The Oyster Creek Tritium Leaks: Hazards Overblown?

Is there enough information to tell use what we need to know about this leak?

Not with this story. There isn't enough information to begin to know what's even happening- unless, of course the words "tritium" and "radioactive" are enough for you.

Stuff I found out from another story: http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2010/05/exelon_forced_to_clean_up_trit.html

The amount of water leaked was estimated at 180,000 gallons.

The underground water supply into which it's leaking is the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer.

The Kirkwood Cohansey aquifer contains 4 trillion gallons of water. (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer )

What we don't know: What is not found in the story: the amount of those 180,000 gallons that has reached the aquifer- although it can't have been very much, due to two factors:

1) it's moving at 1- 3 feet a day, and it's estimated that by the time it reaches the first wells, it's will already have gone through one half-life (half-life of tritium: 12.3 years.)

2) at least some of it is being cleaned up.

The most important factor: that 180,000 gallons is not all tritium- it's "tritium contaminated" "50 times the DEP safe level".

Another story I've accessed say says 200 times.

The DEP is very conservative as to what constitutes contamination, as we will see.

The DEP safe level is 20,000 picocuries per liter (roughly 80,000 per gallon).

50 times the safe level, then, is 1 microcurie per liter, or 4 microcuries per gallon.

200 times the safe level is about 16 microcuries per gallon.

When tritium is ingested in the body, it's radiocative effects are estimated by calculating the Committed Effective Dose Equivalent for the amount of radiation received by the body:

The dose of tritium is dependent upon how much was initially ingested and the resident time in the body. Tritium will equilibrate through out the fluid compartments of the body and deliver the dose to the whole body. Taken form the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP) report 30, the Annual Limit for Intake (ALI) is 80 mCi and the Committed Effective Dose Equivalent (CEDE) in soft tissue is 64 mrem per millicurie (mCi) ingested. The ALI is the amount of activity required to receive a dose of 5 rem of equivalent whole body dose for the year. To use the given CEDE dose factor to calculate the dose, estimate the amount of tritium initially deposited in the body, and divide by 1 mCi/64 mrem. The ALI and the CEDE factor are based on the biological half life of 10 days. As an example of using the CEDE factor:

If a worker ingested 4 mCi of tritium, the worker would receive a dose of 256 mrem...

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/tritium.htm

For comparisons- some natural sources of radioactivity in the environment:

http://www.ans.org/pi/resources/dosechart/

That chart contains various methods of estimating individual's annual radioactive exposure, based on factors such as altitude, hours of jet plane travel, and medical x-rays. That's variable- but everyone starts off with an estimated background dose of 297mrem.

In order to roughly double that exposure through ingesting tritium, someone would have to ingest around 4.5 milliCuries of the contaminated water, or 18 milliocuries per gallon (ck figure).

But the level of contamination in the leaked water is at most 16 microcuries per gallon- only about 1/1000 that figure!

The table for elimination of tritium from the body puts it's effective half-life at 3-10 days
http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/tritium.htm (re-link)

In order for someone to double their annual background exposure to radiation from drinking that tritium-contaminated water, they'd need to drink at least 1000 gallons of it in one day.

Tritium standards are set primarily for workers. The general public has nothing to fear from a tritium release of only 16 microcuries per gallon. It does indicate that there's something wrong in the system, like a leak that needs repair. But as a health hazard, it's insignificant.

This is the point where anti-nuclear peaople pull out their trump card- that "there's no safe level" of radiation. Even though everyone is already getting an estimated 297mrem, just from background sources.

In theory, any additional radiation exposure does add some risk. But let's not get crazy.

Archive From Elsewhere: 5/22/2002

(12:08pm)...It's American conditioning to presume automatically that The US has the ability to order the world about to fit our standards, and the moral authority to do so, as the fairest and most freedom-loving nation in the world. "The indispensable nation", like Madelaine Albright said...

This is axiomatic. It was one of the given assumptions of all my high school history course, most of which were taught by "liberals".

It's folly to believe that, however. It's a cover story.

Occupying a country is approximately 1000 times more difficult than defeating a conventional army in battle. Especially a country of experienced "unconventional warriors" defending their homeland against foreigners...they'll fight you on the beaches, they'll fight fight in the cities, they'll fight you in the hills, they will never surrender. That's patriots anywhere, not just the British.

As ageneral rule, people won't respect a puppet leader put in place by military conquest, no matter whether he has management ability, a college education, proper manners, and, for that matter, ideals and personal leadership qualities. The evidence of foreign interference is a bit too obvious, in that case.

(12:21pm)...ask the Russians about it. Ask the British.

They had a nickname for Afghanistan- the "graveyard of empires". The place isn't even a country, it's one big frontier. Ever visit the Rockies?

I'll bet half of the people over there hate us- that's some millions of people. Most of the other half only like us because we do things like drop $100 bills out of cargo planes.

You'll never force the human spirit to submit, all you can do is eradicate, like the Nazis attempted to do to the Chetniks in the Balkans. Total war. If that prospect doesn''t bother you, you've placed yourself in extremely unsavory company, historically speaking.

I wish that more people were encouraged to self-sacrificing patriotic heroism before they were conquered by hostile regimes, rather than after. Once they have nothing left to lose, folks seem to develop a fierce appreciation of what they used to have...

(12:33pm) ...Carpet bombing has never forced any nation I know of into a state of "submission".

The mountain fortresses of central Asia are even more resistant to such tactics than most geographic terrain.

...

The terminally single-minded sociopath bent on "dominance" might view tactical nuclear bombs as guaranteeing "submission". I'm not convinced, though....many of the survivors of having their homelands dusted with fallout and losing their relatives to radiation sickness would be doubtless encouraged to re-think a previous retience to resort to suicide tactics.

Some folks are just obstinate.

A sharpened pencil can become a deadly weapon in the hands of someone who's sufficiently motivated. It comes down to a contest of wills, and soldiers of a foreign occupation are rarely able to summon that much resolve.

(1:02pm) I'm not saying it [carpet bombing] has never been tried.

It hasn't worked to guarantee "submission" yet, though, and I don't expect it to.

To address another point, it's one thing to train, equip, and pay a palace guard, and another thing to guarantee it's loyalty. As US trainers are finding out at this very moment, I have little doubt.

It's expecially tough when you can't understand any of the several native languages well enough to realize when a mutiny is being plotted.

I don't expect that right away, the inhabitants of Afghanistan are patient people, like most of the societies of the East, with a long legacy of empire, conquest, oppression, treachery, and revolt.

(1:45pm) I think that not overthowing Saddam [ edit: in 1991] was one of the necessary preconditions for pulling an international coalition together.

Most of the "Monday-morning quarterbacking" I've heard with regard to criticism of the reluctance to overthrow Saddam has had to do with the failure to aid a Kurdish revolt in the north of the country.

The US would have needed staging areas and collaboration from the Turkish regime, though, and they weren't about to provide that. Iran, the only other possibility as an ally on the ground, was even more out of the question. The Shi'ite regime helping the Kurds in the north, you'd have to give them the rest of Iraq in return.

If you think war is expensive, try maintaining garrisons in hostile conquered nations. Occupying Western Europe has been expensive enough, and we share so much culturally that it might as well be America, in comparison to the mosaic of indigenous cultures and societies over there. An occupying US force would probably be the thing that would most tend to unify them, albeit not in the way that "pro-Western" idealists imagine.

Archive From Elsewhere: 9/30/2001

(Quote from correspondent poster "Shady Backflash") "when you remove threat of death, the whole reward - punishment fabric that so much of social control revolves around just falls apart"

[edit 4/28/06]( The original context of Shady's post was that a sufficiently obdurate and implacable opposition is, by definition, beyond the reach of intimidation by the threat of execution. And suicide bombers are nothing if not obdurate and implacable. As such, while individuals holding such a fanatical level of conviction can be executed, their death will not necessarily dissuade others who are driven far enough along the path of desperation and desolation to take their place. The "rational calculation" of wanting to avoid death is no longer driving the decisions of such people.)

That's the real nut of it, and that's why I think that although a military effort is a reasonable decision to deal with this particular terror campaign in the short run, in the long run the solutions are going to have to arise from taking the ideals that gave rise to the existence of the "Nonviolence" page in Discussion 20 into account. Because just like the authorities can't even stop the drug trade behind bars or invent a 100% escape-proof prison system without the cost being prohibitive and logistically impossible to administer, they'll never be able to surveill and lock down the entire globe sufficiently to guarantee an end to catastrophic acts of terrorism, and the access to compact and concealable weapons of mass destruction, by those means alone. What, does State Power really believe that it can transform the entire world into something akin to the Security Housing Unit of a Level 5 penitentiary? Have the authorities lost their marbles?

Political institutions have to intensify their efforts to defuse the motivations- disrespect, injustice, disenfranchisement, degradation- that give these groups so much appeal, and their concommitant ability to recruit a sufficient pool of recruits to make them a global threat. Because law enforcement, intelligence, and military tactics may be sufficient to deal with scattered handfuls of violent extremists arising intermittently- but not convoys full of them, with more volunteering every day, convinced that their voices haven't been heard and intent on "sending a message".

I think that it's a grave mistake to cavalierly brush off the grievances of these people, never mind that it seems apparent to "our side" that some of them aren't valid. The point is, the way US foreign policy has been handled, our leaders dismissed even the reasonable ones without feeling any need to provide an explanation...for instance, what was so righteously imperative about keeping a huge US military base in Saudi Arabia, once the Iraqi military infrastructure had been decimated to the point where no sane observer could conceive of Iraq mounting another invasion? Didn't anyone in our presidential advising circles, military, or diplomatic corps have sufficent background in history or cultural anthropology, or just plain horse-sense enough, to recognize that keeping an airbase in Saudi Arabia wasn't the same as keeping one in England or Germany, that we had worn out our welcome (such as it was) and weren't exactly being greeted with open arms as esteemed guests by much of the populace?

A certain quotient of suicidal behavior has often been present the behavior of soldiers in wartime, as well as in the perpetrators of violent tactics with political overtones, such as assassinations and sabotage. What is new is the catastrophic "omnilethal" potential of weapons of mass destruction, due to the technological successes of the death industries that have been so well-funded by so many national governments on the planet, including our own.

Imagine, the airliners that those hijackers perverted into cruise missiles were nonetheless merely conventional weapons. Will we break the mold and step outside of the suicidal tendencies of our own self-righteous arrogance, to defuse this threat once and for all, before matters escalate to an even more next level?

Archive From Elsewhere: 1/24/2001

...BCCI began devouring caches of cash and opening up the original "annual deficit with the man in the moon" of the world economy, from $30 billion in 1978 to $110 billion in 1983. That was the 10% landmark...it all seems so long ago.

(Isn't being reminded that the world economy has become utterly dependent on interlocking networks of "investment elite" financial corruption boring?)

...

Here's another little secret. You know that "ABM" system, the one that they have to provide with a "handicap" in order for it to work for the cameras?

This program serves two purposes. First, the military-industrial power elite needs to lay the legal groundwork for the deployment of space weapons. Whether or not the initial system deployed is any more effective than a rubber slingshot is entirely beside the point. The real hurdles are statutory. Once the legal precedent for space militarization is set, the only remaining obstacles will be technical. The real action will be in space-based lasers, using satellite-based nuclear power sources, possibly in conjunction with energy stored by beamed microwave transmissions from the HAARP program's gigawatt-sized natural gas generating facility in Alaska.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, the current arguments in favor of an ABM defense comprise an experiment in testing the prevailing level of gullibility of the American public in response to bald-faced lying from official sources. If the Bush administration can convince most Americans that the world has become a more perilous place in the aftermath of the Cold War because of the supposed ominous future possibility of a threat posed by possible single-launch ICBM nuclear terror attacks from "rogue states" like North Korea, Iraq, and China, who don't even possess anything close to the counterweight of the Mutual Assured Destruction that the arsenal of the USSR once held, with the first two countries named not even presently possessing one single ICBM, and the third, our economically interdependent #1 trading partner, possessing exactly 20 (and who can all find much, much easier and more deniable ways to smuggle in and successfully detonate a nuclear bomb within US borders than through the suicidal move of delivering it via launching a ballistic missile), and that the answer to this hypothetical threat is the construction of a multibillion-dollar Maginot Line built from the most unworkable weapons system since the Osprey helicopter, then they can convince the American people of almost anything. Chickens have lips, snakes have hips, jazz music leads to mental dysfunction, Valvoline makes great pancake syrup- you name it.

"If something is green and George W. Bush says that it's red, it's red."

That's a power even greater than what a space-based precision-tracking laser death-ray system can provide.

Archives From Elsewhere: Introduction

This is a new blog site for me, but I've been posting on other Internet forums for years. Since preserving historical memory is one of the most important functions that a blog can perform, I'll be transferring some previous contributions to other sites from years past to this blog on a sporadic, intermittent basis. Initially, the order will be "random-looseleaf"; I'll cut and paste first and organize it all later. Most of the posts will be dated precisely and accurately- a few will probably be only approximate, due to occasional database crashes on other sites where the recovery of the posts necessitating a "re-setting" of the posting chronology.

Since many of the posts were originally parts of discourse and dialogue with other posters, I'll be making some minor editorial revisions when I feel the need, in the interest of clarity, coherence, and concision.

DEA Administrator Karen Tandy: Intentional Deception As Propaganda

An Open Letter To The Washington Post, 4/3/06

Dear Editors:

The letter that you published by DEA Administrator Karen Tandy on March 29, "A Drug Dealer's Toll On Americans", contains several misleading statements offered as support for her advocacy for continued criminalization of marijuana. Link

For instance, she refers in her letter to the traffic crash that took the life of Victoria Rogers, alleging that the cause of the accident was a "marijuana-intoxicated motorist."
I find it significant that the only evidence that Administrator Tandy provides to underpin her allegation that marijuana use turns users into a menace on the highways is the reference to a single auto accident from February 2004.

That isn't the only problem with Tandy's account. The impaired driver in the accident to which she refers had not ingested marijuana alone- they were also using
cocaine and opiates.

Karen Tandy is well aware of the complete story. She featured it in a 2004 speech.
Link

I find it telling that Administrator Tandy didn't see fit to lay out all the facts of the case in the course of her anti-cannabis polemic. Instead, she knowingly resorted to an incomplete and misleading account of the accident in question.

Similarly misleading is Tandy's allegation that "marijuana feeds thousands of addictions -- so many that more teenagers enter treatment for marijuana
dependency than for all other drugs combined." Pete Guither does a thorough job of unpacking this canard on his Drug War Rant blog at Salon.com, using
statistics garnered from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive to note, for example, that most of the "referrals" for treatment of marijuana use- 58.1%- are the result of compulsory court orders associated with marijuana's criminalized status; and that in the case of voluntary individual referrals at the behest of affected teenagers and their parents, alcohol features in more than 5 times as many cases as marijuana. More Here

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Archive

But apart from Administrator Tandy's abuse of statistical evidence, there is a larger issue in regard to her referencing "teenagers" as though their use was the principal reason for keeping marijuana illegal. If all the criminal statutes were concerned
with was preventing easy access to cannabis by teenagers, it would be a regulated substance, not one that's illegal for all, including adults. Tandy's referencing "teenagers" camoflauges the fact that the laws against drug possession implicitly treat all citizens as though they were immature children subject
to the punishing hand of the State, taking the role of omnipotent parent. It also sidesteps the fact that unregulated contraband markets in this society are nowhere more rampantly found and difficult to dismantle than at the retail market level found in American high schools. Practically speaking, nothing would more effectively dismantle the widespread easy teenage access to drugs than drug law reform measures
that act to take the lucrative trade out of the hands of youth gangs and the antisocial criminal economy created by the manifestly ineffectual hardline
"prohibition" regime of the present day. For instance, allowing adults to cultivate and possess modest amounts of cannabis for non-commercial personal use
would largely dismantle the illegal market in the substance.

Lastly, Tandy's allegation that "users destroy their
lungs because marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70
percent more cancer-causing chemicals than tobacco
smoke" has not been borne out by medical studies,
including the recently concluded large-scale study of
long-term marijuana users by Donald Tashkin, a man
universally regarded as among the top rank of scholars
on the medical effects of cannabis.
Link

Heavy use of marijuana has been shown to increase the
risk of developing chronic bronchitis, but not cancer.
And since marijuana users typically smoke much smaller
quantities of their substance of choice than tobacco
smokers, few of them ingest amounts of smoke
sufficient to produce a heightened risk of obstructive
lung disease.

Even if her unproven allegations about the toxic effects of cannabis on the lungs were eventually found to have merit, for Karen Tandy's argument to carry any
weight logically, it would have to be extended to make all personal use and possession of tobacco products a crime. But that isn't an argument that she chooses to make, for whatever reason. And thus, she's left enmired in her own contradictions, as an apologist for a failed, unworkable, irrational regime of Zero Tolerance prohibition of marijuana that's been burdening and sapping resources from the wider
criminal justice system for decades.

Sincerely, Robert Reed, Jr.

( Whether or not you print this letter, I intend to
make it available on my blog, Another County-
http://anothercounty.blogspot.com/. Among other
advantages, it will have the added benefit of easy
access to the hyperlinks. In journalistic solidarity,
RDR. )

Of Memes and Memetics

I keep noticing the reoccurrence of the terms "meme" and "memetics" in popular discourse these days. The terms have apparently acquired cachet, even in academic circles, in disciplines like art criticism and cultural anthropology. Despite that, I'm underwhelmed with the concept of the "meme." It's all too often bandied about as jargon, simultaneously ill-defined and weighted with portentuous profundity.


Well, I think I've finally figured out what a "meme" is.

Packaging. A matter of textual "image" that's particularly catchy.

"Meme theory" is about catchiness. Style, independent of content.

Call it another branch of language. So you have grammar, syntax, semantics, and style/memetic ability.

To some extent, the "meme" thing has always been present in text, as a subset of "style." Memes are more about titles of books than their contents, more about headlines than the body of the story. Slogans are memes. Signature punch lines of comedians are "inside joke" memes, playing to the shared "cultural knowledge" of a given audience. So are the comments provided by various pundits that achieve the status of well-known aphorisms.

"Memes" are often featured prominently in political campaigns- and political initiatives of all sorts.

"Operation Iraqi Freedom."

"Leave No Child Behind."

"Department of Homeland Security."

I can accept it, as far as it goes...okay, I just made up a few "memes" a while back. Like this one:

"the Iraq Hostage Situation"

and (caution: academic jargon meme) "Inertial Functionalism"...actually I made that one up years ago, about the time I got my B.A. in Cultural Anthropology.

In some ways, I find photographs to have even more "memetic power" than words. But even words are subject to image manipulation these days, what with easy resort to visual aids like italics and bold print.

When the auditory realm gets considered, text also has memetic "connotations." False cognates, onomatopoetic value, and homonyms among them.

I think the important thing to realize is that memetics relies on compact and easily transmissible images, rather than content and context. It's an imagic concept, not a lexical one. (Italics tend to send an "auditory image"- asense of voice, of accent.) It might help tip the balance of a given prose essay from "boring" to "engaging", but simple memetic power (or even MEMETIC POWER) exists independently of the message itself. Therefore, I think it's more important to learn the antidote to "meme power" than it does to exalt its worth. It's fine, up to a point. But flair with sloganeering- or HTML- doesn't replace a well-reasoned argument.

And there are places where "memetics" is as a rule simply out of place and inappropriate. For investigative news reportage, for instance, memetics is prone to get in the way. At best, using memes can make for a catchy headline- but it can also make for a misleading one. It's been known to be the case that content and context get sacrificed for the dubious power of a more easily transmissible meme. I've been known to do it myself...

Considering that headlines are inevitable, I suppose it's important to grasp some practical and applies memetic style. But it's also important to have the meme convey its "information condensate" as substantially accurate.