Flow rate has something to do with it; also, temperatures across the British Isles show a fair bit of variation due to the Irish Sea, Ireland, and the Gulf Stream. The East tends to be colder than the West, so ice is more prevalent in East Anglia and the East Coast than, say, in the streams that feed the Thames. In cold spells around the Bath area, the canal sometimes freezes (the water is more or less stationary) while the River Avon continues to flow.
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That wasnāt the reason; it was simply to find places for them to live, because the USSR didnāt have a relocation plan for a lot of people in a disaster like that. The evidence is that more people died from the effects of dislocation than from radiation, and it would probably have been a lot better to keep them in the area (in the lower activity regions, of course) and deal witht he consequences in situ. Same with Fukushima.
Incidentally, I know itās a lost cause, but could we please drop this āthe Sovietsā? Itās like calling the British āThe Parliamentariansā or the US āThe Republicansā. USSR is shorter and correct (it stands for the Union of Councils of Socialist Republics, and āSovietā just means a council, as distinct from Duma, which is an advisory body, literally āa thinkeryā.The present Russian administration has a Duma, and you can deduce quite a lot from that.)
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āUSSRā is shorter to type, but when I type I hear the words in my head and āUSSRā is clunky and hard to say. āSovietsā is not.
You call the US āthe USā instead of āthe United States of Americaā; consider āSovietā a similar metonymy for āSoviet Unionā.
The Soviet Union is well known for its humanitarian record.
I find this an implausible explanation for multiple reasons, but I doubt either of us have enough at stake to do the research involved in making a case for our explanations. Consider me unconvinced and uninterested in convincing anyone else.
āLate last year Moller and Mousseau published a paper in the Journal of Animal Ecology showing that reproductive rates and annual survival rates are much lower in the Chernobyl birds than in control populations.ā
Article also points out that cancer rates are still higher in areas near the exclusion zone.
The argument that follows does nothing to indicate that the human race per se might be a bad idea, but that certain activities might be a bad idea.
And itās an effective argument.
See, this doesnāt seem like a good thing. It seems to me that, ceteris paribus, if lead could be mined without heavily polluting the soil that would be better. And if you could do a cost benefit analysis and the economic value of the lead being mined was lower than the economic value destroyed by the soil toxicity, then it would seem reasonable to argue that mining the lead would indeed be a bad idea.
Surely continuing to live in an area with soil contamination that is causing birth defects is worse than finding another place to live. Thereās no moral valence to any of this because, you know, human beings didnāt actually cause it.
But nuclear power plants are caused by human beings, and so there is a moral element to it that there isnāt with respect to the natural nuclear reactors that almost certainly formed in Africa long before human beings evolved. We can resolve the moral issue by using a cost benefit analysis as above with the lead, but in the case of nuclear it doesnāt look so good. The amount of inputs required to build a safe nuclear reactor, manage it safely, decommission it safely, and manage the resulting waste are at least in the same ballpark as the economic value that might be derived from that reactor. At the very least itās arguable either way.
Unless your argument is that we should not worry about safety or pollution at all with respect to heavy industry because, hey, Harz Mountain and Chernobyl and things are mostly OK pssshhhht what birth defects? In which case, shine on you crazy diamond.
Itās no stranger than Union and Confederate.
And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was neither sovyet nor socialistā¦
No, that isnāt my argument. Iām not keen on physical or mental defects. Iāve worked in radiological protection, designed a low-emission plating plant, and identified and eliminated chemical and other hazards in manufacturing plant. My garden is as chemical-free as I can make it.
However, I am also aware that the natural world is not designed to be human friendly. Iāve mentioned this elsewhere, and there is a Tennyson quote I particularly like from 1844 (before Darwin published:)
āSo careful of the type?[species] But no;/from scarped cliff and quarried stone/she cries, āA thousand types are gone;/I care for nothing, all must goāā
Intelligent men in the early Victorian era had realised - and it was a huge shock - that far from the world being designed by God as a nice place for people to live, species come and go at random and this potentially includes our own.
As well as heavy metals and radioactives, we have things like the tobacco plant which produces (accidentally) a substance which modifies peopleās brains so they grow more tobacco plants while shortening their lives with diseases like lung cancer and emphysema. We build and run cars for convenience although every year hundreds of thousands of people die of them. We make gunsā¦donāt get me started on the craziness of that one.
Heavy metals and radioactives, along with coal and oil, have literally fueled our growth as a species. That growth may well now be excessive and we may have doomed ourselves in the long run. Copper, lead, nickel and chromium have killed people through poisoning, but they have also given us clean drinking water and therefore prevented the deaths of millions of children. All of our tools and productions seem to have a yin and a yang, a light side and a dark side. The question is one of tradeoffs.
Nuclear energy has an enormous downside. It has given us bombs and depleted uranium. It also has an enormous upside; it is the only developed electrical production technology that can reliably meet our baseline needs 24 hours a day, and it could take us 50 years or more to develop renewables to that point. The biggest threat to our survival isnāt nuclear energy but the carbon cycle, so on balance I regard Chernobyl as by far the lesser consequence of two evils. Probably more people die prematurely in the US each year from consequences of fossil fuel burning - carbon particles, smog - than nuclear energy has killed in its entire history. We have to be realistic and do proper risk assessments of the threats we face, and not simply take the things that are killing people right now (by pollution) and will kill others in the future by climate change, as givens that we canāt alter.
Well, I said it was a lost causeā¦the ŃŠ¾Š²ŠµŃŃŠŗŠøŠ¹ Š½Š°ŃŠ¾Š“ is like saying āpeople in democraciesā Thatās a phrase which we do use, but to describe us. The Š½Š°ŃŠ¾Š“ (people) bit is rather important, because ŃŠ¾Š²ŠµŃŃŠŗŠøŠ¹ alone doesnāt make sense - where I came in.
Thatās a fair point - though I would argue those are also unfortunate terms. Confederate is definitely an adjective used as a noun, Union perhaps more arguable. Verbing weirds nouns, nounness weirds adjectives. Perhaps what we have here (flame on) is just the typical US sloppiness when it comes to the use of English (flame off). Perhaps it would have been clearer had I denoted my original post thus:
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But, as you argue above, many of these āneedsā are actively harmful to ourselves, and our āgrowthā as a species may not be such a good thing, at least in terms of the degree to which itās occurred.
Honestly, I think westerners could afford to take a huge hit to their standard of living without much impact on their quality of life. Yes, if you insist that we need cars and iPhones and google and so on, then nuclear might be the least bad option. But we donāt actually need those things.
That was basically what I argued in response to what seemed to me a rather fatalistic argument about how Roman mines still cause soil toxicity and so on. I think I actually have fewer of these āgivens that we canāt alterā given that you seem hung up on saving industrial society in its current form whereas Iām willing to consider other scenarios (mainly, walking away from it slowly).
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Of all youāve written, I have to say this is one area where I agree with you. Partly. The US consumes far more resources per head than Europeans, Japanese and Koreans. You would need to halve your per capita energy consumption to get down to an English or Italian level. There are big differences in āThe Westā.
Where I am pessimistic is that human nature makes consumption reduction very difficult. Look around you at the fierce resistance to gun control, smaller vehicles and houses, and the way the rich seem determined to concentrate ever more of the worldās wealth in their hands. An attempt to reduce consumption in the US and Australia to European levels is, I am sure, utterly doomed to failure. An attempt to reduce European consumption levels to that of, say, Greece, would be equally fiercely resisted.
The prospect of civil war and coup has to be factored in for any amelioration strategy. At the moment, it isnāt looking good.
WW2 devastated Europe and the East and killed tens of millions (including the Chinese war in Japan.) The US didnāt have this experience - the Civil War happened when the country was much smaller and poorer and there was no invasion. WW2 was a resources war for Japan and Germany. Think about that and you will see where I am coming from.
Thatās why I guess you must be from the US. āFinding another place to liveā in much of the developed world isnāt that easy. We canāt just put up fences around our nuclear bomb test sites and start up somewhere else. When I say above that WW2 was a resources war, for both Japan and Germany that partly meant living space for their populations - Lebensraum.
Incidentally, I notice that the Chernobyl region is now returning to use as the radiation levels fall below ānormalā background. The world-nuclear.org report mentions in passing that the number of foetuses aborted without good reason in the West considerably exceeds the estimated death toll from the actual accident, which does show how we tend to mis-evaluate risk. And at least one of the biodiversity reports notes that overall biodiversity in the Chernobyl area has increased as the result of depopulation. I mentioned above that the human race itself might not be a good thing, and for much of the larger wildlife on this planet that is certainly true. Ask the ferungulates and the fish.
English is what native speakers make of it.
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Thatās weird, because for almost every single point weāve discussed so far we seem to come to a point of agreement. We agree, for example, that on the whole pollution is bad thing. We agree that the benefits of any particular human activity should be weighed against the drawbacks. We agree that human industry has caused problems that may well be insuperable at this point in history.
There were at most a very few points in your previous comment with which I disagreed at all. Thus, my comment only disputed your characterization of our āwantsā as āneedsā and whether my perspective is actually more fatalistic than yours.
I find it unproductive to discuss anything under the rubric of āhuman natureā, as that only invites debates as to what actually constitutes āhuman natureā. Read some anthropological studies and youāll see that āhuman natureā covers a pretty startling variety of attitudes towards other humans and the world in general.
Note that Iām not denying that there is such a thing as human nature, just that what it refers to is pretty much up for grabs.
This is another area where I think Iām actually less fatalistic than you are ā I think humans make a pretty flexible template. Itās just hard to get them out of a rut once theyāre stuck in one.
I should have explicitly said āeverything else being equalā or something similar. I did not mean to imply it was trivial to move elsewhere, just that it would be preferable where possible.
Really now, I already pointed out that āUSā is an āunfortunateā shorthand for the United States of America. Why do you persist in this sloppiness?
What am I forgetting?
Oh yeah:
Giant-ass masers at the poles pointed into deep space perpendicular to the ecliptic for cooling, carbon capture and sequestration for super strong building materials to be used in construction of space elevators which we can use to haul existing nuclear waste off into space and into the sun whilst we use the new micro fusion reactors to augment renewables.
Jobās a good un.
The right wing has a well-funded campaign to discourage the public from believing in climate science. Itās not like Evolution Denial, which is mainly intended to grab a particular voting block; itās about preventing legislation that might negatively impact the next quarterās and next yearās profits for the energy business.
If 25 years from now, somebody elseās real estate in Manhattan and Florida and San Francisco and Houston and Shanghai and coastal India and little islands in the Pacific flood, thatās somebody elseās problem, except maybe for Houston, but theyāll have amortized the costs of that by then anyway.
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The last-known snow in Boston, MA just melted yesterday.
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I was told that a farmer once bought a disused ice rink, intending to plough it up and farm on it. He went to a university soil science department and asked if they could tell him how long it would take to thaw. Their estimate was 150 years.
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