The Atomic Ocean Liner

[Default] Thus spake RayC :

AZ Nomad wrote:
It's the govt's fault if people are too ****ing lazy to crack open a
book or in today's age type "atomic energy" into a web browser?

I don't know whose fault it is ... but you hit the nail on the head.

Way back when I was going through my training, every book we had was
marked with a big CONFIDENTIAL or SECRET label and we had to have a lot
of special handling of every document we generated as dictated by the
Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954.

"Born classified". Until about 73, anything having to do with nuclear
anything was treated that way.


Some time in the mid 70s, they split up the Atomic Energy Commission
into the DOE and the NRC and quietly declassified a LOT of general
information. But, it went into boring old encyclopedias because nobody
wanted to hear about Nuclear Power in the 70s because we were finishing
up a stupid war, getting hit with the Arab oil embargoes and still
trying to get back the "free love" days. Nobody cared!

Do people have that information today? You betcha! Do they search it
out? NOPE!! It is easier to rely on the TV news, their friends or just
not care.

What shocks me is that some people say the Fox is biased, others say
that CNN is biased but nobody says that either of them fail to provide
any actual information.


Nuclear power can be dangerous. But so is burning fossil fuel. I
wonder what the numbers would look like if we were to compare the actual
deaths/illnesses associated with nuclear power versus fossil fuel. I
know from lots of studies by several factions that about 10,000 deaths
per year are attributed to pollution from burning coal ... our biggest
producer of electricity. I couldn't find any hard numbers on nuclear
power, but "guess-timates" from several sites attribute 56 deaths to
Chernobyl (albeit steam explosion and fire accounts for 80% of them)

The majority of the deaths at Chernobyl were the brave men who went in
with little real protection to quell the mess, many knowing that they
were dead when they volunteered.

and
about 2-4 deaths per year caused by exposure to waste/leakage (primarily
from abandoned medical/industrial equipment) over the last 50 years. Of
course, we hear about every one of those incidents. We never hear about
the guys that die from cancer brought on by pollution from coal because
that is an every day thing. I think the term that was used here was
"acceptable risk".

Black lung still kills more people than can be attributed to nuclear
exposure whether by accident or "deliberate" (Hiroshima and Nagasaki
being only two of them).

Bushong (Radiologic Science for Technologists) says that there were
approximately 2,000,000 people within an 80 km radius of TMI at the
time of the incident. Statistics tell us that we would expect to see
approximately 330,000 cancer deaths in this population without the
exposure. The estimated exposure across the area was about 8 mrad per
person. Which should result in about 1 additional death (one, ONE).
Which is noise.
--

- dillon I am not invalid

The more I drink, the less I think. The less I think,
the better I feel. The better I feel, the more I drink.
And so goes the circle of life.

In article , Dillon Pyron
wrote:

Black lung still kills more people than can be attributed to nuclear
exposure whether by accident or "deliberate" (Hiroshima and Nagasaki
being only two of them).

Mining uranium is a dirty too and has left many sick and dying miners
and polluted areas. When it is mined it still has to be processed into
fuel. Also hazardous.

And there is the waste issue. There is still no place for the waste.

--
Charles

In article ,
Dillon Pyron wrote:

Bushong (Radiologic Science for Technologists) says that there were
approximately 2,000,000 people within an 80 km radius of TMI at the
time of the incident. Statistics tell us that we would expect to see
approximately 330,000 cancer deaths in this population without the
exposure. The estimated exposure across the area was about 8 mrad per
person. Which should result in about 1 additional death (one, ONE).
Which is noise.

Especially since the areas in the couple states around TMI have some
of the highest background Radon rates in the country.

--
I get off on '57 Chevys
I get off on screamin' guitars
--Eric Clapton

Charles wrote:
In article , Dillon Pyron
wrote:

Black lung still kills more people than can be attributed to nuclear
exposure whether by accident or "deliberate" (Hiroshima and Nagasaki
being only two of them).

Mining uranium is a dirty too and has left many sick and dying miners
and polluted areas. When it is mined it still has to be processed into
fuel. Also hazardous.

And there is the waste issue. There is still no place for the waste.

Charles, where do we store the coal waste? A (small) portion of that
coal ash is stored in peoples' lungs. Coal has typically around 4 ppm
uranium and I forget how much thorium in it. That stuff is just placed
in landfills and atmosphere.

If we were to reprocess spent fuel rods the amount of real waste that
needs to be dealt with is tiny compared to coal waste.

The bottom line is that nothing is "safe". Though through the entire
life cycle nuclear power is safer than anything else on an equal energy
basis.

--
Dean in Peoria

Remove the X's to email