freemason9 wrote:the risk of dying from exposure to moldy tomatoes exceeds the fatality rate of accidental irradiation by a factor of 17
I say bullshit
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by seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 15, 2011 8:18 pm
freemason9 wrote:the risk of dying from exposure to moldy tomatoes exceeds the fatality rate of accidental irradiation by a factor of 17
by WakeUpAndLive » Tue Mar 15, 2011 8:36 pm
seemslikeadream wrote:freemason9 wrote:the risk of dying from exposure to moldy tomatoes exceeds the fatality rate of accidental irradiation by a factor of 17
I say bullshit
by justdrew » Tue Mar 15, 2011 9:04 pm
by eyeno » Tue Mar 15, 2011 9:08 pm
justdrew wrote:http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/nssrm/initiatives/usnds.htm
only the "Block IIA and Block IIR GBD configurations" contain "X-Ray sensor (BDX) or Dosimeter (BDD)" and their job is only to "detects exo-atmospheric NUDETs" (nuclear detonations)
so I'm not at all sure the USNDS (current name, was IONDS, and before that vela) can detect the type of airborne radiation we'd like to be able to look at.
Pacific Recovers From Massive Tsunami
Tsunami-Related Visualization Sources From EVL
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by justdrew » Tue Mar 15, 2011 9:27 pm
eyeno wrote:justdrew wrote:http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/nssrm/initiatives/usnds.htm
only the "Block IIA and Block IIR GBD configurations" contain "X-Ray sensor (BDX) or Dosimeter (BDD)" and their job is only to "detects exo-atmospheric NUDETs" (nuclear detonations)
so I'm not at all sure the USNDS (current name, was IONDS, and before that vela) can detect the type of airborne radiation we'd like to be able to look at.
That is what I am trying to determine myself. I keep reading references to detecting airborne radiation but far have not hit any jackpot. I have been reading a lot of technical jargon trying to understand it.
--------------------------------------------
I have no idea what this pic is but it looks cool.
It is from the NOAA site.Pacific Recovers From Massive Tsunami
Tsunami-Related Visualization Sources From EVL
http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/
by eyeno » Tue Mar 15, 2011 9:36 pm
3/14/2011 - CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. (AFNS) -- Members from the 45th Space Wing successfully launched a United Launch Alliance-built Delta IV Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle here March 13 carrying a classified National Reconnaissance Office satellite.
by Jeff » Tue Mar 15, 2011 11:24 pm
URGENT: UPDATE1: Fukushima No.3 reactor's container feared damaged: EdanoTOKYO, March 16, Kyodo
The container of the No.3 reactor of the quake-hit Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant is feared to have been damaged and may have leaked radioactive steam Wednesday, emitting high-level radiation, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.
The radiation level briefly topped 2 milisievert at the plant, its operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. separately said.
Last Defense at Troubled Reactors: 50 Japanese Workers
A small crew of technicians, braving radiation and fire, became the only people remaining at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on Tuesday — and perhaps Japan’s last chance of preventing a broader nuclear catastrophe.
Workers at Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant have suspended their operations and been evacuated, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Wednesday.
by 23 » Tue Mar 15, 2011 11:35 pm
by justdrew » Tue Mar 15, 2011 11:40 pm
by justdrew » Wed Mar 16, 2011 12:41 am
by nathan28 » Wed Mar 16, 2011 1:04 am
freemason9 wrote:the risk of dying from exposure to moldy tomatoes exceeds the fatality rate of accidental irradiation by a factor of 17
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 16, 2011 1:05 am
Experts protect a nuclear interest
Be first to comment
JIM GREEN
How have Australian scientists handled the difficult task of keeping us informed about the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan?
The first thing to note is that precious few Australian scientists have featured in the media. The most prominent have been Professor Aidan Byrne from the Australian National University, RMIT Chancellor Dr Ziggy Switkowski, and Professor Barry Brook from Adelaide University.
A clear pattern is evident − those with the greatest ideological attachment to nuclear power have provided the most inaccurate commentary.
The best of the bunch has been Byrne. He has presented the facts as he understands them and has willingly acknowledged major information gaps.
Switkowski has been gently spinning the issue, repeatedly reassuring us that lessons will be learned, improvements will be made. However, history shows that nuclear lessons are not properly learned. The OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency notes that lessons may be learned but too often they are subsequently forgotten, or they are learned but by the wrong people, or they are learned but not acted upon. The Nuclear Energy Agency says the pattern of the same type of accident recurring time and time again at different nuclear plants needs to be "much improved".
The situation in Japan illustrates the point − it has become increasingly obvious over the past decade that greater protection against seismic risks is necessary, but the nuclear utilities haven't wanted to spend the money and the Japanese nuclear regulator and the government haven't forced the utilities to act.
Brook is a strident nuclear power advocate and host of the bravenewclimate.com blog, which has received an astonishing 500,000 web 'hits' since the crisis in Japan began.
Brook has egg on his face. Make that an omelette. He has maintained a running commentary in the media and on his website insisting that the situation is under control and that there is no reason for concern.
His message remained unchanged even as it was revealed that efforts to cool the nuclear reactor cores were meeting with mixed success, even as deliberate and uncontrolled radiation releases occurred, even as the outer containment buildings exploded, even as 200,000 people were being evacuated, even as a fire led to spent nuclear fuel releasing radiation directly to the environment, and even as radiation monitors detected alarming jumps in radioactivity near the reactor and low levels of radiation as far away as Tokyo.
On Saturday Brook came out swinging, insisting that: "There is no credible risk of a serious accident".
Phew. That afternoon, after the first explosion at Fukushima, Brook made numerous assertions, most of which turned out to be wrong: "The risk of meltdown is extremely small, and the death toll from any such accident, even if it occurred, will be zero. There will be no breach of containment and no release of radioactivity beyond, at the very most, some venting of mildly radioactive steam to relieve pressure. Those spreading FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] at the moment will be the ones left with egg on their faces. I am happy to be quoted forever after on the above if I am wrong ... but I won't be. The only reactor that has a small probability of being 'finished' is unit one. And I doubt that, but it may be offline for a year or more."
On Saturday night, Brook asserted that: "When the dust settles, people will realise how well the Japanese reactors − even the 40 year old one − stood up to this incredibly energetic earthquake event." The dust is (hopefully) settling and it seems likely that four reactors will be write-offs.
On Sunday morning, Brook said of the unfolding disaster: "I don't see the ramifications of this as damaging at all to nuclear power's prospects" and that "it will provide a great conversation starter for talking intelligently to people about nuclear safety."
But Fukushima will likely prove a great conversation starter for talking intelligently to people about nuclear hazards. Not recommended at parties.
On Sunday afternoon, Brook was congratulating himself on his 'just the facts' approach in media interviews. He pondered: "What has this earthquake taught us? That it's much, much riskier to choose to live next to the ocean than it is to live next to a nuclear power station."
Well, the lesson for people in Fukushima is that if you live next to the ocean and next to a nuclear power station, then you're really stuffed.
On Monday, when the second explosion at Fukushima occurred, Brook was still insisting that "the nuclear reactors have come through remarkably well". On Monday evening, half a dozen people were banned from posting comments directly on Brook's website. True, some of their comments were silly and unhelpful, but by that criterion Brook ought to have banned himself.
On Tuesday, with a fire at Fukushima spewing long-lived radioisotopes directly into the environment, Brook was rallying the pro-nuclear lobby, arguing that "now, more than ever, we must stand up for what we believe is right" while introducing a guest web post by someone who announced that Japan gets electricity "from y nuclear reactors at z locations".
But cracks were starting to emerge by Tuesday night, with Brook acknowledging an "ongoing crisis situation", banning another 40-50 "random nobodies" from posting comments directly on his website, and quoting Rudyard Kipling:
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools
Make of that what you will.
One contributor to Brook's website said: "Unfortunately, Prof. Brook has really abdicated a neutral position on this event. His clear support of nuclear power seems to have impacted his critical thinking skills. ... Every time he states something in this crisis is 'impossible', it seems to happen the next day."
Andrew Bolt at the Herald Sun has been urging people to read the "marvellously sane and cool explanation" from "our friend Professor Barry Brook". Both Bolt and Brook claim that no more than 50 people died from the Chernobyl catastrophe.
More on that next month − the 25th anniversary falls on April 26.
The scientific estimates of the Chernobyl death toll range from 9,000 to 93,000.
Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 16, 2011 1:08 am
nathan28 wrote:freemason9 wrote:the risk of dying from exposure to moldy tomatoes exceeds the fatality rate of accidental irradiation by a factor of 17
More or less, yes, because there's no way concentrated fallout is going to land in the US. If it gets into the ocean... it will disperse and just create a deadzone locally and a bunch of sick fish and birds and poisonous shrimp, kind of like BP. But going to wash up on sunny California's shores? I doubt it.
But that doesn't mean this isn't a completely unmitigated disaster for most of Japan, the 130 million people there. Even assuming a moderate problem--say a 50 miles contaminated radius--that part of the island is going to be a no-go zone straight across from one coast to another until some time in the twentieth millennium.
I'm having trouble understanding why they can't sent robots or heavily shielded vehicles with guys earning gigantic hazard bonuses upfront in. Or just contract Xe formerly Blackwater and tell them there's a nine-year-old terrorist boy inside the containment housing.
Four explosions, two fires, and a cloud of nuclear mistrust spreads around the world
After decades of lies, nuclear reassurances now fall on deaf ears
Special report by Michael McCarthy
Wednesday, 16 March 2011SHARE PRINTEMAILTEXT SIZE NORMALLARGEEXTRA LARGE
AP
Evacuees from Fukushima are screened for radiation contamination yesterday, after authorities struggled to contain explosions at nuclear plants
It is unprecedented: four atomic reactors in dire trouble at once, three threatening meltdown from overheating, and a fourth hit by a fire in its storage pond for radioactive spent fuel.
All day yesterday, dire reports continued to circulate about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, faced with disaster after Japan's tsunami knocked out its cooling systems. Some turned out to be false: for example, a rumour, disseminated by text message, that radiation from the plant had been spreading across Asia. Others were true: that radiation at about 20 times normal levels had been detected in Tokyo; that Chinese airlines had cancelled flights to the Japanese capital; that Austria had moved it embassy from Tokyo to Osaka; that a 24-hour general store in Tokyo's Roppongi district had sold out of radios, torches, candles and sleeping bags.
But perhaps the most alarming thing was that although Naoto Kan, Japan's Prime Minister, once again appealed for calm, there are many – in Japan and beyond – who are no longer prepared to be reassured.
The scale of the alarm is the remarkable thing: how it has gone round the world (Angela Merkel has imposed a moratorium on nuclear energy; in France, there are calls for a referendum); how it's even displaced the terrible story of Japan's tsunami itself from the front-page headlines. But then, public alarm about nuclear safety, as the Fukushima emergency proves, is very easy to raise – and, as the Japanese authorities are now discovering, very hard to calm.
The reason is an industry which from its inception, more than half a century ago, has taken secrecy to be its watchword; and once that happens, cover-ups and downright lies often follow close behind. The sense of crisis surrounding Japan's stricken nuclear reactors is exacerbated a hundredfold by the fact that, in an emergency, public trust in the promoters of atomic power is virtually non-existent. On too many occasions in Britain, in America, in Russia, in Japan – pick your country – people have not been told the truth (and have frequently been told nothing at all) about nuclear misadventures.
To understand the mania for secrecy, we have to go back to nuclear power's origins. This was not a technology dreamt up as a replacement for coal-fired power stations; this is a military technology, conceived in a life-or-death struggle, which has been modified for civilian purposes. At its heart is the nuclear chain reaction, the self-sustaining atom-splitting process ("fission") which occurs when enough highly radioactive material is brought together, and which produces other radioactive elements ("fission products"), and a release of energy.
When it was first achieved by the physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, in an atomic "pile" built in a squash court of the University of Chicago in December 1942, it merely produced heat; but all those involved understood that if it could be speeded up, it would produce the biggest explosive power ever known. And so was born the Manhattan Project, the US undertaking to build the atom bomb which was, while it lasted, history's biggest secret.
Secrecy came with nuclear energy, like a birthmark, and, indeed, for 10 years after the first A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, it remained a covert military technology, although first the Russians, and then the British, followed the Americans in developing it. Britain built a pair of atomic reactors at Windscale on the Cumbrian coast, which produced (as a fission product) plutonium, the material used in the first British nuclear weapon. That was exploded off the coast of Australia in 1952. And it was in one of these reactors that the world's first really serious nuclear accident occurred: the Windscale fire of October 1957. The reactor's core, made of graphite, caught light, melted and burned substantial amounts of the uranium fuel, and released large amounts of radioactivity. It was the most serious nuclear calamity until Chernobyl nearly 30 years later, but the British government did all it could to minimise its significance, trying at first to keep it a complete secret (the local fire brigade was not notified for 24 hours) and keeping the official report confidential until 1988.
It was to be the first of many such nuclear alarms and cover-ups at Windscale. In 1976, for example, the secrecy surrounding a major leak of radioactive water infuriated the then Technology Minister, Tony Benn, who supported nuclear power, when he learnt of it. But similar cover-ups were happening all around the world.
At the US atomic weapons plant at Rocky Flats, Colorado, there were numerous mishaps involving radioactive material which were kept secret over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. In Russia, the province of Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals, housed a major atomic weapons complex, which was the site of three major nuclear disasters: radioactive waste dumping and the explosion of a waste containment unit in the 1950s, and a vast escape of radioactive dust in 1967. It is estimated that about half a million people in the region were irradiated in one or more of the incidents, exposing them to as much as 20 times the radiation suffered by the Chernobyl victims. None of which, of course, was disclosed at the time. Chelyabinsk is sometimes referred to now as "the most polluted place on the planet".
When we turn to Japan, we find an identical culture of nuclear cover-up and lies. Of particular concern has been the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), Asia's biggest utility, which just happens to be the owner and operator of the stricken reactors at Fukushima.
Tepco has a truly rotten record in telling the truth. In 2002, its chairman and a group of senior executives had to resign after the Japanese government disclosed they had covered up a large series of cracks and other damage to reactors, and in 2006 the company admitted it had been falsifying data about coolant materials in its plants over a long period.
Last night it was reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency warned Japan more than two years ago that strong earthquakes would pose "serious problems", according to a Wikileaks US embassy cable published by The Daily Telegraph.
Even Chernobyl, the world's most publicised nuclear accident, was at first hidden from the world by what was then the Soviet Union, and might have remained hidden had its plume of escaping radioactivity not been detected by scientists in Sweden.
So why do they do it? Why does the instinct to hide everything persist, even now, when the major role of nuclear energy has decisively shifted from the military to the civil sector? Perhaps it is because there is an instinctive and indeed understandable fear among the public about nuclear energy itself, about this technology which, once its splits its atoms, releases deadly forces.
The nuclear industry is terrified of losing public support, for the simple reason that it has always needed public money to fund it. It is not, even now, a sector which can stand on its own two feet economically. So when it finds it has a problem, its first reaction is to hide it, and its second reaction is to tell lies about it. But the truth comes out in the end, and then the public trusts the industry even less than it might have done, had it admitted the problem.
It doesn't have to be like this. A quarter of a century ago, Britain's nuclear industry acquired a leader who for a few years transformed its public image: Christopher Harding. He was an open and honest man who thought that the paranoia and secrecy surrounding nuclear power should be swept away.
When he became chairman of British Nuclear Fuels, which ran the Windscale plant, he decided on a new order of things. He renamed it Sellafield, and, to general astonishment, decreed that instead of sullenly turning its back to the public, it should welcome them with open arms. He did the unthinkable: he opened a visitor centre!
Harding died young in 1999, but he was, in his lifetime an exceptional man: not only for his charm and his personal kindness – he was revered by Sellafield employees – but for his vision of a nuclear industry which would be better off dealing with its problems through transparency and honesty, rather than through obfuscation and deceit. But he was, unfortunately, the exception who proved the rule.
The rest of the nuclear industry has been dissembling for so long, and caught out in its lies so often, that the chance for trust may have passed. Even if, as I suspect, the Japanese government is trying to be reasonably up front about the problems at Fukushima, it is by no means certain that anything it says about the nuclear part of their nation's catastrophe will be believed
by 8bitagent » Wed Mar 16, 2011 5:05 am
by hava1 » Wed Mar 16, 2011 5:15 am
maybe some mutation will do the trick...sorry for cynicism, but really the culture there is, kind of deadly even without pollution.8bitagent wrote:I felt sadness reading about "the 50" at the plants, working in the dark with little protection as a "last line of defense". Knowing they could very well die, and most likely will get very sick. It's like out of a movie, people making sacrifices. Virtually all of the people who worked to contain Chernobyl on the ground and by air ended up dying and or becoming unbelievably stricken. If the situation becomes worse, one has to wonder how much of Japan could be affected with toxic clouds.
I haven't read newer statistics, but I wonder how many people ended up dying and or suffering horrible illnesses(as well as offspring born with birth defects) in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, etc from the Chernobyl fallout
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