Have you seen the damage to the building housing the reactor? A 37K jpg taken in 1986 Another masssive nuclear disaster occurred in Obninsk yet most people know nothing about it. More info on both. This wasn't the blast of a bomb, only escaping steam! It was a reactor core meltdown, where it got so hot it melted and vaporized some of the nuclear fuel rods with some radioactive materials in them escaping with the steam.
You can see it basically destroyed the #4 nuclear reactor-powerhouse. The debris it spewed as a cloud of radioactivity drifted as a cloud to pollute a wide area of Europe with it's variety of nuclear fallout. The maps in Russian show their figures of the high levels of radioactivity within the former Soviet Union and not the total area affected.
The effects are still being felt in the form of unheard of and incurable ailments, various cancers and countless genetic abnormalities and deformities in babies. The numbers of cancer deaths and deformed infants are far larger than the officially recorded numbers. The effects will go on for a very long time, and in fact have been increasing for years. Know more about it.
Plutonium is highly radioactive and exceptionally dangerous. It takes 25,000 years to decay one half of it to a safe level so truly there is no safe level as far as life goes. The amount it takes to cause cancer is as little as one atom of it. There is enough spilled from that one accident to cause cancer in every human being in the world if we ate or breathed in the smallest dust particle any of the fallout. It isn't the only accident, or dumping involving plutonium. The English Channel has tons of it dumped from Windhover, the British nuclear material recovery plant (from it's early days, not recently). Every government who has had anything to do with nuclear energy has their "dirty dump" somewhere polluting for long into our future generations, or test sites which are also dangerous. Windhover's pollution affects countless people with cancers and strange maladies along the Irish Sea and across the coastal northlands and Scotland.
The governments we elect are putting us at risk with what they apparently think is our informed consent. They accept the naivete and lies of corporate bureaucrats protecting their jobs and industry when they say it is "safe". Safe in relation to what, they don't say. This isn't a faceless enemy. It's every life of everything which is risked. For humans it can mean death by cancers or having sickly, mutant and deformed children. If nuclear warheads are used to divert the "cosmic marauders" we would be just replacing one form of death with another one which lingers for thousands of years. There may be safe uses of nuclear power. We have not seen them. Even if the nuclear power plants themselves are "relatively" safe the disposal of the wastes including the eventual end of the plant itself, is not safe enough.
In the world there are widely varying views on the effects of nuclear energy, the dangers of it and the long term effects of it. In North America the nuclear power industry says no one has ever died from nuclear accidents (avoiding any reference to Karen Silkwood and many others whose lives have been shortened dramatically in differing ways by exposure to nuclear radiation.) Do they only consider an nuclear accident an event like Three Mile Island or Chornobyl? I can hear the spokepeople for the nuclear industry saying that these statistics don't show the true state of the problem, implying that it is less of a problem (when the statistics don't show all the facts and that it is actually worse than we have been seeing.)
In France, and several Eastern European and Asian countries where nuclear energy is used, the number of people living in the general vicinity who are well informed as to the dangers of nuclear pollution is exceptionally low. Governments there do what the nuclear industry does in North America, present their case in such a way to purposefully withhold information, understate the danger, disinform the opposition with partial truths and/or attack any concerns with ridicule, seed other fears or bluster that they are the authority and no one especially the "untrained" could be well enough informed to dispute "the facts", or they silence their opposition in any of several ways.
France's government had a love for nuclear tests long after it was shown that nuclear tests both above and below the ground were a significant factor in the large increase in frequency of major earthquakes in the world. They were determined to continue their tests in spite of the effects it was recognized to be creating elsewhere. The French Government thought they had no responsibility to anyone else in the world except possibly their own people. How can that be? We all live in this lifeboat world together and it takes only one self-centred fanatic with a bomb to sink the lifeboat with everyone in it. Nuclear fallout is not a fact of life, it's a fact of death.
Low levels of radiation are a natural part of our daily life. It comes from many sources but mostly from the ground and rocks. Small amounts of radiation are tolerated by most life forms quite readily. As the radiation level increases the tolerance for it drops until a high level of radiation literally kills a person by nuclear poisoning. (A process which can take hours to weeks to kill a person after a radioactive exposure of seconds to days in length.)
The radioactive material exposure is measured in the same way, in millirems. The long term effects vary depending on intensity and material type. All radioactive products are dangerous if there is sufficient exposure to them. Some radioactive substances are less dangerous (even to the point of giving people "relatively safe" doses of radio-isotopes for medical scanning purposes, as most of that low-level radioactive material is excreted within 24 hours.)
The issue is not so much whether there is a safe use of nuclear material but the issue is the lies and lack of integrity by specific people surrounding the dangers of nuclear material's use and disposal and the hiding of facts. There are many persuasive arguments to allow the use of nuclear energy, not the least of which is the minute amounts of material required to produce a huge amount of energy. One gram of plutonium can generate about the same amount of electrical energy as one tonne of petroleum, a million times smaller weight for the same energy. The use of nuclear power is "cleaner" than using fossil fuels which, when burned, pollute the atmosphere and deplete the oxygen levels as they burn and add other pollutants which increase acid rain.
Alternative means of power are not utilized nearly as much as they should be. The use of electrical (and fossil fueled) power in industrialized countries is high and it contributes significantly to "global warming" problems. We aren't doing enough to wean ourselves from the high levels of consumption we think we need.
Our ability to save ourselves from an object coming from space requires that we use our creative ways, not to arm ourselves but to develop means of propulsion which can speed us or robotic assistants through space to intercept and divert the menace to us. That requires vast amounts of people with scientific or engineering abilities. We need goals going beyond corporate decisions to make these achievements possible. Governments collectively need to ensure the required efforts are coordinated with others to protect our lifeboat, not piecemeal efforts which can be counterproductive.
The decision cannot be left to military men to make a decision affecting us all. There is no precedence for this action. Neither science nor the military have enough answers to make an operation of this importance work without collaboration with people whose ability to foresee is not impaired by politics, profit or less sterling motivations. The military's idea of battle is against the military might of someone within this world, not something 'hanging over it' at such a distance as to make tactical strategy 'out of this world'.
Only a few astronomers have been intently interested in the garbage we know as asteroids and comets zipping about in our solar system. It's much more glamorous to discover something new far beyond our solar system and forget that one of the principal reasons for their occupations is to protect us by keeping track of these objects.
If the goal was to land a man on the moon we saw that was possible in a decade of development from the time the first rocket was launched into space, and that was done by just one nation. We may not have that long, but even if we do one nation cannot do this alone and as every nation would be affected it would be better to get the cooperation before each nation starts on separate paths all leading to the same battleground.
We have a world needing the results of this to succeed. It's not without it's cost. If we fail to put enough effort into the project of diversion, the project of feeding and caring for those who would be harmed would require more. We require the funding to be split between the two. For us to fail in our efforts to get results in a diversion means we will have to rely on our secondary line of defence, caring for those who survive, coordinating huge evacuations, and having vast amounts of building materials readied for reconstruction following the collision(s).
This is not the news you wanted to hear. It will affect stock markets, the values of our homes, futures on some products and have a lengthy list of ramifications. If you hold all your assets and money you make between now and the time it is seen, for your own self interests without consideration to the needs of protecting yourself on a larger scale then you may have the unfortunate realization you put your efforts into the wrong place. It will be too late to plan this with a last minute effort in mind. It requires much more planning than that. If you think 'feathering your own nest' will save you you'd be wrong, dead wrong.
The need to know and be well informed and accurate in such an unknown area of development is not easy. To many this smacks of illogicality or irrationality because they have no understanding of dreams or prophecies so it makes coming forward with this information more difficult. For me it would have been easier to just present this information and then sit back and let everyone else consider the alternatives. Now I know we have no time to waste. The time it takes for a deep space travelling comet or asteroid to travel from Jupiter's distance to us is less than two months. The latest comet wasn't on a collision course but that means little, because any of them could be at some time. Asteroids are usually unseen in the skies unless they cross within the field of an astronomers' photograph, so we could have even less warning...
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