Me too also. I really want to be pro-nuclear-power, but every time I see such blatant dishonesty and downright infantile manipulative behavior from the pro-nuke faction, I’m left thinking that people that dishonest and uncaring can never be trusted to operate anything as dangerous as a car, let alone a nuclear power plant.

Can you quote any part of this article that you wish to allege is “scaremongering?” I only mention this for without such specifics your comment could be accused of dishonest obfuscation a little bit.

Seriously, dude, Greg posts a LOOONG and DETAILED article about a major environmental problem affecting still-undetermined numbers of innocent people, and you’re quibbling about a semantic distinction that Greg shows absolutely no sign of ignoring or getting wrong? That raises serious questions about your motives.

http://www.brookings.edu/projects/archive/nucweapons/davyc.aspx

Wiki lead me to this Brookings article about the “Davy Crocket” tactical nukes, which it estimated at 10-20 tons: 2-4 times the explosive power of the OK city bombings. That does not seem at all out of bounds for the blast in the video above.

That said, determining whether that’s more or less likely than a big hydrogen explosion sending material that has gone critical but not detonated is well beyond my pay grade.

The vast majority of this post, which is one of 62 posts we’ve done on this subject (see the provided link) is simply information taken from the usual sources and put in one place for people to examine and follow up on.

You are probably just uninformed about the current discussion on the “nuclear explosion” issue. What we are talking about here is sudden criticality of a mass of fissionable material causing a chain reaction that blows up a bunch of shit. That is a nuclear explosion, and that is what the evidence is increasingly indicating happened at reactor 3. The event melted and/or mangled and/or bent steel structure and was associated with a massive spread of the sorts of nuclear material expected from such an event over a large area and a burst of radiation picked up by local monitors. Read up on it. There are links here as well as in the previous update on this issue.

We used to have a medical physicist commenting here on these posts on a regular basis. Her was affiliated with a major medical physics research center, though he posted anonymously. He told us in many different ways all about how we were wrong about everything we said. Eventually he was proven wrong in all of his assertions. In the end, although he was actually a trained scientist, it turns out that he was mainly a shill for the nuclear power industry.

That such people are out there concerns me.

In fact, when this disaster first broke I wrote a blog on it from a radiobiology perspective, which I’ve linked in the URL, along with some info on exposure levels and LNT.

Thanks, I’ll be happy to look at that. If you wrote it at the time the disaster “broke” however it is not very useful today unless it contains mainly background info, because the nature of this disaster was not at all understood at the time.

I’m sure we’ll include your post in our next update as well. Thanks.

Truth is not all radiation is created equally, and certainly biological effects are usually well understood. Also, it is tempting but wrong to equate explosion at a nuclear plant with ‘nuclear explosion’. The actual physics are very different.

I only mention this for without these qualifications the article could be accused of scaremongering a little bit..