I’ll trust the nuclear scientists that say that the release is safe, but there should be a transparent international panel, including China which has concerns about the release into fishing waters, that is given access to conduct their own tests with all parties agreeing to release their findings.
The old “trust but verify” position. Agreed 100%. If everything is perfectly safe there should be no reason not to have multiple independent, third-parties with no skin in the game to verify. This is good for everyone as it reassures the fishermen, those buying fish, and really the rest of the world.
china is causing a fuss for political gain. a huge chunk of their fishing practices are illegal and violates international law anyway. their concern is theatrics to drum up their anti-japanese nationalism.
Not only that, but China’s Fuqing power plant also releases 3 times more tritium into the Pacific than the Fukushima plant so they’re also full of shit.
It's a pressurized water plant like Fukishima was. Not quite 3x but still more than 2. Qinshan is a CANDU reactor, so that's why its 10 times more than what they're annually releasing from Fukishma. They release a lot of tritium because they use heavy water as a moderator. Any nuke plant that has a Lithium channel for producing tritium for nuclear weapons will also, of course, release a lot of it comparatively.
Candu are designed to be messy, but the Canadians keep them clean(ish) somehow, never understood how, guess they just watched how much enrichment waste they burned, or they were just careful in reclaiming the tritium, it’s expensive after all.
Also back then, we didn’t have massive populations. Most of the world struggled to survive. Finding food was a all-day activity. Should we go back to that?
Without the haber process modern civilization could not be sustained. We cannot go back without massive population losses. Dunno about you but I’m not picking which of my friends and family aren’t important.
Also, I frankly wouldn’t mind returning to a world where almost half my time was my own and not my employer’s.
It still wouldn't actually be your own. You currently work to afford your lifestyle. You'd still work the same amount, probably more, but you certainly wouldn't have your current lifestyle.
Non stick pans, fire retardant mattresses, nonslip shoes, many forms of plastic, stain resistant shirts, water proof jackets, fume suppressants, metal coating/plating, high quality surfactants (ie lots of soaps), many types of pipe and the joining compounds used in plumbing, and the list goes on.
It’s not even a dent in the list of all effected products. For the no known replacement there should be a preface, we can generally make things without PFAS still, but PFAS is a major reason why the item is desirable.
For example, we can go back to lye and castile soap but we probably won’t be able to have laundry or dish detergent. The alternatives exist, they just don’t function well enough to be replacements. Without detergents you would need to pre-wash your dishes and laundry (or completely skip using) before using your washing machine and dish washer (hand wash everything). This says nothing about industrial usage of surfactants which is also really important.
We’d still have plastics, but we probably wouldn’t have any plastics which are naturally “slippy,” smooth, or soft. Hard brittle plastics only.
An example I used earlier, we could still have metal coating/plating, but it would probably look more like something from the early 1800s. PFAS is used in the process to suppress fumes and also to protect against corrosion, staining, and weathering.
I don’t know enough to say how far back it would set us with computers. I have the sense they’d still exist, but we’d be set back several decades.
Well, then I don’t think it makes sense for an immediate blanket ban on it.
I suspect the best path forward is to set maximum limits and slowly adjust those down over time. I really don’t think we want to continue to be inundated with carcinogens.
I generally agree. The links to cancer are a bit tenuous to be honest. We know at high levels they definitely are bad, but at low levels we aren’t really sure. Looking at the effects to people living downstream of the DuPont plants, and who were drinking high quantities of it in their source water, we known it’s bad. The problem is that it bioaccumulates and we suspect that at low levels, over long enough, it’ll be bad. The low levels we’re talking about are in the single digit part per trillion. It’s really hard to put into context how small 1 ppt is. If we took Lake Superior as an example, 1 ppt would be 32 gallons in the whole lake. Loch ness lake would be 1.95 gallons.
NYC generates approximately 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater per day, that means 1 ppt would be about 5 mL per day in the whole city.
We know that PFAS is bad at high levels, but because the low levels are so low we are having a hard time proving it’s bad. Most studies will say that there are links or that it’s a likely carcinogen.
We definitely need to cut this stuff out, but doing so is going to seriously cripple most peoples way of life or we’ll find a replacement which might not be as safe as we think it is.
What a wonderfully unrelated to my post comment you've made. Since you are so kind as to make up what you want to argue against, perhaps you won't mind making up the response so those of us on topic can get on with discussing that topic.
We also survived thousands of years without any of the creature comforts our society has taken for granted. Unfortunately, all the scientific advances we’ve achieved for the betterment of mankind involved these forever chemicals in one way or another.
I’m not saying they’re not terrible, but at least some of the voices against these restrictions aren’t in bad faith. It just speaks to the importance of finding alternatives, and we have to accept the fact that some things might not be replaceable with biodegradable solutions.
It’s the same stupid bullshit as the 2a nuts. There is no logical reason, they just like a manmade product, which is a great extension of any interesting person :)
Dabie bandavirus, also called SFTS virus, is a tick-borne virus in the genus Bandavirus in the family Phenuiviridae, order Bunyavirales.[2] The clinical condition it caused is known as severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS).[2] SFTS is an emerging infectious disease that was first described in northeast and central China 2009 and now has also been discovered in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan in 2015. SFTS has a fatality rate of 12% and as high as over 30% in some areas. The major clinical symptoms of SFTS are fever, vomiting, diarrhea, multiple organ failure, thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), leukopenia (low white blood cell count) and elevated liver enzyme levels. Another outbreak occurred in East China in the early half of 2020.
Unfortunately, I don’t think employers seeing their employees as mere resources is exclusive to Japan. Though they definitely like to dial it up to 11 there.
We never get a satisfying end to these things; The same people who lied about Iraq and Libya still have jobs in the respectable media.
They’ll never acknowledge that western-backed riots opposing the extradition of a murderer might have been somewhat misguided, instead we get “actually Xi Jinping successfully crushed their hopes and dreams by building inexpensive mass transit”.
basically, ticks are fishing from the low brush and grass. they hang around with their “hooks” out waiting for something to wander by where their hair or fur snags on the tick’s hooks and away they go!
Fun fact, when you see someone forest walking out their rectangle of white cloth or some dude waving a white flag at tall grass, it’s actually researchers collecting questing ticks (those that wait in the grass to catch onto something)
An official explains the National Defense Report at the Ministry of National Defense in Taipei on Tuesday. | COURTESY OF THE MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENCE OF TAIWAN / VIA KYODO
Ahh, ok! Kbin has been doing some wonky things the last day or so with threading, so it looked to me like this was a standalone comment when I first saw it, which was why I was so confused. Sorry!
One would hope for an actual humanitarian ceasefire. But a humanitarian pause seems to be a pause to bandage up people and get them some food for a small period before allowing Israel to bomb those same people again.
A proper ceasefire is really needed right now, but the US and Europe seems very opposed, and is rather arguing about the terms ‘ceasefire’ and ‘pause’, as if that’s the most important thing right now.
We are somehow still not panicking and see that as a point of no return for climate change. These temperatures are still the lowest ones we will experience from now on.
Hopefully, some ignorant people or even climate change deniers will switch their positions and actually support green policies now.
Unfortunately, a lot of folks in power would happily watch the world burn if it means they stay in power. They know they’re rich enough that it won’t hurt them.
For deniers, it getting hotter will never work. There’s an argument about the world being in a long cycle between hot eras & ice ages and temperature records don’t mean much when accurate records only go back one or two hundred years.
A lot of deniers switch to some weird form of defiant stoicism, and pride themselves in taking that stance. I don’t believe there’s ever going to be any switch until the hurt is economic, and that might happen locally in some places, but not globally.
I am really scared for the daughters I have, in what kind of shit show they will have to live. But the scale of suffering this is going to cause is beyond the ability of our brains to process, and it will come down on the poorest and most vulnerable on the planet, and I have to say that is something that remains constant throughout modern history.
Capitalism only functions in an environment of competition. Because of our absolute domination of the Soviet Union, we’ve had no need to improve.
There’s a reason wages were so high back in the day compared to now. It’s because if people didn’t get paid what they were owed, then we would lose mindshare to communism.
To add onto the capitalist blame: people are conditioned to think in a capitalist way, and raising a child is a definite losing venture, hence people won’t invest in that shit.
They’re not just brainwashed they are living a capitalist reality where those thoughts are rational observations of the truth around them.
definite losing venture
I get it now. You’re some teenager who doesn’t know that raising kids is literally massively expensive. Gee you must think you’re so bright for coming up with this idea that people are conditioned to think of kids as revenue negative enterprise! I can’t believe the size of the whoosh here.
If you can hardly feed and house yourself … you can’t afford to woo a wife or raise a kid :/ but that won’t stop some people trying to half-ass it I guess
Quite the opposite, capitalists want more human resources, human capital. There’s an entire ideology, at least centuries old, about this. You can most easily read about it as: pronatalism.
People aren’t conditioned to think in a capitalist way, they’re conditioned to think about their kids future not being worse than their present, since having kids can throw you into poverty.
Some wrong language I guess. You talk capitalists as those who possess stuff, and you’re right in this way. I talk about the liberal ideology of capitalism that produces consumer citizens and the glorification of individualism. The people a capitalist society produce.
Well, it takes a village to raise a child. The capitalist culture also brings this idea of “nuclear family” which generates this impossible situation for the “nuclear family” to afford kids. Of course, the other aspect of this is the eugenicist/fascist aspect of: only the rich can afford kids, so them it makes sense, this nuclear family. It’s not a problem to have a nuclear family if you’re rich, and you can just replace the village by paying for extra caretakers… another type of commodified relationship. The rich can afford to pay a woman to babysit for years, while that woman can’t afford to have a family or to see her kids (often because her family is in a different country). Family for me, but not for thee.
I’m somewhat close. It was the strongest earthquake I’ve been in. Fortunately no damage to the house or anything, just some things that fell off the shelves. Hopefully we won’t get any Tsunamis.
I live in South Korea and I get really frustrated how so many people(lefties) try to make a big deal out of this to shit on Japan.
Please fucking stop smoking first before you try to talk shit about this. You sound like a complete idiot when you drink and smoke and worry about how filtered water that is probably safer than the seawater now. You’re literally paying to suck on carcinogens and radioactive shit.
Why do you specify lefties? Is there something unique about South Korean politics that make their left-wing reject science as much as everyone else’s right-wing?
Please read. I’m leftist, but part of that is recognizing these issues. Anti-nuclear has largely been a left thing. The right only does it to protect fossil fuels.
japantimes.co.jp
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