71–80 of 161 posts
This is why I wouldn't let my kids EVER enlist. The government has no regard for its enlisted. Doesn't take a genius to think our navy would be in harm's way during a RADIOACTIVE DISASTER. Reminds me of when soldiers were being electrocuted in showers in Iraq because of totally incompetent contractors wiring electricity near the showers.
That sounds suspicious. Guam is a U.S. Territory.
"Tokyo Electric Power also knew that radioactivity was leaking at a rate of 400 tons a day into the North Pacific, according to the lawsuit and Japanese officials." I'm sorry, what? What does that even mean? 400 tons of.. Uranium? Water? Pure radioactive essence? This article is shocking on many levels, but the lack of journalistic standards is appalling.
Journalists don't seem to realize the more water there is, the less harmful it is per unit volume, or that the sea rapidly dilutes it further into harmlessness.
There's a little more detail on the claim here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/fukushima-radioacti...
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Then what really happened here?
I am a CBRN specialist in the Marine Corps. These ships run constant radiation detection, everywhere, especially in the water desal. The only probable cause for these kind of biological responses, would have to be inhalation of radiated particulates, but even that would be extremely difficult given the range from the source. Even the most basic respiratory protection(shirt over face) would prevent most of that type o…
I thought that as well, especially with the detail in the article about 'billows of metallic-tasting snow'.
This is why I wouldn't let my kids EVER enlist. The government has no regard for its enlisted. Doesn't take a genius to think our navy would be in harm's way during a RADIOACTIVE DISASTER. Reminds me of when soldiers were being electrocuted in showers in Iraq because of totally incompetent contractors wiring electricity near the showers.
That said, the Army most certainly DOES have regard for its enlisted. When things like this happen, bad PR follows. Bad PR is bad for a variety of reasons, one of which being that it makes recruiting more difficult. People will be much less likely to join an organization which doesn't care about them, and would thus require more incentives to do so, incentives which cost money. Two: soldiers, airmen, etc go through a pretty intensive training process that lasts several months at a minimum, and that training isn't cheap. By the time you're a full-fledged member of your respective service, your service has a lot of money invested in you, and the more advanced in your career you are, the more valuable you are to them. Soldiers cost more money than you imagine. Three: morale in the military is of paramount importance. Without good morale, operations break down. If a group of soldiers feel that their leadership doesn't care about them, morale quickly goes into the toilet, and that has all sorts of detrimental and pervasive effects.
When I was in the Army, I got sick of having to always go to another meeting about another program that, should we need it, was available to us. Everything from PTSD counseling to going outside of your chain of command if necessary to financial counseling to healthcare to complaining about the food, barracks, or what have you - there were channels galore to address grievances. They not only create these programs, but they force you to be aware that they exist. These aren't programs created just for show; they're programs which are created to be used.
This isn't the Vietnam Era. The military is an all-volunteer force, and unless the draft comes back, it can't afford to not care about its members. In an organization of many millions of people who constantly deal with difficult, dangerous things like this, incidents will occasionally occur, but they are the exception, rather than the rule.
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Here's numbers and a primary source [0]: "For perspective, the maximum potential radiation dose received by any ship's force personnel aboard the ship when it passed through the area was less than the radiation exposure received from about one month of exposure to natural background radiation from sources such as rocks, soil, and the sun." Meaning ~300 uSv, or three orders of magnitude short of acute radiation poison…
If any of them have manage to ingest any of the snow, then they could be subject to long term internal exposure and depending on the type of source, it could be very difficult to scan for.
Of all groups you'd hope to be able to detect and protect their staff against radiation, wouldn't the US Navy be fairly near the top of the list? Much as TEPCO may be at fault over the actual reactor the sailors being exposed unnecessarily sounds more like Naval negligence.
During the height of the Cold War, US Navy ships were equipped with a "wash down" system to enable operations after sailing through nuclear fallout. I'm surprised to learn that no means of detecting radiation in the drinking water was thought of back then. Then again, many of those systems were thought of as a way of continuing to operate for just a few weeks more. Many of those scenarios would have included the end…
As the reactors have now dumped thousands of tons of nuclear runoff water into the ocean which then drifts to the North American West Coast, is this not something we should be much more aware of and acting to protect against? Is the US West Coast at danger of increased incidence rates of radiation related illness?
The answer is no, it is not even close to something we should be worried about.
The nuclear apologists are out in full force today. I love how you guys, mostly computer programmers, are so much more informed than experts in nearly every other field of science existing. It must be amazing to be that smart.
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They could have sidestepped the whole issue with a simple reverse-osmosis water filter. Somehow I get the impression that they did not think the ABC (edit: CBRN) thing through.
A "simple" reverse-osmosis system? A Nimitz class carrier can produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 gallons of desalinated (potable) water a day. Desalination is very energy intensive, but energy is something that a nuclear powered carrier has plenty of. There are obviously some consumables involved, but it's mostly just energy, and lots of it. RO, on the other hand, requires a lot of high quality, small p…
http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/657412.pdf
RO is already used in utility-scale desal plants:
http://www.pub.gov.sg/water/Pages/DesalinatedWater.aspx
"This plant can produce 30 million gallons of water a day (136, 000 cubic meters) and is one of the region’s largest seawater reverse-osmosis plants."