Re: Go nuclear
@bad_beaver:
> Also, comparing natural levels of radiation that our miserable species has adapted to with a reactor meltdown seems ever so slightly off
I'm not so much talking about the immediate vicinity of a meltdown - that's probably quite dangerous (although the 'Fukushima 50' are all still alive, and 'the most radioactive man in britain' who gazed down the piles of Windscale while it was on fire and was subsequently banned from touching his wife/kids, lived to a ripe old age) - I'm talking about low-level emissions into the global environment - which are far more costly to control than meltdowns.
ALARA says that ANY emission, no matter how small (even a microgram of tritium up your air extraction stack) must be mitigated as far as reasonably achievable (i.e. to the Nth degree). Most 'low level' nuclear waste is actually just barrels of paper overalls. When a worker goes into a "potentially radioactive" area (i.e. there is no radiation detectable here, but just in case - ALARA you know) then they wear disposable paper overalls. New ones every time they go in. What happens to the used overalls? Well they MIGHT be contaminated. So they are then very expensive low-level "nuclear" waste. Such is the hyperbole of ALARA.
Meanwhile, open-air nuclear BOMB testing was happening regularly up until about 1990. This released uncountable orders-of-magnitude more than any nuclear power plant could, meltdown or not, straight into the global environment.
Yet power plants get slapped in the face for releasing the odd GBq of tritium. (Bequerels as a unit makes everything sound bad because it is so tiny - it literally means one atom decay per second. There is about 1GBq tritium in your average glow-in-the-dark keyring)
The trouble with radiation, really, is that it is invisible yet eminently detectable. Your enviro-hippie can come along with a detector and say LOOK- RADIATION - It's all over the place and it's coming from THAT PLANT. Is it dangerous? You've only got him to ask..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
