"There was one women who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it," says Blum. "Their legs broke underneath them. Their spines collapsed."
Horrific stuff.
I've always found it curious how nonchalant people are with dangerous substances before it's realized how hazardous they can be. My grandfather loaded asbestos into railcars at a factory for 30 years, I still can't quite imagine how he must have felt when he fully realized the dangers it posed.
The U.S. Radium Corporation hired some 70 women to perform various tasks including the handling of radium, while the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves; chemists at the plant used lead screens, masks and tongs.[1] US Radium had even distributed literature to the medical community describing the “injurious effects” of radium.
Why isn't the threat of legal action a sufficient incentive against this? It might not help to prevent freak accidents but for known health problems like the radium, if the managers are documented to know about it without taking action, then they would spend the rest of their lives at risk of going to prison, or at least the company being fined.
Of all the things I've seen scare people in plants, OSHA wins, hands down. The environmental agencies probably come neatly in second. Fines can be paid, lawsuits settled, but OSHA will come in and lock down your facility and stop production. They're like the nuclear deterrent of plant safety (and while it can be said that stuff still gets by, there is always the omnipresent fear of getting caught, and even that helps raise safety awareness).
They have teeth, such that just baring their teeth can be enough to incite action.
Because them knowing about could also be coupled with them knowing that they can defend against such action. Either advised by their legal team based on existing laws or based on how well "written down" the evidence is.
In this case for example, it was an iconic case. But each of the Radium Girls didn't really get that great of a deal out of it ($10k in 1920's money). And US Radium Corp didn't exactly crumble after the lawsuit. It functioned for many decades after.
It's hard to pin liability on specific individuals without documentary proof, as verbal conversations are ephemeral and criminal liability usually requires a demonstration of intent which is hard to establish in court.
companies can build the cost of fines into the price of their product to some extent, and whenever a company is fined a large amount there's always a contingent of unquestioningly-pro-business people available to denounce it a 'gubmint shakedown,' and make noises about tyranny, liberty, due process and so on - regardless of the degree to which the regulatory action is warranted.
Suing someone is a huge pain in the butt and costs a lot of money. It's also extra difficult when you are trying to sue someone who knows what they are doing is wrong and is actively trying to cover their tracks and obstruct the case. At the same time there is a concerted effort among corporations to limit their liability through legislation, and via PR campaigns against lawyers and lawsuits.
A different, but somewhat similar issue came up with PVC (?); hairspray contained PVC until the health hazards became commonly known while industrial users continued exposing workers to those same hazards. The reasoning, as I understand the story, was that the companies' liability to customers (i.e. hairspray users) was unlimited, while the liability to employees was limited.
Yes. Moreover, this self regulating-type "utopias" are not just fantasies or tricks from history -- this is reality in some countries that are corrupt, where government regulations exist, but are just never enforced. You go to the market to buy baby formula and you get chalk mixed with water. You buy "organic" but it is laced with chemicals.
You're right, there should have been a regulatory agency that US Radium could bribe or lobby so that they could avoid paying any damages to the victims at all. /s
denysonique didn't give enough information about whether the legal doctrine should apply or is a good policy; simply that it often does apply and often shields companies from lawsuits.
When the nature of the hazard is entirely new and it causes no symptoms in the short term, who could imagine it's dangerous? Are we confident that Facebook use won't cause psychological problems as people grow older? That reading endless news stories on the internet won't reduce people's ability to maintain a long train of thought?
There are usually people who do, but they will be labelled anti-progress and anti-science because there is no scientific background for their worries (yet).
Because they are anti-progress and anti-science. For every horrific story of "we didn't know the dangers involved until it was too late," there are dozens of other new technologies that give people "bad feelings" that lead to great advancements.
Just imagine if the anti-vaccine hysteria of today was present in the the past. Polio and small pox could still be rampant today.
Look at what the anti-nuclear power activists achieved during the 1970s - a greater reliance on fossil fuels for generating electricity.
Now today we are dealing with unfounded fears of GMOs. You and I can probably comfortably live with higher food prices, but millions around the world can not wait for 30 years of study "just in case."
And then you have fearmonging pushed for political reasons, such as this new opposition to building the Keystone pipeline, created to be a political wedge issue. The result? More oil transported by railcar, which uses more energy and causes more oil spills. The rail yard near me now had to expand into swamp on the Mississippi river[1] to accommodate for all the extra oil railcars.
Net necessarily. Being against something regardless of evidence is an anti-progress position, but asking for safety protocols to be established or longitudinal studies to be carried out is quite reasonable.
In this case the scientists and companies knew about the risks and had stringent safety protocols for some people but not for others. If it ain't safe for the CEO, it ain't safe for the janitor.
Chernobyl and Fukushima killed fewer people than many individual coal mining disasters, let alone the deaths caused by coal's air pollution (which includes vastly more radiation than nuclear accidents have generated).
Coal doesn't have the capability for a cost cutting corporation to have a little oops and kill hundreds of thousands, or irradiate chunks of a state.
We've been lucky so far. There have been multiple nuclear accidents -- including 3 mile island -- that could have been far worse and weren't because of luck. Luck is not a viable strategy for dealing with nuclear power.
Nuclear doesn't really have the ability to kill hundreds of thousands - even Chernobyl's verified deaths (Greenpeace estimates aside) are under 100, and Fukushima didn't kill a single person. It's never going to go off like a nuke.
Chernobyl did serve as a pretty decent area-denial weapon, but advances in both process and reactor design make such a thing extraordinarily unlikely today. The theoretical, worst-case scenarios for nuclear are still better than the every-day reality of coal and oil.
> Indeed, eating 29 pounds' worth of the radioactive creatures would result in radioactivity exposure equivalent to that of a transatlantic plane ride.
> Because something hasn't happened yet it can't is your claim?
I could be wrong, but I think the claim is more "the fact that some people, even a large number of people, feel uncomfortable is not scientific evidence that something is dangerous." Or, "the ability to tell a story about some possible disaster doesn't actually make that disaster likely or possible."
I went to high school in Riverside, California. UC Riverside has an incredible entomology department ( http://www.entomology.ucr.edu/ ). I'm glad that UCR is able to largely escape notice when it wants to study all kinds of invasive species, even if people who have no understanding of how the lab works can come up with nightmare scenarios involving escaped insects or lab workers infected with rare, deadly and contagious diseases. My opinion isn't based on the fact that none of those nightmare scenarios has happened yet; it's based on the fact that the people who know what they're talking about say that those scenarios are literally impossible.
If your claim is that a severe nuclear meltdown with widescale radiation release is literally impossible -- a claim you couldn't even get the NRC to make -- then I'm going to point to actual experience, starting with 3 mile island, fukushima, chernobyl, etc, and a series of very close near misses with widespread radiation release. So it turns out to be quite possible.
I think our biggest disagreement is what counts as a nightmare scenario. For instance, while 3 Mile Island did involve a radiation release, it was very small. I don't consider another 3 Mile Island to be a nightmare scenario. And I believe that we learned from 3 Mile Island, so something that bad is highly unlikely, although within the realm of possibility.
Fukushima involved a major earthquake, a tsunami, a lack of power, and a plant that had reached its end of life. Even with that combination of bad luck, less radiation was released than Chernobyl. I don't worry about a similar disaster in the United States because we simply don't have many nuclear plants in areas that can actually be hit by tsunamis. Clearly we have reactors in earthquake-prone areas (and others in tornado-prone and hurricane-prone areas), but the plants were designed with those dangers in mind. While it is possible to have a similar disaster in the US, the chance of it happening is small enough that I don't lose sleep over the risk.
Chernobyl is the worst nuclear power plant accident ever. Chernobyl's design was below Western standards of the time, and well below current Western standards. There is no plant in operation in the US that could have a disaster as large as Chernobyl. And there is certainly no chance of a disaster larger than Chernobyl. It is literally impossible (for a larger disaster to occur).
If you'd said "very, very unlikely," I'd be fine, but in practice not much of anything is actually impossible. So now I have to worry about "people who know what they're talking about" throwing around unjustified assertions.
It's one thing when the guys running the Large Hadron Collider say that it's very very unlikely that they'll accidentally destroy the universe. (I'm OK with running the LHC).
It's another when scientists say that widespread concern for nightmare scenarios is based entirely on misunderstanding and scientific illiteracy. For instance, I don't worry about nuclear power plants turning into nuclear bombs -- even in the face of terrorism -- not because it's never happened but because the plants are designed to make that scenario impossible. I don't worry about a meltdown that melts through the power plant and the Earth's crust creating a new volcano because scientists say that's not possible.
Yes, there are nightmare scenarios that actually are possible. But when the two sides are "real experts who say the risk is too small to worry about" and "uncomfortable scientifically illiterate public," I put my money on the experts.
> Because something hasn't happened yet it can't is your claim?
Nuclear reactors physically cannot generate a nuclear explosion of the sort you'd get from a bomb.
They've been in use for 60 years. More people per unit of energy die from solar and hydro accidents than from nuclear power, and coal is many, many times more deadly. Turkey's coal mining accident this year killed 3x what Chernobyl - the world's worst nuclear disaster - did, and such mining disasters are routine.
I never claimed they can generate a nuclear detonation, but consider your strawman thoroughly refuted. They can, as demonstrated, leak radioactive particles.
You continue to claim that because something hasn't happened yet, it won't. Flight happened for 60 years before the SR-71. Just to pick one obvious example.
301 people dying in Turkey is irrelevant (though obviously my condolences to their families). Coal doesn't have the ability to, for example, leak radioactive particles over the entirety of nyc. Which we have no practical method to evacuate.
http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan... indicates 13,000 deaths a year attributable to coal. In the extraordinarily unlikely (given better reactor design and regulation) event of a Chernobyl-level incident near NYC, in the extraordinarily unlikely (given that Chernobyl killed 100) event it kills 10% of New York City, nuclear power's death toll would still only match coal's during that time.
Incidentally, Chernobyl's exclusion zone is ~30km radius. There aren't any plants that close to NYC - they're generally carefully placed and have extensive evacuation plans in place for the surrounding areas.
Dude, you're the one arguing that nuclear plants don't detonate like bombs, a point contested solely in your head.
Your facts about chernobyl are misleading. Pripyat -- population roughly 50k -- was evacuated. Hence few direct deaths. What can't we possibly do in nyc? Evacuate it. And it's not like there's a magical air filter 30km outside nuclear plants. Indian Point has 15 million living within 50 miles at most. Hope Creek is 40 miles from Philly. And those two are just off the top of my head. Unless your strategy in the case of a meltdown is to hope that the winds blow the right direction -- in which case I reiterate my point about luck.
Smoking rates in the US, Europe, and Australia have fallen tremendously. The peak rates were during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly after WWII. Cigarettes had been heavily promoted through films and popular culture, were included in soldier's rations and kits (paid for by tobacco companies), and pitched via advertising aimed directly at children and appealing to women's sense of independence and self-determination.
During which time the tobacco companies were actively concealing the negative health effects and campaigning against not only regulation but simply providing truthful information about tobacco's hazards.
Instrumental in much of this was Edward Bernays, the father of the modern Public Relations industry (he coined the term after the word "propaganda" lost its lustre after its use by Germany in WWI).
The BBC series by excellent documentarian Adam Curtis (I've encountered a few of his other works and writings recently), The Century of the Self covers Bernays:
Many of the same methods and techniques were applied to corporate disinformation campaigns against controls over leaded paint, asbestos, ozone, auto safety. Look up GM's attempts to smear Ralph Nader:
In early March 1966, several media outlets, including The New Republic and The New York Times, reported that GM had tried to discredit Nader, hiring private detectives to tap his phones and investigate his past, and hiring prostitutes to trap him in compromising situations.
Naomi Oreskes has drawn the parallels -- in methods, organizations, and often the very individuals -- between corporate disinformation campaigns in the case of tobacco, smoking, acid rain, CFCs and the ozone layer, and global warming, in her book Merchants of Doubt.
Along with Coke, Pepsi and soda in general being one of the most consumed products on earth. It's like a slow form of suicide, and yet people still consume it widely.
For me it is kind of warning against using everything that men invent or men can do. There are always things we don't fully know or understand. In the long term something could be a great danger for all of us.
Before we jump into next great thing it is good to stop for a while...
>Before we jump into next great thing it is good to stop for a while...
I have always wondered what it is in our modern society that is incredibly dangerous that we are still not fully aware of the long term effects. PVC piping, propylene glycol, some food additives?
Nanobots are decades away and may stay that way, but nanotubes are mass-produced and pollution is a problem.
The thin fiber is like asbestos except more volatile, and it can cause cancer.
http://www.particleandfibretoxicology.com/content/11/1/59
Horrific stuff.
I've always found it curious how nonchalant people are with dangerous substances before it's realized how hazardous they can be. My grandfather loaded asbestos into railcars at a factory for 30 years, I still can't quite imagine how he must have felt when he fully realized the dangers it posed.