TMI: Fear, Fukushima and Facts
A critique of the xkcd radiation dose chart I linked to, with some more details and caveats, some of which I recognize as true from by background (but wasn’t going to post on my own because it’s too far away from my areas of competence). Randall’s shortcoming is the mixing of chronic and acute exposure doses (long-term and short-term), which are not equivalent, i.e. a dose spread out over a period of time (e.g. months) does not have the same biological effect of the same dose that happens in a period of minutes or hours or days. Giving the body a chance to repair itself matters.
We are seeing Official Truth blossum like skunk cabbage in early spring.
Yucca Mountain is by any measure an extraordinarily competent fission waste containment repository, certainly over centuries and most likely over millennia. We observe high amplitude sustained hysteria over possible leakage 10,000 years from now. One hot debate is what survivable kind and language of warning sign to erect (Inconel alloy 686, incised skull and crossbones; idiots).
We also observe Official complacency over continuing megacurie groundwater discharges from Fukushima. Should we be dispersing fission waste into the atmosphere and ocean for disposal? The Challenger Deep comes to mind.
Oh, wait – not megacuries and rads, but millsieverts and becquerels. We are flooded with I-131 activity quotes, half-life 8 days, one one-millionth levels 160 days after 11 March 2011. Cs-137 quotes, half-life 30.2 years, are remarkably absent. We see jetsam dispersal maps everywhere. Dilution! We see no flotsam models targetting the entire Pacific fishery by ~January 2012. Ocean parcels travel without substantial depth mixing.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/currents.jpg
The flow of ocean currents. ~18 months to cross the Pacific.
A great many Official things are very, very wrong. Has my government found a solution to average age of mortality versus Social Security obligations? Baby Boomers are too old to be scythed in time… unless things are substantially ramped up.