There is no technology available now or forseeable in the future that will make it safe to fly a personal plane into a thunderstorm or into ice. There is no technology that will take away your ability to fly into them. The only technology that can do that is technology that keeps you on ground, always.
I'm not a pilot but that seems like nonsense to me. At least to the extent that experienced pilots are able to use their judgement to see and avoid thunderstorms and icing conditions today, technology should be able to help somewhat less experienced pilots do so in the future. I'd divide the task into two parts:
(a) Mapping bad spots in real time. Use a network of sensors -- cameras, air and ground temperature sensors, satellite photo, etcetera -- to determine what areas are definitely safe to fly in. Generate a big database. Note that all the other planes in the air can be part of the sensor grid. When pilots currently in the air press the "it looks dangerous ahead, please re-route" button, that becomes part of the knowledge base that affects the pilots behind him.
(b) fly-by-wire/autopilot assistance. Have the default autopilot setting automatically prevent people from flying into the identifiable bad spots, or prevent the plane from taking off at all if the weather is likely to be sufficiently bad along the expected flight path.
You're flying in clear skies on a path that was clear, when bad conditions appear ahead. The speakers announce: "WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! A thunderstorm is developing about 500 miles ahead. I suggest you (a) divert southward to route around it, (b) divert northward around it, (c) return to the airport you just left, or (d) pick an alternate destination." The options appear on your heads-up display. If you don't pick one of the presets or otherwise change course within 5 minutes, the warning system gets more insistent: "This is your last warning!" If you don't pick a safe alternate route within ten minutes, the computer announces it is picking one for you and does so. It also radios ahead to tell the airport you're coming in, and to notify your insurance company that you don't appear to be flying responsibly.
(You can always override the autopilot and continue on your dangerous path by pressing the big red "manual override" button, but that also notifies your bank or insurance company; it's like pulling onto the shoulder of a freeway when you have car troubles. You might have to fill out paperwork later or pay a fine.)
Sure, we can't do this now, but why isn't it forseeable?
Disclaimer: my sister died in a small-plane crash during a training exercise; my mom survived a mid-air collision in a DC-10. So perhaps I'm not the best person to ask for advice on how NOT to get in trouble in the air...:-(
"I've always wondered why nobody has ever actually used nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects, if (and this is a BIG if) the blasts can
be made reasonably radiologically clean."
it amazes me a little
that someone talks about "radiological clean" blasts. There are no radiological clean nuclear blasts in nature and it is stupid to claim such thing.
The poster to whom you refer said reasonably clean, and made it a hypothetical. It'd be fine if it only produced a little residual radiation, since small amounts of radiation are good for you and might even reduce the local cancer risk. See any book or study on radiation hormesis; radiation is one of the many things that are deady in high doses but beneficial in low doses.
I find it highly suspicious that there's no way to tell from the site where this company is physically located or how to send them non-electronic mail. There isn't even a fax number, just an email address.
Having the car automatically fix itself and compensate for problems when things go wrong is yet another really interesting technical problem. Having a reliable and consistent robot driver would make it a lot safer and more practical to test such solutions.
For instance, suppose the car had a way to know your Ford Exploder had had a blowout and automatically adjusted the steering to prevent the car from flipping over. With a robot driver around, you could fine-tune the sensor and the corrective handling routines without risk of loss of life.
Oh, and then we'd probably want to add a VUI (voice user interface) that responds to requests such as
"One of the stabilizers has broken loose; see if you can lock it down!":-)
I question this assertion. How are you defining "wealth"? Do cars, television sets, personal possessions count? Who made this estimate and how did they do the measurement?
Small amounts of ionizing radiation actually help prevent cancer. The cancer rate would probably be a lot lower if there were more background radiation.
The only way people get estimates to the contrary is by doing a straight-line estimation. So if being forced to drink ten gallons of water all at once drowns 99/100 people, being forced to drink a half gallon is assumed to drown 1/20th as many (about 5 people) and so on down the line; a straight-line estimate would allow you to deduce that even a cup of water a day is more deadly than no water at all. This is obviously the wrong way to estimate how dangerous water is; it's also the wrong way to estimate the danger of radiation (both ionizing and non-ionizing).
The medical dictionary definition of hormesis is: "An effect where a toxic substance acts like a stimulant in small doses, but it is an inhibitor in large doses."
This page has some interesting examples, including the following:
Radiation hormesis in cancer mortality was found in 32,000 United States and 22,000 British military observers of atmospheric nuclear explosions (Robinette et al., 1985;
Darby et al., 1988). The cancer mortality rate of Canadian military observers was only 88% of carefully selected military controls (Raman et al., 1987). The leukemia mortality rate
of the Canadian observers was only 40% of that of the unexposed controls. In each study the cancer motality rate of exposed personnel was lower that that of the general population.
The cumulative data represents about 100,000 acutely exposed persons in four countries. This is convincing evidence that whole body exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation
do not cause increased mortality. The supporting animal data showed that both acute and chronic exposure to low dose irradiation decreased cancer mortality (Luckey 1990, 1993). The
combined animal and human results provide impressive evidence that cancer mortality is decreased by acute exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation.
No, you wrote it the way people usually do. The usual attribution is to a "Tyler" and his book called _The Rise and Fall of the Athenian Republic_. But that book doesn't exist, and the quote doesn't even really make sense in the context of Athens. In particular, consider this bit:
"From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury..."
The trouble with that is that Athens didn't really have candidates; rather, decisions were made directly by the voting population. It was a direct democracy, not a representative democracy.
This speech is probably to libertarians what Chief Seattle's speech is to liberal environmentalists. The fact that it appeals to your (and my) political sensibilities to a high degree doesn't prevent it from being a hoax.
Does it really matter? I could have claimed the statement as an original and that wouldn't make it any less relevant.
Yes, it does really matter. Had you claimed the statement as original we'd have to argue about it to establish on what basis you were making the claim and whether it is in fact true. The claim wouldn't have the patina of received wisdom that writing which has survived 200 years does. Time winnows grain from chaff; we tend to assume any quote that survives so long must have had some intrinsic value, some kernel of truth or beauty or elegance that makes it worth passing along to one's kids and reprinting and sticking on posters and asking political figures to respond to.
If you really disagree, consider how it would have been moderated had you posed this question to the candidates: "Murray Shlobotnik, my brother-in-law, wrote the following in a postcard he sent me from Pittsburgh last week. I believe it is a fairly accurate description of America today. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
Alexander Tyler wrote the following regarding the fall of the Athenian Republic. I believe it is a fairly accurate description of America today. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.[...]
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that quote is a myth. First off, the name of the author is a typo. There was a Scottish historian named Alexander Tytler, but the book the quote is supposed to have come from ("The rise and fall of the athenian republic") does not exist. My guess is that PJ O'Rourke may have invented the quote (or at least popularized it).
So it's a nice sentiment, but doesn't deserve the aura of authenticity granted by attribution to a centuries-old academic.
Many substances that are poisonous in large doses are good for you in small doses. The phenomenon is called "hormesis", and radiation seems to fit the description.
There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that small amounts of ionizing radiation help prevent cancer. The cancer rate might be a lot lower if there were more background radiation. If so, then even cellphones that produced ionizing radiation would still benefit rather than harm their users. You might want the one that gives the highest dose, to improve your health!
The medical dictionary definition of hormesis is: "An effect where a toxic substance acts like a stimulant in small doses, but it is an inhibitor in large doses."
A relevant text (recommended on the web but I haven't read it) is: Kondo, S.; Health effects of low-level radiation. Osaka, Japan: Kinki University Press; Madison, WI: Medical Physics Publishing Co.,
1993.
This page has some interesting examples, including the following:
Radiation hormesis in cancer mortality was found in 32,000 United States and 22,000 British military observers of atmospheric nuclear explosions (Robinette et al., 1985;
Darby et al., 1988). The cancer mortality rate of Canadian military observers was only 88% of carefully selected military controls (Raman et al., 1987). The leukemia mortality rate
of the Canadian observers was only 40% of that of the unexposed controls. In each study the cancer motality rate of exposed personnel was lower that that of the general population.
The cumulative data represents about 100,000 acutely exposed persons in four countries. This is convincing evidence that whole body exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation
do not cause increased mortality. The supporting animal data showed that both acute and chronic exposure to low dose irradiation decreased cancer mortality (Luckey 1990, 1993). The
combined animal and human results provide impressive evidence that cancer mortality is decreased by acute exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation.
Thank you for pointing out the PBS references, I'll probably use them as my primary source the next time this issue comes up. By the way, I don't know if you've been following the links I gave, but we now have a reasonable source for your "it doesn't solve the whole problem" claim and for my refutation of it. According to the interview with Hoffert, if we don't use breeder reactors to recycle our nuclear fuel, the U.S. only has a ten-year supply of reactor-grade uranium.
But, Hoffert also says with breeders we could use uranium 100 times as effectively as our current light-water reactors. 100 times 10 years gives us a thousand years of power at the current rate of production using the uranium we can extract at current prices. So even Hoffert, an "alternative fuels" advocate for PBS/Nova, is basically agreeing with my other sources that nuclear power DOES solve the resource issue.
The reason he dismisses it anyway is: (1) breeder reactors produce plutonium, and he's afraid of terrorists getting it to build bombs. (2) Breeders take a while (he says 20 years) to make a significant amount of fuel. So I guess we'd have to borrow some plutonium from France and Japan while waiting for our own production capacity to come on line.:-)
With regard to "help in the areas we desperately need help", (1) if we replace coal-burning plants with nukes, we'll reduce greenhouse emissions and smog. (2) We could use nuclear plants to charge those fuel cells you mentioned in the next generation of cleaner cars. We'll need SOME power source to charge them, so why not pick one that will last a while and doesn't pollute the air?
The [PBS] specials in question (which had to do with global warming, the weather, and carbon emissions) were recorded this year,
and were broadcast just this past spring, if I remember correctly.
With that in mind, I just surfed over to PBS.org to see if I could find any material on nuclear power that might substantiate your half-remembered claims. The first thing I found was a Frontline special called "Nuclear Reaction: why do Americans fear nuclear power?". Here's the link to their
FAQ. So here's what Frontline's Q&A says about the toxicity of plutonium:
Q: What is plutonium? Is it a metal like uranium?
A: Plutonium is, in fact, a metal very like uranium. If you hold it [in] your hand (and I've held tons of it my hand, a pound or two at a time), it's heavy, like lead. It's toxic, like lead or arsenic, but not much more so.
Q: How can plutonium harm you?
A: You have to eat it in order to harm yourself with it. It is radioactive, naturally. Radioactive, but much less so than radium, for example, which is scattered again all over the earth's crust. So it's not a very frightening material.
Q: So you say you hold it in your hand. What about the radiation that is emitted by plutonium?
A: The radiation from plutonium tends to be very easily stopped by any kind of shielding around the plutonium. A pair of gloves, paper. Certainly, a thin film of steel will stop the radiation from plutonium, so that it's perfectly safe.
Q: Is the skin on your hand is enough to shield yourself from plutonium's radiation?
A: The skin on your hand is probably sufficient to stop most of it.
Q: We've all heard that it's the most toxic substance in the world. Isn't it?
A: Well, I think it's absurd. It's not toxic. As I say, it's no more toxic than any other heavy metal, and its radioactivity is very considerably less than many other things that are on the earth's surface. It's an absurd statement.
The other parts of the Q&A seem to back up what I was saying elsewhere. Read the part on why a political moratorium on reprocessing created the U.S. waste problem which would otherwise not be much of a big deal. Now you might say that this is an interview with somebody who is part of the pro-nuclear establishment. To which I would respond that this is the interview FrontLine chose to feature as a definitive FAQ, and FrontLine is a PBS show presumably on equivalent standing with other PBS shows you may have seen on the subject. Perhaps more so since this is a show that featured nuclear power as its primary issue rather than as a side issue to some other topic. Here's the
topmost page; the other interviews they did are illuminating as well. (they made Nader look a bit silly, if you ask me...)
[surfs a bit more...]
Okay, I think I might have found your alternative source. It's a Nova episode on global warming called "What's up with the weather: beyond fossil fuels". Here's the topmost link and here is the FAQ section. If you read it carefully you'll find some support for your position but you'll also see that most of what they are saying is perfectly compatible with what my sources have said. It's pretty clear that Hoffert isn't all that interested in nuclear power, which is fine. He takes it as a given that we won't use breeder reactors or allow reprocessing in the U.S. any time soon due to political constraints, some of which he agrees with. Given those constraints and his assumptions about what a "cost effective price" is, his conclusions follow.
This probably concludes our debate. Surf the PBS links I just gave you for a while if you need any more clarification of the issues pro or con.
Q1: How does the cost of long-term storage of the non-reusable endproduct of nuclear waste affect the economy of nuclear produced power?
Okay, there's high-level stuff, there's low-level stuff, and there's the plant itself. The high-level stuff left after reprocessing (eg, the fuel rods) is pretty nasty but relatively easy to contain because there's so little of it. The low-level stuff (eg, used gloves) involves more mass but is still a tiny amount of material compared to the solid ash generated by a coal-burning plant and involves relatively little risk. It should probably be handled much like medical waste.
As for shutdown expenses, building or decommissioning a research reactor tends to be a lot more expensive than a production one, because it's a one-of-a-kind design and you want to use the opportunity to test different techniques. Shutting down TMI was horrendously expensive because they chose to look at it as a research opportunity rather than an engineering project; I assume your plant was similar. But when you make a lot of nuclear plants of the same design, there are some nice economies of scale so building them up, refurbishing them and breaking them down isn't nearly as bad as when every one is different.
France and Japan chose the "make them all the same" model. America chose the "make them all different" model, which in retrospect was a big lose; the gains to be had from always using the latest technology didn't make up for the costs and risks of everything being non-standard. France accidentally picked the right strategy and the right time to implement it, so now they are pretty happy with nukes providing 80% of their power.
Q2: If nuclear power is really that unproblematic how come the political winds currently goes against it?
I suspect it's just your standard interest-group political game. Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. There currently exist many large politically-savvy lobbying groups that stand to lose from any sort of switch in power-production strategies. For instance, the British coal-miners union. Or the entire state of Texas.:-)
Nuclear is an obvious win for countries that import all their fuel (France), or are starting essentially from ground zero (China). But when there are a bunch of entrenched interests invested in some other technology, the case has to be pretty compelling to force a change. And right now oil is _so_ cheap and available that the practical case for doing something else isn't all that strong.
In the long run relying on nuclear power is probably inevitable, but that doesn't mean we need to adopt it any time soon. There's no particular hurry. Heightened concern over greenhouse gases is the latest thing pushing us in that direction.
"Uranium is STILL a depletable resource just like fossile fuels, and there is less of it on the planet than fossil fuels, and the huge energy density of fossile fuels takes a lot to replace."
Fossil fuels have a huge energy density compared to wood or solar or hydro, but they don't hold a candle to nuclear power. Nuclear fuel is more efficient by many orders of magnitude. If you're producing a thousand times as much energy per unit mass, you don't need very much unit mass to produce a lot of energy.
I don't know when your "PBS specials" were recorded, but I suspect it was more than ten years ago. It used to be the conventional wisdom in the '70s and '80s that we were likely to run out of natural sources of uranium soon. This is why France invested in breeder reactors and reprocessing, because they wanted to be self-sufficent and didn't want to substitue dependency on limited foreign uranium supplies for dependency on limited foreign oil supplies. But the anticipated uranium shortage never materialized. Just as with the often-anticipated oil shortages, we just kept getting better at finding more as the need arose.
I trust the PBS specials on the topic I saw over some poster I don't even know.
You don't have to trust me on any of this. Just look it up for yourself. Do a Google search or something. Or follow the links I've been giving you and check their sources.
The last I heard, current Uranium reserves will supposedly last well over 100 years at the current burn rate.
Very true... at the current burn rate. But that's not what was being discussed, now was it? I'm talking about REPLACING
our existing fossil fuel sources with nuclear power. Uranium is a limited resource just like fossile fuels, and thus doing this
doesn't solve the problem anyway!
I'm sorry, but your information is not correct. There is enough nuclear fuel around to last us for thousands of years, easily. Where are you getting your estimates from? Here's a page from John McCarthy's Sustainability of Human Progress FAQ:
-=-=-
How long will nuclear energy last?
These facts come from an articleBernard Cohen.
Nuclear energy, assuming breeder
reactors, will last for several billion
years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.
Here are the basic facts.
In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at
that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years.
Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very
big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents
per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and
10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)
Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as
the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can
be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents
per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that
price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent
per gallon.
How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?
There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in
Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from
seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and
certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain
that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound
and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.
In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at
$400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil
$5.70, natural gas $3-4.)
How much uranium is there in seawater?
Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium,
so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium.
All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied
by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.
However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact
3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium
from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity
usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He
argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift,
the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of
6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun
will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a
renewable resource.
Comments:
Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life
of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his
postulated 5 billion years.
He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times
as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium.
He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet.
He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.
The main point to be derived from Cohen's article is that energy
is not a problem even in the very long run. In particular, energy
intensive solutions to other human problems are entirely
acceptable.
It all sounds like propaganda from the nuclear power industry to me.
The fact that what I tell you is the accepted standard wisdom within the nuclear power industry doesn't make it false. If you want accurate information about how nuclear power works, eventually you'll have to listen to people who know something about it rather than just listening to people who are terrified by it.
Sorry. I not only don't buy that nuclear power is as safe or safer than other forms, but you haven't addressed the primary point
I've made, which is that nuclear power as it exists today cannot possibly supply the world's energy needs... it can only delay the
inevitable by a few years.
That's a reasonable question. How long will nuclear power last us? You seem to think it will only last "a few" years. What assumptions are you making to get that figure? And by "few" do you mean a thousand years, a hundred years, a dozen years?
Another nuclear advocate, John McCarthy, has an FAQ on nuclear energy as part of his sustainability website; I recommend it to you. His sources calculate that with breeder reactors we could make known supplies of nuclear fuel last for a fair bit more than "a few" years using known technology. Here are some details from this page:
Nuclear energy, assuming breeder
reactors, will last for several billion
years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.
Here are the basic facts.
In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at
that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years.
Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very
big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents
per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and
10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)
Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as
the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can
be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents
per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that
price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent
per gallon.
How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?
There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in
Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from
seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and
certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain
that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound
and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.
In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at
$400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil
$5.70, natural gas $3-4.)
How much uranium is there in seawater?
Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium,
so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium.
All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied
by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.
However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact
3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium
from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity
usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He
argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift,
the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of
6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun
will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a
renewable resource.
Comments:
Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life
of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his
postulated 5 billion years.
He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times
as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium.
He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet.
He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.
The main point to be derived from Cohen's article is that energy
is not a problem even in the very long run. In particular, energy
intensive solutions to other human problems are entirely
acceptable.
Plutonium is primarily dangerous to people due to its chemistry, not due to its radioactivity.
Which is the opposite of the truth. It's primarily the radiation that is dangerous. Plutonium thus gets less and less hazardous over time as the radiation diminishes, whereas arsenic and chlorine do not. That's why Hogan can sensibly make comparisons like "after ten years it's no more poisonous than X; after twenty years it's no more poisonous than Y." Because the radiation component of the danger diminishes and this is a significant fraction of the total threat. Oh, well. Read Hogan instead of me anyway...
AND remember that the 'sufficient amount' of plutonium to kill you is measured in micro-grams... And the form of death is rather horrifying as well (i.e. slow, stealthy, agonizing). It's a lot different from trying to
ingest a lot of bleach...
It's no different from arsenic or bleach in terms of the difficulty of coming up with likely scenarios that could kill more than a few people. In terms of eating it, a smaller amount of arsenic is sufficient. In terms of breathing it, you'd need to inhale hundreds of thousands of particles of plutonium to get a likely death out of it - one particle is not sufficient. Here's a good reference: A Perspective on the Dangers of Plutonium.
I'll quote the abstract and introduction; follow the link to get the detailed conclusions.
-=-=- A Perspective on the Dangers of Plutonium
W. G. Sutcliffe, R. H. Condit, W. G. Mansfield, D. S. Myers, D. W. Layton, and P. W. Murphy
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
April 14, 1995
Abstract
Following the seizure of 10 ounces of plutonium at the Munich airport in August 1994, some press accounts stated that terrorists could kill "hundreds of
thousands of people" by introducing plutonium into a municipal water supply. In response to such incorrect and misleading statements, we describe the
acute and long-term health effects that can arise from ingesting or inhaling various amounts of plutonium. Our estimates indicate that plutonium
introduced into drinking water supplies would produce a radiation dose much less than normal background, and could kill only a very few people (by
inducing cancers that might take years to appear). We also estimate the (considerably greater) risks associated with the inhalation of plutonium,
clarifying press claims that "a tiny speck... can cause lung cancer." We estimate the number of people that might die of cancer if terrorists were to
introduce plutonium into the atmosphere in a large city. This paper provides a scientific perspective for evaluating possible terrorist threats.
Introduction
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, television and print news media have widely reported that plutonium from that part of the world is available on the
black market. The primary concern aroused by this fact is that, if obtained in sufficient quantities, such plutonium might be made into a nuclear explosive.
However, The New York Times and other newspapers have reported that terrorists might also use black-market plutonium to contaminate the air or
drinking water of a large city. Specifically on August 16, 1994, The New York Times claimed[1] that "A tiny speck of the fine powder can cause lung
cancer in anyone who inhales it, and a small amount in the water supply of a large city like Munich could kill hundreds of thousands of people." Other
newspapers made similar claims.[2],[3] The first of these claims is misleading; the second is false. This note provides a scientific perspective on this
perceived danger.
Although the popular myth that "plutonium is the most hazardous substance known to man" has been refuted many times, the misconception persists that
even a small amount of plutonium taken into the body will be fatal. Plutonium is hazardous, but it is not as immediately hazardous to health as many more
common chemicals. This is not to say that plutonium is not a dangerous, toxic material. Chronic exposure to even small amounts should be a matter of
concern. But dispersal by terrorists as described in the press could not produce the drastic health effects that are popularly imagined, and that is the issue
addressed here.
[...]
Plutonium in the Atmosphere
It is important to understand the claims made in the press concerning particles of plutonium in the air. The New York Times[1] says that "A tiny speck of
the fine powder can cause lung cancer in anyone who inhales it." The largest speck of plutonium that can be readily inhaled is about 3 micrometers in
diameter and has a mass of about 0.14 millionths of a milligram. The risk of dying of cancer as a result of inhaling that amount of plutonium is about
0.0000017 (12 cancers per milligram x 0.00000014 milligrams = 0.0000017 cancers, or 0.00017% additional risk); that is not zero risk, but it is very small.
The Los Angeles Times[2] says that one ten-thousandth of a gram (0.1 milligram) inhaled can cause cancer. This is correct: we have already estimated
that 0.08 milligrams inhaled will have 100% probability of causing a fatal cancer. To inhale 0.1 milligram of plutonium, however, a person would have to
inhale more than seven hundred thousand particles. (A single 0.1-milligram particle would have a diameter of over 260 micrometers, about 90 times too
big to be readily inhaled.) Although a single respirable particle is unlikely to harm an individual,[13] there is still cause for concern if plutonium were to be
dispersed in the atmosphere.
The Herald (Glasgow, Scotland)[3] says that one millionth of a gram (0.001 milligram) can kill: the actual additional risk of cancer death resulting from
the inhalation of 0.001 milligram of plutonium is 0.012 (12 cancers per milligram x 0.001 milligram = 0.012, or 1.2% additional risk).
[...]
-=-=-=
You'll find the rest of the article here.
Tell me again how plutonium (a by-product of many nuclear reactions) isn't all that dangerous compared to house-hold chemicals?
Okay. Plutonium is primarily dangerous to people due to its chemistry, not due to its radioactivity. If you eat a sufficient amount of it you could die, just as you could if you drank bleach or ammonia, two common household chemicals. I'm not saying the plutonium isn't deadly - it is. What I am saying is that being deadly doesn't make it particularly unusual or dangerous if appropriately handled. And in fact nuclear waste _is_ less toxic to humans than those two common household chemicals after it's had some time to cool off.
Author James P. Hogan deals with some of this better than I do, especially in an essay he wrote called _Know Nukes_. So here's an item from his web page on the subject:
-----
Following the items I've posted advocating nuclear as ultimately the only way to go, a number of people have repeated the
frequently asked question of what to do about the waste. My response is that it's a needlessly manufactured political problem, not
a technical one. And in any case the problem itself is minor compared to what we have at present.
A single 1,000 Megawatt coal plant releases something like 600lb carbon dioxide and 30lb sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere per
second, and as much nitrogen oxides as 200,000 automobiles, all of which is estimated to cause 25 premature fatalities and 60,000
cases of respiratory complaints per year, per plant. In addition, it has to get rid of 30,000 truck-loads of ash annually--enough to
cover a square mile sixty feet deep--full of carcinogens, highly acidic or highly alkaline depending on the kind of coal, and,
ironically, emitting more radiation from trace uranium than a nuke is permitted to. That's a real waste-disposal nightmare for
you.
The hysteria about toxicity is not justified by anything factual. After its initial on-site cooling-off period (i.e. at the point where it
would be transported to a deep-burial site as currently proposed) high-level wastes would be about as toxic as barium or arsenic if
ingested, and 1/10th that of ammonia or 1/1000th that of chlorine--which we use liberally to clean our bathtubs and swimming
pools-- if inhaled. After 100 years, these figures drop to 1/1000th, 1/100,000th, and 1/10,000,000th respectively.
The"conventional" types of waste remain lethal, and far less easily detectable, forever.
Some figures:
250 nuclear plants would generate enough waste to kill 10 billion people. True, if it were freely accessible, and people obligingly
lined up to receive their daily dose or intake of it. The same is probably true also of gasoline. By the same token the U.S already
produces enough:
arsenic trioxide to kill 10 billion people
barium to kill 100 billion.
ammonia to kill 6 trillion.
phosgene to kill 20 trillion.
chlorine to kill 400 trillion
As for plutonium having a long half-life, so what? Compost heaps and incense sticks have long half-lives; napalm bombs and
gunpowder have short ones. The public health limits on plutonium in drinking water are 400 times higher than for radium, which
is used safely as a matter of course in practically every hospital.
In short, N-waste turns out to be significantly less hazardous than many other substances that are handled routinely in far greater
volumes, and with far less care.
The sensible way to deal with waste (actually a potentially valuable by-product) is to reprocess it into new fuel and burn it up in
reactors, which not only solves the "problem" but would save about $4 billion in imported oil costs in the lifetime of a 1,000 MW
plant. Roughly 96% of the spent fuel that comes out of a plant can be handled in this way. The remaining "high level" waste from
a year's operation of a 1,000 MW (large) plant takes up about half a cubic yard.
This is what the U.S. nuclear industry was set up to do--as the rest of the world is doing--until political obstructionism in the
late 1970s halted work on the Barnwell facility in South Carolina, which was being built to handle commercial wastes. Legislation
passed at the same time cut the utilities off from the military facilities that had been handling commercial wastes safely since the
1950's. The result was that 100% of what comes out of the reactors is having to be treated as if it were high-level waste, to be
stored in ways that were never intended, and this is what gets all the publicity.
So, in answer to "What about the waste?" What about it? -----
Well, you see, the problem with nuclear waste is that it remains highly toxic and highly radioactive for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
If something has a half-life of a hundred-thousand years or more then by definition that means it's breaking down very slowly which means it's not releasing very much radiation per unit time. It's actually the stuff with a short half-life that's dangerous to have around. But that's a self-limiting problem; it's dangerous but it quickly becomes less so as time passes. Wait five or ten years and it's less of a hazard than lots of household chemicals.
Regarding "highly toxic", Chorine is highly toxic too -- and would stay so for a million years if you kept it in a pressurized vat somewhere for that long -- yet nobody minds having it around it to clean swimming pools because the chance of somebody coming across a batch and drinking or breathing it by accident is so small. Ditto for nuclear waste that is merely chemically poisonous.
The "OSI" was the name of the secret organization that Steve Austin (Lee Majors) and Jamie Summers (Lindsay Wagner) worked for. Oscar Goldman was the chief.
I don't know about the rest of the groups you mentioned, but the armed services have their own security folks (think OSI, at least for the air force) who do this.
The OSI really does that now? Awesome! As I recall, that's one highly competent organization!
Although Rudy always did have trouble keeping that adrenelazine locked up.
Is Oscar still in charge? Steve and Jamie always seemed pretty busy solving major national security problems -- I'd really hate to see them reduced to doing clearance checks on Air Force employees.
For instance, a country with a certain infrastructure/police force/etc. can handle 1.5 units of people well. If you increase the number of people to 3.0 units, then the country falls/people are hurt. Therefore, there must be a way to limit the number of people according to what the country can handle effectively.
It's interesting how anti-growth advocates never worry that there won't be enough video stores or pizza parlors or gas stations or used car lots to support new growth. It's only the government sector that seems unable to dynamically respond to changes in market conditions. So the obvious solution is to privatize government services to whatever degree we can. If we got most of our services from privately built toll roads and voucher or tuition-funded schools and subscription-based security patrols, this issue would mostly go away.
How does the flood of cheap mexican workers INCREASE the job pool? They don't start businesses. They lower the average working wage.
They do NOT lower the average working wage. Immigrants constitute demand for as well as supply of labor. Suppose that the Smith family moves here from Mexico to work in a carwash. The Smith family uses its income to rent housing and to buy clothing, food, and all the other basic necessities of life. This constitutes a demand for goods and labor to be supplied by others.
For instance, if the Smiths consume pizzas that would not otherwise be consumed, the Smiths are driving up wages in the pizza industry. Wages on average are increased (relative to the cost of goods) more than they are decreased by the presence of the Smiths because they, like the rest of us, produce more than they consume.
The money they earn here isn't cycled through the economic system, they send it back to Mexico.
Where their relatives eventually use it to buy American goods, increasing our standard of living. There's no way around it, immigrants are not a drain on our economy, they are its very lifeblood.
Here's an idea to solve the problem of deporting people who's lives are now rooted here: allow unrestricted immigration. There's no reason that the government should restrict peoples' ability to make a better life from themselves here. The same opportunity was afforded to the ancestors of almost everyone else in this country.
Absolutely! We need to open the borders. It's the moral thing to do, and it's also in our own self-interest. The people who worry about immigration being harmful are mostly just ignorant. They should read more economics and travel more.
I recommend The Economic Consequences of Immigration by economist Julian Simon. Immigrants create as many jobs as they consume. If we allowed open immigration it would tend to increase the local standard of living and local salaries.
If you do the math on this one yourself, remember not to include the salaries of the new immigrants in your average, that's the rookie mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a pilot but that seems like nonsense to me. At least to the extent that experienced pilots are able to use their judgement to see and avoid thunderstorms and icing conditions today, technology should be able to help somewhat less experienced pilots do so in the future. I'd divide the task into two parts:
(a) Mapping bad spots in real time. Use a network of sensors -- cameras, air and ground temperature sensors, satellite photo, etcetera -- to determine what areas are definitely safe to fly in. Generate a big database. Note that all the other planes in the air can be part of the sensor grid. When pilots currently in the air press the "it looks dangerous ahead, please re-route" button, that becomes part of the knowledge base that affects the pilots behind him.
(b) fly-by-wire/autopilot assistance. Have the default autopilot setting automatically prevent people from flying into the identifiable bad spots, or prevent the plane from taking off at all if the weather is likely to be sufficiently bad along the expected flight path.
You're flying in clear skies on a path that was clear, when bad conditions appear ahead. The speakers announce: "WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! A thunderstorm is developing about 500 miles ahead. I suggest you (a) divert southward to route around it, (b) divert northward around it, (c) return to the airport you just left, or (d) pick an alternate destination." The options appear on your heads-up display. If you don't pick one of the presets or otherwise change course within 5 minutes, the warning system gets more insistent: "This is your last warning!" If you don't pick a safe alternate route within ten minutes, the computer announces it is picking one for you and does so. It also radios ahead to tell the airport you're coming in, and to notify your insurance company that you don't appear to be flying responsibly.
(You can always override the autopilot and continue on your dangerous path by pressing the big red "manual override" button, but that also notifies your bank or insurance company; it's like pulling onto the shoulder of a freeway when you have car troubles. You might have to fill out paperwork later or pay a fine.)
Sure, we can't do this now, but why isn't it forseeable?
Disclaimer: my sister died in a small-plane crash during a training exercise; my mom survived a mid-air collision in a DC-10. So perhaps I'm not the best person to ask for advice on how NOT to get in trouble in the air... :-(
The poster to whom you refer said reasonably clean, and made it a hypothetical. It'd be fine if it only produced a little residual radiation, since small amounts of radiation are good for you and might even reduce the local cancer risk. See any book or study on radiation hormesis; radiation is one of the many things that are deady in high doses but beneficial in low doses.
Here's the medical definition of hormesis.
Here's a Japanese study verifying radiation hormesis in laboratory animals.
Here's a page on radiation hormesis in humans.
I find it highly suspicious that there's no way to tell from the site where this company is physically located or how to send them non-electronic mail. There isn't even a fax number, just an email address.
Having the car automatically fix itself and compensate for problems when things go wrong is yet another really interesting technical problem. Having a reliable and consistent robot driver would make it a lot safer and more practical to test such solutions.
For instance, suppose the car had a way to know your Ford Exploder had had a blowout and automatically adjusted the steering to prevent the car from flipping over. With a robot driver around, you could fine-tune the sensor and the corrective handling routines without risk of loss of life.
Oh, and then we'd probably want to add a VUI (voice user interface) that responds to requests such as "One of the stabilizers has broken loose; see if you can lock it down!" :-)
I question this assertion. How are you defining "wealth"? Do cars, television sets, personal possessions count? Who made this estimate and how did they do the measurement?
The only way people get estimates to the contrary is by doing a straight-line estimation. So if being forced to drink ten gallons of water all at once drowns 99/100 people, being forced to drink a half gallon is assumed to drown 1/20th as many (about 5 people) and so on down the line; a straight-line estimate would allow you to deduce that even a cup of water a day is more deadly than no water at all. This is obviously the wrong way to estimate how dangerous water is; it's also the wrong way to estimate the danger of radiation (both ionizing and non-ionizing).
Here's a Japanese study called verifying radiation hormesis in laboratory animals.
The medical dictionary definition of hormesis is: "An effect where a toxic substance acts like a stimulant in small doses, but it is an inhibitor in large doses."
This page has some interesting examples, including the following:
Radiation hormesis in cancer mortality was found in 32,000 United States and 22,000 British military observers of atmospheric nuclear explosions (Robinette et al., 1985; Darby et al., 1988). The cancer mortality rate of Canadian military observers was only 88% of carefully selected military controls (Raman et al., 1987). The leukemia mortality rate of the Canadian observers was only 40% of that of the unexposed controls. In each study the cancer motality rate of exposed personnel was lower that that of the general population.
The cumulative data represents about 100,000 acutely exposed persons in four countries. This is convincing evidence that whole body exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation do not cause increased mortality. The supporting animal data showed that both acute and chronic exposure to low dose irradiation decreased cancer mortality (Luckey 1990, 1993). The combined animal and human results provide impressive evidence that cancer mortality is decreased by acute exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation.
"From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury..."
The trouble with that is that Athens didn't really have candidates; rather, decisions were made directly by the voting population. It was a direct democracy, not a representative democracy.
This speech is probably to libertarians what Chief Seattle's speech is to liberal environmentalists. The fact that it appeals to your (and my) political sensibilities to a high degree doesn't prevent it from being a hoax.
Yes, it does really matter. Had you claimed the statement as original we'd have to argue about it to establish on what basis you were making the claim and whether it is in fact true. The claim wouldn't have the patina of received wisdom that writing which has survived 200 years does. Time winnows grain from chaff; we tend to assume any quote that survives so long must have had some intrinsic value, some kernel of truth or beauty or elegance that makes it worth passing along to one's kids and reprinting and sticking on posters and asking political figures to respond to.If you really disagree, consider how it would have been moderated had you posed this question to the candidates:
"Murray Shlobotnik, my brother-in-law, wrote the following in a postcard he sent me from Pittsburgh last week. I believe it is a fairly accurate description of America today. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that quote is a myth. First off, the name of the author is a typo. There was a Scottish historian named Alexander Tytler, but the book the quote is supposed to have come from ("The rise and fall of the athenian republic") does not exist. My guess is that PJ O'Rourke may have invented the quote (or at least popularized it).
So it's a nice sentiment, but doesn't deserve the aura of authenticity granted by attribution to a centuries-old academic.
Here's a decent debunking.
There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that small amounts of ionizing radiation help prevent cancer. The cancer rate might be a lot lower if there were more background radiation. If so, then even cellphones that produced ionizing radiation would still benefit rather than harm their users. You might want the one that gives the highest dose, to improve your health!
Here's a Japanese study called verifying radiation hormesis in laboratory animals.
The medical dictionary definition of hormesis is: "An effect where a toxic substance acts like a stimulant in small doses, but it is an inhibitor in large doses."
A relevant text (recommended on the web but I haven't read it) is:
Kondo, S.; Health effects of low-level radiation.
Osaka, Japan: Kinki University Press; Madison, WI: Medical Physics Publishing Co., 1993.
This page has some interesting examples, including the following:
Radiation hormesis in cancer mortality was found in 32,000 United States and 22,000 British military observers of atmospheric nuclear explosions (Robinette et al., 1985; Darby et al., 1988). The cancer mortality rate of Canadian military observers was only 88% of carefully selected military controls (Raman et al., 1987). The leukemia mortality rate of the Canadian observers was only 40% of that of the unexposed controls. In each study the cancer motality rate of exposed personnel was lower that that of the general population.
The cumulative data represents about 100,000 acutely exposed persons in four countries. This is convincing evidence that whole body exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation do not cause increased mortality. The supporting animal data showed that both acute and chronic exposure to low dose irradiation decreased cancer mortality (Luckey 1990, 1993). The combined animal and human results provide impressive evidence that cancer mortality is decreased by acute exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation.
...enough said.
Thank you for pointing out the PBS references, I'll probably use them as my primary source the next time this issue comes up. By the way, I don't know if you've been following the links I gave, but we now have a reasonable source for your "it doesn't solve the whole problem" claim and for my refutation of it. According to the interview with Hoffert, if we don't use breeder reactors to recycle our nuclear fuel, the U.S. only has a ten-year supply of reactor-grade uranium.
But, Hoffert also says with breeders we could use uranium 100 times as effectively as our current light-water reactors. 100 times 10 years gives us a thousand years of power at the current rate of production using the uranium we can extract at current prices. So even Hoffert, an "alternative fuels" advocate for PBS/Nova, is basically agreeing with my other sources that nuclear power DOES solve the resource issue.
The reason he dismisses it anyway is: (1) breeder reactors produce plutonium, and he's afraid of terrorists getting it to build bombs. (2) Breeders take a while (he says 20 years) to make a significant amount of fuel. So I guess we'd have to borrow some plutonium from France and Japan while waiting for our own production capacity to come on line. :-)
With regard to "help in the areas we desperately need help", (1) if we replace coal-burning plants with nukes, we'll reduce greenhouse emissions and smog. (2) We could use nuclear plants to charge those fuel cells you mentioned in the next generation of cleaner cars. We'll need SOME power source to charge them, so why not pick one that will last a while and doesn't pollute the air?
Until next time,
Glen
With that in mind, I just surfed over to PBS.org to see if I could find any material on nuclear power that might substantiate your half-remembered claims. The first thing I found was a Frontline special called "Nuclear Reaction: why do Americans fear nuclear power?". Here's the link to their FAQ. So here's what Frontline's Q&A says about the toxicity of plutonium:
The other parts of the Q&A seem to back up what I was saying elsewhere. Read the part on why a political moratorium on reprocessing created the U.S. waste problem which would otherwise not be much of a big deal. Now you might say that this is an interview with somebody who is part of the pro-nuclear establishment. To which I would respond that this is the interview FrontLine chose to feature as a definitive FAQ, and FrontLine is a PBS show presumably on equivalent standing with other PBS shows you may have seen on the subject. Perhaps more so since this is a show that featured nuclear power as its primary issue rather than as a side issue to some other topic. Here's the topmost page; the other interviews they did are illuminating as well. (they made Nader look a bit silly, if you ask me...)[surfs a bit more...]
Okay, I think I might have found your alternative source. It's a Nova episode on global warming called "What's up with the weather: beyond fossil fuels". Here's the topmost link and here is the FAQ section. If you read it carefully you'll find some support for your position but you'll also see that most of what they are saying is perfectly compatible with what my sources have said. It's pretty clear that Hoffert isn't all that interested in nuclear power, which is fine. He takes it as a given that we won't use breeder reactors or allow reprocessing in the U.S. any time soon due to political constraints, some of which he agrees with. Given those constraints and his assumptions about what a "cost effective price" is, his conclusions follow.
This probably concludes our debate. Surf the PBS links I just gave you for a while if you need any more clarification of the issues pro or con.
Okay, there's high-level stuff, there's low-level stuff, and there's the plant itself. The high-level stuff left after reprocessing (eg, the fuel rods) is pretty nasty but relatively easy to contain because there's so little of it. The low-level stuff (eg, used gloves) involves more mass but is still a tiny amount of material compared to the solid ash generated by a coal-burning plant and involves relatively little risk. It should probably be handled much like medical waste.
As for shutdown expenses, building or decommissioning a research reactor tends to be a lot more expensive than a production one, because it's a one-of-a-kind design and you want to use the opportunity to test different techniques. Shutting down TMI was horrendously expensive because they chose to look at it as a research opportunity rather than an engineering project; I assume your plant was similar. But when you make a lot of nuclear plants of the same design, there are some nice economies of scale so building them up, refurbishing them and breaking them down isn't nearly as bad as when every one is different.
France and Japan chose the "make them all the same" model. America chose the "make them all different" model, which in retrospect was a big lose; the gains to be had from always using the latest technology didn't make up for the costs and risks of everything being non-standard. France accidentally picked the right strategy and the right time to implement it, so now they are pretty happy with nukes providing 80% of their power.
Q2: If nuclear power is really that unproblematic how come the political winds currently goes against it?
I suspect it's just your standard interest-group political game. Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. There currently exist many large politically-savvy lobbying groups that stand to lose from any sort of switch in power-production strategies. For instance, the British coal-miners union. Or the entire state of Texas. :-)
Nuclear is an obvious win for countries that import all their fuel (France), or are starting essentially from ground zero (China). But when there are a bunch of entrenched interests invested in some other technology, the case has to be pretty compelling to force a change. And right now oil is _so_ cheap and available that the practical case for doing something else isn't all that strong.
In the long run relying on nuclear power is probably inevitable, but that doesn't mean we need to adopt it any time soon. There's no particular hurry. Heightened concern over greenhouse gases is the latest thing pushing us in that direction.
Fossil fuels have a huge energy density compared to wood or solar or hydro, but they don't hold a candle to nuclear power. Nuclear fuel is more efficient by many orders of magnitude. If you're producing a thousand times as much energy per unit mass, you don't need very much unit mass to produce a lot of energy.
I don't know when your "PBS specials" were recorded, but I suspect it was more than ten years ago. It used to be the conventional wisdom in the '70s and '80s that we were likely to run out of natural sources of uranium soon. This is why France invested in breeder reactors and reprocessing, because they wanted to be self-sufficent and didn't want to substitue dependency on limited foreign uranium supplies for dependency on limited foreign oil supplies. But the anticipated uranium shortage never materialized. Just as with the often-anticipated oil shortages, we just kept getting better at finding more as the need arose.
I trust the PBS specials on the topic I saw over some poster I don't even know.
You don't have to trust me on any of this. Just look it up for yourself. Do a Google search or something. Or follow the links I've been giving you and check their sources.
I'm sorry, but your information is not correct. There is enough nuclear fuel around to last us for thousands of years, easily. Where are you getting your estimates from? Here's a page from John McCarthy's Sustainability of Human Progress FAQ:
The fact that what I tell you is the accepted standard wisdom within the nuclear power industry doesn't make it false. If you want accurate information about how nuclear power works, eventually you'll have to listen to people who know something about it rather than just listening to people who are terrified by it.
Sorry. I not only don't buy that nuclear power is as safe or safer than other forms, but you haven't addressed the primary point I've made, which is that nuclear power as it exists today cannot possibly supply the world's energy needs... it can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
That's a reasonable question. How long will nuclear power last us? You seem to think it will only last "a few" years. What assumptions are you making to get that figure? And by "few" do you mean a thousand years, a hundred years, a dozen years?
Another nuclear advocate, John McCarthy, has an FAQ on nuclear energy as part of his sustainability website; I recommend it to you. His sources calculate that with breeder reactors we could make known supplies of nuclear fuel last for a fair bit more than "a few" years using known technology. Here are some details from this page:
Plutonium is primarily dangerous to people due to its chemistry, not due to its radioactivity.
Which is the opposite of the truth. It's primarily the radiation that is dangerous. Plutonium thus gets less and less hazardous over time as the radiation diminishes, whereas arsenic and chlorine do not. That's why Hogan can sensibly make comparisons like "after ten years it's no more poisonous than X; after twenty years it's no more poisonous than Y." Because the radiation component of the danger diminishes and this is a significant fraction of the total threat. Oh, well. Read Hogan instead of me anyway...
It's no different from arsenic or bleach in terms of the difficulty of coming up with likely scenarios that could kill more than a few people. In terms of eating it, a smaller amount of arsenic is sufficient. In terms of breathing it, you'd need to inhale hundreds of thousands of particles of plutonium to get a likely death out of it - one particle is not sufficient. Here's a good reference: A Perspective on the Dangers of Plutonium.
I'll quote the abstract and introduction; follow the link to get the detailed conclusions.
-=-=-
A Perspective on the Dangers of Plutonium
W. G. Sutcliffe, R. H. Condit, W. G. Mansfield, D. S. Myers, D. W. Layton, and P. W. Murphy
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
April 14, 1995
Abstract
Following the seizure of 10 ounces of plutonium at the Munich airport in August 1994, some press accounts stated that terrorists could kill "hundreds of thousands of people" by introducing plutonium into a municipal water supply. In response to such incorrect and misleading statements, we describe the acute and long-term health effects that can arise from ingesting or inhaling various amounts of plutonium. Our estimates indicate that plutonium introduced into drinking water supplies would produce a radiation dose much less than normal background, and could kill only a very few people (by inducing cancers that might take years to appear). We also estimate the (considerably greater) risks associated with the inhalation of plutonium, clarifying press claims that "a tiny speck ... can cause lung cancer." We estimate the number of people that might die of cancer if terrorists were to
introduce plutonium into the atmosphere in a large city. This paper provides a scientific perspective for evaluating possible terrorist threats.
Introduction
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, television and print news media have widely reported that plutonium from that part of the world is available on the black market. The primary concern aroused by this fact is that, if obtained in sufficient quantities, such plutonium might be made into a nuclear explosive. However, The New York Times and other newspapers have reported that terrorists might also use black-market plutonium to contaminate the air or drinking water of a large city. Specifically on August 16, 1994, The New York Times claimed[1] that "A tiny speck of the fine powder can cause lung cancer in anyone who inhales it, and a small amount in the water supply of a large city like Munich could kill hundreds of thousands of people." Other newspapers made similar claims.[2],[3] The first of these claims is misleading; the second is false. This note provides a scientific perspective on this perceived danger.
Although the popular myth that "plutonium is the most hazardous substance known to man" has been refuted many times, the misconception persists that even a small amount of plutonium taken into the body will be fatal. Plutonium is hazardous, but it is not as immediately hazardous to health as many more common chemicals. This is not to say that plutonium is not a dangerous, toxic material. Chronic exposure to even small amounts should be a matter of concern. But dispersal by terrorists as described in the press could not produce the drastic health effects that are popularly imagined, and that is the issue addressed here.
[...]
Plutonium in the Atmosphere
It is important to understand the claims made in the press concerning particles of plutonium in the air. The New York Times[1] says that "A tiny speck of the fine powder can cause lung cancer in anyone who inhales it." The largest speck of plutonium that can be readily inhaled is about 3 micrometers in diameter and has a mass of about 0.14 millionths of a milligram. The risk of dying of cancer as a result of inhaling that amount of plutonium is about 0.0000017 (12 cancers per milligram x 0.00000014 milligrams = 0.0000017 cancers, or 0.00017% additional risk); that is not zero risk, but it is very small.
The Los Angeles Times[2] says that one ten-thousandth of a gram (0.1 milligram) inhaled can cause cancer. This is correct: we have already estimated that 0.08 milligrams inhaled will have 100% probability of causing a fatal cancer. To inhale 0.1 milligram of plutonium, however, a person would have to inhale more than seven hundred thousand particles. (A single 0.1-milligram particle would have a diameter of over 260 micrometers, about 90 times too big to be readily inhaled.) Although a single respirable particle is unlikely to harm an individual,[13] there is still cause for concern if plutonium were to be dispersed in the atmosphere.
The Herald (Glasgow, Scotland)[3] says that one millionth of a gram (0.001 milligram) can kill: the actual additional risk of cancer death resulting from the inhalation of 0.001 milligram of plutonium is 0.012 (12 cancers per milligram x 0.001 milligram = 0.012, or 1.2% additional risk).
[...]
-=-=-=
You'll find the rest of the article here.
Okay. Plutonium is primarily dangerous to people due to its chemistry, not due to its radioactivity. If you eat a sufficient amount of it you could die, just as you could if you drank bleach or ammonia, two common household chemicals. I'm not saying the plutonium isn't deadly - it is. What I am saying is that being deadly doesn't make it particularly unusual or dangerous if appropriately handled. And in fact nuclear waste _is_ less toxic to humans than those two common household chemicals after it's had some time to cool off.
Author James P. Hogan deals with some of this better than I do, especially in an essay he wrote called _Know Nukes_. So here's an item from his web page on the subject:
How's that?If something has a half-life of a hundred-thousand years or more then by definition that means it's breaking down very slowly which means it's not releasing very much radiation per unit time. It's actually the stuff with a short half-life that's dangerous to have around. But that's a self-limiting problem; it's dangerous but it quickly becomes less so as time passes. Wait five or ten years and it's less of a hazard than lots of household chemicals.
Regarding "highly toxic", Chorine is highly toxic too -- and would stay so for a million years if you kept it in a pressurized vat somewhere for that long -- yet nobody minds having it around it to clean swimming pools because the chance of somebody coming across a batch and drinking or breathing it by accident is so small. Ditto for nuclear waste that is merely chemically poisonous.
The "OSI" was the name of the secret organization that Steve Austin (Lee Majors) and Jamie Summers (Lindsay Wagner) worked for. Oscar Goldman was the chief.
The OSI really does that now? Awesome! As I recall, that's one highly competent organization!
Although Rudy always did have trouble keeping that adrenelazine locked up.
Is Oscar still in charge? Steve and Jamie always seemed pretty busy solving major national security problems -- I'd really hate to see them reduced to doing clearance checks on Air Force employees.
It's interesting how anti-growth advocates never worry that there won't be enough video stores or pizza parlors or gas stations or used car lots to support new growth. It's only the government sector that seems unable to dynamically respond to changes in market conditions. So the obvious solution is to privatize government services to whatever degree we can. If we got most of our services from privately built toll roads and voucher or tuition-funded schools and subscription-based security patrols, this issue would mostly go away.
They do NOT lower the average working wage. Immigrants constitute demand for as well as supply of labor. Suppose that the Smith family moves here from Mexico to work in a carwash. The Smith family uses its income to rent housing and to buy clothing, food, and all the other basic necessities of life. This constitutes a demand for goods and labor to be supplied by others.
For instance, if the Smiths consume pizzas that would not otherwise be consumed, the Smiths are driving up wages in the pizza industry. Wages on average are increased (relative to the cost of goods) more than they are decreased by the presence of the Smiths because they, like the rest of us, produce more than they consume.
The money they earn here isn't cycled through the economic system, they send it back to Mexico.
Where their relatives eventually use it to buy American goods, increasing our standard of living. There's no way around it, immigrants are not a drain on our economy, they are its very lifeblood.
Absolutely! We need to open the borders. It's the moral thing to do, and it's also in our own self-interest. The people who worry about immigration being harmful are mostly just ignorant. They should read more economics and travel more.
I recommend The Economic Consequences of Immigration by economist Julian Simon. Immigrants create as many jobs as they consume. If we allowed open immigration it would tend to increase the local standard of living and local salaries.
If you do the math on this one yourself, remember not to include the salaries of the new immigrants in your average, that's the rookie mistake.