Posted on 01/31/2002 12:09:53 PM PST by DCBryan1
Cow chips. If anything, the liability limits are unrealistically high. LWR technology results in very low probability for maximum credible accidents. Even if the worst happens, you'd get some local damage, in and around the plant site, but unless the media and anti-nuke kooks start stirring up and panicking the sheeple, large-scale effects are unlikely to approach the limits of P-A liability.
What are you saying is paid at pennies on the dollar? The insurance premiums? Sure, and if you know anything about insurance you will know that this is the case for any kind of liability coverage. I just renewed my automobile insurance. In my state, for the kind of cars I drive, the rates were in the couple of hundred dollar range for coverages ranging into the hundreds of thousands of dollars of liability. IOW, a penny or two on the dollar. Why? Well, its just the way liability insurance works. Check it out, if you are old enough to have to pay your way on any kind of liability insurance, and the idea of pooling coverage and spreading risk. Its a neat idea, and one of the positive outcomes of capitalism and free markets. Its just amazing...
Now, most people instinctively recoil at such a thought. After all, the anti-nuke kooks and presstitutes always tell us that "there is no safe level of radiation exposure" (which is a lie) so everyone "knows" that radiation is much, much more dangerous than driving on the roads. Yeah, everyone knows that, except the people who know and understand the science. We know that risk is risk and it doesn't matter what the causative agent might be. If you get a 10 millirem exposure, which adds maybe 10% to your annual dose from natural background (not even counting the sometimes much greater exposures from medical procedures), and add that into your cumulative exposure for an average lifetime, the increased risks become vanishingly small, far below the threshold necessary to sort out the effects in an exposed group from "background" effects, things like fatal illness brought on by other factors, accidents risks from lifestyle choices, even commonly-accepted risks we face everyday, such as accidents in the home (fires, falls, choking, drowning, etc).
BTW, what the hey is "an x-ray booth"? I have some experience in nuclear medicine (going on 25 years now) and I have never heard of such a device. We have x-ray rooms and portable x-ray units, CAT scanners and MRIs, soft x-ray, hard x-ray, and linacs, but nothing in the way of a "booth" for x-rays. Is that something you heard somewhere, or just made up...?
If that was not your intent, my apologies, but the implication of saying that the source of terrorism was CNN and FR 'TERROR HAS ALREADY STRICKEN via CNN and FreeRepublic' is that the terrorists themselves are not the source. I sometimes have problems with clarity of intent myself, we have to remember we are posting to a bunch of strangers, in many cases. Not everyone knows you well enough to understand unclear messages. As I say, this is an error I make myself, so this is meant as a suggestion, rather than criticism.
DITTO !!
You are so right. To me it seems as plain as can be, and yet here we are, strip searching your grandmothers in the airports while young men who LOOK suspicious walk onto planes with explosives in their shoes because we dare not "profile" because some Muslim nutjob might get offended. What ever happened to "who the h*** cares. This is America and if you don't like the way we do things get the h*** out and if you stay shut the h*** up."
We have things in this country a darned site more important to worry about than some whiney ass foreigner or liberal socialist getting offended. These *^$%^@#* have been offending ME and I dare say MOST of America for WAY too long. Let's stop being afraid of being called racists. If they want to call us racist for exercising common sense and good judgement, so be it. Let them think what they want to. I know I'm not a racist, if "racist" means disliking somebody because of their race or ethnicity. I really could care less what color somebody is. What I do care about is if someone is a good and decent person. We have to stop playing these ridiculous semantics games and call a spade a spade. And if anybody doesn't like it, oh well. Maybe somewhere down the line they will have grandchildren who will be thanking God we took a stand instead of wondering why we didn't.
Well, I thought it might be worth a closer look at this just to see how outrageous a claim this really is. First, lets run a few numbers on what we know about x-ray exposure in diagnostic procedures.
Well-established dosimetry methods will show that the average chest x-ray results in a whole-body expoure of about 30 millirems, depending on filter settings and accelerating potential. Using reasonable quality factors and kerma for converting from tissue-equivalent dose to gamma exposure rate, we get something in the range of 20 to 30 milliroentgens (mR) exposure. Lets go with the higher number of 30 to be conservative.
Now, the beam is only on for a few seconds, maybe two or three, to get this dose. Again, to be safe and overestimate the rate, lets use two seconds. Combining this with the observed exposure, we get and exposure rate for diagnostic machines of about 15 mR/sec, or, converting to the more familiar hourly rate, 54 R/hr.
Now, assuming your "x-ray booth" is just a colloquial term for the conveyor x-ray unit that you see in airport security stations, we will assume, not knowing otherwise, that these machines are similar to medical units. This is reasonable; they are commercially-produced devices that use similar technology. So, you are saying that being around TMI udirng the course of an accident was like being exposed to a source producing an exposure rate in the range of 50 R/hr, and that for days at a time?
Well, if that is so, it is totally outrageous. First, if it were, at that rate, the 24 hour exposure to an individual would be about 1200-1500 rems. You said the exposure time would be one week. That would place the acute dose in the range of close to 30,000 rem. That is a 100% lethal exposure. Since the LD50/60 (look that one up) for human beings is about 450 rem, your assumption would result in everyone dying in that area within about 3 weeks, more likely within a few days. Here's a clue: NO ONE DIED. Further, verified, documented exposure rates at the plant boundary at the peak of the releases were in the millirems per hour range. And you say they were in the tens of R per hour range? Well, you're only off by several orders of magnitude, which, for a Luddite, I guess isn't too bad...
Bottom line, leave the science to scientists. Well, now that we have utterly demolished this incredible bit of sophistry, and other fables to bring up?
Read this:
Now to the nitty gritty as they say. My father died at age 65 from lukemia. My mother died at 67 of lung and pancreatic cancer. All of those friends passed well before they did. Mostly in their 50s, and all of cancers. The last passed about 10 years ago of lukemia, the same variety my dad had.
There are many articles regarding the total elimination of a town and surrounding area. The government has been quietly paying some of the complainers off, I believe. This stuff is nothing to play around with.
Plant safety is very good now but accidents do and have happened. Some we don't know about, Like the fallout that dropped over central Wisconsin from a test in the early 60s. I think I was 1960. The grade school I was attending fed us iodine tablets every day for months.
About three weeks after the 11th, my old man was going to his favorite fishing hole a few miles away from a nuke plant. He was driving his big van and still had FL plates on it...suddenly, four black SUV's box him in and follow him for a couple miles, and pass on after he pulls into the Park entrance. They're not asleep anymore.
My boss used to work nuke security, too. He said they were mostly ex-Marines, and a bunch of harda$$es. But we still need to keep our eyes open.
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