Why is Fukushima nuclear crisis so threatening?

JaredJames

Wasn't so hard was it, now let's get some from Joe regarding all his claims (including those that support the conspiracy style ones) and everyone is happy.

Dmytry

ahh, and for acceptance of the LNT: see
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/risk.html
really, guys, you only show your ignorance here by demanding sources for common knowledge. It's as if in one of the scientific forums here someone demanded sourcing on the derivative of sine or cosine.

NUCENG

If we shut every nuclear plant in the world today, we will lose 20% of the power generation in the US. You will still be exposed to low level radiation. There will still be cancer deaths. In the hot California summer there will be more brownouts and rotating blackouts. Power shortages cost lives more certainly than your lack of proof of harm from nuclear plants. If I recall the great Northeastern Blackout a few years ago had 6 deaths blamed on the blackout. Remember the people in Chicago that died of heatstroke after the steam explosion in the utility tunnels cut off their power? Even a traffic light out of service can be deadly. It is time for you to start justifying those kinds of threats before we start shutting anything down. Economic disaster and increased death rates are a common sense approach?

The same God that gave me a soul gave me a brain - my dreamworld, your reality. Okay I'll choose my dreamworld where I will try to make things better. You can have your reality where we all should be huddled in a corner waiting to die. You have seen many people die from radiation exposure. Really? Were they first responders at Chernobyl? No? Then, Sir, show your proof.

JaredJames

Thank you Dmytry.

As a note, I was referring more to Joe's specific claims when requesting sources.

QuantumPion

According to the IAEA, 0.2 Gray (20 Rads) is the threshold between known acute effects. Meaning there is no statistical evidence of doses below 20 Rads directly causing cancer.

Note that I am not saying that low levels of radiation do not cause cancer. What I am saying is that the risk is so small that it is impossible to tell whether low radiation dose causes cancer or not.

GJBRKS

The question raised by this thread pertains not to the immediate effects of a nuclear explosion or reactor breach , but to the possible amount of radioactive fallout produced.

Thus the introduction of megatonnes of energy can as well be harmlessly compared to energy of incident rays as it is therefore not conducive to this discussion.

Your thoughts as well as my words ...

PS I'm glad I have the talent to compare apples and oranges , helps me a lot during shopping fi.

Dmytry

ahh, also, regarding LNT. The EPA page is kind of out of date. The microbeam studies are additional evidence in support of LNT.
The reason it is not possible to show effects of low levels of radiation is that you need large sample sizes to eliminate noise, i.e. random fluctuations. The statistical noise is proportional to square root of sample size. Meaning that if it takes e.g. 100 people to conclusively show dose effect of 1 sievert - which causes excess cancer rate of 10% on background of 40%, it will take 100 million for 1 millisievert (and another hundred million for control).
It is not possible to control for healtcare (rate of failure to diagnose), age, smoking, race, etc. when big populations are involved. It is theoretically impossible to directly show that radiation effects continue at low doses - there is a threshold to sensitivity of population studies. However, theoretical considerations - and single cell single track studies - lead to conclusion that effects are linear.

Generally, in science, the continuation is adopted as null hypothesis, in absence of proof of non-continuation.
For example, how much money would you bet that 1 gram of matter does not attract 1 gram gravitationally over distance of 2 meters? Such attraction would be EXTREMELY difficult to show, but surely we aren't going to bet our money it isn't true, as simple logic shows there must be some very complicated effect to make gravity not work on 1 gram, but work on 1000 pieces each of 1 gram.
Would you bet human lives on such an assertion? I can't show that 1 gram attracts 1 gram over distance of 2 meters directly, sorry, all i have is theory that it does, based on evidence with larger masses or smaller distances and the perceived complexity of a theory which would fit the experimental data but would not have 1 gram attract 1 gram over 2 meters distance.
It's a simple matter of occam's razor - and occam's razor is very much in favour of LNT.

Dmytry

no. Cancer is not 'acute effect', it happens after many years if at all. The acute effects are like, white blood cell decrease, immune system less effective, hair loss in particularly radio-sensitive individuals, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome
cancer is never included as acute effect.
http://www.jlab.org/div_dept/train/r...ts.html#accute

The word 'acute' has specific meaning in medicine.

JaredJames

Just to reiterate, my issue was Joe attributing all his claims to low level radiation and ignoring any other possibilities and then not supporting them in the slightest.

Drakkith

The comparison of scientific theories and the effects of radiation on human health is not possible. Scientific theories have FAR fewer variables to contend with than someone studying a person. That is one reason medical science has so many mysteries in it. Does 1 gram of matter attract another 1 gram of matter gravitationally? Of course! How do we know if we couldn't measure it? Because the rule of gravitational attracted has been proven to be correct from things as large as supermassive stars down to the size of small asteroids at least. We don't EVER see any sudden jumps where a small increase in mass results in a large increase in gravity. It is steady the whole way.

On the other hand, you have uncountable variables that could cause cancer in a person compounded by the fact that we aren't nearly as knowledgeable about how the human body works as we are about the basic laws of physics. Was their cancer caused by radiation, smoking, genetic anomolies, viruses, or one of a thousand other things?

The only way to decide anything is to look at statistical data and make an educated guess. We can look at individuals known to have been exposed to radiation and observe their progress in the long term. This gives us at least some general knowledge of how radiation affects someone. Does it tell us that every person reacts the same way? No! On the contrary, people are all slightly different and will respond slightly differently than your observed person does. Do you look at this fact and just throw away all of your observations because they aren't 100% accurate? No! For then you wouldn't have ANY data to go off of.

QuantumPion

You misunderstood. It is the dose that is acute, not the formation of cancer.

Dmytry

you said "Meaning there is no statistical evidence of doses below 20 Rads directly causing cancer."
which is you misunderstanding the source.

andybwell

Twenty years after Chernobyl, increased thyroid cancers in children are still prevalent. The immediate concern for the Japanese government should be the children living around Fukushima nuclear reactors.
"Today, 20 years after the Chernobyl accident, the large increase in thyroid cancer incidence among those exposed in childhood and adolescence continues."
http://www.hotthyroidology.com/editorial_158.html

Drakkith

I think you mean, increased thyroid cancers in people exposed to radiation as children still show increased thyroid cancers. At least, that's what the article says.

Argentum Vulpes

@ Joe Neubarth:
I'd be much more worried about living downwind of a coal plant. You will get a little over a 100x more of a yearly dose from a coal plant then a nuclear plant (490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants.

/sarcasm on/

I really hope you and every anti nuke out there get San Onofre shut down.

/sarcasm off/

Really the loss of San Onofre would considerably hurt the state of California. The loss of 2350 GW of base load power would be disastrous. Also the loss of 2K + well paying jobs would be disastrous. But then again the western states with large rivers or reservoirs might not mind all of the money/jobs that would come from making a large base load power plant to replace San Onofre.

@ Dmytry:
Yes the USA accepts the LNT, however France, China, and Japan follow Radiation hormesis in their guidelines. Even the medical publication Radiology has come out against LNT saying:

LNT was a useful model half a century ago. But current radiation protection concepts should be based on facts and on concepts consistent with current scientific results and not on opinions. Preconceived concepts impede progress; in the case of the LNT model, they have resulted in substantial medical, economic, and other societal harm.

Boding mine, artical

If the LNT were a hard and fast rule then places like Ramsar Iran would be wasteland and the populace that was crazy enough to live there would be in oncology wards. Instead this High background radiation area (260 mSv/y) has no noticeable increase of cancer rates. And there are several other areas on the globe that have a HBRA. Study

Also on a side note if humans were single celled organisms then the LNT would be an essential rule to follow. However last I checked we are multiple celled organisms with several repair functions that evolved on a hot planet. The LNT is just over an over cautionary theory.

A factor that must also be looked at when comparing Chernobyl to Fukushima is that the populace living Ukraine/Belarus had a iodine deficiency, therefore when a large quantity of iodine was released into the environment the body picked it up and the thyroid concreted it. Since this iodine was radioactive and in a large dose in the thyroid an increase of thyroid cancers are to be expected. Because of the Japanese high iodine diet I really doubt that there will be a significant increase of thyroid cancers seen. If the Thyroid is saturated with iodine it will not absorb any more, even if it is radioactive.

Dmytry

nope.
workers there breathe in all sorts of nasty chemicals when manufacturing ipods for you. Work safety is nearly non-existent. A great example of progressive country when it comes to protection.
terrible nuclear safety record for past 20 years, not just Fukushima.
That's always the thing... the hormesis studies always rely on some third world place where they barely even have diagnosis to start with. Places where the only data is from fools who take a consumer grade geiger counter, and think it's mSv/h figures have anything to do with reality. (hint: most counters are overcounting betas).
Cancers start from 1 cell. It is a fact that cancer is a clonal expansion of a single cell.
There is a baseline cancer rate of about 40%. Small changes to amounts of carcinogenic chemicals (that's what radiation does, makes reactive chemicals), which leads to small increase in mutation rate, can be expected to result in proportionally small changes to the cancer rate. Radiation is nothing special.
The 'repair mechanisms' - and most importantly, not the repair mechanism, but the programmed cell death - they work. They work extremely well. There is about 10¹⁴ cells in the human body, and in the whole life of human, in only 40% of the humans, over whole lifetime, a single cell becomes cancerous. Depending to the diet, it can be anywhere from 30% to 50% though.
Its BS. Firstly, it may come as surprise but soviet union had such thing as dietary supplements, secondarily, the doses required for saturation - such as in the typical radiation protection pills, you can look it up, are on order of several hundreds times larger than the RDA. 130 milligram
http://www.epi.state.nc.us/epi/phpr/ki/kifaq.html
vs RDA of 150 microgram
http://www.nutriherb.net/iodine.html
so taking your RDA doesn't quite equate to the protection pills. Those protection pills aren't something you'd just take, too, having too much iodine is not good for you. Saturation is not normal, and does not happen with those 'iodine rich' diets.

Argentum Vulpes

Dmytry did you even bother to read either paper? What dose the fact that HBRAs are in third world areas have to do with anything. I guess the PhD researchers or the assistants that are sent to do a study are using the cheapest equipment out there and ignoring scientific procedures when taking in data. Thanks for opening my eyes to that fact.

Also the WHO has come out in a paper stating that iodine deficiency really helped with the uptick in thyroid cancers after Chernobyl. Also Oxford has put out a paper that came to the same conclusion. As for the protection pills being distributed the USSR the government would of had to of handed them out quickly. However they didn't acknowledge the accident till 3 day later after they were embarrassed into it.

This really bugs me that you are acting just like the global climate change deniers. You have been shown a mountain of evidence from reliable engineers, and reliable sources, yet you arguments come from sources of questionable reliability or from studies with very narrow scopes.