Ah, but the spinsters don't give us any idea where they came up with that '1 in 20' number of cases of thyroid cancer in children supposedly developing, nor do the antispinsters make any more sense by saying 'The spinsters say 5% of the children. In a country with 300 million people, that means 15 million will develop cancer'. They have 300 million children there???? And of course they give no cites.
ENENews is an online service dedicated to covering the latest energy-related developments. Established shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in March 2011, ENENews has grown rapidly to serve approximately 2,000,000 pageviews per month — and with over 200,000 comments and counting, our active community of registered users is one of the most engaged on the internet. These figures represent a vast audience that includes not only nuclear industry professionals, but also scientists, researchers, journalists, opinion and policy-makers, as well as the general public.
Sounds like some spin site cranked up to cash in on the fear to me. Lotta 2nd & 3rd hand reported stories, damned few going on the record as named sources, just anonymous 'Fukushima worker' etc. Time for a grain of salt, methinks...
The news channels can't educate people on what a rem is, or why its important, in under 30 seconds, and nobody knows that from school anymore, so the news spin cycle is forced to sensationalize.
More like, the news channels in the US won't educate people in a 30 second sound byte. They get better ratings when they pile on the hype. Remember dirty bombs? How they kept saying they were the end of the world and no nuclear knowledge was needed to kill kill KILL with them? The few stations who actually did the math and figured out the (conventional) explosive component was far more deadly than any radioactive jacket you could cover it with, and the radiation 'released' by one could only seriously injure you if 1) they cemented your feet in place for 5-10 years in the 'radiation zone', and 2) nobody cleaned up after it, not even the rain, didn't get the ratings that the stations who went all 'OMGOMGOMG!!! It's the end of the world!! Tune in at 5 tomorrow and we'll show you how you can possibly survive this massive danger!!' did. And with the ratings, so go the advertising dollars. Being businesses that had to answer to their stockholders, guess which way the tv stations went, especially in a low income slot like the news? Hell, the US Army studied dirty bombs, did the math, decided they were a humongous waste of time, and had their contractors develop better artillery shells. Yeah, some of those use depleted uranium, but that's because DU goes through light to medium armor extremely well.
Um, it did The wave was 50 foot when it hit Fukushima, after losing a shitton of energy moving over the land.
Scary thought, eh? And yet everybody bitches that they didn't design Fukushima to handle it.
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!
on
The Panic Over Fukushima
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That's less than 10% chance to get lung cancer by smoking. People get lung cancer all the time, from things like asbestos, air polution, whatnot. But develop lung cancer without smoking, and people will automatically assume it's from the second hand smoke you picked up when you walked past a room somebody had a cigarette in 20 years ago. It just ain't so. Primary cigarette smoke is a contributing factor to lung cancer, but nothing like the hype they'd have you believe, like, light up just one cigarette and you'll die of cancer. It's hype.
A couple people in my family died of lung cancer. My whole family is Mormon, they never smoked. They didn't hang around smokers other than me. I've been a heavy smoker since 1969, when I started. I smoke more than 2 packs a day, full flavors, none of that 'ultralight' shit, those just have no taste. Almost 45 years now, no lung cancer yet. My old man had emphysema, from being a professional welder for over 30 years. Never smoked a cigarette in his life. He just did an awful lot of welding in very enclosed spaces without a resperator, like, inside a 10,000 gallon tank (he did a LOT of those). . He was also half blind, because he'd strike his arc with the hood up so he could see what he was doing, then nod his head to bring it down. The light did cause retinal burns, and he ended up with something on the order of 20/200 vision. And people wondered why his driving made me nervous...
Dingdingding, we got a winner!! Fukushima was designed to withstand an earthquake. It got hit with an earthquake AND a tsunami. A billion to 1 freak occurance that nobody planned for because it was so bloody unlikely. You have better odds hitting the Lotto, and everybody knows how bad those odds are. Yet, as I said in an earlier comment, everybody's bitching that it wasn't armored from a rock from space the size of Texas and looking to crucify anybody in sight. Every environut from Greenpeace on out snagging sound bytes to hype the shit outta it certainly didn't add to the solution, and as my old man used to say, if you ain't part of the solution, yer part of the problem!
That's assuming every last nuclear reactor on the planet Chernobyls over its expected lifetime. The nastiest isotope is still iodine, with a halflife of 8 days. So, move everybody out of range for a couple months and the iodine level will be around normal. Kill and bury every livestock animal in the exclusion zone WAY deep in a land fill someplace where it can decay over the years, and the seepage won't matter as the iodine has already decayed. Seriously, guys.
What gets me is, everybody bitches that Fukushima 'failed'. Yeah, after taking an earthquake and a tsunami. What were they expecting, the Japanese to armor it against a direct impact from an asteroid the size of Texas or something? It was what, a 1 in a billion chance they took? The gods of statistics hated them that day.
Know what the leading cause of lung cancer in smokers is? The decay of potassium in the smoke that came from the fertilizer for the tobacco. Know how liable you are to get lung cancer from cigarette smoke? Less than 10% chance for an active smoker, less than 1% for a nonsmoker. Yeah, it's a risk factor. So is breathing. Hell, the leading cause of death is life. Some light reading for shits & giggles. And he shows source materials. Nice guy, he did the cites for us...
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!
on
The Panic Over Fukushima
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Never been to Denver, eh? They not only use those radioactive blocks for foundations and basements, they also build walls out of them. So, when you spend 8 hours a night in bed trying to get some sleep, you're breathing in that lovely radon gas. And air, as you might know, goes readily into the bloodstream in your lungs. Biology 101. When I was a teenager on the Western Slope of Colorado back in the lat e60's, the hype was that those radioactive cinderblocks would cause cancer, mutations, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Didn't happen. You get a much higher dose from cosmic radiation in Denver every year due to the thin air.
As far as mutations go, it usually takes a few years for them to show up. Most mutations are not viable, so they die shortly after birth and don't reproduce. End of problem.
Ignore the hype from places like rt.com which claims that Fukishima 'has nuked Kalamazoo, MI' and 'thousands of Russian troops have died trying to cover Chernobyl'. Even Greenpeace admits the radiation is only 70 times background level, at 5.7 becquerels and they have a vested interest in hyping everything out of proportion, so take their numbers with a grain of salt until you see a peer-reviewed report by a PhD. . When it's all said and done, though, even at Greepeace's probably highly inflated numbers, it's still about 1/50th of what's allowed for a nuclear reactor worker in the US to recieve per year. The radiation absorbed from a week at Chernobyl was less than a chest CT scan. A 2 week stay in the Fukishima exclusion zone would give you a quarter of the average yearly background radiation exposure. At the Fukishima town hall, you'd get about a quarter of the radiation you'd get from your yearly potassium decay in your own body, in a two week period, roughly equivilent to 20 dental xrays over 2 weeks.
At the moment, they can. However, all that's needed is an El Presidente asking a Party-packed Congress to pass a law authorising EOs as Federal law in case of emergency. Then, immediately after getting his 'state of emergency', sign another one arresting the Supremes, if they haven't already been properly packed with Party partisans. No judges, no ruling. It's for the good of the country, a matter of national security.
Maybe the current crop of Presidential Idiots won't do that, but who knows what the future may bring? EOs need to be limited, bigtime.
Fortunately our founding fathers imparted the never ending ability to 'throw out' those at the top. So if the Religious Cranks do manage to get in charge, we can remove them.
Unlike the usual 'Religious Crank' system which is most definitely 'Top Down'.
Unless the Head Crank signs an executive order declaring a state of emergency, suspends elections for the duration of the emergency, and refuses to lift the emergency for his/her lifetime. All for the good of the country, of course... And they wonder why I have problems with executive orders creeping into areas they shouldn't with the full force of Federal law.
Back in the day, when we hunted dinosaurs from the backs of our '57 Chevys, schools taught reading, writing, and math. They also taught kids how to learn, how to study, ad nauseum. The point they made was, keep learning, keep competitive. These days, seems what they teach is 'obey the government without question and watch the Kardashians'.
Dude, everybody in the US has trouble understanding the legal system in the US. It just don't make sense no matter how you slice it, even when you use a chainsaw.
Actually, he had it right. Must not be American, else he's a greybeard like me from back in the day when we DID leave kids behind if they just couldn't cut it...
Thing is, even if the Brits do demand the Ecuadorians close their embassy, the staff still has diplomatic immunity until they leave the UK. Sorry, that's how diplomatic immunity works.
The sad thing is that we have lost a lot of them to "aid in fighting" un-winnable and/or lost wars.
Of course we won the Iraq war. We got rid of their WMD, didn't we? 'Mission Accomplished.'
Except Iraq didn't have any WMDs or they would have used them the instant we invaded. How many months did El Presidente stand in front of a camera saying "You've always lied to us. Even when you're lying, you're lying to us. We're coming to your town to get you. Your government will be destroyed, as will your way of life. We intend to kill you." With absolutely nothing to lose, and El Presidente made that damned clear in every broadcast, why not try to take a few infidels with you when you're gonna die anyways?
And believe it or not, chemical and biological weapons are not weapons of mass destruction, they're weapons of mass death. They don't fuck up property values one bit except for the cleanup. The MOAB, on the other tentacle... Oh, wait, that was an American weapon system, deployed and used by Americans.
So you're saying you advocate security through obscurity, rather than making the systems that use that information more secure by design such that I could publish those things and not worry?
More like, "That's nifty technology. Why can't you be bothered to get a warrant to use it for law enforcement purposes?"
So your saying welfare queens produce War-fighting goods-- err i mean solders.
Pretty much, yeah. Grow up in a gang-infested slum so broke you can't even pay attention, and all of a sudden, military service looks like a good option to get out, especially when the government stops all the educational benefits designed to bootstrap kids out. When the house is burning down, and there's only one door available to escape, you're not gonna stick around and cook marshmallows.
Projects that never complete are not completely wasted money. An MBA might think that. But knowledge is developed and it reduces the cost on future projects.
Except when the projects never get out of planning before they fall to the knife. Anything looks good on paper, but til they start building prototypes, they're not going to find the 'gotchas'. Way too many NASA projects get killed in the planning stages. THAT'S where the money gets lost, especially when the specs of the project change on a weekly basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but the spinsters don't give us any idea where they came up with that '1 in 20' number of cases of thyroid cancer in children supposedly developing, nor do the antispinsters make any more sense by saying 'The spinsters say 5% of the children. In a country with 300 million people, that means 15 million will develop cancer'. They have 300 million children there???? And of course they give no cites.
ENENews is an online service dedicated to covering the latest energy-related developments. Established shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in March 2011, ENENews has grown rapidly to serve approximately 2,000,000 pageviews per month — and with over 200,000 comments and counting, our active community of registered users is one of the most engaged on the internet. These figures represent a vast audience that includes not only nuclear industry professionals, but also scientists, researchers, journalists, opinion and policy-makers, as well as the general public.
Sounds like some spin site cranked up to cash in on the fear to me. Lotta 2nd & 3rd hand reported stories, damned few going on the record as named sources, just anonymous 'Fukushima worker' etc. Time for a grain of salt, methinks...
The news channels can't educate people on what a rem is, or why its important, in under 30 seconds, and nobody knows that from school anymore, so the news spin cycle is forced to sensationalize.
More like, the news channels in the US won't educate people in a 30 second sound byte. They get better ratings when they pile on the hype. Remember dirty bombs? How they kept saying they were the end of the world and no nuclear knowledge was needed to kill kill KILL with them? The few stations who actually did the math and figured out the (conventional) explosive component was far more deadly than any radioactive jacket you could cover it with, and the radiation 'released' by one could only seriously injure you if 1) they cemented your feet in place for 5-10 years in the 'radiation zone', and 2) nobody cleaned up after it, not even the rain, didn't get the ratings that the stations who went all 'OMGOMGOMG!!! It's the end of the world!! Tune in at 5 tomorrow and we'll show you how you can possibly survive this massive danger!!' did. And with the ratings, so go the advertising dollars. Being businesses that had to answer to their stockholders, guess which way the tv stations went, especially in a low income slot like the news? Hell, the US Army studied dirty bombs, did the math, decided they were a humongous waste of time, and had their contractors develop better artillery shells. Yeah, some of those use depleted uranium, but that's because DU goes through light to medium armor extremely well.
Um, it did The wave was 50 foot when it hit Fukushima, after losing a shitton of energy moving over the land.
Scary thought, eh? And yet everybody bitches that they didn't design Fukushima to handle it.
That's less than 10% chance to get lung cancer by smoking. People get lung cancer all the time, from things like asbestos, air polution, whatnot. But develop lung cancer without smoking, and people will automatically assume it's from the second hand smoke you picked up when you walked past a room somebody had a cigarette in 20 years ago. It just ain't so. Primary cigarette smoke is a contributing factor to lung cancer, but nothing like the hype they'd have you believe, like, light up just one cigarette and you'll die of cancer. It's hype.
A couple people in my family died of lung cancer. My whole family is Mormon, they never smoked. They didn't hang around smokers other than me. I've been a heavy smoker since 1969, when I started. I smoke more than 2 packs a day, full flavors, none of that 'ultralight' shit, those just have no taste. Almost 45 years now, no lung cancer yet. My old man had emphysema, from being a professional welder for over 30 years. Never smoked a cigarette in his life. He just did an awful lot of welding in very enclosed spaces without a resperator, like, inside a 10,000 gallon tank (he did a LOT of those). . He was also half blind, because he'd strike his arc with the hood up so he could see what he was doing, then nod his head to bring it down. The light did cause retinal burns, and he ended up with something on the order of 20/200 vision. And people wondered why his driving made me nervous...
Dingdingding, we got a winner!! Fukushima was designed to withstand an earthquake. It got hit with an earthquake AND a tsunami. A billion to 1 freak occurance that nobody planned for because it was so bloody unlikely. You have better odds hitting the Lotto, and everybody knows how bad those odds are. Yet, as I said in an earlier comment, everybody's bitching that it wasn't armored from a rock from space the size of Texas and looking to crucify anybody in sight. Every environut from Greenpeace on out snagging sound bytes to hype the shit outta it certainly didn't add to the solution, and as my old man used to say, if you ain't part of the solution, yer part of the problem!
That's assuming every last nuclear reactor on the planet Chernobyls over its expected lifetime. The nastiest isotope is still iodine, with a halflife of 8 days. So, move everybody out of range for a couple months and the iodine level will be around normal. Kill and bury every livestock animal in the exclusion zone WAY deep in a land fill someplace where it can decay over the years, and the seepage won't matter as the iodine has already decayed. Seriously, guys.
What gets me is, everybody bitches that Fukushima 'failed'. Yeah, after taking an earthquake and a tsunami. What were they expecting, the Japanese to armor it against a direct impact from an asteroid the size of Texas or something? It was what, a 1 in a billion chance they took? The gods of statistics hated them that day.
Know what the leading cause of lung cancer in smokers is? The decay of potassium in the smoke that came from the fertilizer for the tobacco. Know how liable you are to get lung cancer from cigarette smoke? Less than 10% chance for an active smoker, less than 1% for a nonsmoker. Yeah, it's a risk factor. So is breathing. Hell, the leading cause of death is life. Some light reading for shits & giggles. And he shows source materials. Nice guy, he did the cites for us...
Never been to Denver, eh? They not only use those radioactive blocks for foundations and basements, they also build walls out of them. So, when you spend 8 hours a night in bed trying to get some sleep, you're breathing in that lovely radon gas. And air, as you might know, goes readily into the bloodstream in your lungs. Biology 101. When I was a teenager on the Western Slope of Colorado back in the lat e60's, the hype was that those radioactive cinderblocks would cause cancer, mutations, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Didn't happen. You get a much higher dose from cosmic radiation in Denver every year due to the thin air.
As far as mutations go, it usually takes a few years for them to show up. Most mutations are not viable, so they die shortly after birth and don't reproduce. End of problem.
Ignore the hype from places like rt.com which claims that Fukishima 'has nuked Kalamazoo, MI' and 'thousands of Russian troops have died trying to cover Chernobyl'. Even Greenpeace admits the radiation is only 70 times background level, at 5.7 becquerels and they have a vested interest in hyping everything out of proportion, so take their numbers with a grain of salt until you see a peer-reviewed report by a PhD. . When it's all said and done, though, even at Greepeace's probably highly inflated numbers, it's still about 1/50th of what's allowed for a nuclear reactor worker in the US to recieve per year. The radiation absorbed from a week at Chernobyl was less than a chest CT scan. A 2 week stay in the Fukishima exclusion zone would give you a quarter of the average yearly background radiation exposure. At the Fukishima town hall, you'd get about a quarter of the radiation you'd get from your yearly potassium decay in your own body, in a two week period, roughly equivilent to 20 dental xrays over 2 weeks.
Problem is, one man's waste is another man's paycheck...
At the moment, they can. However, all that's needed is an El Presidente asking a Party-packed Congress to pass a law authorising EOs as Federal law in case of emergency. Then, immediately after getting his 'state of emergency', sign another one arresting the Supremes, if they haven't already been properly packed with Party partisans. No judges, no ruling. It's for the good of the country, a matter of national security.
Maybe the current crop of Presidential Idiots won't do that, but who knows what the future may bring? EOs need to be limited, bigtime.
Fortunately our founding fathers imparted the never ending ability to 'throw out' those at the top. So if the Religious Cranks do manage to get in charge, we can remove them. Unlike the usual 'Religious Crank' system which is most definitely 'Top Down'.
Unless the Head Crank signs an executive order declaring a state of emergency, suspends elections for the duration of the emergency, and refuses to lift the emergency for his/her lifetime. All for the good of the country, of course... And they wonder why I have problems with executive orders creeping into areas they shouldn't with the full force of Federal law.
Back in the day, when we hunted dinosaurs from the backs of our '57 Chevys, schools taught reading, writing, and math. They also taught kids how to learn, how to study, ad nauseum. The point they made was, keep learning, keep competitive. These days, seems what they teach is 'obey the government without question and watch the Kardashians'.
I can think of 535 people right off the top of my head. No, make that 539, this is an election year.
If we kick the shit outta all of them, we'd be able to fit 'em all in a matchbox and save fuel for the mission...
Dude, everybody in the US has trouble understanding the legal system in the US. It just don't make sense no matter how you slice it, even when you use a chainsaw.
You are wasting your time if you are trying to convince the wilfully ignorant by educating them with the facts and using logical deductive reasoning.
You will have more luck convincing the Pope that indeed, bears do not shit in the woods.
FTFY. Yer welcome.
Actually, he had it right. Must not be American, else he's a greybeard like me from back in the day when we DID leave kids behind if they just couldn't cut it...
Thing is, even if the Brits do demand the Ecuadorians close their embassy, the staff still has diplomatic immunity until they leave the UK. Sorry, that's how diplomatic immunity works.
I'm fully aware of the chemical weapons used on the Kurds. That was back in the 80s and 90's. They were all used up.
Oh, and btw, the Americans sold them to Iraq to use on Iran.
The sad thing is that we have lost a lot of them to "aid in fighting" un-winnable and/or lost wars.
Of course we won the Iraq war. We got rid of their WMD, didn't we? 'Mission Accomplished.'
Except Iraq didn't have any WMDs or they would have used them the instant we invaded. How many months did El Presidente stand in front of a camera saying "You've always lied to us. Even when you're lying, you're lying to us. We're coming to your town to get you. Your government will be destroyed, as will your way of life. We intend to kill you." With absolutely nothing to lose, and El Presidente made that damned clear in every broadcast, why not try to take a few infidels with you when you're gonna die anyways?
And believe it or not, chemical and biological weapons are not weapons of mass destruction, they're weapons of mass death. They don't fuck up property values one bit except for the cleanup. The MOAB, on the other tentacle... Oh, wait, that was an American weapon system, deployed and used by Americans.
So you're saying you advocate security through obscurity, rather than making the systems that use that information more secure by design such that I could publish those things and not worry?
More like, "That's nifty technology. Why can't you be bothered to get a warrant to use it for law enforcement purposes?"
Anyone else notice that the cost for just *3* of these things is half a billion dollars, assuming no cost overruns?
Yup. And if they can't scam cost overruns outta this, they ain't trying.
And now you know where the NASA budget cuts are going...
So your saying welfare queens produce War-fighting goods-- err i mean solders.
Pretty much, yeah. Grow up in a gang-infested slum so broke you can't even pay attention, and all of a sudden, military service looks like a good option to get out, especially when the government stops all the educational benefits designed to bootstrap kids out. When the house is burning down, and there's only one door available to escape, you're not gonna stick around and cook marshmallows.
Projects that never complete are not completely wasted money. An MBA might think that. But knowledge is developed and it reduces the cost on future projects.
Except when the projects never get out of planning before they fall to the knife. Anything looks good on paper, but til they start building prototypes, they're not going to find the 'gotchas'. Way too many NASA projects get killed in the planning stages. THAT'S where the money gets lost, especially when the specs of the project change on a weekly basis.