At MOHANADHASSAN….
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Perhaps we should start building powerplants filled with bicycles driving dynamos, now that would create some jobs!
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The irony is that the anti-nuclear proponents are shooting themselves in the foot.
Wait, what?
Well think about it for a second. Your electricity doesn’t come from magic. The only thing your protestation does is stop the construction of new plants. The old plants will keep running because they cost millions to safely dismantle and would not easily be replaced by another powerplant of the same capacity. Solar and wind are just a pipe dream, they cannot sustain baseload power generation. Only hydro, fossil and nuclear can. Hydro’s nice if you have the space and the money and don’t care too much about destroying the environment around the dam, but all those conditions are rather limiting. Fossil I think we can all agree is not the way to go; between pollution, scarcer resources and risks associated, they easily kill more people than all other sources combined.
So that leaves nuclear, but the thing is, yes, the plants we have right now are bad. You shouldn’t be basing yourself off designs from half a decade ago when thinking about nuclear! Do we still measure car security by what a 1950s American car had?
Modern nuclear designs, as I’ve repeated countless times, are passively safe, recycle burnt fuel to extract about 99% of fissile material and produce so little waste it’s not even funny. You couldn’t notice the waste if you weren’t looking for it.
We shouldn’t be discarding a technology based off the batshit insane USSR experiment that was Chernobyl or how a 40 year old plant didn’t fully resist a 9.0 earthquake followed by a 10m tsunami. Well dang, how surprising!
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The problem is not the % likelihood of a nuke power station accident, but the number of people that can be wiped out and the number of more millions who will be affected by radiation from severe burns to nausea for the rest of their lives.
Yesterday the British media told us that above-normal radiation has been detected in this country and it originated from Fukushima. Is this just scare mongering, since there are so many miles between us, or has the radiation been also detected in Russia, China, Asia and the rest of Europe too, which are between us and Japan? If yes, then the range of the problem is so great that it may threaten all of the world. And the Japs can’t get close enough for long enough to plug the hole, it is killing their people who are trying to fix the problem!
Fukushima is not over yet.
And my suspicion is that all of the tremors and quakes and natural disasters that we are seeing around the world are leading up to a really big shift or jerk of the continental plates which will threaten all of us. And there is nothing we can do about it.
Maybe this old world has had enough of the human race. We need to look for the seven-headed monster that will destroy mankind - Fukushima may well be the first head.
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Severe burns? Probably just those two who already got that. Rest will get on perfectly fine.
I think you’re not really understanding how this thing works. You can’t get burned from phantom magical particles or something. You get burned by something exceedingly energetic, like err fire. Not by small particles in the air.
There is absolutely nothing to fear about this outside of Japan. I hope you realize the magnitudes involved here. “Higher than normal” means what, 10-100x? That’s still many orders of magnitude below any possible danger to humans. Because of the nuclear arms race, we have developed exceedingly sensitive detectors for this kind of stuff.
If one year, 5 people get killed by lightning and the next year, 10 people do, that’s “higher than normal”. Doesn’t mean everybody will get toasted by lightning overnight, now does it?
Now please, stop with the dramatic “WE’RE ALL IN DANGER” lines, everyone. This is grave… for the immediate area next to the plant. If things get worse, it could be bad for the entire province. But it will not affect anything more than Japan in any meaningful way. Eating a banana everyday will get you more radiation than that.
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Speaking on purely medical terms here, since I just finished my MD, the severe burns that people who have received excess amounts of radiation are extremely similar to the ones that people get after radiation treatment, except are more systemic. The burns occur because radiation causes death to quickly growing cells; ones in your skin, GI tract and bone marrow. This causes the upper layers of the skin layers/GI layers to slough off causing the “burn appearance”. In terms of your GI tract, because the upper layers of tissue are critical for absorbing nutrients, not having them there causes certain chemicals to cause the body to have nausea, GI upset and diarrhea.
For the majority of people, they will be fine. Most of the leaked radioactive content is I 131 which has a half-life of approx 8 days. In a few months the radioactive content will be negligible. There definitely will be an increase risk of cancer amongst the population closest to the nuclear plant but no where near the levels we saw in Chernobyl.
The real concern comes from release of plutonium which has a half-life over over 40 years and could cause permanent effects to the Japanese food chain. But, they haven’t detected this in any great extent.
As for people outside of the country, you have nothing at all to be concerned about. And this scare mongering with radiation leaks is a bit absurd…
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Actually they found a little bit of plutonium right outside reactors, and if I remember correctly Pu-239 has a half-life of several thousand years (we’re talking somewhere around 24k years), which is what they end up with after running U-238 through the reactors.
Pu-239 is highly radioactive and IMO they should shut the plant down and bombard the thing with cement, the reactors are destroyed now anyways.
The rest of the world is not threatened by this, but Japan is.
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They are shutting them down. That’s the thing.
They did the obvious thing. They tried their best to bring them under control, cause reactors are sort of an expensive thing to lose. When it became clear that they could not, they made the decision to strike reactors 1-4. Reactors 5 and 6 are still up in the air as of that news article, which was a few days ago. These are professionals here.
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WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! Run for your lives, the mutants are coming!
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My previous post referred to the possible next nuclear powerplant incident causing burns to many people. Isn’t this the third incident already?
The people trying to kill the plant are not succeeding, are they.
And it is not a good idea to gloss over the hazard to the Japanese people, who are next to this thing and whose population is already in the millions.
Percentages are all very well unless you are the percentage. But there is not much we can do about it anyway.
The UK media mentioned radiation levels 3,000 times more than the normal, wasn’t that over Europe?
Yes Timmy, we are all going to die - in our predefined time and way? Ha! Guess my preferred?
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I’ll repeat what I said: 3000x is still orders of magnitude below danger levels. It’s safe.
Also, the people are still trying not to wreck the entire thing because they’re well aware it’ll make the decontamination process harder. You’d rather have the reactor mostly contained than crushed under concrete that gets irradiated over time.
Finally, you’re doing projection here. I could very well say the same of any energy source. The next dam collapse is going to do victims, BAN DAMS! The next coal plant will catch fire and kill dozens! The next solar panel will crush the person installing it!
You catch my drift
(And it’s also worth pointing out that nuclear has the lowest death per GWh of all current energy sources)
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Only time and the next event will tell.
If this is one of the “Seven Heads” predicted in the Bible (and Omen 2 or was it Omen 3?) then… we’re DOOMED, DOOMED, I tell you! Moooaahahahahahaaaaaa!!!
Go grab the nearest single unattached blonde you fancy and - do your thing! There’s no more time!
Mind you, I hope I’m addressing normal single unattached and unirradiated males…
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StarTrader wrote:
Yes Timmy, we are all going to die - in our predefined time and way? Ha! Guess my preferred?I don’t know, death by two tonne irradiated carrot? Nah, you’ve moved on from the wabbit thing. Glorious death by walking dead highly irradiated mutated Steve Irwin? Damn, I don’t know, it’s not like crocs have any real predators, maybe you’ll get lucky and an elephant will stand on your head
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Nope, wrong on all counts…
Any more guesses?
