I think I might choose to simply not participate in this thread anymore. I'm being accused of lying and misrepresenting things when I'm extensively citing sources. Meanwhile we have people responding with "I imagine that" and "I suspect that" and making claims with no corroboration of them at all.
You can cite sources as much as you want, but when the study says A, and you say B, you're misrepresenting it's findings.
And yet I can already hear the cries of "oh, but not all of those are small girls." Which is obviously true. But there's a massive shortage of common sense in this thread. If an example is given that young girls 30 miles away from an event were shows to have increased risks of cancer...it's ridiculous to conclude from that that exclusively young girls 30 miles away are at risk. Conveniently ignoring that the same study also concluded that boys were at risk. Conveniently ignoring the possibility of effect in areas other than the one being discussed. That's the kind of thinking a couple of you are using here.
What most people expect as common sense is deeply flawed. But anyway, let's follow the common sense path. A vulnerable sub-group who were in the most heavily contaminated area, suffered a minor increase in cancer rates. That gives us no reason to assume that less vulnerable subgroups, or groups in less contaminated areas, were harmed. It also doesn't give us any reason to assume that they weren't.
A June 2012 Stanford University study estimated, using a linear no-threshold model, that the radiation release from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could cause 130 deaths from cancer globally (the lower bound for the estimater being 15 and the upper bound 1100) and 180 cancer cases in total (the lower bound being 24 and the upper bound 1800), most of which are estimated to occur in Japan. Radiation exposure to workers at the plant was projected to result in 2 to 12 deaths.[19] However, a December 2012 UNSCEAR statement to the Fukushima Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety advised that because of the great uncertainties in risk estimates at very low doses, UNSCEAR does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disasterOn a side note, I did not ignore that the study said that boys and other people where at risk. I only said that your original statement was misleading, if not fallacious.
I provide studies and I get "oh, well those don't count." I point out massive events that shut down thousands of square miles and I hear "oh, well that only happens sometimes." I show studies that show real cancer increases, and I get "oh, well, somebody disputed that, so I'm going to ignore it."
- You provided studies that didn't say what you said they said.
- And yes a meltdown only happens every so often. A single large event is not worse than millions of smaller events which, while individually having a smaller impact, have a larger impact together.
- You provided studies that are widely considered flawed by the scientific community, and are written by a small group of people with known profit motivations.
- People who wrote stuff like the study discussed here :
LinkAnd yet somebody points out that the chinese are dumping chemicals and some of you leap to the conclusion that "therefore" those chemicals are worse than nuclear waste without providing any information or evidence of the risks at all. Deaths and cancers due to nuclear "aren't that much?" Are "lower than some studies claim?"Ok. Find me a single correlation at all between solar cell waste and cancer. At all. And hey, while we're at it: find me a single one of those reports in any country other than china. If you guys can dismiss Chernobyl because the russians are careless, I can dismiss china for the same reason. Try applying one tenth the amount of skepticism and sheer dismissal to your own arguments as you are to mine.
But this is a strawman. I went through the entire thread, and nobody has ever said that those chemicals were worse than nuclear waste. Nobody ever said that waste causes cancer (there are other ways to die). In fact, the only thing that has been stated about the waste chain of solar is the following :
- That the incorrect disposal of solar panel waste
can cause health hazards and environemental concern for people miles away. (
http://web.stanford.edu/group/sjir/pdf/Solar_11.2.pdf)
And I'm afraid nobody is dismissing Chernobyl because the Russians are careless. People are dismissing Chernobyl because the RBMK reactor has no design relation whatsoever with any present or future reactor. With China hoping to capture at least 50% of the solar power market (or at least part of the resource supplies), you can't say it is irrelevant to the global picture.
I think it's safe to say that thermal solar is safer than nuclear, and would be with scaling up as well. Although it being several times more expensive and still ineffective away from the equator are dealbreakers IMO.
Nothing is safe to say, I'm afraid.
Hopefully things have improved since the sixties, though.
Among them an improvement in common sense, like not having to manually adjust the control rods. I can't find any sources for why they had it like that.
You didn't have to manually adjust cool rods. They just had a tendency to get stuck.
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Topic: Alternative Power Sources. (Read 10984 times)