heywood on 30/3/2011 at 09:40
Quote Posted by Kolya
I had originally posted the article to disprove heywood's assertion that:
"For Chernobyl, the most scientifically authoritative study to date concluded that there were no reproductive or inherited effects."The study I posted shows that even low level radiation doses (below 50-200 (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGy) mGy) can double the number of de novo genetic mutations and did so at Chernobyl. In other words, it is exactly what heywood said didn't exist.
I'm not sure you really read & digested what I wrote. Ionizing radiation damages DNA. I recognize that. I said that the DNA damage from radiation is random, just like DNA damage from toxins, drugs & alcohol, medical x-rays, cosmic rays, and plain old aging. So any inherited effects would likely manifest themselves as the same common birth defects and child health issues that are associated with the other sources of damage.
But the key point is that there's a gap between the hypothetical health effects of nuclear fallout and the observed health effects of nuclear fallout.
An organization was set up to research the long term health effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It has collected over 60 years worth of data from survivors and multiple generations of their offspring, and has so far concluded there are no inherited health problems of statistical significance. The UN commissioned the Chernobyl Forum which consists of 7 UN agencies plus the governments of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus and the World Bank. They did the most comprehensive scientific investigation on the health effects of Chernobyl and produced the conclusion I mentioned. I also noted that the jury is still out on Chernobyl because there are a lot of anecdotal stories and studies which point to an increase birth defects, but without the proper controls & rigor to establish a cause and effect relationship.
Your article does not refute the Chernobyl Forum's conclusion. In fact, the concluding paragraph suggests that the doses would have to be 5-40 times higher than the Chernobyl clean-up teams received in order to produce the kind of mutations that could cause inherited health effects.
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.
Bullshit.
Quote Posted by Kolya
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.
The closest we could get to an apples vs. apples comparison is between the uncontrolled radioactivity released into the environment by coal burning vs. released by nuclear accidents. But even that would be problematic because the health effects are determined at least as much by the chemistry of the radioisotopes as their radioactivity.
Also, surely you understand there is a fundamental choice to be made between coal and nuclear? It's so easy to say "I'm against fossil fuels and nuclear, I'm for clean renewables". But that's a fantasy option at the current time. Of all the renewables we have under consideration, only wind is a technology we have in hand that can be deployed on a large scale now. We're adding wind power generation at a fairly rapid pace but it will be many decades before it provides a major fraction of our energy. Solar is not there yet. Geothermal is not there yet. The transitional source you proposed, natural gas, is nearly fully exploited already except for risky extraction methods. And it releases CO2. And it explodes way more often than nuke accidents.
P.S. What Tocky said.
Martin Karne on 31/3/2011 at 04:54
Quote Posted by heywood
Bullshit.
No, is not.
He died.
Of alcoholic withdrawal syndrome enhanced by Plutonium.
(what is this? Water? Argh aaaaah...)
Why accusing me of Bullshitting something, tell that to the Russian guy who said that on TV.
june gloom on 31/3/2011 at 05:48
can we increase the letter limit on tags? 'martin karne nonsense spree' doesn't fit :(
Vasquez on 31/3/2011 at 06:54
So, nuclear radiation is about as harmful as sunbathing. Sigh of relief.
heywood on 31/3/2011 at 12:42
Quote Posted by Martin Karne
No, is not.
He died.
Of alcoholic withdrawal syndrome enhanced by Plutonium.
(what is this? Water? Argh aaaaah...)
Why accusing me of Bullshitting something, tell that to the Russian guy who said that on TV.
I didn't intend to accuse
you of bullshitting, but the story is bullshit. It's simply impossible. Not to mention so ridiculous it's not really worth rebutting. For background, you could start by reading the Wikipedia article in the post you responded to. After that, you could calculate the radiation from a grain size particle of Plutonium, compare it to the level that causes acute radiation sickness, and tell me how someone could die almost instantly from it.
Plutonium is not chemically toxic, and not very radioactive either. Back in the 1940s, some nuclear scientists would literally handle the stuff with bare hands, and the only time anybody got hurt was in botched experiments where it went critical. Now they use rubber gloves and don't show off their dick size by doing cavalier criticality experiments.
Like I said before, the long half-life alpha emitters are not particularly dangerous. It's the short half-life beta emitters, which are the byproducts of fission, that will kill you.
Kolya on 31/3/2011 at 13:11
While he wouldn't get the typical radiation sickness, the short reach, high energy alpha rays of even tiny amounts of Plutonium suffice to create cancer and leukaemia when getting inside the human body. Going on here about how Plutonium "is not chemically toxic" and basically kids play is misleading at best. But I'm sure you know that.
Koki on 1/4/2011 at 07:13
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)
Well, some of them did, anyway...
heywood on 2/4/2011 at 23:27
Quote Posted by Kolya
While he wouldn't get the typical radiation sickness, the short reach, high energy alpha rays of even tiny amounts of Plutonium suffice to create cancer and leukaemia when getting inside the human body. Going on here about how Plutonium
"is not chemically toxic" and basically kids play is misleading at best. But I'm sure you know that.
Actually, he would probably just shit it out a day or two later with his next meal. Because Plutonium oxide isn't very chemically reactive, very little of it gets absorbed into the body. You could theoretically ingest enough to kill you but it would have to be intentional. Chemical stability is also why it doesn't get absorbed into plants, so the accumulation of Plutonium fallout in soil isn't much of a problem either. A bigger potential danger is inhaling Plutonium particles in dust or ash, because these can stay in your body longer. But this is theoretical because there are still no known cancers in humans attributable to Plutonium ingestion or inhalation.
I wonder if Martin wasn't thinking of Polonium instead of Plutonium. Polonium was the stuff used to assassinate that ex-KGB Russian dissident a few years ago.
Martin Karne on 4/4/2011 at 19:37
Ha ho heee! 10500 tons of radioactive water to be dumped into the sea.
Then people I know wonder why I don't eat fish, cumulative toxins, loads of Mercury poisoning, oily waters and now radioactivity...
Keep your fish and shove it.
Shug on 5/4/2011 at 01:17
Fish may well be the best food there is, particularly salmon.
Dumping radioactive water into the ocean certainly isn't a great thing, but I'm confident 10,500 tonnes of radioactive water isn't going to pose a significant risk to the multiple billions of cubic kilometres the various oceans contain.
