Agreed. It was literally the wake up call for the fact that air quality standards are as important as soap and handwashinhg are, and yet... nothing happened.
And so the question of what effects getting rid of several-yearly respiratory infections would have on our health and the development of children remains open.
You could probably improvise something cheaper using the same filter arrangement, though now that you have it, sounds like the best thing to do might be just including an extra sacrificial initial filter to increase the lifespan of the proper ones.
Were you maybe thinking some kind of wire mesh, like the "washable pre-filters" in air purifiers tend to be? I did initially consider this; but, after running the air scrubber for a few months and seeing what actually builds up in the pre-filter, it seems like the pre-filters don't actually end up being coated in anything (dust/hair/etc) that can actually be rubbed/scratched away or even vacuumed out of them. Rather, just end up gradually blackening (due, I think, to fine [PM2.5] particulate making it partway through them before gradually embedding deep inside them); and gradually feeling more and more "skudgy" to the touch (due perhaps to some of those particulates being hygroscopic, and due to also trapping things like pollen/mold spores.) You can actually touch the surface of the fouled pre-filter and your fingertip will come away clean (but touching it won't be a nice sensory experience.)
I think, for helping with that kind of particulate, a wire mesh wouldn't do much if anything. The only "passive" thing that would help is a non-woven cross-linked fiber material, porous enough to not overwork the air scrubber's fan to the point of making it work harder / be louder / burn out sooner, yet layered and "internally labyrinthine" enough to capture particulate despite that porosity. I.e. the same material used in the pre-filter.
(If I could add an active component, I might introduce an intake-side ionizing air purifier, where particulate gets charged and then preferentially deposits onto the fins of a washable heatsink-like grille. AFAIK, those don't normally work at the sort of CFM being pushed by the air scrubber. But if anyone wants to design a better mousetrap here, that might be a direction to look into.)
Better "understanding of technology", probably not - early computing and internet required a lot more technical insight, and younger generations are notoriously tech illiterate.
Insight into how it effects society? Very possibly, at the least it's a different, more native perspective. Whether it is also broader or more correct, it's hard to say.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
> Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
> Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.
I agree coal power plants are much worse. As an aside, I’m not convinced that’s the bar we need to clear. I would think we need to be safer than solar power, since that’s the source that’s actually growing rapidly. If we’re going to add new power generation, I think it’s probably a trade off between nuclear and solar.
And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.
Wow, that's really fascinating to me! I am a bit cautious that the distribution of outcomes from nuclear may be skewed, so we've maybe avoided some of the "black swan" events so far simply because we don't have much nuclear deployed. I think the common example is "Picking up pennies in front of a steamroller"; you'll be totally fine until you totally aren't. However, I expect we'd also learn more and improve the safety as we deploy more, so I (somewhat naively) feel this is a good argument in favor of more nuclear.
In Fukushima zero people died from radiation. If we regulated everything to a similar point (cars, planes, fossils), you'll start living like a monk. Fossils aren't just worse but orders of magnitude worse
They are in valleys and I think the risk assessment was heavily influenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard which has been toned down quite a bit since... But IRSN (now ASNR) studies all kind of risks seriously...
You're right but this seems difficult to estimate. From the wikipedia* article:
> ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
> ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (which also caused meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident) caused 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, 2,553 missing.
So nuclear radiation impact from Fukushima is minimal in the total loss of life.
Per UN no deaths are recorded nor will be recorded due to the low dose.
Evacuation wasn't necessary, govt enforced it deliberately. If ppl weren't evacuated in such a rush(or not at all), they would have been fine
The low dosage claim is shady considering we have parts of the world with higher natural background radiation and in some cases cancer rates are lower there
Still, even by wildest estimations nr is fairly low
Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).
To be fair, people will say many of those deaths are due to the evacuation rather than the meltdown, and they’ll say the evacuation was overblown — too _much_ regulation. However, I think you’re right that these can still be attributed to the meltdown, since the evacuations were undertaken to avoid the difficult-to-predict impact of the meltdown. In hindsight, we can see the evacuation wasn’t needed. But the reactor meltdown made an already-bad situation even more brittle, and in a disaster scenario i think we naturally prefer the evacuation, as opposed to the (low) chance of total destruction.
The deaths are due to the evacuation, and the evacuation is due to some combination of [poor judgement] and [reactor meltdown]. If we attribute all the deaths to poor judgement, then we’re asserting we could confidently predict a reactor meltdown would pose no danger. Some people might claim that, but it seems implausible to me.
That myth keeps persisting. In reality per $ of the project wind farms face significantly higher regulatory costs in many countries. Nuclear power operators also managed to get regulations on the turbines dropped compared to coal plants (in Germany IIRC).
In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.
The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it or tightening targets far beyond any useful range. Also, arguably the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have, an example of paranoia as opposed to effective regulation.
(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).
Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
Lot of health impact of Chernobyl disaster was also because of Soviet's obsession with saving face.
The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.
Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.
> the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have
This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".
People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.
The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.
To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.
But now you're using older designs to argue against not building newer ones.
The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't actually a nuclear reaction. It was that the reactor got hot enough to separate the cooling water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you can get a hydrogen explosion.
If the primary coolant is water. And the reactor is designed in such a way that that can happen.
Meanwhile you can use other primary coolants or other designs where that isn't a thing. There are designs that don't explode even if you lose power entirely. At which point the cost of an evacuation that the design doesn't require you to do, isn't a cost that you have to pay.
There is a fair argument for the uncertainty at the time affecting that call. And I think we can agree that avoiding what happened at Fukushima is a core part of nuclear safety. My main point, though, is that people often think that nuclear safety people spend most of their time and effort on 'make the reactor not blow up', but actually the regulations and practical reality is that they spend most of that instead on avoiding trivial amounts of radiation exposure to their workers and the public, perhaps to the expense of effort that could be spent on 'not having a massive disaster' or (assuming you somehow fix the other bits of nuclear that are really expensive) 'not having a climate that's too hot'. I'm not arguing that there should be no regulation, I'm arguing that even from the point of view of safety outcomes more regulation is not intrinsically better.
The problem is that if we don't find an exit, climate change will come with its old friend, war. War for the resources. And we didn't even globally agree in a minimum ruleset.
We are being promised about how much safe will be this new plants in a normal context while we do that, this context is vanishing. New possibilities opened and now we must deal with the possibility of a nuclear plant versus 1000 drones that want to destroy it, or that will keep coming for months until destroying it. Each energy plant is now a target, guided by AI.
Too much people in power are plutonium grade unstable, and is just a question of time that at some moment new "smart robot soldiers" will be asked to do unstable things also
So... how can you convince us, and guarantee that this is not just planting bombs under our own bedrooms?
No they didn't. Data was available to jot do rushed forced evacuation and for older people evacuation literally led to death. Even if Fukushima was as bad as Chernobyl (which would be a wild statement considering it has containment), those ppl would have died from age earlier vs cancer. It was absolutely idiotic decision in this regard.
The physics of nuclear reactors push you towards making them big, and that means that there are correspondingly few of them, and they are all big civil engineering projects that are a little bit different from each other. This is a recipe for expensive and slow construction. The whole reason people are trying to make SMRs a thing is to try and get around this but it's not obvious there's an intersection between what the physics is happy to make efficient enough and a scale where you can actually get some learning rates and economies of 'scale' (which is more economies of unit volume than just in total how big something is).
The human impact of those is a fraction of fossil-fuels. So it’s not fair to judge nuclear for being expensive if we don’t hold other fuels to similarly rigorous standards
Not GP, but plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is.
Don't get me wrong, it's super deadly, but there are loads of toxins that are more deadly than plutonium. And while its radioactivity is seen as ultra scary, it's actually pretty nice, because you can at least detect it. Harder than beta or gamma, but still, it announces its presence.
How I wish I had a magic wand (spectrometer) that I could wave over my food to see if cyanide, ricin, mercury, or lead were there.
This. I wish people made a Geiger counter equivalent for pm2.5 and other atmospheric pollutants, people would never get to the subway again. And breathing air in any big Asian city is much more dangerous than doing the same in Prypiat.
Yeah, the problem is the overhyping of radiation's danger kind of covers-up the other problem, radiation weakens everything. Hairline cracks are a threat because the radiation is going to weaken the cement that's holding the very high pressure steam that's generating electricity.
Nuclear meltdowns have been common but dangerous radiation leaks rare and over-hyped, sure. But meltdowns involve an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment irrevocably breaking and that is what has made nuclear power uneconomical, not environmentalists' hand wringing. Indeed, I'd suspect nuclear company executives love to say the environmentos killed things, much better than saying their operations weren't economical.
> plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is... it's super deadly
"Super deadly" sounds enough scary to me, thanks
There are things that are "super deadly premium" of course. Stupidity terrifies me more than Plutonium. Specially when both things come together, but in the end the result is not much different.
What can the Kremlin do that is worse than the tech bros? Leverage data to deliver people additive divisive content until it all boils over into the "real world" and splits society? Oh wait...
This might have been plausible if this study came out of nowhere but there have been placebo controlled studies inducing/reversing autism-like symptoms in mice with fecal transplants and studies linking individual git microbiome metabolites to symptom severity in both animal models and humans.
Yeah the research is still preliminary but it's still pretty strong evidence that it's a research direction worth exploring.
TLDR of the article is that it's yet another person confusing "heritable" with "genetic". Genes aren't the only thing we inherit from out parents - and in fact there's strong preliminary evidence that the gut microbiome plays a major role in autism.
There are very strong reasons to suspect that gut microbiome at least plays a major role in at least a large portion of autism cases, complete with studies where we've been able to induce/reverse a subset of autism symptoms in mice, and even humans, as well as linking individual gut microbe metabolites to them. And ~80% of autistic people have gut problems.
There's no question in my mind that at least some of the propensity to develop autism is genetic, but calling the whole of it genetic feels ridiculous in the face of preliminary evidence to the contrary consistent with the massive increase in diagnosis rates beyond what can be explained by changing criteria.
Yeah, even if some people are genetically favored to get it, it doesnt mean the enviornment doesnt increase the chance it will happen, how strong it will be.
I don't like the direction some research is pushing it, like its just genetics there's nothing we can do here.
You can smoothly interpolate between different projections, and the scale differences are large enough that it should be gradual enough not to notice much. Either way, globe view is always superior.
And so the question of what effects getting rid of several-yearly respiratory infections would have on our health and the development of children remains open.
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