Reply #18: Thank you. It is I think a winner. [View All]

[NNadir]

Perfectly appropriate for the level, I think, which is very, very low.

I am dying to read about the actual uncovered terrorist plots against a nuclear plant.

The last major terrorist attack I recall in the United States involved oil. Or am I mistaken?

Was Muhammed Atta angry because of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant?

I am dying to learn how, within the next decade, the global climate change crisis will be solved by shutting nuclear power plants. What is exactly going to replace 361 gigawatts of nuclear capacity installed and operating without failure for nearly two decades?

I have been trying to learn for years about the first person killed by the storage of so called nuclear waste.

I have been trying for the same period to learn why people who are actually killed by global climate change, say like today in the Yucatan, last month in Guatemala, weeks before that in Texas, weeks before that in Louisiana are worth less that people who conceivably be killed by a putative nuclear accident or terrorist attack.

I am in short asking the same question that one would ask of the fear mongering press and the fear mongering "government" in another context. Is, for instance, the risk of being killed in a skyscraper by a terrorist attack as high as the risk of destroying the world's oldest democracy. Is the need to address that risk through blindly striking out and stealing (or hoping to steal) a little oil on the side, equal to the risk of fostering an eternal war?

But since I won't get any of that, I think I'll just specify that I regard idiocy as idiocy.

Here is what I call idiocy, something about which I have been clear for sometime, although idiots, being idiots, have a hard time grasping it: An idiot is a person who cannot do comparisons on a simple level or on a slightly deeper level, simple risk analysis. An idiot is a person who evaluates a problem in isolation from the possible consequences of alternatives.

Risks are measured by numbers, by probabilistic analysis, analysis that derives from data. Here for instance is a link to a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing causes of death in the United States in the year 2000:

http://www.csdp.org/research/1238.pdf

We see that the number of deaths in the United States is reported as 2,403,351. Thus if we assume that the number of deaths that occurred in 2001 was similar, and we also assume that 3000 people were killed in the oil inspired terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, we can see that the fractional risk of dying by being an occupant of a tall building killed in a terrorist attack is 0.001 of the risk of dying all other causes.

Now some people think that this risk is worth completely discarding the US constitution, just as some people declare - with contempt for human life - that the risk of an imaginable attack on a nuclear plant - which may or not succeed by the way - is worse than the risk of global climate change which is killing people right now, as I write.

Now, I'm going to look over the figures and see how many people died of causes related to the operations of nuclear power plants. Excuse me, I'll be right back...

...OK I'm back, looking at table 2 in the link (I'm actually reading the link, as opposed to merely presenting it as if it supports what I say - what a concept!)...

Here we go. Toxic agents: 55,000 deaths.

Now, let's go to the discussion and see what the toxic agents are, looking especially for those deaths attributable to nuclear power plants.

Toxic Agents.

Estimating the number of deaths due to toxic agents is more challenging than any of the other risk factors due to limited published research and the challenges of measuring exposure and outcome. In the 1990s, many improvements were made in controlling and monitoring pollutants. 44 There is more systematic monitoring of pollutants at state and county levels, and exposure to asbestos, benzene, and lead have declined.44 In fact, the US Environmental Protection Agency reported a decline of 25% from 1970 to 2001 in 6 principal air pollutants: carbon monoxide, lead, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter.45 Toxic agents are associated with increased mortality from cancer, respiratory, and cardiovascular diseases.46-49We used the National Morbidity, Mortality, and Air Pollution Study to estimate mortality due to air pollution.50 The study assessed the association between air pollution and mortality and morbidity in 90 cities in the United States. Only particulate matter (PM) was associated with a significant increase in mortality— an approximate 0.5% increase in total mortality for each 10-ì/m3 increase in PM10. Previous studies reported a range of 0.4% to 1% for that association. 51,52 We used 23.8 ì/m3 as the daily average of PM10 concentration in 2000,45 which results in an estimate of 24000 deaths per year (range, 22000-52000 deaths) from air pollution alone.

There seems to be NO mention whatsoever of nuclear materials in the paper on deaths under toxic agents. Maybe it's somewhere else. Let me see...

Let's see, let me search the document for the word "nuclear," as in nuclear terrorism, nuclear accidents, nuclear waste, nuclear power plants, let's see what I get.

Zero.

Zero?

Yeah, Zero.

(I do note that the period in which sulfur dioxides and carbon dioxides is alleged in the paper to have decreased corresponds roughly to the period in which nuclear power production rose worldwide from 684 billion kilowatt-hours (1980) to 2,517 billion kilowatt hours (2001), an increase of 370%.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls)

People do die from air pollution though. Why don't they count? Because they're not part of some special esoteric paranoia, specifically the anti-nuclear hysteric paranoia that is backed by zero numbers.

The anti-nuclear crowd is completely ignorant of numbers. This is how they can make a completely pixilated and confused argument, filled with "what if" and "could happen" links, for closing the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, a plant that, when we review the deaths from air pollution, clearly saves lives.

Now I'll sit and wait for 15 or 20 posts "refuting" what I say via irrelevant hysterical blabber while outside, people continue to die.