Why no thread on the French military intervention in Mali?

[Kidlicious]

Radiation from glow watches is not harmful because the exposure is miniscule. The same is true of air and water around Fukushima Daichi.

No, stupid. The radiation in a glow watch is not ingested and not gamma radiation, which makes it harmless. Radiation from Fukushima is ingested.

[Dinner]

HC doesn't seem to understand what the life time exposure limit of things like radiation is for.

[Kidlicious]

Stochastic effects are associated with long-term, low-level (chronic) exposure to radiation. ("Stochastic" refers to the likelihood that something will happen.) Increased levels of exposure make these health effects more likely to occur, but do not influence the type or severity of the effect.

Cancer is considered by most people the primary health effect from radiation exposure. Simply put, cancer is the uncontrolled growth of cells. Ordinarily, natural processes control the rate at which cells grow and replace themselves. They also control the body's processes for repairing or replacing damaged tissue. Damage occurring at the cellular or molecular level, can disrupt the control processes, permitting the uncontrolled growth of cells cancer This is why ionizing radiation's ability to break chemical bonds in atoms and molecules makes it such a potent carcinogen.

Other stochastic effects also occur. Radiation can cause changes in DNA, the "blueprints" that ensure cell repair and replacement produces a perfect copy of the original cell. Changes in DNA are called mutations.

Sometimes the body fails to repair these mutations or even creates mutations during repair. The mutations can be teratogenic or genetic. Teratogenic mutations are caused by exposure of the fetus in the uterus and affect only the individual who was exposed. Genetic mutations are passed on to offspring.

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/health_effects.html

Like I said we don't know what the death count will be. In fact, we never will. It could be thousands.

[Hauldren Collider]

HC doesn't seem to understand what the life time exposure limit of things like radiation is for.

No, I totally understand that. It's just that flight attendants will probably receive more radiation over their careers than people near Fukushima. For a properly functioning power plant, they certainly will.

[BlackCat]

Alice's problems was small compared to mine - I agree with HC

[Dinner]

No, I totally understand that.

Could have fooled me. Heck, your babbling about radition exposure at moderate levels completely ignored cumulative life time exposure much like your babbling about Agent Orange being hunky-dori lacked any and all understanding of what a mutagen is.

[Dinner]

BTW, back on topic, French soldiers are now advancing. Supposedly the bombing by French military aircraft have sent the Islamist militants into a panic and they are abandoning towns which they expect French soldiers to soon occupy. There are videos of the people of the towns cheering and celebrating that the Islamists have left telling terrible tales of what harsh and arbitrary punishments the Islamists had dealt out to people without any rule of law. The upside is the Islamists have been driven out but the downside is they are like cockroaches who scurry away from superior force only to pop up again some where else.

It should be noted that almost all the Islamic militants are foreign Arab fighters while the locals are blacks who hate them and want them out of their country. To compare the locals declare they love France and are all adorning their cars and houses with French flags. Merchants in Mali supposedly cannot keep French flags in stock as people keep buying out all the French flags in stores.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

It should be noted that almost all the Islamic militants are foreign Arab fighters while the locals are blacks who hate them and want them out of their country. To compare the locals declare they love France and are all adorning their cars and houses with French flags. Merchants in Mali supposedly cannot keep French flags in stock as people keep buying out all the French flags in stores.

[MichaeltheGreat]

And to put things in perspective. Which was worse. TMI and Fukushima or Deepwater, Valdez and every other oil spill?

They're not really comparable. Oil has much broaders uses in the global economy, and the long term issue of safe rad waste storage has not been satisfactorily addressed.

[MichaeltheGreat]

No, I totally understand that. It's just that flight attendants will probably receive more radiation over their careers than people near Fukushima. For a properly functioning power plant, they certainly will.

There are already several hundred TEPCO employees with many times lifetime exposure limits. At the peak of the efforts to limit the meltdowns and fire damage, there were hot areas where employees had to go where you absorbed safe lifetime dose limits in just over an hour. It took more than an hour to get in and out of those areas. There was also a lack of safety gear and numerous other issues. TEPCO is probably the most politically protected and arrogant utility on earth (they make all North American utilities a joy to work with in comparison. Other than the pro forma apologies to shareholders, the Japanese government, culture, legal system and press will all combine to severely limit the extent and accuracy of information released to the public.

[Kidlicious]

No, I totally understand that. It's just that flight attendants will probably receive more radiation over their careers than people near Fukushima. For a properly functioning power plant, they certainly will.

:facepalm:

[Dauphin]

Not a single person got hurt by Three Mile Island.

They managed to **** things up without a natural catastrophe. That no-one was ultimately hurt was not a contemporaneous certainty given that human error significantly contributed to the incident.

[Hauldren Collider]

We have thousands? Tens of thousands? of machine-years of operation, summing up all the nuclear reactors on the planet, including naval reactors, and three accidents to speak for it. Consider the number of people who die in coal mines and other related activities to coal power production. Consider the pollution and crap it chucks into the environment. Nuclear power is efficient, safe, and clean.

[MichaeltheGreat]

It depends on your definition of accidents. USSR Navy SSNs had several issues. There are also some classified, or at the time, not published, incidents at Hanford, because those weren't commercial reactors, they were under jurisdiction of the AEC. You also have things like radiation releases due to defects in new heat exchanger tubing (or the installation, or the interface with existing parts of the system) in secondary heat exchangers which has caused the indefinite shutdown of SONGS. That still doesn't even address the as yet unsolved issue of transport and permanent storage of various types of rad waste. Back in the 60s and 70s, reporting requirements were radically different, and a lot of potentially significant issues were addressed between the utility and manufacturer/integrator, and if they were fixable, it never got to AEC.

Nukes are a preferable alternative to coal, except for three minor details - the waste storage issue, grid realignment and capital costs. You can't just decommission all coal plants in the US and Canada and replace them with nukes, so comparing one to the other is just ridiculous. The sites aren't necessarily compatible, there is a lot of minehead coal smaller than can be replaced by a nuke, grid capacity at various points is based around existing plants and demand (and reconductoring/re-routing is enormously expensive), and if you scale up nukes to 10 times the present output, you magnify the as yet unsolved long term waste disposal issue.

[Dauphin]

We have thousands? Tens of thousands? of machine-years of operation, summing up all the nuclear reactors on the planet, including naval reactors, and three accidents to speak for it. Consider the number of people who die in coal mines and other related activities to coal power production. Consider the pollution and crap it chucks into the environment. Nuclear power is efficient, safe, and clean.

I'd already pointed out Deepwater and other oil spills have caused far more damage. I'm pro-nuclear power. I just don't agree with some of your assertions.

It's also more than three. You just know of three.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents