Nuclear fallout is showing up in U.S. honey, decades after bomb tests
science.org
science.org
In a related note, I know someone who keeps bees and harvests honey. I recently visited the spot way out in the mountains where he does this and I asked why he chose a spot so far out. He explained that to get the organic label, the honey must contain no pesticides and if you keep bees around the property of other people they will ingest pesticides from flowers on those property, since pesticides are so commonly used.
How are you so certain? You don't know the specifics of the situation. If he worked underwater for a year and spent half a day working on a reactor in protective gear it could easily even out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
There is now some thought that very low doses of ionizing radiation are better than no radiation at all (so called 'radiation hormesis'), but I don't believe that has been adopted as part of any specific standard.
FWIW an individual person may be experiencing up to a trillion DNA mutations per day from both external and internal mechanisms of action. We just have a bunch of systems built in to prevent them from getting out of control (most of the time).
I think this is a very common misunderstanding. The bees are allowed to forage on organically-cultivated crops, and farmers can use a whole range of 'natural' but also 'certified' synthetic pesticides on them.
Producers of organic food don't seem to mind too much that people assume organic food growing doesn't involve the use of pesticides.
Which is a funny group of people. Their rules sound kooky, but their results aren't at all what I would expect from kooks. The best strawberry jam I can get here comes from from a farm where they (I learned when I asked about why it's so good) turns their compost according to the phases of the moon. Weird. The same farm was also raided by the police. 130 police officers searched the place at dawn one morning, and apparently the only reason for suspicion was that those weirdos had money to spare for a succession of new greenhouses even in years when all their conventional neighbours had no money to spare for anything.
The Companion also notes that many of them do it but prefer discretion. I can see why.
It might not be so weird.
While not as noticeable as ocean tides, aquifer tides[1] cause the soil to "breathe" twice per day. Spring tide vs. neap tide (which is a function of Moon phase) would change the magnitude and diurnal timing of this "breathing" pattern, which could have a significant effect on soil biology.
As you learn more about Earth Science, it's interesting to discover that (some of) these "crazy" ideas start to look not-so-crazy.
One of my favorite examples: how do you stop vermin in your garden? Make a small pile of rocks off in the corner, of course! Sounds like superstitious gobbledygook, right? And it is, right up until the moment you realize that all you really did was make a happy undisturbed snake habitat.
[1] https://theconversation.com/squeezed-by-gravity-how-tides-af...
No need to overthink this. Just pile some rocks and enjoy the benefits of ecosystem services.
But won't they bite you?
Hmm maybe snakes that feed on insects, don't usually also eat humans
In this case, the effect is largely due to the overburden itself expanding and contracting with varying tidal attraction. These mechanisms force atmospheric gases into and out of the soil, like a piston.
Just a WAG.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520277465/agrarian-dreams
"In this groundbreaking study of organic farming, Julie Guthman challenges accepted wisdom about organic food and agriculture in the Golden State. Many continue to believe that small-scale organic farming is the answer to our environmental and health problems, but Guthman refutes popular portrayals that pit “small organic” against “big organic” and offers an alternative analysis that underscores the limits of an organic label as a pathway to transforming agriculture.
This second edition includes a thorough investigation of the federal organic program, a discussion of how the certification arena has continued to grow and change since its implementation, and an up-to-date guide to the structure of the organic farming sector. Agrarian Dreams delivers an indispensable examination of organic farming in California and will appeal to readers in a variety of areas, including food studies, agriculture, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, and history."
I just confirmed for those so inclined, you can quickly download a PDF of the book for free on Library Genesis.
Biodynamic is an unregulated label that is often meant to imply this, but of course offers zero guarantees. Usually it comes with a “tour the farm” level of visibility into processes, which is a nice upside. Often coincides with “dry-farmed” and/or “trap cropping” practices, two labels that indicate material benefits to crop quality independent of the biodynamic label.
With the greatest respect to the Navy, I smell more fish than in the seas that submarine travelled through.
My non-scientific understanding is that sun exposure is UV radiation exposure which causes skin melanoma. Meanwhile with nuclear reactors, UV is not the problem and the problem with exposure goes deeper than skin melanoma.
My feeling is you received a standardised "policy explanation" rather than an entirely scientific one. Happy to be proven wrong with links to scientific fact though !
Indeed. But isn't it really only "a thing" for airline pilots, cabin crew and a few unfortunate people at ground level who happen to live/work high-altitude on mountains or somewhere lower down with the wrong kind of rocks ?
Fun story: as part of my physics education we did an experiment on the cosmic radiation with a "radiation" telescope. That were 2 Geiger counters with a logic that only registered events which basically occured in both counters at the same time. That made the observation reasonably detectable and you could "see" the sun with this. This experiment was conducted indoors, just on the top floor of the building. We had about 1 event/second, our bodies would be getting a similar dosis all the time.
There is some good information about the relative exposure levels to cosmic radiation that one can expect to encounter on this site. They have been doing balloon launches and measuring in-flight levels for quite a while now.
I'd you are worried, avoid plane flights.
Handy simplified chart: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
A large chunk of that average dose, 4 mSv, is from radon, where the dose varies a lot depending on where you live, and if you live in such a radon-prone location, whether you have sufficient ventilation in your house.
Source: live in Finland and have read the health authority info on subject.
"For example, the health risk caused by radon is estimated on the basis of epidemiologic examinations, not the effective dose. Every year, an average of 280 Finns die from lung cancer caused by radon. Of these cases, 240 deaths are induced by smoking in addition to radon."
So they're not actually measuring an average 4 mSv/y dose from radon, but rather going the other way, that is that 280 yearly deaths from radon would be consistent with an average dose of 4 mSv/y (assuming LNT, presumably).
Humans receive about 3-4 mSv per year of background radiation on average. Some of this is from radioactive decay, and some from cosmic radiation. Being underwater much of the year might shave 1-2 mSv off this.
Civilian radiation workers can receive, by regulation, doses up to 50 mSv per year. Typical reactor workers in the civilian energy sector get a couple mSv per year of dose. It is plausible that he was close to breakeven.
100mSv/year is the lowest dose that has shown a clear link to increased cancer risk.
That’s specific for cancer. For other forms of toxicity, the concept of “maximum safe dosage” does make sense when the dose/effect relationship is not linear. Pharmaceuticals, for example, can be entirely benign at small dosages yet lethal if you overdose.
The overall average, across all industries, fatal work injury risk is something like 35 per 1,000,000 worker-years. Compare to this, where the risk to radiation workers from radiation, if they receive the highest allowed dose (and basically no one does) can be confidently bounded to be well under 1 per 1,000,000 worker-years. (And, if it should ever happen, is likely to be far in the future and cost less life expectancy as a result).
You're getting caught up in _detectable_ but not thinking enough about the actual level of risk. The danger/risk from 100mSv is far less of a risk than very common activities we do. Remember that that fatal cancer risk is over a lifetime (so let's say 40 years, or 0.01%/year if you receive that dose once). Smoking a cigarette a day (singular, not a pack) is a 30+% chance increase in stroke and heart disease. I'd argue that this is far more dangerous but something we don't worry about as much.
Humans are really just bad at estimating risk.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/occupation...
"The NRC requires its licensees to limit occupational exposure to 5,000 mrem (50 mSv) per year. Occupational dose does not include the dose received from natural background sources, doses received as a medical patient or participant in medical research programs, or "second-hand doses" received through exposure to individuals treated with radioactive materials."
I thought it was perhaps appropriate, if we're quantifying US Navy occupational exposure to a US citizen, to compare to US civilian reactor exposure limits. It doesn't seem appropriate to call me "wrong" in this context.
> For DOE 50 mSv is regulatory limit and 20mSv is administrative control level.
Sure: one needs controls well short of the regulatory limit to keep pretty much everyone short of the limit. Most nuclear medicine workers and reactor workers are well under 2mSv/year in the US. A few outliers end up with lifetime doses of a few hundred mSv.
P.S. Something went wrong here:
> 100mSv is a 0.55% increase in risk. So 50mSv is a 0.055% increase risk
In that you halved the dosage but divided the risk by 10, when saying you were evaluating it under LNT.
Ops, that's my bad and it is too late to edit. Thanks for the correction.
Even so, radiation hormesis has been noted in lab models, etc (slight benefits from low doses).
If you are basing radiation safety procedures off of an internet PNG image and things go wrong, you have nobody yonbalme but yourself.
I'm amazed at some of the idioms I hear about comparable radiation doses.
These idioms often completely overlook things like dose duration.
On the surface any radioactive gases get dispersed in the atmosphere.
What radiation? Note that he didn't say he received radiation exposure throughout the submarine, only "working on the reactor". That's an isolated space that doesn't continuously exchange air with the rest of the submarine and has an extra layer of shielding between it and the rest of the submarine (in addition to the shielding around the reactor itself that separates that from the space where people working on the reactor go--nobody ever goes inside the reactor itself).
The relevant radiation exposure when you're outdoors is not from radioactive gases in the air, it's from radiation hitting atoms in your body. (The relevant radiation to compare with what a nuclear reactor produces is actually not from the Sun, it's from cosmic rays.)
Umm, how is energetic charged particles not radiation? Isn't that just what alpha and beta radiation is?
Highly charged particles are a type of radiation, at least as that term is used in the context of this discussion. (Yes, in some physics contexts "radiation" only refers to massless particles like photons, but in such a context no "radiation" to speak of comes from nuclear reactors either, since the potentially hazardous radiation from nuclear reactors is neutrons and some alphas and betas.)
Turns out the bees thrive in this environment, because they're still better off there than in the countryside.
You have to know your actual average, peak, and total dosages to be able to compare it with everyday civie life.
Regarding pesticides: the US has a major problem with gross under-regulation of chemicals in nearly every context. This stems from TSCA 1964 grandfathering-in 10k's of chemicals without evidence of safety, a guiding principle of "assume safe until proven otherwise because profits", and ignoring safety data and conservative exposure standards set in the rest of the industrialized world.
Edit: My father worked on the flight line of a US military base in Vietnam. He was exposed to agent orange, unburnt napalm, and jet fuel many times. He suffered from the rare adult-onset type I diabetes for most of his life and experienced several kinds of cancers.
There’s other weird corners to pesticides. I found myself helping somebody with a .gov contract that required computing equipment to be sanitized and cleaned with a manufacturer recommended method that is a listed pesticide.
Problem: most manufacturers recommend isopropyl alcohol for this purpose, and it’s one of those grandfathered in chemicals, and isn’t “listed” as a pesticide.
Solution: We found a company that made cleaning supplies for industrial processes, and they had a specific formulation of isopropyl alcohol wipes listed as a pesticide. (For a price nearly 20x more than normal products)
It’s a silly story but illustrates how nuts this stuff is. Just with something silly like sanitizing wipes, people are using proprietary “quats” with serious potential health impacts where something as simple as alcohol could easily do the job.
The chemical is really unique sounding.
Also, they are not to be used on food surfaces.
When I was stuck researching this topic, I spoke to a few academics… their recommendations were always cautious around quat products, and usually peroxide was the “wipe of choice” if it was ok for the use case. (Ie you cannot use peroxide on computers, keyboards, etc.)
Of course the dose rate from these nuclides was many orders of magnitude less than natural background so it was more a curiosity than a concern. Radiation detectors can detect single atoms decaying and attribute them to specific nuclides. Good old quantum energy levels of the nucleus.
If I could have one media wish this year, it would be that whenever someone says something is 'radioactive', everyone else asks what the dose rate is compared to natural background before talking about hazards.
This looks like silly news. They may as well just have run with "US did nuclear tests in the 1960s" or "radioactive cesium has a half life" and left it at that unless there is something to report on.
Similarly after Fukushima, there were terrified articles about how radiation could be detected in fish across the Pacific. But as you say, at what level? Certainly orders of magnitude lower than your baseline exposure. We just have very accurate detectors!
Fewer clicks and shares I guess.
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushim...
Following Trinity test and the rest of nuclear testing campaign, every single living thing or any matter that has been processed in any way has been contaminated and shows high background radiation (compared to pre-Trinity test).
That's why some materials like steel from ships comissioned before Trinity test or lead ballast from sunken Roman ships is highly sought after where low background radiation material is required.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/search-d...
>All lead mined on Earth naturally contains some amount of the radioactive element uranium 235, which decays, over time, into another radioactive element, a version of lead called lead 210. When lead ore is first processed, it is purified and most of the uranium is removed. Whatever lead 210 is already present begins to break down, with half of it decaying on average every 22 years. In Roman lead almost all of the lead 210 has already decayed, whereas in lead mined today, it is just beginning to decay.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-lea...
Lead 210 has a short half-life, uranium 235 has a long one. Thus, once uranium is removed, lead 210 levels drop "quickly".
Well, high and high. On average, humans worldwide receive a dose of about 4 mSv/year. Nuclear weapons testing and nuclear accidents contribute about 0.01 mSv/year to that.
https://www.umweltanalysen.com/en/wild-boar/cesium-137-conta...
> From September 1st, 2017 to December 31st, 2019, muscle meat samples from 376 wild boars were delivered by the forest services (Bodenmais 129, Dahn 123 and Zusmarshausen 124). So far, 355 samples have been measured for Cs-137 activity. The Cs-137 contamination of wild boars fluctuated seasonally depending on the availability of individual food components within a study area, with the variability of the measured values being up to three orders of magnitude. The values ranged from 0.6 Bq/kg fresh mass (FM) (Dahn) to 16,704 Bq/kg (Bodenmais).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Health_risk_of_rad...
But if we're just talking about increase chance of cancer iirc the meat calculations you need to eat like 15 kg of boar a day from that region (like 3kg if the highest measured). I'll let you make your guesstimate from there. And we're not even talking about risk of cancer from eating that much meat.
In my barely educated opinion the health risks of the radiation level measured in the boar meat is so low as to be ignorable. It might help people (like me) to be able to compare the health risk to other forms of radiation that we already accept.
This is fairly accurate. Though I wouldn't seek out those boars. I just wouldn't freak out if you found out later.
I would say that the bigger thing we can do is learn to relax and admit that we don't know much about topics we don't know much about. I'm all for more information, but this problem is more abstract and applies to far more things than radiation. Often the more heated a topic the less the average person knows about it though their confidence is often high.
There are food regulations in Germany and they need to be obeyed.
So are they stupid(overprotective), or do they make sense, in the meaning there is a real danger from eating contaminated boar?
The English, American sources dominated, Wikiarticle makes it sound mostly benign.
Yet European language articles, like French and German, will be quite a lot more skeptical.
This even goes up to an official levels where afaik the EU has associated more dangers and risks with lower Caesium-137 than their US counterparts, thus the "tolerated levels" of it also vary greatly between the two.
It seems to me you've drifted off with your argumentation. I don't see a reason to continue this discussion at this point.
>>> I rather trust my local scientists who care about peoples health.
You said you trust the scientists and not the government regulations. I'm encouraging you to actually talk to these scientists because nuclear is very popular among scientists.
Also: what do you mean by "constantly"? How many articles are there and how can there be too many if you don't even know that they are not below regulation?
HN is an exceptionally clean, minimalist website. Instant page loads. No ads, no "accept cookie" banner, no autoplaying media, in fact no media of any kind, no engagement-maximizing algorithm. Quality moderation via dedicated human mods.
Then everyone comes here to talk about their Svelte ESnext 69.0 x serverless kubernetes 3d metaverse animated gif NFT marketplace subscription-based growth hack horror they're about to inflict on the public.
Janky is 50MB of Javascript that doesn't load all at once so things jump around ocnstantly at the start, only to display 1/3 of the text of an article before you insert 3 ads but I won't know that until I click past the cookie warning and the "Please subscribe" popup that happens when I scroll more than 100 pixels.
It would be nice if HN posts could include an "alt link" which would be paywall free. (like an archive.is link or similar)
There’s a ton of opportunities here to use (paywall), or simply use an alternative link. The admins here don’t, won’t; and sadly, worst off - discourage comments like this.
I will never read a paywalled article on HN, by principle alone. I don’t come here to see information I have to pay for. I don’t think anyone here does.
In that context it's imho a bit weird how we humans always gotta have that one causation, when reality is usually extremely multi-causal and complex.
Life developed in a mutagenic environment and there are natural sources of radiation all around us. Granite is measurably radioactive, for instance. Artificial radiation at much lower doses are not going to make a significant difference; they’re just very easy to detect because of the very precise energy signature they show on things like gamma ray spectrometers.
Pesticides, possibly pollution, and disease in general are much more likely candidates. Last I heard there was an issue with some bee parasites, however you'd need to verify that.
Life and our bodies are and have been bathed in carcinogenic radiation (as well as other carcinogenic and DNA-damaging environmental factors) since the beginning of life on Earth. Every time you go outside, you are exposed to ultraviolet radiation on your skin and when you’re inside, cement and granite countertops and nuts and bananas expose you to radiation as well. It’s inescapable. So an extremist perspective on artificial radiation where even its detection is considered harmful is just innumerate and scientifically illiterate. It’s a kind of superstition if not related to levels of naturally occurring radiation.
That said, radium bioaccumulates because it subs in for calcium. You are over 2% calcium by weight, but you only take in about 0.1% of that mass per day. Potassium is about 0.2% of you, and you take in 2-3% of that daily.
Meaning that radium almost certainly more dangerous to you than potassium.
Apparently there’s less money in those scuttled ships now than there was 50 years ago.
(Sidenote: is it really possible that after all these years they've just left a smashed nuclear bomb in a marsh? I would imagine they've gone back with better technology and recovered the pieces, at least to avoid the material falling into the hands of terrorists?)
Probably the Air Force decided it would be cheaper to keep the site under constant surveillance for a few centuries than to go through the nightmare of trying to excavate a swamp well enough to extract the thermonuclear stage.
There's nothing to debate here except what we fear more. But our lack of fear over climate change is how we got here. Because the killer is slow moving and (mostly) invisible.
That's a bold assertion. Would you care to back it up?
Nuclear does not produce carbon. It's one of the safest forms of energy we have. There's a reason France has one of the lowest emission rates in the world. Killing nuclear in the 80's and 90's is clearly one of the worst mistakes we've ever made. The mistake we're making now is pitting nuclear against renewables. There's a large scientific consensus that we should _complement_ renewables with nuclear. Use renewables where we can but it is a far better option than gas. That's the choice we are currently making.
Let's not make the same mistake twice, there's a lot more on the line this time.
[0] https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6043f-meyers-f...
https://www.gcsp.ch/global-insights/75-years-later-nuclear-w... https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/1991/06/RadioactiveHe...
And from solar panels! There are a dozen deaths a year, worldwide, from installing them on roofs, which mean solar is more deadly than nuclear ;)
I accept that statement only when it's followed by ' so far as you know.'
[https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/atomic-veterans-1946-...]
[https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/25/us/us-nuclear-accident-in...]
* Yeah, the number of deaths from radiation poisoning is very low, so we can be reckless.
So, let look at nuclear risks:
* potential damage area is extremely high. If a state sponsored actor will take control over a nuclear station or nuclear waste store, he can blast it and disperse over half of a continent. Unlike nuclear weapon, it will be very dirty, so it's better not to do at same continent, but an Asian or African country can do that in the USA.
* potential loses are very high, up to billions of people, if major part of the continent will be contaminated. Nobody can provide insurance for such event.
If we increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, risks will increase by 10x or more, because it's easier to guard a few stations than a dozen or a hundred stations.
To keep risks low, safety of stations must be improved by the same number, otherwise, by increasing the number of stations by 10x we will have a Chornobyl/Fukushima level event every 3-5 years.
Do you see a way to improve safety of nuclear stations and waste storage by 10x, while keeping construction cost and construction time in acceptable range?
Lets rephrase because the argument you're trying to make is good, just exaggerated and incomplete.
Nuclear has a small chance of something going bad but when it goes wrong it's big and localized. We'll bound the cost as a bit higher than Fukushima (which includes a tsunami) with $200bn. But if we look at the median cost of accidents is well under 10bn and covered by the insurance. You're right that there's also a chance of a state sponsored attack. Though note that reactor domes are designed to withstand airplane strikes. Most state sponsored attacks on nuclear facilities haven't led to disasters and fallout.
On the other hand, nuclear has provided us clean energy for over half a century. Still accounts for over 50% of the US's clean energy and provides and good constant base load.
Coal and gas have a moderate chance of things going wrong. Costs often being in the range of several billion dollars to several tens of billions, a handful being a few hundred. But the big cost is the slow release of carbon into the atmosphere which has led to the largest catastrophe in human history and has an estimated cost of $4 trillion per year.
The benefits are that these energy sources are cheap and can easily be throttled matching demand.
Renewables have a high chance of danger but it is very low in damage (high rate of people falling off roofs and dying). Sometimes there's a high risk but rare (see dams breaking and specifically Banqiao). The other issues are that we don't have a way to provide constant load, there's not enough batteries, low production rates, and some unsolved problems that mean they don't work everywhere and thus require gas or coal to fill in.
The upside is that they are relatively cheap and produce no emissions.
This is the calculous that the scientific community is doing. It's not simple and requires a lot of experts working in different areas working together. The scientific community is asking for nuclear + renewables (not nuclear vs renewables). Preference renewables but when you can't, nuclear is infinitely better than gas or coal. There's some that argue we don't need nuclear but their estimated costs are far higher than renewables with a sprinkling of nuclear. This is a more nuanced debate that I encourage others to read on but take your emotions out of it. The calculous extremely convoluted. Please listen to the scientist. Trust but verify does mean to first trust.
I don't need to invent or exaggerate arguments, because I can point to problems we already have:
* Chornobyl disaster tanked economy of Ukraine for decades. Ukraine still paying for it. Life-time profits from nuclear energy cannot cover loses from just one disaster. Huge thanks for international help.
* Radiation level in my hometown was higher than in many parts of Chornobyl safety zone, because few hot particles are landed near to town and caused micro red-forest (so they are easy to spot). My parents were not able to move, because the price of land and property sank to the bottom ($600 for a 4-bedroom house). I moved to clean city. As a student, I measured the radiation level and found that my lungs were the most radioactive item in the classroom. It was not funny.
* Long term effects of nuclear poisoning. I watched it effect on my younger brother. People are forgetting about the danger of radiation now, so they're stopping taking iodine pills or iodine salt, and cancer level are rising and rising. For example, a whole school was sick in Northern Ukraine about a decade ago just because the school administration replaced iodine salt with regular salt to pocket the difference.
* Long therm safety of nuclear stations, reciprocal stations, waste sites. How to make them prone to diversion from a state sponsored (RF) agent. How to protect Chornobyl zone: lots of radioactive materials are stolen already. It's not possible to maintain long term full time ground patrol in a zone with dangerous levels of radiation.
* Safety subsystem can automatically shutdown a nuclear station when base level drops below threshold.
* Nuclear stations are competing with cities for fresh water because of drough: Rivne and Khmelnytsk stations from 2015, South-Ukrainian station from 2020. How to solve the problem with water?
I'm tired with nonsense about telegraph failure at Banqiao dam, or mixing of flood protection with hydro power generation, or house maintenance with solar power generation, to make nuclear power look safer in comparison.
How much can we «safely» kill by {solar panel roof installations, wind turbines, driving, drinking water, eating, taking showers, insert literally any }. You're creating an unreasonable position that I need to defend and you are not acting in good faith.
When we phase out coal, say in 20 years, the next acceptable number will be much lower. We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't?
When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned, like it happened before. Do you have a Plan B for this case?
If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent, how much cancer percentage will rise when people will not be able to escape to clean land, clean food, clean water?
Yes, I was being facetious, obviously 1 million / year is not a good goal. But considering that the total amount of radiation related deaths has not even reached 1 million total since the first bomb in 1945, it is unlikely any such number will be approached soon.
> When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned
This has never happened for oil rig disasters that have released millions of gallons of toxic crude oil into the ocean causing untold damage to the global ecosystem. If we go all in on nuclear we're not turning around.
> Do you have a Plan B for this case?
Mars? The Plan B is just to not use as much electricity or convert a sizable portion of land to solar and wind farms. The public will not tolerate either option.
See my other comment comparing the size of nuclear plants to solar farms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765656
TL;DR the world's largest solar park can hold 459 Fukushima plants, which would generate over 13.5% of the world's energy supply as opposed to the 2.7GW the solar panels are currently generating which is 0.016% of the world's energy supply.
> If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent
A terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant could not cause an explosion like Chernobyl because the emergency shutdown procedure would safely end the fission reaction as opposed to Chernobyl's mechanism which accidentally accelerated it. The worst that could happen is something like Fukushima where the core melts down due to a LOCA (loss of coolant accident). Three cores melted down that day and 12 years later there has only been a single recorded radiation death.
> how much cancer percentage will rise
20 years from now we will also have more advanced and successful methods of treating cancer - keep in mind that modern chemo vs. 1980's chemo is worlds apart and certainly contributed to the public fear as cancer was still mostly a death sentence. Now many types of cancer have been cured and the likelihood of survival has risen across the board. This is not an excuse to say that cancer is acceptable, just that it won't be a death sentence for the majority of people even if a nuclear accident did somehow cover an entire continent.
Also, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was kept active until 2000! Operators were bused in every day following the accident. You can even go on tours in the city of Pripyat now and the resulting dose is just slightly higher than background radiation. In other words, the situation was resolved within a few years, and that was using 1980's technology. Today with technology such as robots, quadcopter drones, and advanced construction techniques (ie. the New Safe Confinement) it is unlikely that another Chernobyl would last even a few weeks before the core was covered up. It doesn't matter where it happens either; the UN and the developed world would not let an accident like that go unnoticed and unsolved in our connected society.
Well mostly why Chernobyl is different is because their reactor was pressurized, and thus had the ability to explode (and spread core nuclear material over a large area). The only other event that has caused something similar without a pressurized reactor is one of the largest tsunami ever recorded.
But a terrorist attack on a power plant would need to come from the inside of the plant and to cause a disaster similar to either Fukushima or Chernobyl would require a significantly large weapon and fairly close to the reactor or where they store high energy materials (which is still inside the a pool of water).
At least if one ignores the hundreds of thousands of people who were directly killed by nuclear weapons.
While the sun and hurricanes are natural phenomena that we don't really have much influence over nor were they designed for the specific purpose of giving skin cancer or killing people.
Thus, fossil and biofuel combustion have been many orders of magnitude worse than nuclear weapons testing for overall human health.
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
Honey is a nutrient? I thought it was water + sugar?
(This is an educational site that does food monitoring as public outreach. It is underfunded, and full disclosure, I am a former leader of the project).
(Broken links are all over the page because as I said, underfunded and mostly run by students these days)
See the subtitle.
> The radiocesium levels reported in the new study fall "well below" 1200 becquerels per kilogram—the cutoff for any food safety concerns, the agency (red: FDA) says.
I eat enough honey that I AM a nuclear weapon.
It's not a test to say "hey I'm going to poison all the air, let's see what happens".
We shouldn't call this a "test" as if it was conducted by actual scientists doing actual experiments.
If you want to be pedantic:
It was a test of if the air-poisoner-inator sufficiently poisoned the air. If the air was not poisoned then the experiment obviously failed. If the air was poisoned then the hypothesis was correct and the experiment succeeded.
A bomb test tests if the bomb bombed the location it was meant to bomb with the correct amount of bomb. The control variable would be not dropping the bomb.
> Would you call someone who goes around smashing things a "scientist"?
Yes, automotive engineers do this every day to build safer cars, and anyone in the safety industry obviously replicates unsafe conditions (explosions, fires, electrical failures, chemical spills, etc) to test safety equipment.
"Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down” - Alex Jason
It's all to easy to conflate 'detectable' with 'hazardous' when you're dealing with some of the most sensitive instruments on earth.
See: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/01/f46/doe-ioni...