Posted on 06/05/2016 3:01:50 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Dozens of activists were detained in Vietnam's two biggest cities Sunday as they tried to hold protests calling for greater government transparency over a recent spate of mass fish deaths.
Tonnes of dead fish and other marine life began washing up on central Vietnamese shores two months ago and continued to appear for two to three weeks, sparking widespread anger.
Frustration has been further fuelled by a perceived lack of clarity from the communist leadership about what caused the deaths.
Major streets in central Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City were temporarily deserted on Sunday morning as security forces blanketed the area.
Activists used social media accounts to document many arrests, saying people had been detained in both cities either before or while they joined protests.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
I make choices about whether or not I expose myself to a radiation source with the documented medical knowledge that doing so raises my risk of illness - if I handle a small amount for a brief time - it’s a small increased risk of illness. Therefore, I can’t applaud your decision to handle uranium unless you are talking about completely depleted (no longer radioactive) uranium - in which case your comment is irrelevant to this discussion. Fukushima is not presenting us with a choice for what kind of exposure, duration of exposure, environment of exposure (do we want radioactive waste in the ocean) etc.
Obviously, and I do mean obviously, you made a choice, after being advised of the risks, to use the less harmful short-lived isotopes commonly used in medicine. So patients who do so (like dental xray patients) decide that short, controlled exposure will contribute to health treatment with an assumed risk - cost benefit analysis. This entirely unrelated to Fukushima. No one is controlling dose, no one wanted dosage, the public never gave permission and if they knew the risks -they would flatly refuse, the “dosing” will continue uncontrolled and unmonitored with stronger toxic isotopes like uranium present and the public in the vicinity will inhale and ingest a variety of isotopes which will build up in their bodies. So in relation to the discussion of Fukushima - your medical usage is irrelevant.
The amount of radiation present in the ocean and in fish as a result of Fukushima is not negligible. Since we’ve never had 3 nuclear core meltdowns with fuel and byproducts being washed into the ocean before - it’s unscientific to make blanket statements about the safety and “negligible” impact. Having read extensively on this subject since it occurred, as well as Chernobyl and Downwinders, I now know to disregard those who sneer that it’s harmless. Exposure to radiation reduces immune systems so it’s important to keep an open mind when you hear that animals are dying at unprecedented levels from what is currently attributed to a disease but may later be determined to be supported by suppressed immunity. 3 nuclear power plant cores are loose in the environment and I think it is reasonable to discuss and review this new territory and potential impacts on the environment and health. Collecting information and discussing hypotheses is not unscientific.
No fish kill in Vermont, eh? So the presence of radiation 6+ K from origin doesn’t make it seem slightly possible that it could be present 2K from origin.
And here you introduce the strawman argument that radiation “came ashore” to kill lots of fish? That’s all yours - no one else said it. You do know fish swim right? And some traverse great distances etc.? And toxins build up in the food chain over time. Grazing aquatic creatures would continue to concentrate toxins found in their fodder? etc., etc., etc.
I have not heard of this, but if you want to take the time to google it ...
You do know fish swim right? And some traverse great distances etc.? And toxins build up in the food chain over time.
And all these dying fish just happened to decide to swim to central Vietnam?
You do know that there are actually not as many fish in the open ocean as near land, right?
If the Vietnamese authorities could blame the problem on Japan they would do so.
If fish were dying all around Japan for thousands of miles, then it might make sense that Fukushima might be to blame. But that's not happening. It's much more likely that something more local to Vietnam is causing this.
“Who was that little bad luck fellar that followed Superman around.. Joe BlhkT*pflk or sumthin’.. ?? always had an umbrella and a dark cloud over head.
That character was in the Lil’ Abner comics, IIRC.
“Some comics script themselves..”
A comedian named Benchley once observed “The political joke we laughed at last year was just elected.”
The chart is not accurate or relevant to this discussion.
It makes the same mistake that nuclear industry dosimetry calculations make - it does not account for the element and type of exposure.
Potassium emits energy at a higher energy than Uranium therefore formulas typically used comparing bananas to uranium indicate - if the numbers are right, that Potassium is more harmful (higher resulting calculated “dose”). But this is not medically true.
According to an online EPA source, counter intuitively, the human body is relatively transparent to high energy radiation (like that of bananas) and is more seriously harmed by lower energy provided by uranium. According to a lecture I attended, the theory explaining this behavior is that high energy radiation passes quickly through human cells one time, in this example lets say it cuts through the strand of DNA one time and continues on through neighboring cells and out of the body. The body must repair one break in that cell’s DNA and let’s say one break to many other body cell’s DNA.
Contrast this with the lower energy transmission of Uranium which can pass through cells at a slower rate and essentially bounce off of cellular material and atoms in a manner that results in ricochet with damage done each time the energy bounces off material in the cell or body and passes through DNA more often, causing more breaks, requiring more repair.
The chart is poor in that anytime you get comparisons which align bananas, sleeping next to someone, and air travel with comparisons to medical use and nuclear disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl, distortion is at work. They are not the same.
None of us knows what our current dose (cumulative over the span of our lives) is at the prescient moment, but we can say adding any additional radiation to the environment (not the medical office)through incompetent management (the nuke industry) raises the level of risk of human illness and that risk can remain elevated for decades (Cesium) or thousands of years (Uranium).
Our society investigated and rejected Carbon Tetrachloride for use in dry cleaning once it was discovered to contribute to cancer risk. Yet because nuclear power is defended by government, we get charts suggesting that we should look at radiation doses from one time exposures like chest x-rays and somehow relate them to the dosage of exposure to residents of Fukushima over a specific period of time (Tokyo) when those are unrelated to the chronic exposure that fits reality - residents of Fukushima, Tokyo and the rest of Japan (Government maps indicate that the far reaches of the island nation received fallout albeit far smaller amounts that regions closer to the nuke plant the nuke plants)will be chronically exposed to the unconstrained wastes of this ongoing nuclear disaster for the rest of their lives. They will receive combination doses in food, water and air for the foreseeable future. No one has a chart for that.
Nuclear waste remains in the land, the produce, the drinking water etc. and will continue to do so for many lifetimes - where is that on the chart? Nope - the chart is deceptive. It normalizes things that are not normal.
According to the EPA, evidence supports the Linear No Threshold Model, which proposes that even small amounts of exposure increase the chance of resulting illness (a small amount, and these exposures are cumulative).
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-health-effects
Certainly the BEIR reports, (state of the art research studying effects of radiation on human health) year after year report that small amounts of exposure to ionizing radiation contribute a small amount to illness risk, and that large exposure contributes to large illness risk.
http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/reports-in-brief/beir_vii_final.pdf
So the public has a right to question the increased risks it faces when Fukushima loses control of 3 nuclear fuel cores. And the chart is deceptive in that it poses an unrealistic view of radiation effects.
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