Eldron on 29/3/2011 at 15:10
I'd believe the actual metric tons of dirt you ate would kill you before you got near the amount of ingested plutonium needed to kill you in the fukushima region.
Kolya on 29/3/2011 at 15:21
New post, new distorted argument.
Yes, fly-ash by coal plants is very lightly radioactive. It's certainly not healthy. But what you and this article compare it to are the air-emissions of a nuclear plant. Fortunately for your argument these only consist of steam for a working plant.
Of course you would actually at least have to include the used fuel rods any nuclear plant produces in your radioactivity comparison. But yeah, that would destroy your apples and oranges comparison and kill all the fun of being a cool smartass.
Let alone the fact that no reasonable person suggests coal plants as an environmentally safe substitute for nuclear plants. But you still cannot stop pointing at coal plants. Because they're so much worse and surly that makes nuclear power good.
Kolya on 29/3/2011 at 15:35
Oh it gets better: Apparently readers admonished the original article when it said that fly-ash
contained up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste. Which is a blatant lie, see fuel rods.
So they decided to weasel out of this:
Quote:
Editor's Note (posted 12/30/08): In response to some concerns raised by readers, a change has been made to this story. The sentence marked with an asterisk was changed from "In fact, fly ash—a by-product from burning coal for power—and other coal waste contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste" to "In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."
((
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste&page=2))
I guess that's true as long as you don't store the actual nuclear waste in the surrounding environment.
Martin Karne on 29/3/2011 at 21:41
Bah, we're all gonna die!
Stop ruining my dark mood, dammit!
:p ;)
Azaran on 30/3/2011 at 04:43
Quote Posted by Martin Karne
That's funny, do you remember Chernobyl do you?
One tunnel digger, you know the ones who made a cooling tunnel under the reactor molten core, drank from unprotected bottles and somehow one sand grain sized particle of Plutonium entered that bottle and he drank it, needless to say that dude died almost instantly.
Well you should know if you had watched Discovery channel's documentary special on Chernobyl.
So much for Wikipedia's reliability:(
I saw a documentary on Chernobyl a few years ago, but they only talked about the workers who died from exposure to the radiation, the ones who had the balls to go here:
Inline Image:
http://www.ukrainianweb.com/images/chernobyl/chernobyl_reactor.jpgYou have to admit, these people are heroes. They know they're gonna die from extreme radiation exposure (or be scarred for life), and yet they go and clean up the mess anyway
Tocky on 30/3/2011 at 05:25
They are and I tip my hat to the brave bastards.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." It's Spock for real.
Eldron on 30/3/2011 at 08:03
Quote Posted by Azaran
You have to admit, these people are heroes. They know they're gonna die from extreme radiation exposure (or be scarred for life), and yet they go and clean up the mess anyway
They are heroes, that's true, but if we're lucky most of them will live normal lives after that, they have more precautions and rules at fukushima than they had when cleaning up at tjernobyl.
Firefighter on 300sv/h in tjernobyl? no problem, have at it comrade!
fukushima worker encountering a spike thousands times below that of tjernobyl in fukushima? they back off.
june gloom on 30/3/2011 at 08:54
Makes me think of an old joke the Russians sometimes told during the initial cleanup.
"We sent the Japanese robot in, and the radiation was so bad it broke down in an hour. We sent the American robot in, and the radiation was so bad it broke down in an hour. Finally we sent the Russian robot in, and in an hour we said, 'Comrade! Take a break and have a cigarette!'"
