The nuclear industry is proving itself contaminated with incompetence and stupidity

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?


So with that Justin thought it over for a few days and then came back with even MORE nonsense:

There it is for you folks, the mentality of the nuclear power industry and if you don't agree with them then you must care about the environment like Greenpeace or something.  Beginning to get the idea of the true depths of incompetence and stupidity in the nuclear industry?  Here's exactly how and why that's the case and why he's so wrong:

@"Know-it-all Justin" first you claimed the "probability of any particulate plutonium alpha decaying inside the lungs is near impossible" and I showed you how you were wrong about that, now it looks like you have done a little homework and maybe talked to another nuclear apologist about how to explain away the dangers and risks of such a scenario, but you STILL DIDN'T GET IT RIGHT. 

Correct me if I am wrong about this but you have apparently morphed your original ignorant opinion about there being no chance of plutonium alpha decay into another but equally ignorant opinion about the dose from any such particle of plutonium being too small to constitute any risk.  Okay I'll school you AGAIN Justin, but I wonder how many times do you need to be shown wrong before you come to your senses?  You've been hypnotized, propagandized, bullshitted by the nuclear industry and just swallowed it all uncritically, but reality is out there if you want it.  So what's your preference, do you want to live in a fantasy world or do you want to face the truth?

Here's the truth about alpha exposures you are not yet understanding, Justin.  Alpha particles exhibit what's called a high Linear Energy Transfer because of their +2 charge and that means they interact very strongly with matter, causing them to deposit all of their energy over a very short track length.  This is in sharp contrast to something like the cobalt-60 gamma radiation you cite for comparison (and apparently don't understand the difference yet).  That's because gammas are relatively low-LET photon radiation, uncharged, which deposit their energy at widely separated intervals down long track lengths since they only interact very intermittently with matter compared to alpha radiation.  Gamma rays can oftentimes pass completely through a human body and not even deposit all of their energy within it.  But the most important factor in this case is that gamma interactions are spread out over such long track lengths that there's only likely to be a single gamma photon interaction within any one body cell.  Thus the damage done by gamma radiation is spread out thinly if you will, more or less evenly throughout cells and tissues irradiated.  This damage adds up with increasing exposure and can indeed cause the radiation sickness you mentioned at the doses delivered, you didn't get every detail wrong, just the overall picture with your invalid comparison.  Your invalid comparison assumes that plutonium exposure would be spread out over the entire volume of a human body just like the gamma exposure, and if that were true then you would be a little bit closer to the truth, because you seem to have got the Quality Factor part right.  But we are talking about particulates, like the huge quantities in smoke and ash and dust that came off Chernobyl and now Fukushima.  Yes they are composed of particles that are heavier than air but so are all other dust particles too, and that doesn't prevent them from being blown around the world by the wind and even being resuspended after they've been deposited already.  The important thing about alpha-emitting radionuclides is when they are inhaled or ingested or contaminate a wound they have the opportunity to come to rest adjacent to living cells, and therefore when they decay all their energy is deposited within a very small radius encompassing those cells.  So whereas a gamma photon might cause a single ionization event in its interaction with a cell on its way through the body that MIGHT do some damage, an alpha particle produces dense tracks of ionization through cells that will ALMOST ALWAYS do some lasting damage, if not kill the cell outright.  Cell death is actually preferable because if a cell does survive an alpha hit, especially a hit to its nucleus, if it is still able to reproduce it is in very many cases going to turn into a cancer.  Consequently inhaling plutonium particulates in the range of sizes easily suspended of air is ALMOST ALWAYS a death sentence of cancer for the unlucky people who inhale them. 

So you see your error Justin is comparing a dose in terms of absolute energy delivered by gamma radiation to the same energy delivered by alpha particles AS IF that alpha energy was evenly distributed throughout the body, but that is not a valid comparison in the kind of real world cases we are talking about.  Whoever has been "educating" you has been doing a very poor job and if you want to continue to hold onto and display your ignorance that's fine with me, it's rather revealing to have such a poor understanding of radioactivity coming from someone who claims to be such an expert in the field.  Now this is the SECOND time I've corrected your misconceptions Justin, which begs just one more point: nuclear power can only be practical in a perfect world: a world without accidents, a world where neutron activation never causes metal fatigue, a world where stable civilizations last for at least a quarter million years because if they don't the dangerous nuclear waste won't be properly safeguarded the required time, a world where there are no terrorists or other malicious intent (it's only a matter of time before an aircraft is crashed into a reactor), a world where there is no stupidity and incompetence.  But we don't live in that perfect world Justin and therefore nuclear power can never be made safe for all these reasons, and you are actually helping to prove that stupidity and incompetence are deeply ingrained in the entire culture of nuclear power because somebody is apparently teaching you the misleading nonsense you believe in.  Keep up the good work Justin, with your help we'll be rid of nuclear power even sooner.

Again see http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10150233934475289&id=46528750288#!/pages/Nuclear-Power/46528750288 to find the original posts or if you want to tell the nuclear power incompetents what you think of them.