Welcome to Nucleotidings. This is a blog about radiation. Radiation is a general term with different meanings. This is a blog about dangerous radiation in our environment. There are different types of dangerous radiation and there are multiple sources. I will be most concerned with radioactive emissions from man-made sources.
The greatest current man-made source of radiation is from nuclear reactor accidents. The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan that destroyed the reactors at Fukishima has released a great deal of radiation into the environment, some of which has made its way to the United States.
Nucleotidings will contain a broad variety of articles dealing with various aspects of dangerous radiation including science, history, politics, economics, etc. There are two related blogs that I will also be producing. www.rad-links.com will contain links that deal with current news about dangerous radiation. www.geigerthis.com will contain daily radiation readings from my home in Seattle, Washington.
My name is Burt Webb. I am a retired software engineer who now has time to write and publish novels, non-fiction books and blogs posts. Many years ago I was a founding member of the Evergreen Chapter of the World Future Society here in Seattle. One of the things that we spent a lot of time discussing was the benefits and dangers of technology. I was very concerned with environmental issues and looked into the pros and cons of different sources of energy.
Nuclear power has been advertised as a safe, clean and inexpensive source of energy. Unfortunately, none of these qualities have proven to be true. The disaster at Fukushima has illustrated how unsafe nuclear power can be. The enormous problem of how to dispose of accumulating radioactive waste belies of the claim of clean energy. And the rising cost of plant construction, clean up, uranium, etc. have shown us that it is not really inexpensive.
Long ago during an argument about nuclear power, I said "I am sure that the engineers could design a safe, clean and cheap nuclear power plant. The problem is that we would have to be able to trust government and industry to be 10 times as honest and capable as they have ever proven to be in the past." Nothing that has happened since that conversation has convinced me that I was wrong. Government has been woefully incompetent at monitoring and policing the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry has often put profits over safety and failed to deal adequately with many risks and problems associated with nuclear power. We still have no permanent solution for how to deal with waste products from nuclear power plants. And many of the functioning nuclear power plants are reaching the end of their projected life-spans and will have to be decommissioned.
Since Fukishima some countries like Germany have decided to build no more nuclear power plants and to decommission the ones that are currently operating. Here in the United States we don't seem to really be getting message and there is a new effort to promote the licensing and construction of more power plants.
One of the big problems with engaging the public in the debate over the pros and cons of nuclear power is that fact that biological radiation damage can be invisible and take decades to manifest itself as cancer and other illnesses. Nucleotidings and its companion blogs are an attempt to increase public awareness and knowledge of the dangers of radioactive contamination of our environment.