Sanity check please.... at least or affects from Japanese nuke plant..

[samrock]

In the 40's and 50's we had several atomic bombs go off over Nevada as part of testing.. I never read of cases of radiation poisoning in Colorado or Texas.. and I would think those release a lot more radiation than a leaky nuke plant.. and they were a lot closer to Colorado and Texas than Japan is to the U.S. west coast.. So please calm down.. and be rational..

[NutmegYankee]

1. How Dare You!

You're ruining a perfectly good freak out session with logic! Shame!

[Forkboy]

6. I hope you see the logic in posts #3 and #4.

Since it's your thing and all.

[NutmegYankee]

33. We are not within 100 miles of Japan.

The people I'm concerned about are there. We will be OK here in the USA.

[Downwinder]

42. The biggest thunderstorms on the globe are found in the American Midwest.

Radioactive dust is washed out of the air by rain. The Chernobyl cloud circled the earth.

[NutmegYankee]

44. And yet we are still here.

[Tansy_Gold]

19. I wonder what the logic is behind

the banning of atmospheric nuclear testing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_Nuclear_Test_Ban_Treaty

The Treaty banning Nuclear Weapon Tests In The Atmosphere, In Outer Space And Under Water, often abbreviated as the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), or Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (NTBT) (although the latter also refers to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) is a treaty prohibiting all test detonations of nuclear weapons except underground. It was developed both to slow the arms race (nuclear testing was, back then, necessary for continued nuclear weapon advancements), and to stop the excessive release of nuclear fallout into the planet's atmosphere.




Now why would they want to do that?

:eyes:

[NutmegYankee]

25. The OP's point is that we are not at significant risk.

People are freaking out even here on the East Coast.

[Liberal Veteran]

28. We are talking about the same Americans who were convinced Iraq was charging up the Death Star...

....and it was aimed right at America!

I am worried about the folks in Japan and am deeply concerned, but I think anyone in Iowa rushing out to get some Potassium Iodine might be a bit high strung.

[NutmegYankee]

30. Oh I completely agree.

The people I'm concerned about are in Japan.

[Tansy_Gold]

2. The effects were slow but they were there.

What we didn't know then hurt us.


TG

[Tansy_Gold]

3. Here's one report

http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/12/news2.shtml

April 2002



The Cold War may be over, but its legacy remains quite hot—and deadly. A new report estimates that fallout from open-air nuclear testing has killed more than 15,000 Americans and will cause at least 80,000 cancers.

In the ’50s, when the United States selected the Shoshone lands in the Nevada desert as the location for testing nuclear weapons, President Harry Truman said he wanted someplace remote enough that Americans wouldn’t worry about the government “shooting bombs in their backyards.” Ominously, there is no place on earth remote enough to safely test nuclear weapons. Indeed, the report concludes that nuclear testing has exposed to radiation nearly everyone who has resided in the United States since 1951.

The new report, conducted by the National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (NCI/CDC), is remarkable for several reasons, not least because it represents the first time the U.S. government has released an assessment of the spread and consequences to human health of radioactive fallout from global nuclear testing. It’s also the first time that the government has admitted that a substantial number of cancer deaths nationwide have been caused by nuclear testing.

[Tansy_Gold]

5. Here's another

http://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/the-effects-of-nuclear-testing/the-united-kingdomsnuclear-testing-programme/page-4-british-nuclear-testing/


Rowland study shows link between nuclear tests and genetic changes in veterans

In addition to physical health problems, veterans of the British nuclear testing in the Pacific suffered serious psychological trauma, according to a 2007 survey conducted by Professor Al Rowland of the Massey University in New Zealand. The study involved 50 veterans who had participated in the Operation Grapple testing programme. They were found to have an average rate of depression four times higher than the age-matched control group of ex- military and police. The study showed nuclear veterans suffered three times more genetic mutations than normal.

Almost a quarter had suffered from cancer, compared with just one in the control group, while 40 percent had chronic skin conditions - a rate more than three times higher than among the control group. Exposed men also had twice as many respiratory conditions, gastrointestinal ulcers, bowel disorders and bacterial/viral infections.

[Bluebear]

43. thank you

[HereSince1628]

4. Apparently a whole lot of people on a John Wayne flick being filmed

died of various cancers...proof no...suspicion yes.
http://www.gangsterbb.net/threads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=582360


THE CONQUEROR is a 1956 CinemaScope epic film produced by Howard Hughes and starring John Wayne as the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. Other performers included Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Pedro Armendáriz. A film rightfully forgotten by all parties involved. But this is the...REST OF THE STORY (paul harvey tribute) you might not have heard.

The exterior scenes were shot on location near St. George, Utah, 137 miles (220 km) downwind of the United States government's Nevada Test Site. In 1953, extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing occurred at the test site, as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole. The cast and crew spent many difficult weeks on location, and in addition Hughes later shipped 60 tons of dirt back to Hollywood in order to lend verisimilitude to studio re-shoots.<1> The film-makers knew about the nuclear tests<1> but the federal government reassured residents that the tests caused no hazard to public health.<2>

Powell died of cancer in January 1963, only a few years after the picture's completion. Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1960 and committed suicide in 1963 after he learned it was terminal. Hayward, Wayne, and Moorehead all died of cancer in the mid to late 1970s. Cast member actor John Hoyt died of lung cancer in 1991. Skeptics point to other factors such as the wide use of tobacco - Wayne and Moorehead in particular were heavy smokers - and the notion that cancer resulting from radiation exposure does not have such a long incubation period. The cast and crew totaled 220 people. By 1981, 91 of them had developed some form of cancer and 46 had died of the disease.<2> Dr. Robert Pendleton, professor of biology at the University of Utah, stated, "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law."<2><3>

[Vanje]

7. Downwinders

http://sharlot.org/archives/history/dayspast/text/2002_08_25.shtml

[Vanje]

9. More on Downwinders. Utah has cancer

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700026087/Triple-awards-for-downwinders.html

http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/nucleartestingandthedownwinders.html

[k2qb3]

13. I recently read about a Japanese man who was in both Hiroshima...

AND Nagasaki, got flash burns and so on and lived into his 90's, over 50 years after the bombs.

OTOH I've always wondered if the cancer explosion linked to tobacco is really all about tobacco or about smoking contaminated tobacco products, there's a pretty significant peak in the rates corresponding to those who smoked in the testing era.

[Vanje]

15. I don't think Utah's high cancer rates

are a result of smoking.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

17. It would not be crazy to think that maybe that guy...

...had a natural resistance to radiation. That's why some people in the Ukraine got sick and died and others never have. :shrug:

[WilliamPitt]

8. Am I allowed to be worried for people in Japan?

Good.

Thanks.

I am.

[tabatha]

10. Exactly.

They have had a triple whammy, and a lot of people are really worried about them. But you said it more succinctly.

[Bluebear]

12. No. You must be hysterical. And crazy.

:crazy:

[YellowRubberDuckie]

20. Yes. I am worried about them as well...

People who tell others how to feel or not feel seem to be rampant here.
On the other side of the coin, though, I'm not overreacting about how we are going to be affected over here in the US.
Although, this could be us tomorrow. We're just getting ready and staying prepared. It is also approaching storm season in Oklahoma, so there's another good excuse.
Duckie

[a la izquierda]

23. I'm more worried about that than radiation...

two tornadoes touched down very close to my house last year. My house shakes in a good wind. I'm off to the store to get storm season supplies tomorrow, not radiation supplies.

[Bluebear]

11. Yes, everyone worried must be "insane".

And hysterical. :eyes:

[xchrom]

14. 'insane' is your lack of historical fact. Nt

[jpak]

16. Chernobyl released more fission products than a Little Boy-type uranium bomb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_compared_to_other_radioactivity_releases

and Downwinders would disagree with the Pollyanna argument

We banned atmospheric nuclear testing for a reason

yup

[BeFree]

22. Yep

There may be as much as 100 times more radioactive material in a nuke plant as there is in a bomb.

[Junkdrawer]

29. 1.2 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel at Fukushima. Little Boy weighed 140 pounds....

I make that 85,000 times as much....

References:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=639439&mesg_id=639439

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

[BeFree]

32. That's a lot of junk

Junk just sitting there waiting to blow....

Tks for that. I had an idea that 100x might be conservative.

[Junkdrawer]

34. And that doesn't count the fuel in the reactors....

Reactors hold much more radioactivity than nuclear bombs....

[BeFree]

35. So

When one of these blows, the contamination may be as much as 85,000 times greater?

My gawd, what have we done? Are doing?

[Junkdrawer]

36. The standard counter use to be that there was no credible scenario....

where even a fraction of the radioactivity could escape.

Use to be....

[BeFree]

37. Yeah

The old saw was: Technology will save us.

"No one could foresee"
Well, I'm not no one.

Heh, I was in Hawaii when they blew up that atoll in the south Pacific.
Turned night into day for 2 seconds.

That power can't be contained forever.
It ain't safe. Can never be safe.

[SpoonFed]

40. Not blow...

burn up

[PDJane]

18. There is some proof

that constant, low-level radiation is more dangerous than a flash; it seems that the dna can heal after a clean break, but the low-level stuff is a more constant bombardment and makes it harder for the dna to recover.

[Raine]

21. I'm sure denial helps you sleep more sound at night

but you might be better off using some of that time to read up and check these things out.

[Johonny]

24. maybe I'm not getting enough strontium 90

[fascisthunter]

26. then sign off and go for a walk

if it bothers you that much. We don't need your advice, we are fine.

[marmar]

27. Please do a little more reading before posting these things......

.....(snip).....

By then, children and others living in downwind areas were beginning to develop leukemia. As time passed, people in affected areas suffered extraordinarily high rates of cancer and thyroid ills. Functioning in tandem, the news media and the federal government continued to deny that nuclear testing was a health hazard.

In August 1980, nearly three decades after the Nevada site opened for nuclear business, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations concluded: "All evidence suggesting that radiation was having harmful effects, be it on the sheep or the people, was not only disregarded but actually suppressed."

That assessment was no surprise to thousands of downwind residents like Jay Truman, who grew up in southwestern Utah under the shadow of the test site. After watching many friends die, he had no interest in pretending that the U.S. government did not kill his schoolmates. ............(more)

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0105-06.htm

[Bluebear]

39. Thank you.

[oldlib]

31. I was in the USAF in the early fifties.

I was a technician responsible for the maintenance of the Bomb navigation equipment on the B-47 bomber. The bomber carried an Atomic bomb and, at the time, the USA answer for the cold war, keeping the USSR at bay. I don't recall, during the 3 years that I spent at March Field, in Riverside, CA, ever being concerned with the possibility of nuclear radiation. I survived that period and I believe that I will survive the threat from Japan.

[SpoonFed]

41. fallacy

there are cases of people surviving both bombs dropped on Japan in the second world war,
but does that mean most people survived?

Anecdotal information has no bearing on a valid statistical argument.

Some 60 year old guy got rescued out to sea on the roof of his house, too.

[Downwinder]

38. Look at the Iodine 131 fallout maps for Texas and Colorado.

Particularly along the Red River. It got washed out in the squall lines.

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/causes/i131/stateandcountyexposure

[nadinbrzezinski]

45. That was a ONE TIME release

many of the people WATCHING these things later did die from cancer

And this will continue to leak until entombed...

No that does not mean we will get huge amounts in the West coast either... measurable yes, more than an x-ray on my pinky... hardly... far less, most likely.

But hey, if you want to feel ok about it, hey who is stopping you?

By the way, the Chernobyl exclusion zone still has people at checkpoints with dosimeters.