OK, then for someone who looks at C02 emissions as providing more fuel for trees, then this probably isn't the best comparison for pollution. I'll stop there and not say anything more threadlockable. Or is c02 exhaust different from what trees utilize?
Is Keeping Your Old Car Better For The Environment?
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Nick1994
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But at 29 mpg for the xB and 46 mpg for the Prius, the last 16.5 years at 15k miles per year and $2.50 per gallon means the Prius would have saved $7,886, which would pay for several batteries. If needed. Sometimes they last a long time.
The Sierra Club and Greenpeace will only be satisfied when everyone on the planet is dead. Man is bad.
This thread is veering severely off course....
I like the video, it gives a clear indication on when to do X or Y for a given outcome.
Whether you agree with the motivation to acheive that outcome is irrelevant. Don't watch the video then.
The bottom line is buy the most fuel efficient vehicle that you can and drive it as long as you can.
I like the video, it gives a clear indication on when to do X or Y for a given outcome.
Whether you agree with the motivation to acheive that outcome is irrelevant. Don't watch the video then.
The bottom line is buy the most fuel efficient vehicle that you can and drive it as long as you can.
They're not wrong...
I lived in Europe during Chernobyl. It wasn't fun. There were high levels of radioactivity in the food chain, so that for a time certain foods like salad were not safe to eat.
Chernobyl complex was built in Ukraine because the Russian leadership did not like Ukraine. It was built with no containment dome. Only in the USSR-
OVERKILL
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Atmospheric CO2 concentrations is indeed a topic of hot debate. If we are concerned about that increasing (which is the main thrust at present) then we should be trying to reduce it. And no, the same CO2 emitted from the various generation sources is consumed by trees. The issue is that we are releasing the CO2 sequestered by trillions of dead trees, plants, organisms....etc over millions of years in the span of hundreds which is increasing atmospheric levels at a rate far higher than current greenworks are able to remove it.
Discussing further risk going into the politics so I'll stop there.
Given a Suburban is twice as large, this defies logic and reason. Do you have any evidence of this? Heck, just the tires on the Suburban would require twice the materials and resources to produce versus those of the Prius. When you make an outrageous claim you should back it up.
OVERKILL
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Yep, Chernobyl was a disaster, there's no denying that, but the total death toll of the event is around 4,000 people. That's not excusing it, there is absolutely no excuse for that reactor design, which lacked secondary containment and was designed to produce weapons material, but in terms of deaths relative to energy produced, that event pales in comparison to those that have died in dam breaches, lung cancer from mining coal, other cancers from pollution, even falling off wind turbines.
And of course the RBMK was a single reactor design produced by the Soviets during the cold war. Its performance and safety record are not indicative as to the safety and operating record of other designs. Fukushima, which was setup to fail by Tepco, despite being a far older design than Chernobyl (1st gen GE BWR) managed to be a far less severe event despite having multiple units meltdown, because it had secondary containment and was subsequently a much safer design. Had Tepco followed the recommendations by the nuclear safety commission to upgrade the seawall like its newer sister plant, the event would never have happened.
Ironically, in avoiding the seawall upgrade and backup generator relocation to save money, Tepco cost itself massively more money in the long run because of the clean-up costs at the site.
Comrade Overkill, only 31 people died due to the minor events at Chernobyl.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll
"In the weeks and months that followed the Chernobyl disaster, hundreds of thousands of firefighters, engineers, military troops, police, miners, cleaners and medical personnel were sent into the area immediately around the destroyed power plant in an effort to control the fire and core meltdown, and prevent radioactive material from spreading further into the environment.
These people – who became known as “liquidators” due to the official Soviet definition of “participant in liquidation of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident consequences” – were given a special status that meant they would receive benefits such as extra healthcare and payments. Official registries indicate that 600,000 people were given liquidator status... as many as 830,000 on clean-up teams...
...In Ukraine, death rates among these brave individuals has soared, rising from 3.5 to 17.5 deaths per 1,000 people between 1988 and 2012. Disability among the liquidators has also soared. In 1988 68% of them were regarded healthy, while 26 years later just 5.5% were still healthy. Most – 63% – were reported to be suffering from cardiovascular and circulatory diseases while 13% had problems with their nervous systems. In Belarus, 40,049 liquidators were registered to have cancers by 2008 along with a further 2,833 from Russia....
...“In hospitals throughout the region and as far away as Moscow, people were flooding in with acute symptoms,” she says. “The accounts I have indicate at least 40,000 people were hospitalised in the summer after the accident, many of them women and children.”...
...
The NRCRM estimate around five million citizens of the former USSR, including three million in Ukraine, have suffered as a result of Chernobyl, while in Belarus around 800,000 people were registered as being affected by radiation following the disaster.
Even now the Ukrainian government is paying benefits to 36,525 women who are considered to be widows of men who suffered as a result of the Chernobyl accident.
As of January 2018, 1.8 million people in Ukraine, including 377,589 children, had the status of victims of the disaster, according to Sushko and his colleagues. There has been a rapid increase in the number of people with disabilities among this population, rising from 40,106 in 1995 to 107,115 in 2018....
...Mortality rates in radiation contaminated areas have been growing progressively higher than the rest of the Ukraine. They peaked in 2007 when more than 26 people out of every 1,000 died compared to the national average of 16 for every 1,000....
...Thousands of animals were slaughtered in the area around Chernobyl as it was being evacuated. ...."
I imagine it has a lot to do with the batteries...
OVERKILL
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The UN figure of 4,000 is listed right in that article, but I'll provide it here again:
https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm
Per your link there:
One person's sensationalist historic "research" does not a peer-reviewed study make.
Also, you clearly intentionally cut this part from your liquidators quote:
Which I would suggest you read instead of cut out to fit your agenda.
The link quotes:
The individual quoted for most of your piece is a scientific historian at MIT, not an expert on radiation and much of this "work" is anecdotal. We are supposed to just dismiss the peer-reviewed scientific studies, performed by by actual scientists and experts on radiation because somebody wrote a sensationalist industry hit piece that doesn't agree with it? I don't think so.
While it might align well with your radio-phobia to parrot this nonsense, it does nothing for your credibility here in this exchange.
Leading with "Comrade" was really cute BTW, implying I'm complicit in some form of cover-up or a Soviet apologist. There was a group, around the 1940's, that were really keen; hell-bent actually, on the control of the dissemination and type of information that was shared to fit a particular narrative and dismiss and shutdown views that were contrary, regardless of their validity. We called this propaganda and the propaganda minister was an actual role. There were a surprising number of people who didn't question the propaganda, even when they had access to material that clearly contradicted it, often from far more authoritative and expert sources. A big part of this is that these people had already invested themselves, mentally in that narrative. That reminds me of this exchange.
Either you believe the experts and the science, or, you can lap up the sensationalist propaganda because it fits the depiction you've already accepted in your mind. If the latter, then this exchange isn't worth pursuing, I'm not entertaining the mindless ramblings of the nuclear equivalent of a flat-earther.
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OVERKILL
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Yes, that's why the starting position for lifecycle CO2 emissions for an EV is significantly higher than for a gas vehicle. The production of the batteries has a much larger ecological footprint than for an ICE vehicle. However, if you operate an EV on a grid where the majority of the power produced is low emissions, then the payback period on that initial CO2 "investment" is greatly reduced.
I posted an article a while back on this with respect to lifecycle emissions and the like, I'm sure you can find it if you look.
Yes, my original comment had to do with producing a Suburban or a Prius.
OVERKILL
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Yes, and I was supporting that, because of course a Prius (at least a modern one with current tech batteries) is similar to an EV in that regard, which increases its initially invested emissions relative to a non-hybrid or non-BEV counterpart.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I don't believe that only 4000 died from that disaster. Those figures are propaganda. The evidence supports that the higher end of numbers of human deaths, in the short and long term, is the reality.
Well over 50,000 people lived in sight of the reactor, which spewed lethal doses of radiation for 3 days before they were evacuated. Those nearest received doses of up to 400x the amount of lethal radiation as compared to the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima. Ultimately, 350,000 were evacuated DAYS after the event. Pripyat will not be habitable for 20,000 years, or about 10x the amount of time since A.D. records have been started. The clothing from the first responders, that was dumped in the hospital basement is still not safe to be near, some 3 decades later.
There were thousands who watched the event happen that night, and that appears to have been lethal to the witnesses. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of first responders responded with practically no radiation shielding before anyone "responsible and intelligent" even appeared on scene. It wasn't for 3 days until the event was taken seriously as this reactor was leaking lethal doses of radiation every hour to people for miles in all directions. Nearby cities were not evacuated for several days. And all vehicles, even those only there short term, were scrapped in a massive famous graveyard as the vehicles became too radioactive dangerous to keep. The city STILL is lethal to visit for more than a few hours.
No chance it only killed 4000 people when over 10x that many had exposure for many days at the start of the event.
I know you're a fan but nuclear energy is a huge human mistake and the most dangerous form of energy by far. A real Pandora's box, that is great, until it's not and then it's a ecological and human nightmare without peers. A disaster can make regions uninhabitable for centuries. Nothing - not coal, oil, gas, whatever - is even close to as dangerous.
OVERKILL
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But you are being argumentative, and you are using opinion pieces while calling official documentation from experts in this field "propaganda' which would be funny if it wasn't so sad. You don't know a **** thing about this subject, but you've already formed an opinion because it scares you. Fear is a powerful motivator and that's what falling victim to propaganda does.
And yet the fire crews and people that went in to the belly of the reactor, all but one of them is still alive. High levels of exposure are not a death sentence. It was the particulate that was in the smoke and debris that was radioactive, and the exposure to that was not uniform. You have to be close to the source of radiation for it to harm you, being in sight of the reactor doesn't mean a **** thing, lots of folks watched the detonation of atomic weapons from a distance too, it's being near the material, for prolonged periods of time to produce a significant dose, that's the issue.
Pripyat could be cleaned-up, if the Ukrainians were willing to spend the money to deal with the soil and metal (metals become radioactive when exposed, the soil is contaminated with radioactive particulate) but it's likely cost prohibitive. Far less expensive to just leave it a ghost town.
Not sure if you are aware, but the plant continued to operate after the disaster. The other three units ran for decades, only shutdown finally in the 2000's. Staff rotated in and out of the plant regularly.
Only if they were exposed for prolonged periods of time to an actual elevated dose, which you have no proof of. Watching the event from a distance, depending on the direction of the fallout, did not mean you were exposed to levels that would be lethal.
Yes, and it was the first responders and people that responded to the even that make up the bulk of the 4,000 people cited by the UN, people who were exposed to doses high enough to cause significant health impacts and premature death.
That's incorrect. While the Soviet response was poor, and evacuation not properly timed, there's no evidence that the dose received by people was lethal, you keep eschewing that like it's fact, but it isn't, and it's contradicted by numerous peer-reviewed studies so I suggest the cessation of hanging your hat on that delicious little tidbit.
And no, the city is not "lethal" to visit for more than a few hours, Christ on a cracker, learn how this stuff works. You can walk around inside the exclusion zone without issue. Folks do it all the time, carrying geiger counters. Why do they carry geiger counters? To warn them of hot spots, because radiation doesn't work like you think it does. There is particulate in the soil, metals are contaminated, but most of that area doesn't have unusually high levels of radiation. The problem is, you can be walking along and it's zero and then all of a sudden hit a pocket where it spikes extremely high. Since the area is so massive, cleaning up these pockets would be an incredible effort and take considerable time, so they aren't doing it.
Animals thrive in the exclusion zone, unfazed by these pockets. They aren't being born and then dropping dead from these "lethal" doses, because the doses aren't lethal and since the animals are moving around, they are only exposed to these pockets for brief periods of time.
Again, a hyperbolic take, you have no idea of the dose received by these people. Just because they were in close proximity doesn't mean they received a life-altering dose.
And yet Fukushima is fully habitable. Your take is not rooted in reality. These messes can be cleaned-up, just like oil spills, it just takes time and money, like oil spills. But there have only been two of them in the history of civilian nuclear power and only Chernobyl hasn't been cleaned-up, quite unlike oil spills of which there have been many.
Ignorance breeds fear, and it's clear that this isn't a subject you know much about but one you are utterly terrified of. I suggest, for starters, reading the material you already dismissed as propaganda from actual authorities on the subject and then, if you are still not a fan of it, at least you are doing so from an informed position, not one steeped in fear and misunderstanding.
The FDA just lifted many of the restrictions on food from Fukushima. In addition, Japanese fishermen have been allowed to fish in waters that were closed.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/pub...shima-daiichi-nuclear-power-facility-incident
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/pub...shima-daiichi-nuclear-power-facility-incident
Charles, if the radioactivity was so lethal how do you explain that operations at the three remaining reactors continued? Chernobly complex had 4 unshielded (no containment dome) reactors, and after #4 melted the other three continued to be staffed by human beings and generating electricity. As far as I know those 3 are still generating electricity. Comparing USSR unshielded reactor safety to reactors anywhere else in the world is like comparing apples to zebras.
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