Riding on the Space Shuttle Is Safer Than Taking a Bath.

[NNadir]

Deaths from riding on the space shuttle: 14.

Deaths from drowning in a bathtub: 341.

http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm

From the above link we can see that being an Apollo astronaut is safer than wearing clothes.

Deaths from being an Apollo Astronaut: 3

Deaths from ignition of clothing: 116.

Also, in other news, sky diving is safer than riding in a car.

Deaths from riding in a car (US): 41,059.

http://archives.starbulletin.com/2008/08/15/news/story10.html

Deaths from sky diving (US): 34.

http://www.dropzone.com/fatalities/2008/

In other news, nuclear power has been producing energy on a ten to twenty exajoule scale for almost 50 years. After lots of hot air and huffing and puffing, the wind industry still does not produce 1/500th of humanity's energy, which is currently at around 500 exajoules per year.

Nuclear is the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy, and has been so for more than three decades.

Wind, um, isn't, not that it would stop the wind greenwasher Paul Gipe and his little "lipstick on the dangerous fossil fuel pig" so called "renewables" scammers from stating otherwise.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x235860">A Pretty Much Standard Bunch of Tripe From People Who Know Zero Nuclear Physics.

:eyes:

[BlueJazz]

1. Shouldn't that be..."Deaths per percentage of people performing the action" ?

[Chulanowa]

2. Pretty much, yeah

Statistically, your chances of dying on the space shuttle are pretty good. of course, if we simply count it by individual incidents (counting Columbia and Challenger as "one" each, for instance) then the odds get much better

[NNadir]

3. That would depend on my agenda.

I have been known on some occassions to engage in something called "irony." I'm not saying that this is happening in this case, but I'm not saying it isn't either.

[exboyfil]

4. Yep irony

Your chances of dying on a space shuttle are about one in sixty five based upon statistics. We also had a number of near misses as they looked back after Columbia. If you are a private employer with that level of risk, OSHA would shut you down. Could you imagine how many race car drivers would die every year if they were killed once in every sixty five races?

Consider Apollo 13 as a near miss, then your chances were probably about one in twenty-five of dying on an Apollo mission (not sure how to classify the fire since it prompted changes that made the later Apollo missions safer).

These are some of the reasons why I think manned space flight may never get over the technological/dollar hump. We may be permanently confined to this gravity well. Our children (ie thinking machines though??)

[Kalun D]

5. A Fallacious Argument If There Ever Was One

What's more important amount of death or chance of death?

Which has a higher chance of getting you killed if you engage?

""Deaths from riding on the space shuttle: 14.""

number of riders in 20(?) years, 750? (rough estimate)

about 1 in 50 chance

""Deaths from drowning in a bathtub: 341.""

number of bathers in the same 20 year period 341 billion (low estimate)

about 1 in 1 Billion chance

and you didn't mention the damaging effects of all the pollution spewed by the space shuttle, including damage to the ozone layer, after all it doesn't have pollution controls.

[NNadir]

6. Well, it's no more ridiculous than comparing deaths from wind and nuclear power.

Nuclear power has provided between 20 exajoules and 30 exajoules of energy for more than 3 decades, making it the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy.

Wind energy, by contrast, has provided nothing but hot air, less than an exajoule 30 years of delusional talk.

It doesn't even produce an exajoule of energy in this country.

Yet we have numerically illiterate people citing the gas, whoops I mean the wind industry, to say how wind and nuclear compare.

This post, which consists (as noted elsewhere) of contemptuous irony directed at mathematical illiteracy (often called innumeracy), is designed to make that point.

[kristopher]

7. Levelized by production the statistics speak for themselves

You are the one making the attempt to discredit wind and solar power by pretending they are more dangerous than they are and that their external costs are similar to or worse than those of nuclear power.

Now you insult everyone's intelligence again by pretending the numbers were not comparable. Here they are again so that you can explain why you claimed the amount of electricity produced wasn't part of the calculation.

1) The number of fatalities associated strictly with the nuclear fuel chain (excludes major accidents) is 0.69/TWh (The Meaning Of Results: Comparative Risk Assessments OF Energy Options). http://www.informaworld.com/index/02X48X98DVPW7U96.pdf
The 0.69 deaths/TWh represents 0.04/TWh in OCCUPATIONAL fatalities AND 0.65/TWh in PUBLIC fatalities.

2)Gipe, (2006, 2009) finds that the number derived from considering ALL KNOWN FATALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH WIND (including incidents that strain credulity to attribute them to the technology) as of 2009 is 0.07/TWh. . Also, there is a very strong case to be made for the position that this already low number hugely exaggerates the actual risks associated with the wind industry.
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/BreathLife.html

One of the most significant issues, however, is the typical glossing over of what deaths are attributable to nuclear. This is typical of the way that omission is dealt with by nuclear proponents (it is an actual quote from a blog posted on DU in support of nuclear energy). "The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

Compare to this 2009 peer reviewed study:

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1181 Issue Chernobyl
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Pages 31 - 220

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health

Alexey B. Nesterenko a , Vassily B. Nesterenko a ,† and Alexey V. Yablokov b
a
Institute of Radiation Safety (BELRAD), Minsk, Belarus b Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Address for correspondence: Alexey V. Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Prospect 33, Office 319, 119071 Moscow,
Russia. Voice: [phone]; fax: [phone]. [email protected]
†Deceased


ABSTRACT

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former.

Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia.

Accelerated aging is one of the well-known consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation. This phenomenon is apparent to a greater or lesser degree in all of the populations contaminated by the Chernobyl radionuclides.

This section describes the spectrum and the scale of the nonmalignant diseases that have been found among exposed populations.

Adverse effects as a result of Chernobyl irradiation have been found in every group that has been studied. Brain damage has been found in individuals directly exposed—liquidators and those living in the contaminated territories, as well as in their offspring. Premature cataracts; tooth and mouth abnormalities; and blood, lymphatic, heart, lung, gastrointestinal, urologic, bone, and skin diseases afflict and impair people, young and old alike. Endocrine dysfunction, particularly thyroid disease, is far more common than might be expected, with some 1,000 cases of thyroid dysfunction for every case of thyroid cancer, a marked increase after the catastrophe. There are genetic damage and birth defects especially in children of liquidators and in children born in areas with high levels of radioisotope contamination.

Immunological abnormalities and increases in viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases are rife among individuals in the heavily contaminated areas. For more than 20 years, overall morbidity has remained high in those exposed to the irradiation released by Chernobyl. One cannot give credence to the explanation that these numbers are due solely to socioeconomic factors. The negative health consequences of the catastrophe are amply documented in this chapter and concern millions of people.

The most recent forecast by international agencies predicted there would be between 9,000 and 28,000 fatal cancers between 1986 and 2056, obviously underestimating the risk factors and the collective doses. On the basis of I-131 and Cs-137 radioisotope doses to which populations were exposed and a comparison of cancer mortality in the heavily and the less contaminated territories and pre- and post-Chernobyl cancer levels, a more realistic figure is 212,000 to 245,000 deaths in Europe and 19,000 in the rest of the world. High levels of Te-132, Ru-103, Ru-106, and Cs-134 persisted months after the Chernobyl catastrophe and the continuing radiation from Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu, and Am will generate new neoplasms for hundreds of years.

A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The lack of evidence of increased mortality in other affected countries is not proof of the absence of effects from the radioactive fallout. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups.

From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout. The number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow over many future generations.

[NNadir]

8. Um...um...how come our car CULTists here don't refer to the YUGO when handing out horseshit?,

How come our little whiny brats here never give up their cars because of the safety record of the YUGO?

I'll tell you why. Because they're dishonest.

Repeating the same tired wrong papers every two days, about the YUGO of nuclear reactors doesn't

1) Make wind power's safety any less speculative. It remains after 30 years of talk a trivial form of energy. It's killing already on an impressive scale and it is still largely only destroying rural habitat. Since wind power has an atrocious energy/mass density, and is already destroying huge tracts of forest habitat, it will only get closer to people.


2) Talking about an RBMK just obviates the complete ignorance of anti-nukes about the topic which they are discussing.

3) Chernoybl fetishists ever mention the world's largest energy accident, the renewable energy disaster at Banquio, reserving a special fetish for alleged and exaggerated death tolls, claiming by citing, for instance, Steven Wing's published tripe "proving" that Harrisburg PA ceased to exist after Three Mile Island.

4) All of the pieces of shit still functioning are relatively new. They haven't had the time to fall apart. Evidence from Vestas's warranty problem that damaged its profitability tell us that we haven't seen anything yet.

5) Even if the bullshit claim that 125,000 were amything but horseshit - and I'm not going to concede that to anyone who only reads what he wants to hear and clearly can't think critically, 125,000 deaths over a twenty year period - among any population - needs a fucking control group. The Ukraine is poisoned by dangerous fossil fuels any anyone with a shred of scientific knowledge knows that epidemiology is a difficult science.

Ukraine burns lots and lots and lots of low grade coal. Anti-nukes. Couldn't. Care. Less.

The UNSCEAR report which contains hundreds of references - not just one reference repeated over and over and over and over - indicates that some of the liquidators deaths involved suicide and alcoholism, possibly exacerabated by scare mongering and fear racheting.

The claim that all 125,000 people who were liquidators died over a 20 year period and it was all caused by Chernobyl not only conflicts with the many hundreds of references on the topic that state otherwise, but ignores the possibility that people also die of other causes, like say, fucking car accidents, they type of accidents never referred to by car CULTist lightweight anti-nukes.

It's hysteria and overtly dishonest and shows a contempt for science.

There are 440 nuclear reactors that have operated on this planet, most of them are operating now, and almost none of them have caused a single death.

If one knows math or science - and zero anti-nukes qualify on this score - the actual death rate from Chernobyl - not the fantasy death rate but the real death rate - is 4000 (eventual) deaths (over a 30 year period) divided by 25 years times 440 reactors (including the Yugo at Chernobyl) roughly 0.3 deaths/reactor-year.

The anti-nukes like to generalize and call themselves "everyone." They're like creationists in this way, assuming their own sense of self-rectitude stops the argument. I am not insulting "everyone's" intelligence.

I am not insulting anti-nuke's "intelligence" either. This is because I regard anti-nukes as unintelligent. They don't know what they're talking about and so are compelled to hand wave and make shit up.