear Events Scale, level seven incidents are ones with a "major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures."
BBC News
"Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) may face as much as 2 trillion yen ($23.6bn; £14.5bn) in compensation claims, according to JP Morgan.
The company has been grappling to contain the radiation leak crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
On Tuesday, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency raised the severity of the nuclear crisis at the plant to level 7.
Washington Post
Japanese authorities planned Tuesday to raise their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to the Kyodo news agency.
Officials reclassified the ongoing emergency from level 5, an “accident with off-site risk,” to level 7, a “major accident.”
So what you're saying is that proponents of nuclear power consider this type of leakage and dispersal of radioactive material to be acceptable and unremarkable.
I would love to call my boss and coworkers idiots to their face and deliberately sabotage them for my own amusement and face no consequences whatsoever.
Don't worry about the downmods. You have an excellent point, but there are a lot of nuclear power industry lobbyists who're unwilling to allow open discussion.
Yeah, problem is that if Microsoft is a puppy, it's a puppy with a hell of a lot of fleas living on it.
Those fleas don't just spread the plague themselves, they also vigorously defend their highly infectious lunch...
You have zero chance of discussing any competing OS without a bunch of reputation managers sticking their pointy little proboscises in, and sucking the lifeblood out of the conversation.
Programming with.NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.
However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t.
See, Microsoft very intentionally (and very successfully) created.NET to be as different as possible from everything else out there, keeping the programmer far away from the details such that they’re wholly and utterly dependent on Microsoft’s truly amazing suite of programming tools to do all the thinking for them. Microsoft started down this path when they were the only game in town, explicitly to maintain their monopoly by making it as hard as possible to either port Windows apps to non-Windows platforms, or to even conceive of how to do it in the first place.
SOP for Microsoft. Why is everybody acting surprised and offended?
This generation of Windows Phone 7 is definitely a Microsoft developers phone
So that's how you guys are going to spin the market failure?
That explains all of the "developer tools are rock solid." taglines we're seeing. It's like the whole "Win 7, have you tried it?" mantra all over again.
Slashdot Mirror
Could be useful for Facebook and Twitter.
MySpace Quantum Edition: Instantly more irritating.
Microsoft don't generally have a habit of being a Patent troll
Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm
Why Did Microsoft Sell Off 22 'Linux-Related' Patents?
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Why-Did-Microsoft-Sell-Off-22-LinuxRelated-Patents-618335/
TomTom gets allies in Microsoft Linux patent lawsuit fight
http://blogs.computerworld.com/tomtom_gets_allies_in_microsoft_linux_patent_lawsuit_fight
Microsoft's Linux patent bingo hits Google's Android
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/29/microsoft_htc_linux_patents/
I've already done that. Will you answer my question?
What evidence would it take to change your mind about nuclear power?
There is a general trend of alarmist hysteria surrounding nuclear power
You mean hysteria like this?
“Fukushima is going to kill 200,000 from increased cancers over the next 50 years.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japan/110415/fukushima-death-toll-meltdown-chernobyl?page=full
PS WTF Japan, you're only NOW starting to use robots help fix the reactor???
Why bother, when genpatsu gypsies are so much cheaper?
Coal releases tons of radiation
More nuclear power industry propaganda
The idea that coal ash is 100 times more radioactive than nuclear waste has been making the rounds among bloggers and Twitterers, thanks to a headline which makes that assertion in Scientific American online. In fact, Google the words in the headline and you’ll come up with dozens of Web sites that have repeated this statement.
The problem is that it is a profoundly preposterous idea unsupported by a single shred of evidence.
Ivan Oransky, a medical doctor, as well as the managing editor of Sciam online, former deputy editor of The Scientist and an instructor of journalism at both NYU and the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, City College of New York should know better.
Using several research studies as evidence, the story does make a convincing case that, as it says, “the fly ash emitted by a power plant . . . carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.
It doesn’t take a grammarian to parse what’s going on here. Oransky is admitting that despite what the headline says, fly ash most definitely is not more radioactive than nuclear waste. Instead, I think he is saying that if you stood next to a pile of fly ash you’d probably get a bigger radiation dose than if you stood next to radioactive waste that is adequately shielded.
Hmmm. I guess that’s why they shield the stuff — to protect people from the deadly radiation it emits. But fly ash doesn’t need to be shielded. It needs to be landfilled responsibly. (Too bad they didn’t get that message at the TVA.)
http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410
citing such illustrious sources as YouTube, Wikipedia and the Daily Mail.
AFP
Kyodo earlier reported that preliminary figures from the country's Nuclear Safety Commission revealed the battered plant had released 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive material per hour for several hours.
That calculation prompted Japan to consider upgrading the accident to the highest level -- something that has only been given to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster -- Kyodo said, citing unnamed government sources.
According to the International Nuclear Events Scale, level seven incidents are ones with a "major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures."
BBC News
"Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) may face as much as 2 trillion yen ($23.6bn; £14.5bn) in compensation claims, according to JP Morgan.
The company has been grappling to contain the radiation leak crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
On Tuesday, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency raised the severity of the nuclear crisis at the plant to level 7.
Washington Post
Japanese authorities planned Tuesday to raise their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to the Kyodo news agency.
Officials reclassified the ongoing emergency from level 5, an “accident with off-site risk,” to level 7, a “major accident.”
So what you're saying is that proponents of nuclear power consider this type of leakage and dispersal of radioactive material to be acceptable and unremarkable.
Reality will continue to disagree.
Google's App Platform for Government wasn't FISMA certified and thus wasn't qualified to be bought.
Neither is Microsoft's.
There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do.
Yep true, if everything's locked up.
But provide that amount of power in an open system and there'll be people who'll find beautiful ways of suing it.
I would love to call my boss and coworkers idiots to their face and deliberately sabotage them for my own amusement and face no consequences whatsoever.
You can call me an idiot later.
And all future updates.
Don't worry about the downmods. You have an excellent point, but there are a lot of nuclear power industry lobbyists who're unwilling to allow open discussion.
Those fleas don't just spread the plague themselves, they also vigorously defend their highly infectious lunch...
You have zero chance of discussing any competing OS without a bunch of reputation managers sticking their pointy little proboscises in, and sucking the lifeblood out of the conversation.
Even Ubuntu, arguably the most user-friendly distro has problems with sound playback on modern, commonly available sound hardware.
Recent versions of Ubuntu are fine, as are most other recent distros.
You should try them.
end of discussion. No more comments are needed.
Not quite.
Malevolent organisations which don't respect community commons are the threat. Patents are just one of their tools.
Until those organisations are reigned in, they will continue inventing ways to diminish the value of projects which threaten their income.
Why would you say that?
The settlement did nothing. It was Mozilla and Firefox which revived competition in the browser market.
Then why didn't you predict it?
Many of us did. We were drowned out or modded to invisibility by the pro-nuke lobby.
Were they any good?
"Create Shortcut here" context menu.
Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.
However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t.
See, Microsoft very intentionally (and very successfully) created .NET to be as different as possible from everything else out there, keeping the programmer far away from the details such that they’re wholly and utterly dependent on Microsoft’s truly amazing suite of programming tools to do all the thinking for them. Microsoft started down this path when they were the only game in town, explicitly to maintain their monopoly by making it as hard as possible to either port Windows apps to non-Windows platforms, or to even conceive of how to do it in the first place.
SOP for Microsoft. Why is everybody acting surprised and offended?
This generation of Windows Phone 7 is definitely a Microsoft developers phone
So that's how you guys are going to spin the market failure?
That explains all of the "developer tools are rock solid." taglines we're seeing. It's like the whole "Win 7, have you tried it?" mantra all over again.