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From a cognitive/psychological/understanding perspective: Fundamentally the reason it is hard for average citizens to understand the dangers of radioactive mat

From a cognitive/psychological/understanding perspective: Fundamentally the reason it is hard for average citizens to understand the dangers of radioactive materials, is because humans are pretty bad at understanding huge numbers, similar to how we are poor at dealing with low probabilities. The big number in question is avogadro's number. A tiny speck of material contains huge amounts of nuclei. A single nuclear disintegration (after being say ingested) can cause mutations in multiple ways (chemically by daughter nucleus and alpha particle, compton effect knocking an electron away, beta particle ionization, ...). for a given level of enrichment in a radioactive material, the number of fissionable nuclei is proportional to Avogadro's constant, it's pretty hard to fathom the number of future disintegrations. Another way in which the paramount requirement that these materials not mix with our environment is hard to visualize is again Avogadro's number: once mixed into the environment it becomes very hard, to unmix them, again because of the sheer number of nuclei in even small samples of normal matter. Then there is also of course our poor intuition with low probability events, and that any unforseen rate/probability that is greater than the sum of all rates/probabilities of all known failure mechanisms would easily dwarf this sum of known failure probabilities, since we engineer the known ones to be as small as possible. Just today I read in the local paper that our nuclear reactors apparently weren't built to specification, and the steel in the reinforced concrete is degrading, and would not withstand many events (like a plane crashing into the reactor) There is a known example of a hijacked plane, where the perpetrators threatened to crash into an experimental nuclear reactor. Cryptocurrencies did not exist yet so they were forced to land in order to receive their demands, today they would not have to... The legal limits are defined in terms of natural background radiation.

killjoywashere 8y ago
The exposure limits are based on the number of cancers from Fukushima, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima, them extrapolated down to tolerable population limits (reduce exposure until signal is below background). A multiplier was added in to account for the fact that radiation workers (x-ray techs, power plant staff, etc) are at far more risk of slipping above background than the general public. The noise is non-trivial: 1 in 4 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point.
kryogen1c 8y ago
...what? I don't agree with any part of that. Public fear of nuclear power has nothing to do with the magnitude of disintegrations per second/becquerels/curies, Compton scattering, schroedingers equation, or any other science buzz word you want to apply. Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about? The resistance to nuclear power is a straight up FUD campaign. Everyone knows how radiation works - you get sunburned every day and you drastically raise your chances of getting skin cancer. In fact nuclear power is safer per twh than any other fuel source, by a lot. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- jacobush 8y ago
  I think you simplify a bit. Nuclear is scary because it's something invisible that can kill you. No smell, no sensation of heat or light, nothing. Oh, and it can take a long time after exposure before it kills and then it's too late to do anything about it. This is the stuff or horror movies and the supernatural. It even comes with the same kind of charms and potions that the supernatural stories do! You take pills to protect you, and your wear a charm in a string around your neck to detect the evil. You give the charm to a temple where the learned priests pour over the results. (Not really, but you give the film to a lab for development.) This is not like sun bathing at all - you sit in the sun for an hour, you feel the heat and the radiation, and you think, maybe I should get inside? Nah, not yet, it feels so good. Maybe I should not have another drink? Nah, it feels good. These are normal tradeoffs we do all the time between pleasure (or convenience) and risk.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  We often fear what we don't understand, correct? I was not explaining public fear of nuclear power, as you seem to think I was explaining that, I was explaining why it is so hard to scientifically understand the level of danger of radioactivity without exagerating the threats (wheither nuclear power, or other sources of radioactivity). "Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about?" I am not making this complicated, I am replying some of the ways why understanding the real dangers of radioactivity are hard to understand, as the post to which I replied asked. It's laudable and pretty rare when a person solicit's a greater level of detail of why a certain class of threats (here radioactivity) is treated as so dangerous by governments and scientists. No not everyone knows how radiation works, and I specifically consider the comparison to sunburns very disingenious: UV has a shallow penetration depth, and organismms succeed in evolving proteins to absorb the UV in this thin layer of penetration depth in the skin: melanin! There is no melanin for gamma rays! That said, of course certain forms and levels of UV can be very dangerous (i.e. ozone producing mercury line in cramped spaces, cataracts, inadequate natural or artificial skin protection,...) Let me illustrate how Avogadro's constant is essential to understand threats from radioactivity: Suppose it was a much smaller number, say a hundred, then mole of material consists of ~ 100 molecules/atoms/nuclei (I am knowingly conflating them because I consider orders of magnitude not a pedantic factor of low order). 1. That means that a typical mole of material could only have ~100 future disintegrations, since the radioactive nuclei have a decay chain of a certain length, and we ignore small constant factors. So in this alternative unniverse with small Avogadro number, the same amount in weight or volume of material has much less opportunity to cause mutations. 2. It also means that if we consider a mole of contaminated material from Chernobyl in our alternate world, that we are talking about ~100 nuclei, some of which are radioactive. Then it becomes feasible to sort all matter which we suspect contaminated by say mass spectrometer. However in our world Avogadro's number is enormous, so for us it is mandatory to monitor radiation levels, and to lock away and protect radioactive materials until they decay. I agree there certainly EXISTS a straight up FUD campaign, but not all of the resistance to nuclear power is part of this FUD campaign. Just like there is a campaign to manufacturee consent for nuclear power, and not all people pro nuclear power are part of that campaign.

killjoywashere 8y ago

The exposure limits are based on the number of cancers from Fukushima, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima, them extrapolated down to tolerable population limits (reduce exposure until signal is below background). A multiplier was added in to account for the fact that radiation workers (x-ray techs, power plant staff, etc) are at far more risk of slipping above background than the general public. The noise is non-trivial: 1 in 4 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point.

kryogen1c 8y ago

...what? I don't agree with any part of that. Public fear of nuclear power has nothing to do with the magnitude of disintegrations per second/becquerels/curies, Compton scattering, schroedingers equation, or any other science buzz word you want to apply. Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about? The resistance to nuclear power is a straight up FUD campaign. Everyone knows how radiation works - you get sunburned every day and you drastically raise your chances of getting skin cancer. In fact nuclear power is safer per twh than any other fuel source, by a lot. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

jacobush 8y ago
I think you simplify a bit. Nuclear is scary because it's something invisible that can kill you. No smell, no sensation of heat or light, nothing. Oh, and it can take a long time after exposure before it kills and then it's too late to do anything about it. This is the stuff or horror movies and the supernatural. It even comes with the same kind of charms and potions that the supernatural stories do! You take pills to protect you, and your wear a charm in a string around your neck to detect the evil. You give the charm to a temple where the learned priests pour over the results. (Not really, but you give the film to a lab for development.) This is not like sun bathing at all - you sit in the sun for an hour, you feel the heat and the radiation, and you think, maybe I should get inside? Nah, not yet, it feels so good. Maybe I should not have another drink? Nah, it feels good. These are normal tradeoffs we do all the time between pleasure (or convenience) and risk.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
We often fear what we don't understand, correct? I was not explaining public fear of nuclear power, as you seem to think I was explaining that, I was explaining why it is so hard to scientifically understand the level of danger of radioactivity without exagerating the threats (wheither nuclear power, or other sources of radioactivity). "Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about?" I am not making this complicated, I am replying some of the ways why understanding the real dangers of radioactivity are hard to understand, as the post to which I replied asked. It's laudable and pretty rare when a person solicit's a greater level of detail of why a certain class of threats (here radioactivity) is treated as so dangerous by governments and scientists. No not everyone knows how radiation works, and I specifically consider the comparison to sunburns very disingenious: UV has a shallow penetration depth, and organismms succeed in evolving proteins to absorb the UV in this thin layer of penetration depth in the skin: melanin! There is no melanin for gamma rays! That said, of course certain forms and levels of UV can be very dangerous (i.e. ozone producing mercury line in cramped spaces, cataracts, inadequate natural or artificial skin protection,...) Let me illustrate how Avogadro's constant is essential to understand threats from radioactivity: Suppose it was a much smaller number, say a hundred, then mole of material consists of ~ 100 molecules/atoms/nuclei (I am knowingly conflating them because I consider orders of magnitude not a pedantic factor of low order). 1. That means that a typical mole of material could only have ~100 future disintegrations, since the radioactive nuclei have a decay chain of a certain length, and we ignore small constant factors. So in this alternative unniverse with small Avogadro number, the same amount in weight or volume of material has much less opportunity to cause mutations. 2. It also means that if we consider a mole of contaminated material from Chernobyl in our alternate world, that we are talking about ~100 nuclei, some of which are radioactive. Then it becomes feasible to sort all matter which we suspect contaminated by say mass spectrometer. However in our world Avogadro's number is enormous, so for us it is mandatory to monitor radiation levels, and to lock away and protect radioactive materials until they decay. I agree there certainly EXISTS a straight up FUD campaign, but not all of the resistance to nuclear power is part of this FUD campaign. Just like there is a campaign to manufacturee consent for nuclear power, and not all people pro nuclear power are part of that campaign.