http://xkcd.com/radiation/

some perspective

I never actually checked this fact. But I heard that a box of iodine pills went from $10-15 US to $400 US

I saw that chart today in the news paper. I knew many things around us everyday gave off radiation but it really puts it into perspective.

It wouldn't surprise me that iodine pills skyrocketed, its the good ole supply and demand. I heard though, and this is coming from the Canadian health board that we ingest enough iodine in regular everyday foods that adding to it with the pills may actually cause more harm than good. But with that being said i don't believe that the radiation will be strong enough when it reaches me anyway so IMO its the damn news that's blowing everything out of proportion again and will eventually cause pandemonium.

http://www.wsoctv.com/news/27204269/detail.html

small town company near where i grew up.

also note that life needs a certain amount of background radiation to survive although the reason for that is not totally understood in the case of animals.

i think i need to check that link

so that chart is trying to say that the radiation entering the environment from the fukushima plant poses no increased risk to individuals who would normally live nearby ? given that this chart seems to have been made by someone in the industry , my first reaction is , it doesnt convince me that the leaked radiation is safe , and if someone like the person making this chart says it is , i invite them to go swimming at the beach next to the plant . when they do , i will believe them .

The problem is that it adds up, 1 days exposure is not a problem, but what about a month or year + exposure from food and water over time. In terms of swimming at the beach it depends on how long they stay in the water, if they drink any etc. The danger of the radiation depends on what form that it is leaked as, and how frequently people are exposed.

The radioactive iodine is not the real problem, its the radioactive cesium (from the partial meltdown) and strontium (if there is a full melt down), as these get absorbed and stay in the body turning your soft tissue and bones radioactive respectively.

At the moment the Japanese radiation levels are not a huge problem, its just likely that the area immediately around the plant with be uninhabited for 10-20 years. It will only be an international problem in the case of a full meltdown.

On a side note, I was a bit pissed when I was exposed to uranium and x-rays.

For the x-rays they said, don't worry its the safe yearly exposure.

For the uranium they said (different person), you haven't lived until you have been exposed to uranium.

This isn't pudding.

the thing a lot of the career mad physicists forget , is that most of the rest of us want kids , or in my case more kids ( as in with the new wife ) , and i dont care how likely or unlikely it is that low doses would affect your balls and whats in them , i dont want no two headed babies .

lol

i know someone that was treated with xrays or some kind of radiation for eczema or something like it

ended up with luekemia

that was probably crazy over the top doses compared to what youd get these days but with radiation you just never know

just takes the wrong cell mutating and replicating itself too much, its like playing a really hard to win lottery that everyone always gets a few tickets but some people get way more

but the reason ionising radiation seems to be so scary is its almost impossible to get a 0 reading and its so easy to make even tiny doses or changes sound scary

enshula that is probably the best statement ive heard in regards to this radiation thing. your right, it doesnt matter how large or small the dosage is that you get. Its always a gamble.

The situation in Japan is not good of course - but alot of the horsefluff you are seeing about the situation on the media is just alot of fearmongering.

We're the Mayans right after all??

2012?

theyve stopped putting stories about it up for discussion on one of our local newspaper websites , they get half a dozen fervent uranium worshippers posting on each comment thread , and dozens of people who worry about the risks posting to debate about it .

one of my latest fun comparisons about it , is to ask them , "seeing as 1 in 150 nuclear reactors have failed , its not safe is it ? , after all , if you got told when you booked your airplane ticket , that the plane you will be flying on is safe , only 1 in 150 falls out of the sky , you would have absolute confidence in that plane wouldnt you ..."

wow

thats a pretty twisted form of statistical analysis right there.


counting the ones under construction, there are around 500 reactors in the world, with them only existing for the past 60 years. this is not counting the past inactivated reactors.

not counting the recent japanese events, there have been 8 "failures" that have caused $300mill or more in damage

and you are trying to transcribe that ratio into air travel? lol


edit: id also like to know what you define as a "failure" as there has been only one massive failure un-aided by outside variables. so in your analogy, a failure would be related to a plane crash, which would be absolute failure correct?

Chernobyl is the only recorded absolute failure due to human error in the known history of Nuclear power. 3 mile island and others were accidents yes, but not failures.

and to blame the Japanese incidents on the dangers of nuclear power alone is pretty stupid. there were a few.....extenuating circumstances there and a few safety measures that wernt taken for some reason that are in the United States.

it seems to me that you are just a forum poster that reads a post by someone else and thinks "hey thats pretty cool" and then runs everywhere spreading that post without really knowing anything about it. im im wrong then im sorry, but thats how it looks.

Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)





dont know how well that will come out

now they are dumping radioactive water into the sea. i doubt im gonna eat seafood for quite some time =(

seafood??? you don't really eat any of that stuff that comes from an ocean do you? all our oceans have been polluted for so long nothing that comes out of them is really safe to eat anyway.

its meant to be a twisted comparison , as often the people i argue with suggest solar power creates more carbon , to generate its power than nuclear , so i like to play with their heads . but even if it was 1 in 500 , would you fly on that plane ? with your kids ? the reality is that if things go wrong , badly , the fallout from the incident with the radiation can last a very long time , if solar panels suffer a catastrophic failure , the worst result is having to pick all the bits up .

3 mile island started as an accident, but it was human error that exacerbated it.

We need to figure out a way to cool reactors in cases of complete power failure, preferably with apparatus stored off site and transported to the plant in the event of a localized incident.

The area of the World Ocean is 361 million km2 (139 million mi2)[8] Its volume is approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometres (310 million cu mi).[9] This can be thought of as a cube of water with an edge length of 1,111 kilometres (690 mi). -Wikipedia

I've no idea how much radioactive water is being dumped into the sea, but it's going to be diluted as hell. and contain elements that already exist in the ocean.

some of this sounds like a plot for a godzilla movie!

if i was designing a reactor to be failsafe . i would turn the "drop the fuel rods into the reaction area" upside down . i would instead have the fuel rods raised into the reaction area on hydraulic rams with 3 or more ways of letting them down into the moderator area . with the automatic shutdown or no power design to mean that when there is some power failure the rods obviously automatically drop back into their "safe" position .

The rods went in as planned about 15 seconds after the quake hit, but the problem is that doesn't completely stop the reaction. It has to be constantly cooled. Usually they use external power, and have backup generators, and batteries. The backup generators got screwed because of the tsunami (they were diesel, I guess they got drenched?), and the batteries only last 8 hours. That's why, stories about the nuclear problem didn't begin until a few days later... Eventually the thing got too hot and now it's going to take months for it to be completely cooled, and then they can clean it up.

It's not too bad, I still think nuclear power is safe, but it was definitely stupid to not have the backup generators better protected against tsunamis. The plant should've been higher from sea level, or maybe they should've had generators on the mountain next to the plant, with underground wires going to the plant.

The reactor in Japan with the issues, was not designed to be failsafe. It was designed in the 60s to be economical. The whole design is based around using the cheaper pressure driven method of generating electricity.

They merely took the cheapest American, safety approved design, and put in a bit more safety based on 100 years of sesmic activity (not 250 years where there were larger earthquakes). It wasn't designed to handle anything near an 8.0 earthquake or resulting tsnami. The reactor was due for decommision in Jan '11, but was allowed to remain for economic reasons again. Why do you think the Japanese government is trying to control the impression of their own media so much? it was a very unpopular decision not to decomission the reactor to begin with.

the problem with the safety versus cost issue , is that i just dont trust companies to protect the public when their shareholders profits are at stake . to make a safe enough reactor to satisfy the doubters of which i am one , is so incredibly expensive , that you might as well spend that same amount on the similarly expensive large scale green power sources . not to mention research into high volume energy storage is needed .

the local paper heres website has completely stopped letting people comment on this issue . probably because it lacks any new stuff for debate , but probably also because the issue has shown people are generally very distrustful of nuclear energy .

weekly post

does this mean that my Garlic Salt is worthless now, i was kinda thinking about reselling what i wasn't actually capable of eating...

mightbe

well that lasted one day , the perthnow website put up a thread to let us discuss riotinto's boss telling us all we needed nuclear power and again the audience bias against radioactive power dropped it out of sight quicker than a politician avoiding the interviewers question

i'd like you to clarify just to as how many dead people take the time and effort to buy electricity...

In Australia the companies don't actually check the meters, they guesstimate usage. So dead people do receive power bills quite often, then the families have to complain and provide evidence (eg death certificate) so that they bill is cancelled. Its happened three times for my family.

Its really annoying because even when we go on holidays (little to no electricity usage) we still get billed the area average.

so, you pretty much stated that dead people have received a bill for electricity that they didn't use and if somebody took the time to complain about it, it didn't get paid.

it all depends on the recipient . my parents get a card and post it to the power company after going and reading their own meter . my neighbour has a electronic meter which sends the reading to the company itself . and my meter is the old style and every couple of months a lady drives up , gets out , and copies the reading onto a handheld thingy which she obviously uploads to her bosses .

Imma go dip my sack in a puddle in japan...huge sack...here I come!!!!

Sounds a lot like our national power company, they check it every two months and charge your usage based on the last check (1 month check, the other month charge based on 1st month usage). Which is totally fluffed up since those lazy fags have no real reason to do that. They already pay minimum wage to a bunch of barely productive workers (it takes two full vans of nearly a dozen people to fix a power outage at the local substation (something like that: http://prasys.info/...muthukrishnan-300x225.jpg). 2-3 do the work while the others just chillax in the background. Just another "cost saving initiative" by our fatass corporations.

now they are shifting people from more than 20km from the reactor , must be worried about the two heads

thats due to the radioactive water they are removing

the iodine is the least of the worries. it has a short half life compared to other reactive materials.
http://www.reuters.com/...tor-idUSL3E7GC2JQ20110512

reading through that, they're still not actually in control of the situation properly, and still spewing radiation into the environment. also given they seem to be saying that reactor #1 went into full meltdown, there will also be uranium waste material about, and that DEFINITELY has a long term half life.
Something of the scale of Fukushima and chernobyl convince me personally, that until nuclear fusion technology is fully understood and made practical and efficient, nuclear power is NOT the answer.

Chernobyl was larger than Fukushima and, and it's failure was more to do with design flaws, operator error, and the Soviet system itself.

What's worse is to consider that there are still 4 operating reactors of not only the same type, but the same generation of Chernobyl's reactor No. 4.

Chernobyl was due to people doing what they weren't supposed to with the reactor.
Fukushima was more due to FUBAR.
Making a structure to Withstand an earthquake AND a tidal wave is somewhat hard at the best of times. The fact that most of it was still standing is very impressive.

The major design flaws in the original RMBK reactors didn't help the situation, and was never told to the operators until after the accident. A similar and smaller incident that lead to no major malfunction occurred at a larger RMBK reactor in Ignalina, Lithuania, in 1983.

Also, the complete lack of a containment building kinda screws over the whole thing.

Tbh, it's a bit surprising that the Fukushima No. 1 reactors dealt as well with the earthquake and tsunami as they did. Japan rocks when it comes to designing and building stuff.

/me is waiting on the first Mothra sightings . . . .

another issue with nuclear power at the moment is cost , worlwide new scheduled plants cost on average over 10,000 US dollars a Kilowatt to build . thats three times the cost of a kilowatt of solar power . at that cost you can spend 2 times the cost of your solar cells on storage and still be competitive with nuclear power .

my weekly post to get my points , radiation baaaaad , drinking gooood .