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Post by cyrilr on Feb 7, 2014 0:52:24 GMT 9.5
For comparison, Olkiluoto, the most expensive most cost overrun nuclear new build, costs 9 billion euros, produces about half the 2013 German PV electricity. So two olkiluoto EPRs would produce as much.
This means even with the most expensive nuclear new build at this moment, you only pay 18 billion euros, with PV the Germans are paying 111 billion euros for the same amount of yearly electricity. And the nuclear output is actually reliable so it displaces coal capacity, whereas the solar capacity is unreliable, it actually has a negative capacity credit because of the mismatch of demand, so needs INCREASED fossil fuel capacity. The nuclear output will generate for 60+ years, longer than the technical lifetime of solar installations.
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Post by cyrilr on Feb 7, 2014 0:46:03 GMT 9.5
The end of 2013 PV installment was 35,692 MWe peak. This only generates an average of 3200 MWe however.
So, 111 billion euros (2013) means over 34 euros per average Watt in subsidies.
For Australian readers. That is a subsidy of 51 Australian dollars per real Watt output.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 28, 2014 5:34:35 GMT 9.5
There are no countries that use non-hydro renewables to anywhere near 80% (not even close to 40% in fact).
So the answer is simple. There are ZERO countries that get their majority of electricity supply from wind/solar/geothermal/tidal/wave COMBINED.
Sod has given lists of countries that have small power demands and get most of the power from large hydro-electric dams.
For some reason Sod seems to believe that this proves wind and solar are able to power the world with ample examples. Sadly it just shows how disconnected these people (renewable enthusiasts, nuclear haters, coal agnostics, they are all the same) really are.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 26, 2014 20:10:22 GMT 9.5
1.8 nuclear plants per day is entirely reasonable.
If you put the reactors in pairs, it is only 0.9 reactors/day. If you use larger reactors (or a team of smaller modular reactors) it drops down to only 0.5 sites/day. With (say) 100 countries building them at the same time, this means only 0.005 sites/day/country. This means that most countries would be starting to build 1-2 sites per year. That's entirely reasonable, in fact outright slow I'd say. France did a lot better than that, it went to 80% nuclear in 15 years (from about 20% nuclear).
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 6, 2014 20:54:28 GMT 9.5
You know, I've never seen Sod make a single statement that is supported by Sod's internet links. Perhaps our little troll has trouble reading? Must be that anti-nuclear veil of Sod that prevents Sod from reading simple sentences. What problem do you have with reading that headline? "German Power Costs Seen Dropping for Fourth Year on Glut: Energy" www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-03/german-power-costs-seen-dropping-for-fourth-year-on-glut-energyThe feed in tariff paid by average consumer does still increase. the reason is, that Germany used subsidies to get a new technology going. Try reading the full article. Then you might understand, why big power companies are counter attacking alternative power. And you might also understand, that the real reason for the current situation is the failure of the carbon price. You've misunderstood Sod, as usual. The feed in tariff is a seperate surcharge on electricity for consumers; it is not included in raw power sales prices in the spot market. It's perfectly possible for raw power prices to decrease 1 cent/kWh due to cheap coal, and the feed in tariffs increasing due to more expensive solar and wind on the grid, by 5 cents/kWh. Net is an increase of 4 cent/kWh for consumers. Industry has so far been exempt from paying this price for unreliable unproductive electricity. That was the ONLY sane thing about Germany's renewables plan. Now they're trying to retract that, which will scare away heavy industry from Germany (as has already occured recently). Here in the Netherlands, an aluminium smelter has recently gone bankrupt. The cause: high electricity prices. Root cause: poor energy policy - no reliable nuclear plants, only expensive unreliable renewables being built and old inefficient fossil plants kept running, and a pricing policy to make electricity more expensive to discourage use (its clearly working to some extent as the aluminium smelter has reduced energy usage by 100% now).
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 4, 2014 5:30:26 GMT 9.5
Wrong. Your links mentions that coal prices have dropped. So coal power will be slightly cheaper. Feed in tariff payments still increase. You know, I've never seen Sod make a single statement that is supported by Sod's internet links. Perhaps our little troll has trouble reading? Must be that anti-nuclear veil of Sod that prevents Sod from reading simple sentences.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 2, 2014 9:32:36 GMT 9.5
You did catch the picture of the new sarcophagus for Chernobyl I assume. Are all those folks deluded? Yes, they are. There's no risk to the public if there new sarcophagus were not placed. But it is not their fault; radiophobia is a historically ratcheted and collective thing. The whole world is scared of a millisievert. Correct, not by any sane rationale based on $/lives saved (which is about infinite for the sarcophagus). They are not hosing them down anymore, have you by chance been living under a rock the last two years? The answer to your second position is yes, they should. There is no risk in the water. It is not likely to kill even 1 person and not likely to kill as many fish as a single fishing ship if all of it were dumped directly into the sea. Interestingly, it turns out that the truth is exactly opposed to your vantage point. The advantages of nuclear are unique - energy density and reliability. There are no visible downsides of nuclear power, only visible upsides. For some reason people can't see it. It's strange, you'd think that a parking lot with some concrete casks that is the "troublesome"waste from powering a city for decades, would cause people to pause and think. But we can't think on nuclear. It's a devil in the mind, and who can speak well of the devil?
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 2, 2014 9:18:14 GMT 9.5
Thanks. So we have a 9 hour local grid blackout in only one country, as a historic event. Hardly the doom scenario of a 2 year blackout of the world. It seems also that regions at low latitudes are safe even in a large solar storm, and that the solar storm is a highly localized phenomenon in terms of damage (it hit New Zealand but not Tasmania/southern Australia).
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 1, 2014 22:12:50 GMT 9.5
Roger Clifton --- The concern is that of frying major transformers. There is no stockpile of replacements. So once again my question, how many times has this actually happened? Transformers have been around for a long time and there have been many solar storms. I can't find any major transformer failure in history.
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Post by cyrilr on Dec 30, 2013 21:04:39 GMT 9.5
What is the maximum extent of damage for a solar storm? Does it affect the whole earth or only the portion of the earth pointed to the sun? If the latter, a global blackout would not be possible and recovery would be relatively rapid (other countries could send supplies/repairers).
If on the other hand a global blackout is possible, then it is clear we should do something about it; not because of nuclear plants, but because of the billion + possible death toll from chaos, famine (no fertilizer, no food distribution infrastructure), etc.
How plausible is this, really? If the chance is 12% per year, how come we've never had nation sized blackouts? Electricity grids have been commonplace for many decades now. Most likely the damage is a lot more local and limited on the surface than doomers would have us believe..
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Post by cyrilr on Dec 30, 2013 7:11:59 GMT 9.5
A global blackout for multiple years would easily kill over a billion people in chaos and war.
I don't think the nuclear plants will kill even a thousand. I don't think that people will worry much about a few dozen Fukushima's going on because a bunch of plants can't bring in enough diesel fuel beyond a typical supply of a week or so. The more because there's no television morons to blurp out hysterical stories about it.
Still, the amount of diesel fuel beyond the onsite supply is modest, and the heavy rebar inside the diesel generator buildings/turbine buildings protects against EMP so they should all work.
A few liters of diesel fuel per hour would be sufficient to run some emergency injection pumps. So in a pinch, you bring in a single diesel car and its fuel tank can supply emergency makeup feed and bleed (boiloff) cooling for a few days. Or you manage a diesel truck and it will supply several months of such emergency injection.
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Post by cyrilr on Oct 30, 2013 5:13:23 GMT 9.5
Ed, you're wasting your time with Sod. He's just another troll. I'm not entirely sure why he hasn't been banned from this forum yet, as his writings violate multiple different scientific forum policies, apart from the fact that he is wasting valuable time from various intelligent and honest commenters like Ed. Ed, you just have to accept the fact that not everyone is living on the same planet as we do.
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Post by cyrilr on Oct 22, 2013 5:26:46 GMT 9.5
Thanks for yet another thoughtful post full of perspective, Geoff.
Regarding the Fukushima steam explosion. That actually wouldn't have happened in any event. The many redundant steam relief valves (SRVs) will reject excess pressure from the reactor vessel passively (powered by springs that don't care about electricity being available or not). These SRVs will then slowly pressurize containment. With a saturated water pool in the pressure suppression chamber, this would then result in slooooowly increasing the pressure in the containment. But never a steam explosion. The slow pressurize rise will at some point lift seals such as the containment head seals, relieving the pressure. This is what happened to the hydrogen in at least one of the reactor units, it escaped the containment vessel this way and detonated outside containment, in the upper building used for servicing, refuelling etc.
Chernobyl was very different due to the rapid pressurization created by the runaway reactor, later reinforced by the graphite that reacts with steam producing flammable and volumous carbon monoxide gas. Impossible with LWRs.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 31, 2013 21:10:02 GMT 9.5
Rick, no one is commenting on your theories because you're so blatantly obviously clueless about basic concepts that people prefer to not talk to you. It's like trying to explain biology to a 2 year old child. Pointless.
Come back when you
1. have learned basic English 2. have learned basic concepts of biological half life versus radiological half life 3. are sober.
@ Jonathan. We have some 14000 reactor years, and hundreds of thousands of spent fuel storage years of experience to show that you are wrong. We can contain this, we are containing it, even despite numerous different approaches of numerous countries, some having been quite irresponsible with nuclear technology. The difficulty with spent fuel is in the first years after it comes out of the reactor, as it makes enough heat to damage whatever container it is in. Beyond that point it's simple, simple dry casks that are zero maintenance, we can contain this as long as we want. Every 50-100 years you lift out the assemblies and put it in a new cask. It is childisly easy. The average car garage could do this. It is not a technological challenge.
Regarding geological storage, google Oklo natural nuclear reactors and read up on this subject.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 31, 2013 20:57:56 GMT 9.5
Sod, the 300 tonnes did not leak into the sea. That's an important fact you're incapable of comprehending.
Here is what Sod forgot to quote:
Further inland, nearer to the faulty tank, there was no detected caesium while beta radiation was at 93 Bq/L. This compares to some 200,000 Bq/L in water sampled from the faulty tank, indicating this is not reaching the sea in any significant quantity, if at all.
And in fact, Sod, even if all of the radioactive water would reach the sea, its impact to the environment would be negligible. The stuff just gets diluted into the sea, which has vastly more radioactivity in it from natural background sources such as K-40, even compared to all of the radioactivity in the Fukushima contaminated water combined.
There is no risk here. No one has died or even got injured. No one will die from these leaks. It is hyperbole.
@ the moderator of this forum. Is hyperbole without fact or science such as what Sod displays allowed as per forum policy?
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 27, 2013 16:44:06 GMT 9.5
Aug 27, 2013 9:17:34 GMT 9.5edireland said:
Aug 26, 2013 17:12:33 GMT 9.5 RogerClifton said: Jagdish spoke of electrolysis of used LWR fuel in a chloride melt, as has been discussed elsewhere on BNC. Here, the first, majority deposit on the cathode is the still-enriched uranium, ready for re-enrichment for LWR use. The second, minor deposition is the U-Pu amalgam in the cadmium cathode, appropriate for reuse in fast reactors.
This seems to me like "sufficiently high separation factors to make pyroprocessing practical for LWR use". Am I missing something? Fast reactor fuel is useless when we will likely not have a squadron fleet of fast reactors to use it. Plutonium and uranium will have to be recycled in light water reactors. (At best maybe RMWRs)
FLUOREX is the best process that can produce LWR usable materials. In that electrolysis process you will end up with a fission product contaminated metallic product which is of no use in an LWR. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disagree completely. LWR fuel recycling is more about a once or twice more passes, causing downgrading of the plutonium quality. Then the plutonium can't be economically used in any reactor, including fast! Moreover it does little to reduce long lived wastes and produces highly problematic aqeous wastes. Those are the worst types of wastes due to their mobility, corrosivity and volatility. Fluorex is even worse in this regard.
If we want a future fast plutonium or thermal thorium reactor fleet, the thing to do is immediately stop recycling fuel for LWRs. It's not even recycling, more like squeezing a small amount of added energy out of the fuel. In stead of using 0.5% of the theoretical energy of the natural uranium, you use 0.7%. Hardly impressive.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 26, 2013 19:46:57 GMT 9.5
Plutonium Nitrate would exist in nature in certain circumstances, such as a leak from a reprocessing plant. But in the case of a catastrophic chernobyl esque core accident it is correct that it would not. The thing is that the plutonium nitrate used in reprocessing plants has no concentrated decay heat source to spread it to the greater environment. The Chernobyl accident did have that concentrated heat source, plus heat from graphite-steam reaction, plus the large initial high temperature heat present from the initial criticality accident. Despite that worst case of worst case of worst cases, less than 3% of the plutonium could out of the reactor building, and almost all of what got out stayed close to the plant.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 26, 2013 19:42:39 GMT 9.5
This criticality thing is simply wrong. A single fuel assembly cannot go critical on its own when eg dropped accidentally on the bottom of a pool of water. It just leaks too many neutrons to go critical... and since the fuel assemblies are handled one at a time, you cannot get a pile of fuel assemblies topped up onto each other. And even if the assemblies could somehow be made to go critical (which would be well planned malignant worker conspiracy sabotage) they would simply start a sustained chain reaction with the water in the pool slowly heating up. You'd get a pool type research reactor, if you do nothing the water will boil away and then the chain reaction stops and passive air cooling will prevent fuel overheating from the decay afterheat (which is by now very small), hardly an apocalyptic event.
This Christina Consolo is completely clueless.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 23, 2013 4:43:53 GMT 9.5
This INES incident killed 0 people and injured 0 people and killed 0 fish. Funny you say my claims are false as you haven't the slightest evidence to the contrary. Many things bio-accumulate. This does not make them dangerous. It depends on the dose rate. The dose rates are trivial. The media are spreading FUD about microsieverts of dose to fish and no dose to humans. It is silly. A single fishing trawler causes more damage to marine life than the entire Fukushima accident radionuclide releases combined. The effect of trivial doses to fish is well known. It is so low as to be not measurable.
I challenged you, Sod, for once to come up with a damage assessment. You've come up with nothing but FUD. You utterly failed my test once again. Just a few media releases who don't do research, except if you perhaps think that recycling other media outlet garbage without doing critical research of the severity of claims is "research".
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 23, 2013 4:06:07 GMT 9.5
Pu238 has a short half life and lots of hazardous daughter products. Yet the guy I referenced got a massive dose of 64000000 microsieverts from Pu238 plus its daughers (yes these get counted along for your information) yet the guy did not have any cancer or any other radiation related illnesses.
Rick tells us the daughter products are dangerous. So my reference to this guy who got terrible amounts of daughter products radiation, more than any other person in recorded history, but did not get cancer, discredits the idea of hazardous daughter products. Pu238 is shorter lived than a mix of Pu239, Pu240, and Pu241 that you get from weapons or reactor grade plutonium. It follows that weapons or reactor grade plutonium produces less daughter products per unit time than Pu238 from cyclotron deuteron bombardment, as this guy had got administered.
What is hazardous is dose rate. Not dose. Dose means nothing without unit time. Nuclear bombs produce deadly radiation not because of dose but because of dose rate; everything is released in a second or so, that means huge doser rate per hour (micro or millisievert/hour). Same with x-rays.
It is not different from anything else. Take 365 pills of aspirin and your life is in danger. Take 1 pill per day for a year and you get the same dose but actually a positive health effect (the acid in aspirin is good for you in small amounts). Same dose.
Nuclear power is benign because its dose is not prompt, but chronic. Even in a nuclear accident far beyond the design of a nuclear powerplant (like Fukushima) the dose rate in millisieverts/hour is tiny. Don't be fooled by total dose. This is linear no threshold nonsense, an artifact from a nuclear bomb study where all prompt radiation led the world at large to believe that there's a linear dependency between dose and damage. Completely ignoring the most important factor - dose rate.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 21, 2013 20:06:12 GMT 9.5
Health effects of plutonium? There appear to be none. Here's a nice discussion we are having: www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4152The guy received 64000000 microSieverts of dose, all from plutonium. The most deadly type, the Pu238. And a type that doesn't exist in nature, highly soluble plutonium nitrate. The type that gets in your bones and supposedly causes great havoc there. The LNT model predicts that this guy should have died 4 times over from cancer from this radiation. Actually he didn't get any cancer. Funny. The results were the same for the other test subjects. What does this tell us about plutonium and about the LNT model?
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 21, 2013 19:58:34 GMT 9.5
That's what "super" stands for - above the critical point. In case of supercritical water turbines, usually only the first high pressure stage is actually supercritical. That is, the exit from the first turbine stage is subcritical and the downstream turbine stages are just "ordinary" steam turbines.
Supercritical transition is also attractive for heat capacity reasons. In the case of water, the transition form pressurized subcritical water to supercritical water sucks up a much greater amount of heat than boiling water at say 300 degree Celsius, and the resulting supercritical water takes up a fraction of the space required for steam. This, combined with very low viscosity, makes it the most efficient coolant available. Coolant average specific volumetric enthalpies of over 15000 J/l/K are achievable. With helium, even at similarly high pressures, you'll never even get 75 J/l/K. 200x lower. How can helium compete with supercritical water cooled coal or nuclear plants?
CO2 is pretty dense even well above the critical point. A significant fraction of water at room temperature, in fact. Not anywhere near as good as supercritical water though, but it could end up a simpler cheaper and more compact power cycle (because of heat rejection under pressure meaning compact equipment).
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 20, 2013 17:30:24 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 20, 2013 17:22:53 GMT 9.5
Ok Roger, so it's as I suspected, it can't be estimated accurately like that. Here's something interesting: www.pirika.com/ENG/ChemEng/SCFThc.htmlThe thermal properties of supercritical CO2 are very favorable around the critical point; a great thermal conductivity of over 250 mW/m.K is available at the critical point. Good for a cooler. Even at higher temperatures and supercritical pressures, it looks like you can easily get 3x the value of helium. So it appears that the premise of higher conductivity in favor of helium over the S-CO2 cycle is not correct.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 20, 2013 3:11:20 GMT 9.5
By the way, Roger Clifton, where does this square root of the relative molar weight difference come from? Helium has about 10x the thermal conductivity of CO2. Not 3.3x. Roughly 140 mW/K versus 14 mW/K. According to this source, hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tables/thrcn.htmlH2 has 25% more thermal conductivity than helium. Its molecular weight is 2, helium is 4. So square root of (4-2) = 1.42 = 42% more. That's not right either. It's neither 2x nor 1.42x. It is well known that lighter molecules tend to have higher thermal conductivity. An exact formula weight based prediction of thermal conductivity would be very useful to me. I was under the impression this is not possible as many other properties than molecular weight affect thermal conductivity...
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 19, 2013 21:11:59 GMT 9.5
Sorry Rick, but you've just listed a lot of facts that are not relevant. It took me 20 seconds to google this: www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/3165Biological half life of Cesium-137: 110 days (3-4 months). Yet Rick decides to talk about radiological half life, which we are not even arguing about. A pretty standard tactic for anti-nukes: talk at length of things that no one disagrees with, to divert attention from the things that are obvious and where disagreement exists. Rick likes to find irrelant references and then state that which must be demonstrated "Like all radionuclides, exposure to radiation from cesium-137 results in increased risk of cancer." There is not a SHRED of evidence for this claim. Nothing. We know that some people who have been exposed to >1000 mSv of Cesium-137 in a short period have gotten very sick and some have died. This is to be expected. It is also to be expected, based on simple biological mechanisms that LNT people like to cover up and not investigate further, that a dose of even 1 mSv/day of Cs-137 does not result in any measurable increased cancer incidence.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 19, 2013 18:10:16 GMT 9.5
In a letter to Physics Today we read a little more of EM2. ' ... by better harnessing the reaction energy through a high-heat-capacity medium and state-of-the-art turbine generators. ... The EM2 is a compact fast reactor about 12 meters high, with 265 megawatts electric (MWe) output. The immediate challenge for the reactor is proving out the fuel element, which consists of novel ceramic cladding and fuel that enable the reactor to operate at high temperatures and high power densities. The company is also developing and testing a compact high-speed turbine generator that can achieve efficiencies of more than 50%. ' It is unclear what the GA author means by "high-heat-capacity medium". Sodium? Or does he mean high heat transfer capability, as in helium? He says the selling point is "small", at least for fast construction. And then asserts that high thermal efficiency is necessary for cost efficiency. But if he intends a helium turbine and cooling cycle, it could be risky innovation. That's silly. Helium has very poor heat capacity, and fast reactors lack the greatest heat capacity in a reactor core - the moderator. As for better harnessing the reactions with high heat capacity media, that's completely clueless sales talk. Compact means it has no great heat capacity. Can't have cake and eat it. I would like to see the transient performance (peak temperatures) during a loss of all forced circulation. I fear the worst.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 16, 2013 8:01:40 GMT 9.5
I messed up by 10 X on (2 and 3) should be Radiation deposited in to a fetus can be there for 9 months. .0005 micSv over 9 months is 10 milSv. .001 micSv over 9 months is 23 milSv. .1 micSv over 9 months is 2330 milSv For Sv/min divde by 60 but internal in a baby growing would be more likely to hit a vital cell forming that would easely be 60 times more likely to cause medical problems. Thats why the article said very dangeris for baby developing in womb. I would like to know what kind of drugs you are on. Must be a fun trip, losing all sense of math. Radiation that is there for 9 months? It isn't there for a split second. .1 microsievert/hour over 9 months is 0.657 millisieverts. Nothing at all. It's hard to understand what Rick is talking about or where he learned math. His drugs must be pretty strong.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 16, 2013 6:31:11 GMT 9.5
Sure Rick, and if I take 1 glass of beer every day for a year, I'll take a dose of 365 glasses of alchohol. Which is 100% deadly dose if taken at once. Funny I take a lot more than 365 glasses of alcohol a year, yet I'm still very much alive, and fitter than my peers.
Dose rate is what counts more than anything else. Microsieverts/hour are a laugh. They make you happy.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 12, 2013 1:48:06 GMT 9.5
Rick, perhaps your post didn't get published by the moderators because you don't have a point?
Or perhaps you should try to write half decent English. If you can count to 14, you can surely learn better English. Sorry. You've lost me completely.
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