This is not an encouraging report. We need safe, sustainable, renewable energy, and we need to ramp up now. Germany and China are addressing the issue, as well as being out front on the development of alternatives. Where is the US on this? Oh, right, bogged down in MENA where the oil is. Meanwhile, Iowa has shrugged off Fukushima and is proceeding with plans for a new nuclear plant subsidized by the state.
9 comments:
It's scaremongering nonsense. Using Becquerels for Beta radiation for starters.
You'd have to stand in front of a 3.7 megabecquerels source for about 30 years without it decaying at all to get even a 0.0001% measurable change in cancer risk.
There is always massive radiation world wide thanks to the huge nuclear reactor in the sky.
The real data comes from Chernobyl. Less people died from Chernobyl in the last twenty five years and died last week from coal mining.
15 fatalities in the past 5 years from natural gas pipeline explosions in the USA.
The public is being scared of this while a bigger problem is underneath them.
While I agree with this, Neil, and don't think that it is a nuclear emergency in the ROW, I don't trust governments to provide accurate data either. I think that parents need to be vigilant about developments.
There is no such thing as good radiation. I've maxed out on the sun, for example, and get skin cancers as a result of previous over-exposure. I didn't realize this in my younger years.
I think that people have to be vigilant about developing conditions, not only nuclear obviously, and not rely on government to warn them or protect them. Very often government is protecting the vested interests involved.
The primary risk would be to children now. Unless things get a lot worse, it is not going to be a problem for adults. But even though the risk many be small for children from this even so far, they have a lifetime in front of them in which they will be exposed to radiation from many sources. So taking precautions to limit exposure now seems prudent.
I should also add that I am also concerned about a lot other things than radiation. I am a strong proponent of safe, sustainable, renewable energy because of the deleterious effects of air pollution. I woke up to this in 1973 and from then, I have not lived in large cities or areas of high pollution, other than for brief periods while working on limited projects.
I am also highly skeptical of using xray machines for security scanning. While the radiation my be low, radiation is cumulative. Moreover, I really wonder how accurate the testing it, and how well controlled the amount of radiation from individual machines is.
And don't get me going on food safety. The US government actively works with the food industry to obscure the facts regarding organic, natural, non-GMO and so forth. e.g., by preventing accurate labeling.
While this may not not directly related to MMT, it is an aspect of political economy, and MMT as monetary economics is joined at the hip to political economy due to its policy recommendation, which includes public purpose and sustainability.
Radiation is the pollution associated with the use of nuclear energy. That pollution is increasing.
test cookie
1. More radiation passes out as body excrement from medical patients than all nuclear plants in USA.
2. Radon is very prevalent naturally and bubbles through foundations of homes and sits in cellars - second leading cause of lung cancer in the USA.
3. City of Houston has been for 30 years using the bottom bracket of error margin for reporting radiation levels in ground tap water while the upper bound exceeds federal regulations.
4. etc
4. Tobbaco fertilizer was once analyzed in the late 80's and shown to have radio isotopes of phosphorus or other minerals and the acculmulation of which in people's lungs was possible.
Goog,
In our house (Central Maryland) we have a radon suppression system installed that runs all of the time. There is a fan that creates a neg. pressure under our basement slab and then blows the air up and out of a tube at the top of our second story....
but I'm with Tom here, I dont trust the Japanese govt (and related ours) to be providing the real skinny. Too much tendency to "save face", etc... I hope we have our intel assets keeping a real eye on that situation....
They really f'ed this up with a shitty containment structure in the first place (Looks like steel structure with panelized concrete, very Chernobyl looking imo) and then had no "Plan B" for back up AC power when the on-site backup power system got flooded looks like.
You know everyday I drive by a big Cummins diesel logistics facility that has many of their mobilized backup/portable AC power systems just sitting there in the lot unused these days.
You would think the Japanese (with their $985B of US Treasuries) could have bought a few of these systems and had them staged and a few of our heavy lift helos (CH-47 type, 23,000 lb lift) to quickly fly these things into place and get the pumps running again.... but nooooo they are sooooo greedy to hoard USD balances.... what is wrong with these people that they are so zealous to hoard the USD? And cant bring themselves to buy a few things made in the USA for disaster preparedness at least.
It looks like a Katrina situation to me, govt caught flat footed again, only this time it is a nuke issue.. Resp,
hi frank
i agree
OPEC
Chinese
British
Japanese
They all could start buying our stuff
that's $4 trillion worth of USD they are sitting on
this reverberates Krugman's savings hoarding critism of the above
their savings created the economic problems of the 2007 years
sure price of oil got too high, but that's because china didn't buy our tecnology
Goog,
"their savings created the economic problems of the 2007 years"
Very well said!
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