Atomik Vodka is their latest (only) export product. That and quided tours of the now wilderness dead zone around the defunct plant.
Figuring out what you can and cannot grow there safely would make sense.
I bet they have confiscated it just because it says "Chernobyl". Those who shipped it can't possibly not have measured it - radioactive contamination is much easier to measure than others and there can't be any shortage of Ge detectors, labs etc.
Some years (decades?) ago there was some report how wildlife in the area has thrived because humans have been kept out....
While this is the worst accident the nuclear power industry has had the effect to the public has been mostly because of the associated scaremongering.
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associated scaremongering.
I was in England when it happened and it did spread a lot of low level radioactive junk across Scandinavia, northern Europe and northern England.
The radioactive iodine seems to have produced about 5000 extra thyroid cancers and fifteen extra deaths.
I am anything but a health physicist but I have been long enough on the radsafe mailing list to know that all these figures - like the one you quote - are completely unsubstantiated, part of the scare mongering.
131I has a half life of only 8 days so unless you get it right away you just won't get any. What remains is 137Cs (apr. 30 years half life IIRC) and nowadays it is well within what is out there due to atmospheric nuclear tests (they measure the ratio 134Cs/137Cs to see where it comes from, 134 has a much shorter half life, both have nicely separated energies).Most health physicists I have listened to - if not all of them - say the victims of Chernobyl were only among the people who were on the frontline, obviously they got huge exposures.
Then there are the health physicists - about half of those I knew - who say we get *too little* of radiation, they swear into what they call "hormesis", you make your body adapt/respond better and thus you live longer. Their examples were some area in Iran where the natural radioactivity is way above average and the Hiroshima survivors. I am far from being equipped to judge which is correct and neither did health physicists come to a conclusion. The practical part I remember from my time at the (now defunct or just dead) radsafe mailing list is what one guy once said about saturating you thyroid with iodine, you can do it by smearing some all over your belly....
The bottom line is that the nuclear failures - including Chernobyl, by far the worst accident - have been resposnible for a lot less deaths than coal (I have no figure to compare victims per kWh though). Anyway, the bottom bottom line is that most if not all of the screams about the dangers associated with nuclear energy is just scaremongering, probably due to financial interests (I have no idea if/what the latter might be).
Dimiter
====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI
You'd be surprised. I know of one government who would love to, if only they could figure out how to sell the idea to the public.
There is a great opportunity here for enterprising politicians as they could demand (and embezzle) the payments upfront from those countries needing to dispose of waste, yet the costs could be largely postponed until they are out of office (not their problem) and probably until after they have died (definitely not their problem).
It was noticeable where I was in Cheshire. We could see the change in lead isotopes in rainwater pretty easily. The other nuisance turned out to be that some moorland mosses and heather sequester group I & II elements which made some sheep too hot with Cs for human consumption.
Haggis was still banned in Japan for fear of its radioactivity all the time that I was there a decade later (somewhat of an over reaction).
I think that is probably true but there were places in the UK that got unlucky and had hotspots with Chernobyl fallout. Wales was one of them:
Nuclear waste disposal is a politics-and-fear issue. There's no physical problem.
Oh it was noticeable in Bulgaria, too - probably more than in the UK. People I know in the nuclear science institute nearby have been collecting Cs "sources" just walking around the yard there with a GM counter... Other people I know have been testing milk samples on a just 15 minute per sample basis (IIRC they had 30% or so Ge detectors), it was edible-not edible decisions. But the bottom line is that the health physicist community does not attribute any deaths to the disaster apart from the ones I mentioned before, of those who fought the "fire".
I remember back then (late 1988), I used to work in Cologne and some guy from Munich had sent some mushrooms to my employer to measure (target, an MCA manufacturer). They made a nice peak at 661.6 keV on a NaI detector, looked like you had put some of the test sources on it...
Dimiter
====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI
Are you Bulgarian? My new neighbors are Bulgarian, very nice couple. Both work at home these days, in their new multi-megabuck house.
Yes. Does anyone remember the solid-waste crisis of the 1970s and
1980s? Of course, the traditional solution, town incinerators (which reduce volume by 90%), was verboten.I then lived in the Baltimore, MD area. The fear was that Baltimore would run out of places to dump their municipal waste. All the east coast cities were having the same problem, and many very expensive solutions were proposed. I lurked, but didn't much participate, although many of my friends were telling me all about it, and trying to recruit me to their causes.
And I know exactly when I realized that it was nonsense: I was flying from San Francisco back to Baltimore, and was over Nevada, looking down as we flew over one desert ravine after another. Hmm. One could dispose of the entire State of Maryland in the ravines of Nevada, with plenty of space left over, never mind the other arid western states.
So the solid waste crisis was political, not physical. The cities that bought into those very expensive early solutions lived to regret it as better solutions emerged.
In the late 1990s, when visiting friends in Vienna, Austria, they showed us this wildly colorful building and asked us what it was. No idea. Turned out to be the municipal incinerator. The City of Vienna had commissioned a famous artist to make it into a art exhibit.
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Joe Gwinn
I was born in Sofia and grew up there, lived most of my life there, apart from 4 years in Germany ("defected" from the communist regime
1988). My gran (mother's side) was German, my grandfather and she got married while he was studying in Germany. My father's parents were from an area south of Sofia known for its dialect, a person from there is called a "shop" (just pronounced so, nothing to do with selling goods etc., just a name for some type of folks). Like other areas of Bulgaria this has also been a crossroad during the centuries, even today if you look at the people from it you are likely to think some crusaders from North Europe/Scotland etc. must have passed through, perhaps settled.... The genetic pool in Bulgaria is very colourful, second to none in that I guess, because of the location. If you look at me what you will see is an average European face (could be German though I look more like the way the husband of the German gran looked...), from the waist down I look more oriental, short stout legs. Nothing that interesting but since you asked :-).
Really? What and how much, precisely?
In most places, there is no good way to store energy.
Does anyone have a Powerwall?
Of course! But, such a thing would be too hard to "hide" from the voting public.
As I said, you don't see the NIMBYs in San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Portland, Miami, etc. all rushing to enrich their local coffers ("Hey, we can eliminate property taxes with the revenues from this ONE venture!").
Florida doesn't want oil wells, at sea, to tarnish the views from their beaches. Yet, want access to cheap fuels (just from someone ELSE's backyard!) Yucca Mountain has been such a resounding success (not!).
Just to make sure I understand, your solution to problems that are not universal by location, is to say they don't really exist in the places where people can't find an easy solution? So the east coast doesn't have a waste problem because Nevada has lots of waste land?
By that same reasoning Detroit, New York and Los Angeles and other major cities never had air pollution problems because Millinocket, Maine didn't. Parts of the arid southwest doesn't have a water problem because Beardstown, IL doesn't.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense!
Really? I don't recall where you are from.
The guy next door is a google software engineer, no doubt grossly overpaid. We are near the 280 freeway, and have google bus stops nearby, so we are a google bedroom community.
There goes the neighborhood! Not Bulgarians, but googlites.
He's tall and fair and sort of germanic looking. Nice accent.
We have a great Meyer lemon tree next to the fence, and he can have any lemon he can reach.
You do seem to listen to right-wing conspiracy theory enthusiasts.
That's not the way exponential decay works. after eight days you will have half as much, after 16-days a quarter. The damage is done when the I-131 decays to Xe-131 in thyroid, damaging cells up to couple of millimetres away. The cells damaged take a while to produce a visible cancer, but the I-131 only needs to be around for long enough to get into your thyroid before it decays.
CS-137 may be the next most visible radioactiv4e contaminant, but it isn't the only one.
A few huge exposures are easy to point to. Lots of lower-level exposure is easier to ignore.
Areas where natural radioactivity is way above average have been that way for generations - the current population has been selected for radiation resistance.
Hiroshima survivors have been selected in exactly the same way. "Hormesis" implies that radiation strengthens you if it doesn't kill you - what you seem to be seeing at are the natural variations in vulnerability which existed before the exposure to the radiation. There's no need to hypothesise that exposure to radiation made you stronger.
True.
Iodine is volatile at room temperature. It doesn't boil below 184.3 C but it has an appreciable vapour pressure at room temperature, and your body is good at picking up even small numbers of atoms and delivering them to your thyroid.
Coal mining has been going on for centuries, and it got very large scale after the industrial revolution. The nuclear industry is a minnow in comparison,
The fossil carbon extraction industry makes a lot of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel. They've spent a lot of climate change denial propaganda so that they can keep on making money that way for as long as possible.Energy generation from nuclear fission could be competititve, so they can be expected to have funded lies about that too.
None that John Larkin can understand. And getting him to understand that he doesn't understand the extent of problem is higher level problem.
Gullible twits find it very difficult to grasp that they are gullible twits.
John Larkin regularly criticises other people for not believing in evolution, so it seems fair to point out that this is evidence that he doesn't believe in capitalism.
Google is a remarkably successful company, so the proposition that they pay their programmers (who are crucial to the success of the company) more than they ought to is decidedly anti-capitalist. What John Larkin may mean is that Google pays software engineers more than Highland Technology does - which might suggest that Highland Technology doesn't sell particularly impressive software, and pays peanuts to get the kind of software monkey who is competent enough to write the kinds of trivial programs that John Larkin can understand.
There's the risk that he might catch the brain-damaging virus to which you seem to have been exposed.
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