I wore a dosimeter in my 20's on a nuclear submarine and received some radiation exposure working on the reactor, but the Navy explained to me that it was balanced out because I was underwater and not receiving radiation exposure from the sun. 40 years later, and still cancer free, knock on wood.
In a related note, I know someone who keeps bees and harvests honey. I recently visited the spot way out in the mountains where he does this and I asked why he chose a spot so far out. He explained that to get the organic label, the honey must contain no pesticides and if you keep bees around the property of other people they will ingest pesticides from flowers on those property, since pesticides are so commonly used.
I would take anything the US mil claimed with a large grain of sodium chloride. There has been an extensive history of them and their affiliated contractors lying to personnel and civilians: agent orange, ddt, pcbs, gulf war syndrome/pesticides/sarin/mustard gas, radium, and so on.
You have to know your actual average, peak, and total dosages to be able to compare it with everyday civie life.
Regarding pesticides: the US has a major problem with gross under-regulation of chemicals in nearly every context. This stems from TSCA 1964 grandfathering-in 10k's of chemicals without evidence of safety, a guiding principle of "assume safe until proven otherwise because profits", and ignoring safety data and conservative exposure standards set in the rest of the industrialized world.
Edit: My father worked on the flight line of a US military base in Vietnam. He was exposed to agent orange, unburnt napalm, and jet fuel many times. He suffered from the rare adult-onset type I diabetes for most of his life and experienced several kinds of cancers.
> Regarding pesticides: the US has a major problem with gross under-regulation of chemicals in nearly every context.
There’s other weird corners to pesticides. I found myself helping somebody with a .gov contract that required computing equipment to be sanitized and cleaned with a manufacturer recommended method that is a listed pesticide.
Problem: most manufacturers recommend isopropyl alcohol for this purpose, and it’s one of those grandfathered in chemicals, and isn’t “listed” as a pesticide.
Solution: We found a company that made cleaning supplies for industrial processes, and they had a specific formulation of isopropyl alcohol wipes listed as a pesticide. (For a price nearly 20x more than normal products)
It’s a silly story but illustrates how nuts this stuff is. Just with something silly like sanitizing wipes, people are using proprietary “quats” with serious potential health impacts where something as simple as alcohol could easily do the job.
Honestly, I don’t know, but the MSDS sheets all call for users of wipes that use quats to wear gloves or wash hands immediately.
Also, they are not to be used on food surfaces.
When I was stuck researching this topic, I spoke to a few academics… their recommendations were always cautious around quat products, and usually peroxide was the “wipe of choice” if it was ok for the use case. (Ie you cannot use peroxide on computers, keyboards, etc.)
Not smart. It says right on the bottle that it's not made for skin contact. Check the ingredients (if they're all listed) and see if there's safety data for them all.
> the honey must contain no pesticides and if you keep bees around the property of other people they will ingest pesticides from flowers on those property, since pesticides are so commonly used.
I think this is a very common misunderstanding. The bees are allowed to forage on organically-cultivated crops, and farmers can use a whole range of 'natural' but also 'certified' synthetic pesticides on them.
Producers of organic food don't seem to mind too much that people assume organic food growing doesn't involve the use of pesticides.
The synthetics that are allowed in certified organic farming are pretty limited (when it comes to pesticide use) and pretty innocuous. Anyone can read about them specifically here: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/part-205/subpart-g
Which is a funny group of people. Their rules sound kooky, but their results aren't at all what I would expect from kooks. The best strawberry jam I can get here comes from from a farm where they (I learned when I asked about why it's so good) turns their compost according to the phases of the moon. Weird. The same farm was also raided by the police. 130 police officers searched the place at dawn one morning, and apparently the only reason for suspicion was that those weirdos had money to spare for a succession of new greenhouses even in years when all their conventional neighbours had no money to spare for anything.
>turns their compost according to the phases of the moon. Weird.
It might not be so weird.
While not as noticeable as ocean tides, aquifer tides[1] cause the soil to "breathe" twice per day. Spring tide vs. neap tide (which is a function of Moon phase) would change the magnitude and diurnal timing of this "breathing" pattern, which could have a significant effect on soil biology.
As you learn more about Earth Science, it's interesting to discover that (some of) these "crazy" ideas start to look not-so-crazy.
One of my favorite examples: how do you stop vermin in your garden? Make a small pile of rocks off in the corner, of course! Sounds like superstitious gobbledygook, right? And it is, right up until the moment you realize that all you really did was make a happy undisturbed snake habitat.
All that suggests that turning the compost once per moon cycle makes sense. I've no problem with that. But turning the compost at specific points in the cycle… and yet, these are the farmers with the best produce.
Aquifer tides sound like a fascinating concept that didn't occur to me before, but tides require a lot of fast lateral mass transfer thats usually not possible in most aquifers.
In this case, the effect is largely due to the overburden itself expanding and contracting with varying tidal attraction. These mechanisms force atmospheric gases into and out of the soil, like a piston.
It sounds like doing that might encourage the snakes to reproduce and you’ll just end up with more snakes. Even if you’re fine building a few new habitats every year, at a certain point would you encounter some sort of snake breeding law/regulation?
The Oxford Companion to Wine has a long article about it. It "remained little known in the wine world until an increasing number of top-quality producers" adopted it, many of whom learned about it from someone who "makes no claim to understanding how biodynamics works". I, uh, find it difficult to believe … but these actually are top-quality producers.
The Companion also notes that many of them do it but prefer discretion. I can see why.
Maybe what matters isn't exactly when they turn their compost, but that they turn it at all. Like, caring about the details even in a "whacky" way (according to most non-biodynamicists) is a lot better than not caring about the details at all -- and maybe to people who aren't into biodynamics, turning the compost is a weird detail that only "whacky" people would care about.
Maybe the phase of the moon is important. Maybe it's not, but if you're bothered enough to do things according to the phase of the moon you're probably paying attention to other stuff that matters.
"In this groundbreaking study of organic farming, Julie Guthman challenges accepted wisdom about organic food and agriculture in the Golden State. Many continue to believe that small-scale organic farming is the answer to our environmental and health problems, but Guthman refutes popular portrayals that pit “small organic” against “big organic” and offers an alternative analysis that underscores the limits of an organic label as a pathway to transforming agriculture.
This second edition includes a thorough investigation of the federal organic program, a discussion of how the certification arena has continued to grow and change since its implementation, and an up-to-date guide to the structure of the organic farming sector. Agrarian Dreams delivers an indispensable examination of organic farming in California and will appeal to readers in a variety of areas, including food studies, agriculture, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, and history."
I just confirmed for those so inclined, you can quickly download a PDF of the book for free on Library Genesis.
Oregon Tilth was a certification for sustainable farming when I was growing up in PNW, though I can’t attest it’s “strictly” enough or not on the topic.
Biodynamic is an unregulated label that is often meant to imply this, but of course offers zero guarantees. Usually it comes with a “tour the farm” level of visibility into processes, which is a nice upside. Often coincides with “dry-farmed” and/or “trap cropping” practices, two labels that indicate material benefits to crop quality independent of the biodynamic label.
At least save whatever documentation you have. I have some letter from the military about various nasty organic solvents they had us use squirreled away somewhere.
It might have been because of the insecticides really. I have a donation subscription to an organisation which keeps bees in the dead center of a 1.7mln city.
Turns out the bees thrive in this environment, because they're still better off there than in the countryside.
You’re breathing the same recycled air for weeks at a time. The radiation is continuously creating isotopes in the gases in that air. That means a continuously increasing radiation exposure the longer you stay underwater.
On the surface any radioactive gases get dispersed in the atmosphere.
No, this is not the case. We often surfaced at night to recirculate with fresh air. In fact, this is done so often that the first thing we do is turn the clocks 12 hour forward so our day shift when everyone was working occurred at night. We need to surface to recharge the lead acid battery off the diesel engine as well, which was done to make sure that kept working well. I did this when newly qualified as an electric plant operator and it was difficult for me to do correctly.
> On the surface any radioactive gases get dispersed in the atmosphere.
The relevant radiation exposure when you're outdoors is not from radioactive gases in the air, it's from radiation hitting atoms in your body. (The relevant radiation to compare with what a nuclear reactor produces is actually not from the Sun, it's from cosmic rays.)
Cosmic rays come from the sun, as well as other sources, but mostly from the sun. Cosmic rays are highly charged particles, not a particular type or class of radiation, and are energetic enough to produce ionizing cascades in the atmosphere.
> Cosmic rays are highly charged particles, not a particular type or class of radiation
Highly charged particles are a type of radiation, at least as that term is used in the context of this discussion. (Yes, in some physics contexts "radiation" only refers to massless particles like photons, but in such a context no "radiation" to speak of comes from nuclear reactors either, since the potentially hazardous radiation from nuclear reactors is neutrons and some alphas and betas.)
> The radiation is continuously creating isotopes in the gases in that air.
What radiation? Note that he didn't say he received radiation exposure throughout the submarine, only "working on the reactor". That's an isolated space that doesn't continuously exchange air with the rest of the submarine and has an extra layer of shielding between it and the rest of the submarine (in addition to the shielding around the reactor itself that separates that from the space where people working on the reactor go--nobody ever goes inside the reactor itself).
Reactors on Navy vessels, since at least the 70s, are very safe. They are closed systems and are completely sealed in compartments surrounded by feet of shielding. While some negligible amount of radiation does get through, it's half life is very short. Radioactive isotopes don't escape, nor do they get created by proximity to a radiation source and start floating around the crew compartment. In addition, each crew member carries a dosimeter which tracks their exposure. As others pointed out, walking around outside exposes us to more radiation (from the sun, earth, ceramic tiles...) than spending months next to to one of these reactors.
> the Navy explained to me that it was balanced out because I was underwater and not receiving radiation exposure from the sun
With the greatest respect to the Navy, I smell more fish than in the seas that submarine travelled through.
My non-scientific understanding is that sun exposure is UV radiation exposure which causes skin melanoma. Meanwhile with nuclear reactors, UV is not the problem and the problem with exposure goes deeper than skin melanoma.
My feeling is you received a standardised "policy explanation" rather than an entirely scientific one. Happy to be proven wrong with links to scientific fact though !
Cosmic background radiation is a thing and water is really good at blocking it, so it's not complete bullshit. Of course, without knowing what dose the GP received, it's impossible to say whether it's a comparable dose to what they would have received on the surface - but it's plausible.
There is some good information about the relative exposure levels to cosmic radiation that one can expect to encounter on this site. They have been doing balloon launches and measuring in-flight levels for quite a while now.
Indeed. But isn't it really only "a thing" for airline pilots, cabin crew and a few unfortunate people at ground level who happen to live/work high-altitude on mountains or somewhere lower down with the wrong kind of rocks ?
Depends how you look at it. Cosmic radiation might not be extremely high level on the sea level, but it is a thing. So the total radiation dosis in a nuclear submarine might equal or even be less than on the surface.
Fun story: as part of my physics education we did an experiment on the cosmic radiation with a "radiation" telescope. That were 2 Geiger counters with a logic that only registered events which basically occured in both counters at the same time. That made the observation reasonably detectable and you could "see" the sun with this. This experiment was conducted indoors, just on the top floor of the building. We had about 1 event/second, our bodies would be getting a similar dosis all the time.
No, it is a gradient, with more exposure happening higher up. Radiation damage is considered “additive” over your lifetime. So if you are somewhere with less background radiation, you can receive more radiation from other sources and still be considered within “safe” limits. This is the basis for the policy mentioned.
I think they just poorly explained that his exposure in the sub was lower than background radiation levels on the sea surface. You get more rads living in Colorado for a year than anyone would get working in a nuclear power plant for a year at sea level.
Humans receive about 3-4 mSv per year of background radiation on average. Some of this is from radioactive decay, and some from cosmic radiation. Being underwater much of the year might shave 1-2 mSv off this.
Civilian radiation workers can receive, by regulation, doses up to 50 mSv per year. Typical reactor workers in the civilian energy sector get a couple mSv per year of dose. It is plausible that he was close to breakeven.
100mSv/year is the lowest dose that has shown a clear link to increased cancer risk.
The dose-dependent risk of cancer is in textbooks as an example of linearity. While it is hard to shown for low values of exposure because any measurements/estimates would drown in noise and errors, there is little doubt that the relation shown for higher values is just as valid at the lower end. That also conforms with the stochastic model of how radiation causes cancers and the mutagenic effects of low-dose radiation seen in vitro.
We're not absolutely confident that there's not some threshold dose. LNT is a decent conservative assumption for calculating the harms from low doses and reasonable to use for regulatory purposes.
Even so, radiation hormesis has been noted in lab models, etc (slight benefits from low doses).
We accept occupational risks all the time. Here, the threshold for radiation workers allows a dose half of what has been ever linked to any amount of cancer.
The overall average, across all industries, fatal work injury risk is something like 35 per 1,000,000 worker-years. Compare to this, where the risk to radiation workers from radiation, if they receive the highest allowed dose (and basically no one does) can be confidently bounded to be well under 1 per 1,000,000 worker-years. (And, if it should ever happen, is likely to be far in the future and cost less life expectancy as a result).
Why? 1 Sv (over a year) equates to a 5.5% increase chance of fatal cancer within a lifetime. Assuming the dosage is linear (it isn't but we use a Linear _no threshold_ model because it over estimates risk) 100mSv is a 0.55% increase in risk. So 50mSv is a 0.055% increase risk (note the parent is slightly wrong. Most countries and workers have a 20mSv maximum).
You're getting caught up in _detectable_ but not thinking enough about the actual level of risk. The danger/risk from 100mSv is far less of a risk than very common activities we do. Remember that that fatal cancer risk is over a lifetime (so let's say 40 years, or 0.01%/year if you receive that dose once). Smoking a cigarette a day (singular, not a pack) is a 30+% chance increase in stroke and heart disease. I'd argue that this is far more dangerous but something we don't worry about as much.
"The NRC requires its licensees to limit occupational exposure to 5,000 mrem (50 mSv) per year. Occupational dose does not include the dose received from natural background sources, doses received as a medical patient or participant in medical research programs, or "second-hand doses" received through exposure to individuals treated with radioactive materials."
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. NRC is a US government. I said _most countries_ which in fact includes countries other than America. The EU standard is 20mSv. You'll also notice that this NRC listing specifies which workers. For DOE 50 mSv is regulatory limit and 20mSv is administrative control level. Of course, all this also changes based on occupation. I mean astronauts are allowed higher levels and pilots lower. But most countries and (radiation) workers have a 20mSv limit.
> I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. NRC is a US government.
I thought it was perhaps appropriate, if we're quantifying US Navy occupational exposure to a US citizen, to compare to US civilian reactor exposure limits. It doesn't seem appropriate to call me "wrong" in this context.
> For DOE 50 mSv is regulatory limit and 20mSv is administrative control level.
Sure: one needs controls well short of the regulatory limit to keep pretty much everyone short of the limit. Most nuclear medicine workers and reactor workers are well under 2mSv/year in the US. A few outliers end up with lifetime doses of a few hundred mSv.
P.S. Something went wrong here:
> 100mSv is a 0.55% increase in risk. So 50mSv is a 0.055% increase risk
In that you halved the dosage but divided the risk by 10, when saying you were evaluating it under LNT.
There are any number of substances where there’s little doubt that they can cause cancer even at minuscule doses, just at similarly low rates. Get enough data and you will find that a single whiff of tobacco smoke (or any other smoke) can cause cancer. The “lowest dose linked to cancer” is the result of our ability to measure such effects, not anything intrinsic to the harm these substances do.
That’s specific for cancer. For other forms of toxicity, the concept of “maximum safe dosage” does make sense when the dose/effect relationship is not linear. Pharmaceuticals, for example, can be entirely benign at small dosages yet lethal if you overdose.
But we can still set a significance threshold. Your point applies equally to radiation exposure flying on an airplane but we don't worry about the cancer odds from a single flight since it's lower than the (already miniscule) odds of crashing.
Would you say more? What that suggests to me is the authority responsible for setting the max allowed said “Well let’s keep it below the threshold linked to cancer, reduce it by half for safety factor, and call it a day”. IE they chose one of the simplest possible approaches- doesn’t seem surprising, but I am probably missing your point.
You're probably right. I thought the same thing, but since I didn't care I didn't pursue it. I would have cared if the scuttlebutt was that people were getting sick and dying, but that was not the case. Sub sailors were not dying in an detectable numbers.
A large chunk of that average dose, 4 mSv, is from radon, where the dose varies a lot depending on where you live, and if you live in such a radon-prone location, whether you have sufficient ventilation in your house.
Yes, you're correct. The page I linked to has this to say:
"For example, the health risk caused by radon is estimated on the basis of epidemiologic examinations, not the effective dose. Every year, an average of 280 Finns die from lung cancer caused by radon. Of these cases, 240 deaths are induced by smoking in addition to radon."
So they're not actually measuring an average 4 mSv/y dose from radon, but rather going the other way, that is that 280 yearly deaths from radon would be consistent with an average dose of 4 mSv/y (assuming LNT, presumably).
The math sounds nonsensical. The risk adjusted exposure from a reactor should definitely be higher as you would be closer to the threshold of DNA bond breaking. Being stabbed once a year isn't necessary better than getting hundred paper cuts. Any actuaries here care to comment?
There are mountains of literature and regulations on this and the math just kind of works that way (up to some limit, beyond which acute radiation effects will begin to dominate)
There is now some thought that very low doses of ionizing radiation are better than no radiation at all (so called 'radiation hormesis'), but I don't believe that has been adopted as part of any specific standard.
FWIW an individual person may be experiencing up to a trillion DNA mutations per day from both external and internal mechanisms of action. We just have a bunch of systems built in to prevent them from getting out of control (most of the time).
> The risk adjusted exposure from a reactor should definitely be higher as you would be closer to the threshold of DNA bond breaking.
How are you so certain? You don't know the specifics of the situation. If he worked underwater for a year and spent half a day working on a reactor in protective gear it could easily even out.
He is not saying the overall exposure may not be same (it could be) he is saying risk of cancer or other bad side effects may not be equal in both scenarios.
Nuclear engineer here. In school in Ann Arbor we ran a radiation detector overnight in the lab and were able to identify several nuclides in the air leftover from weapons tests. Fun times.
Of course the dose rate from these nuclides was many orders of magnitude less than natural background so it was more a curiosity than a concern. Radiation detectors can detect single atoms decaying and attribute them to specific nuclides. Good old quantum energy levels of the nucleus.
If I could have one media wish this year, it would be that whenever someone says something is 'radioactive', everyone else asks what the dose rate is compared to natural background before talking about hazards.
Speaking as a cheerfully untrained armchair observer, we might also expect the nuclear fallout to be detectable for at least the next 50,000 years [0] on the basis that detection equipment is really sensitive. Sensitive to the point where we can detect sunny days happening several millennia ago.
This looks like silly news. They may as well just have run with "US did nuclear tests in the 1960s" or "radioactive cesium has a half life" and left it at that unless there is something to report on.
This is the general point that most of the press and general public fail to appreciate when thinking about radiation risk.
Similarly after Fukushima, there were terrified articles about how radiation could be detected in fish across the Pacific. But as you say, at what level? Certainly orders of magnitude lower than your baseline exposure. We just have very accurate detectors!
Indeed, none of those articles said: "oh yeah and at these dose rates, you'd have to eat 330,000 kg of albacore to double your natural dose, and more than 10x more than that before you got a dose that has been shown to cause harm.
Actually, nuclear fallout is present in everything.
Following Trinity test and the rest of nuclear testing campaign, every single living thing or any matter that has been processed in any way has been contaminated and shows high background radiation (compared to pre-Trinity test).
That's why some materials like steel from ships comissioned before Trinity test or lead ballast from sunken Roman ships is highly sought after where low background radiation material is required.
For lead the radioactivity comes from uranium mixed with the original ore, not from outside sources. That's why it needs to be hundreds or thousands of years old rather than just pre 1945.
>All lead mined on Earth naturally contains some amount of the radioactive element uranium 235, which decays, over time, into another radioactive element, a version of lead called lead 210. When lead ore is first processed, it is purified and most of the uranium is removed. Whatever lead 210 is already present begins to break down, with half of it decaying on average every 22 years. In Roman lead almost all of the lead 210 has already decayed, whereas in lead mined today, it is just beginning to decay.
"When lead ore is first processed, it is purified and most of the uranium is removed. Whatever lead 210 is already present begins to break down, with half of it decaying on average every 22 years. In Roman lead almost all of the lead 210 has already decayed, whereas in lead mined today, it is just beginning to decay."
> Following Trinity test and the rest of nuclear testing campaign, every single living thing or any matter that has been processed in any way has been contaminated and shows high background radiation (compared to pre-Trinity test).
Well, high and high. On average, humans worldwide receive a dose of about 4 mSv/year. Nuclear weapons testing and nuclear accidents contribute about 0.01 mSv/year to that.
> From September 1st, 2017 to December 31st, 2019, muscle meat samples from 376 wild boars were delivered by the forest services (Bodenmais 129, Dahn 123 and Zusmarshausen 124). So far, 355 samples have been measured for Cs-137 activity. The Cs-137 contamination of wild boars fluctuated seasonally depending on the availability of individual food components within a study area, with the variability of the measured values being up to three orders of magnitude. The values ranged from 0.6 Bq/kg fresh mass (FM) (Dahn) to 16,704 Bq/kg (Bodenmais).
This constantly gets brought up but few people run the numbers because you can safely eat kilograms of each a day. You can see the full calculations if you search my comments. The truth is just that we're really good at detecting radiation because doing so allows us to better detect weapons.
How does the radiation from boar meat compare to sunlight? E.g. eating 500 grams is similar to sitting in the sun for 5 minutes, in very rough comparison.
It mostly doesn't compare - sitting in the sun for five minutes doesn't expose you to much in the way of ionizing radiation as almost all of it is filtered out by the atmosphere. And when you get out of the sun, it stops. Radioactively contaminated food glows at your insides for much longer. Cs-137 biological half-life is weeks:
Radiation is a pretty weird thing that is easily misunderstood because people use the same term to talk about very different things. While sitting in the sun will cause UV radiation and can result in skin cancer it's not the same as interesting cesium. Though both can cause cancer.
But if we're just talking about increase chance of cancer iirc the meat calculations you need to eat like 15 kg of boar a day from that region (like 3kg if the highest measured). I'll let you make your guesstimate from there. And we're not even talking about risk of cancer from eating that much meat.
Thanks for the reply, especially given that I worded my question poorly.
In my barely educated opinion the health risks of the radiation level measured in the boar meat is so low as to be ignorable. It might help people (like me) to be able to compare the health risk to other forms of radiation that we already accept.
> In my barely educated opinion the health risks of the radiation level measured in the boar meat is so low as to be ignorable.
This is fairly accurate. Though I wouldn't seek out those boars. I just wouldn't freak out if you found out later.
I would say that the bigger thing we can do is learn to relax and admit that we don't know much about topics we don't know much about. I'm all for more information, but this problem is more abstract and applies to far more things than radiation. Often the more heated a topic the less the average person knows about it though their confidence is often high.
Sure. But if the numbers are below regulation numbers why write articles on it constantly. I mean the same thing happened with fish around California after Fukushima. There was a measurable increase in radiation in the fish but still well below legal limits which are below dangerous levels (factors of safety are built in. Caution is good after all).
But the numbers are not below regulation. They are being surpassed in different regions during different times of the year. They have to reimburse those hunters with 250€ for every board which amounts to millions just for the state of Bavaria.
Also: what do you mean by "constantly"? How many articles are there and how can there be too many if you don't even know that they are not below regulation?
I'd argue that overprotective is not the opposite of stupid. In radiation we purposefully overestimate the risk when setting regulations and limits. This is due to the fact that we can actually have a lot of error and still be safe. Error due to bad detectors, non-homogeneous distribution of radiation, dosages due to outside factors while not wearing a dosimeter, etc. These regulations are also what have made nuclear one of, if not _the_, safest source of energy we have. This safety comes at a monetary cost, yes, but I don't think anyone is really against that.
I don't think they're stupid just because some anonymous person on the internet says so and especially not if it's a regulation nobody profits from. There will be reasons for that.
Particularly as there still seems to be quite a disagreement over the dangers of Caesium-137 across the pond.
The English, American sources dominated, Wikiarticle makes it sound mostly benign.
Yet European language articles, like French and German, will be quite a lot more skeptical.
This even goes up to an official levels where afaik the EU has associated more dangers and risks with lower Caesium-137 than their US counterparts, thus the "tolerated levels" of it also vary greatly between the two.
The EU just recently decided that nuclear energy is green because some of the influential countries failed to get into renewables and now need to greenwash their rotting nuclear fleet. I rather trust my local scientists who care about peoples health.
Your local scientists often advocate for nuclear. So I'm a bit confused. Sure there's some that don't but there's no large group that has unanimous agreement on anything.
>>> I rather trust my local scientists who care about peoples health.
You said you trust the scientists and not the government regulations. I'm encouraging you to actually talk to these scientists because nuclear is very popular among scientists.
Significant means that hunters need to hand in their boar, it will be checked and if it surpasses the health levels defined, they're reimbursed with 250€ for every boar. This is taxpayer money. And just the state of Bavaria pays millions every year.
You know what would be a really nice HN feature.. when you submit a URL it can be flagged as "pay per view" and I can have a profile setting to filter them out.
The sad thing is; the admins here have, for reasons I can’t understand - taken a massive stance on not only allowing paywalled links, but featuring them; which is obviously a lot worse.
There’s a ton of opportunities here to use (paywall), or simply use an alternative link. The admins here don’t, won’t; and sadly, worst off - discourage comments like this.
I will never read a paywalled article on HN, by principle alone. I don’t come here to see information I have to pay for. I don’t think anyone here does.
I think it is fair that a forum maintained by an startup incubator would not like to encourage things that go against the monetization strategies of internet companies.
I think it is even very gentle of them not to censor comments with links to archive.is
Would be pretty easy to make a browser extension that does this, based on a list of known pay wall sites. Could even have a "create archive.is link" button for submitting the URL to archive.is if you wanted to leave it as a comment, as many people already do.
HN is an exceptionally clean, minimalist website. Instant page loads. No ads, no "accept cookie" banner, no autoplaying media, in fact no media of any kind, no engagement-maximizing algorithm. Quality moderation via dedicated human mods.
Then everyone comes here to talk about their Svelte ESnext 69.0 x serverless kubernetes 3d metaverse animated gif NFT marketplace subscription-based growth hack horror they're about to inflict on the public.
Janky is 50MB of Javascript that doesn't load all at once so things jump around ocnstantly at the start, only to display 1/3 of the text of an article before you insert 3 ads but I won't know that until I click past the cookie warning and the "Please subscribe" popup that happens when I scroll more than 100 pixels.
You assume that when I say janky that I mean JavaScript. Sites can not have JavaScript and still be featureful when it comes to features and privacy. In this instance I was specifically talking about rate limiting responses and some of the censorship I see here.
While the levels of radiocesium found in honey are not harmful to humans, I wonder if it has any deleterious effects on the bees themselves? Could this be a contribution to the "colony collapse disorder" we are seeing worldwide?
No, if that were the case it would have started in the 60's and gradually gotten better (bees have short lifespans). Instead, it's gotten worse and started much later. Pesticides are a much more likely explanation.
Gotta disagree; actually a lot stops those effects. There are multiple mechanisms for DNA repair besides good old natural selection.
Life developed in a mutagenic environment and there are natural sources of radiation all around us. Granite is measurably radioactive, for instance. Artificial radiation at much lower doses are not going to make a significant difference; they’re just very easy to detect because of the very precise energy signature they show on things like gamma ray spectrometers.
They mention it might be having an effect but also stat the the level is about 10 times lower than in the 70's. So my guess is that unless a high level of radioactivity is good but low level is bad then it is not a major contributing factor.
Unlikely. The article talks about a localized phenomenon, not something that could effect worldwide bee population issues. It explicitly talks about comparing honey from that region to other honey in the US.
Pesticides, possibly pollution, and disease in general are much more likely candidates. Last I heard there was an issue with some bee parasites, however you'd need to verify that.
"at levels above 0.03 becquerels per kilogram" -- note that an average banana contains about half a gram of potassium, producing 15 Bq, or about 25,000 times the radiation from a typical serving of honey. I'm not sure if cesium sticks around in the body -- the potassium in bananas doesn't.
Of course not. My whole point is that potassium, which is (except for extreme cases) radioactive due to Potassium-40, is an essential part of the human body. It does not “wash out.” Carbon itself is also radioactive, containing Carbon-14 that decays over time.
Life and our bodies are and have been bathed in carcinogenic radiation (as well as other carcinogenic and DNA-damaging environmental factors) since the beginning of life on Earth. Every time you go outside, you are exposed to ultraviolet radiation on your skin and when you’re inside, cement and granite countertops and nuts and bananas expose you to radiation as well. It’s inescapable. So an extremist perspective on artificial radiation where even its detection is considered harmful is just innumerate and scientifically illiterate. It’s a kind of superstition if not related to levels of naturally occurring radiation.
Sorry, didn’t see this until now. To be clear, I’m arguing that the radiation in honey is almost certainly not of concern. I think we’re on the same side.
That said, radium bioaccumulates because it subs in for calcium. You are over 2% calcium by weight, but you only take in about 0.1% of that mass per day. Potassium is about 0.2% of you, and you take in 2-3% of that daily.
Meaning that radium almost certainly more dangerous to you than potassium.
Fallout is evident in nearly everything made with atmospheric air. It's possible to tell the difference between steel made before 1945 (low-background) and after due to radionuclide contamination. Items made prior to the end of WWII are unlikely to have such trace impurities.
> Since the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing, background radiation has decreased to very near natural levels,[4] making special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive applications, as brand-new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature that it can generally be used in such applications
Apparently there’s less money in those scuttled ships now than there was 50 years ago.
How could it be the culprit? If nuclear material entered the groundwater supply it would be immediately noticeable and a major environmental catastrophe. It wouldn't just affect bees.
I understand, what I'm saying is that if this did happen it would have been obvious to everyone that it did. The fact that nobody's drinking water is irradiated right now proves that it couldn't have happened...
(Sidenote: is it really possible that after all these years they've just left a smashed nuclear bomb in a marsh? I would imagine they've gone back with better technology and recovered the pieces, at least to avoid the material falling into the hands of terrorists?)
If the US military couldn't recover it with the legal right to be there and no concern about having to be clandestine, I doubt a terrorist group will successfully recover it.
Probably the Air Force decided it would be cheaper to keep the site under constant surveillance for a few centuries than to go through the nightmare of trying to excavate a swamp well enough to extract the thermonuclear stage.
Fossil fuels. No question. We know the dangers of both very well. Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. More people die each day from climate.
I accept that statement but also the people we do know that have died are several orders of magnitude. While I'm sure there are plenty of people that have died from radiation that we don't know of I'm sure this number isn't in the millions but rather in the dozens or hundreds. It'd be pretty difficult to hide so many deaths.
I didn't say reckless. But we also can't get the death number to zero without spending an infinite amount of resources. But doing so would result in more deaths due to not spending resources elsewhere. The problem is we can't look at everything individually. We can to a certain point but after that there are coupled effects and also noise. This is very different than saying that we can be reckless (which is a gray term, not a binary).
Yep, it's the classical runaway tram problem: people will die anyway, but we should kill as fewer people as possible.
So, let look at nuclear risks:
* potential damage area is extremely high. If a state sponsored actor will take control over a nuclear station or nuclear waste store, he can blast it and disperse over half of a continent. Unlike nuclear weapon, it will be very dirty, so it's better not to do at same continent, but an Asian or African country can do that in the USA.
* potential loses are very high, up to billions of people, if major part of the continent will be contaminated. Nobody can provide insurance for such event.
If we increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, risks will increase by 10x or more, because it's easier to guard a few stations than a dozen or a hundred stations.
To keep risks low, safety of stations must be improved by the same number, otherwise, by increasing the number of stations by 10x we will have a Chornobyl/Fukushima level event every 3-5 years.
Do you see a way to improve safety of nuclear stations and waste storage by 10x, while keeping construction cost and construction time in acceptable range?
You can make a good argument without exaggerating. Exaggerating just makes people ignore you or worse you create strawmen and people endlessly fight because you give clearly false statements that can be rebuttled. Most of your conclusions don't follow. I mean do you really think things haven't changed in the last 50 years? You can't calculate likelihood from black swans.
Lets rephrase because the argument you're trying to make is good, just exaggerated and incomplete.
Nuclear has a small chance of something going bad but when it goes wrong it's big and localized. We'll bound the cost as a bit higher than Fukushima (which includes a tsunami) with $200bn. But if we look at the median cost of accidents is well under 10bn and covered by the insurance. You're right that there's also a chance of a state sponsored attack. Though note that reactor domes are designed to withstand airplane strikes. Most state sponsored attacks on nuclear facilities haven't led to disasters and fallout.
On the other hand, nuclear has provided us clean energy for over half a century. Still accounts for over 50% of the US's clean energy and provides and good constant base load.
Coal and gas have a moderate chance of things going wrong. Costs often being in the range of several billion dollars to several tens of billions, a handful being a few hundred. But the big cost is the slow release of carbon into the atmosphere which has led to the largest catastrophe in human history and has an estimated cost of $4 trillion per year.
The benefits are that these energy sources are cheap and can easily be throttled matching demand.
Renewables have a high chance of danger but it is very low in damage (high rate of people falling off roofs and dying). Sometimes there's a high risk but rare (see dams breaking and specifically Banqiao). The other issues are that we don't have a way to provide constant load, there's not enough batteries, low production rates, and some unsolved problems that mean they don't work everywhere and thus require gas or coal to fill in.
The upside is that they are relatively cheap and produce no emissions.
This is the calculous that the scientific community is doing. It's not simple and requires a lot of experts working in different areas working together. The scientific community is asking for nuclear + renewables (not nuclear vs renewables). Preference renewables but when you can't, nuclear is infinitely better than gas or coal. There's some that argue we don't need nuclear but their estimated costs are far higher than renewables with a sprinkling of nuclear. This is a more nuanced debate that I encourage others to read on but take your emotions out of it. The calculous extremely convoluted. Please listen to the scientist. Trust but verify does mean to first trust.
My parents are living in Northern Ukraine (Rivne region), so I have first-hand experience with all that stuff. Moreover, I'm lieutenant. My country is on war with RF. Both countries are nuclear, so it's high risk of using nuclear material in war. I spotted and stopped one attempt to use nuclear waste against Ukraine by rebels by myself, but I lost two of my men in the process.
I don't need to invent or exaggerate arguments, because I can point to problems we already have:
* Chornobyl disaster tanked economy of Ukraine for decades. Ukraine still paying for it. Life-time profits from nuclear energy cannot cover loses from just one disaster. Huge thanks for international help.
* Radiation level in my hometown was higher than in many parts of Chornobyl safety zone, because few hot particles are landed near to town and caused micro red-forest (so they are easy to spot). My parents were not able to move, because the price of land and property sank to the bottom ($600 for a 4-bedroom house). I moved to clean city. As a student, I measured the radiation level and found that my lungs were the most radioactive item in the classroom. It was not funny.
* Long term effects of nuclear poisoning. I watched it effect on my younger brother. People are forgetting about the danger of radiation now, so they're stopping taking iodine pills or iodine salt, and cancer level are rising and rising. For example, a whole school was sick in Northern Ukraine about a decade ago just because the school administration replaced iodine salt with regular salt to pocket the difference.
* Long therm safety of nuclear stations, reciprocal stations, waste sites. How to make them prone to diversion from a state sponsored (RF) agent. How to protect Chornobyl zone: lots of radioactive materials are stolen already. It's not possible to maintain long term full time ground patrol in a zone with dangerous levels of radiation.
* Safety subsystem can automatically shutdown a nuclear station when base level drops below threshold.
* Nuclear stations are competing with cities for fresh water because of drough: Rivne and Khmelnytsk stations from 2015, South-Ukrainian station from 2020. How to solve the problem with water?
I'm tired with nonsense about telegraph failure at Banqiao dam, or mixing of flood protection with hydro power generation, or house maintenance with solar power generation, to make nuclear power look safer in comparison.
Not to mention that the use of fossil fuels also releases small amounts of radioactive contamination directly into the atmosphere as a matter of normal use.
A 1991 study by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) predicted that some 2.4 million people would eventually die from cancer as a result of atmospheric testing globally.
Hard to say tbh, but I'd wager less than a million. For comparison, that's about the yearly death rate (or rather early deaths, which is similar to how we attribute radiation deaths) from coal. Not fossil fuels, coal. The __magnitudes__ are vastly disproportional here.
There's nothing to debate here except what we fear more. But our lack of fear over climate change is how we got here. Because the killer is slow moving and (mostly) invisible.
That's a bold assertion. Would you care to back it up?
Nuclear does not produce carbon. It's one of the safest forms of energy we have. There's a reason France has one of the lowest emission rates in the world. Killing nuclear in the 80's and 90's is clearly one of the worst mistakes we've ever made. The mistake we're making now is pitting nuclear against renewables. There's a large scientific consensus that we should _complement_ renewables with nuclear. Use renewables where we can but it is a far better option than gas. That's the choice we are currently making.
Let's not make the same mistake twice, there's a lot more on the line this time.
Nuclear does produce radioactive waste. It's why Chornobyl, Fukushima, Kyshtym, and few other places are inhabitable. We should clean these dirty places before we call nuclear energy «clean».
The context was nuclear weapon tests, nuclear weapons are designed and built for a purpose, they are man-made we have influence over their existence.
While the sun and hurricanes are natural phenomena that we don't really have much influence over nor were they designed for the specific purpose of giving skin cancer or killing people.
Modify mlyle's argument to deaths due to power outages or the danger of state sponsored attacks on power grids. Either way these comparisons are very weird. No one questions how a knife can be used for cooking and is found in most homes yet knives are very dangerous weapons. But also people aren't killing one another with kitchen knives. They're both knives but have different purposes and different designs.
Sure. At least 1 million per year, because that is the amount of people that die due to the various illnesses caused by coal mining and coal power plants (lung cancer etc.) in the US alone. Assuming the liberal estimate of 60,000 deaths caused by Chernobyl in total (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...), the nuclear industry would have to give us about 17 Chernobyls per year to match the fossil fuel industry.
When we phase out coal, say in 20 years, the next acceptable number will be much lower. We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't?
When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned, like it happened before. Do you have a Plan B for this case?
If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent, how much cancer percentage will rise when people will not be able to escape to clean land, clean food, clean water?
> We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't?
Yes, I was being facetious, obviously 1 million / year is not a good goal. But considering that the total amount of radiation related deaths has not even reached 1 million total since the first bomb in 1945, it is unlikely any such number will be approached soon.
> When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned
This has never happened for oil rig disasters that have released millions of gallons of toxic crude oil into the ocean causing untold damage to the global ecosystem. If we go all in on nuclear we're not turning around.
> Do you have a Plan B for this case?
Mars? The Plan B is just to not use as much electricity or convert a sizable portion of land to solar and wind farms. The public will not tolerate either option.
TL;DR the world's largest solar park can hold 459 Fukushima plants, which would generate over 13.5% of the world's energy supply as opposed to the 2.7GW the solar panels are currently generating which is 0.016% of the world's energy supply.
> If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent
A terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant could not cause an explosion like Chernobyl because the emergency shutdown procedure would safely end the fission reaction as opposed to Chernobyl's mechanism which accidentally accelerated it. The worst that could happen is something like Fukushima where the core melts down due to a LOCA (loss of coolant accident). Three cores melted down that day and 12 years later there has only been a single recorded radiation death.
> how much cancer percentage will rise
20 years from now we will also have more advanced and successful methods of treating cancer - keep in mind that modern chemo vs. 1980's chemo is worlds apart and certainly contributed to the public fear as cancer was still mostly a death sentence. Now many types of cancer have been cured and the likelihood of survival has risen across the board. This is not an excuse to say that cancer is acceptable, just that it won't be a death sentence for the majority of people even if a nuclear accident did somehow cover an entire continent.
Also, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was kept active until 2000! Operators were bused in every day following the accident. You can even go on tours in the city of Pripyat now and the resulting dose is just slightly higher than background radiation. In other words, the situation was resolved within a few years, and that was using 1980's technology. Today with technology such as robots, quadcopter drones, and advanced construction techniques (ie. the New Safe Confinement) it is unlikely that another Chernobyl would last even a few weeks before the core was covered up. It doesn't matter where it happens either; the UN and the developed world would not let an accident like that go unnoticed and unsolved in our connected society.
> A terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant could not cause an explosion like Chernobyl
Well mostly why Chernobyl is different is because their reactor was pressurized, and thus had the ability to explode (and spread core nuclear material over a large area). The only other event that has caused something similar without a pressurized reactor is one of the largest tsunami ever recorded.
But a terrorist attack on a power plant would need to come from the inside of the plant and to cause a disaster similar to either Fukushima or Chernobyl would require a significantly large weapon and fairly close to the reactor or where they store high energy materials (which is still inside the a pool of water).
How much can we «safely» kill by {solar panel roof installations, wind turbines, driving, drinking water, eating, taking showers, insert literally any }. You're creating an unreasonable position that I need to defend and you are not acting in good faith.
Fossil and biofuel combustion kills 8 million people per year and has for decades [1]. Nuclear testing exposed some hundreds of people to high levels of radiation, some of which died or had shortened lives. Wide populations that got fallout doses many times less than natural background were very likely not affected by testing fallout.
Thus, fossil and biofuel combustion have been many orders of magnitude worse than nuclear weapons testing for overall human health.
(This is an educational site that does food monitoring as public outreach. It is underfunded, and full disclosure, I am a former leader of the project).
There is a theory that the so called 'Long Peace' of 1945-present is a direct consequence of nuclear proliferation. This could be one possible reason to like nuclear weapons.
It is impossible to know how many civilian lives have been saved from conventional weaponry (including your own) because the threat of nuclear holocaust has nullified any benefits from such attacks. For example, I find it extremely hard to believe that the US mainland would have been able to go this long without being bombed without its nuclear arsenal. We've pissed off a lot of people that would love to destroy us but they can't because we would carry out our own holocaust within minutes. Countless American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, and Indian wars have fizzled out before the first shot because of the implication of nuclear bombardment.
Well minus the fallout and mortalities quite some people, included, find big explosions quite awesome. I wouldn’t say I like nuclear weapons specifically though
> The radiocesium levels reported in the new study fall "well below" 1200 becquerels per kilogram—the cutoff for any food safety concerns, the agency (red: FDA) says.
If anything, in tens of thousands of years, when anthropologists dig up the remains of the 2000s civilizations, you will make it that much easier for them to date us.
Trace amounts of radiation do not poison the entire air. There is natural radiation everywhere, from rocks, from space, from our own bones. The amount remaining from the tests is not even remotely close to a health hazard.
It's all to easy to conflate 'detectable' with 'hazardous' when you're dealing with some of the most sensitive instruments on earth.
It's still poison. Check msds.
Just because there is already poison in the air, doesn't mean people can't put more poison in the air.
Just because the poison doesn't kill everyone, doesn't mean it isn't poison.
That's a perspective one can have, for sure. Something that's like 10 orders of magnitude below the known hazard level is not something anyone should raise alarms about to the general public though. Otherwise you'd have to go around policing every little bird that's exhaling CO₂, etc.
Who were these people then? To say that they weren't scientists is to say that scientists can never be held accountable because every "actual" experiment is morally and ethically righteous.
Morality has nothing to do with it. There can't possibly be a control variable. Would you call someone who goes around smashing things a "scientist"? What is the experiment?
> It's wasn't a test. Someone just poisoned all the air.
If you want to be pedantic:
It was a test of if the air-poisoner-inator sufficiently poisoned the air. If the air was not poisoned then the experiment obviously failed. If the air was poisoned then the hypothesis was correct and the experiment succeeded.
A bomb test tests if the bomb bombed the location it was meant to bomb with the correct amount of bomb. The control variable would be not dropping the bomb.
> Would you call someone who goes around smashing things a "scientist"?
Yes, automotive engineers do this every day to build safer cars, and anyone in the safety industry obviously replicates unsafe conditions (explosions, fires, electrical failures, chemical spills, etc) to test safety equipment.
"Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down” - Alex Jason
They are doing contained, well-thought-out experiments, with hypotheses, peer review, control samples, ability to repeat trials, data collection, and discussion.
