I have an idea of where this
bizarre interpretation came from, but I'm not going dignify that kind of claptrap by reading it. This is why God created the "ignore" button. Suffice it to say that I know from whence it comes and the extremely low scientific level at which it is represented.
Lately I have been ignoring some cases of massive ignorance and misrepresentation, well, because I live in the time of the Bush administration where, as Orwell would have it, "Lies are Truth." There are so many distortions, so many examples of
tortured thinking, and so little time. I've got to put limits on the level at which I'm willing to throw up.
Now let's get right to the core of the issue, or under the core of the reactor. Somebody, obviously not too bright, told you that 400 "units" cause cancers and you, credulously, went so far as to attempt a calculation of the "garbage in, garbage out" variety.
First let's refer to the article beginning the post and I will add the
relevant bold:
The plant is operated by Southern California Edison and houses two working reactors. A third, 450-megawatt reactor was shut down in 1992 and is being dismantled.
While workers were taking apart the containment dome that housed the inactive reactor, they discovered that groundwater beneath the reactor complex was tainted with tritium...
..."So far, the spills … haven't resulted in people off-site being exposed to excessive amounts of radiation," said David Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety project for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit advocacy group that focuses on environmental problems...
...Samples of the groundwater beneath San Onofre's decommissioned unit contained 50,000 to 330,000 picocuries per liter, Bricks said.
In drinking water, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's safety limit for tritium is 20,000 picocuries per liter, a measurement of radioactivity based on one-trillionth of a unit. The state of California has recommended a "public health goal" of no more than 400 picocuries per liter, a level the agency determined could still cause one cancer case per million people exposed.
San Onofre has extracted more than 10,000 gallons of the contaminated groundwater and piped it into the Pacific about 8,600 feet offshore, where it is instantly diluted in seawater, Golden said
OK, well enough.
Directly under the reactor there is a concentration that
could cause a 1 in a million chance of cancer.
Now let's look at the California agency standards
themselves and not as interpreted by a weak thinking poster on DU. Here is what they say, again the
bold is mine:
The calculation of the PHG level applies the risk coefficient for tritium to a lifetime of exposure to 2 L/day of water and incorporates a de minimis excess individual cancer risk level of 10-6 (one in one million) from exposure to tritium to estimate the health-protective value of 400 pCi/L. Lifetime risks of 10-4 and 10-5 would correspond to tritium activity levels of 40,000 pCi/L and 4,000 pCi/L, respectively...
http://www.oehha.ca.gov/water/phg/pdf/PHGtritium030306.pdf#search=%22%22risk%20coefficient%22%20tritium%22Now we're getting somewhere. Someone has to
crawl under the reactor, insert a straw in the groundwater,
suck up 2 liters every day for a lifetime in order to face a
one in a million risk of contracting a cancer.
However, we have some information, from the article, about
how much water there is: 10,000 gallons. OK, we're going to have to deal with the metric system, I know, but not much can be done about that: A gallon is roughly 3.79 liters. Thus ten thousand gallons is about 38,000 liters. At two liters a day, this enough for
one person, who has crawled under the reactor for this specific purpose
to drink 2 liters a day for 51 years in order to
raise his or her risk level by one in a million.
Do you have any idea of the risk that will be involved in
driving on Interstate 5 to San Onofre, straw in hand? Comparable? What about the gasoline burned in this 51 years of sucking the water from under reactor? Any risk associated with it? Any comment on the 999,999 chances in a million that even with these elaborate constraints,
nothing will happen at all?
Here, by the way is the statement from Argonne National Laboratory about the real risk of tritium:
Where Does It Come From? Tritium is naturally present as a very small percentage of ordinary hydrogen in water, both liquid and vapor. This tritium is produced as a result of the interaction of cosmic radiation with gases in the upper atmosphere, and the natural steady-state global inventory is about 7.3 kilograms (kg). (About five times this amount remains from past atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.) After being produced in the atmosphere, it is readily incorporated into water and falls to earth as rain, thus entering the natural hydrological cycle. Tritium is also produced as a fission product in nuclear weapons tests and in nuclear power reactors, with a yield of about 0.01%. That is, about one atom of tritium is produced per 10,000 fissions. Each year a large commercial nuclear power reactor produces about 20,000 curies (2 grams)of tritium, which is generally incorporated in the nuclear fuel and cladding. Because little tritium is naturally present, it must be produced artificially for use on a practical scale. Tritium can be made in production nuclear reactors, i.e., reactors designed to optimize the generation of tritium and special nuclear materials such as plutonium-239. Tritium is produced by neutron absorption of a lithium-6 atom. The lithium-6 atom, with three protons and three neutrons, and the absorbed neutron combine to form a lithium-7 atom with three protons and four neutrons, which instantaneously splits to form an atom of tritium (one proton and two neutrons) and an atom of helium-4 (two protons and two neutrons). The United States has recovered an estimated 225 kg of tritium, of which 150 kg has decayed into helium-3, leaving a current inventory of approximately 75 kg...
http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/tritium.pdf#search=%22%22cancer%22%20tritium%22This link also gives the cancer risk for ingestion of tritium (box lower right hand corner) which is 4.4 X 10
-14 per pCi of tritium.
Briefly during the early 1960's, during the period of nuclear testing, the worldwide concentration of tritium in water reached 5000 TU (1 tritium unit = 3.19 pCi/liter.) In spite of the worldwide growth of nuclear
power since then, the concentration has decreased and is now about 20 units.
http://www.iaea.org/programmes/ripc/ih/volumes/vol_two/ChT_II_05.pdf#search=%22tritium%20concentration%20atmosphere%20%22From this it is easy to calculate that, assuming 2L per day and a population around 3 billion in 1963, that about 1500 people world wide died from tritium induced cancers that year. This would be
trivial compared to the number of persons killed by air pollution in that year or in coal mines or in wars or car accidents or
other carcinogens, but who's counting? Certainly not you.
Following the same calculation for 1995, when the concentration was about 20 tritium units, and a population of 6 billion for the planet, a rough calculation shows about 12 people getting cancer because of tritium worldwide. The 1995 figure, derived from the next link, includes tritium from all sources, medical treatments, tritium watch dials, nuclear reprocessing, weapons manufacture, and, oh yes, the useless and largely meaningless labeling experiments in research of third rate biologists at fourth rate institutions. Thankfully nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere has been banned, but I'm afraid we're going to face the risk of poorly educated biologists for many years to come.
http://www.eawag.ch/research_e/w+t/UI/tritium.htmlThese figures are very different than your "calculation" for Southern California.
Now, here is the
fact that cannot be disproved. If you are anti-nuclear, you are pro-coal. This can be seen by
inspection of the energy flow chart:
Anyone who comes to you with some pilot program involving hydrogen for four or five people hooked up to a wind mill has no fucking clue about
industrial issues, which in the time of global climate catastrophe, are fucking
real. Global climate change is not happening in 50 years. It is not happening in 20 years. It is not happening in 10 years or in 2 years. It is happening
now.
If 100,000 people dropped dead from air pollution in Southern California you would not pay attention. How do I know? Because you
don't. You misinterpret
misinformation in a credulous way and you don't even have a
clue about what is being said.
You have not attempted to calculate the number of cancer deaths associated with soot - which is just as well since your calculational skill is so poor - because you wish to
pretend that such deaths
don't matter.
Right in the State of California they have written on their gas pumps, all of them, "This product contains compounds known by the State of California to cause cancer." Got a calculation for that one? No? It doesn't matter? You don't calculate for anything but
nuclear issues and even in that case, can't be troubled to get them right?
If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, make stuff up.