Is that COP OUT 20?

[barbos]

So, what are you saying? That Hollande took advantage of the shootings in order to create a law to be used against the protesters or that he's taking advantage of the laws he created to use against terrorism to also use them to shut down protesters?

Hollande was probably one of the shooters, someone should check his alibi

 

[barbos]

Actually Chernobyl had an effect on Russian life expectancy.

Please elaborate on that.

 

[arkirk]

Actually Chernobyl had an effect on Russian life expectancy.

Please elaborate on that.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ii1eBZsxzTbuELqjQ5bc-y5V8vnBviC3hmKmcUnwcS4/edit

This was just one of many reports you get when you google post Chernobyl Russian life expectancy.

 

[untermensche]

The so-called "war on terrorism" is nothing but a government crackdown on the rights of human beings.

The Patriot Act that appeared instantly as if by a miracle is one government crackdown after another.

It is a joke to say you allow protest when in fact you do not.

A nation that does not allow free protest is not a free nation.

 

[barbos]

Please elaborate on that.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ii1eBZsxzTbuELqjQ5bc-y5V8vnBviC3hmKmcUnwcS4/edit

This was just one of many reports you get when you google post Chernobyl Russian life expectancy.

I am not a fun of nukes but this "study" is garbage. And garbage starts on the first page where mortality rate in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus is shown. It's clear that that spike has noting to do with Chernobyl but has everything to do with Perestroyka.

 

[repoman]

So, I am fully convinced through extensive review of research that global warming is real and inexorable.

However, my guess knowing how the major powers work is that they will use this as a way to get more disaster capitalism put through. Some well connected people are going to make lots of usurious/skimming money off whatever system they implement.

Am I wrong?

 

[ZiprHead]

Wow, you moved those goal post quickly.

What?

I have held an entirely consistent and unchanged position, not only throughout this rather short thread; but also in other discussions of the topic on these boards over several years.

If you think you can demonstrate a change in my position in this thread, then please do. If not, then please retract.

You stated this, which happens to be the only portion of your post I was addressing in post #10.:

More people died in the recent Paris shootings than have been killed in the entire sixty year history of the nuclear power industry.

I quoted a study by the American Journal of Epidemiology finding a significant increase in cancers amongst uranium miners. You then went to the point that nuclear is safer *in comparison* to other energy production. That is classic moving the goal post.

 

[bilby]

What?

I have held an entirely consistent and unchanged position, not only throughout this rather short thread; but also in other discussions of the topic on these boards over several years.

If you think you can demonstrate a change in my position in this thread, then please do. If not, then please retract.

You stated this, which happens to be the only portion of your post I was addressing in post #10.:

More people died in the recent Paris shootings than have been killed in the entire sixty year history of the nuclear power industry.

I quoted a study by the American Journal of Epidemiology finding a significant increase in cancers amongst uranium miners. You then went to the point that nuclear is safer *in comparison* to other energy production. That is classic moving the goal post.

Nope; I just addressed your NEW topic - the subset of deaths that is uranium miners.

The total deaths due to nuclear power remains lower than the deaths in Paris even with those people included; they were always part of the consideration.

Unless you disingenuously include deaths in the nuclear medicine and nuclear weapons industries, the total deaths for the entire end-to-end process of making electricity out of uranium in the history of the technology are fewer than the deaths in Paris due to the November 13 terrorist attacks.

And by the way, the vast majority of the miners in your study were mining uranium for the military. So if you want to discuss goalpost shifting, perhaps you might take a glance in a mirror. This is a discussion about generating power without carbon emissions.

That said, let's assume for the sake of argument that I am wildly mistaken. Let's assume that the nuclear power industry kills a ten times that many people; and not just over sixty years, but every year.

Let's imagine a vast conspiracy, whereby only one six-hundredth of the true toll of deaths and injuries are known. Even in that crazy scenario, it would still save thousands of lives per annum if all coal power plants were replaced by nuclear plants.

This is not a close call; there isn't room for doubt about which of the two options is more hazardous. and that's assuming NO deaths or injuries due to climate change.

It really is a no-brainer. Even if I am badly mistaken, and have missed 999 of every 1,000 casualties out of my assessment, my conclusion would still be the correct one, if we are trying to minimise harm.

 

[beero1000]

You stated this, which happens to be the only portion of your post I was addressing in post #10.:

More people died in the recent Paris shootings than have been killed in the entire sixty year history of the nuclear power industry.

I quoted a study by the American Journal of Epidemiology finding a significant increase in cancers amongst uranium miners. You then went to the point that nuclear is safer *in comparison* to other energy production. That is classic moving the goal post.

Nope; I just addressed your NEW topic - the subset of deaths that is uranium miners.

The total deaths due to nuclear power remains lower than the deaths in Paris even with those people included; they were always part of the consideration.

Unless you disingenuously include deaths in the nuclear medicine and nuclear weapons industries, the total deaths for the entire end-to-end process of making electricity out of uranium in the history of the technology are fewer than the deaths in Paris due to the November 13 terrorist attacks.

And by the way, the vast majority of the miners in your study were mining uranium for the military. So if you want to discuss goalpost shifting, perhaps you might take a glance in a mirror. This is a discussion about generating power without carbon emissions.

Not to mention that the article's statistics are super sketchy. In particular, those miners smoked like chimneys - (84% of the white miners were former or current smokers, with half of those being current smokers of at least one pack a day), and the significant increase in cancer was relative to the general population of their states, not to smokers or miners. There was no control for other confounding factors, etc...

Radon is known to cause cancer. I've seen stats that it is a factor in causing up to 10% of the cancers in the US. Radon exists around uranium deposits, so it does make sense that uranium miners would have larger exposure and higher cancer rates. The question is how many additional deaths does uranium mining cause? I don't think it is anywhere near the total number (<1500 total cancer deaths in the study 1960-2005).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So, what are you saying? That Hollande took advantage of the shootings in order to create a law to be used against the protesters or that he's taking advantage of the laws he created to use against terrorism to also use them to shut down protesters?

I think you are beginning to get the idea. There is a terrible lot of prime infrastructure that will lose its significance and wealth once we as a society begin to tackle the transition from Carbon and Nukes. Nukes create a large volume of highly radioactive waste.

replace/large/tiny/

In the 80's and indeed up until today, efforts were made to find ways to contain this waste and they all failed. Attempts were made to isolate it in glass but the radiation quickly reduced the glass balls it was contained in to fractured rubble. The problem was old in 80's and older today and still there. Our atmosphere is a little warmer today than when transition to alternative energy was first proposed. Every little increase in temperature means more and more south Pacific real estate is disappearing and whole countries are buying housing for their people when they have to leave. The scenario the oil companies are building would have cities like New York relocating. It is long past the time we should have started thinking and doing something about this.

What are you smoking?? There are multiple good answers for dealing with high level waste. Yucca mountain would work, salt mines would work, deep sea mud would work. If it weren't for global warming dropping it in Antarctica would work. The issue is political. (And the question of whether we should be seeking to dispose of it in the first place without reprocessing.)

Actually, places like New York have very tall buildings that all have huge continuous energy requirements. Once we truly get serious about climate change we will not be building any more sky scrapers anyway.

Skyscrapers have less surface area for the volume than small buildings and thus less loss to the environment. While I haven't seen any numbers I would expect that in general a skyscraper is more energy efficient than the same space in smaller buildings.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

More people died in the recent Paris shootings than have been killed in the entire sixty year history of the nuclear power industry.

You seriously need to think very hard about that fact.

Disagree--30+ died from fighting the fire in Chernobyl. Those were nuclear deaths, not fire deaths.

 

[ZiprHead]

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=378195

http://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/1969/05000/Mortality_of_Uranium_Miners_in_Relation_to.4.aspx

http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM198406073102301

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0140673692908662

http://oem.bmj.com/content/53/10/697.full.pdf

These are just a few of the published research articles linking uranium mining to cancer and other health issues. And many of them did include tobacco use in their finding well over and above what they would find in tobacco users otherwise (the first cite I posted did take tobacco use into account too).

Would you like more?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Apparently you are have not studied the results of Chernobyl and its continuing problems with containment. You also do not seem to notice the constant updates on Fukushima. Both of these events were terrible blows to the economy of the countries where they occurred and both have radioactive plumes thousands of miles long. It is you who are continually burying your head in the sand regarding long term disposal of nuclear waste. Actually Chernobyl had an effect on Russian life expectancy. I do appreciate the fact that you are a technological narcissist and insist on pushing all sorts of risks on the people of the world. You seem to have made it into a religion. Lotsa luck with that.

While his claim is wrong even when you count Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear power still has a safety record well above any other source of power.

And Chernobyl is more an indictment of the Russian system than of nuclear power. In a sane country the watch crew would have stopped him before he took the reactor to the very brink. (And the engineers would not have designed an emergency stop that momentarily stepped on the gas, either. Put the two together and when he finally scrammed the reactor it went prompt critical in response.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nuclear pollution from power generation is a serious problem with or without Fukushima-like events. Nuclear power represents unacceptable risks and that has always been what is wrong with it. Because it does not contribute greenhouse gasses does not make it safe. The nuclides produced in a nuclear reactor can have half lives of thousands of years. What I was talking about with free lunch and perpetual motion machine I was pointing out that you have no sense or capacity to understand frugality. You feel entitled to use huge blocks of energy for an entire lifetime and leave behind wastes others will have to cope with. The free lunch is on someone else or perhaps the environment elsewhere as a whole as in Global Warming. You just don't want to admit that we will have to decrease our level of destruction of ecosystems on this planet and that means you and me. You choose to attack me an my thinking without thinking too much yourself. Sorry about that.

If nuclear has unacceptable risks where do you suggest we get power? Everything else has higher risks, thus by definition must be unacceptable. Why are you endangering people by posting here?

And so what if they have a half life of thousands of years? Put them in a box, throw them in an old salt mine and walk away. End of issue.

Put them in a big box, go out where the ocean is really deep and the bottom is muddy and throw them overboard. End of issue. (You need a box that is big enough that it will sink well into the mud.)

Put them in a box, go out in the Atacama desert with an earthmover and bury them. End of issue.

If you have done the sane thing and reprocessed the fuel what's left will decay to ambient in 10,000 years. That means you only need a containment system that has an average life expectancy of 10,000 years to reduce the net risk to zero. Both of these systems easily accomplish that.

- - - Updated - - -

Bilby: There is no convincing you of anything but your pet project. Advocation of nuclear power is advocation of sacrifice zones, cancer, and loss of ecosystems. That clearly is a sacrifice you keep saying is small but it already is huge. I won't argue with you on this issue anymore because you are just going to keep ranting and demanding more destruction and calling it the best we can do. We have honest differences and I personally find your demeanor offensive and unwarranted.

Even if true it's better than your system which would sacrifice 99.9999% of the human race. At a minimum.

 

[beero1000]

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=378195

http://journals.lww.com/health-phys...ality_of_Uranium_Miners_in_Relation_to.4.aspx

http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM198406073102301

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0140673692908662

http://oem.bmj.com/content/53/10/697.full.pdf

These are just a few of the published research articles linking uranium mining to cancer and other health issues. And many of them did include tobacco use in their finding well over and above what they would find in tobacco users otherwise.

Would you like more?

I'd like to see a single well-designed study. No one is arguing that radon doesn't cause cancer, but if you're trying to determine how much cancer uranium mining causes you need to have a realistic comparison for control...

In particular, the linked papers compare:

1. Uranium miners vs military veterans
2. Uranium miners vs general population
3. Uranium miners vs general population
4. No comparison
5. Uranium miners vs general population

I'm unimpressed.

 

[bilby]

More people died in the recent Paris shootings than have been killed in the entire sixty year history of the nuclear power industry.

You seriously need to think very hard about that fact.

Disagree--30+ died from fighting the fire in Chernobyl. Those were nuclear deaths, not fire deaths.

The total death toll at Chernobyl - including those you mention - was 41 directly attributable to the incident (including four killed when a helicopter engaged in firefighting clipped a cable and crashed). Estimates of deaths due to long term effects vary wildly; the most reliable figures are around the 40-50 mark. So taking that top end estimate, we get 91 deaths at Chernobyl vs 130 victims (plus seven terrorists) who died in the Paris attacks.

Nobody died in any other nuclear power accident; Uranium mining is pretty safe (as compared to other mining), and is VERY safe on a 'per TWh' basis, due to the high energy density of uranium as a fuel. I doubt that there are as many as 40 mining deaths attributable to the proportion of uranium mined that has been used for reactor fuel.

But as I said earlier, even if I am mistaken, and the total number of nuclear power deaths in six decades is slightly more than the 137 killed in Paris, it would require thousands of times more fatalities to even approach the deaths per TWh level associated with coal power.

Of course, you can find estimates online of hundreds of thousands of deaths due to Chernobyl; but you can also find proof that 9/11 was an inside job; that vaccines cause autism; that Elvis is still alive; and that the moon landings were faked.

Whatever the 'real' numbers, the idea that 30+ firefighter deaths exceeds the 137 deaths in Paris doesn't add up.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The economy of Japan was seriously injured by Fukushima and there are announcements every so often of ever more desperate containment measures and escalating costs. Meanwhile you blather on about how safe nuclear power is. It isn't and there still is a lot of work to even ameliorate the damage it has already done to our environment. The human injury begins in the mines, moves to the surface with radioactive waste piles, and to reactors, then to high and low level dumps...also to the ocean and in the fish where it and mercury and other heavy metal contaminants concentrate. If they can ever figure out where they can put the stuff, that will be the ultimate sacrifice zone.

You realize you're responsible for Fukushima? The reactor would have been replaced long ago if it weren't for people like you.

Prove to me that the nuclear industry has not badly affected the Navajos on their reservations where their mine workers die off of lung cancer early in life.

Look up Black Lung someday. What's happened to the uranium miners is small potatoes in comparison. And it's mostly self-inflicted, besides--radon seems to be of pretty much no threat to non-smokers.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Please elaborate on that.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ii1eBZsxzTbuELqjQ5bc-y5V8vnBviC3hmKmcUnwcS4/edit

This was just one of many reports you get when you google post Chernobyl Russian life expectancy.

That page shows a graph looking at life expectancy as if it's due to Chernobyl--never mind what was happening to Russia at that time.

- - - Updated - - -

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ii1eBZsxzTbuELqjQ5bc-y5V8vnBviC3hmKmcUnwcS4/edit

This was just one of many reports you get when you google post Chernobyl Russian life expectancy.

I am not a fun of nukes but this "study" is garbage. And garbage starts on the first page where mortality rate in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus is shown. It's clear that that spike has noting to do with Chernobyl but has everything to do with Perestroyka.

We can't conclude it has nothing to do with Chernobyl--there simply isn't enough data to draw a negative. There certainly isn't enough data to draw a positive, though.

- - - Updated - - -

I quoted a study by the American Journal of Epidemiology finding a significant increase in cancers amongst uranium miners. You then went to the point that nuclear is safer *in comparison* to other energy production. That is classic moving the goal post.

No, it's not. Risk always has to be compared to the alternatives, not taken as an absolute number. He just hasn't always explicitly spelled this out.

 

[ZiprHead]

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=378195

http://journals.lww.com/health-phys...ality_of_Uranium_Miners_in_Relation_to.4.aspx

http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM198406073102301

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0140673692908662

http://oem.bmj.com/content/53/10/697.full.pdf

These are just a few of the published research articles linking uranium mining to cancer and other health issues. And many of them did include tobacco use in their finding well over and above what they would find in tobacco users otherwise.

Would you like more?

I'd like to see a single well-designed study. No one is arguing that radon doesn't cause cancer, but if you're trying to determine how much cancer uranium mining causes you need to have a realistic comparison for control...

In particular, the linked papers compare:

1. Uranium miners vs military veterans
2. Uranium miners vs general population
3. Uranium miners vs general population
4. No comparison
5. Uranium miners vs general population

I'm unimpressed.

The observed differences from the usual lung cancer mutational spectrum may reflect the genotoxic effects of radon.

Obviously #4 compared to "the usual lung cancer mutation spectrum" meaning they did compare to standard cancers seen in smokers and other lung cancer sufferers.

Considering that cancers among even smoking miners was eleven times greater than smokers in the general population, I find your apologia unconvincing.

If not comparing to the general population, whom would you compare to? Personally, I think that's the whole point.

 

[ZiprHead]

I quoted a study by the American Journal of Epidemiology finding a significant increase in cancers amongst uranium miners. You then went to the point that nuclear is safer *in comparison* to other energy production. That is classic moving the goal post.

No, it's not. Risk always has to be compared to the alternatives, not taken as an absolute number. He just hasn't always explicitly spelled this out.

It wasn't an absolute number. It was a comparison to general population, including tobacco users.