(If this is considered grossly O/T for this board, I'll try posting it on the newer one, but I do think it's highly relevant to the whole discussion.)
FWIW--
I'm a non-expert, a non-scientist, and was fairly agnostic about nuke power till recently.
I try very hard to objectively sort through the multitude of opinions and reports about the developments at Fukushima (and their implications on lots of broader policy issues).
A big part of that is gradually determining whose opinions are NOT worth taking seriously.
While it only took me several hours to recognize that TEPCO was not to be trusted, and only slightly longer to figure out that many of the 'Nuclear Experts' in the Media appeared to be shills for the industry, that does NOT mean that 'experts' with the opposite perspective are any more trustworthy.
I quickly discerned that Busby appeared to be a nut, with a serious axe to grind, and disregarded him offhand.
Helen Caldicott seems like a nice lady, and I think she's done some good in the world, by bringing attention to proliferation issues that have largely been ignored.
But she, like Busby, says a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense, and seems prone to extreme exaggeration. I stopped paying attention to her pretty quickly, too.
Gunderson gave me a little more trouble. He comes off as so rational, and level-headed, I took him fairly seriously at first.
Then I saw him carefully, earnestly explain that the FHM of Unit 4 had clearly collapsed into the SPF, and was clearly sitting right on top of the crushed, and totally exposed, fuel racks themselves. This, frankly, scared the crap out of me.
One slight problem, though. After thinking it over for several hours, studying pictures and video, reading discussion on this board and others,... I realized it wasn't true.
It was pretty clear that the FHM had *not* dropped down into the pool, and in fact seemed to be just about where it started.
After that I started to notice that Gunderson says lots of things that appear to be false, or at least unsupported, no matter how calm he seems when he presents them.
So I stopped paying much attention to him.
(A great analogy can be drawn, I think, with the stuff said by Matt Simmons around the BP spill last year. He seemed like a good, and reasonable guy. He'd written a well-received book, and was highly respected by lots of smart people. But the stuff he was saying was ridiculous, and didn't even make logical sense internally. So I stopped listening.)
You slowly figure out what's unreasonable, inconsistent, non-sensical, or obviously biased (whichever direction), throw that all out, and see what's left.
Then you gradually start to edge towards the truth, which is almost always somewhere between the most extreme representations.
One helpful guideline is when there's an 'official' account with a readily apparent bias.
That provides an easy common-sense limit.
For instance, I have no idea how many people have died because of Chernobyl.
While I'm pretty sure it's not the million or so claimed by Greenpeace and Helen Caldicott, I'm also fairly certain it's not the 43 claimed by the Soviet government for many years, and still claimed today by the Ann Coulters of the world.
So, at least that's a start.
Similarly with the numbers of civilian deaths involved in the war in Iraq.
Nobody knows exactly what that number is. I do remember that at some point (perhaps in '07 or so) the CIA issued a certain number (something like 30,000, I think), and it was soon rebutted by some fairly left-leaning advocacy group, who claimed a number more like 800,000.
I imagine the latter was probably way high, and I'm certain the CIA number was outrageously low (especially since the smartest, best-informed journalists uniformly agreed that the CIA number was completely impossible).
Anyway, to bring it back to the present discussion, let's consider the total radiation released at Fukushima.
When Busby tells me it exceeds Chernobyl by a large margin, with no supporting evidence I can see, I automatically toss that out.
When TEPCO tells me, after weeks of dithering, obfuscating, screwing up, dissembling, etc., that it's 10% that of Chernobyl... I figure that's probably a lower limit at which to start the discussion.
When I then find out that that number's from data two weeks old, that they seem to have conveniently 'ignored' all the water-borne contamination, that they used an assumption that roughly doubled Chernobyl's official release-numbers, not to mention that it's continuing to compound every day, and now that they grossly understated the current release-rates... well, those are all pretty good indications.
I'd figure maybe I could double TEPCO's number, and I'd likely be in the right rough ballpark.
I doubt very much I'd be too far low, and I'd probably be well within an order.
Anyway, that's all in the vein of general rambling about common-sense guidelines for analyzing disasters with scant information.
It served me very well in looking at the Gulf last year --as the numbers I was guessing weeks before ended up being pretty damn close to the ones BP publicly conceded later on--
and I'm finding the parallels here quite amazing.
Azby said:
I appreciate that members of this forum are wiling to consider all possibilities. It's open minded and good science. But I have serious questions about Gunderson's credibility, as well as Busby's. The latter's arguments concerning radiation epidemiology, his ecological studies of Sellafield, and his "Second Event Theory" of DNA mutation have been pretty well demolished more than once. The report of the CERRIE committee from 2004 makes very informative reading in this regard. It notes that as far as Busby's claims are concerned, "The Committee concluded that the available scientific evidence did not support these hypotheses and, in many cases, substantially contradicted them." He threw a fit. Time and again during committee, one of which he chaired, he was asked to provide the papers upon which he based various claims so the others could review them, and was unable to. Sloppy does not begin to describe it. He makes this stuff up.
http://www.cerrie.org/report/
(For the record, I've been lurking for a while and just signed on. I'm not a scientist, but direct a design theory lab in Tokyo, doing mainly environmental design studies as well as a long-term collaboration with a neuroscience team on hand-brain issues. I'm learning a lot here. My hats off to you all)
