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[Undertoad]

The death rate from Chernobyl is way lower than you might have expected!!!

Experts have estimated that around 4,000 people will die from the effects of the 1986 accident at Chernobyl.
...
The report finds more than 600,000 people received high levels of exposure, including reactor staff, emergency and recovery personnel and residents of the nearby areas.

The predicted 4,000 death toll includes 50 emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome in 1986, and from other causes in later years; nine children who died from thyroid cancer and an estimated 3,940 people who could die from cancer as a result of radiation exposure.

The report says there is "no convincing evidence" that there has been a rise in other cancers because of Chernobyl.

It says confusion over the incident's impact has arisen because many emergency and recovery workers have died since 1986 from natural causes which cannot be attributed to radiation exposure.

Most people who died from Chernobyl, died from drinking milk from cows who ate contaminated grass, which concentrates the radiation in such a way that you get thyroid cancer.

People older than me, who have been through civil defense instruction during the cold war, remember that iodine pills can be given to prevent this precise problem.

Don't know about you, but I am in favor of nuclear energy.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Don't know about you, but I am in favor of nuclear energy.

In theory, I am too. Unfortunately, I also worry about nuclear power in the hands of these guys or these guys.

I'm all for private ownership and the free market. Unfortunately, the free market is not always free. In the worse case, a company can negligently kill or injure thousands of people and avoid responsibility. Any attempt to hold them accountable financially would be met with cries of 'tort reform' and finding any one individual criminally responsible in a corporation is difficult.

The buck never seems to stop anywhere. Forgetting 3 Mile Island for a moment, tell me who was responsible for the 1994 blackout. Was it the control room staff, the repair teams, or the executives who were tasked with making sure enough money was spent to make sure that they were properly trained and equipped?

In many ways the CEO of First Energy knew before the blackout that he would never be personally accountable for any failure, so when he and his board were looking at budgets and making cuts, they probably didn't have a 'worst case' mentality. They were operating focused on budgets, not safety. This is the kind of mentality that put too few lifeboats on the Titanic.

Do I want him and his buddies in charge of a nuclear reactor in my back yard? Not unless Congress passes a law that he and his family have to live within 10 miles of it.

o nobody's surprise, the final report on the blackout released by a U.S.-Canadian task force Monday puts most of blame for the outage on Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp., faulting poor communications, inadequate training, and the company's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines.

A silent failure of the alarm function in FirstEnergy's computerized Energy Management System (EMS) is listed in the final report as one of the direct causes of a blackout that eventually cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and Canada. The alarm system failed at the worst possible time: in the early afternoon of August 14th, at the critical moment of the blackout's earliest events. The glitch kept FirstEnergy's control room operators in the dark while three of the company's high voltage lines sagged into unkempt trees and "tripped" off. Because the computerized alarm failed silently, control room operators didn't know they were relying on outdated information; trusting their systems, they even discounted phone calls warning them about worsening conditions on their grid, according to the blackout report.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

People older than me, who have been through civil defense instruction during the cold war, remember that iodine pills can be given to prevent this precise problem.

Did you remember to pick yours up when they were giving them out at the firehouse a year or two ago?

Only firefighters who were directly on the roof of the reactor building fighting the fire died ... the ones who were putting out fires on the rooves (coated in flammable material, for some reason only Soviet Planners understand) of the machine building and other reactor buildings spent time at the special radiological hospital, but survived.