Transcript: Obama News Conference Announcing Environment and Energy Team - December 15

[bananas]

http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/12/15/transcript-obama-news-conference-announcing-environment-and-energy-team-december-15/

Transcript: Obama News Conference Announcing Environment and Energy Team | December 15

<snip>

CHU: Thank you.

I’m honored to be selected as the nominee for secretary of energy. In the years ahead, the Department of Energy will be a major force in meeting the challenges that the president-elect has described.

Its role is to support energy research and development that will lead to innovation in the private sector, to nurture broad-based scientific research that is essential for our future prosperity, and to provide scientific leadership to minimize the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons.

<snip>

Some people think that proliferation and use of nuclear weapons have nothing to do with Environment and Energy.
They are wrong.

[Dogmudgeon]

1. How about nuclear medicine?

I'm very glad nuclear medicine exists. It saved my life by detecting a hidden abcess in my skull when I was a teenager, and a SPECT study detected an impending stroke this summer, so that's twice for me.

MRIs are also nuclear. The procedure was originally called NMR for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. They changed the name due to patients' phobias over the word "nuclear". (One patient sued Temple University Hospital claiming that the radiation destroyed her psychic ability -- and won.)

For those with an anti-nuclear agenda, the largest nuclear material disaster aside from Chernobyl, in terms of deaths, was the Goiânia accident in 1987.

The Goiânia accident was an incident of radioactive contamination in central Brazil that killed several people and injured many others. On 13 September 1987, an old radiation source was scavenged from an abandoned hospital in Goiânia, the capital of the central Brazilian state of Goiás. It was subsequently handled by several people and caused serious radioactive contamination, resulting in a number of deaths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident">Source: Wikipedia

But, x-ray exposure has killed more people overall, mainly from lack of awareness of radiation-induced pathology in the early years. For instance, millions of people were exposed to fairly high doses of x-rays from http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/shoexray.htm">shoe store x-ray machines from about 1940 until 1981.

Nuclear and x-ray radiation are also used to treat cancer. The newest techniques include the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_knife">Gamma Knife. My sister-in-law had GK treatment for a malignant pituitary tumor. (Totally cured, incidentally)

Radiation has killed many people, but it has saved quite a few, too.

--p!