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The Radiation Exposure Lie

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Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#61

Post by zer00eyz »

duskwuff wrote: post #48

> 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…

> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history...

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/inadequate-con...

Some of the more notable such accidents include:

In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure;

In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radiation-induced skin disease. Eleven servicemen had to be transferred to specialized hospitals in France and Germany. The cause of the exposures was found to be several abandoned caesium-37 and a cobalt-60 sources of varying activities, abandoned in a former military barracks that had been under the control of the former Soviet Union;

In Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, two cobalt-60 sources in their shipping containers were sold as scrap metal and ten persons were inadvertently exposed to radiation and had to be treated for acute radiation syndrome;

In Peru in 1999, a worker put an iridium-192 industrial source in his pocket and suffered severe radiation burns;

The most serious of these accidents occurred in the south-central Brazilian city of Goiânia in September of 1987. he Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission sent in a team and they discovered that over 240 persons were contaminated with caesium-137, four of whom later died.

These things should be somewhat easy to keep under control, yet we cant. There are currently 90,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA. We keep hearing that the cost of nuclear is cheaper than gas... because we just leave the problem sitting on site. The moment that you either dig the massive hole in the ground to dump this, or build a fuel reprocessing site(s) that economic value pretty much disappears. And fule reprocessing doesn't get rid of the problematic parts, only concentrates them, you still need a hole.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#62

Post by [deleted] »

zer00eyz wrote: post #61
duskwuff wrote: post #48

> 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…

> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history... https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/inadequate-con... Some of the more notable such accidents include: In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure; In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radia…

[deleted]

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#63

Post by lstodd »

talon8635 wrote: post #53
epistasis wrote: post #4

> 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…

Regarding the beer analogy, can anyone on earth survive 365 beer servings of alcohol without dying? Are you demanding research that 365 beers at once is more harmful than 1/day/year?

365 beers even if 0.33l.. one would die of acute electrolytic disbalance while being quite drunk, about same as if one would neither drink nor eat anything but water.

edit: IIRC it takes about 10 liters of water to commit suicide. Depends on body weight of course.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#64

Post by loeg »

antonvs wrote: post #39
amarant wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity, instead opting for less-scary-but-worse alternatives like coal, oil and gas.

Historically, yes. We have good alternatives now, though. What’s stopping us moving off carbon fuel is not the viability of alternatives.

Unless by "viability" you're completely ignoring price, I disagree (I would argue that excessively expensive solutions aren't viable). We don't have good alternatives to gas (carbon fuel) peakers yet. Nor is winter generation a solved problem. Non-nuclear carbon-free generation needs a tremendous amount of battery storage to get to 0% carbon-emitting.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#65

Post by Schiendelman »

loeg wrote: post #64
antonvs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, yes. We have good alternatives now, though. What’s stopping us moving off carbon fuel is not the viability of alternatives.

Unless by "viability" you're completely ignoring price, I disagree (I would argue that excessively expensive solutions aren't viable). We don't have good alternatives to gas (carbon fuel) peakers yet. Nor is winter generation a solved problem. Non-nuclear carbon-free generation needs a tremendous amount of battery storage to get to 0% carbon-emitting.

That is much, much cheaper than nuclear at today's prices.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#66

Post by Zigurd »

lisper wrote: post #34
antonvs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation. Not even that, they simply didn’t know because they couldn’t measure, so they took a conservative approach. Btw you can count me in to the cabal of anti-nuclear activists. Humans simply are too greedy and incompetent to manage the technology responsibly over the long term. We’ve already irreversibly altered the biosphere with the nucl…

The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another.

In theory. But in fact, attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates, and the supposed benefits of nuclear power end up being delayed by many years and in many cases decades.

The effect of trying and failing to build nuclear power plants on time and on budget uses up many billions in capital that could've been applied to reliable delivery of renewables.

Even the supposedly efficient French nuclear power program vastly underestimated decommissioning costs.

In other words project risk for nuclear is hideously expensive, even when you think you've dodged project risk problems, there's another whole very expensive project in decommissioning that has its own set of project risks.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#67

Post by ptx »

Alright, let's say the author is right and low-level radiation exposure is not harmful. Then... what? If a little radiation is not harmful, then we should be more relaxed about radiation, deregulate it and allow companies to contaminate our living spaces? Is that why the argument is being made?

But as the article mentions, in those Taiwanese flats there were large variations in radiation levels in different spots in the building. If we allow radioactive contamination everywhere, will it be neatly spread out at harmless levels? How would you know? What if you happen to ingest traces of the harmlessly radioactive material now surrounding you?

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#68

Post by NotGMan »

Only ~35% of women in the UK support nuclear power while ~65% of men do.

https://spectator.com/article/why-are-women-so-anti-nuclear/

So technically, if one extrapolates the best case scenario, if women wouldn't have voting rights, we'd already have nuclear power everywhere.

Though to be fair, this varies from country to country and in some countries even women are over 50%.

But in many countries women are under 50% while men are seemingly always over 50%.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#69

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

wat10000 wrote: post #49
throw0101a wrote: post #19

Reminded 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?

Surely you jest Sir. It's obvious, plain as day to any one who has eyes and can read.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#70

Post by gurjeet »

> 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.

I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-ray over a long period is not the same as getting exposed to all of it in a fraction of a second.

They insist it because it is covered by insurance, and that I shouldn't worry about the cost. I have to clarify that the monetary cost is not my primary concern.

I have now learnt to simply say No, and agree to sign a waiver that's required by the insurance company.

I am okay with getting the x-ray if a professional has a legitimate reason to suspect there's something hidden that can be better investigated by getting an x-ray. My family has received x-ray, MRI, CT scans, ultrasound, etc. but only when its benefits outweigh the risks; e.g. bone fracture, pregnancy, concussion, etc.

As I said, I may be overreacting, but I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.

edit: s/by I'd like/but I'd like/

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