Mary Yugo wrote:
And by the way, it's expensive.
It is much cheaper than inadvertently irradiating hundreds of
thousands of people.
What's wrong with ordinary radiation detectors?
You can measure radioactivity with instruments but you cannot predict
what effect it will have on different species. Different power levels,
the overall dose, and different types of radioactivity have different
effects. You have to first measure the radioactivity a cold fusion
reactor produces (if any) and then subject various species to that level
and type of radiation for extended periods. Just knowing how much there
is does not give you an accurate picture of how much risk it presents.
Unless the dose is so high it causes immediate damage or death, it is
hard to estimate how much damage it will cause. Biology is complex and
unpredictable.
Or do you think animals are used to verify that conventional
nuclear power plants are safe? Maybe they use canaries?
They use a variety of species. I doubt that includes canaries.
The standards for things like a safe level of human exposure are mostly
educated guesses. Actual ill health varies a great deal from one person
to another. Some people can be exposed to high levels without ill
effects. Children are much more vulnerable than adults. There are exact
levels of allowed radiation written into laws, but the science is murky.
The standards had to be raised in Japan in response to Fukushima
disaster. Otherwise they would not run out of skilled workers to fix the
reactor.
There has been a great deal of coverage of this in the Japanese press,
and I discussed it with some Japanese scientists.
At the National Plasma Fusion Science Lab in Nagoya, they exposed fish
and other species to tritium at levels much higher than national
standards allows. (Standards in Japan, the U.S. and Europe are pretty
much the same, I gather.) They saw no ill effects. Tritium is a lot
safer than people think. That's good because I believe tritium is the
most common radioactive product from cold fusion, and it is difficult to
contain.
- Jed
