dohboi wrote:Just had a high level scientist talk on cancer causes. She said only about 10% were from genetics. The rest were from environmental/behavioral causes--basically carcinogenic chemicals and exposure to radiation. The talk happened to focus on the chemical side, which did seem to predominate. But most people don't really realized how much cancer is a self inflicted disease on humans (or rather an industry-inflicted disease on citizens). And exposure to radiation from various sources is definitely part of that.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (福島第一原子力発電所事故 Fukushima Dai-ichi (About this sound pronunciation) genshiryoku hatsudensho jiko?) was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.[6][7] Although it was the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986,[8] and the radiation released exceeded official safety guidelines, there were no casualties caused by radiation exposure.
A few of the plant's workers were severely injured or killed by the disaster conditions resulting from the earthquake. Furthermore, at least six workers have exceeded lifetime legal limits for radiation and more than 300 have received significant radiation doses. Workers involved in mitigating the effects of the accident do face minimally higher risks for some cancers.[9]
Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[10] in the academic literature from none[11] to hundreds.[12] On 16 December 2011, Japanese authorities declared the plant to be stable, although it would take decades to decontaminate the surrounding areas and to decommission the plant altogether.[13]
The Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami killed over 15,000 people from effects unrelated to Fukushima.
sparky wrote:.
Wood burning smoke is like tobacco smoking a strong emitter of carcinogenic fumes and substance
since about one million years humans have gathered around hearths , inhaling all those dangerous stuff
there is a fantasy about bad stuff giving one horrible death ,
the truth is that babies are saved and live which wouldn't some decades ago ,
instead of living up to fifty if lucky and dying , people now experience heart attacks , senile dementia and cancers .
the more people live..... the more they will die , that's the deal .
sometimes people die young , that's either accidents , bad genes or violence
every day one get to see a sunrise is a victory of sort against a long list of natural laws .
people have the privilege today of considering death from new causes ,
don't worry , the old causes are not gone , they just wait around the corner
pstarr wrote:dissident wrote:The detail you are missing is that that the chemical profile of wood smoke is not the same as that of gasoline and diesel engine exhaust. Humans are adapted to the carcinogens in wood smoke but not from industrial and transport emissions. So your attempt to generalize is a total fail.
Talk about fail. You just trapped yourself in a logical leghold. You have two choices diss: to chew your leg off or admit your mistakes.
hint: how does a species adapt to something that causes cancer? Would the tumor evolve into a useful appendage? And if humans have adapted (somehow) to one particular carcinogen, why not to another? Like radiation.
The warnings about fallout from nuclear tests six decades ago often noted that cancers from the radiation would probably not begin appearing in large numbers for many years. But that time is now – and medical experts are wondering whether the surge in some cancers is a result.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission doused the entire United States with thyroid cancer-causing iodine-131 — and 300 other radioisotopes — by exploding atomic and hydrogen bombs above ground. To protect the dirty, secretive, militarized bomb-building industry, the government chose to warn the photographic film industry about the radioactive fallout patterns, but not the general public.
In 1951, the Eastman Kodak Company had threatened a federal lawsuit over the nuclear fallout that was fogging its bulk film shipments. Film was not packed in bubble wrap then, but in corn stalks that were sometimes being fallout-contaminated.
By agreeing to warn Kodak, etc., the AEC and the bomb program avoided the public uproar — and the bomb testing program’s possible cancellation — that a lawsuit would have precipitated. The settlement kept the deadliness of the fallout hidden from farmers and the public, even though the government well knew that fallout endangered all the people it was supposed to be defending.
This staggering revelation was heralded on Sept. 30, 1997, in the New York Times headline, “U.S. Warned Film Plants, Not Public, About Nuclear Fallout.” The article began, “While the Government reassured the public that there was no health threat from atmospheric nuclear tests…” The fallout’s radioactive iodine-131 delivered thyroid doses to virtually all 160 million people in the U.S. at the time.
According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland, which discovered the cover-up, children were especially affected and received higher doses because they generally consumed more milk than adults and since their thyroids are smaller and growing more rapidly. The “milk pathway” moves radioiodine from grass, to cows, to milk with extreme efficiency — a fact known to the government as early as 1951.
Ingested iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid gland where it can cause cancer. Average doses to children averaged between 6 and 14 rad, with some as high as 112 rad. Prior to 1997, the government claimed that thyroid doses to children were 15 to 70 times less.
The National Cancer Institute disclosed in 1997 that some 75,000 thyroid cancer cases can be expected in the U.S. from just 90 — out of a total of 235 — above-ground bomb tests and that 10 percent of them will be fatal. That year, the NCI said, about 70 percent of the thyroid cancers caused by iodine-131 fallout from those 90 tests had not yet been diagnosed but would appear years or decades later.
The 14-year NCI study also said the 90 bomb blasts produced more than 100 times the radioactive iodine-131 than the government had earlier claimed. The NCI estimated that they dispersed “about 150 million curies of iodine-131, mainly in the years 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1957.”
The study reported that all 160 million people in the country at the time were exposed to the iodine-131 (the only isotope out of more than 300 that were dispersed by the bomb blasts that it studied). Children under 15, like Steve O’Neil and all the Baby Boomers, were particularly at risk. High doses of fallout were spread nation-wide. Wind patterns and local rainfall caused “hot spots” from Montana and Idaho to South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri and beyond.
he National Cancer Institute’s 1997 study said about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed in the U.S. annually, and that 1,230 would die from the disease. This estimate turned out to be a gross under-statement.
Today the NCI reports that 60,220 new cases of thyroid cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, and that 1,850 of them will be fatal. The thyroid cancer “balloon” is with us because the nuclear weapons complex under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy attacked the very people it was said to be defending. Yet, it gets worse.
The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation says that iodine-131 doses comprise only two percent of the overall radiation dose from weapons testing. Ninety-eight percent of our fallout dose is from 300 other isotopes produced by the Bomb.
It is not idle speculation to suggest that the cancer pandemic afflicting the people of the U.S. has been caused by our own government’s deliberately secret and viciously reckless weapons program.
According to the National Cancer Institute in 1992, about 150 million curies of radioactive iodine was released in open air from nuclear testing in Nevada, causing heavy contamination of the nation's milk supplies from the early 1950's to the early 1960's. This is more than 20 times the amount estimated to have been released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. At the time of open air testing, millions of children were drinking this contaminated milk. In the early 1950's when radioactive fallout was over-exposing film in cardboard made with contaminated straw, the Eastman Kodak company secretly complained and was given routine warnings by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The public was never warned by the U.S. government about the dangers of consuming milk it was contaminating in its quest to amass a nuclear arsenal.
After the ratification of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration established "Protective Action Guides" for Iodine-131 that triggered removal of dairy products from human consumption following nuclear accidents. Had these limits been in place during the open air nuclear testing in the 1950's and early 1960's, the NCI study indicates that milk supplies would have had to be removed from the markets for months at a time. The NCI admitted in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1998, after an investigation by the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, that it suppressed this study for 5 years. The NCI also conceded this may have caused as many as 212,000 excess thyroid cancers.
6.16 As to long-lived radionuclides such as strontium-90 the Council notes that processes for the removal of radionuclides from milk developed jointly by the Department of Agriculture, the Public Health Service, and the Atomic Energy Commission are now being evaluated for the feasibility of full-scale production for possible use in an emergency.
6.17 However, in the Council's judgment, major national programs directed at removing strontium-90 from food supplies would not contribute to the national welfare. Even if the strontium-90 levels in human bone reached those corresponding to the Radiation Protection Guide, the removal of strontium-90 from foods would not necessarily be in the best interests of the nation.
The Council would have to consider whether the health risk would be great enough to justify the total impact of such a program on the economy and the necessary allocation of national resources in relation to the health benefits that might be achieved through feasible reduction in strontium-90 intake.
2h ago Fukishima cooling system has stopped operating
Highest radiation reading since 3/11 detected at Fukushima No. 1 reactor
The radiation level in the containment vessel of reactor 2 at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 power plant has reached a maximum of 530 sieverts per hour, the highest since the triple core meltdown in March 2011, Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. said.
Tepco said on Thursday that the blazing radiation reading was taken near the entrance to the space just below the pressure vessel, which contains the reactor core.
The high figure indicates that some of the melted fuel that escaped the pressure vessel is nearby.
At 530 sieverts, a person could die from even brief exposure, highlighting the difficulties ahead as the government and Tepco grope their way toward dismantling all three reactors crippled by the March 2011 disaster.
Tepco also announced that, based on its analysis of images taken by a remote-controlled camera, that there is a 2-meter hole in the metal grating under the pressure vessel in the reactor’s primary containment vessel. It also thinks part of the grating is warped.
The hole could have been caused when the fuel escaped the pressure vessel after the mega-quake and massive tsunami triggered a station blackout that crippled the plant’s ability to cool the reactors.
The government and Tepco hope to locate the fuel and start removing it in 2021.
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