|
|
Home | Switchboard | Unix Administration | Red Hat | TCP/IP Networks | Neoliberalism | Toxic Managers |
| (slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and bastardization of classic Unix | |||||||
| Home | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 1999 |
For the list of top articles see Recommended Links section
|
|
Switchboard | ||||
| Latest | |||||
| Past week | |||||
| Past month | |||||
 |
 |
 |
October 07, 2011 | Jesse's Café Américain
"Tyranny is always better organized than freedom."
-- Charles Peguy
This essay by John Kay excerpted below is a very nice summary of the problem we have in modern economics. It is a bit dry to the layman, but it touches on the distortions that crept in to economic thought and their intellectual sources and in particular the operational rather than political means.
I do not think it was unintentional. Economics served to distort public policy and blind people to unfolding reality. Investments in think tanks and universities encouraged and paid for misleading reports and studies, draping propaganda in the robes of respectable academia and faux science.
This is certainly not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Medicine has a rather checkered history in service to power. These types of distortions can of course cut both ways, and science has been used to justify abuses from all ends of the political spectrum.
The concept to remember then, is that economics and other sciences are no substitutes for public policy. Policy is not an outcome of economic science, but rather, policy is set and renewed from first principles, a commitment to certain ideals and common objectives. Economics and other sciences do play a role in shaping the details of implementation. But we must revisit and determine the effect which those details have on the achievement of first principles.
Unfortunately we must sift those inputs with care, and especially the assumptions on which they are based, because the professions have shown a willingness to misrepresent, distort, and even lie for money and power.
One must always come back to first principles, to some notion of what they, and by extension their community, wish to be. Is the first principle of the US the maximizing of profit? By what measures, and to whom? Or is it something else again.
This is the question that the protesters of Occupy Wall Street are asking. People of the status quo say, 'What do they want? What is their solution?' No, it is they who are asking the question of those comfortable people in power. If they have any statement to make, it is 'The Emperor has no clothes.'
And since the modern day Emperors do not wish to answer the people plainly and honestly, having only their tired old lies, they become uncomfortable and afraid. Instead they ignore, ridicule, and silence the question, offering new lies and scapegoats, claiming all is well. And it is, at least for them.
If the people are ignored and abused long enough they will stop asking questions and begin to make their demands and push them forward, and then it may be too late as these things obtain their own momentum.
Economics is a discredited science at the moment. A few practitioners sold its soul and honor to a small group of wealthy ideologues while the great majority remained silent. But certainly no more discredited than the doctors who served the policies of euthanasia or the Russian abuse of psychiatric wards. And when the destroyers appear on the horizon, the mechanical sciences and their industrialists are generally seen swimming out to meet the boats.
But a caution is that those who promoted false theories for power and money in the service of crony capitalism are still at work, and the results are more difficult to see than piles of dead bodies, or rooms full of broken individuals.
The answer is not to turn away from knowledge, and embrace a hatred of science promoted by a new crop of passionate know-nothings, although that also is a recurrent historical theme, and a phenomenon already evident as a minority theme in the world of politics and a certain status quo. In this modern age they not only have their own magazine but television channels as well.
Science has its proper place. But it is not at the top, dictating outcomes in the social world like the answers to irrefutable equations. And it is especially good that we remember this when science is abused, and used to justify cruelty, selfishness, and plunder.
"The preposterous claim that deviations from market efficiency were not only irrelevant to the recent crisis but could never be relevant is the product of an environment in which deduction has driven out induction and ideology has taken over from observation.This intellectual and financial decline traces back perhaps to the closing of the gold window by Nixon, and the rise of the willful relativism of value with fiat money. But more important is the subsequent rise of the financialization industry, under the flag of efficient markets and deregulation and globalization.The belief that models are not just useful tools but also are capable of yielding comprehensive and universal descriptions of the world has blinded its proponents to realities that have been staring them in the face. That blindness was an element in our present crisis, and conditions our still ineffectual responses.
Economists – in government agencies as well as universities – were obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto while the world around them was falling apart."
John Kay, An Essay on the State of Economics
The country became gripped by a preoccupation with aggregating wealth from the real economy by manipulating paper. Not only were their real direct effects, but there were profound long term effects through the malinvestment and diversion of strategic resources. And the absolute worst of it has come from the corporations and those who serve them.
As Satyajit Das puts it in his most recent book interviews:
"The best and brightest went into finance because... it paid better than every other profession. So we had this whole generation of people - who would have been great scientists, great doctors, great creators of other things - attracted to a business which ultimately only provided, to a substantial degree, toxic waste. And that is the tragedy of our time. ... It was this diversion of enormous amounts of talent."People can point to select innovations like Facebook and the iPod, but in fact America's technical and physical infrastructure has been distorted and has languished because public policy unleashed the financiers, the money magicians, and then became captive to them. And they have willfully led their people into a lingering period of decline.I hope to have no illusions. Those who give themselves over to the dark impulses of their imagination often prove more impervious to reason with each victory. At some point they are blooded, and it is then they make the decision whether to come back to their senses, or go forward to the bitter end. And in their pathological delusion they might continue to reaffirm their perceived advantages, and mythological self, while standing in the ruins, or on a scaffold, or as they are about to end their bitter compulsions in a bunker.
But there is room for optimism. The ordinary people are starting to wake up and come out of their slumber, most notably in the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon. And a number of eminent economists like Thoma, Krugman and Stiglitz are putting forward principled stands for meaningful reform and constructive change for the better. It is the minority that is the problem, because of the silence of the majority which is always slow to stir.
No one knows how this will turn out yet. There is always hope against forces that seem far too powerful at the moment. And tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
At the worst, some day this entire episode may be expressed by those who write history for the young as the madness of the ignorant crowd, acting foolishly despite the best efforts of their leaders and intellectuals to restrain them.
Some inquisitive student may find this little morsel of thought, and his mind will be provoked, and a flickering light of truth will be struck from that spark, to caution ordinary people about the imperfections and corruptibility of even the best, the dark hearts of predators who walk unseen among us, and the danger of too much power in too few hands.
And if not now, then perhaps in some better tomorrow. Nothing is ever wasted in God's economy.
|
|
|
NYTimes.com
Dr Jaan (Tallinn, Estonia)
Soon after GE started production of the type of reactors found in Fukushima, the Mark 1 type reactors, American regulators discovered serious weaknesses. Already in 1972, Stephen H. Hanauer, a safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission, said that the Mark 1 system should be banned. There were a number of concerns, but the greatest problem was that he found that the smaller containment design is too susceptible to explosion and rupture from a buildup of hydrogen. This is exactly what now has happened at Fukushima Daiichi. Moreover it was warned already in 1972, that if a Mark 1 reactor's cooling system failed, the fuel rods would overheat and, because of this, the primary containment vessel surrounding the reactor would burst, spilling radiation into the environment. That is exactly what now happened at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
General Electric however ignored these warnings. They denied that the reactors were unsafe and continued to produce these reactors. Obviously they were wrong and the question is whether they made an error of judgment or very well knew that the reactors were unsafe but still continued production.
In the late 1980s, Mark 1 reactors in the United States were retrofitted with venting systems. Their purpose is to help ease pressure in overheating situations, after Harold Denton, an expert at the Nuclear Regulatory Committee, warned that Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting if the fuel rods were to overheat and melt in an accident. This exactly what happened in Japan, so the question is if the Japanese reactors were not retrofitted. If so, in my opinion, a heavy burden falls on General Electric.
(Main source: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/225976-Dangers-Of-General-Electric-s-M...
Sandy (Pennsylvania)
David Lochbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists testified today before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Ponder this from his statement:
"And I cannot emphasize enough that the lessons from Japan apply to all US reactors, but just the boiling water reactors like those affected at Fukushima. None are immune to station blackout problems. All must be made less vulnerable to those problems."
and
"Eleven US reactors are designed to cope with a station blackout lasting eight hours, as were the reactors in Japan. Ninety-three of our reactors are designed to cope for only four hours."
Here's the PDF of his statement: lochbaum-senate-ene...
It doesn't take an earthquake followed by a tsunami, all it takes is for the electricity to go out.
Ron
I live in Tokyo and would like to comment that this article is factually incorrect. It states "a plant ravaged by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake." The 9.0 earthquake occurred far out at sea, and the coastal areas where the reactors are experienced a 6+ or 7 earthquake. On a logarithmic scale this is a hundred times different. Please get your facts straight.sas (new york)
here's a more serious take on the fuku nuke disaster from the hawaii news daily:
http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/03/when-the-fukushima-meltdown-hits-grou...When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater March 27, 2011 By Dr. Tom Burnett
... ... ...
Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did – although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster. Every containment in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese chose to ignore the fact that a similar earthquake had hit that same general area in 1896.
Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn't seem to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.
Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is the street name for 'mixed oxide fuel' which uses ~9% plutonium along with a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used.
The problem is that you don't want to play with this stuff. A nuclear reactor means bring fissile material to a point at which it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or a Chernobyl incident). You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can't stop it.
|
|
|
May 23, 2004 | The Japan Times
Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list.
An aerial view of the Hamaoka plant in Shizuoka Prefecture, "the most dangerous nuclear power plant in Japan" The Japanese archipelago is located on the so-called Pacific Rim of Fire, a large active volcanic and tectonic zone ringing North and South America, Asia and island arcs in Southeast Asia. The major earthquakes and active volcanoes occurring there are caused by the westward movement of the Pacific tectonic plate and other plates leading to subduction under Asia.
Japan sits on top of four tectonic plates, at the edge of the subduction zone, and is in one of the most tectonically active regions of the world. It was extreme pressures and temperatures, resulting from the violent plate movements beneath the seafloor, that created the beautiful islands and volcanoes of Japan.
Nonetheless, like many countries around the world -- where General Electric and Westinghouse designs are used in 85 percent of all commercial reactors -- Japan has turned to nuclear power as a major energy source. In fact the three top nuclear-energy countries are the United States, where the existence of 118 reactors was acknowledged by the Department of Energy in 2000, France with 72 and Japan, where 52 active reactors were cited in a December 2003 Cabinet White Paper.
The 52 reactors in Japan -- which generate a little over 30 percent of its electricity -- are located in an area the size of California, many within 150 km of each other and almost all built along the coast where seawater is available to cool them.
However, many of those reactors have been negligently sited on active faults, particularly in the subduction zone along the Pacific coast, where major earthquakes of magnitude 7-8 or more on the Richter scale occur frequently. The periodicity of major earthquakes in Japan is less than 10 years. There is almost no geologic setting in the world more dangerous for nuclear power than Japan -- the third-ranked country in the world for nuclear reactors.
"I think the situation right now is very scary," says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and professor at Kobe University. "It's like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode."
Last summer, I visited Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Shizuoka Prefecture, at the request of citizens concerned about the danger of a major earthquake. I spoke about my findings at press conferences afterward.
A map of Japan annotated by the author, showing the tectonic plates, areas of high ("observed region") and very high ("specially observed") quake risk, and the sites of nuclear reactors
Because Hamaoka sits directly over the subduction zone near the junction of two plates, and is overdue for a major earthquake, it is considered to be the most dangerous nuclear power plant in Japan.
Together with local citizens, I spent the day walking around the facility, collecting rocks, studying the soft sediments it sits on and tracing the nearly vertical faults through the area -- evidence of violent tectonic movements.
The next day I was surprised to see so many reporters attending the two press conferences held at Kakegawa City Hall and Shizuoka Prefecture Hall. When I asked the reporters why they had come so far from Tokyo to hear an American geoscientist, I was told it was because no foreigner had ever come to tell them how dangerous Japan's nuclear power plants are.
I told them that this is the power of gaiatsu (foreign pressure), and because citizens in the United States with similar concerns attract little media attention, we invite a Japanese to speak for us when we want media coverage -- someone like the famous seismologist Professor Ishibashi!
When the geologic evidence was presented confirming the extreme danger at Hamaoka, the attending media were obviously shocked. The aerial map, filed by Chubu Electric Company along with its government application to build and operate the plant, showed major faults going through Hamaoka, and revealed that the company recognized the danger of an earthquake. They had carefully placed each reactor between major fault lines.
"The structures of the nuclear plant are directly rooted in the rock bed and can tolerate a quake of magnitude 8.5 on the Richter scale," the utility claimed on its Web site.
From my research and the investigation I conducted of the rocks in the area, I found that that the sedimentary beds underlying the plant were badly faulted. Some tiny faults I located were less than 1 cm apart.
When I held up samples of the rocks the plant was sitting on, they crumbled like sugar in my fingers. "But the power company told us these were really solid rocks!" the reporters said. I asked, "Do you think these are really solid?' and they started laughing.
On July 7 last year, the same day of my visit to Hamaoka, Ishibashi warned of the danger of an earthquake-induced nuclear disaster, not only to Japan but globally, at an International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics conference held in Sapporo. He said: "The seismic designs of nuclear facilities are based on standards that are too old from the viewpoint of modern seismology and are insufficient. The authorities must admit the possibility that an earthquake-nuclear disaster could happen and weigh the risks objectively."
After the greatest nuclear power plant disaster in Japan's history at Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, in September 1999, large, expensive Emergency Response Centers were built near nuclear power plants to calm nearby residents.
After visiting the center a few kilometers from Hamaoka, I realized that Japan has no real nuclear-disaster plan in the event that an earthquake damaged a reactor's water-cooling system and triggered a reactor meltdown.
Additionally, but not even mentioned by ERC officials, there is an extreme danger of an earthquake causing a loss of water coolant in the pools where spent fuel rods are kept. As reported last year in the journal Science and Global Security, based on a 2001 study by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, if the heat-removing function of those pools is seriously compromised -- by, for example, the water in them draining out -- and the fuel rods heat up enough to combust, the radiation inside them will then be released into the atmosphere. This may create a nuclear disaster even greater than Chernobyl.
If a nuclear disaster occurred, power-plant workers as well as emergency-response personnel in the Hamaoka ERC would immediately be exposed to lethal radiation. During my visit, ERC engineers showed us a tiny shower at the center, which they said would be used for "decontamination' of personnel. However, it would be useless for internally exposed emergency-response workers who inhaled radiation.
When I asked ERC officials how they planned to evacuate millions of people from Shizuoka Prefecture and beyond after a Kobe-magnitude earthquake (Kobe is on the same subduction zone as Hamaoka) destroyed communication lines, roads, railroads, drinking-water supplies and sewage lines, they had no answer.
Last year, James Lee Witt, former director of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, was hired by New York citizens to assess the U.S. government's emergency-response plan for a nuclear power plant disaster. Citizens were shocked to learn that there was no government plan adequate to respond to a disaster at the Indian Point nuclear reactor, just 80 km from New York City.
The Japanese government is no better prepared, because there is no adequate response possible to contain or deal with such a disaster. Prevention is really the only effective measure to consider.
In 1998, Kei Sugaoka, 51, a Japanese-American senior field engineer who worked for General Electric in the United States from 1980 until being dismissed in 1998 for whistle-blowing there, alerted Japanese nuclear regulators to a 1989 reactor inspection problem he claimed had been withheld by GE from their customer, Tokyo Electric Power Company. This led to nuclear-plant shutdowns and reforms of Japan's power industry.
Later it was revealed from GE documents that they had in fact informed TEPCO -- but that company did not notify government regulators of the hazards.
Yoichi Kikuchi, a Japanese nuclear engineer who also became a whistle-blower, has told me personally of many safety problems at Japan's nuclear power plants, such as cracks in pipes in the cooling system from vibrations in the reactor. He said the electric companies are "gambling in a dangerous game to increase profits and decrease government oversight."
Sugaoka agreed, saying, "The scariest thing, on top of all the other problems, is that all nuclear power plants are aging, causing a deterioration of piping and joints which are always exposed to strong radiation and heat."
Like most whistle-blowers, Sugaoka and Kikuchi are citizen heroes, but are now unemployed.
The Radiation and Public Health Project, a group of independent U.S. scientists, has collected 4,000 baby teeth from children living around nuclear power plants. These teeth were then tested to determine their level of Strontium-90, a radioactive fission product that escapes in nuclear power plant emissions.
Unborn children may be exposed to Strontium-90 through drinking water and the diet of the mother. Anyone living near nuclear power plants is internally exposed to chronically low levels of radiation contaminating food and drinking water. Increased rates of cancer, infant mortality and low birth weights leading to cognitive impairment have been linked to radiation exposure for decades.
However, a recent independent report on low-level radiation by the European Committee on Radiation Risk, released for the European Parliament in January 2003, established that the ongoing U.S. Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Studies conducted in Japan by the U.S. government since 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors underestimated the risk of radiation exposure as much as 1,000 times.
Additionally, on March 26 this year -- the eve of the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history, at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania -- the Radiation and Public Health Project released new data on the effects of that event. This showed rises in infant deaths up to 53 percent, and in thyroid cancer of more than 70 percent in downwind counties -- data which, like all that concerning both the short- and long-term health effects, has never been forthcoming from the U.S. government.
It is not a question of whether or not a nuclear disaster will occur in Japan; it is a question of when it will occur.
Like the former Soviet Union after Chernobyl, Japan will become a country suffering from radiation sickness destroying future generations, and widespread contamination of agricultural areas will ensure a public-health disaster. Its economy may never recover.
Considering the extreme danger of major earthquakes, the many serious safety and waste-disposal issues, it is timely and urgent -- with about half its reactors currently shut down -- for Japan to convert nuclear power plants to fossil fuels such as natural gas. This process is less expensive than building new power plants and, with political and other hurdles overcome, natural gas from the huge Siberian reserves could be piped in at relatively low cost. Several U.S. nuclear plants have been converted to natural gas after citizen pressure forced energy companies to make changeovers.
Commenting on this way out of the nuclear trap, Ernest Sternglass, a renowned U.S. scientist who helped to stop atmospheric testing in America, notes that, 'Most recently the Fort St. Vrain reactor in Colorado was converted to fossil fuel, actually natural gas, after repeated problems with the reactor. An earlier reactor was the Zimmer Power Plant in Cincinnati, which was originally designed as a nuclear plant but it was converted to natural gas before it began operating. This conversion can be done on any plant at a small fraction [20-30 percent] of the cost of building a new plant. Existing turbines, transmission facilities and land can be used."
After converting to natural gas, the Fort St. Vrain plant produced twice as much electricity much more efficiently and cheaply than from nuclear energy -- with no nuclear hazard at all, of course.
It is time to make the changeover from nuclear fuel to fossil fuels in order to save future generations and the economy of Japan.
Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who worked at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory on the Yucca Mountain Project, and became a whistle-blower in 1991 by reporting science fraud on the project and at Livermore. She is an independent and international radiation specialist, and the Environmental Commissioner in the city of Berkeley, Calif. She has visited Japan four times to work with Japanese citizens, scientists and elected officials on radiation and peace issues. She can be contacted at [email protected]
|
|
|
March 29, 2011 | naked capitalism
Bob Kerns:
A check of the EPA website reveals that they have NOT pulled those 8 monitors, as this article claims. Indeed, I was able to pull up data from the one in San Jose with a click of my mouse.
Rather, the 8 monitors are being reviewed, to understand the readings, for example, whether the change is due to a change in the local environment. This sort of review is essential if we are to trust their accuracy.
This is also part of the reasoning behind having so many of them.
There are a few around the country (7 by my informal count) which are out of service, out of 124 total.
This is very different than what was reported.
On the other hand, I compared what Ann Coulter said, and Lawrence Solomon wrote, to what the scientists wrote - and I can see why you might suspect a concerted propaganda campaign, although you actually present no evidence. I can present no evidence there is not, and their behavior is certainly consistent with such a campaign!
The scientists were searching for whether there's threshold below which radiation damage is no longer linear. Understanding this is part of fundamentally understanding how radiation affects us, and assessing radiation risks, not just from nuclear plants, but from granite countertops in your kitchen.
What they found is a little surprising, and needs to be verified by further experiments. They found that the cancer rate was slightly less at the lowest exposures than in the controls. This could be true, for example, if cancer cells are more susceptible to radiation than normal cells - it could be both causing and curing cancer. (I'm not saying that's the explanation - I'm just illustrating how complex phenomena can interact, especially when dealing with small numbers).
What these "journalists" have done, is take an odd quirk in a scientific finding, and, entirely on their own, turned it into a "plutonium is good for you" argument.
The scientists did not make this argument. THEIR conclusion was, that this suggests that, if a threshold exists, it probably exists in the range of 15-40 cGy. This is over the lifetime (the plutonium stays in place), so we're talking about total exposure, equivalent to a few chest CT scans.
But if there is a threshold, inhaling even tiny amounts of plutonium clearly puts you closer to that threshold - and somebody working in a dusty environment might be exposed to far more. Nobody with a shred of responsibility or credibility is arguing that plutonium is good for you.
Clearly, Ann Coulter and Lawrence Solomon have both shed any remnants of credibility and responsibility they may have had.
Personally, I think the conspiracy here is to sell advertising. There's a lot of past precedent in inflated headlines to draw readers to news outlets. Even CBS has recently succumbed, shouting that "pools of plutonium" have been discovered outside the reactors - as opposed to the reality - traces slightly above the expected background (from atmospheric testing). Even the article didn't make that claim - it was invented by the editor who wrote the headline.
So please don't become a "media shill" yourself, and lump the government scientists in with those pushing sensationalism.
Sensationalism of any type detracts from credibility and distracts from sober appreciation of the important issues, of the real risks, and of the need for transparency and accountability - not just in the case of nuclear power, but in all matters of public policy.
The facts as they stand are scary enough. The prospect of 9 billion people on this planet, all of them demanding energy and food, should give us real pause. Every war fought is a disaster - many far larger than this one. Natural disasters that would have gone unnoticed, will strain already overburdened food supplies, or displace thousands crammed into dangerous locations, simply because they have to live somewhere.
If we're going to address the world's present and future problems, we need to address the risks we face honestly, and as accurately as we can.
David:
Well said, Bob.
Fear seems to be a prevalent, underlying response to much of what gets written at this site. Sensationalism sells more than common sense.dearieme :
The idea that radiation must damage you, however low its level, is not based on data – it was just an assumption made long ago before there were data. The idea that plutonium is especially scary is rather babyish – it's nasty stuff, all right, but not because of its radioactivity. It's not out of line with other radioisotopes – the problem is a chemical one: it's toxic. And like all toxins, 'the poison is in the dose'.
"uninformed frothing" seems a pretty fair description. Or hysterical pants-wetting would do.
Justin:
The problem with plutonium is not chemical. Radioactivity is mutagenic/carcinogenic via alpha/beta/gamma particle ionizing interaction with the body, which is not the same as chemical ionization process. Several Plutonium isotopes have long half lives as alpha emitters, which generally have less penetrability than beta and gamma particles. However if inhaled or ingested they have a greater chance of altering a cell than beta or gamma radiation would, as they have slower speed, more mass and energy and thus more chance of absorbtion/interaction with cell structures.
gepay
The problem faced by radiation protection officials is that reactors create a massive cocktail of radionuclides with widely differing characteristics and different biochemistry. Some concentrate in muscle, some in bone, teeth and DNA, some in lymph nodes. Some don't concentrate anywhere. Some cause localised damage, others don't. Radioactivity is like poison – there are many different kinds and they operate by myriad biological mechanisms. Accurate modelling of the biological effects of either radioactivity or poison involves understanding the specific variations, but that makes regulation very complex.
For convenience in the 1940s and early '50s nuclear officials decided to treat the energy of the radioactive decays from all kinds of radionuclide as if they were a uniformly distributed dose. Then they quantified the expected disease, dose for dose, by reference to studies of the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima. These people in fact were exposed to a uniformly distributed dose – the flash of the bomb itself – and the effects of unevenly distributed internal radioactivity were excluded from the study by the clever trick of comparing the "exposed" bomb survivors with "unexposed" people ("controls") who lived in the city but had been shielded when the bomb exploded. Thus the controls and the study group had equal amounts of radioactive fallout inside them.
Justin:
I do think the reactor disaster is a huge concern, primarily for Japan.
However, you have a number of misstatements and conflations in your blog posts. For example, there are quite a few isotopes other that Cs-137 that have been created via manmade nuclear reaction whose halflife is short enough not to be naturally occurring in significant quantities. so it is not unique in that regard.
Background radiation is one effective relative measurement despite differences in isotopes, because the exposure pathway result is the same: direct exposure to external radiation.
So while you do say that the problem is more complex than just relative radiation levels, that's not new information.
There is a field of study already that models all risks from environmental radioactivity releases: radiation risk exposure analysis. It takes into account initial and residual release, dispersion patterns, composition and concentrations of radionuclides, environmental transport pathways, exposure pathways, and generates statistical distributions of both short term and total effective doses.
ResRad is freely available to download if one would like to do their own model, however quite a few international scientific organizations are already doing so.
I think it's difficult for most people to know exactly what to worry about with the reactor disaster and what to do, so I applaud people for getting informed. However, like medical knowledge, a little can be more dangerous than none at all in that it can allow emotion to change our estimation of the real risks.
Chris Rogers:
SteveA, I trust my posting have made clear one does not make light of the Fukushima nuclear crisis – by using the term 'crisis' I suggest one has conveyed how dangerous the situation is, and hopefully, dare I say it, the plant operator has the incident under some meaningful control.
What has annoyed me from day one of the 'crisis' is the outrageous media reporting of this crisis, the scare mongering and absolute crass behaviour of those 1000's of miles away from Fukushima that borders on madness – a madness inspired by the poor reporting of the facts, little knowledge of scientific jargon used and a clear lack of emphasis on the 20,000 deaths attributable to a rather large tsunami.
Rather than 'down play' the incident, most reasoned posters quite rightly have stated that this is a nuclear disaster, one of the worst on record and obviously, many dangers exist and will continue to exists.
Will this disaster lead to a huge loss of life though, my understanding from reading the UNCLEAR report on Chernobyl, is that unlike that disaster, the impact on human's will be limited and a greater danger exists due to panic, rather than various radioactive elements being emitted from the damaged plant.
Lets be clear, generating power from nuclear energy sources is always going to be dangerous and such dangers are taken into account when building these large infrastructures.
In all seriousness, we should all be glad that the plant survived the earthquake intact and that we don't face another Chernobyl catastrophe.
As a reasoned observer, obviously one questions why a nuclear facility is built in a earthquake zone region, why necessary precautions were not taken against a tsunami – I'm referring here to the fact that whilst the plant had a sea wall defence, engineers forgot what would happen if it was breached.
Now, the true cause of this disaster/crisis was a loss of electricity to power cooling – combine this with the fact that the diesel generators were at ground level or in basements, suggests a huge engineering blunder was made, one I trust the Japanese will learn from.
So, we have a real crisis, one that currently seems under control, but a crisis nonetheless.
Does this mean living close to Japan I should panic, obviously not – I note the Korean's have not acted like headless chickens – I wish I could make this claim for many in the USA, unfortunately, following crass reporting standards, many citizens have behaved like headless chickens and purchased large amounts of iodine and bottled water – had they lived in Korea I could understand, that they live more than 5,000 miles away from Fukushima, one questions their sanity – to put it bluntly, those poor desperate fools who supported the Tea Party are the same fools running around like headless chickens who share one brain cell between them.
Thank god I'm British, I note my Embassy is open in Tokyo, which best sums it up – there is little to fear apart from fear itself, yes, we have a crisis, but as stated all along, not a crisis comparable with Chernobyl – hence, the health risks, that's the real ones are less. Risks still exist nonetheless, whether these will result in any deaths is questionable as the UNCLEAR report I keep mentioning makes clear – a link can be found in one of my other posts for this.
|
|
|
While in discussion of Japan nuclear disaster we all are out of depth, and the facts on the ground are difficult to interpret even for specialists it is important to avoid radiophobia and do not propagate it consciously or unconsciously. .
From pure scientific perspective in no way Japan in 2011 situation is close to Chernobyl (no burning graphite on site) and I think that progress is sufficient to state that full meltdown was avoided.
Now the main danger I think is spreading panic not so much temporary spike in actual radiation.
Information available is distorted due to extremely low level of understanding of the nature of ionizing radiation (which is not uniform and consists of three different types).
The problem of radioactive contamination of food chain (also with several pretty different sources with different half-life periods) is a completely separate problem which is not that different from presence of dioxin, lead, and other heavy metals in food and water. I think many people who post here do not understand the danger of typical levels of radon in basements of NJ and NY and happy go there to do laundry and other household chores on a regular basis.
After all US high schools eliminated physics as a separate subject :-)
Please remember that physicists like Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford and many others worked with radioactive materials without any precautions and none of them died quickly. Also people forget about lake Karachay problem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay ).
Also the whole planet is contaminated with Caesium-137 (hal-life 30 years) due to atmospheric nuclear testing in 1946-1963, while some parts of the USA territory are additionally contaminated with very toxic DU powder (perfect dirty bomb component) from DU weapons testing (http://vzajic.tripod.com/5thchapter.html). There was pretty telling incident in which Caesium-137 was distributed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident). I think reading this description of human propagated Caesium-137 dirty bomb is enough to stop fear mongering about Japan case.
BTW after 1954 the Castle Bravo radioactive fallout (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo) one member of the Japaneses fishing boat crew which was in the area died from radiation sickness after returning to the port. So high levels of contamination of both atmosphere and the ocean are not new. BTW there are life forms that learned to use radiation as energy source and live inside Chernobyl sarcophagus.
But panic is deadly and can cause immediate harm to both physical and mental health.
I think that in this particular forum poster under nickname "Maju" can serve as a field manual to this type of phobia. (see for example the statement "As far as I know there was a 40% increase in deadly cancers in Belarus after the Chernobyl accident.". Is not this blatant fear mongering ? What is the source of this figure??? ).
This looks like a pretty widespread, dangerous phobia propagated with the help of MSM and I would advocate extreme restraint in related statements especially from non-specialists.
See
http://www.saharov.com/eshact/Research/Radiophobia/tabid/123/Default.aspx
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
http://www.phobia-fear-release.com/radiophobia.html
Panic is really deadly. And fear mongering about Japan nuclear disaster is really dangerous and dishonest: some people already hurt themselves by taking excessive amount iodine pills (they were swiped from the shelves). And this is just a start. A lot of crazy things is going on with this mass radiophobia hysteria that swiped the USA (and not only the USA).
Also we need to understand that coal-burning power plants are more significant source of nuclear poisoning of the USA (see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste) then nuclear plants.
Here are key points that I think people need to think about:
Is this a tragedy. Yes. But lessons learned from it as lessons learned from Chernobyl disaster will increase safety of existing power plants dramatically.
How dangerous is it?. Below level of Chernobyl and influence is by-and-large local. So it is potentially dangerous to Japanese people in the evacuation zone and, especially, workers at the plant. But is this like Chernobyl? No way (amount of radioactive materials released is many times less; absence of burning graphite is the major difference here). After all Japan is an island nation. Not something in the heart of Europe.
Reaction to radiation like reaction of other types of poisoning is highly individual. Some people who were present in control room in Chernobyl are still alive:
Yuri Korneev, Boris Stolyarchuk and Alexander Yuvchenko are the last surviving members of the Reactor No. 4 shift that was on duty at the moment of the catastrophe. Anatoly Dyatlov, who was in charge of the safety experiment at Reactor No. 4, died in 1995 of a heart attack.
High end estimate of the death rate among people who tried to contain Chernobyl disaster (liquidators) and got high or extremely high doses is 10%. That is not that different from natural death rate.
According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, the main organization of liquidators, "25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled", which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600 000, liquidators) and 165,000 disabled.[2]
In 2003 there were 6,328,000 car accidents in the US. There were 2.9 million injuries and 42,643 people were killed in auto accidents.
In 2002, there were an estimated 6,316,000 car accidents in the USA. There were about 2.9 million injuries and 42,815 people were killed in auto accidents in 2002.
There were an estimated 6,356,000 car accidents in the US in 2000. There were about 3.2 million injuries and 41,821 people were killed in auto accidents in 2000 based on data collected by the Federal Highway Administration
As far as I know there were no radiation related death cases for this disaster. So irresponsible fear mongering that heats this mass radiophobia hysteria should be avoided.
Google matched content |
Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
Quotes
War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
Copyright © 1996-2021 by Softpanorama Society. www.softpanorama.org was initially created as a service to the (now defunct) UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) without any remuneration. This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is distributed under the Softpanorama Content License. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
FAIR USE NOTICE This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to advance understanding of computer science, IT technology, economic, scientific, and social issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided by section 107 of the US Copyright Law according to which such material can be distributed without profit exclusively for research and educational purposes.
This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Grammar and spelling errors should be expected. The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree...
|
|
You can use PayPal to to buy a cup of coffee for authors of this site |
Disclaimer:
The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.
Last modified: August, 01, 2020
