AmericanAnDerTU

Tuesday night I was hanging out with a friend and his room mate, both of whom are physicists and both of whom work at the Atomic Institute of Vienna, which is part of the Vienna University of Technology. We got into talking about the situation in Japan and they explained to me how the reactors work, what exactly caused the cooling systems to fail and how they work, etc. Got into real detail about it while we ate dinner and then played poker. 

During the discussion, my friend’s room mate brought up a group of slides from a previous course he took that had some interesting information about how much radiation was spread across the globe during the Cold War and all the nuclear testing that was going on. It’s interesting to look at these slides and see just how much radiation was released from these weapons and compare that to the radiation that was expelled during the horrific Chernobyl accident. 

A lot of talking heads on the news are talking about what could be the end of the world and how Japan could be destroyed for life, but given that the reactors in Japan are vastly different from Chernobyl (I’ve read multiple times that what happened at Chernobyl cannot happen in Japan simply because of the different designs of the reactors), that’s not likely. Looking at these graphs makes you also realize that if Japan can’t be worse than Chernobyl and Chernobyl was the absolute worst nuclear disaster in our history, relatively speaking, what’s going on in Japan really isn’t as bad as the media makes it out to be. Certainly it’s a horrific situation and any release of radiation outside the reactors is a bad thing (thankfully the steam that was released has a very short half-life - this coming from my physicist friends), but I think we can also be thankful that we’ve learned from the past and nuclear technology itself has become much safer.

Here are the slides and graphs, though. I appreciate you reading this and it would be nice if you would spread the information around as I think it’s something that everyone should have a look at.