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Comment by noirchen | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago a professor from the Miami University in Ohio came to our institution to give a talk about her students accidentally found high levels of radiation in a valley nearby. After some investigation they tracked down the source of radiation to a factory that prepared nuclear raw materials during the cold war. Some of the radiating dusts got carried by the wind and affected a region of tens of miles down in the valley. Apparently the locals in the valley town are not informed and the cancer rate is relatively high in the town. For some reason their papers on this are rejected, and calls for a public investigation were buried. I am not sure what the situation is now, but it would not be too difficult to contact some faculties of environmental sciences in that university if anyone is interested.

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I wonder if this was it, Alba Craft Laboratory, Inc. They processed radioactive uranium in Oxford, Ohio. https://magazine.miamistudent.net/alba-craft/

Sounds like it got cleaned up in the 1990s.

That is it. They published a book which the article mentions. It was reported in USA Today in 2000. OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy.

This is the guy to figure it out: https://www.armscontrol.org/about/daryl_kimball

That's not the resume of someone not able to get the word out.

>OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy.

"Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't despite everyone dropping dead from cancer" is a tempting and juicy narrative and will generally be welcomed with open arms around here even if it turns out reality is a lot more mundane (reality is almost always more mundane than the story).

Excise the part you made up and simply say Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't and you have an accurate assessment of what happened.

There does not appear to be any evidence they knew they were or were likely to be contaminating the site and ignored it at the time (i.e they did not act with negligence). The typical accusations, denial, lawsuit, wash, rinse, repeat cycle that tends to characterize instances when corporations act in bad faith (malice). By the time the site was identified activities that were contaminating it had ceased. It was cleaned up as promptly as a big lumbering bureaucracy (DOE in this case) can be expected to. They even expedited the cleanup at the request of the stakeholders.

This does not appear to be an example of corporate bad behavior because it is lacking in both negligence and malice.

If you want to be outraged over evil corporations go read about DuPont poisoning the water in various places. There's been a few longer articles posted here about it fairly recently and they seem to actually be acting in bad faith.

Incompetence is not an acceptable excuse.

Where did I assert or imply it was or bring up anyone's competence at all?

It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office in 2019 and look at decisions made decades ago and say "they should have known" when in in all liklihood the people doing this probably didn't know they were leaving behind an unsafe level of radioactivity.

Speaking generally about pollution, not this specific case, everybody wants to see everything as the result of some bad actor(s) so they can have someone to blame. Reality is often much more mundane. Usually either it was not widely known that the thing was dangerous at that level of exposure, the people who could know didn't want to go looking for the knowledge or society considered the pollution worth it and if it bothered you the onus was on you to limit your own exposure (social media comparison anyone?). If you didn't want to smell paint all day you didn't live downwind of the paint factory. Times have changed a lot and to try and look at decisions in the past through the lens of modern values is a fools errand, to put it charitably.

people read through their own lenses. some people read conspiracy, others see that it is generally due to circumstances and human error. perhaps, it might be somewhere in between, or perhaps both overlap in ways. i'd say people generally overestimate how 'on purpose' these things occur, but then again, with lack of clear information, both sides of the coin hold equal value...

Juicy like the tales around aromatic amine dyes, or beryllium, or tetraethyl lead, you mean?

There are alot of anecdotal incidents like that which don't attract attention for reasons unknown or because they fall short of a standard. One I'm familiar with was a cancer cluster associated with county roads, which were tarred gravel until the late 1970s. A local factory would kindly "donate" waste oil loaded with various nasties to the county, who would tar the roads with it, there were elevated rates of lung cancers along those roads. Because the "cluster" was a strip, it didn't meet a geographic threshold.

Other common nasties include old rail depots and military depots. The stuff they used to clean locomotives was awful. I read a local article about a local military depot issue and a program called "Defense Environmental Restoration Program for Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS)". The New York/New Jersey District estimates it has $500M of cleanup to do, with an annual budget of $3-5M.

it is really difficult to get people to 'admit' mistakes like this due to the long term human costs often involved. Even, people will do a lot to avoid any additional financial costs incurred when such an admission is made. Hence, academics and interested non-academic parties are often boycotted from releasing such information, or if not possible ,ridiculed / discredited to avoid such financial costs to the responsible parties.

it's a shame, and i'm not yelling conspiracy, but this is how business and politics works, and that's a shame / sad.

If anyone was interested to follow up and research the current status of this valley you note, most likely they would meet similar resistance to publish their findings.

Looking from the outside, dealing with problems of this scale have a number of aspects to them: remediation of the issue, understanding, prevention, and accountability. In this list, accountability stands out. A person or organization that makes a mistake that has already been taught the other pieces of understanding and prevention of an accident has limited need for accountability.

This is not how our society works or thinks, though. There is a strong current of punitive accountability. From a financial perspective, someone might argue that this makes sense: someone who causes harm to many others shouldn't be allowed to remain rich. However, implementing such a system means that organizations within will defend themselves vociferously.

This is why many businesses are starting to use low or no accountability systems to make sure that root cause analysis and mistakes are brought to the forefront after issues. I'm not suggesting that such a system would be easy to implement on a much larger level, especially with our level of inequality in the US, but perhaps the solution is just not to be so damn punitive, and perhaps the other aspects of issue remediation wouldn't be so damn bad. Perhaps there wouldn't be lawyers informing business owners that they can't apologize, because that is opening the doors to being completely destroyed by accountability.

On Hacker News there are relatively many people arguing for nuclear fission, I wonder if they ever factor in societial factors like these.

In an ideal society it still would be a challenge to deal with the unprocessable wastes of nuclear fission (some extremely poisonous and with half lifes well beyond thousand years). But we are far from ideal and the incentives to not just offload it onto future generations are simply not there.

>I wonder if they ever factor in societial factors like these.

Radioactive releases like this are endemic to every coal-burning power station, which while a problem for public health certainly isn't publicized like this is.

Remember, carbon emissions will also destroy the planet if the current projections are anything to go by; I think the chance (certainly less likely with modern reactor designs) that a few local areas are rendered uninhabitable is a tradeoff society will need to be willing to make when the alternative is that the entire planet be rendered uninhabitable over a significantly longer timeframe.

Any other answer just isn't taking climate change seriously enough. Reactors are ready (with the proper funding) for construction today; solar/wind designs capable of supplying the quantity of baseload power nuclear can do not currently exist and neither does power storage- and they aren't nearly as scalable as building another reactor is (mainly due to land and raw materials usage) when power demands jump because everyone needs an air conditioning to survive the summer and a local desalinization plant (or water pipeline) because the rivers and aquifers no longer provide enough water. Additionally, if an energy-intensive carbon capture technology becomes available, the only energy source capable of powering such a device at the scale required is nuclear.

We've already offloaded our waste onto future generations. Might as well use the most effective technology we know how to create to stem the bleeding a bit.

I’m in favour of nuclear, but what you say of renewables is only half right. PV is currently around 0.5 terawatts and 2018’s relatively slow growth was 27%, and at these rates it is likely to solve most of our problems before any nuclear plant not yet commissioned gets finished.

As for land usage, if the USA did this it would be smaller than the road network, rising to “about the same” if you want to replace all ICE cars with battery cars.

CO2 capture, and desalination, don’t need to be run 24 hours per day, so there’s no reason to care if they don’t have energy storage to run at night. Likewise, AC is most important when, and just after, the sun is shining, so the storage need is low.

Storage does have a long way to go before we’re out of trouble, but even if I wasn’t fairly optimistic about it, PV knocks out the worst carbon sources first, giving us more time to build — for example — your preferred nuclear reactors.

Reverse osmosis desalination needs to operate 24/7 as the capital costs are extreme.

Storage backed solar power is significantly lower than nuclear across most of the world. Further as a base load production Nuclear can’t cheaply follow demand which makes it a poor fit in a world with occasionally negative wholesale prices. That is what is stopping significantly increased Nuclear adoption.

Please don’t confuse finance and physics. Taxes and incentives can change financials overnight.

It’s cheaper for a reverse osmosis plant to buy batteries to operate at night than shut down 1/2 the tome. Stupid incentives can change what people do, but the economy pays for the inefficiency.

It all depends on what you don't count as costs. When you take environmental impact of running a desalination plant off non-renewables, it might be more efficient to not run it at night if the wind isn't blowing. Thinking in terms of current prices doesn't make sense in the environment context.

(I agree that a lot of batteries may be a very good solution.)

no carbon emissions will not destroy the planet - it will just destroy human civilisation.

> I wonder if they ever factor in societial factors like these.

This is either egregious intellectual laziness or a passive-aggressive attack, neither of which I'd like to see on HN. In any case, the answer is that we do, and fission is still orders of magnitude safer than coal.

Do you though? The cost of potential accidents is not integrated in the price. When shit happens on a large scale the company doesn't have the funds to repair the local economic loss or century-scale maintenance effort.

0.0000x% chance of a major issue vs 100% chance of breathing various fumes and particles all your life.

What's the societal factors of coal and ICE again ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

> 0.0000x% chance of a major issue

Which might be okay if it wasn't for certain states whose prime directive is to cover up mistakes and issues.

Otherwise this article wouldn't exist and we'd be discussing ways to improve safety. Just look how they handled Chernobyl. It was pure luck that the majority of Europe wasn't contaminated as a result of disinformation, refusal to accept help in order to appear strong, and pure incompetence on all fronts. All followed by an unwillingness to fix the problem.

Nuclear fission power in such hands is seriously dangerous. Even Belgium is holistically incapable of safely running a nuclear plant as highlighted by Tihange.

I am completely with your sentiment but the true issue is real world handling. Idealistic scenarios don't help us.

Even Chernobyl is a drop in the ocean compared to the impact of fossil fuel though. aka: The worst case scenario of using nuclear energy is less harmful than the best case scenario of using fossil fuel.

It's all about perceived threat vs actual threat. In the case of nuclear energy the perceived threats is blown out of proportion, in the case of fossil fuel it's just business as usual. I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have issues, but I'd argue that nuclear issues are manageable/solvable whereas fossil fuel issues are not.

It's not nuclear vs fossil fuels that is the real debate though. It's nuclear vs renewables. And IMO renewables come out way ahead in this debate.

They have other drawbacks, pollution, storage, transportation and peak production aren't solved.

In the meantime just look at France vs Germany, nuclear is a net positive in every possible metrics I can come up with. How many people died directly/indirectly in the last 60 years because of german coal industry ? Way more than in all nuclear disasters world wide. And that's for a single country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

fr https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/El...

de https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/El...

The argument isn't that it is riskless cheap energy - but that it is far better than fossil fuels and necessary to complement other renewables in energy supply.

There is no question that there are risks and they are non trivial - but they are mostly manageable through proper regulation!

It can be argued that regulation is almost completely broken in the United States.

>almost completely broken

That seems like a gross exaggeration, almost to the degree of willful ignorance.

The amount of premature death as well as increase in morbidity caused by the entire nuclear energy industry in the US is significantly lower than any other source of power. Simply the steel and concrete alone required for solar power pushes it's morality rate higher.

While our current secretary of energy, Rick Perry, might have had no clue what the department of energy did when he wanted to abolish it as a presidential candidate. Nonetheless, it and other regulatory bodies are quite effective an ensuring we have safe nuclear facilities.

If the regulation worked we probably wouldn't need nuclear reactors. If the trillions spent on oil subsidies due to regulatory capture (which incurs the cost of warfare) went to renewable energy, we'd likely be close to non-dependent on oil and nuclear.

We'd still want them though - progress of civilization is predicated on increasing availability of cheap energy, and nuclear reactors are great for this - using high-density fuel to generate electricity in a safe and non-polluting way.

Regarding the expectation of progress, have you seen this?

http://folk.uio.no/roberan/t/global_mitigation_curves.shtml

No, I haven't. It's very informative, thanks!

WRT. energy needs - pulling carbon out of the atmosphere will be energy-intensive; it's yet another reason why we need clean and cheap energy (and lots of it!). Nuclear shouldn't be taken off the table.

Seeing the shape of the slope needed now and comparing it to the shape we have needed in e.g. 2000 and knowing the current political climate in the U.S. makes me very pessimistic that the 2 deg limit will be achieved, and knowing how dramatic e.g. 4 degrees or more are going to be, I doubt anybody can expect much “progress”. More some medieval developments.

The current estimate is +3.2 deg in 2100, but it still assumes that the current actions progress:

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/

I wanted to reply in a snarky way but your question raises a very troublesome and deep problem to which a solution if it doesn't come right way will certainly condemn our successors to basting in a hothouse earth with too little energy for a recognizable civilization.

Have you thought about what could be offered up in the way of positive incentives for responsible behavior? Do they need to be positive incentives rather than overwhelming disincentives?

Copyedited

Pollution and contamination are merely future opportunities for innovation. Let’s make more, bigger opportunities!—or so the founders-in-waiting may advocate

There is also for a lot of people a refusal to try and solve the present problem (and not obsess about pious trendy fell good campaigns)

So in a thousand years its a SEP - but we do need to slow or reduce global warming NOW

[citation needed]

> their papers on this are rejected, and calls for a public investigation were buried

Well you can allays publish them anyway - even in HN for public review.

Yes, we would be all very interested to read them. I'm aware of these kinds of things happening in the 50s, but a few years ago - that's unthinkable and should lead to criminal investigation. All major media would be extremely interested and talk about it for months.

> All major media would be extremely interested and talk about it for months.

I think you meant, talk about it on page 5 of the paper or on some sidebar on the website, be enraged for exactly two days and then immediately drop the topic and don't do any followup?

It is not the case. The fact that people tend to forget news nowadays is because there are so many of them. And there are so many of them, because more people are able to break stories like that.

The situation above is a major fuck up of the local authorities. A lot of journalists out there would make a career if they break a story like that and ride the hype wave for the next year or two. So if you want to make something public it is much more difficult to stop you nowadays rather then to publish anything.

How many people had heard of Erin Brockovich before there was a movie made about it? Not zero, but nowhere near as many as after the movie.

A huge proportion of society (who are eligible to vote) don't hear about these things even after a journalist has fought tooth and nail to release the story.

People, for many varied and complex reasons, tend not to care about this sort of stuff unless it gets glamorized.

See Edward Snowden for one example. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, promises made and serious discussion of the problem, but is the situation now any better?

I have a feeling that the modern method to deal with PR nightmares is to acknowledge the problem, promise to fix it, and then just let the hype die before doubling down on the nefarious behavior, but with better op-sec.

If it's not obvious, I'm getting (even more) jaded about the whole issue.

The Flint water crisis took years to resolve. Authorities and businesses poison people all the time, but usually those people are poor and irrelevant enough that news coverage makes no impact at all.

this smacks of the conspiracy fallacy... "the guilty are hiding the evidence"

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