From a discussion page... Think of it like the escalating scale of earthquakes, where a 6.0 is exponentially more powerful than a 5.9, not just one per cent stronger. Spent fuel rods have always been the weak link of nuclear power. Try to picture that kind of long-lived radiation drifting its way around the world, contaminating the food sources, the water, the air, of everyone in the Northern Hemisphere. Half-life of 24,000 years. And while the bombs detonated at Hiroshima & Nagasaki released nearly all of their energy in the first split-second, a leaking nuclear reactor continues to release radiation. The radiation release from Chernobyl was 200 times that of the WWII-era bombs that killed hundreds of thousands, and continued for weeks...to state that a release at the Dai-Ichi site would 85 times more lethal than that, with prevailing winds headed toward geographic areas hat are considerably more populated, and without any ability to contain the leak at all, ever, is pretty scary.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 10:58:47 +0000
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