European Salon de News, Discussion et Klatsch - 28 January | 94 comments (94 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

I dont ignore oppositional statistics. I ignore bad statistics. You are referring to the way I slammed the high chernobyl numbers, right?
Correlation is not causation. It often hangs out with causation, drinks its beer and cadges its cigarettes, but they are not the same thing, and without a clear mechanism for two things to cause one another, any correlation is neigh-certain to be either spurious, or a case of both things having the same ultimate cause.

As an example: it has been widely reported that there are cancer clusters near some german nuclear power stations. Note that these power stations have been monitored by continious use of geiger counters for their entire operating lives, and have never released any radiation to the public. So why are there cancer clusters near them? Because they got built in century+ old industrial zones, and chemical toxins work just fine for causing cancers.
Blaming the cancers on a cause that is logically and physically impossible just means that the true cause goes undetected. Similarily, public health in the FSU has had one hell of a crisis. It was, and is a real crisis, those people are really ill, a lot of people actually died.
The step where I get off the train is where all of that gets assumed to be due to chernobyl in an enviorment which is deeply polluted by any metric, has an ongoing epidemic of alchoholism and a severe collapse of the economy and health services.

by Thomas on Sun Jan 29th, 2012 at 05:24:37 PM EST
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Re: Living off the Planet (none / 1)

What industrial zones are you fantasising about? Nukes were built at a distance from industrial centres. I know how plenty of the sites looked, I have been demonstrating there. Your arguing that the cause was logically and physically impossible is wishful thinking.

by Katrin on Sun Jan 29th, 2012 at 05:50:57 PM EST
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Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

.. wait, so your argument is that nuke plants which were monitored, and radiated nothing none-the-less cause cancer? There is an actual debate to be had about the magnitude of the impact of chernobyl. A debate with actual scientific uncertainties, due to crappy recordkeeping and general chaos.

The german cancer clusters cannot be attributed to the nuke plants because there is no possible causal link at all. Splitting atoms dont cause people to just spontaniously get cancer in an x kilometer radius, actual radiation has to hit actual cells. I dont know what the actual cause is, but I am quite confident that it is worth the time to look. Germany has been industrial for a long time, and the early industrialization very frequently disposed of toxins in extremely irresponsible ways.

by Thomas on Sun Jan 29th, 2012 at 06:18:17 PM EST
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Re: Living off the Planet (none / 1)

have you ever known people who work in nuclear plants, Thomas?

my dearest friend lost her father (a nuclear engineer) to thymus cancer when she was 12 and he was in his thirties. she remembers him telling her how rules and safety measures were routinely abused, dodged and flouted by employees.

perhaps it is better now, and this is hearsay.

humans are not very good at following rules 100% of the time, and the risks of nuclear electricity generation do not allow slack or play.

Vivian Norris: Here Comes the Sun: Tunisia to Energize Europe

TuNur will benefit Tunisia by creating jobs and spurring investments in local education to aid the long term management of the plants after 2016... With this important first step, we are showing the world's governments, industries and consumers that what many thought to be science fiction is actually science fact. We hope that this is the first of many more such plants to be built in the desert regions of the world.
This week in Tunis, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, saw visits from the likes of Google's Eric Schmidt and the IMF's Christine Lagarde, as local members of civil society from Tunisia, members of both the traditional and renewable energy private sector, young business leaders, diplomats, NGOs focused on Green issues, and journalists, primarily from Africa and the Arab world, gathered to discuss the TuNur project and exchange ideas about how North Africa can look towards a stronger more stable economic future through true win-win collaborations.
If the disturbing story of how one Tunisian citizen lost hope, his economic livelihood destroyed and his family's future placed in peril, can serve as a lesson to what would best help the region, i.e. economic opportunity and growth, then may the memories of the martyrs of the Tunisian revolution live on through a better future for Tunisia and its people. Through utilizing local partners and management to develop the project, setting up new manufacturing industries (for example for the flat plate mirrors needed by TuNur), economic growth is assured. Up to five years of construction translating as up to 20,000, as well as hundreds of long term jobs and revenues for local governments, this North-South collaboration is not only needed but should be encouraged and replicated around the world.

why not go with the flow, and quit touting tech that can lay waste to all that makes life worth living?

methinks your faith is wildly misplaced, notwithstanding your excellent communication skills and marshalling of factoids to support your arguments.

your growing appreciation for the possibilities of other methodologies is noted, happily.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Mon Jan 30th, 2012 at 02:19:26 AM EST
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Re: Living off the Planet (none / 1)

You can put your argument in bold as much as you want but that doesn't make it better. Nukes are monitored, right. More or less by themselves.

German nukes weren't built in places where we can expect toxins to have been dumped. Look on a map: they were built in rural areas.

Your theory depends on the information from the power stations being correct. The text you put in bold. Implicitly you say that the industry can be trusted to inform us correctly about radiation and radioactive particles being set free. Really, Thomas, isn't that naïve? Melo has already pointed that out.

As to the impact of Chernobyl, I recommend you look at all data about deaths and anomalies of newborn babies of that period, and all over Europe. There are enough data.

by Katrin on Mon Jan 30th, 2012 at 07:30:49 AM EST
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Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

.. and by anyone else that cares to. I trust the nuclear industry not to lie about facts that can be checked by anyone with a piece of kit that costs 150 euro off amazon. Given nuclear paranoia, I am quite sure a heck of a lot of people in the vicinity of said plants made that investment and we would have fracking well heard about it if they were covering up leaks. Not to mention that those very detection systems are how we promptly learned about chernobyl! They didnt wait and hem and haw about reporting that spike, it got published instantly.

As to rural dumping, I live 30 klicks from a major remediation project. - a plantation that was established in 1860 to limit sand dune migration, and used to dump waste from paint production in 1920s. Utterly poisonous to this day, and picked as a dump site because it was not near people, and that was the height of enviormentally responsible thought back then. Germany industrialized earlier, is a world center of chemical industry, and fought two world wars (Which was not good for record keeping! or responsible industry during).
The first instinct when you see a spike in cancers anywhere in germany really should not be to blame the nearst reactor. It should be to test the soil and water. There is probably something there, and that means it might well be fixable.

by Thomas on Mon Jan 30th, 2012 at 02:13:13 PM EST
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Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

In rural areas where the local farmers remember every lorry for decades you don't need records, Thomas. And that's the sort of areas nuclear power plants where built in, at least here in the north. You can hide dumps in a city. In rural areas people remember that there was something ( and that they had been told it was harmless, most likely).

by Katrin on Mon Jan 30th, 2012 at 03:00:53 PM EST
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Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

nuke plants which were monitored, and radiated nothing none-the-less cause cancer?

Man, you are four years behind this news...

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Feb 3rd, 2012 at 04:34:50 PM EST
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European Salon de News, Discussion et Klatsch - 28 January | 94 comments (94 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)