Thanks Peter Walker for directing my attention here. Wow, I'm astounded to read this on a BBC news website (though he lost me a bit with his mention of climate change), and really wish this kind of sanity appeared in its TV news programs . It doesn't. I select out the BBC in this respect mainly because it's funded by a compulsory tax, yet ITV and Sky have been just as bad. I must add that I have found a TV news program that seems free of much of the bias of the ones above and from which I at last obtained some sensible perspective on what's happening in Libya. Ironically that program is 'Russia Today'.
And Chernobyl? The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer - which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan). And in each case the numbers are minute compared with the 3,800 at Bhopal in 1984, who died as a result of a leak of chemicals from the Union Carbide pesticide plant.
So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let's look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).
A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m - areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl
Go read the whole thing.
13 comments:
you don't need to worry about the end work life of boiled thorium rocks.
http://tinyurl.com/thorium8
also, that power plant was off on their own path, unmonitored, near condemned, taking their own time in shutting it down.
http://tinyurl.com/TEPCOmedy
The UK Media are just easily led little whores with a short attention span who want to see the worst in everything. That's why the demo at the weekend turned into a media masturbation over the couple of hundred who were causing trouble and not the hundreds of thousands making a peaceful protest. I think the politicians have long known that they can easily control the agenda on any radio or tv program because of this media attitude.
I note there's a link at the bottom taking you to Wade's own website where you can buy his book.
I'm still waiting on someone pronouncing the name of the power plant the way I read it: fuk-u-shima.
i am jack's complete lack of surprise...
I just loved the fact checking on the reports about that protest. In the Mirror the number of protestors was given as 400,000, whilst in the Mail it was 250,000. On the TV news it varied between these figures over about two minutes.
Oh yeah, all those cuts that are going to result in government expenditure growing by 50 billion over the next four years...
not to mention all those government departmens/affiliates 9like the prison service, police etc) all imploding because now there won't be physically enough people to handle all the red tape...
Apparently Chernobyl is now becoming a tourist destination for some http://www.argophilia.com/news/chernobyl-touris/21787/. Maybe the BBC can film the next series of Survivors here to save some money...
Jebel, and of course the answer is, sack anyone but the bureaucrats. I give up now, seriously, the human race is just going to get what it deserves.
Please not, billd. The BBC must not be encouraged to dabble in SF.
And on thorium-based molten salt reactors:
http://tinyurl.com/4t5ojde
...
The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.
"The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs."
i'm trying to find out this politico tourniquet that Reagan pushed into full bloom, but cant find any evidence other than a few blog-opinion things. i'm sure there will be some books out there soon on who fucked who soon enough.
G.E. again:
http://tinyurl.com/genfukt
Vaude, the more I read about this the more I think like you 'military-industrial complex'. Though perhaps that was it initially and now it's more a case of vested interests in the uranium model quashing anything else. Ridiculous. Give it twenty or thirty years and China, and probably India, are going to be chuckling at our primitive life styles.
power grabs in the middle east right now are about the market cornering of that rare(ified) black gold. the energy companies, especially G.E., were all about weaponizing anything that had an open wallet or bank account in the 80s. you got someone you wanna kill? great. here to help.
Syriana(movie) & Blowback(book) touch on this cycle of stupid. waiting for an sf book to come out thats similar to the endless kill recycle kill super pace like the Skinner is with the spatterjay virus.
military industrial complex=endless pandora box forever.
a pal of mine drank thorium for an x ray recently. doin' ok.
More about revenge in Libya I think. It was only on Russia Today that I found out Gadaffi is not only responsible for the Lockerbie air crash, but a French one too (and he's been harming their commercial interests):
http://rt.com/news/vengeance-west-gaddafi-terror/
the Lockerbee crash he was supposedly paying reparations to. wonder if he will bother now. he's been wanting to get back into the world game big time and has been a good boy (as much as possible for him) because he's a rabid gear head. building cars for safety reasons, and hoping to market them in the world theatre.
http://daydaily.com/2011/03/13/gaddafis-nice-car/
these switch and bait things are nothing new for ordering and cancelling in military deals. i could see the french getting upset about their contracts being shit on, but not the flight bombing of eld since he was droppin dough. why would they cut a deal otherwise?
http://tinyurl.com/GADDApay
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