Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue
nypost.com
nypost.com
This doesn't mean anything, its technobabble. How many REM or mSv total exposure?
"I said something complicated and science-y sounding, so you are supposed to be scared right now".
The biggest misfortune is they may even accidentally be correct, just completely incompetent about it.
A big epidemiology problem is identifying the actual cause by symptom, and avoiding the assumption that participation in something big and scary therefore means all problems must be caused by big n scary. Some goofball tipping over a barrel of solvent in the maint bay could cause many cancers later, and is marginally more likely.
Even if figures and readings are produced, some will talk about bananas, flying in an aeroplane, and background radiation.
The biggest joke of all has been how the "safety limits" of different types of radiation were all magically raised after Fukushima.
I'm sorry but you have fallen hook, line and sinker for the nuclear industry's PR / propaganda / talking points.
There are real numbers from the Fukushima disaster. Just because this single NYPost article does not cite that data does not mean it does not exist.
Units matter, and context matters. Perhaps we should fear bananas, or use it as a point if reference. Either way, it's a useful, comprehensible comparison, just like the others mentioned. Just think it through, and you don't need to worry about falling for hog wash.
From listening to those people, you might almost think the numbers were factual information to be evaluated thoughtfully!
"Considered safe" for how long? For continuous life exposure? For the length of time it takes to make a medical X-Ray? It doesn't say.
The OP is right. There is zero useful information in that statement.
People are bashing the article not because it is from the NY Post but because there is a zero evidence that being on a ship a hundred miles away was more dangerous than actually being at the site or in tokyo. The article is filled with all kinds of misunderstandings about radioactivity that are accepted wholesale by the reporter to drum up a good story.
Japan is just lucky that 95% of the radioactive release from the meltdowns was blown out over the ocean, otherwise a much larger fraction of their island would have become useless for agriculture. If the earthquake occurred during the fall, the winds would have been generally off the ocean.
Wouldn't that depend on how many orders of magnitude of safety margin went into deciding what is "considered safe"?
"For perspective, the maximum potential radiation dose received by any ship's force personnel aboard the ship when it passed through the area was less than the radiation exposure received from about one month of exposure to natural background radiation from sources such as rocks, soil, and the sun."
Meaning ~300 uSv, or three orders of magnitude short of acute radiation poisoning [1].
"Using sensitive instruments, precautionary measurements of three helicopter aircrews returning to USS Ronald Reagan after conducting disaster relief missions near Sendai identified low levels of radioactivity on 17 air crew members. The low level radioactivity was easily removed from affected personnel by washing with soap and water. They were subsequently surveyed, and no further contamination was detected."
(edit) By the way, [0] says the carrier was 100 miles from Fukushima at the time. Overlay that with the calculated I-131 dose map [2] (from [3]) (I-131 is the largest early dose component); it makes it really hard to believe any of these claims.
The paper [3] is relevant too: it shows off the ability to measure internal I-131 dose, long after the fact. And claims that people far closer to the disaster, with presumed far higher radiation exposures [2], are relatively safe.
[0] http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=59065
[1] http://xkcd.com/radiation/
[2] (figure only) http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120712/srep00507/fig_tab/sre...
[3] (full paper) http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120712/srep00507/full/srep00...
When held close to skin, the majority is absorbed by the top layers of flesh and only a small amount will penetrate deeper. Conversely, when inside you, only a small amount will escape your body.
EDIT: misread your question. If the steam was radiated it "could" carry that downwind but the nature of decay would greatly reduce the possibility for anything at the size of snow to stay frozen at sea level.
TLDR they bond with organics and other stuff in the water, and snow initiates around particulates.
(Now just watch as pg fixes that)
It seems plausible to me that some of the radioactive particles would be a form that could be incorporated into snowflakes, but I'm not an expert.
[1] http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/rulesregs/sdwa/radionuclides/i...
[2] Remember the USS Ronald Regan has a couple of hundred MW of nuclear power reactors in their hull, so they train for radiation emergencies.
>>“We were probably floating in contaminated water without knowing it for a day and a half before we got hit by that plume,” said Cooper, whose career as a third-class petty officer ended five months after the disaster for health reasons. The toxic seawater was sucked into the ship’s desalinization system, flowing out of its faucets and showers — still radioactive — and into the crew member’s bodies.
Toxic seawater a hundred miles offshore???? You can't make up anything more ridiculous.
That said, I wouldn't weigh things too heavily either way, just because these folks are breaking the news. I very much doubt we have the whole story here and I would prefer not to weigh in until all the information is out. Other commentators on HN have noted that this was a nuclear carrier, so there should be proper records of their exposure (not to mention alternate routes of exposure...) which should be properly evaluated before rushing to judgement here, but there are simply too many possibilities to sensibly evaluate them all without more information.
For example, the article makes it sound like they were exposed to radioactive iodine (due to the thyroid conditions), something I would have expected the carrier to detect, and for which we have reasonable counter-measures (iodine pills). I do not have any insight into what went wrong, but I would focus my investigation on their records of exposure, any treatments, etc. My gut tells me that someone screwed up here, but we lack information sufficient to determine who, and everything is suspect.
That aside, radiation sickness is a terrible thing, and hope they are able to recover.
This was my favorite line.
I'm sorry, what? What does that even mean? 400 tons of.. Uranium? Water? Pure radioactive essence?
This article is shocking on many levels, but the lack of journalistic standards is appalling.
Journalists don't seem to realize the more water there is, the less harmful it is per unit volume, or that the sea rapidly dilutes it further into harmlessness.
There's a little more detail on the claim here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/fukushima-radioacti...
Much as TEPCO may be at fault over the actual reactor the sailors being exposed unnecessarily sounds more like Naval negligence.
> By the time the Reagan realized it was contaminated and tried to shift location, the radioactive plume had spread too far to be quickly outrun. > > “We have a multimillion-dollar radiation-detection system, but . . . it takes time to be set up and activated,” Cooper said.
But... if you're on the coast helping deal with the tsunami damage like them and then a nuclear disaster starts, setting it up & activating it seems like a priority task.
The U.S. Seventh Fleet said Monday it had moved its ships and aircraft away from a quake-stricken Japanese nuclear power plant after discovering low-level radioactive contamination.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that there were two separate radiation exposures on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. The first was to air crews who were swabbed upon returning from search and rescue (SAR) missions, 17 of whom were found to have received the equivalent of a month's radiation and had to be decontaminated.
The second exposure occurred when the carrier's shipboard alarms went off. Since the Reagan is nuclear-powered, it has sensors to detect radioactivity, said Martin, and those went off as soon as the radiation levels went above the naturally-occurring background.
...
The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was about 100 miles offshore when its instruments detected the radiation. The fleet said the dose of radiation was about the same as one month's normal exposure to natural background radiation in the environment, and no one was exposed to levels that would have made them sick, reports CBS News correspondent Celia Hatton.
The power plant and its plume are south of Sendai, so as long as the wind doesn't shift, the Reagan can stay out of the plume and still be in position to conduct SAR missions.
EDIT: Consider some circumstantial evidence:
- In the Navy nuclear-power subculture, people pay attention to detail (to put it mildly). This is true in general, and especially on the subject of radiation exposure to the crew or the public.
- The commanding officer and executive officer of every U.S. aircraft carrier are nuclear-trained, on top of being senior aviators or naval flight officers; they must successfully complete the full, one-year, very-intense nuke qualification course even to be eligible to hold those jobs. Then before they assume those jobs they undergo still more training to be an XO and then CO.
- On any U.S. aircraft carrier, the chief engineer (who "owns" the evaporators that produce the ship's drinking- and washing water) and the [chief] reactor officer (who "owns" the ELTs) are nukes, of course. They're among the most-senior officers on the ship.
- Unambitious people don't put in the years of stressful work that it takes to get these jobs. It's a safe bet that these senior officers all want to be admirals someday. A radiological "incident" of the kind being described likely would severely impair their chances of ever being assigned to a responsible job again, let alone being promoted to flag rank.
So: We're being asked to believe that, in a non-combat situation, somehow all of these career-minded senior officers aboard the Reagan inadvertently allowed the crew's radiation exposure to get to dangerous levels. Sorry, I just don't buy it. I suppose we can't categorically rule out the possibility, but to me it's another reason to be skeptical of the radiation-sickness claims.
The consensus seems to be that the exposure numbers being reported don't make any sense under the circumstances. (I've been out for years, so I'm not qualified to offer an opinion of my own.)
I'm specifically interested in the idea that the carrier was in irradiated water for a long time.
Do the radiation sensors in the ship really need to be 'turned on' in a long process? Would there be any geiger counter or something that automatically detects whether the water the ship takes in is tainted?
It seems crazy to me that there wouldn't be an always-on, cheap, sanity check.
I live in a university town. Various parts of the research arms of the university have various radiological materials on hand for experiments or ongoing work. There's an old, decommissioned nuclear reactor near the airport. ALL of the people who work in these facilities wear dosimeters that change color if an incident resulting in overexposure occurs. ALL of the emergency response teams in the area (campus police, county, city, city fire, and county volunteer fire) have a geiger counter on each truck -- there is a mini one that is just a box on the trucks, and the hazmat trailer with the chem suits has a bigger and more sensitive one with a wand. And this is just a small town research university kind of place, not a big government warship that's designed to fight nuclear wars.
On top of that, I'm 99% sure that distilling water removes the radioactive contaminants.
I can say that even in my day we were constantly monitoring ambient conditions -- and one of the things we constantly drummed into each other was to look for trends, not just instantaneous readings (life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie).
It's interesting that these people you're describing are so concerned with the part that's hard to prove or disprove. The number of sick people seems rather more significant.
See the Telephone Game, a.k.a. Chinese Whispers. [1]
It's amazing how stories get distorted in the retelling. I collected lots of examples on my blog. [2]
Would it have been standard operating procedure for them to don the dosimeters given the understanding of the events unfolding in the area?
I can't say for sure how things are now, but back in the day the answers would have been Yes and Yes.
1. How might they ever know to avoid a massive radiation plume they weren't expecting? Particularly if the plume is very large and expanding faster than they can move the ship?
2. How much of the crew would be informed of such a situation? Would there be a risk of panic or mutiny, if all of the crew were permitted to fully understand such circumstances?
3. Given that this is a military vessel, if they are ordered into harm's way (or perhaps ordered to assist since they've already unwittingly suffered irreparable harm), would they say no? Would careers be protected and defended if orders were obeyed?
4. Would it be possible to fake 70 cases of thyroid polyps, leukemia, testicular cancer and uterine bleeding so bad it requires transfusions?
...and as an aside, given that we're introducing the idea that everything might be a hoax, one more question: Given what we've learned about the NSA and Facebook over the past year, how probable is it that a Navy-nuke Facebook group might be astroturfed into an echo chamber aligned with a particular agenda?
The crucial assumption here is that the crew supposedly wasn't expecting a radioactive fallout plume. From personal experience I can vouch that the crew is trained to deal with radioactive fallout. Given the Fukushima circumstances, I truly cannot imagine that the ship wasn't on alert for a radioactive plume, and would have either navigated around it or taken appropriate precautions such as setting Material Condition Zebra (closing hatches, buttoning down the ventilation system, and so on); activating the water-wash-down system; etc.
2. How much of the crew would be informed of such a situation?
The down-in-the-weeds details likely would have disseminated to the people who would deal with specific issues.
As to the big picture, I'm confident the CO would have told the entire crew the basics of what was going on -- not least so that they would be able to spot apparent anomalies and report them up the chain of command. Sailors at sea are keenly aware that they're "all in the same boat."
Would there be a risk of panic or mutiny, if all of the crew were permitted to fully understand such circumstances?
No.
(OK, I've been out for a long time, and I didn't know every single person in the Navy even then, so I can't say for certain, but ... no.)
3. Given that this is a military vessel, if they are ordered into harm's way (or perhaps ordered to assist since they've already unwittingly suffered irreparable harm), would they say no?
That's a very imaginative hypothetical question, with no indication that it bears any relationship to the facts. The U.S. Navy has a tradition of doing the needful (as our British friends sometimes say). See, e.g., the self-sacrificing heroism of the USS Johnston, USS Hoel, USS Samuel B. Roberts, and USS Heerman at the Battle off Samar on Oct. 25, 1944 [1].
Would careers be protected and defended if orders were obeyed?
Yes.
4. Would it be possible to fake 70 cases of thyroid polyps, leukemia, testicular cancer and uterine bleeding so bad it requires transfusions?
Probably not -- but that assumes facts not in evidence, namely that there actually were 70 such cases attributable to radiation. One thing I learned in years of doing litigation was not to believe everything you hear or read. For all I know, among a crew of around 5,000, the 70 cases mentioned might conceivably be within the bounds of statistical probability.
...and as an aside, given that we're introducing the idea that everything might be a hoax, one more question: Given what we've learned about the NSA and Facebook over the past year, how probable is it that a Navy-nuke Facebook group might be astroturfed into an echo chamber aligned with a particular agenda?
I doubt it -- U.S. Navy sailors are loyal but independent-minded, with very-sensitive and finely-calibrated bullshit detectors, coupled with a willingness to call bullshit when they encounter it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#The_battle
You don't think other crimes are covered up as well? Like letting people drink and bathe in radioactive water because it would get the chain of command in trouble if it was reported?
How about the fact they couldn't get a port to accept them - you think the sailors made that up and it couldn't be verified?
From what little details are given, it sounds like the crew of the Reagan suffered from some kind of gut infection, not radiation poisoning. That would explain why they were denied port entry at Guam, and so on.
I live on the fringe of the area where contamination from Fukushima can be detected. To my knowledge, doctors haven't noticed anything unusual yet, and believe me people are watching. Still, the article sends a chill...
Do gut infections cause thyroid problems, cancers and uncontrolled gynecological bleeding?
Shit happens and we don't always know why.
From a crew of 6,000, there's nothing that strikes me odd about the occasional case of thyroid or gynecological problems. Shit happens.
For illustration, the official number of deaths attributed to the Chernobyl disaster is 31.
Link to a reputable source contradicting the official death toll please.
3 out of every 7 people you know will die of cancer. Every single person you know will die of cancer if they aren't taken first by some other illness, accident, murder, or natural cause.
Do you suggest that cursing government and companies is akin to racism?
Corporations and governments can and do screw up. They also do malicious things with bad intentions (even things that kill people). And when they do so, it's perfectly appropriate to call them on it.
That's not something that will "go out of style".
Case in point: in Fukusima, the government and the reactor officials admitted they have lied about the significance of the thing more than once.
The details of which are the showers needed water pumps,and the water pumps were not properly grounded.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Bullshit. That was never implied, let alone said, you simply made it up.
That said, the Army most certainly DOES have regard for its enlisted. When things like this happen, bad PR follows. Bad PR is bad for a variety of reasons, one of which being that it makes recruiting more difficult. People will be much less likely to join an organization which doesn't care about them, and would thus require more incentives to do so, incentives which cost money. Two: soldiers, airmen, etc go through a pretty intensive training process that lasts several months at a minimum, and that training isn't cheap. By the time you're a full-fledged member of your respective service, your service has a lot of money invested in you, and the more advanced in your career you are, the more valuable you are to them. Soldiers cost more money than you imagine. Three: morale in the military is of paramount importance. Without good morale, operations break down. If a group of soldiers feel that their leadership doesn't care about them, morale quickly goes into the toilet, and that has all sorts of detrimental and pervasive effects.
When I was in the Army, I got sick of having to always go to another meeting about another program that, should we need it, was available to us. Everything from PTSD counseling to going outside of your chain of command if necessary to financial counseling to healthcare to complaining about the food, barracks, or what have you - there were channels galore to address grievances. They not only create these programs, but they force you to be aware that they exist. These aren't programs created just for show; they're programs which are created to be used.
This isn't the Vietnam Era. The military is an all-volunteer force, and unless the draft comes back, it can't afford to not care about its members. In an organization of many millions of people who constantly deal with difficult, dangerous things like this, incidents will occasionally occur, but they are the exception, rather than the rule.
There's been some effort to amend Article 60 of the UCMJ within the Senate; however, it's never gotten past committee.
I'm curious, is it your view that the Army dealt well with the people who had Gulf War syndrome? (or whatever we're calling it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_syndrome
I had a cousin go to war very healthy and come back sick and his experience getting treatment wasn't exactly great. It's nice to think that we're not living in the Agent Orange days anymore but I wonder if the government is really any less inclined to stonewall sick vets whose problems go against the official narrative than they used to be.
edit: you're right that it's important for retention to have good PR and make it look like there aren't serious problems. Damaging the credibility of sick people seeking help is one way the DoD does that.
>A November 1996 article in the New England Journal of Medicine found no difference in death rates, hospitalization rates or self-reported symptoms between Persian Gulf veterans and non-Persian Gulf veterans. This article was a compilation of dozens of individual studies involving tens of thousands of veterans. The study did find a statistically significant elevation in the number of traffic accidents suffered by Gulf War veterans.[44] An April, 1998 article in Emerging Infectious Diseases similarly found no increased rate of hospitalization and better health overall for veterans of the Persian Gulf War in comparison to those who stayed home.[45]
>Despite these studies, on November 17, 2008, a congressionally appointed committee called the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, staffed with independent scientists and veterans appointed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, announced that the syndrome is a distinct physical condition. The committee recommended that Congress increase funding for research on Gulf War veterans' health to at least $60 million per year.
The DOD is a large, cumbersome bureaucracy, and Gulf War Syndrome was an entirely new disorder which is still controversial today. It took a decade, but the DOD came around, and to my knowledge, people with Gulf War Syndrome are being treated.
I'd go further. I would wager that a US nuclear powered carrier is one of the safest places on earth. After all, it is built to fight in an all out nuclear war and hopefully survive. Perhaps be the last hope if the mainland was devastatingly attacked. It can't possibly be that if its crew are, well, dead.
Also, carriers are kind of isolated. They are societies in themselves. The captains are probably more attached and sympathetic to their crews than many other parts of the military.
http://www.navytimes.com/article/99999999/CAREERS/302050309
USS Enterprise captain relieved: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/04/navy.videos/
USS Stennis Captain and his boss get into a biggest dick contest: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/us/rear-admiral-charles-m-...
Pacific commanders: http://nation.time.com/2013/10/03/second-warship-commander-r...
How statistically significant is 70 people out of 5,680 suffering serious health problems over 2.5 years? I'm guessing that most people on board were fairly young and in good health.
Imagine waking up every day for the rest of your life and wondering if you have cancer today? Not good..
Edit: and let's not talk about the increased likelihood of disfigured offspring.
30% of us will have it at some point, also you have chance 1 in 1000-2000 that you'll die next year.
You have a 1000-2000 chance that you'll die when you are no longer an infant but still young. Your chances of dying next year go up as your get older. If you had only 1 chance in 1000 to die each year that would mean that people would live to be 1000 years old on average.
A good estimate of human mortality rates can be calculated from Gompertz law: http://forio.com/simulate/mbean/death-probability-calculator...
Actually it means your chances of living to be 1000 would be 37%.
0.999 ^ 1000 = .37
If there is a 0.001 chance of dying every year, the average lifespan will be 0(0.001) + 1(0.001)(0.999) + 2(0.001)(0.999)^2 + 3(0.001)(0.999)^3 + ... , or \sum_{i=0}^\infty (i(0.001)(0.999)^i). The idea is that to live to the age of 0, you have to die in your first year; to live to be three, you have to live through exactly three years and then die, and so on. Then, \sum_{i=0}^\infty ix^i is x / (1-x)^2 .
So the sum of interest is 0.001 times (0.999) / (0.000001), which is exactly 999.
I usually say: I have a chance of 1 in 1000 to die next year. It puts other probabilities in perspective.
You're not old, and you're also not an infant. Your chances are much lower than a naive average.
"The toxic seawater was sucked into the ship’s desalinization system, flowing out of its faucets and showers — still radioactive — and into the crew member’s bodies."
A Nimitz class carrier can produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 gallons of desalinated (potable) water a day. Desalination is very energy intensive, but energy is something that a nuclear powered carrier has plenty of. There are obviously some consumables involved, but it's mostly just energy, and lots of it.
RO, on the other hand, requires a lot of high quality, small pore filters and membranes that need to be cleaned and changed regularly. RO systems have dramatically lower throughputs than desalination systems of similar size. An RO system capable of producing 400,000 gallons/day (especially one capable of filtering radioisotopes that are (while larger than a water molecule), still quite small) would be very large, and very maintenance intensive.
But hey... you're probably right... The folks who designed the potable water infrastructure for the Nimitz class aircraft carriers were probably idiots...
You are not an idiot just for doing something stupid. All people, even the smartest ones have capacity to do dangerously stupid things. In this case they probably just weren't ordered to built a system that can provide clean water in case of the ship being covered in radioactive snow. So the people doing stupid things (possibly, but not necessarily, idiots) were the people who gave orders. Still hard to imagine for a country that treats nuclear war sort of seriously.
Of course I think you are totally right about RO being non-easy. I have no idea about RO and desalination systems but my motto is "nothing's ever easy".
I think it's even more likely that they weighed the advantages and disadvantages of each system, and decided that a waste heat desalination system would be a _much_ better fit then a huge, expensive, high maintenance RO system.
My point was simply that this was almost certainly an informed decision, not an oversight (or just 'following orders').
(It also seems to be a possibility that they were using (contaminated) seawater for decontamination procedures, but that is hard find reasonable information about)
http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/657412.pdf
RO is already used in utility-scale desal plants:
http://www.pub.gov.sg/water/Pages/DesalinatedWater.aspx
"This plant can produce 30 million gallons of water a day (136, 000 cubic meters) and is one of the region’s largest seawater reverse-osmosis plants."
If you're trying to minimize energy (particularly steam) usage, then RO starts to make a bit more sense. On the Nimitz class, they have plenty of waste heat from the powerplant, and already had numerous steam distributions systems in place.
That sounds suspicious. Guam is a U.S. Territory.
I can't find any references to how many crew are typically assigned to the USS Ronald Regan. Guam doesn't seem like it has a lot of healthcare support for a full-aircraft carrier of irradiated seamen.
it is that TEPCO, which is the organization best suited to know and measure what was/is going on, has been shown to lie, even to its own government, about the situation.
(mentioned in more detail here: http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/28/world/asia/japan-fukushima-law... )
If it truly the case that TEPCO has been lying about things from the start, then nothing that they have said in the interim, or things that they say in the future, can be taken at face value, and whatever claims they make require independant third party confirmation.
When people sperg out over specific radiation claims being floated in the NY Post (of all places) they ought to keep in mind that if these people are anywhere near as sick as they're described to be they need help, and they're up against a nasty brick wall when it comes to getting that help. Picking a side here ought to be pretty damn easy unless this turns out to be some kind of outright fraud.
http://singularityhub.com/2013/12/20/nasa-unveils-valkyrie-a...
It's really up to us if it's going to be 10 years or 20.
For some interesting history, look up "Bio-Robots" to see how the Soviet Union dealt with the disaster. Basically they sent up humans in heavy lead suits for no more than 45 seconds at a time. Run up, get three or four shovelfuls (they were clearing radioactive debris from the roof), get out.
Search and rescue is a hard problem and is terribly underfunded. It is also funded in a way that makes long term improvements hard. There is very little money until there's a disaster, then there is a ton of cash you have to spend right now.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=711577&page=4
on why it isn't entirely straightforward to send in a robot.
I think it was a really cool hack and one of my favorites, but it didn't go anywhere with the jury (I guess no business model and all :) ).
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/26/open-radioactivity-warning-...
http://techcrunch.com/video/open-radioactivity-warning-syste... (Video)
I still have a large network of friends in the military and work in the defense industry in San Diego so I was surprised when I first learned of this incident only a few weeks ago. I thought the post I was reading at the time was a sick hoax at first but have since learned otherwise.
This doesn't surprise me much at all unfortunately, and I wish my fellow sailors the best of luck in not getting screwed by Uncle Sam, which is what I fully expect will happen.
Is the US West Coast at danger of increased incidence rates of radiation related illness?
No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad
"Ex-Rad (or Ex-RAD), also known by the code name ON 01210.Na, is a drug developed by Onconova Therapeutics and the U.S. Department of Defense.[1][2] This newly developed compound is said to be a potent radiation protection agent. Chemically, it is the sodium salt of 4-carboxystyryl-4-chlorobenzylsulfone.[3"
Why is that? Countries that don't have the technical expertise to judge how dangerous it could have been for their people are absolutely right to have prevented them from docking.
Their only loyalty is to their own people, as it should be. As long as they don't have the expertise to verify that their is no risk to their own people, they should default to GTFO.
Do you think the US would allow a shipload of people with the SARS coronavirus or Ebola to dock at one of their ports?
I love how you guys, mostly computer programmers, are so much more informed than experts in nearly every other field of science existing. It must be amazing to be that smart.
It's the fools who talk about "400 tons of radiation" who are committing the sin of hubris in thinking that they know more than the experts.
The person I was replying to was clearly on the "yes" side of that.
You can certainly disagree, but then your argument is going to be radically different.
Useful information that could have been included: Actual radiation measurements, with units. Specific location of the ship over the timeline. What radiation the Navy and the ship in question knew about, and when (news reports indicate the USS Reagan nearby knew very early on when radiation exceeded background radiation since as a nuclear vessel it had good radiation sensors). And, since some of the claimants are claiming thyroid problems, whether the navy issued iodine tablets to sailors in the area, since that's a well known and practically risk-free preventative measure against radioactive iodine uptake. Hell, the standard navy rations probably have supplemental iodine. Table salt often does.
You might also be interested in researching how much radiation is released into the atmosphere from coal plants, and how many health problems are caused by all sorts of conventional energy sources, coal, burning fuel, pollution from batteries, etc.
Disclaimer: not to say that 60's-era nuclear reactor designs are good, even with more precautions being taken since Fukushima; they absolutely should be phased out in favor of new designs that provide passive safety (for several days without power).
The entire CBRN community was hyper focused on these operations Navy wide, and the possibility of an entire group of ships not taking every precaution is very very very low. I am not discounting the possibility of equipment failure(unknowingly) or execution failure by individuals, but the chances of that with so much attention on the issue would be low.
EDIT: What do people do when they see snow? Think tounge out.
I thought that as well, especially with the detail in the article about 'billows of metallic-tasting snow'.