“I drink twelve fluid ounces each day.”
“Of food coloring?”
“Low-level carcinogen. I’m building up a tolerance.”
“To what?”
“To cancer.”
– “Sewer, Gas & Electric” by Matt Ruff (highly recommended)
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Flint: where it all goes to die.
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Yeah. If we can’t have blue milk, at least we can have glowing milk!
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thanks to Cherenkov radiation at high enough frequency you can have both.
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---------------------------------------->>>whoosh
Missed: irony.
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How deep does the pool have to be before you can watch the blue glow in safety?
If you start now, we’ll know. In about 25 years, based on experience with conventional reactors to date.
I know I seem like a killjoy, but in my defense I have worked for a company making safety-critical products. You might put your bet on technology X, but you’re going to have to convince an awful lot of people including the IAEA, and you’re going to have to persuade someone to put up the money to do the assessment. Given that we know how to make power reactors, engineering conservatism and economics are going to kill you.
The Indians may be prepared to see if they can make use of their thorium, but India was also where Bhopal happened. It will be interesting to see how it works out but, frankly, in my 60s I do not expect to see the end of the story.
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Depending on the criteria for “safe” (few seconds? ten minutes? hours, days, lifetime?), and the amount of the material, I’d guess a meter to few meters of water.
There is also the blue air glow, often mistaken for Cherenkov radiation; air is not dense enough for that from common radiation sources.
(I wrote this one.)
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I think you’d want at least five novelty straws to take a sip. Cookie dunking would be with a robotic arm only.
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I’d say some 10-15, but not in the scaredycat West.
A reactor or two will crap out. That’s the price of progress. If we won’t want to pay that, we won’t get anywhere. It’s a cost but it is smaller cost than not having the technology at the end.
Are novelty straws the new Libraries of Congress/Hogsheads?
We also need a humanities graduate unit for radiation.
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rare/medium/well-done
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India has been an IAEA member since 1957 (So has Israel but we all need the occasional laugh.) China joined in 1984. This means that they will share information on reactor technology. Having a reactor “crap out” is going to be extremely bad news for either. The truth is that nowadays nuclear reactors are a world industry, and subject to a lot of oversight. This is why Indian Point is being so open; it goes with the territory since the well named Black Grass (aka Чорнобиль, Chornobyl) caused everybody to start feeling they could perhaps do with a bit of idea sharing before there was another one.
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It never seems to fail: Whenever there’s a mishap with a nuclear power plant, people come out of the woodwork to declare that it’s important not to let baseless fear keep us from doing the only sensible thing, which is to build more of them. It’s uncannily like whenever there’s another mass shooting, people come our of the woodwork to declare that we mustn’t let current events goad us into making it harder for anyone to get a handgun. I suspect a dangerous combination of identity politics with confirmation bias.
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If you look at deaths per gigawatt hour, nuclear is pretty well off. Don’t forget the coal mining accidents that take a quite high toll. Water needs large artificial lakes that have significant local climate impact and displace many people. Wind requires dangerous work at heights and sometimes a worker falls. Solar, workers fall from the roofs and you consume quite some energy and materials, some of them all but plentiful (indium, I am looking at YOU - granted, the ITO layer is thin but it adds up, and then there’s the CIGS), to make the panels, some of which also require mining and the related mishaps.
And there is a lot of energy needed, and for some applications the centralized high-power sources are beneficial - hydrogen or other fuel production, or metallurgy (purification of copper, aluminium plants, new electrowinning technologies that are alternatives to carbon reduction).
And then the poorly informed greenies swarm out like sheep and claim that nuclear is baaaaad.
Edit: deaths per terawatt-hour:
More edit: if you have enough energy, you don’t need crude oil. Make hydrogen, whether by electrolysis or high temperature catalytic dissociation, take any carbon containing material (waste biomass will do), and run it through Fischer-Tropsch process. So, technically, you can indirectly have a nuclear-powered car even if you don’t want to go the electromobile way.
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Let me fix that:
It never seems to fail: Whenever there’s a mishap with a nuclear power plant, people the International Atomic Energy Authority comes out of the woodwork to declare that it’s important not to let baseless fear keep us from doing the only sensible thing, which is to build more of them there will be a full investigation and the lessons learnt will be circulated to other plants with similar designs. It’s uncannily unlike whenever there’s another mass shooting, people come our of the woodwork to declare that we mustn’t let current events goad us into making it harder for anyone to get a handgun.
Whereas with nuclear plants the design standards and the range of incidents to be allowed for become increasingly severe with time. I suspect a dangerous combination of identity politics with confirmation bias.
Total number of Americans killed by handguns since WW2 >1.2 million
Total number of people in the entire world killed by nuclear power plant accidents since WW2 believed to be under 100. Most of those were due to Chernobyl. Even the most pessimistic estimate of excess deaths based on epidemiological studies and assigning cancer deaths of nuclear plant workers to radiation exposure puts the world total at under 40 000. That’s about a year of US road accidents. Or four years of gun murders in the US.
Now if the US gun industry had an agency like the IAEA, and every time there was a gun crime it investigated and reported on how such a crime could be prevented in future - you might possibly have a point. If every time someone picked up a gun his or her use was monitored and recorded - you might have a point. If someone who handled a gun more than a certain amount was banned from doing it again till a certain time had elapsed - you might have a point. As it is, you’re bloviating.
[edit - I don’t include deaths due to the irresponsible use of DU by NATO, which may well exceed the total for nuclear power related deaths. If we didn’t have power stations I suspect the military would be using as-mined uranium in its warheads - which would be even worse.]
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The whole notion of “public health” has done wonders to improve one’s odds of survival, but on an individual level, it can, on occasion, be deeply upsetting.
On average, nuclear power, by displacing coal, improves everyone’s chances of surviving without cancer. It may however, create new point sources of risk which need to be addressed through proper engineering.
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Hmm - or maybe, just maybe it’s a call to look at the overall big picture on declaring if something is bad or dangerous. Certainly one can point out that vaccines do indeed kill over a hundred people a year. That in no way means it is a prudent measure not use vaccines.
To be fair, fear of nuclear energy IS largely baseless. Yes there have been high profile failures. Yes, people have died. How many more has gasoline or coal powered energy killed or shorten the lifespan of people? Many, many, many more. Especially when you factor in things like we used to use lead in gasoline. But someone dying over 50 years due to pollution doesn’t even enter your brain as an issue. Assuming climate change is largely man made, the prudent measure would be to push energy that reduces carbon and gives us the best return on power. Nuclear right now is that energy.
What people fear and what is actually dangerous are often two different things. It is why medical research and donated money go to some niche diseases that give good press, when in reality more mundane disease are what are actually killing people.
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