24 Responses

1. We learn from every accident. They now have a small reactor that can be installed underground and requires no active cooling whatsoever, making it walk-away safe. I’m guessing you think greenhouse gasses are a real problem. Do you have any concept how much GHG emission would be required to power China, India, and the developed world without nuclear power? Hydroelectric has its own problems and isn’t possible everywhere, and solar and wind aren’t efficient enough to provide enough capacity.

2. Just 3 WTF how many fucking more accidents is it going to fucking take?

3. v=fDSoep_3pF0

4. … But compared to the radioactive fission products (like iodine, strontium, potassium and cesium) uranium is a mild, mild problem. Granted it will be around a lot longer, but there will probably be tech fixes for that eventually. We already know how to separate dirt into its constituent parts, akin to the enrichment process for uranium, but it is hideously expensive and slow for something like mass extraction from soil. It may not be so forever. Oh, and take your epithets and self-apply.

5. Consider: Every acre-foot of soil, all over the Earth, contains 5.5 pounds of uranium on the average. Everywhere. It’s in the dust we breathe all the time; we and our forebearers have lived with it always. It is radioactive for a very long time, and that fact makes it equivalently mild in radioactive intensity. As for “why aren’t they testing”, they are. Though common geiger counters are gross instruments for measuring radiation in general, uranium and its cousins are easy to detect.

6. And so radioactive Uranium isn’t a problem now? And how long is it radioactive? And why aren’t they testing for it? Idiot.

7. Jan’s blog tekknorg. Good stuff, usually, but you know he is goal- rather than evidence-driven when this pops up: “If the food you EAT contains 1 becquerel of let’s say Cesium 137 — it’s not safe. You eat many times a day, many days a week, a month, a year, a whole LIFE.” Everyone eats much more than a becquerel per meal, and not just cesium. Much more than that will be radon 222 and potassium 40, and that goes all the way back past the dawn of mankind. I personally try to avoid such rhetoric.

8. Moi? I said nothing about you personally. Your paranoia is also not my problem.

   Mox fuel (or any real reactor fuel) doesn’t stay in the atmosphere; it is too heavy for that. It settles into the ground and water in a short time. And they are the least of a radiation accident’s problems. In the short term those are fission products, like iodine, potassium and cesium.

9. no radiation is harmful at all times.

   but mox fuel circumamulating the planet every 40 days isn’t the same palblum you guys like to feed to those you consider less intelligent, ie, we antinuclear folks.

   so again i say, go back to sleep because you’re only goal is get control of this conversation and show the world how stupid i am.

   well i’ll back it all up with my friend jan hemmer’s blog.

   tekknorg – wordpress

10. Wonderful commitment to your argument there. Radiation is only harmful when it’s not “natural”?

11. oh go back to sleep.

12. You are confused here. Photons ARE light waves. They do penetrate. Their ability to ionize any materials is dependent only on their wavelength/frequency, and anything below UV is not so capable. The only other way to affect cells is by jiggling the molecules in them, thereby heating them a’la microwave heating. Cell phones radiate well below oven microwaves in both frequency and power, so that’s out. Your theory has no empirical evidence; in fact there is no evidence of any damage.

13. …
    When a body is contaminated by radioactive materials, the body sheds them just as it recycles all materials. Most have “biological half-lives” in the months range; uranium, for example, is 60 days, and with prussian blue therapy 30 days. Secondly, when the body dies its captured radiation and and chances of latent cancer die with it; it is not legacy to offspring, so in that sense it does get turned off.

    Cold blooded? No, just the facts.

14. That’s not a very apt argument. Most of the radioactivity from an accident like Chernobyl decays away in 300 years; that’s ten times the half-life of the K40 and Cs137/131. The remaining stuff is uranium fuel and some actinides. These have long half lives and are proportionally of low intensity. It is likely there will be ways of handling that stuff in the long run; the technology to separate it from the dirt exists today (mass spectroscopy), but would be extremely expensive. …

15. Let’s do a little figuring here. The most often mentioned radioactive menace is the dreaded gamma ray. It’s not a particle and it has high penetration power, but it is absorbed by just about everything, and therefore everything is a shield against it. The effectiveness of shielding is the thickness which reduces the gamma ray’s energy by one half. For lead, that is 1 cm, for dirt, 9 cm. For air, it’s 162 meters. So, from a source of gamma a mile away, the reduction is 2^10, or 1024 times.

16. What do you know about radiation that evokes such a wave of reaction? Yes, radiation. It’s not death rays; it’s fast moving particles, mainly, and some EM waves like x-rays. You get radiation from the water you drink, from the rocks around you (including the expensive granite countertop), from the sky overhead. Every acre-foot of soil across the planet contains 5 pounds of uranium.

17. Where did you get this 10,000 figure for Fukushima? Japan lost about 20,000 altogether in the earthquake and tsunami, of which two were at the power plant and caused by industrial accident, not radiation. Coal has an estimated death rate in 2010 amounting to 13,400 for that year. (treehugger(.)com/clean-technology/coal-pollution-will-kill-13200-americans-this-year-cost-100-billion-in-additional-health-care-bills.html)

18. You’re going downhill fast….

19. No, that is wrong. The effects on graphite/steel/other materials in reactors are done by the activation of the elemental atoms with neutrons, converting iron and other materials to radioactive isotopes which decay into other elements, ruining the crystal structures and opening them to corrosion. It is valueless to scream about something that is a very real problem when you get your facts wrong. Gammas do indeed cause problems in living cells, which seems to be part of what you are saying.

20. I’d like your opinion on the retention of fission products produced by the Oklo natural reactors in Gabon. They operated 2 billion years ago, and it appears that the actinides produced have migrated a maximum amount of 2 cm in soil which is fairly saturated with seasonal water (that is part of how the reactors worked). And please, not in all caps.

21. In fact, from rand.org: “Tom LaTourrette is a senior physical scientist at the RAND Corporation, specializing in energy, public safety, and homeland security policy. His public safety and homeland security research addresses emergency responder safety and health, management and coordination for disaster response, disaster insurance, terrorism risk modeling, aviation security, and individual preparedness and response for terrorism. [etc]”

22. How do you know he isn’t an expert in nuclear power plants? I personally have a degree in electrical engineering, but I’ve had 40 years of experience in computer hardware and software. My thesis was the end of my EE, except inasmuch as it applies to computers, and it may very well be the same for him. And I’ll agree with your last assertion, but I find that it is true in spades for the anti-nuclear power people, often quite proudly so. For example, do you know anything about power engineering?

23. also people seam to get this guy confussed with a politition, just no. this guy is a legit scientist not a politition.

24. nuclear power got such a bad rap after chernoble, fukishuma and france, it really isint as bad as people make it out to be. P.S. sorry for bad spelling.