Timothy Murphy wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

DEFRA's own statistics make interesting readings.

50% of all radiation we currently receive is from natural RADON.
14% is from X-rays and other medical stuff.
Cosmic and other natural radiation accounts for most of te est.

That is a surprisingly high percentage from X-rays.
I would have thought that with all the care they take nowadays
the absorption during normal X-rays would be negligible.
I wonder if this is due to a very small percentage
getting very high radiation doses during cancer treatment?

Also 36% for cosmic rays seems very high.
It would suggest to me that people who fly a lot (eg pilots)
must get massive doses.

At one time it was thought that astronauts would die within minutes of
getting above the earths atmosphere.

That's why they sent up monkeys and dogs first.

Now it seems that maybe they get about double teh dise if they saty up a
few months..


Fallout from Chernobyl and nuclear industry sources is utterly trivial
by comparison.

I agree with this.
Also, it is amazing that people who claim to be concerned about radiation
do not seem to worry at all about radon,
especially as it is relatively easy to reduce the dosage from this.


Inded.
Incidentally, all this does not prove that nuclear power generation
is a sensible option.
I do not think it is;
it has always been subsidized to a large (and hidden) extent
by weapons production.
It is a very expensive way of generating electricity.


No, it isn't...it may have been subsidised in the past, but thats no
longer the case. IF you take out decommissioning costs and compare like
for like with fuel power stations (how much asbestos has to come out of
old coal fired stations...and how much radioactivity is in coal ash?)
its pretty similar in capital cost. And fuel costs as well.

Its been actively discriminated against by having to conform to
pollution standards infinitely higher than any other technology.

Now it seems that those standards are totally uneccessary, it probably
ranks better than coal and oil, and on a par with gas.

If you e.g. start to charge fossil fuel techonology with the cost of
long term storage (say a billion years) of THEIR waste - CO2 - I think
you will see an entirely different slant on the cost benefit analysis.