On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> >> I disagree. Assuming the above is true, and it probably is, that would >> be WONDERFUL news. In a water cooled reactor, the sort that is used >> everywhere ( except for Chernobyl and other reactors in the former USSR >> which used graphite) a core meltdown is as bad a disaster as it gets, and >> having the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded right under the plant >> caused billions of dollars of damage, but Fukushima killed NOBODY. So >> apparently the worst that can happen to a water cooled nuclear power >> reactor is bad but not all that bad. The death toll from the huge >> earthquake was 20,000, but the death toll from Fukushima was zero. > > > The incurred cancer deaths will happen quietly, years, decades, centuries > and millennia later and they will happen off camera, but that does not mean > that they will not happen.I doubt we will ever know the final death toll – > many tens of thousands of years from now when the released corium decays > through various decay series into relatively innocuous elemental products – > along the way slowly leeching into the biosphere over the centuries, > millennia and tens of millennia. However one thing I think is clear is that > your figure of zero deaths has a zero percent probability of being correct > Maybe, and maybe the blade on a giant wind turbine will crack off and slice into a school bus packed with children, but I doubt it. In 1979 the reactor core at Three Mile Island melted down just like at Fukushima but despite 6.02 *10^23 doomsday stories about how it would kill us all it ended up killing NOBODY. BY Far the worst nuclear accident that ever happened was at the graphite cooled Chernobyl reactor in 1986, but no reactor in the western world is built like Chernobyl, they use water to slow neutrons not graphite and that is vastly safer because unlike graphite water does not burn (one reason I don't like Uranium breeder reactors is that they use molten sodium to cool the neutrons and molten sodium does burn in the air and even explodes in the presence of water). And as bad as it was even Chernobyl killed fewer than 60 people, a single oil rig disaster can kill that many, and a coal mine disaster in China can kill 10 times as many. For a water cooled reactor having the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded occur directly under 3 reactors is close to being as extreme as conditions can get, and having those 3 reactors melt down was a worst case scenario, but even then NOBODY died. As for very long term effects ending up killing people, you're assuming that the Linear No Threshold theory is correct, the idea that even very small amounts of radiation will end up killing lots of people if enough are exposed to that small increase. I've written about this before but apparently it needs repeating. Everybody agrees that huge amounts of radiation are harmful or fatal, especially if received virtually instantaneously as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but do more moderate amounts received much more slowly really increase the likelihood of getting cancer and death years later? All our public policy regarding nuclear power is based on the assumption that the answer is yes, in particular it is assumed that the Linear No Threshold theory is correct. But is it? If death rates were always linear and it was known that there was a 50% chance that when people were hit in the head with a 3 pound iron ball moving at 20 mph they would die then if a million people were hit in the head with an iron ball 6000 times less massive you'd expect about 83 people to die, but in actuality a .008 ounce BB moving at 20 mph wouldn't even break the skin and nobody would die. It doesn't work for iron balls but is the Linear No Threshold theory correct for radiation? For obvious ethical reasons there isn't a lot of data on this subject but there is some. The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received 2000 millisieverts of radiation were 7.9 times as likely to get Leukemia as the general population of Japanese, If they received half that amount of radiation (1000 millisieverts) and the Linear No Threshold theory was true you would expect them to be 3.95 times as likely to get that disease, but instead they were only 2.1 times as likely; and if they got 200 millisieverts they were 4% LESS likely and with 100 millisieverts they were 17% LESS likely to get Leukemia. These NONLINEAR results are NOT consistent with the LINEAR No Threshold theory. And the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received more than 100 millisieverts were more likely to develop solid cancers than the general population of Japanese, but those who were under 100 millisieverts were not. Such a THRESHOLD is NOT consistent with the Linear NO THRESHOLD theory. The natural background radiation of the Rocky Mountain states in the USA is 3.2 times higher than in the Gulf States, and yet the cancer death rate in the Gulf States is 1.26 times HIGHER than in the Rocky Mountain states. Radiologists spend their lives exposed to X rays, but they have less cancer and a lower death rate than other physicians. People who became radiologists between 1955 and 1970 had a 29% lower cancer rate and a 32% lower death rate than non-radiologist physicians. In 1983 steel bars used in the construction of 180 apartment buildings in Taiwan were accidentally contaminated with Cobalt 60, it took about a decade for this error to be discovered and in the meantime 10,000 people were exposed and some residents received as much as 500 millisieverts per year, the average was 50; by comparison the natural background level is only 3.3 millisieverts. In a group of people that large you'd expect that 232 would die from cancer by now, and if the Linear No Threshold theory is true you'd expect 70 additional would die due to the excess radiation, so there should have been 302 deaths from cancer; but the ASTONISHING thing is that only 7 people died of cancer. In addition the Linear No Threshold theory predicts there should have been 46 birth defects, but the actual number was 3. A study was done on 71,000 people who were shipyard workers between 1957 and 1981, they were divided into 3 categories, a high dose group received more than 0.5 rem, a low dose group that received less than that, and a control group of shipyard workers that didn't work on nuclear ships and so received no excess radiation at all. Actuarial studies show that the high radiation group had a 25% LOWER death rate than the control no radiation group; the low radiation group had a bigger death rate than the high radiation group but it was still lower than the zero radiation control group of shipyard workers. These results are the exact opposite of what the Linear No Threshold theory predicts and incredibly it seems to indicate that modest amounts of radiation received over a long period of time can actually be beneficial. If this were about any other subject evidence this strong would be more than enough to kill a theory, but the Linear No Threshold theory is based on radiation fear, and fear is a powerful emotion that can not always be stopped by logic. > > …. Over the long run. > "Over the long run we're all dead" John Maynard Keynes John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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