The Radiation Exposure Lie
51–60 of 144 posts
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#52Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#53> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree. Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data. The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data. There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings. It…
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#54My problem with radiation: the units of exposure are so clumsy. We should have standardized on nanoSieverts as the main unit. The normal background radiation is 200 nSv per hour, and you get acute radiation sickness at 1_000_000_000 nSv. The lethal dose is 5_000_000_000. It really puts things into perspective. E.g. even 10x the normal background is still ridiculously low. Also, the LNT model is good enough. It's real…
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am looking at their county level distance-to-power-plant map and it's literally xkcd 1138.
Then you are not understanding it. Looking at a map of people not close to power plants would show the same rough picture. People live where people live, of course! But proximity to nuclear power plants has higher incidence of cancer. What is different about this study that's worthy of a national map is that it's an evaluation of national data, after having first found the discovery on smaller state level datasets.
if it's the pollutants as the Nature paper claims without evidence, then any other industrial plant would also be emitting those. in fact, coal power plants will emit much more. chemical pollutants are no less dangerous than radioactive ones when the radioactive ones are too low to measure (that is not to say that coal power-plants don't produce radioactive pollutants, they do much more than nuclear power plants).
> Nuclear power plants emit radioactive pollutants that can disperse into the surrounding environment, leading to potential human exposure through inhalation, ingestion, and direct contact. These pollutants can be transported through air, water, and soil, contributing to long-term environmental contamination
yet their source for this: > Radiation doses and cancer incidence among the population living within 25 km of three nuclear power plants (NPPs) in Ontario, Canada were investigated for the period 1985 to 2008 for radiation exposure and 1990 to 2008 for cancer incidence. This study design provided at least a five-year latency period between potential radiation exposure and cancer incidence. Around the NPPs, the incidence of childhood cancers, leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in young children (aged 0 - 4) was lower than the general Ontario population, but not statistically so. Cancer incidence in children aged 0 - 14 was similar to the Ontario population. Overall, for all ages there was no consistent pattern of cancer incidence (all cancers combined and radio-sensitive cancers) across the population living within 25 km of the three NPPs. Some types of cancers were statistically higher than expected, others were statistically lower than expected, and others were similar to the general Ontario population. Although variations in all cancers combined and radiosensitive cancers were found in this study, the pattern was found to be within the natural variation of cancer in Ontario. During the period 1985 to 2000 (Pickering and Bruce NPPs) and 1985 to 2002 (Darlington NPP) radiation doses to members of the public from the operation of the NPPs, estimated on the basis of a hypothetical individual at the facility fence line, were ≤0.052 mSv/year; while for the period 2001 to 2008 (Pickering and Bruce NPPs) and 2003 to 2008 (Darlington NPP) radiation doses, more realistically estimated using the critical group concept for six age classes, were ≤0.0067 mSv/year. Hence, public doses from environmental releases of radionuclides from Ontario NPPs represent a very small fraction of natural background radiation (1.338 and 2.02 mSv/year) in the regions where the NPPs are located. Our study shows no evidence of childhood leukemia clusters around the three NPPs and that the incidence of all the cancers investigated for all age groups is within the natural variation of the disease in Ontario. The radiation exposure from NPP operation is a small contributor to the public’s total exposure to radiation and is not a plausible explanation for any excess cancers observed within 25 km of any Ontario NPP.
I wonder why none of these researchers just go and grab soil samples around the nuclear power plant and compare those to random samples from any other industrial installation... since it's such an obvious thing to do they no doubt did this, why isn't it in any of the relevant papers? could it be that the results are against their ideological anti-nuclear project?Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#56Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation": * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-... > I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl ac…
That doesn't even make any sense. How can you compare the harm of completely different things with completely different mechanisms and exposures? And why would nuclear winter have anything to do with it?
Because humans are creatures of association, not logic.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#57> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. The Tokaimura incident (Japan, 1999) comes to mind as a counterexample. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TOAC_web.pdf TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiate…
What's missing is the Mayak accident / Kyshtym disaster, 1957.
It also did not result in any world-ending stuff. People died, is all.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#58My problem with radiation: the units of exposure are so clumsy. We should have standardized on nanoSieverts as the main unit. The normal background radiation is 200 nSv per hour, and you get acute radiation sickness at 1_000_000_000 nSv. The lethal dose is 5_000_000_000. It really puts things into perspective. E.g. even 10x the normal background is still ridiculously low. Also, the LNT model is good enough. It's real…
I don't understand the relevance of the normal background level. The natural background level of mercury is many orders of magnitude below the level that causes acute mercury poisoning. That tells me absolutely nothing about the risks of mercury exposure from industrial activity or accidents.
These numbers really need to be put into proper perspective.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#59> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. The Tokaimura incident (Japan, 1999) comes to mind as a counterexample. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TOAC_web.pdf TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiate…
This article on Douglas Crofut [died 1981] implies that there were several.
"His death was the first of its kind in the United States since the 1940s, when radiation deaths occurred during the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crofut
It turns out that there were two Manhattan Project fatalities, one in 1945, and one in 1946.
Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie
#60Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl. There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics. And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now? Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years,…
You need potassium to live; it's radioactive. UVB rays provide vitamin D, but too much can give you skin cancer. Of course it's all a stats game, but (ionizing) radiation plays an important part in our lives and survival.
Of course it's all a stats game, but the stats can play out how much you should worry about it. Living in Denver can expose you to up to twice as much cosmic radiation as somebody living at sea level, yet there are no statistical differences in cancer rates. You don't need to worry about your granite countertops, either (though it's fun to joke about the radioactive stone in the US capital building making congress "toxic").