Fukushima Reactor > US Deaths ?

looks like a fully annotated and legitimate scientific study to me. Why don't you verify it... Problem is correlation is not proof. A nice rebuttal to the it's- their-problem simple minded isolationists here.

Sensational headlines spreading panic sells newspapers. It isn't responsible journalism though. I would suggest you dump the source.

Looks to me like statistical noise in selective data cherry picked by anti-nuclear nuts.

Credibility is close to zero for anything on this site - though they may accidentally say things that are correct from time to time.

I doubt if the doses in the USA from Fukushima would amount to enough to produce any measurable effects even in the long term. The levels of radiation so far are at ultra-trace levels even at their peak and whilst they might just possibly increase long term risk of cancer they are not going to cause any immediate deaths.

Regards, Martin Brown

Low-level radiation causes influenza? Essentially immediately?

John

Anyone knows ionizing radiation reduces immunity...

There's debate about whether low-level radiation does that. It may increase immunity. High-level radiation destroys everything, immune cells included.

The study sounds flakey, blaming an increase in influenza deaths on a likely coincidental increase in trace levels of radiation, averaged across the entire country.

John

nd

ews.

.

That's the business of epidemiology, picking information out the noise of myriads of other potential causes. It's used to discover things like women who use black hair dye for twenty or more years are at a

1000x greater risk of developing non-hodgkins lymphoma. Statistically improbable events that track well with spikes in background radioactive contamination are rather strong indicators of cause and effect here.

s.

...

That's not what they said. They are taking death by influenza as a surrogate event for what is actually death by ill health caused by the radiation. That kind of thing is done with lots of other diseases, poisons, etc when it is impractical if not impossible to ascertain cause of death with any certainty. You might familiarize yourself with the concept of meta analysis and the use thereof in the instant report before you dismiss it. The authors are well qualified.

dea...

While that may be true, one cannot judge the "track well" part or your evaluation from the minimal information in the link you provided, lacking even a calculation of the variance of the measurements being made. Just how far down in the noise are these measurements? One has no way to judge this from the method of comparing only to one small sample period, selected by some unstated (and therefore suspect) criteria. And it must be taken in context, compared to the disease costs of the alternative, coal. For example:

"The World Health Organization reports that 3 million people now die each year from the effects of air pollution." Other estimates abound, but I think that an estimate of around 400,000 excess deaths per year due to coal pollution alone is now considered to be conservative.

I liken the rash of early nuke accidents to the rash of early steam power boiler explosions, while we learned what it takes to minimize the occurrence of pressure vessel failures. All of the nuke failures so far are understood well enough to prevent recurrence. Probability of leakage from new designs is lower. So do we proceed with the new nuke plants, and accept the possibility of thousands of deaths resulting, or do we stick with coal and accept the certainty of millions of deaths?

Meanwhile, fusion is being studiously ignored in the US (except for the occasional fraud) while others finish what we started:

May you live in interesting times :-).

That's even worse. Influenza is notoriously variable.

John

As i understand it, there were thousands of people killed and maimed due to the tsunami and earthquake, and (so far) ZERO due to the reactor. Somebody needs to put the right EM-Phaasys on the right SYL-Laable.

You mean well qualified anti-nuclear scaremongers. They would have latched onto road traffic accidents or suicides if they had served their purpose of producing panic about what are infinitessimal changes in the US background radiation rates as a result of Fukushima releases.

It is incredibly disingenious to blame flu fatalities on Fukushima. The same sort of dodgy reasoning that put yummy mummies off the MMR vaccine by claiming it causes autism and now means UK herd immunity in young adults for measles, mumps and rubella is seriously compromised.

The problem with modern ultra-trace analytical techniques are that they are so sensitive we can detect anything rare or non-existent in nature at insanely low levels.

Natural radiation completely outweighs any contribution from Fukushima in the USA - more so if you live on granitic rocks or soils.

Regards, Martin Brown

If you think ultra trace amounts of radiation can trigger a flu epidemic then you had better demonstrate how. This is just a random event where a correlation has been exploited to create panic.

That will depend on the dyes they used. "Black" and "brown" hair dye is almost always a mixture of several components.

There is no cause and effect here. It is irresponsible scaremongering by an organisation that is terrified of nuclear power.

The radioactive emissions of a coal fired power station are larger than those of a properly operated nuclear station of the same power. Traces uranium, thorium and polonium in the coal are significant.

Only the very earliest boiler explosions were due to ignorance or fundamental bad design. They learnt how to make safe boilers, but the customers defeated the safety systems (eg putting extra weights on the release valves and over firing) and did not look after their kit.

Most of the early large scale steam boiler explosions were caused by very bad operating practice by rapacious millowners who didn't give a damn about their workforce. Exploding the boiler provided an opportunity to fit a newer model and the insurers paid for it.

It was only when the insurers forced their own independent boiler inspectors onto mill owners and refused to pay out for uncertified boilers or those where safety systems had been tampered with that things improved. The owners almost always got away with it - the boiler engineer if he survived was usually prosecuted and convicted of manslaughter. eg

It wasn't all that much better twenty years on although by then Parliament were at least prevaricating about the issue instead of simply ignoring it entirely.

It took them another 5 years to get their act together

I would be a bit careful in claiming that all nuclear failures are sufficiently well understood to avoid repeating any. Too much of what goes wrong is down to human factors rather than plant failure.

Famously at TMI they spent a fair proportion of the early stages of the emergency reading the manuals to try and figure out how to get the all the various alarms silent so that they could actually think!

Fusion is always 50 years away from being realised as a practical source of power (and has been for several decades now).

Regards, Martin Brown

Was there the concept of depreciation then in accounting?

I am surprised they'd pay up *until* they'd done that. Perhaps it's the heritage of insurance as a feature of shipping. Not paying just wasn't done...

I am surprised the survivors of the workers killed didn't take matters into their own hands.

Very interesting, Martin. Thanks for the links.

At Chernobyl, they'd gone way off the nominal operating cases for the plant.

-- Les Cargill

But rational thought doesn't lead to the sensationalist headlines the leftist weenies relish so much. ...Jim Thompson

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On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:05:06 +0000, Martin Brown wrote:

Fukushima Reactor -> Irrational Anti-Nuke Hysteria -> More "Clean Coal" -

I think you have just described the best way to reduce the number of incidents at nuclear power plants also.

explosions-legislation

I would have said that all significant nuclear accidents to date were entirely due to human failure, and it is the unavoidable human failure issue which must be and is being addressed, through increased damage resistance. Compare the previous generation of reactor designs to the Westinghouse AP1000 for instance:

A minor symptom of the real problem, which was that the reactor was operated by General Public Utilities. Therefore there was not one single qualified reactor operator on duty when the accident occurred. Had all operators left the building immediately when the first alarm sounded and not come back the reactor would not have melted down; the automatic controls were correctly responding to the stuck open pressurizer relief valve. Since it was GPU's policy to hire already trained former Navy reactor operators so they wouldn't have to waste money on training, none of the reactor operators on duty had any plant specific training, the one factory trained operator did not show up until hours later. So they assumed that the pressurizer relief valve position indicator was the output of a direct valve position measurement LVDT with continuous diagnostics, as required by their former employer, rather than a pair of wires connecting the pilot solenoid to a light bulb, as bodged by GPU. So they made decisions based on the one unreliable indicator while ignoring dozens of conflicting indications. Did I mention they had no simulator time practicing response to failures? Did I mention that any half qualified reactor operator should have easily been able to interpret the console readings available and act accordingly within seconds, and then worry about the alarms, which they would know how to silence from all the simulator drills?

While industry did in fact learn a thing or two from this, the independent insurance inspector approach to enforcement, plus fines and points on their operating license for every safety violation (5 points and they lose their license for 90 days and have to go to remedial reactor operator school :-), is probably about the best that can be done.

Several decades ago there was no realistic schedule for practical fusion power, because basic physics questions about how to control a continuous stable fusion reaction had not yet been answered. Today the problem has been reduced to straightforward engineering work with no new breakthroughs required in any area, and the best time-line out there calls for the first 2000 to 4000 MW fusion demonstration reactor delivering power to the grid by 2040, with full scale commercialization underway by the last quarter of the century.

If this work were funded as well as any of our recent wars the schedule could be accelerated considerably.

Nice dream, but extremely low probability of success as an economic power source on a large scale. Maybe they can generate that much energy, but every tokomak device in the world suffers from massive attrition due to the enormous temperatures, heat flux and radiation levels. They have to be shut down, decommissioned and essentially rebuilt on a cycle of months, and the work involves large amounts of beryllium compound dust, which is extremely toxic (so much for a 'clean energy source'). WTS, it won't be long before the funders of these jollies for men in white coats lose their patience, and the money runs out.

I've had a couple of ex-Iter guys come through my team, they tell some nasty stories.

Please explain...

And you aren't going to share...?

Pure garbage. Not even lies, just electric koolaide for the anti-nuke crowd. It would take over twenty years to collect proper evidence for that claim.

?-)