Health
"There remain no indications that anyone has yet suffered any radiation health effects"
FFS Lewis, will you just fucking stop. Every fucking report you have made has been premature (no, not just the 'hot off the press' bollocks I keep hearing in the comments, just premature) in this area.
I have been very impressed at the robustness of the technology, the ability of plant workers and others to try and cope with the failure of back-ups when they occured and understand the ratio of those who have died or been injured due to other, more immediately physical, causes versus any immediate radiative effects. I am, I guess, what people would call 'pro-nuclear' in general - although not at the exclusion of other directions, and so the lack of any sudden catastrophic event in the plant despite the large amount of damage sustained I find heartening.
I have also been impressed with much of your exposition of the technical side of the incident - even if some of the earlier reporting was, as one commentator so ably put it, "triumphalist" .
What I don't get, especially from someone who has been in the Navy, is your reporting of the health effects in such an absolute manner...
"Whoa - lucky for me I just ducked the very second the radiation went past"
"Agh - the radiation got my shoulder"
..you should know damn well that that is not how it works. Yes, thankfully, the reported dosages outside the plant have been extremely small and the weather conditions and location have helped matters as well. Inside the plant, things have been different - and the reported dosages are consistent with the sort of flux that will involve non-trivial healing in tissues if exposed. As fractionated doses over a period of time, they are very unlikely (statistically) to directly result in harm - but significant levels, even over short time scales, can start a series of damage that is not always easy to stop [0].
The periods of exposure have been short, as far as we can tell so far - but we have very little hard information about it - and thats one of the big problems... without that hard information I just don't see how you can pontificate on the effect in manner that IMO is at best pre-mature, and at worst ignorant and border-line callous.
There seems to be an increasing amount of research published, and coming through, examining genetic and tissue proximity effects as far as cancer susceptibility is concerned - we don't know those factors here - we don't know the actual radiative levels, flux, location or duration of exposure - we don't know the shift rotas of the plant workers and others nor where they were working - we don't even know for sure what, if any, leakage or containment breach has occured and hence the true local conditions.
In short, we know fuck all about a lot of this, and until we do could you PLEASE lay off this fucking omniscient proclamation about the only one (now altered to zero) person who could possibly have anything wrong with them.
"no indications that anyone has yet suffered any radiation health effects, and the prospect is growing that this will remain the case"
No - the prospect is we will only find out if you're right some time in the future - probably years not hours from now. I really hope you are right, but your uncritical and overly assertive statements are not going to have an effect on that, one way or the other.
[0] There is a phrase i've heard numerous times, from physicists and medical personal, which is basically there is no safe dose of radiation - there is invariably damage but, statistically, you can have a pretty good guess at the ability of the body to repair it in time before it becomes a problem. Your body can do sod all about the collision, but it can try and patch it up.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
