BTW, the workers at that plant are heroes, and I hope they get treated as such for the rest of their quite possibly abbreviated lives.
Strawman #1!
You’re using “alarmists cherry quote!” to continually deflect attention and discussion of the topic you pro-nukies fear most: these reactors are well and truly fucked, there’s radiation, and a “Chernobyl Solution” is being considered. That is, burying it in concrete and sand is being considered.
I just made up “Chernobly Solution.” Sounds cool, though eh?
Oh hey, isn’t Bill O’Reilly you pr-nukies official spokesman for most things? Give him a listen. Seriously, do. Pretty much everything you’ve accused our board alarmists of not citing or misquoting comes right out of O’Reilly’s mouth. Right there for us all to see & hear it.
:rolleyes:
O’Reilly is the same fellow that claimed that the tides could not be explained scientifically and that means that they are evidence of god existing.
BTW another report, from a more reliable source, mentions that experts do not think a “Chernobyl Solution” is a good one.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=134661322
As usual, that may change, but so far the best evidence shows that this is worse than TMI but, but telling all that we are, right now, going into Chernobyl levels is an alarmist position.
One should note that its quite likely any declared “uninhabitable” zone of whatever size that results is more of a “you are somewhat more likely to get cancer if you live here” rather than a “stay here and you’ll die fast and sure” sorta thing.
Yeah, most would still not choose or want to live in the area, but its not a mutant zombie producing zone either.
What Tom Scud said.
Just as a side note to the thread, I knew a retired firefighter in Tennessee who had worked in Oak Ridge as a young man during the Manhattan project. He told a story of helping another worker clean up a room in the facility after a spill.
They had to push lead lined shields ahead of them and manipulate mops and buckets in front of the shield. Well, that was slow going and being productive patriotic mountain folks, and it being close to the end of their shift, they both ditched their shields and mopped up the room in short order.
According to my friend, as they finished up one of the egghead doctors peeked in, turned pale, and ordered them into decontamination. They were stripped, shaved and scrubbed several times “until we were raw and bleedin’”, and until they satisfied the geiger counter they were clean.
A week later, their teeth turned black and fell out, he told me. I knew him and his wife through their son when I lived in Johnson City, TN in the 80’s and 90’s. Mr. Adkins died of lung disease 50 years after his work at Oak Ridge. (I’d blame that on more than three decades of firefighting and six decades of smoking, but I guess you never know.)
Let’s hope those Fukushima workers are telling stories about it fifty years from now.
In this particular argument, I am rooting for those who believe all will be well. I want you to be right. Everybody who is sane wants you to be right.
Interesting story. I’ve read of more than one of those types. It appears that if you survive in the short term (like weeks to months) a very high radiation dose, you have a fair chance of living many years afterwards, so its not a death sentence.
I think by the time you are in your 70’s you can blame it on pretty much anything you want.
IIRC some of the Chernobyl workers (and maybe a couple Japanese workers about 12 years ago) got doses high enough that they needed bone marrow transplants because the radiation was high enough (which is pretty damn high) to kill it. Some of them made it I think.
BTW, “alarmists cherry quote!” is indeed more supported than your accusation on me making a straw man, once again: Myself and many others here and most experts have not said that these reactors are not well and truly fucked, but what you are missing is that that is at a technical level, at the level of they going out in a blaze like Chernobyl or that they are leaking to kill most of the polulation? Not so.
Myself and others have reported on the Radiation dangers, the straw man here is when you say that we do not mention that “there’s radiation”, the alarmist bit from you comes out on saying with no qualifications where is that radiation and to whom it is deadly.
Finally the bit of a “Chernobyl Solution” being considered, of curse it is, but once again that is offered with no explanations, experts do not consider that to be the most likely end to this emergency, in reality it is posted as an effort to mislead the people more. Indeed a “Chernobyl Solution” just points to an effort the nuclear workers would made after a core explosion, so the implication is clear: it is more conductive to seed panic and fear to just mention a “Chernobyl Solution” with very little explanation.
For the love of God, you certainly don’t want anyone to panic. That can be dangerous.
That was our feeling at the time. He never had a harsh thing to say about how the government treated him, even though he knew families who’d been uprooted by the project on just a few day’s notice. In fact, he credited Gen. Groves with putting him on a law enforcement/fire fighting career path.
[/hijack]
The real worry right now is coal of course. Them dangerous coal plants. It’s far more dangerous than the 6 reactors and 300 tons of fuel rods at risk. Or is it 500 tons? Nobody knows it seems. They also can’t find the blueprints of the plant, so we have to guess where the fuel rods might be. And I checked, and it does appear that nobody in the entire world has any kind of remote controlled flying craft that can sense gamma radiation. Or x-rays, or ultraviolet light. But thanks to the wars, we do have the ability to view infrared, and they are diverting drones from the war effort to take a look at the plants in infrared. So the engineers and other trying to save the plant can figure out where the fuel rods are. It’s so reassuring to find out how prepared everybody is for a nuclear plant problem.
I’m pretty sure that they actually believe the official position of the governments and industry. How many years was it before it was confirmed that Three Mile Island was a meltdown? Partial yes, but a meltdown nonetheless. How many days before it was confirmed that Chernobyl was a meltdown (its never been proven it wasn’t only a partial meltdown!) when it was obvious to anyone a continent downwind with a gieger counter? Government and industry are not being forthcoming here because they don’t want to believe it and they don’t want to lose their phoney baloney jobs.
We can now hope and pray that this incident is slight, like Three Mile Island. But it would have been better to plan and drill over the past 40 years.
I hope the deniers are right. The part that is really getting my fuel rod heated up is the complete and utter lack of any means to image what is going on. While they finally have a global hawk with infrared imaging at work, it actually appears that in the entire world, of all the nations that have both nuclear reactors, AND a crapload of nuclear weapons, AND all the medical imaging isotopes, and food irradiation materials (which come from nuclear plants), nobody has a single device to image radiation. Not a single one.
Which is why I believe them now when they wail and moan that they actually DO NOT know what is going on. Nobody does. There isn’t a single flying vehicle with a measuring device or camera that can see where radioactive material is, or image gamma or x-rays or even ultraviolet radiation.
This in a world that claims it is safe and ready for nuclear problems and wants everyone to feel secure and support nuclear power.
Now that is as unsettling as the current disaster unfolding.
And, the deniers don’t care. They will still say nuclear is safe, we need it, nothing can go wrong. And they really believe that.
So why have any way of measuring radiation? Nothing can go wrong.
We are all going to die!
Just wanted to keep the ball rolling…
Well- good news! Ann Coulter sez radiation is good for you and cures cancer, and that recommended government radiation limits are too low, so no worries!
I don’t, my experience though is that mainstream media is really lousy when dealing with scientific matters and unfortunately for your conspiracy minded position, more often than not, the official position (on nations that are not dictatorships) is the closest to the truth, specially after independent commissions take a look.
And how much radiation was released?
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html
I would rather dump baloney sources of information, the Chernobyl disaster was not a meltdown but a chemical explosion and fire that released the reactor material into the atmosphere. (There were subsequent parts melting, but that was not the main reason of the disaster or contamination.)
Actually I do think the overall design was not a good one, what I see is that the one for the reactor was good, but it was not a good idea to have the spent fuel stored next to the reactor. The good news is that that peculiar design and aging plants are being taken offline, I have seen that Germany has accelerated the pace of decommissioning aging plants.
I’m sorry but we have to clarify, deniers of what?
You really need to let go of that straw man clutch.
How is that different than you actually believe the official position of the government and industry? You say “I don’t” but then your explanation leads me to believe that you do.
It is one thing to put credence in a government report that comes out 25 years after TMI. But sometimes in a disaster a person has to act in the blink of an eye to save his or her life. Where you stand in a severe earthquake can mean the difference between life and death. Locating your residence at sea level or within a 10 miles of a nuke plant can ruin a lifetime of investment in a matter of an hour or days.
And by plan and drill, I mean safety drills.
That is because I can see how the alarmists are twisting and giving us misleading reports.
I think that hysteria and misinformation can cause more harm, specially when taken into account how unlikely it would be that we could reduce CO2 emissions without increasing the number of nuclear **and **solar and wind power plants.
AFAIK that is why in France people who are closest to the plant benefit economically from it, where I part with many nuclear proponents is the idea that private enterprise alone can deal with nuclear power properly, constant vigilance of independent groups and economical support for all people living next to nuclear plants should be a given and one should not wait for a disaster to get any support afterward.