From: Chuck Kuecker (ckuecker@mcs.net)
Date: Sat Jun 02 2001 - 07:50:51 MDT
If all the plutonium on Earth was finely divided and passed around, many
people would get cancers. Not all would die, at least not all at once. Some
would live long lives with no apparent effects, others would develop lung
cancers within a year. Enough would live and reproduce new generations, who
would have the same chances of life and death. The world would go on.
"Statistics" like this about a pollutant are irresponsible, because they
never tell the whole story. Especially with "cancer" stats - no one can
honestly say that a particular cancer came from inhaling a speck of Pu, or
from some other insult to the person, possibly decades earlier. All the
stats say is that your chances of damage get higher.
Again, to get "30" or even "20" pounds of sufficiently pure fissionable
from reactor waste is NOT EASY. The people doing the extraction need to
have very specialized knowledge, and without a very expensive and complex
facility, they will be committing suicide. You don't just dump the waste
into a neat machine and get shiny Pu chunks out the other end.
This is like saying that a few hundred pounds of cyanide similarly spread
around will kill all mammal life on the planet. Sure it would - but it's
NEVER going to happen except that EVERYONE on the planet cooperates in a
mass suicide effort.
If every volcano on Earth erupted in the next ten minutes, this planet
would be rather uncomfortable for a few decades, but I am not going to
waste any time worrying about that happening.
Chuck Kuecker
At 03:35 AM 6/2/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Point isn't what hasn't happened; it's what could and probably will
>happen; these other, "small potatoes" incidents were forerunners of
>Chernobyl.
>
>Nobody hurt at TMI? Gee, how do you know? No one (presumably) knows
>the true extent of the release. No one (to my knowledge, anyway) is
>tracking the residents and former residents for the next thirty
>years. So you really can't say.
>
>20 pounds for a bomb? Yah, about that if you're talking weapons-
>grade; more like 30 for reactor-grade 63% fis. As you say, over a
>thousand tons of the reactor stuff laying around. As Gofman noted,
>however, a few ounces, evenly distributed and inhaled, is enough to
>kill everyone on earth. Actually you're safer next to the coal plant;
>the crap comes down miles away.
>
>jm.
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