Nic Roets wrote: > > Many scientific labs and hospitals work with radio active materials > within an appropriate legal and enforcement framework. That may > include placing of signs at the perimeter of the premises. In those > cases we should tag it. > > But people have an irrational fear of radioactivity. We certainly > don't want mappers to draw they own conclusions. For example, if a > site is storing depleted uranium, that does not mean that the public > should be worried. The level of radiation may be so low that it is not > harmful to humans. > +1
Radioactivity is just one of many man-made hazards, and, overall, people overestimate it's danger compared to other hazards and often don't understand the real hazards. If you're going to tag radioactive hazards, you ought to be tagging other hazards as well. In Upstate NY there are a large number of industrial "brownfield sites" that are still contaminated with heavy metals, hazardous organic solvents, and other hazards. Yes, in upstate we had the only commercial nuclear reprocessing plant in the US (with a sordid story that makes Sellafield look golden) but there was also a 40-building complex that manufactured film that contaminated a heavily populated area in Binghamton NY with Cadmium and Silver. Two industrial plants near Ithaca have leaked TCE and other solvents, affecting an elementary school, nursing home and the entire South Hill neighborhood. Note that these hazards are both pointwise and diffuse. For instance, you could be quickly killed by a lethal radiation field if you were to go for a swim in a spent fuel storage pond at a nuclear reactor. On the other hand, there are good procedures in place to protect the public and the workers at nuclear plants; for one thing you'd need to get past the fence and armed guards. There's a hypothetical danger there (the glaciers could come and spread the contents of a temporary nuclear waste repository across a wide area) but no "clear and present" immediate danger. You might as well tag all the roads as dangerous since hundreds of thousands of people get killed in automobile accidents every year. Now, coal burning power plants release about 300 times as much radiation into the environment during normal operation as a nuclear power plant. The issue is that there are trace quantities of uranium and it's decay products such as radium and polonium in coal: the coal burning plant in my county consumes about 120 freight cars of coal every day, to produce only 1/3 the power of a typical nuclear plant, which consumes 1 kg of U235 and produces about 1 kg of fission products every day. It deposits a fallout plume for hundreds of miles, which includes radioactive elements, sulfur compounds and which contributes to lung and heart diseases. It emits more carbon dioxide, as a point source, than all of the other activities in the county put together, but yet, by some Jedi Mind Trick, it was left out of a report on "Global Warming In Tompkins County" since they charged CO^2 emissions to the places where electricity is used, not where it is produced. The nuke industry isn't perfect either. The operation of "once through" plutonium production reactors at Hanford has deposited radioactive contamination into sediments downstream in the Colombia river. Early tank storage systems at Hanford were criminally inadequate, and have leaked plumes of FP and TRU contamination that are migrating to the Colombia. Yet, Hanford didn't drive Salmon and Trout to the verge of extinction: that was done by hydroelectric dams and overfishing. SRS did a much better (but not perfect) job of tank storage, and future commercial reprocessing operations at SRS won't need tank storage at all. On top of all that, the hazard of environmental contamination is distributed oddly in space. If you put a dab of a strong essential oil on your skin and spend a few hours in your house, it's quite entertaining to sniff around the next day and try to explain the spatial distribution of the odor. You might find that somebody else sits down, picks up the odor and their clothes, and distributes it to a room that you didn't go in. Similarly, you'd think that DDT and PCB contamination would be worst in places close to where these substances were used. However, if you look at tissue concentrations in wild animals, you'll find shockingly high levels of contamination in arctic animal populations in places that are basically uninhabited -- food webs work like that. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk