RE: 60th criticality/oil, genetic burdens...

["Bjorn Cedervall" <bcradsafers@hotmail.com>]

>Now, anyone care to hazard a guess as to how many workers have died
>in accidents at oil refineries or non-nuclear power plants since 1945?

I think that it would be fair to compare the entire life cycles and relate 
it to fatalities per TWh.
Oil: No idea but the accident in Nigeria alone last year resulted in more 
than one thousand killed. Hmm... there must be compilations on the Internet 
somewhere.

One other aspect is that if we speculate about cancer risks - the projection 
into the future is by no means unique to radiation/nuclear. If an individual 
receives a mutation in a germ cell due to for instance some chemical (like a 
PAH type of molecule from "green" fuels) and this resulting allele is 
recessive - it may be inherited for 24300 years (or whatever...) and then be 
inherited in a genetic context where it actually starts a cancer process so 
that someone dies from cancer say in his/her childhood. So what is the 
difference?

Radiation: A decay occurs 24300 years from now and _then_ results in some 
kind of DNA damage. This may, or may not cause some disease soon (=24320 
years from now) or further into the future (say 50000 years from now).
Chemical: DNA damage occurs _now_ and may cause disease soon or far into the 
future.

Most of the extra genetic damage is basically hidden by the 
recessive/potentially lethal load that is already out there in our gene 
pool. It can therefore not be expected to be easily detectable (but this is 
gradually shifting due to molecular biology techniques to investigate point 
mutations) - we should thus not expect to see (phenotypically) any/much 
inherited genetic damage due to many of our activites (such as nuclear 
accidents, hair dyes, exposure to nitrosoamines, PAH etc - you name it). The 
genetic effects of modern medicine (that we of course excercise for 
humanitarian reasons) is probably contributing to a heavy genetic extra load 
on a population basis. I am not proposing that we should rule out any of the 
modern items that easily help to keep us alive - but the effect on our 
population genetics must reasonably still be there.

Note that the disease must not be cancer - and for that poor individual - 
the suffering would be the same regardless of the cause. But we know the 
answer - "radiation is a special dimension" - especially "nuclear 
radiation".

These are my own thoughts - not necessarily coinciding by those of others.
Bjorn Cedervall   bcradsafers@hotmail.com

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