--- John Conway <conway@Math.Princeton.EDU> wrote:
On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Eugene Salamin wrote:
This little chuckle pales in comparison to the damage done by the pervasive belief that nuclear power is unsafe, or that human activity is casusing global temperatures increases. Explain this last point to the people in Quebec City. It's -50 and the laughter may help warm them.
I well remember being in England about 20 years ago when the whole of Western Europe was suddenly very much concerned at the rapid rise in radioactivity that we later learned was the result of an accident at Chernobyl in Russia (but now Ukraine once again). The concern was amply justified, since many thousands of people in the Ukraine have died as a consequence, and very many more, all over Europe, would have done so had a few dozen volunteers (unwittingly) sacrificed their lives in order to save us.
That assertion sounds dubious. Can you quote measurements of radioactivity in Europe outside of Ukraine?
Conservatives usually pride themselves on being hard-headed, but surely the hard-headed view here is that cock-ups will always be with us, since what's not impossible will, with probability one, ultimately happen, So we are assured that such accidents will happen again, and some of them will be worse than the Chernobyl one. You don't have to get much worse for it to become pretty awful!
John Conway
If we shut down the nuclear industry, then the energy will be generated instead from fossil fuels. Coal produces air pollution, which kills people, about 50000 per year in the US. But these deaths occur widely separated and over time, and so are not newsworthy. Natural gas is nonpolluting (except for those who think CO2 is a pollutant). But natural gas and liquid fuel storage facilities are potentially dangerous, and quantitatively more likely to lead to fatalities than a nuclear reactor. [Today's Yahoo news: SKIKDA, Algeria (Reuters) - Rescue workers searched through rubble for missing workers at Algeria's largest refinery and export port Tuesday after a blast at a nearby liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant killed at least 23 people, officials said. ... It was the worst LNG accident since 1975 when about 40 people died in an explosion in Staten Island, U.S. ...] The Chernobyl reactor had known design problems that required strict adherence to an operating protocol. This protocol was violated, in spite of a warning from the control computer. A similar situation occurred at the SL-1 reactor in Idaho in 1961, killing the 3 people in the building. Power generating reactors in the US are of a safer design; water is both coolant and moderator, so loss of coolant is automatically also a loss of moderator, which shuts down the chain reaction. A loss of coolant accident followed by a failure of the emergency core cooling system (the Three Mile Island scenario) leads to core meltdown due to the heat from radioactive decay. Because US reactors have containment buildings, the Three Mile Island core meltdown caused zero injuries. The fact that nuclear energy is so concentrated is what makes it economically feasible to build containment structures. This just couldn't be done with natural gas storage. Commercial nuclear power in the US has zero injuries and deaths from radiation accidents, although there have have been steam explosions. (I exclude SL-1, since that was a military research reactor.) These statistics justify the safety of nuclear power. By refusing to accept a very low probability of a nasty nuclear accident, we pollute our air and water and land, and with certainty sicken and kill large numbers of people. Reference: Petr Beckmann, "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear", Golem Press. Gene __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus