Reply #146: Whatever.

[NNadir]

Like I said, when your argument is weak, change the subject.

I am not discussing nuclear war, in which one seeks maximal distribution of radiation, but nuclear fuel and its management, where the goal is to contain and control nuclear materials created for constructive and peaceful use.

One of the mechanisms used by people who have an irrational and frankly dangerous fear of radiation and the promotion of irrational judgment resulting from that fear is to confuse the spectra of nuclear war with nuclear power. This is the equivalent of confusing a fear of napalm firebombs with gasoline. No one is calling for the banning of gasoline by appealing to arguments about Dresden or Tokyo or Hamburg or Hanoi although people feel perfectly free to call for the banning of safe clean nuclear reactors because of 60 year old events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If, however, one insists, that war and power must always be confused, I note that nuclear wars have not killed anyone in recent years, whereas fossil fuel wars and weapons manufactured from fossil fuels for use in war have been killing people almost continuously on this planet for as long as I can remember.

There is no mechanism whereby 18 billion curies of cesium from commercial nuclear power could escape all at once and be confined to an area between Boston and New York and no amount of irrelevant blather about nuclear war can make it so. Right now that material is widely distributed, and is contained in such a way as to prevent access only by elaborate means. I am merely stating that if all the ridiculous fantasies of people who know doodly squat about radiation and chemistry came true, and somehow all 18 billion curies of Cs-137 were to magically escape, it certainly would not be more dangerous as the collapse of earth's atmosphere. It would be very easy, btw, to dilute cesium to the same concentration of potassium in the sea. I don't advocate that because I don't pretend that diluted natural radiation as represented by K-40 is harmless simply because it naturally occurs and is dilute. But then again, I know what I'm talking about.