Hacker News Reader

Comment by jharsman | Hacker News Reader

A number of years ago there was an incident in Sweden where a tiny crack was discovered in a container that had been used to transport nuclear waste from one of Sweden's reactors.

This caused a lot of media attention and some politicians made statements about how this was unacceptable and that they would look into it.

One reporter interviewed an older physicist that worked with radiation protection for the government and asked him if a substantial amount of radiation had been released. He said something along the lines of:

"Well, yes there was a fairly significant amount of radiation, about the same level as you would be exposed to when standing next to several crates of bananas."

This made the media hype seem somewhat exaggerated...

View on HN

I think the media's exaggerated response to tiny nuclear leaks is, however, one case where I'd prefer media hype to put the pressure on the industry to over-engineer their containers.

The consequences of breaking open (not just a tiny crack) a crate of bananas and a container of industrial nuclear material are probably many many multitudes apart.

I'll bet that more people have been killed in the last 10 years by falling crates of bananas than have been killed by leaking nuke containers.

Yes, there are far more crates of bananas. My point is that we should make these decisions with cost-benefit analysis, not hype.

How do you weigh the benefit of not killing unaware people against the benefit of not killing people? At least banana loaders know they're in some danger, and have probably analyzed the cost of that against the benefit of a larger pay.

Six months ago you could have made the same claim about blowout preventers. Extremely rare catastrophic failures can cost a bundle. In many cases you may not even be aware of the risks or the potential costs before you first encounter them.

More nuclear power is the future, at least in the near term, but we should have the humility to admit we don't really understand all the risks and all the costs.

We also don't have enough resources to protect against every imaginable risk, which six-months ago, is all the current oil disaster could have been: imagined.

It still makes more sense to spend attention and resources protecting us from falling crates of bananas if those are more harmful in reality.

But fear normally wins these battles, like with terrorism. Automobile accidents kill about 36,000 people[1] per year in the United States. That's 12 times the number[2] of people killed in the 9/11 attacks. Which one of those do you think we're spending hundreds of billions on?

1. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

2. http://nymag.com/news/articles/wtc/1year/numbers.htm

>... every imaginable risk, which six-months ago, is all the current oil disaster could have been: imagined.

Ahem:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=127_1274931222

I don't know, how much goes into transportation in the US? I mean, aside from the vehicles, including researching new tech for safety, advertising those features, law enforcement of safe driving laws, DMV money, roadwork, and whatever else goes into it. It seems like a lot to me.

Another thing to think about is that maybe we're hitting the safety cap in automobiles. Maybe the cost of making things more safe nowadays is just way too high. It could be that the cost of going after some terrorists is even higher, but we might not have been so sure at the time.

Also, the problem with ignoring people who set out to murder you is that it shows an unwillingness to do so. It might prompt other would be killers to attack. A car, on the other hand, isn't going to notice all the accidents happening, and choose to crash because of them.

>Also, the problem with ignoring people who set out to murder you is that it shows an unwillingness to do so.

Terrorism is not about murdering people. It's about pushing people like yourself to overreact.

Terrorism is pretty much about murdering people. If you're talking about the motive for terrorism though, I didn't mention it, so I don't know why you would try to contradict me on something I never mentioned.

Also, what are people like me? And what is a proper reaction to an organized attempt to kill civilians in your country? I do not suggest that the US took the proper course of action, btw.

> Terrorism is pretty much about murdering people.

No. Terrorism is, by definition, about using fear as a weapon to further your goals. Terrorism can be perfectly successful even if nobody dies -- it's all about playing your opponent's need to react against him. That's why even a fake bomb, or pre-announced bomb attacks IRA style are terrorism -- because there has to be a reaction to a bomb threat, at a relatively small cost a terrorist can force the opponent to do huge evacuations and bomb sweeps.

Completely ignoring the 9/11 would have been a better reaction that what the USA took -- but as usually with well planned terrorism, completely ignoring the attack would have been politically impossible.

> And what is a proper reaction to an organized attempt to kill civilians in your country?

A proportioned response against the attackers, instead of some of their various allies or complete third parties.

Expand that to 60 years and you include Japanese who suffered long term radiation problems and birth defects as a result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention Chernobyl and those who suffered as a result of depelted uranium munitions in both Gulf Wars.

On the last point:

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/95178_du12.shtml

Over x10 increase in Iraqi birth defects from 1989 - 2001:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/iraq-m10.shtml

I think giving lethal doses of radiation is an important part of what a nuke is supposed to do (which is mostly to terrify the other side).

As for Chernobyl, it was significantly underengineered and negligently operated, something clearly indicated by the fact no other comparable nuclear accident happened, before or since.

And depleted uranium ammo... well... that's what you get when you use something toxic (depleted uranium is toxic even if it's not that much radioactive) to make your ammunition.

It wasn't merely negligently operated. The safety was turned off for tests. Effectively, it was the equivalent of sawing off your brake pedal and driving full speed into a wall to see if the airbags hold. With known-faulty airbags.

The only point I was making was in response to the comment above where the commenter was downplaying the effects of radiation poisoning causing huge amounts of human suffering and death. I was merely pointing out that there has been a lot of hardship caused by both nuclear weapons, DU and nuclear accidents - read the second link above, and account of a guy who was sent to clear up DU after the first Gulf War. Pretty horrific stuff.

Both the radioactive fallout of a nuke and the toxicity of depleted uranium are features rather than bugs. Those things are designed to be as lethal as possible.

OTOH, in the specific case of the depleted uranium, it could be possible the extra lethality was only a happy accident.

Weapon designers are an interesting breed.

Part of the problem with objective cost/benefit analysis in the case of nuclear exposure is the history of government deception about the risks of nuclear experiments. All that lying has made people very distrustful of both scientists and the government.

I found

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...

to be a revelation in this regard. It's about the uses and abuses of the Nevada test site over the 1950s. From the summary:

"In the late 1950s, birth defects and deaths from cancer began to soar among civilian and military test-site workers and their newborn children, and among "downwinders" living in Nevada, Utah and other western states. Gallagher, a professional photographer, spent several years interviewing and photographing these nuclear-test victims and gathering evidence of official indifference, callousness and outright cover-ups. The sheer density of suffering depicted here is awesome; in certain Utah towns, for instance, Gallagher found cases of cancer in every house. The bitter, stoic testimony of the victims (many of whom have since died), accompanied by Gallagher's photographic portraits of them, is deeply disturbing and exposes a major national scandal. "

I think hype does far more harm than good. It tends to produce blanket opposition to nuclear power rather than pressure to do it well. And nuclear facilities are already over-engineered. What we need is calm examination of the risks and benefits, not hype.

Yes, but you should put equal pressure on other industries that do as least as much harm. E.g. coal burning power station release more radioactivity [1] into the atmosphere (and other worse stuff) than nuclear power plants.

[1] Coal contains some radioactive elements, and they are burning so much coal, that it gets significant.

Its easy to cause hysteria over things one can't have one of the few senses to grasp. Radiation has no taste, smell or other subjective graspable metric. Thats how you can play on it and media knows it, as good writers do.

From now on, all small leaks should be denoted in crates of bananas. 1x1 meters in size.

I wonder at how many bananas my WRT54Gs radiates...

I love the comparison through to three-mile-island. This really goes to show that radiation is so hyped and never put in perspective. Obviously not everyone is a nuclear physicist or even understands this stuff. This is why people should have researched and claimed that the radiation exposure they got from 3mi is the equivalent of ingesting a single banana. It is important to put things in terms most people would understand when you are making a public announcement. Maybe that is asking too much from the media...

Unfortunately, radiation lends itself very well to sensationalism - "Invisible death rays are killing you right now!" That's exactly the kind of thing you would actually, really want to be very afraid of if it were happening, because developing symptoms is the only way a civilian could notice.

But the important part of assessing danger is knowing the strength of the radiation, and most public accounts simplistically divide objects into "radioactive, run for your lives" or "safe". Since measurements can accurately distinguish levels of radiation that are actually indistinguishable as far as real danger to human beings, you get reports like in the link stating that "the milk is radioactive!" when it's only 1/75th of a banana dose and no threat at all.

> Unfortunately, radiation lends itself very well to sensationalism

It's strange, but it wasn't always this way. If you look back into older literature, there was a sense that radioactive things would bring about a bright, promising future. So much so that people did some pretty crazy things (at least, knowing what we know now) like those foot x-rays that shoe stores once gave (which caused some pretty high radiation exposure), or those "health" drinks that got people to drink Radium water a long time ago[1].

But once the problems came to light along with the fears of nuclear war and the demonstration of the power of atomic weapons, radiation became something to be feared, even irrationally much. I really hope that things even out over time, so that we fear it neither too much nor too little. It certainly can be dangerous. There were even some really scary criticality accidents[2] with people working on the cores to nuclear bombs. But at the same time, people point out that we don't have to fear every bit of radiation. After all, there's plenty of natural background radiation all around us, from bananas to Brazil nuts.

I wish that we could come up with a happy medium, but I think it will require a lot of time and education.

[1] If you want to see the Radium water, read this: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-08/healthy-glow-d...

[2] The "walking ghost" phase after massive exposure is especially creepy. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident

OT, but interesting factoid about TMI:

TMI-2 was built on the final approach path to Harrisburg International Airport, a former U.S. Air Force base, and was therefore beefed-up specifically to withstand the impact of a B-52 hitting the structure at 200 knots. A normal containment [vessel] would have been breached.

http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/three-mile-island-memories/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com