Reply #3: Um, well, I guess radiation isn't that dangerous then.

[NNadir]

All you have to do to live a long time if 100 million curies of radiation falls on your head is quit smoking and drinking. Or are you saying it is. Clearly being down wind from nuclear tests is not as dangerous as smoking, since life expectancy would go down irrespective of your smoking habits if it were.

Thanks for pointing that out. I appreciate it. Let's start a movement against ash tray wastes.

Thanks for all the NIMBY references too. I'm glad to learn that we all have to eat, drink and breath coal dust and ash because the army can blow a hole in a nuclear cask. I'll bet if you bang on one with a jack hammer for a month or two, you can do the same thing.

Now, let's make a totally unrelated remark. I am always intrigued by people who say the rosary and then remark on how important saying the rosary is because they say it.

This would be similar to saying that nuclear waste is dangerous because a crash of a nuclear truck in Chicago could kill one 1,200 people. This is a meaningless statement, because it includes no estimate of the probability that a nuclear crash will occur in Chicago and that all of the other improbable events connected that also must occur for the killing will also occur.

Now I recently asked another poor thinking poster here if he (or she) could define what an expectation value is and of course rather than an answer to that question, I got a whole diatribe about why I am a bad guy (which BTW I do not deny).

So, it looks like I'll have to define an expectation value. It's best described (in this case, as opposed to the quantum mechanical case) as the probability of an event multiplied by the magnitude of its consequences. For instance, if there is a type of accident that has a known probability, and it has an effect like killing people, the expectation value is the probability of the accident occurring times the number of persons killed by the accident.


Commercial nuclear fuel as moved around the country since 1957, tens of thousands of tons of it. In no case has any ever leaked out of a container. Ever. Anywhere. But lets say that this remarkable string of good luck ends tomorrow and a truck with a canister of nuclear material crashes in chicago near Chicago tomorrow. Let's say too, that the army immediately drives up with a Sherman tank and blows a hole in the caninster and its nuclear material spread all over I-90. Now let's concede also that 1200 people immediately die from this accident. Let's also insist that their is a 100% probability that whenever a truck crash occurs in a truck carrying nuclear material, the army will arrive in a timely manner to make sure that the cask is breached to the satisfaction of nutcases who cite this improbable event as though it were an absolute certainty. Now let's estimate the probability base on our experimental value. We have 1 crash in 48 years, and therefore the experimentally determined the probability of crashes involving trucks carrying nuclear fuel is 1/48 or roughly 2%. 1200 people die. The expectation value of deaths from this accident in any given year is thus 0.02*1200 = 24 people.

Now let's say that there is a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that if nothing is done about global warming because of the fondness for complete idiots for coal, that a runaway outgassing event of methane hydrate will occur for methane hydrate and extinguish mammalian life on the planet. If the planet's population is 6,000,000,000 we have an expectation value of 6,000,000,000*(1/1,000,000) = 6,000.

Thus even if the probability of the outgassing event is 1/21,000th as small as the Chicago crash coupled with an over enthusiatic Sherman tank driver, the overall risk to humanity is 250 times greater.

No wonder our planet's doomed. We certainly deserve it. We are actually proud of our poor thinking.

Oh and about that DU. Don't worry about it. People in countries that have a future will probably buy all of that material and every other thing we have, the grand canyon, the grand West Virginia coal pit, (a wonderful place for Chinese municple waste I think. Uranium, all Uranium, depleted and otherwise, is valuable to people who think. Only dumbells think of it as waste. Every serious energy scientist on the planet recognizes that we will people in wealthy countries (which will NOT include the United States) are going to NEED that Uranium.