Category: Health

“You’re Being Lied To About Nuclear Waste”

A few considerations…
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“Temporary” dry-cask storage does NOT pose any kind of risk. Not any more than a jug of bleach. Unless you are stupid enough to drink the bleach. And it would be so many orders of magnitude more difficult, and time consuming, and labour intensive, and costly, to “get at” any of the fuel in DCS than to just chug some bleach in front of the washing machine.

A simple solution to automatically cooling wet storage is called a Stirling Engine. As things stand, most backups are diesel, but if you just wanna be able to “walk-away” there are solutions.

The solution to sites where nuclear plants have been decommissioned or removed and the DCS has been left behind, is to rebuild the nuclear plants. Those sites are ideal for new nuclear. All the original connectivity is already in place.

The discussion of military waste is not relevant to civilian energy. Here’s an idea. Don’t build nuclear weapons.

It is insane to put 90% recyclable fuel in DGS. FFS! Recycle it!

OMG! She said, ass backwards, that reprocessing fuel could power the entire US for 100 years at a cost of $100 billion. I don’t know about you, but that seems like $1 billion a year to power the whole country for a century. Um, seems like a really really low-cost. The US could just take that out of the criminal-ICE budget. GFGDCoaS!

If we just took $100 billion from Eloi Mush right now, he would still be a many-multi billionaire and everyone’s energy could be FREE for ten decades? Sounds awesome!

“Burning coal produces toxic coal ash.” Yes. And orders of magnitude more of the radioactive waste in our environment than nuclear technology. Because radioactive Carbon 14 is just dumped into the environment out chimneys of coal plants. Coal burning presents an actual radioactive waste problem.

Worrying about how a collapsed civilization would deal with our waste is a bit like worrying about whether you might have left the iron on after your house has been blown away by a hurricane.

PRATT Chernobyl

Someone ‘what about Chernobyl’-ed me. “Chernobyl is still uninhabitable.”

That is an interesting misconception. So let me address it on two grounds.

First, while initially it was thought that the accident would render the exclusion zone uninhabitable, what actually happened is that in the absence of human settlement the area has recovered a diverse ecosystem, with even large rare mammals finding sanctuary in the accidental nature preserve. The presence of human settlement was actually worse for the environment, than the disaster. Which is a real slap in the face.

In fact the undamaged reactors remained in operation for many years and today the exclusion zone is a tourist attraction. But I advise you not to go near the elephant’s foot.

Secondly, while horrific, the increased mortality from the disaster is something between 4000 and 15,000 over a period of about 70 years. That number will be rapidly decreasing because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing so many more deaths. If a Russian drone kills you today, you cannot get thyroid cancer in 20 years.

But to put the 4–15 thousand in context, particulate matter from German coal-fired mostly-electricity generation kills about 75,000 people in Europe EVERY year. And closing the last two nuclear plants in Germany was expected to increase that number by about 1000, per year. Closing Germany’s nuclear power plants has conservatively killed so many more people than Chernobyl ever will.

But here is a thought… Don’t build an unsafe archaic RMBK reactor. Problem solved.

But… again, for what it is worth if you are able to understand actual statistics, here is a graph.
It is NOT building nuclear power that is killing people.

An old thing about plastic recycling

Reminder: By and large plastic is not recyclable, or at least not recycled. We have technology for reprocessing some plastic. Clean PET, that is pop bottles, thoroughly washed, with the lids and labels removed can be reprocessed into fibres that can be used to make fleece or shoddy tarp fabric or plastic wood. But that process is not ‘recycling’ it does not cycle.

Some clean second generation materials can be reprocessed again into increasingly lower grade materials but inevitably such plastic is headed for the garbage, or the environment. In fact, reprocessing is an important stage in reducing whole plastic items to microplastics as the material is extruded as fibres.

But all of this is moot, since we never built the local facilities to reprocess plastic and instead rely on shipping our plastic garbage to vulnerable developing nations that also do not have the proper facilities to deal with our waste. Slave-wage workers there pick through literal mountains of wind-blown plastic to find economically salvageable bits. And because this is marginally more lucrative than subsistence farming, the local agricultural economy is undermined.

What garbage pickers can’t sell to reprocessing they sell as raw fuel to be burned uncleanly in local industries. Just burned in furnaces. No emission controls.

What should be happening to our plastic is that is should be incinerated locally in waste-to-energy facilities with state of the art emission control. But to do that we would have to build the infrastructure. And to build the infrastructure we would have to admit we have been talking bullshit about plastic recycling for decades.

Women’s washroom

At a mall in Toronto, when it was built, in the hallway with one set of washrooms the men’s washrooms were first and the women’s were further down, so that every woman who went to the women’s had to walk past the opening for the men’s. Then, some men being what they are, incidents occurred, and the washrooms were closed temporarily and switched so that the urinals went down to the end. Then women did not have to walk past the men’s to get to the women’s.

I don’t care about the gender of people I share a washroom with. But it is just dishonest to pretend that, in public, there is no cause for women, generally, to want a washroom that doesn’t have any men in it. Oversimplifying the issue, in the context of historic and ongoing male violence against women is not really that helpful a pretense.

However, I do like to check what I am saying. It has been years since I was in there, so I had a look. Today, according to the map those are all “Shared Access All Gender Washrooms.” There are men’s and women’s washrooms elsewhere in the mall still. And I suspect that for many women, certainly women who have been victims of male violence, the Shared Access All Gender Washrooms are now the men’s and they are gonna have to head over to the food court to use the women’s.

It would be better if people were not so awful.

Pi (π) is not 3.2

“The Indiana pi bill was bill 246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.” In short, they tried to pass a bill changing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter from π (3.14159…) to 3.2. Which is, and always will be, incorrect.

I have no idea how often I have seen a biologically literate person painfully explain the complexities of sex and gender in humans. But even if we are just talking about sex, in which most people fall into one of two broad categories, the reality, in a very real biological sense, for some people, a not statistically insignificant number, it really really is not that simple, or binary.

And no matter how you try to legislate contrary to the science, that shit is never gonna be less false than π = 3.2. And anyone who would try to pass such legislation, or any “executive” order by an ignorant imbecile, is quite simply wrong.

the real problem is the cars

Yes, the real problem is the cars but do you really think they will be eliminated?

Well, no I don’t. I think we are going to pretend that we can get away with half-assing our mitigation and don’t have to make radical adjustments to our way of life, and that decision will end us.

Fuck, we cannot even get consensus on public health measures in a “relatively minor” pandemic.

However one of two things will certainly happen. We will take the minimum steps necessary to keep this planet habitable or we won’t.

Although “eliminated” is the wrong idea. Having a car is not the problem. Building societies that are dependent on cars, so that you can’t go anywhere or do anything without driving, is the problem. Many people in the Netherlands have cars. They just don’t continually need them for everything. And because of that, driving in the Netherlands is way way better than here.

It is unfortunate that a failure to make fundamental changes in our culture and society has already baked a certain level of catastrophe into the coming decades. That is already unavoidable.

Either way, car-dependent culture will either end as a function of a movement toward more sustainable development and management, or it will end because civilization collapses. We get to choose. But there is no third option however comforting the pretense may seem.

So far we have chosen very very poorly.

Today’s IARC Roundup

Glyphosate is almost certainly NOT carcinogenic. I say “almost” because I would change my mind if a preponderance of peer-reviewed good-quality studies with adequate evidence were published that demonstrated a risk.

Nothing of the kind has happened. None the less, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) lists glyphosate as a Group 2A carcinogen. It is worth checking what that means in humans. “An agent may be classified in this group when there is inadequate evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.” There is “inadequate evidence,” indeed little or none, to suggest that glyphosate could be a carcinogen.

That said, I can no more prove that glyphosate is NOT a carcinogen than I can prove that this table is NOT giving me cancer. But the onus for scientific claims lies with the claimant. And so far, there are no good studies showing conclusively that glyphosate could increase your risk of getting cancer. That could change. But given the number of good studies that have not shown any link, if there is one, if it were shown to increase risk at all, the effect would have to be very small to be so difficult to detect.

Glyphosate is a very important and useful agricultural chemical with an excellent safety record and, again, no credible evidence that anyone can show that it causes cancer. So, glyphosate’s evident safety illustrates a problem with IARC.

Group 2A is called “Probable Carcinogens.” And some of the items so classed “probably” do, at least somewhat, increase the risk of cancer. But since the Group explicitly does not require that there be adequate evidence, there is a good chance that at least some of these hazards are “probably” imaginary. For others, it is likely that the increased risk is so small as to be statistically pointless to discuss. No one should much care if they are exposed to an increased risk from 1:10,000 to 1.12:10,000, even though that is a 12% increase. Everyone does stuff every day that is more dangerous than that.

And this ought to be pretty easy to understand. Because in Group 2A you will also find, working nights, cutting hair, fireplaces, hot tea, steak, the smell of fries cooking, urethane, and bizarrely malaria.

“One estimate, which has been published in a 2002 Nature article, claims that malaria may have killed 50-60 billion people throughout history, or about half of all humans that have ever lived.” Malaria killed 619,000 people in 2021. And IARC thinks it is worth considering if it “probably” could cause cancer, without adequate evidence that it does.

Group 2B carcinogens are said by IARC to be “possibly” carcinogenic. So less certain than “probably.” Or to put it another way, like everything else in the world, allowing that new evidence could arise, it is NOT “impossible” that some Group 2B agents are somewhat carcinogenic. That is more than “possibly” not a useful claim. And while this group contains a long list of scary chemicals, it also contains Ginkgo extract, aloe vera, magenta, pickles, carpentry, talc, and sewing.

For due diligence here, it is worth noting that Groups 2A and 2B include agents for which IARC believes there is, “sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals.” Which is why so many flash-in-the-pan claims need to have, “…in mice,” appended to them. Or, as we shall see shortly, “…in rats.”

Group 3 carcinogens according to IARC are agents that, “can not be classified in regard to their carcinogenicity to humans.” Where the “evidence of carcinogenicity is inadequate in humans and [also] inadequate or limited in experimental animals.” So, this is explicitly a grouping of agents for which there is literally no reason why they should be on any list of “carcinogens.” More than half the agents on IARC’s carcinogen list are in Group 3.

IARC used to have another category. Group 4: “‘Probably not carcinogenic to humans’ There is strong evidence that it does not cause cancer in humans.” Problematically this, if comprehensive, would be a list of every last thing in the universe not included in Groups 1–3. But probably also most of what is in Group 3. They put one agent in Group 4, but since have removed that group altogether.

Alcohol is now alphabetically at the top of the Group 1 list among agents including ionizing radiation and asbestos. Which ought to elicit some surprise and clearly illustrates how misleading IARC Groups are for assessing risk. I will happily drink a shot of rye any day, rather than a shot of plutonium. Plutonium is in Group 1 with rye.

And while IARC’s list may be useful for informing research, it is almost useless for public health. Groups 2A–3 in practice appear to be a naughty-list of things IARC would like you to think of as carcinogens, but with “inadequate” or indeed no evidence that they are.

In 2023 IARC put aspartame in Group 2B. “Possibly” causes cancer in humans, except that, again, there is, by definition, “inadequate evidence” for that claim.

Which brings me to saccharine. That sweetener was used extensively for something like a century with no problem in humans. Then it was discovered that because of the nature of their urinary tract, which they do not have in common with humans, massive doses of saccharine could sometimes cause bladder cancer “…in rats.” Subsequently however it was shown that this was not true for humans. Much as I can survive eating chocolate, but your dog might not.

“IARC originally classified saccharin in Group 2B (“possibly carcinogenic to humans”) based on the rat studies, but downgraded it to Group 3 (“not classifiable as to the carcinogenicity to humans”) upon review of the subsequent research.” But let’s be clear. Saccharine is NOT A CARCINOGEN.

But because it is inevitable that the public and governments will interpret IARC group classifications as safety advice, saccharine was assumed to be a carcinogen anyway, and banned in many places. Most of those restrictions were lifted more than 20 years ago, when the claim was debunked. But saccharine is not used as a sweetener today, despite its vindication, because no one would buy a product with it on the ingredients.

And that is what is wrong with using the IARC Group lists as a guide to what is a carcinogen. Clearly there may be hundreds of agents on that list that are not carcinogenic. And there will be hundreds more that may have a nearly undetectable risk. You should not worry much about an exposure that has a one in a thousand chance of causing a cancer every five hundred years. And IARC should, in view of how their reports are misinterpreted, develop a much more nuanced classification system, that reflects relative risk and does not make claims for which, by their own admission, they do not have adequate evidence. Because as things stand, some of the agents they claim “probably” or “possibly” cause cancer, or “probably” don’t, make an important intergovernmental agency forming part of the World Health Organization of the United Nations, look kinda ridiculous.