Story Time - GeekAlpha on Japanese Radiation

[geekalpha]

Back when I was in Nuclear Power School (in the Navy *), I had this awful class called CMR (Chemistry, Materials, and Radiation Controls) where we learned about radiation controls. Given the situation in Japan, this story is relevant to world events.

Comments

[erischild]

Seconded. I was a kid in Germany at the time so I have a lot of elementary school memories, but I'd be interested in the Science! now that I know you can't see the "particles" in the grass you're not allowed to play on for a while.

[dporowski]

I gave up due to incipient monitor defenestration when I read, in a roughly 72 hour span, a series of reports by the same person "Water being dumped on spent fuel and reactors", "large puddles of radioactive water now in basement of buildings near reactors", "radiation detected in seawater just off reactors" summed up with "OH MY GOD IT'S GETTING WORSE AND WORSE WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?!"

I don't necessarily ask that people passing along or reporting news be experts on everything, but is it too much to ask that they be able to figure out where water eventually goes once you drop it?

I'm just, I think, going to ask them if they eat bananas and brazil nuts.

[poh]

No Rads meter has popped up on my HUD, so I think we're ok.

[serpentmoon]

Soooo... are you saying we will or won't be seeing teenage mutant ninja turtles popping out of Japanese sewers?

Seriously, though, Japan is like my hometown. I can still hardly bear reading about it, and don't for the most part. There's been more disaster than I can take. It's bad and we have yet to see exactly how bad it will be in the end. Thank you for being non-alarmist about it.

[taowulf]

I remember a tree hugger friend of mine once going on and on about nuclear plants years ago, I had sort of phased him out while he was ranting and finally something caught my ear.

"You can just SEE the pollution coming out of that place"

At this point I sat up and said "excuse me?"

"They have those massive smokestacks and all of that pollution just coming out!"

"Um....you know that is water, right?"

"No way, those ARE SMOKESTACKS!"

"Actually, they pipe hot water up to the top of those cooling towers, drop water down as it cools off. The 'smoke' you see is actually water vapor as a result of evaporation. It is the same a cloud. Clouds are pollution, are they?"

"Man, don't listen to their propaganda man, it is all lies!"

We didn't talk much after that. People's ignorance is the biggest enemy here. Yes, Chernobyl was bad, Three Mile Island an inconvenience, but with proper engineering, it is a hell of a lot better for the environment than burning billions of tons of fossil fuels.

[geekalpha]

After decades of rightful fear of nuclear war, I can understand why anything nuclear scares people. What annoys me is that there really is an objective engineering truth to how things are designed and how they work.

To me, if one feels strongly about a topic, they should learn everything they can about it instead of just making shit up and stamping their feet.

I always find it funny that it is the cooling towers that are shown whenever anyone wants to scare people about nuclear power. They aren't anywhere near the actual reactor, it's just a place to dump waste heat (through convection of uncontaminated water that doesn't even come near the reactor; it's just warm water).

[taowulf]

Very clean water too, probably cleaner than our drinking water.

BTW, I think your George Jetson on Ludes made a great point with his story. After all, it stuck with you all of these years.

[perrrfect_angel]

(nods) I like and agree with the main points of this post, and thank you for mentioning the bits about radiation levels and contamination. Those are good points. So are your points on how few nuclear accidents we've had, especially when one thinks of all the non-nuclear but still highly toxic/cancer-causing spills/accidents we have all the time. This is one of the main reasons I enjoy watching your journals, the levels of logic you apply to most everything you post about. It's refreshing and often educational, and almost always entertaining.

[perrrfect_angel]

"All the time" referring more to "far more often than nuclear" rather than "happens daily/weekly/monthly..."