Should they race at Motegi this year?

to all those that think Motegi would be unsafe. Reminds me of the ..... ..... who were taking anit-radiation pills here in California. LAME!



The poll is missing option: GAY

Jumkie said:

The poll is missing option: GAY

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Why, are you feeling left out?

Tom said:

Well i've heard that according to all scientific sources the race should be safe radiation-wise. If the Japanese authorities want to run the race it should go ahead, if they don't want it then that's alright too. For the riders to kick up a fuss because they are scared of something they don't understant is all a bit silly.

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^^^^ what he said.

There is absolutely zero risk of any health impacting radiation exposure by attending motegi, and I think it reflects very poorly on any rider that would support a boycott thats based on ignorance and ill-founded fear.



I agree with this guys letter on superbikeplanet



Also, here is a very informative chart linked on the WERA boards that shows what kind of actual radiation levels we are talking about here:

Tom said:

Well i've heard that according to all scientific sources the race should be safe radiation-wise. If the Japanese authorities want to run the race it should go ahead, if they don't want it then that's alright too. For the riders to kick up a fuss because they are scared of something they don't understant is all a bit silly.

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Agree - reminds me of the ludicrous myth perpetuating years of rider protestations concerning supposed diminished adhesion at Donington due to aviation fuel

Arrabbiata1 said:

Agree - reminds me of the ludicrous myth perpetuating years of rider protestations concerning supposed diminished adhesion at Donington due to aviation fuel

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Yeah that was a bit silly. We all as bikers know what fuel looks like on tarmac, you get that rainbow effect and i must say i have never seen that at donny.

Goatboy said:

Why, are you feeling left out?

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I just wanted to include you Gayboy.

Jumkie said:

I just wanted to include you Gayboy.

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What you do in the privacy of your local public toilet is your own business, just don't try dragging me into it.

michaelm said:

Depends on whether you believe in the linear no-threshold hypothesis, which is just that, a hypothesis.

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Well, I do. Given the manner in which ionizing radiation causes discreet, highly localized damage, it seems unwise to assume that there is a 'harmless' dose. The analogy is that you are standing in a huge field, several miles across. Someone far away is lobbing mortar rounds into the field at random. The field represents the cell and you are that cell's DNA. Most shots miss by a huge margin. Occasionally, you will suffer a near miss that causes repairable damage. A direct hit, however, will cause you a world of hurt and represents non-repairable genetic damage. This may occur in a 'dead' code area, where it has zero effect, or it may scramble just the right bit of code and cause the cell to go berserk - producing a tumor. It's all about the odds - how many mortar shells do you want fired into your field?

We evolved and live in a radiation field; it may be a part of what makes us mortal, who knows, but the levels of radiation from Fukushima 100 miles away from there are not significant compared to normal background radiation, a fundamental physical principle known as the inverse square law being operant apart from anything else. Radio-iodine is leaking into the sea, but the pacific ocean is hard to beat for volume of dilution, and as you say there should not be too much in the way of airborne radio-isotopes given the winds and that the fukushima reactors were not encased in graphite which burnt/exploded as was the case at chernobyl, and they seem to have been careful about contaminated produce from the immediate vicinity.

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People also die from 'spontaneous' cancer. You can live your life like a saint, with zero risk factors, and still die a gruesome death. I suspect a number of these cancers are caused by the low level radiation that surrounds us. Sure, there are other causes at work: chemicals, viruses, etc., but I don't see any logic behind the 'safe radiation dosage' argument some try to claim.





FWIW.

The also have teeth like daggers





Okay forget radiation, I am really afraid of mutant rabbits - call it off!

Geonerd said:

Well, I do. Given the manner in which ionizing radiation causes discreet, highly localized damage, it seems unwise to assume that there is a 'harmless' dose. The analogy is that you are standing in a huge field, several miles across. Someone far away is lobbing mortar rounds into the field at random. The field represents the cell and you are that cell's DNA. Most shots miss by a huge margin. Occasionally, you will suffer a near miss that causes repairable damage. A direct hit, however, will cause you a world of hurt and represents non-repairable genetic damage. This may occur in a 'dead' code area, where it has zero effect, or it may scramble just the right bit of code and cause the cell to go berserk - producing a tumor. It's all about the odds - how many mortar shells do you want fired into your field?

People also die from 'spontaneous' cancer. You can live your life like a saint, with zero risk factors, and still die a gruesome death. I suspect a number of these cancers are caused by the low level radiation that surrounds us. Sure, there are other causes at work: chemicals, viruses, etc., but I don't see any logic behind the 'safe radiation dosage' argument some try to claim.





FWIW.

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Cells also have mechanisms to repair dna damage, and a lot of the oncogenes associated with cancer are to do with impairment of such repair mechanisms.



My perspective on all this could be considered biased because of my background, but there is little evidence of diagnostic levels of radiation, orders of magnitude greater than would be involved here, causing cancer, and data from following a huge number of radiographers in the usa also showed no increase in cancer. There is some data to suggest that low level increase in background radiation is associated with improved health, so called radiation hormesis, but I have always taken this with a grain of salt, the proponents mostly tending to zealotry and the data being possibly conflated by other associations, the increase in background radiation with altitude for example.



ALARA ( as low as reasonably achievable) always applies as far as radiation doses are concerned, but if you are going to worry about the sort of radiation doses which have been said to be involved with fukushima,you would have to live your life as you say like a saint with zero risk factors just from the point of view of radiation safety, and definitely never catch a plane or live in a brick or stone house for instance, with naturally occurring radon giving you a higher radiation dose than living in a timber house in the latter circumstance, to say nothing of exponentially greater risks not involving radiation associated with many activities of daily living, and those associated with riding motogp bikes at 300 kmh are so many orders of magnitude greater that it would be difficult to calculate.



Notwithstanding this, I heard in a radio feature since my initial post concerning this that the riders may be right to be concerned that the japanese government has not been telling the whole truth; they apparently under-reported the level of radiation, and some now consider they should have had a wider exclusion zone and given iodine tablets to more people. The accident appears now to be worse in some ways than chernobyl; there has not been a melt-down but rather a melt-through with fuel rods penetrating the floor of the facility and leaking into groundwater, with possible contamination of a much wider area. Caesium and strontium which are produced by accidents like this have half-lives of decades, and there may have to be long-term exclusion of the surrounds from agriculture and fishing, certainly an argument against nuclear power generation.

Isn't saying there is no safe threshold ignoring that the body is able to repair damage done by radiation?



I think humans are amazing, to be concerned with going within 150km of Fukushima for a short period but OK with riding bikes at 300km/hr in the wet alongside a bunch of other guys.....







edit, I just sore the rabbit article, they don't say if radiation is the likely cause of this deformation. Mutations and deformities happen all the time in nature whether or not they are near a radiation source (as sad as it is, humans are born every day with deformities that can leave them disabled) . Was there a big increase in the number of deformities or was there one rabbit in a litter that was born deformed? If it is just a case of the latter, than this is scare mongering/sensationalist journalism, which is the worst part of the industry.

browney said:

Isn't saying there is no safe threshold ignoring that the body is able to repair damage done by radiation?



I think humans are amazing, to be concerned with going within 150km of Fukushima for a short period but OK with riding bikes at 300km/hr in the wet alongside a bunch of other guys.....







edit, I just sore the rabbit article, they don't say if radiation is the likely cause of this deformation. Mutations and deformities happen all the time in nature whether or not they are near a radiation source (as sad as it is, humans are born every day with deformities that can leave them disabled) . Was there a big increase in the number of deformities or was there one rabbit in a litter that was born deformed? If it is just a case of the latter, than this is scare mongering/sensationalist journalism, which is the worst part of the industry.

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Teratogenesis is a well recognised dose related effect of foetal radiation exposure, but requires fairly high levels of radiation. Such levels would definitely have been present if the rabbit gestated sufficiently close to fukushima, where the time the plant workers could work was/is severely limited due to the risk of acute radiation toxicity/radiation poisoning; from what I can glean workers have also been exposed to levels where carcinogenesis definitely occurs. Somewhat surprisingly, there is little evidence of genetic defects, a different issue, in the progeny of those exposed to radiation from chernobyl or the WW2 atomic bombs.



So it would depend where the earless rabbit was found; if it gestated quite close to fukushima radiation may well be involved, if kilometres away it is likely a beat-up as you say, congenital malformations being not uncommon in general as you also say.

Andy Roo said:

The also have teeth like daggers





Okay forget radiation, I am really afraid of mutant rabbits - call it off!

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Maybe the yamaha and ducati could mutate problem solved

That rabbit freaked me out. . . . . . . . . .

Looks like it is on. If Lorenzo keeps ceding precious points to Stoner in the championship, he has no choice but to go!