Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

atlasobscura.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 122 posts

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#91

Post by iSnow »

chii wrote: post #46
Joona wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a documentary like that on Finnish TV a couple of years back, but it wasn't just about the wolves - it included other animals too. They seem to be doing very well. Do you happen to remember the name of the documentary? It sounds very interesting.

Perhaps they do well, because the radiation kills off the weak ones relatively quickly (compared to other habitats), and thus the remaining population is actually stronger over time. For humans, that doesn't happen because we try to cure those afflicted which would've otherwise have been "naturally selected out", and so weakens the gene pool over time.

That does not make sense. If the radiation culled the weakest, then it would also affect the stronger individuals. Essentially, radiation would make the stronger weak and make the weak too unhealthy to survive.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#92

Post by john61 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #90
dragonwriter wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear opponents propose shutting down old reactors and not building new reactors -- but they haven't been able to find viable economic alternatives to the old reactors To the extent this is true, neither have nuclear proponents or the nuclear industry; the reason new nuclear reactors aren't built isn't because of nuclear opponents, its because the nuclear industry won't build them without special liability protec…

Those cheaper power sources are coal and oil, right? Doesn't every discussion of nuclear being with the assumption that controlling carbon emissions are the real goal?

Germanies currently installed photo voltaic systems have the power output of 21 nuclear reactors on sunny days.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#93

Post by iSnow »

Symmetry wrote: post #81
nnq wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alpha particles (high energy bare Helium nuclei actually) and beta particles (high energy electrons actually) don't "go into your blood", they are just absorbed by atoms in your skin and they break a few molecules those atoms were part of along the way. If they go deep enough they make break up some DNA in you skin cells. If they would get to the blood they would just be absorbed by the blood itself and break some mo…

It's really only neutrons that can transmute other elements into radioactive ones. Charged particle or EM radiation might damage your body's chemicals but they won't harm your atoms. Generally a whole body dose of 1 sievert will increase your odds of getting cancer by 10% over your life. I don't know how much she's been exposed to but while my guess is that while future cancer is a concern it really isn't a sure thin…

> Charged particle or EM radiation might damage your body's chemicals

Which is probably the biggest problem for biological systems - alterations in the DNA caused by radioactivity.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#94

Post by Retric »

nnq wrote: post #64
moopling wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gigacounter predicts the sieverts/h based on the local amount of radiation and by assuming that is the dosage all parts of your body are exposed to. If significantly less of your body is actually exposed to that level of radiation the actual dosage you receive will be less than predicted.

You're right but it's not about the dose only. If I blast a millimeter-sized piece of your finger with neutrons the body dose might be extremely small, but that piece of finger tissue might itself become radioactive and the newly-made-radioactive atoms in it will keep irradiating the cells around. Then some of them will get cancer mutations. Then some of them will go long enough along the path to cancer. Then some of…

High Radiation doses to small areas are a really complicated issue. One example of a greater than lethal dose in 1978 to a person’s head where mostly it was just a question of direct tissue damage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski Note: You may want to avoid doing an image search though.

More generally in the short term it's fast growing tissue that's most at risk. So, exposure that is quickly lethal may not do a lot of damage to slow growing tissues. Long term you can often remove severely affected tissues so a person can often survive much higher doses to their arms and legs vs torso.

PS: Another issue relates to population sizes. A 0.1% risk to everyone in the US kills more than 300 thousand people and is a major issue. A 0.1% risk to one person may not seem that bad as that's around the default risk every month for a 55 year old male.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#95

Post by soperj »

john61 wrote: post #92
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those cheaper power sources are coal and oil, right? Doesn't every discussion of nuclear being with the assumption that controlling carbon emissions are the real goal?

Germanies currently installed photo voltaic systems have the power output of 21 nuclear reactors on sunny days.

And still rely on france to provide nuclear power when it isn't.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#96

Post by ethbro »

LordKano wrote: post #84
pizza234 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's not as crazy as it sounds, in a certain perspective. If you guarantee that "hey! nuclear stuff is absolutely safe, there will never be problems whatsoever!", but then incidents happen, it's reasonable that people is skeptical when you say "hey! that coffin is absolutely safe, there will never be problems whatsoever!". This could be extended as a reasonable doubt of nuclear energy in general (I don't claim…

I completely agree. I understand that radiation isn't magic and things don't become permanently tainted by mere exposure. Still, this girl ingested cesium and died as a result. I would be highly uncomfortable with with an unknown quantify of a beta+gamma emitter with a 30 year half life being buried anywhere near where I get my family's drinking water.

You also have to take into account the fact that (and I'm trying to be charitable here) the principles involved's first reaction to a glow being emitted from inside a difficult to open metal cylinder was "Let's see if we can open this so we can make glowing jewelry!"

People are scared of nuclear technology in no small part because they simply don't understand it.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#97

Post by ethbro »

pantalaimon wrote: post #44
joshvm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or better yet, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers which the film was based on.

But this doesn't have anything to do with radiation

It does and does not have to do with radiation with the same relationship that post-WWII Japanese media features.

Sometimes it's more interesting to write a story about the effects and meaning of a thing, rather than the thing itself.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#98

Post by mikeash »

allendoerfer wrote: post #66

My problem with nuclear disasters or really any kind of bigger scale environmental damage is, that you have no control over other people's actions and failures. You therefore can not argue, that the technology is fine as long as we all use it securely, because you simply can not ensure that for countries you have no control over. And it is not only the small countries. We trust developed nations with nuclear technolo…

I see the free rider argument for nuclear safety. But it also seems to apply to nuclear prohibition. Whether your approach is to make nuclear power safer or simply to eliminate it, you face the same problem when it comes to ensuring that everyone follows along. So while I see it as a problem, I don't see how it's an argument in favor of elimination over safety as you seem to be making.

The waste problem is greatly overstated. For one, newer technology allows reusing much of the waste. For another, the amounts involved are tiny. Finally, we put up with processes that produce far nastier stuff that lasts forever, not merely centuries or millennia. The "generations to come" bit is always brought up when it comes to nuclear waste, but that's still way faster than, say, environmental arsenic goes away.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#99

Post by jjoonathan »

dragonwriter wrote: post #89
jjoonathan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Administrative maturity does not reliably advance over time but technology does and technology can compensate for a lack of administrative maturity. The social challenges may be intractable but the compensating technological challenges are not and reactor technology has come a long way in this regard. If Fukushima had been built in 1971 instead of 1967, it would not have had the flaw that caused the 2011 meltdown. Th…

> Nuclear opponents propose shutting down old reactors and not building new reactors -- but they haven't been able to find viable economic alternatives to the old reactors To the extent this is true, neither have nuclear proponents or the nuclear industry; the reason new nuclear reactors aren't built isn't because of nuclear opponents, its because the nuclear industry won't build them without special liability protec…

> its because the nuclear industry won't build them without special liability protections.

You say "liability protections" as if the dispute were over indemnification in case of a meltdown or accident. That's not what has made nuclear reactors too "risky" to be built in the US. The "risk" in question is that anti-nuclear factions will be able to indefinitely stall construction by repeatedly coming up with new "safety studies" to perform (e.g. environmental impact on squirrel population). This strategy worked for them in the past and the nuclear industry reckons it will work in the future unless they have legal protection against it.

> Old reactors in the US continue to be decommissioned even though new ones aren't being built.

A few old reactors, yes. But we've been holding steady at ~750GW of nuclear power for 15 years. "We have been keeping the old reactors running" is far, far closer to the truth than "we have been shutting them down."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/US_Electr...

> Objectively, the market has found economically viable alternatives to nuclear power.

Yeah, coal, which is probably even worse on average than running old, dangerous nuclear plants:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

Clean sources other than nuclear will eventually make this point moot but it'll take decades and in the meantime we have been / will be running on an unholy mix of unclean, nonrenewable power and power derived from old, dangerous nuclear reactors when we could have switched to clean, safe nuclear sources decades ago.

Yuck.

Re: The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

#100

Post by guscost »

allendoerfer wrote: post #66

My problem with nuclear disasters or really any kind of bigger scale environmental damage is, that you have no control over other people's actions and failures. You therefore can not argue, that the technology is fine as long as we all use it securely, because you simply can not ensure that for countries you have no control over. And it is not only the small countries. We trust developed nations with nuclear technolo…

By this logic it doesn't matter which way you argue, or whether you argue at all, right? Those actors who you have no control over will do what they want. I don't see what I'm supposed to take away from it.
Post reply on HN