[OSM-talk] radioactivity

[Paul Houle]

Nic Roets wrote:
>
> Many scientific labs and hospitals work with radio active materials 
> within an appropriate legal and enforcement framework. That may 
> include placing of signs at the perimeter of the premises. In those 
> cases we should tag it.
>
> But people have an irrational fear of radioactivity. We certainly 
> don't want mappers to draw they own conclusions. For example, if a 
> site is storing depleted uranium, that does not mean that the public 
> should be worried. The level of radiation may be so low that it is not 
> harmful to humans.
>
    +1

    Radioactivity is just one of many man-made hazards,  and,  overall,  
people overestimate it's danger compared to other hazards and often 
don't understand the real hazards.  If you're going to tag radioactive 
hazards,  you ought to be tagging other hazards as well.  In Upstate NY 
there are a large number of industrial "brownfield sites" that are still 
contaminated with heavy metals,  hazardous organic solvents,  and other 
hazards.  Yes,  in upstate we had the only commercial nuclear 
reprocessing plant in the US (with a sordid story that makes Sellafield 
look golden) but there was also a 40-building complex that manufactured 
film that contaminated a heavily populated area in Binghamton  NY with 
Cadmium and Silver.  Two industrial plants near Ithaca have leaked TCE 
and other solvents,  affecting an elementary school,  nursing home and 
the entire South Hill neighborhood.

    Note that these hazards are both pointwise and diffuse.  For 
instance,  you could be quickly killed by a lethal radiation field if 
you were to go for a swim in a spent fuel storage pond at a nuclear 
reactor.  On the other hand,  there are good procedures in place to 
protect the public and the workers at nuclear plants;  for one thing 
you'd need to get past the fence and armed guards.  There's a 
hypothetical danger there (the glaciers could come and spread the 
contents of a temporary nuclear waste repository across a wide area) but 
no "clear and present" immediate danger.  You might as well tag all the 
roads as dangerous since hundreds of thousands of people get killed in 
automobile accidents every year.

    Now,  coal burning power plants release about 300 times as much 
radiation into the environment during normal operation as a nuclear 
power plant.  The issue is that there are trace quantities of uranium 
and it's decay products such as radium and polonium in coal:  the coal 
burning plant in my county consumes about 120 freight cars of coal every 
day,  to produce only 1/3 the power of a typical nuclear plant,  which 
consumes 1 kg of U235 and produces about 1 kg of fission products every 
day.  It deposits a fallout plume for hundreds of miles,  which includes 
radioactive elements,  sulfur compounds and which contributes to lung 
and heart diseases.  It emits more carbon dioxide,  as a point source,  
than all of the other activities in the county put together,  but yet,  
by some Jedi Mind Trick,  it was left out of a report on "Global Warming 
In Tompkins County" since they charged CO^2 emissions to the places 
where electricity is used,  not where it is produced.

     The nuke industry isn't perfect either.  The operation of "once 
through" plutonium production reactors at Hanford has deposited 
radioactive contamination into sediments downstream in the Colombia 
river.  Early tank storage systems at Hanford were criminally 
inadequate,  and have leaked plumes of FP and TRU contamination that are 
migrating to the Colombia.  Yet,  Hanford didn't drive Salmon and Trout 
to the verge of extinction:  that was done by hydroelectric dams and 
overfishing.  SRS did a much better (but not perfect) job of tank 
storage,  and future commercial reprocessing operations at SRS won't 
need tank storage at all.

    On top of all that,  the hazard of environmental contamination is 
distributed oddly in space.  If you put a dab of a strong essential oil 
on your skin and spend a few hours in your house,  it's quite 
entertaining to sniff around the next day and try to explain the spatial 
distribution of the odor.  You might find that somebody else sits down,  
picks up the odor and their clothes,  and distributes it to a room that 
you didn't go in.  Similarly,  you'd think that DDT and PCB 
contamination would be worst in places close to where these substances 
were used.  However,  if you look at tissue concentrations in wild 
animals,  you'll find shockingly high levels of contamination in arctic 
animal populations in places that are basically uninhabited -- food webs 
work like that.