Misplaced good intentions, or dogmatic zealots?

Last week Greenpeace issued a "study" that made the alarming claim that "Pregnant women and children under the age of four should avoid living within 10 kilometres of nuclear power plants". A pretty strong statement. They also state that federal standards allow up to 7,000 Becquerels per litre of tritium in drinking water. This is true. A Becquerel is equivalent to one nuclear decay per second. Tritium is an unstable isotope of hydrogen. It has a half-life of 12.3 years, and decays by emitting a very weak beta particle (electron). It is only a hazard if taken into the body, usually in the form of water.
However their claim of the danger is alarmist and misleading. Here are a few facts that GP didn't make a lot of noise about:
1. Radioactive emissions of all types are closely monitored by the CNSC (Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission). Failure to meet CNSC requirements can result in loss of a licence to operate. With revenues on the order of $1 million per day per reactor, does it seem likely that an operator with take chances on losing a licence? Not to mention the public relations disaster.
2. Industry standards (self imposed) are 70 Bq/l, not 7000. The place I work at maintains less than 20 Bq/l.
3. Drinking 250ml (1 cup) of water with 100 Bq/l would give you a dose of about 0.0004 mrem (milliRem). The same volume of milk: 0.0006 mrem from natural sources. By comparison, you receive 27 mrem per year from cosmic background radiation, 28 from the earth's crust, 50 from naturally occurring elements in your body, and if you smoke 1-2 packs a day you're getting a whopping 1300 mrem per year. In order to get an extra dose equivalent to what the average non-smoker receives in a year (about 250 mrem), you would have to drink about 39000 litres of tritiated water (at 100 Bq/l).

But, of course, they omit little details like this. Like the fact that eating bananas (chock full of that yummy potassium-40) is more dangerous than living around a nuclear plant. To put things in proper perspective would not be spectacular enough. And flashy scare-mongering is what brings in the donations, isn't it?
Don't get me wrong, I think Greenpeace is a good and useful group. They've done some good work in the past, but as far as their attitude to nuclear power goes, I simply believe they're wrong. So does GP founder Patrick Moore.

To be continued.

**In the interest of full disclosure, the facts quoted about are taken from AECL, UNSCEAR, and CNSC.

Musical Meme Thingy

Ok, I've been tagged by the spousal unit with this:
1. Go to www.popculturemadness.com
2. Pick the year you turned 18
3. Get yourself nostalgic over the songs of the year
4. Write something about how the songs affected you

The trick is that I wasn't really much into music back then. We only had an old stereo receiver and an early '70s portable cassette recorder. But I still heard a few things on the radio and around school. Scanning the list...
Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love. Yep, a bunch of identical model types. Just the thing for an 18 year old male.
Bangles, Walk Like an Egyptian. Just something heard around school. Kind of liked it, actually.
Peter Gabriel, Sledge Hammer. Very cool video. Later on I got "introduced" to PG again by some friends. 'So' is still one of my all time fave albums.
Falco, Rock Me Amadeus. Thought is was kind of cool then. Now it just sounds like pretentious Eurotrash. Yes, I hate Kraftwerk too.
Dire Straights, Walk of Life. I've been a big DS fan for a very long time. I used to play a copy of Brothers in Arms in the old mono Sony with one earplug while playing games on my Atari 600XL. This is still a sing-along-in-the-car tune for me.
Anything by Wham! Hated them. I was more than a bit homophobic back then. Now I just hate it for being sickly sweet pop drivel.
I still absolutely despise Bon Jovi. I hate the sound, I hate the image. Pure commercial crap.
Other stuff I was hearing around that time, and still like: Police, Depeche Mode, Psychedelic Furs, Billy Idol.
I know this was supposed to be '86, but here are a few others: Men at Work's Business as Usual still takes me back to my first D&D games. Huey Lewis' Walking on a Thin Line was the tune for playing Pole Position, while Zenyatta Mondatta by the Police was for extended games of Archon.
Then there was Genesis: Take Me Home. Grade 11 field trip. This was played in the bus on the way back. Great song. Bruce Hornsby's The Way it Is, I still think of the cold, snowy December/January days when that came out.

Enough for now.

Making changes...

As we trudge towards the big relocation, now about a month away, and try to ensure we cover every last detail, I'm making one other small adjustment. As the area I'm moving to is one of the few places in Canada that the Rogers vast telecom octopus hasn't suckered onto, I will be moving to another service. This means losing the old e-mail address, and their Yahoo based browser. Not a huge loss in my opinion. So I've grabbed the opportunity to switch browsers to Firefox. I've just downloaded and installed it, without any trouble whatsoever. I was actually surprised how easy it was. So far I like it. A nice clean, neat, logical interface. The only hassle is going to be with bookmarks. Yahoo has a web-based bookmark thing, where the list was stored on some server somewhere, and not on my good ol' electric abacus. So there's no easy translation. This means the tedious, one-at-a-time, go-to-the-site-and-bookmark-it method. I also need to check out the security features before I try any banking. But, so far, so good.