Hillary Clinton, the TPP, and Protecting Our Food

[jeff47]

42. Fucking reality. Always too long to properly respond to.

Please provide link to where he actually said that. I am quite sure he didn't.

http://enenews.com/gundersen-pyrophoric-fire-fuel-rods-unit-4-pool-cooled-potential-contamination-entire-northern-hemisphere-video

Btw, the surface area of the Northern hemisphere is about 98 million square miles. There's around a couple hundred pounds of radioactive material in reactor #4. Gundersen is claiming that a couple hundred pounds would render all of that 98 million square miles uninhabitable to all life.

He also neatly forgets to consider why radiation would stop at the equator.

She is quite credible, and her books have been criticized extensively by the nuclear lobby. Are you pro-nuke? I am not.

Your measure of credibility appears to be based on your agreement with her position. As opposed to things like math and physics.

As for "pro-nuke", I'm anti-fossil-fuel.

Up until a couple years ago, that required being "pro-nuke". We didn't have the technology to power everything using renewable sources. That inherently meant using nuclear power. The cost of an unlikely nuclear disaster contaminating a relatively small area is vastly less than the guaranteed global disaster of climate change.

Essentially, do what France did.

But time and technology move on. We now have technology in power generation and, more importantly, power distribution that we did not have before. (For example, saying "We can power the world via 1980's-era photovoltaic panels covering part of the Sahara!!" neglects that the power has to actually leave the Sahara to do any good.)

You need to read more. Contaminated water is coming from beneath the reactors, as well as from the surface. They built the darn things on top of ground water flowing into the ocean.

Then cooling wouldn't be a problem. That groundwater would keep the reactors cool, and Gundersen's fears of cooling failure are completely unfounded.

Again, pick one.

It takes a long time to die from cancers caused by radiation. The real problem is with internal emitters or hot particles that are ingested or inhaled. Even small amounts are harmful.

Not from the doses required by your claims.

You are claiming the food imported from Japan is a deadly threat to all Americans. We import virtually no rice from Japan, but the Japanese eat a ton of rice grown in Japan. For the foods we do import to be so contaminated, that rice must be HIGHLY contaminated. So the Japanese would be dying of acute radiation sickness due to their rice.

TEPCO and the Japanese government have only recently admitted that their reported "test results" were lower than the actual data showed. They have been making mistakes with the data for some time.

Gets back to the "where are the dead Japanese" problem. They're eating the rice.

Japan mixed rice from areas near Fukushima with rice from other areas in order to alter the overall results.

False. Sacks of rice harvested near Fukushima are tested independently. If they pass those tests, the rice can be mixed with the rice grown in other parts of the country.

And places as far as Tokyo have shown contamination, even in schoolyards.

I can measure contamination everywhere on the planet, thanks to nuclear weapons, as well as natural sources of radiation. That isn't a measure of how contaminated everything is. It's a measure of how good our sensors are.

For that contamination to be a health risk, it has to be more than detectable. It has to be enough to cause harm.

At which point you'll probably say "No level of radiation is safe!!!". Which would mean the sun has already killed us all. We can detect lots and lots of radiation from it hitting the Earth.

Using the "no radiation" standard is using a scientific concept in a layman context.

Our country does lots of stupid things too, especially for economic reasons. However, some countries do have higher standards than we do when it comes to radioactive contamination in food.

So you're going to argue Russia has better environmental contamination standards?

Levels that we consider safe are considered unsafe by other countries. Is this to protect the nuclear industry?

No, it's because nobody has been able to demonstrate harm caused by the US level of contamination.

But you can win votes by claiming to protect people from nuclear contamination. Make sure to say the last two words in a menacing voice with a minor-key soundtrack in your ad campaign.

However, the nuclear industry has a lot of influence worldwide.

If the nuclear industry is so powerful, how come they haven't been able to build any new nuclear plants in the US in decades? Or in Japan, for that matter?

Just because someone only makes tens of millions instead of tens of billions does not mean they are not trying to sell you something.