Newsletter of the Science Council for Global Initiatives thesciencecouncil.com - November 2023
Dear Friends of SCGI,
In this newsletter we have a contribution by our SCGI treasurer and board member, Ron Gester. Being both a geologist and a physician, Ron has long been interested in the health aspects of nuclear power and radiation (and innumerable other subjects). He decided to write up a short piece about radiation to educate his friends on the topic, but was able to be convinced to share it with our website readers. We hope you'll find this enlightening and will consider sharing it widely with others.
Tom Blees
President SCGI
A people's guide to our nuclear planet
An introduction to nuclear radiation and its impacts on human health and Earth’s environment.
Ron Gester, retired geologist & physician, 2023.
Earth is a nuclear planet … and nuclear energy is essential for our existence on Earth.
Without Earth's molten core, life as we know it would not exist. Earth is protected from extreme levels of cosmic and solar radiation by a geomagnetic field generated by the rotation of Earth’s molten core. It rotates because of a combination of convection, due to heat, and Earth's rotation. The heat is generated in part from the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium isotopes. [Johnston, 2011] This heat also contributes to convection in the mantle which drives plate tectonics and continental drift. Nuclear energy is a natural and essential force on Earth. Nuclear fission reactors have occurred naturally in Earth’s geologic past. Rock formations in Oklo, Gabon, W. Africa reveal that self-sustaining nuclear reactions ran in these formations for hundreds of thousands of years starting about 1.7 billion years ago.
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