OT Nuclear material used as a power supply

Bill Sloman wrote in news:987adf7d-b75f-4cb8-ae0b-4a5203df4b24 googlegroups.com:

Bill Palmer wrote in news:vilsia1enrsvtutsr8dkkfnbvqnobt6fdu 4ax.com:

bloggs.fredbloggs.fred gmail.com wrote in news:731f889c-a47b-4a34-b6fc-94ea1312c06a googlegroups.com:

Why reply at all if it adds nothing?

Cheers

I've heard "The Register" referred to as a "rag", but not "right-wing". They are famously sceptical about /everything/, and are well-known for using wider sources of information (such as their own common sense) rather than accepting whatever is popular in other media. They are particularly enthusiastic in cases where other media promote scaremongering.

Thus they are more realistic about anthropogenic global warming than many other media - which are typically either total denial (or even enthusiastic about it - after all, the sooner we destroy the planet, the sooner we'll see the second coming!) or spread the worst scare-stories without actually understanding what scientists and researchers are saying. And they are realistic about how pointless most (but certainly not all) new "renewable energy" power generation is.

I have no problem with you disliking The Register, or disagreeing with the opinions of the editors. But I would just /love/ to see your evidence for claiming that they have sold out their journalistic integrity and honesty to the economic interests in the nuclear power industry!

Their background radiation had negligible health effects. Doubling it for a short while gives, at most, slightly less negligible effects. It's fair enough to avoid the nearest km from the reactor, but outside that the radiation levels did not reach the /average/ background radiation for people living in the USA, never mind the levels of people living in Aberdeen or much of Norway (or anywhere else with a lot of granite).

I don't understand why even intelligent people have this irrational fear of anything nuclear.

The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should have had children with terrible defects. But they didn't. (at least that's what I heard on NPR.) Germ plasm...(A weird word.) is tough stuff apparently.

this was my first google hit

George H.

"All three of these cases found that there is no increased risk of these conditions if the parents of the child were exposed to the ionizing radiation of the atomic bomb (child was not conceived at the time of the exposure)."

The Chernobyl country/area animal situation might also be telling.

I only get to see the "The Register" when John Larkin posts a link to one of their articles, which always seems to be denialist bunk, clearly cut and pasted from some denialist source.

If the journalists at "The Register" had either common sense or journalistic integrity, they wouldn't put their names to that kind of rubbish. My opinion is that they lack both, but they aren't big-time enough to get noticed by "Sourcewatch".

I doubt if they have any integrity or honesty to sell.

Something creates the mutations that cause the cancers that kill about a third of us. Background radiation is at least one of the sources of those cancers

Life expectancy in Norway - 81.9 years - is shorter than that in Sweden - 83 years, and in Scotland - at 78.9 years - than in the UK as a whole - 81 years.

Henri Curie died young - run over by a beer dray. Marie Curie and Roentgen both died of cancer. There's nothing irrational about minimising your exposure to radioactivity, or beer drays.

It's not so much that germ plasm is tough stuff as that primates generate their own mutations

About 30% of human pregnancies end in early miscarriages. Your genetic machinery is so busy engineering mutations that a bit of radioactivity scarcely counts.

Cancer incidence is another story.

The Soviet radar satellites using the TOPAZ fission reactor (85 kWth) had the nuclear reactor integrated into satellite core.

For an interplanetary probe, there should not be a problem mounting the fission reactor at the end of a boom as was done with the Voyagers with RTGs on a boom.

Based on observations with a 250 kWth pool type research reactor operating for decades, of course the reactor itself will become radioactive, but structures separated with a few meters of water/concrete are not an issue.

The affected areas strongly depended on the prevailing winds after the accident. On some areas close to the site, the radiation level was quite low, but in other directions, the contaminated area was extended to tens of kilometers. Since a large number of people lived from agriculture, a contaminated soil means that they are out of business.

I can very well understand why people are so afraid of various types of (non)ionized radiation.

First of all, humans do not have any natural senses to directly detect this kind of radiation, thus we have to rely on instruments. Various detectors detect various kinds of radiation, but it is hard to tell how dangerous it is. A "harmless" alpha emitter in the air you breath can be as harmful as some low level gamma.

I hope someone will make a cheap (wristwatch type) ionized radiation detector preferably by a logarithmic scale (e.g. decibels), so that everyone could detect the radiation levels every day at every place. Including non-ionized radiation (RF,cell phone/WiFi) would be a bonus.

A few metres of water and concrete is pretty expensive to send to the outer planets. Since an RTG is relatively simple, it can be made comparatively small. It just runs and runs, for decades.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes, the after-effects were much worse with Agent Orange than the atom bombs. Depleted uranium tankbusters caused more defects in the next generation, mostly because the radioactive particles got inside people's bodies (alpha particles are easily stopped by skin, but they are terrible if they are released inside the body), and partly because it causes heavy-metal poisoning.

Ironically, a major reason why "we" fear radioactivity is that once it was realised that radiation was a health risk, scientists and authorities worked hard to make good safety rules. In the early days of the use of radioactive substances, people didn't think about any health risks (in fact they were often used in snake-oil cures!). When the connection to cancer was made, no one knew what levels of radiation could cause an effect - nor whether the issue was short-term bursts or long-term build up of doses. So the safety levels were set very low, just to be sure - "they" (the authorities, health experts, scientists, etc.) wanted to err on the side of caution.

The result, however, is that people automatically assume that anything over these safety limits is dangerous - thus some people worry about the radiation dose from an X-ray, without realising it is the equivalent to eating a dozen bananas.

A boom and possibly some reflectie barrier material will quite easily solve any long term radiation issues.

You are condemning a fairly well-known online media as "denialist" on the basis of some links posted by John Larkin? If Jim Thompson posted links from Wikipedia, would you condemn it too?

In other words, no, you haven't the slightest evidence or justification for your claims. I (and "The Register") wrote something you don't like, and you therefore assume corruption, bribery and lies.

Background radiation has been linked to a very small proportion of cancers (and note that the term here is "linked to", not "causes"). For most people, worrying about background radiation will cause more health issues than the radiation itself.

And you think this is because of differences in the background radiation? You do love to pick random statistics and invent stories around them, don't you?

Laughable coming from an eternal-september idiot...

What's more, despite the strong evidence that our DNA repair mechanism is good at its job, so that radiation below a threshold level has little effect, the govt got rid of the threshold in its mortality calculation algorithm--which means that one LD50 worth of radiation is calculated to cause 0.5 deaths on average, regardless of whether it's administered to one person or spread out over a whole city.

Whole industries are devoted to keeping people afraid of very little.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I invite you to post a design for a reflector for uranium fission gamma rays.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs