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back to article Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear

Events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan continue to unfold, with workers there steadily restoring redundancy and containment measures across the site. It remains highly unlikely that the workers themselves will suffer any measurable health consequences from radiation, and – continued media scaremongering …

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  1. Will 30
    Paris Hilton

    Let's have a party at Lewis' house this weekend

    Because there's no consequence to being booted out of your house, I've decided that Lewis is moving 20km away from home this afternoon (taking Iodine tablets as he goes). We won't tell him if/when he can come back, and we're going to tip all his milk and spinach away too. But the empty beer cans, used condoms and cigarette ends stamped into the carpet will all be below the levels known to cause problems to human health.

    By the way, I must say Lewis, I did like your description of 100mSv/a as the 'reduced' limit. Does anyone know if leaking reactors emit chutzpah?

    There are probably lots of good arguments to be made for reviewing all sorts of radiological protection limits, it's just that dramatically increasing them while you're in breach of the current ones makes you look a bit desperate...

    (Paris, because she can always move into a hotel when the government evacuate her house)

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    1. Filippo Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: consequences

      People being booted out of their houses and not knowing when they can come back and/or in what state the house will be is a fairly normal condition after this sort of quake+tsunami event. The point is that if the reactor had never been built, the end result for the population would have been pretty much the same.

      That's why the eco-hysteria is bad, because not building nuclear reactors doesn't have any measurable advantage in terms of health or safety - if a megaquake hits, you're screwed *anyway*, because *it's a freakin' megaquake*. You're very likely to have to leave your home anyway, possibly for months. The reactor doesn't make it significantly worse - hell, nothing can, except maybe a chemical factory or storage. The only thing you get by building a coal plant instead is a higher power bill, a whole bunch of deaths-per-year on your conscience (but they're chinese miners, so who cares, right?), and a measurably higher risk of cancer from its regular operation.

      By the way, in other parts of the country, nuclear plants are actually providing shelter to people who *really* lost their homes (as in "they're destroyed", not in "got to stay in a hotel for a few weeks"). There are still significant quakes going on, and the nuclear plants are the safest place to be.

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      1. Will 30
        Reply Icon
        Flame

        Circular argument in progress...

        You might as well say it was a minor tsunami, because people would still have been moved out of their houses if a major radiological event had happened.

        Lewis says "effects on the public look set to be nil", which is just bollocks - being indefinitely evacuated from your house is not 'nil', even if it doesn't imply you're going to suffer some radiation-caused disease. You could have chosen to build a nice strong house on top of a hill, but you'd have still been moved out by the events at the power-station.

        I'm not anti-nuclear *at all*, and I even rather liked Lewis' writing prior to last week, but I've read every Tepco and IAEA report since the quake (neither party having any interest in exaggerating the problem), and I don't think they align well with Lewis' output.

        The pompous frothing of a Register Hack about journalists exaggerating for effect is also pretty irksome to read. If he really had a serious problem with that, he certainly wouldn't work for El Reg.

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        1. Filippo Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Flame

          Re: circular argument

          Er, what? If the natural disaster had not happened, you wouldn't have had the radiological event. There is no scenario in which the nuclear plant makes the situation much worse, because the nuclear accident was caused by the quake, and the quake had people out of their houses or outright homeless anyway. I don't see how that is a circular argument: the chain of cause and effect is crystal clear. If you had to leave your house in Japan in mid-March 2011, the reason was almost certainly the quake or the tsunami, not the radiological event.

          On top of that, the nuclear accident will only keep you out of your house for a few weeks, after which it will be exactly the same as it was before the nuclear accident, while the quake or tsunami can raze it to the ground, or deal massive damage and make it require major work before it is safe again. A rad evacuee is lucky compared to lots of people in northern Japan.

          Yeah, getting evacuated sucks, but my point is that *in the context of a quake+tsunami* the nuclear event is very minor no matter how you cut it. Also, you can't consider it outside of that context, because it shares the same cause - there's no accident without the quake.

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    2. Andydaws
      Reply Icon

      Sorry?

      According to the IAEA, just one individual has had more than 100mSV exposure.

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    1. Tim Worstal
      Reply Icon

      Strangely

      Many report that nuclear industry workers do have lower levels of cancer than the general population. Some argue this is hormesis (ie, that low doses are good for you) but I prefer, on the basis of no evidence at all I should add, to assume that it's because they're actually checked more often for cancer. Thus it's treated earlier and so fewer die of it.

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      1. Terry Barnes
        Reply Icon

        Sense?

        That makes no sense - to be treated for cancer, they'd have to have cancer - so how does increased testing reduce the incidence of cancer? Deaths from cancer, maybe you'd have a point, but incidences?

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        1. chr0m4t1c
          Reply Icon

          @Terry Barnes

          >so how does increased testing reduce the incidence of cancer?

          Simple, the testing will also catch pre-cancerous growths and similar, which can be treated/removed before they become cancerous.

          A bit like putting someone with furry arteries on a special diet to de-fur them before they have some form of coronary attack. You can do it randomly (mostly what happens) or you could actually look at everyone's arteries every 6-12 months and just target the people with the symptoms.

          My father and his brother both died of the same form of cancer, as a consequence my cousins, my siblings and myself have all be told what things to look out for and one of my cousins has had a pre-cancerous growth removed already, so this is not as daft or illogical as it actually sounds.

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      2. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Hormesis

        I wondered what the scientifically acceptable term for homeopathy was.

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        1. mmiied
          Reply Icon
          Boffin

          from what I read

          the sugestion was (and I stress I do not nessarley bleave it I just read it) that a low dose trigers the bodys self repair and whail it is repairing it notices that a few more cells are dead/dieing and fixes them

          or a low dose kills of only the weekest cells and there for they are replaced with healthy cells

          it is a nice theroy but personley I stick to the theroy of healther starting pool, better living (raidation workers see doctors more and there for get better life style advice) and regular checks and thing (if you catch cancer early enought it can be treated better)

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          1. kissingthecarpet
            Reply Icon
            WTF?

            Christ on a bike

            Your spelling is appalling - is it a joke?

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      3. Schultz
        Reply Icon

        fewer nuclear industry workers die of cancer...

        They instead die from the nasty infection they received along with the colonoscopy.

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      4. hplasm
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        Thumb Up

        Good point, but they Are healthier...

        Nuclear industry workers are indeed checked very carefully,very regularly- every 6-12 months, full workover.

        This is mainly to ensure that any scare stories can be fully refuted- and less people do show up with anything nasty- see commentard below. (qv)

        It is a nice perq for those in the industry; peace of mind as advertised by the 'BUPA' types but for real,and for free.

        In the UK the results are probably freely available- they are good publicity.

        awaiting downthumbs from the 'sky is falling and the bits have isotopes in them' tards.

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  3. Anonymous Bosch

    Thanks for the actual data

    So much of the MSM has simply stated 'radiation for in spinach' without any aactial measurements. Thanks Lewis for the data. Perhaps now the debate can be meaningful.

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  4. Paul Williams

    Loving the bias...

    That Wind v Nuclear article....it proclaims not one person has died in a nuclear incident, compared to wind turbines...and then in the latter counts deaths of people killed while transporting parts or falling off them. Presumably the death of the worker who fell off a crane in Japan should be chalked up as a death for the nuclear industry then? Or people who've died while constructing power stations? Or deaths in Uranium mines?

    Notice also how the article seamlessly moves from 'fatalities' into 'incidents' after the first item....

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Strangely enough

      Sky News hasn't been running an uninterrupted scareathon about the perils of coal following yesterday's tragedy in which 43 miners were killed. Nor has Matt Frei been backed by crappy computer animations of how wood smoke kills more than 1.5 million people every year.

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  5. Simon Neill

    OMG! Its NUKULERR!

    Pretty much is the reaction. I'm sick of hearing about how radiation could cover the land. We learned from chernobyll. Heck, we learned BEFORE it happened. As for relative safety....ask the gulf of mexico how they feel about oil.

    Wind and solar energy are useless, I don't want to stop using my PC because the wind stopped and the sun went in.

    Tidal seems like a reliable alternative energy source, not that I would like to maintain any form of equipment under 20 feet of salt water. Don't imagine it would last long.

    10 4
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Flame

      Re: OMG! Its NUKULERR!

      "Wind and solar energy are useless, I don't want to stop using my PC because the wind stopped and the sun went in."

      Yeah, that shiny thing in the sky: it's useless! It just sits there and shines without providing direct current to "my PC". It's inconvenient too! That probe NASA sent to Mercury has to wear sun-block because of the damned thing. I bet it does it on purpose!

      If anything there's an underinvestment in solar technologies, especially given the fact that this planet is a live demonstration of the potential on offer in harnessing solar energy, but I suppose it's easier for people to point at the solar cells from their childhood (or their parents' childhood in some cases) and snigger in ignorance of the progress being continuously made in things like materials science which actually lets us attempt to replicate nature's considerable success in the area for the first time in human history.

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      1. Alex Walsh
        Reply Icon
        Stop

        Is there

        A consumer solar panel available that has an estimated payback time that's actually shorter than the warranty?

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      2. Dr Atomic
        Reply Icon

        You're not wrong, but..

        Solar vs nuclear is not a competition, solar can't compete. Solar cannot be deployed as it exists today and it makes no sense to steal research funds from a viable technology to fund research in an area just because we would love to be able to use it.

        Solar funding SHOULD be in competition with subsidies for corn based ethanol and pointless wars in the middle east. Just think of the research that could have been done with the hundreds of billions spent in Iraq.

        What we have to do is figure out how plants do it.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: You're not wrong, but..

          "Solar vs nuclear is not a competition, solar can't compete. Solar cannot be deployed as it exists today and it makes no sense to steal research funds from a viable technology to fund research in an area just because we would love to be able to use it."

          Strange, then, that solar is deployed today. However, one can argue that it hasn't had the subsidies that the nuclear fission business has had, nor been able to enjoy economies of scale to the extent that the kit is cheap and particularly efficient. Interestingly, one area that has enjoyed those economies is the semiconductor business, which does overlap quite a bit with the solar business, although it's questionable whether the semiconductor-based technologies in question are the most appropriate for solar power generation.

          "Solar funding SHOULD be in competition with subsidies for corn based ethanol and pointless wars in the middle east. Just think of the research that could have been done with the hundreds of billions spent in Iraq."

          Well, yes, but actually there is no reason why research into solar technologies shouldn't compete with nuclear subsidies or fossil fuel subsidies. Power generation companies won't invest in the long term: as long as the kit is available to generate power as of today, and as long people still need power and can pay for it, they'll happily burn coal, oil and gas, and all that will look "cheap" and "competitive" to superficial economist types who think those commodities are appropriately priced. (We all know that no-one will build a nuclear plant without being handed a big pile of money, regardless of whether a direct subsidy is officially available or not.)

          "What we have to do is figure out how plants do it."

          Which is what people are actively trying to do, amongst other things. That said, there are plenty of people qualified in lots of "hot" research areas who can't find jobs, while funds get handed out to sustain the current state of affairs in many sectors all the time. The prevailing attitude, especially around sustainable power generation, would be like someone a few centuries ago questioning the need to experiment with manned flight because "horses and boats can get you anywhere you need to go" while scoffing at the notion of a person floating in the air with the aid of a "contraption".

          In short, we need to pursue more lines of enquiry and be able to take full advantage of them if they look promising, not sit on the technology we already have and expect someone else to make the breakthrough. One would think that minds in Britain would be focused by the increasing shortfall in power generation, but I imagine the other prevailing attitude is that somehow money will always be there to pay the gas bill, and that it will always be "cheap" (presumably thanks to the kings of shale, if you buy into the reporting of that other pillar of The Register's line-up).

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    2. sisk
      Reply Icon

      Um, wrong.

      You do realize that there are a growing number of people powering their homes with wind and solar power, right? In most cases thier personal wind turbines and solar collectors make more power than they can use. As for the wind stopping and the sun going down, ever hear of batteries? You know, the things you charge during the day and use at night?

      Seriously, the sun is about as reliable as you can get. You KNOW it's going to rise every day. Some days you may get reduced power from it, but you will still get some and the average will stay pretty static from year to year. In some areas the wind is just as reliable (it NEVER stops blowing here.

      6 4
      1. Richard 12 Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        @Sisk: Except that no domestic install actually does that.

        According to the people selling them, the typical photovoltaic installation is 2kW, and "capable of providing 40% of the household needs". So even they don't think it'll run your house.

        They go on to say that the payback period of those installations is 8-12 years.

        Furthermore, that payback period is based upon a Government subsidy of 41.3 pence per unit of electricity generated *by the panel*, regardless of whether or not it's being consumed by the owner or sent into the grid, plus 4p/unit for anything you do send into the grid.

        The subsidy for wind is smaller - 34.5p/unit.

        In other words, the payback period is based on getting paid approx. 3 to 4 times the going rate for the electricity.

        That's clear proof that neither technology is anywhere near commercial viability. End of story!

        http://www.government-grants.co.uk/feed-in-tariff.shtml, plus various photovoltaic installers.

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        1. 42
          Reply Icon
          FAIL

          What rubbish

          My parents have a 2KW solar system, and have been credited rather than billed for the last 2 quarters. The warranty is 20years so payback will be well before warranty ends.

          Is there no lie Nuclear shills on ELReg which is infected with them will go to deny reality.

          Page has simply misled and misrepresented repeatedly about this incident. He has as much credibility as Mickey Mouse on this issue.

          Luckily our population is too smart to fall for the nuclear industries propaganda

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          1. Richard 12 Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Yep, on a MASSIVE subsidy of approx. 4 times the consumer rate

            - Regardless of whether the energy generated is leaving the premises or not!

            In other words, everyone's tax is paying for your parents to have that credit.

            Would you be happy to pay more than 41.3 pence per unit of electricity?

            If the answer to that is no, then you should be lobbying against Solar - because that's the price you're currently paying for it. (And it's not even the people using the electricity that are paying for it, which is properly ludicrous.)

            Would you be happy paying over 28 pence per unit? That's the price of Wind.

            You're currently paying somewhere between 10 and 15p per unit. If you'd like that to continue, then nuclear is the only way it's going to happen.

            New-build nuclear generation in the UK will have a zero subsidy - that's something that both Labour and the Conservatives have stated, thus neither will let the other go against it.

            Plus the guys who want to build new plants have agreed to that already.

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        2. FredM
          Reply Icon

          commercial viability?

          Is nuclear power commercially viable ?

          Only (perhaps - but even this is in doubt) if one does not do proper worst-case scenarios, and deliberately lies and distorts the truth, and hides expensive errors, and by these desceptions produces a reactor at 1/5th of the price that a "safe" reactor would cost.

          The above is EXACTLY what is done to make nuclear power "commercially viable".

          If even BASIC safety requirements meeting REASONABLE worst-case scenarios were costed into reactor design and construction, there would be absolutely no commercial viability whatsoever in nuclear power generation..

          If one takes the deferred expense of processing and storage of nuclear waste and adds this into the costings, SOLAR POWER GENERATION IS CHEAPER NOW!

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          1. Richard 12 Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            @FredM - Got a source for that?

            Like any source whatsoever?

            No - I see that you're just shouting drivel. Go away and live in a cave somewhere - as you appear to want everyone to do that, you may as well get the best cave first.

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  6. Ian K
    WTF?

    About that subhead...

    There've been way too many scare stories on what's been happening at Fukushima but to call this a "minor incident"'s to err in the opposite direction, and risk having anything else you say disregarded as part of a whitewash.

    Whatever else it might be, an alert at a nuclear power station that lasts for several weeks, has a 20km evacuation zone set up, needs water dropped from Chinooks to try to keep things cool and may well have damaged 3 reactors beyond the point where they're capable of further use is _not_ minor.

    32 5
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Stop

      From a certain point of view...

      Have a gander at this... http://www.endgame.org/industrial-disasters.html

      It isn't even up to date but it shows that, if you put it in context, this was minor. More people were killed and more environmental damage was caused by the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico last year than by this plant.

      If your measure is deaths and environmental damage then it is minor, just because it looked dramatic on TV doesn't change the nature of the impact.

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      1. Ian K
        Reply Icon
        Headmaster

        Context?

        @Neil W

        If one decides the sole criterion for rating the Fukushima incident is the number of fatalities, it is minor. Bring in environmental damage and it's most likely not major - quite possibly minor, in fact, although the final verdict isn't in on that one yet.

        Look at impact on the local populace (20km evacuation zone...), financial cost (both capital loss of the reactors, and work needed to perform long term repairs and cleanup) and loss of generating capacity and it's not minor at all.

        By the same token a 40 car pileup on the M25 that stopped all traffic for a day...but didn't actually kill anyone...would be "minor". But, of course, it clearly isn't.

        3 1
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Indeed...

          I think we agree... I didn't say the measure was just deaths.

          Considering the tsunami, I don't think many people were moved out that hadn't already... If that had been a gas power station that blew up or caught fire then I suspect it would have had a similar evacuation zone, so the fact it was a nuke plant didn't change things.

          With regards to clean up, near where I lived as a kid, a chemical plant was knocked down and a housing estate built. The housing estate was only built after they spent over a year digging out and replacing all of the soil and cleaning the ground up, a similar effort would take place whether it was a nuke plant that leaked a bit, a chemical plant or a gas power station.

          Actually, I would call the M25 example minor... I've been stuck on the M25 in situations like that and it didn't really change my life in the long term!

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        2. Veldan
          Reply Icon
          Stop

          @Ian K

          Then again, if you take the issues you've actually stated we can draw a few conclusions.

          1. The evacuations were a precaution and outside of the 10Km zone unnecessary, within the 10Km it could probably have been half this safely but that is just my speculation. Also speculation is the fact that many of these houses were already evacuated due to, oh i don't know, the tsunami and earthquake?

          2. Financial cost of the reactors (repairs, clean up) can also be pinned as damages from the tsunami/earthquake. I don't know about you but when a major accident occurs (say a train carrying petrol) and as such a follow on accident occurs (petrol ignites burning down houses) i don't put the blame for the burnt houses on their inability to be properly fireproofed or deal with such an unexpected and outlandish event (which a earthquake/tsunami of this magnitude was)

          3. Loss of generating capacity - see above. I doubt nuclear power plants were the only ones shutting down operations due to the earthquakes.

          So the evacuation of several thousand people who were probably homeless due to an ACTUAL major disaster just before. Seems pretty minor to me... Especially minor when you add some perspective and see the *catastrophic* event that preceeded and caused it.

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        3. Veldan
          Reply Icon
          FAIL

          Also

          I forgot to mention. No one blames the 40 car pile up for stopping traffic when the highway was ripped from the ground in front of them by an earthquake. They blame the earthquake.

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  7. Thomas 4
    Pint

    Hazardous radiation or no...

    I'll still raise a glass this weekend to the tech guys at the reactor - they've been working like the clappers for these couple of weeks, not to mention being hassled by journos the entire time.

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    1. James Hughes 1
      Reply Icon

      I doubt they have been hassled by too many journos

      I guess most reporters believe their own stories and won't go within 50 miles of the place.

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    2. Nightkiller
      Reply Icon

      As well as

      to the engineers who integrated multiple redundancies to the system in the first place. Whine all you want about doing better. Hindsight is your specialty. They've done their best, and it shows.

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      1. byrresheim
        Reply Icon
        Alert

        You mean the engineers who

        resigned in protest from GE over the design of this type of reactor?

        Or those who included in their blueprints a neat little arrow: apply sea water via helicopter here?

        Enquiring minds want to know.

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  8. Thomas 4

    Oh and on another subject

    Everyone knows wind energy is far more dangerous than nuclear:

    http://xkcd.com/556/

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    1. Thomas 4
      Reply Icon

      Oo

      Clearly 3 people have had a sense of humour bypass or they really have something against stick figures.

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  9. There's a bee in my bot net

    Oh well thats all right then...

    "cancer is a very common cause of death, future investigations decades from now will almost certainly not be able to attribute any cases of cancer among the workers to service during the current incident"

    No need to try and establish a link to the lower radiation doses then... move along nothing to see here...

    9 4
    1. Filippo Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Flame

      links to low doses

      You fail at statistics. The point is that cancer has lots and lots of causes. If anyone gets cancer, you can never find *the* cause. You can only find a range of probable causes - say, 50% congenital, 30% cigarettes, 11% diet, 4% tanning, 4% particulates, 0.9% chemicals in food, 0.1% radiation (disclaimer: these numbers are random).

      Even if a worker at Fukushima has 10x the standard chance of getting cancer from radiation (an implausibly high number), then if he *does* get cancer, the chance that it's due to congenital, cigarettes, diet and so on, is *still* far, far higher than the chance that he got cancer from the 2011 accident.

      In that sense, establishing a link will be impossible, not because someone is getting paid by TEPCO to mess up the research, but because it *is* impossible. At best, making unfairly pessimistic assumptions, you might be able to say that there's a few percentile points of chance that a cancer among Fukushima workers was caused by radiation.

      Of course, this won't stop the econuts from attributing each and every cancer for the next 40 years among people within a 200 km range from Fukushima to the accident...

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Boffin

        public distrust

        I accept fully that the marginal increase in cancer due to the ionising radiation emitted in this accident will be "in the noise" with regard to the other causes.

        The eco-nuts as you describe them are right to be wary of governmental "don't worry" plaudits, we should always be wary of announcements with a definite agenda behind them - there is, or could be, a legitimate conflict of interest in there.

        Certainly with regard to Nucular power, it was totally and utterly a weapons project for many years, Calder Hall was designed to produce Plutonium, the electricity was incidental.

        Against this backdrop, earlier serious breaches, principally of Plutonium and other long-lived radionucleides were brushed off as "minor" leaks of radiation - because these long-lived isotopes are not highly radioactive.

        However, apart from being insanely toxic (Pu), most heavier elements metabolise as calcium, get laid down in bone tissue, and sit there sniping at the blood formation within our marrow - hence the significantly increased risk of leukemia. (highly significant Leukemia clusters within the UK and centered mostly on nuclear facilities are to this day "unexplained")

        So, concerned citizens know not to trust the radiation-alone figures, they know that they do not tell the whole story.

        Lewis's contributions are welcome in this regard, he does explain the short-lived isotopes and their risks well. However, he is not quite so forthcoming on what nasties lie within the spent fuel, or in reactor 3, fuelled by MOX - an interesting mix of U and Pu (see previous posts).

        My point is that particulate contamination by plutonium may register low on a geiger counter, but carries pretty much a death sentence to whoever ingests it.

        If the only risk were to be from extraordinary natural disaster then I for one would accept it, given the facts, the radiation risk and the contamination risk.

        If the (contamination) risks are multiplied enormously by the plutonium reprocessing necessary for atomic weapons, they fall way outside the legitimate risk vs reward argument one can put forward for power generation.

        The public seem to understand this, even if they don't know why.

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        1. Robert Sneddon
          Reply Icon

          Plutonium

          Plutonium is not that toxic, compared to arsenic (an incredibly toxic metal pumped out into the surrounding countryside in tonne quantities by coal-fired power stations) or beryllium (cumulative, doesn't chelate, wrecks the immune system, no cure). People known to have being contaminated by plutonium, usually by inhalation of oxide dust particles, in the US nuclear weapons development programme in the 1940s and 1950s were tracked and monitored closely afterwards. I've seen a report that of ten such individuals four or five were still alive fifty years later. Only one of the sample clade had died of the effects of cancer, the rest from assorted diseases common in old age.

          Radiotoxicity for Pu is low to medium, an alpha emitter with half-life of over 10,000 years for the two common isotopes (239 and 240) found in fuel rods. It's definitely not good news in large amounts in tissue but there is a lot worse in the nuclear zoo biologically speaking -- polonium-208, cobalt-60, cesium-137...

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          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Stop

            OK, I take it back...

            ... in my SMPT databook in 1980, the toxicity of Plutonium was quoted as 50 picogrammes per kilo LD 50 (lowest dose to kill 50% of the population) in mice over 30 days.

            This figure seems to be at odds with more recent work including the well-researched and referenced article here...

            http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter13.html

            I stand corrected.

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      2. Mike VandeVelde
        Reply Icon
        WTF?

        low personal risk

        Yes their is low personal risk. And yes attributing the root cause of a particular incedence of cancer directly to exposure from any particular event is not realistic. But even just a 1% rise in cancer rates when spread among several hundred workers basically means that several additional deaths can be expected. Does entering that kind of lottery give anyone even a little more respect for the danger these people are facing?

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        1. mmiied
          Reply Icon

          execpt

          ". But even just a 1% rise in cancer rates when spread among several hundred workers basically means that several additional deaths can be expected"

          execpt that only 1 person has even recived the 1% increese doseage the rest have recived a dose that can not mesrable increase there chance

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      3. kissingthecarpet
        Reply Icon
        Terminator

        That's not always true

        Some cancers are caused by specific things - e.g. Asbestos & mesothelioma, or AIDS-related herpes & Karposi's sarcoma. Best not bandy statements like "You fail" around eh?

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Thanks again LP for trying to cool things down

    LP is the firehose trying to fill the holding pools of Media hype-rods. They want so badly for their worst fears to be realized. Sadly those directed by the propaganda machines of oil soaked nations are drilling holes in the pool so the hysteria can burn out of control.

    Like religious zealots of any stripe, the so-called 'tolerant' begin the personal verbal assaults on Mr. Page, for daring to try to diffuse the fervor of the faithful, the anti-nuclear cult that demands Japan be punished for its affront to Gaia.

    I'd add to Mr. Page's logical conclusions of how truly damaging to the environment and surrounding population any other power source of comparable output and longevity would have been, but those with logic already understand these facts and the Faith of the No Nuke Jihad cannot be broken by truth.

    Posted Anonymous so Fatwah is not declared on me as well. But I suspect Mr. Page will follow true the advice of his past: Keep Calm and Carry On!

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  11. FredM

    Safe? Perhaps they could be.. IF..

    The idea that any reactor presently operating is adequately safe, is utter nonsense.. Nuclear power generation is intrinsically unsafe - even if reactors work their entire life without problem, the waste has dangers which extends for thousands of years - far beyond any pridictable or forseeable future - and these toxins can present a problem for future generations.

    One could design and construct a reactor which could be deemed "safe enough for now" IF one looked at REAL worst case scernarios, and built the reactors to EXCEED these scenarios - BUT, the cost of doing this would be AT LEAST 5 times the cost that even the best modern reactor comes in at.. A truly 'safe' reactor would need multiple containment levels in which ALL operations (refuelling, fuel and spent fuel containment, maintanance etc) were performed.. The reactors (or, at least the containment ) would need to incorperate the means to automatically seal / kill the reactor (A large quantity of 'damping' material which could flood the containments and prevent any chance of criticallity, and permanently entomb the reactor) and the containment units would need to be rated to cater for any possible levels of pressure caused by reactions.

    The containment would need to be strong enough to deal with any natural event, and strong enough to contain and instigate an 'entomb' action in the event of strike by aircraft or weapon.

    The economics related to safe nuclear power generation could not make sense (they do not make sense even with our present reactors, which come nowhere near to any sane persons definition of 'safe').

    Unless and until intrinsically safe reactors are built, all unsafe reactors (and by this I mean ALL reactors presently on this planet) should be shut down and cleared away..

    And I have not even discussed the problems of nuclear waste - solving the safety issues on reactors as I described above, is simple and cheap compared to solving the waste problem.

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