The Future
Thursday 16 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
If we can somehow discount the opinion of proglodytes on matters in which they use only emotion and completely discount science, basic economics, and reality, perhaps we can finally move our energy resources towards the future.
You wouldn’t know it from the press, but the nuclear industry is far and away the safest industry in America, with the fewest injuries, no deaths, the best safety record, and the least lost-work hours. Nuclear even has the best environmental record of all industries.
By any measure, nuclear outshines all other work places. But that never seems to be enough, and nuclear workers feel frustrated at the common misrepresentations and onerous requirements that keep being piled on them, post-Fukushima additions being the latest round.
Unfortunately, Fukushima has ended the modern debate for nuclear power despite not really being the disaster that activists really wanted it to be. CNN on a WHO report concerning the fallout from the meltdown:
As Fukushima Daiichi unraveled in global public view with fire, explosions and radioactive emissions for weeks, people living nearby were exposed to radiation and trauma.
The trauma was worse, the World Health Organization said in a report released Thursday on the health effects of the “Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.”
The lifetime risk of contracting certain types of cancer rose slightly for a small group of people because they were exposed to radiation from the nuclear disaster, the WHO said Thursday.
The notable exception was young emergency workers at the plant, who inhaled high doses of radioactive iodine, probably raising their risk of developing thyroid cancer. But since the thyroid is relatively resistant to cancer, the overall risk for these people remains low, the report said.
Otherwise, any increase in human disease after the partial meltdown triggered by the March 2011 tsunami is “likely to remain below detectable levels,” the WHO said in its report.
People exposed as children in towns close to the Daiichi power plant are slightly more likely to contract leukemia, breast or thyroid cancer in the course of their lives than the general population, the WHO said.
[. . .]
Those living in hardest-hit areas of Fukushima prefecture were exposed to radiation levels of 12 to 25 milliseverts (mSv) in the first year since the disaster, the WHO reported.
That’s equivalent to one or two CAT scans, according to the American College of Radiology. Even on the upper end of the scale, that barely raises the risk of dying from cancer, the college says.
According to United Nations nuclear experts, exposure to less than 1,000 mSv annually causes no meaningful increase in the risk of getting cancer.
The worst side effect of the Fukushima “disaster” (it would seem to me that a disaster would have more than 0 deaths) is that because radiation leaked in to the sea, people ought to avoid eating fish from the immediate area. Those who had some exposure didn’t even have enough exposure to raise the risk of dying of those who already had cancer. Which isn’t to say that one shouldn’t be concerned about potential contamination, but that we must remember that this is the worst “disaster” in the nuclear industry since Chernobyl and not a single person has died from the initial meltdown. No one has even gotten so much as sick from radiation exposure. Yet because of the fear that has been elicited in proglodytes and other environmental activists based on nothing but emotional appeals, the most efficient, cleanest, and historically safest form of energy we have has been virtually dismissed as a possibility, when the only thing to have been learned from Fukushima is that building anything on the shoreline in an earthquake zone with a propensity to tsunamis is probably a bad idea.
2013-05-16 » madlibertarianguy