And such a breath of fresh air, as today I've already run into questions on AskMeFi from people in Yokohama, Hawaii, and Los Angeles worrying about how much radiation they're going to get, and if they should get farther away. (Most sensible answer "Ukraine is 6000 miles from Los Angeles. Tokyo is 5500 miles from Los Angeles. You'll be OK.")
There's also a bunch of OMG NUUUUUUUUKES!!!!! happening. I've seen people freaking out elsewhere over it, despite many, many reassurances from others who actually work in the industry and know exactly what the failsafes are on the Japanese reactors and what the consequences are if they all fail. (People are still freaked out over Three Mile Island, and grand total radiation released there: 0.)
The only time you'd see a catastrophe at the level the public envisions is if the system was neglected for 20 yrs, procedures weren't followed in response to potential issues, and the guy at the control panel fell asleep and faceplanted a few important buttons.
Yay for engineers who put lots of redundancy and emergency response systems in place to take care of the job given them.
People get very weird about radiation in all sorts of ways.
True story: when I worked for a nuclear pharmaceutical manufacturer and we had a consulting firm in to build us new software, nothing would do for the consultants but that I write the code to calculate radioactive decay. Which is just one simple line, but they didn't want to touch it.
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The only time you'd see a catastrophe at the level the public envisions is if the system was neglected for 20 yrs, procedures weren't followed in response to potential issues, and the guy at the control panel fell asleep and faceplanted a few important buttons.
Yay for engineers who put lots of redundancy and emergency response systems in place to take care of the job given them.
no subject
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True story: when I worked for a nuclear pharmaceutical manufacturer and we had a consulting firm in to build us new software, nothing would do for the consultants but that I write the code to calculate radioactive decay. Which is just one simple line, but they didn't want to touch it.
no subject