Explosion At French Nuclear Site Kills One 262
syngularyx writes "An explosion took place in an oven Monday at the Marcoule nuclear site near the city of Nimes in the south of France. From the article: 'One person was killed and three were injured in the explosion, following a fire in a storage site for radioactive waste, Le Figaro newspaper said. It is a major site involved with the decommissioning of nuclear facilities. emergency services said.'"
Update: 09/12 16:20 GMT by S : Changed headline and summary to reflect that there seems to be no risk of a leak.
Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:5, Informative)
In other news, 30 coal miners die each year in the U.S. alone and no one gives a rats ass.
Deaths per terawatt hour (from nextbigfuture.com [nextbigfuture.com]):
Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Oil: 36
Natural Gas: 4
Biofuel/Biomass: 12
Peat: 12
Solar: 0.44
Wind: 0.15
Hydro: 0.10
Nuclear: 0.04
Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:5, Informative)
a petroleum pipeline explosion has killed at least 100 [bbc.co.uk] so far today in Kenya.
From linked article:
"The scene is horrific, with charred bodies all around. I cannot differentiate between men and women or boys and girls. All that is left are bones, and the only way to identify the children is from their smaller skeletons."
They're "darkies" so who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like they're real people or anything.
This was one white European guy, so he matters far more than they do.
It's also not scary radioactive material, just plain old oil.
All this together makes it not so newsworthy.
Re:They're "darkies" so who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
That's racist, sir. Racist. France employs a lot of North African immigrants to do dirty, dangerous work, it's far too early to jump to conclusions about whether we should care about the corpse.
Let's Rewrite that Headline Story (Score:2, Troll)
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It sounds like you are trying to say that these people have a choice to live in a nicer place and instead choose to live with this danger so they can tap the fuel line. You couldn't be more wrong.
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On the front page of the CBC (Score:5, Insightful)
Sidebar: At least 61 killed in Kenya pipeline explosion
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Therefore, we should all be driving Ford Nucleons [wikipedia.org]? ;)
Nice point, but (Score:2)
does it take into account that so MUCH more coal has been used and is being used than nuclear power.
How many more nuclear debacles would there be if every municipality in the US had a nuclear power plant the way there is a coal fired electrical plant now?
Would radioactive zones that people had to stay away from become a common every day occurrence?
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nuclear power accounts for about 1/3 the electricity that coal power does in the USA.
See above. It implies about four times as many "debacles". Note that we've only managed ONE "debacle" in the USA over the last half century (TMI).
Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:5, Interesting)
(If you think this is off-topic - think about it some more)
Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you can drive a car to Alpha Centauri that will become a meaningful statistic.
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There are far more deaths among the *users* of those fuel sources than the producers. In the USA 36,600 deaths from automobiles, 1000 from railroads, 140 from aircraft....and even 1,000 annually of the green bicyclers get slaughtered by those using the fuel to get around. Do you give a rat's ass about that? no? then shaddap...
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Even modern Generation IV reactors are not entirely safe, we still don't know what to do with the waste that is building up and that its not going away any time soon and not to mention that when things go wrong we're not usually just talking about it affecting a handful of people we're talking about massive environmental damage and potentially huge effects on the human population.
I swear the people on slashdot who jump to the defence of
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The problem with these statistics is that they are unreliable for long term prospection; i.e. one big incident for nuclear or hydro (dam collapse) near populated areas would skew the result for all times.
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And everyone knows that coal is only used for energy production, nothing else, like cooking steel or something the like ...
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Your link is one of the most irresponsible, shoddy pieces of "reporting" I've seen in a long time. I followed back their web of references until I finally found their source [iaea.org]. The numbers for coal cited by their source are 0.04-0.14 or 0.13-0.23 occupational deaths per TWh for coal, and 0.01-1.23, 0.65, or 0.62 public fatalities per TWh for nuclear and 0.02-0.09, 0.04, or 0.02 occupational fatalities per kWh.
In short, their numbers cited are total BS.
Let's look at the rest of the graph that the author *did
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Germany is already phasing out coal power [spiegel.de], so no. Because of how rapidly they're doing their nuclear phaseout, there will probably be more coal in the short term, but Germany has made it clear that it intends to replace them with solar and wind, and has announced a boost in investment in these sectors.
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I fail to see your point. Just changing the numbers to show that Nuclear Energy could be more dangerous doesn't disprove that it isn't safe.
How many people die from health conditions living next to a coal burning plant? At least with Nuclear its worse case usually effects a limited range. Fossil fuels effects thousands of miles.
Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:4, Insightful)
which would be reflected in the total amount of power produced by a particular source.
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So? The relevant statistic, deaths per terawatt hour, was given.
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I believe he means because there are many more coal plants than nuclear.
Ummmm, you see the bit that says "...per terawatt hour"?
That's there for a reason.
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Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:4, Funny)
It's when you drink too much Brawndo.
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But it's got electrolytes.
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Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes sense to compare the safety of different means for producing energy. the number of workers, or the cause of death is irrelevant: if more people die to produce the same amount of energy, then this kind of energy is more dangerous to produce.
Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:4, Insightful)
The risk depends on where the energy is produced too, so the metric is not absolute.
The procedures and technology can be improved. The solar/wind/hydro deaths for example are calculated from resource mining, construction and maintenance related fatalities (/resource or /profession in general population) : http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html [nextbigfuture.com] That article precedes the one that OP referenced and provides the methodology.
The nuclear comes out as the safest probably because of the strict safety guidelines and the fact that not anyone can maintain a nuclear power station. Should the same kind of methods be enforced to all energy related activities in society the renewables (and coal too) would appear a lot more safer.
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Whether you "agree," or "buy that" doesn't make the slightest difference. The statistics, which you do not even contest, tell the story. They are not "arbitrary" numbers. They are an actual accounting of the comparative death tolls, apples to apples. If you are not prepared to apply rational thought to the issue, then you must not expect to be taken very seriously. If an entire nation is not prepared to apply rational thought to the issue, then that nation must not expect to be taken very seriously.
You
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Oh I do rational think about it. You seem to miss my point? Or?
If we have 1000 workers in the nuclear energy to produce 1 terrawat, and 1 dies per year, and OTOH
we have 20000 workers in the coal based energy production per terrawat and 300 die per year, then obviously we have more death to coal mining and coal based energy production than to nuclear.
However, if we would magically reduce the amount of workers needed to produce that amount of coal to 100, we had far better ration. Don't you agree?
So: AGAIN, u
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Magic is not an available option. Until coal can make such a reduction in work force theorizing about it is worthless.
You are also ignoring the costs of human health damage from coal emissions.
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Yes, and if an 12 angels could dance on the head of a pin maybe John Lennon would still be alive. You're not very good with statistics, are you?
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required energy production does not depend on the type of energy source, thus deaths per terawatt is the most meaningful statistic there is by far.
So say for 10TW requirement for coal there is 1 610 deaths while for nuclear there is 0.4 deaths, or in other words 1 death per 2½years.
So let's reflect that for every 1 death in nuclear production you get 4025 deaths for coal energy production. I'd say that's a DAMN GOOD trade off, even if deaths by nuclear production would increase by multiple orders of ma
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That is what I meant: you think it is a damn good trade off, but the coal miners perhaps think different.
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Because they might be out of a job? We're talking about safety here, not employment. If you want to talk employment about an industry that will eventually be replaced by more up-to-date technology, then the coal miners will have to deal with it in the same way the buggy manufacturers were screwed by the car industry, the portrait painters were screwed by the advent of photography, and 8-track factories were shut down when ... you get the idea. At least I hope you do.
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All the numbers include disasters. So yes, the nuclear number includes all deaths involved in "plant explosions" (sic) and more importantly the raised cancer risks in the surrounding area (which are much lower than the raised cancer risk around a coal plant).
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You know that the official numbers about Chernobyl are faked, or don't you?
Also the numbers about cancer around coal plants are decades old and don't apply to modern plants (if they ever where true, most papers or reports in the USA regarding teh danger of coal are debunked since a dekade or more).
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Such incredibly bad spelling makes me think you don't know what you are talking about. If there is any truth behind what you claim, post links to proof that aren't coal sponsored, but everything I've seen published in the last 3 years says coal is 10x more dangerous than previously thought.
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what happens to a coal miner who becomes unemployed because of a switch awayy from coal?
Job protection has historically been a poor reason to fail to embrace new technology. But I'm guessing he might look at the new nuclear power plant, or uranium mine depending on where the hypothetical miner is. You also seem to be overlooking construction, which is a multi-year project for a nuclear power plant, and would create many jobs in the safety-conscious first world.
Your point about the failure to impose first world safety standards on third world coal mines is well taken, but seems like more of a
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Very likely the measurement death per terawatt hour is not very meaningfull.
Depends what the discussion is about. If the discussion is at a national energy policy level, then the question is really "Given that we need X kWhr per year to do everything we want to do, what is the 'best' way to get that much power?" Then for 'best' we can decide what tradeoff we want between cheap, reliable, safe, etc. So if we're talking about the safety of various energy sources, then certainly the death rate per terawatt-hour is (one of) the right metrics.
If a given industry can give us the same num
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Interestingly, most injuries and deaths in the nuclear industry are from industrial accidents. None (in the US, at least) are from radiation exposure. When I took a tour of a research reactor, they told me that by far the most dangerous aspect of working in the reactor building was the crane. The radiation exposure is very low on the risk of hazards that a rad worker encounters (because shielding, monitoring, etc. are so rigorous).
There are probably more deaths involved in uranium mining then working in a r
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Accounting for a higher number of workers per terawatt isn't that important. Even if the excess deaths were primarily driven by the number of workers, the fact that it puts so many more workers in danger is still a problem.
Also, as you mention, solar-related deaths are probably almost all due to just plain everyday accidents. This sets a nice baseline level of danger and implies that the deaths in the bottom four entries are probably driven mostly by workers per terawatt. This makes sense because of the ene
I've never heard this before, but it's perfect (Score:2)
We need X energy. We want to evaluate the safety of the various means of providing X energy.
So the relevant question is: How many people will die to provide us with X energy by a means?
Deaths per terawatt-hour perfectly answers the question.
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Lol,
I *know* t is on the first glance.
Did even read my post to the end?
A much more interesting question for me is: how can you make the unsafe energy sources more safe? You get it?
There is always more than one solution to a problem ...
When deaths per TWh go down (Score:2)
the "unsafe" energy source is more safe.
It sounds useless to me to just give raw numbers. You need some measure of utility.
For example, X number of people killed on highways is a useless number for comparison. More or fewer miles having been driven would make any comparison meaningless. That is why we express it as deaths per 100,000 km or miles.
Same here, X people died means nothing. X people died per terawatt of power provided means a lot, allows for a good safety comparison between the means of power gen
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If a solar panel installer falls off a roof, he falls off a roof and there aren't isn't any other significant fallout (puns intended).
If a nuclear reactor explodes and one person dies, that's often not everything. Dozens of additional workers may get ill, have their lives shortened in ways that are difficult to pin to the specific event, or pass on issues to their unborn offspring. Additionally, dangerous contamina
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Very likely the measurement death per terawatt hour is not very meaningfull.
Why the uncertainty? Either it has meaning or not. But let me ask a couple of questions. Is it relevant to you whether someone lives or dies? All else being equal, would you pick an option that killed less people over one that killed more?
So why don't you compare it then with other industries that do work on the rooftop?
Those other industries don't generate electricity. The original poster is conducting a crude but fairly rational analysis. There's a particular outcome, generation of a unit of electricity and a cost (though not a full measure of the costs) associated with that outcome.
If you have so many workes in solar energy related issues dying the first thing I would do is question the security measures.
Sa
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Then the question gets even more interesting: how teh fuck can you die to Solar energy then? Thanx for pointing out the "saftey" ;D a common mistake for a german, sorry. Safty and Security translate to the same german word so if we don't think we easy mix it up.
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On the other hand, "deaths per terawatt" is nearly meaningless if you are on the production side, either a miner, a plant worker, etc.
Such measures are all subjective. So let's consider the original poster. Was he on the production side or the consumer side? I think it likely he was on the consumer side.
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In other news, 30 coal miners die each year in the U.S. alone ...
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Coal - USA: 15
You couldn't even read your own source?
30 coal miners die each year
Deaths per terawatt hour
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30 coal miners die each year
Deaths per terawatt hour
Crap. My mistake. Apologies, OP. :-P
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Deaths per terawatt hour and deaths per year, the list is in deaths per terawatt hour, which would not necessarally line up with deaths per year.
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I don't see an inconsistency.
The first number is deaths per year.
The second number is deaths per terawatt-hr.
Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:4, Informative)
The linked source claims there are 30000 deaths per year from coal, and 2000 Twh. Those are roughly consistent with your numbers.
They aren't all coal miners, so it's also consistent with the OP.
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Coal miners are not the only people involved in production of energy from coal.
There can be a lot of people die at coal fired power plants, but not a single miner die, or the other way around.
In reality, it's a bunch of miners die, and various industrial accidents at coal fired power plants cause other deaths, and probably transporting coal to those plants causes a few deaths, too.
You're trying to compare two completely different statistics that measure two completely different things, and wondering why the
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You're off. That 440TWh number is huge. In 2009, US generated 314 GW from coal [eia.gov]. That works out to about 2.75 TWh for the whole of 2009 from coal.
2.75 TWh * 15 deaths/TWh = ~41 deaths.
So the original poster's figure sounds reasonable.
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No, T is tera. 1 TWh is 1000 GWh. 314 GW corresponds to 2750640 GWh, or 2751 TWh.
Re:Cue more irrational nuclear panic in 3...2... (Score:4, Informative)
No, the difference is that we mine far less uranium than we do coal.
Note that it requires about 10,000 times as much coal as natural uranium (the kind you get out of the ground and then enrich to make nuclear fuel) to produce a given amount of energy.
If we were to replace all electricity production in the USA with nuclear plants, we'd need to mine less than one tenth the uranium to run them all than the coal required for ONE big coal-fired plant.
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As was seen this year in Fukushima. Even if you didn't get cancer or be made infertile (afaik people not working in the station did not suffer these risks) you were probably not very happy about what happened if you lived in the evacuation zone.
Nuclear isn't the only industry whose accidents can displace a community on a near permanent basis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania [wikipedia.org]
And that is just direct impacts. If global warming from fossil fuel usage causes large sea level rises or shifts in what land is arable that could displace a lot of people to.
RTFA! (Score:4, Informative)
The article states that there is NO risk of a radioactive leak. Geeezuz H Me, couldn't someone vet this stuff before it gets posted?
Re:RTFA! (Score:4, Informative)
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Okay how about this. Solar panels could kill Billions as a headline.
Hey if we made enough of them and dropped them from a good height on to people they could. Let's always post what could happen in every headline shall we. France could attack Russia, hey it happened before. Nazis could take power in the next German elections. Or better yet Obama could order nation wide martial law and suspends elections.
Their is as much evidence of those happening as their was for a leak at that facility.
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The article states that there is NO risk of a radioactive leak. Geeezuz H Me, couldn't someone vet this stuff before it gets posted?
LOL... You must be new here.
Re:RTFA! (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot the new Midnight Sun!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Freak, an oven exploded killing a working in the plant. There IS NO LEAK. THEY EXPECT NO LEAK. THEY DO NOT EXPECT A LEAK!
FREAKING HECK PEOPLE!!!!!
If this was a Lego factory no one would care.
We had two workers die at my local power plant. They where putting giant snow flakes on the smoke stacks for Christmas! Really this is just to the point of being shameful.
HOW BAD IS THIS TITLE!
From the link in the story!!!!!!!!!!
"There was no risk of a radioactive leak after the blast, caused by a fire near a furnace in the Centraco radioactive waste storage site, said officials."
REALLY JUST SHUT DOWN SLASHDOT your are killing it with your abuse!
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We had two workers die at my local power plant. They where putting giant snow flakes on the smoke stacks for Christmas!
You know, I wouldn't kill anybody, but it seems like those guys deserved to die. There's just something too fucking postmodern about putting giant snowflakes on top of global warming-contributing pollution emitters...
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A no they didn't and by no they don't pollute.
That power plant has not been run in probably more than a decade but it is still manned and just sits there. It is a running joke.
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Re:Slashdot the new Midnight Sun!!! (Score:5, Informative)
There are no nuclear reactors at the southern French site
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Yes I am. This level of crap makes me crazy. Not to mention that Slashdot was my favorite site. While not perfect the community was actually much better behaved and reasonable than most other communities plus it was News For Nerds and did't have the crap spin that other sites had.
Samzenpus who posted this should be let go for allowing such garbage on the front page. It isn't a human error but an intentional lie that was posted on the front page of Slashdot.
Re:Slashdot the new Midnight Sun!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. This is beyond pathetic. One of the first sentences is "There was no risk of a radioactive leak after the blast" and later it says there are no nuclear reactors on that site. The fact somebody was killed in an industrial accident is sad, not matter how many times it happens each day, but the nuclear element is spurious.
There is nothing quoted that even insinuates there is a remote possibility of a leak, and so I agree with lwatcdr that the whole Slashdot post is a made-up lie. This is majorly damaging to the reputation of Slashdot.
Phillip.
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Well they edited the headline which is good. Now the question is will they learn from this or just do it again.
Re:Slashdot the new Midnight Sun!!! (Score:4)
This is shameful. Come on I know Slashdot is like a skin mag and we don't really read it for the articles, but this is Daily Mail-quality reporting here.
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It's almost as though they want people to leave
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Frankly, in light of the current reputation of the nuclear industry, I think it's understandable people might be a little oversensitive to, ooh, I don't know, explosions at a nuclear waste processing site.
Rather a healthy skepti
Re:Slashdot the new Midnight Sun!!! (Score:4, Informative)
The papers said the body of one male worker at the plant had been "found carbonised", but it added that there was no evidence that the explosion had "caused any radioactive leak".
A spokesman for the French atomic energy authority told journalists: "For the moment, there is nothing coming out."
Emphasis, mine, obviously.
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"Rather a healthy skepticism about the words of a tarnished industry than a collective head in the sand blindly accepting the word of PR as truth. Sheesh. You're just as bad as those who insist on claiming the sky is falling all the time."
So make it up?
Really?
This is not skepticism this is out and out fabrication. No where in the linked article did it say that there was any risk of a leak. Everything said that there was no leak.
The explosion was in an oven used to burn old coveralls and their are no reactor
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Here's another way of putting it (with apologies to Mel Brooks):
Throw up your lunch!
Posts incorrect!
Errors? a bunch!
Front page a wreck!
You'll be surprised
You're making a French mistake.
Voila!
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From Here : (Score:5, Funny)
Hi there,
I am french, and i can tell you all : there are no problem in nuclear here. Never. Go back to sleep. Thanks for your attention.
In fact, here in France, it is almost illegal to put "problem" and "nuclear" in the same sentence without any negation...
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In fact, here in France, it is almost illegal to put "problem" and "nuclear" in the same sentence without any negation...
Is that one of Sarkozy's new policies, because I hear he really has issues with that "freedom" thing...?
Re:From Here : (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a big supporter of nuclear Energy and I think a lot of the world has an irrational fear of nuclear energy. However to ignore and not respects the dangers of it too is just as irresponsible. Part of the reason for Nuclear Energy Safety is the fact that people do have a healthy fear of it. Preventing people from cutting corners on safety.
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Lies. France is particularly transparent regarding nuclear incidents. They even invented a level 0 incident. And absolutely everything is published on the website of the ASN http://www.asn.fr/ [www.asn.fr] . Now if other industries could be even half as transparent
Hey, I worked on this website!
(it has been down several hours today... maybe I shouldn't brag about it.)
The first line of the article disagrees... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Furthermore, If a Bono isn't on stage where people can see him and isn't clicking his fingers, are children in third world countries still dying much more often than industrial workers on French nuclear waste processing sites? Yes. Yes they are.
Oh Ye /. of Yore (Score:2)
Really, Editors? Really, Syngularyx? (Score:3)
Radioactivity figures in TFA (Score:2)
TFA claims that what they burn averages nearly 10,000Bq/kg, yet the 4 tonnes in the oven accounts for 63,000Bq?
Maybe they gave an average over their whole activity, and the explosion occured when they were burning extremely low activity waste, but phrased like that it's very confusing. Anyone has more info?
Note that either way we're talking about a negligible amount of radiation (the average human being generates about 8,000Bq.)
First Sentence of TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot, please fix the damned headline.
Thanks for changing the subject line (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is this even on Slashdot? (Score:4, Funny)
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