There's been some interesting discussion at
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nuclear-Power/46528750288 between Dr. Simanonok and a fellow calling himself Justin Forro, who claims to be a graduate student in Nuclear Engineering and says he got his initial nuclear training in the Navy in an "accelerated program". Justin believes quite strongly in the safety of nuclear power despite the abundant and obvious evidence ruling against it, but the scary part is that he is being taught gross absurdities by whoever's been instructing him, and the last thing we need in the nuclear industry is EVEN MORE stupidity and ignorance bringing disasters like Fukushima down upon us. Justin clearly shows that many of the educators for the nuclear power industry are grossly incompetent through their failure to understand & teach the real hazards of radioactivity and their apparent desire to NOT want to understand & teach them either! OF COURSE nuclear power makes sense to them in the fantasy world they fabricate by ignoring and dismissing the real dangers! This is what we're up against folks: incompetence and stupidity believing they know it all. Observe Justin's easy dismissal of reality, his arrogance and desire for his opinions to be forced upon others, his childish habit of personal attacks (not shown: he's advocated the murder of Dr. Helen Caldicott), and ask yourself:
is this the kind of person you want running nuclear reactors? Because he is what we have going for us. Not a very good prospect, I know:
Please note the blue-highlighted text above; Justin makes several other errors too but what's highlighted is just SO wrong and SO ignorant that I corrected him thusly:
@"Know-it-all Justin" Let's start with your own faulty analysis: "With a half-life of 24,000 years the probability of any particulate plutonium alpha decaying inside the lungs is near impossible. Even still, you would have to near (sic) an extremely large quantity of particulate plutonium in order for it to even be probable." Let's say we're talking about a smoke or ash particle of pure Pu-239 too small to readily see with the naked eye weighing only one microgram. Of course in the real world we know the stuff blasted out of the Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors wasn't pure and each tiny particle didn't necessarily weigh exactly one microgram, but we'll take this simple example to its logical conclusion.. Pu-239 has a specific activity of .063 Curies per gram where a Curie is a unit of radioactivity equalling 3.7 * 10e10 disintegrations per second so one microgram of plutonium-239 will be decaying at the rate of 2300+ disintegrations per second!
@"Know-it-all Justin" so much for your "probability of any particulate plutonium alpha decaying inside the lungs is near impossible" even for much smaller quantities of plutonium-239 than the one microgram used for this example, and if you really understood even the basics of radioactivity you wouldn't make such asinine and misleading statements, would you? So my only question is, are you just an ordinary run of the mill dumbass shooting off your ignorant mouth Justin, or are you deliberately shilling for the nuclear industry, spreading disinformation knowingly?
@"Know-it-all Justin" of course there's plenty of room to quibble: we don't know yet how many Curies of plutonium-239 have been released at Fukushima SO FAR, we don't know the size distribution of particles released SO FAR in the explosions and fires, we can't know how much of it has blown over to the U.S., we don't know how pure those particles are or how many people have inhaled any of them and we don't know how many of those extremely dangerous particles will find their way into human bodies in the future through resuspension in air and water or through food contamination. So we are not really talking ONLY about Pu-239, and ONLY about alpha emitters, but whatever unknown toxic mix of radionuclides has come from Fukushima so far and hasn't yet decayed. Despite these MAJOR UNKNOWNS however we can still expect apologists for the nuclear industry to issue calm assurances that everything is fine, no danger, nothing to see here move along now please. Only a fool would believe them.
@"Know-it-all Justin" what we do know without any question is that a microgram is in the ballpark of reasonable weights for a dust particle, and that almost every person who is unfortunate enough to inhale or ingest a plutonium-laden dust particle from Fukushima (or even Chernobyl dust for that matter, there's lots of it) is very likely to get cancer from it and die unless they die of something else first. That's an ALMOST GUARANTEED CANCER SITUATION Justin, meaning you only need to inhale ONE TINY LITTLE DUST PARTICLE of plutonium and it's essentially a death sentence. THAT is the truth of nuclear power Justin, that the guy in the white shirt and tie at your nuclear orientation class didn't tell you. Or that you don't want people to know. Which is it?
