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Japan Reluctant To Disclose Drone Footage of Fukushima Plant
garymortimer writes with word that "footage taken from an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone was passed on to the Japanese government with permission for public release from the US Air Force. US military sources said that the decision to release the footage — or not — was up to the Japanese government." The Japanese government, though, has thus far chosen not to release the high-resolution footage of the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant.
A nuclear power plant is at "stage 5" alert, where the worst is stage 7.
Three Mile Island was also a stage 5 (don't know if you're old enough to remember that one). Also, it's a logarithmic scale.
I'm not intending to play down the seriousness of the situation - it's definitely bad. But it's not "71% of the worst possible case scenario" bad.
#DeleteChrome
Actually, the Wikipedia article does state that it is intended to be logarithmic. ;)
And it makes sense, because the difference between a 1 and a 2 is "Bob dropped his coffee" and "Bob dropped his coffee in the storage pool, now we gotta drain it", but the difference between a 6 and a 7 is "Might want to consider moving a couple dozen miles down the road" and "Might want to consider moving to a different hemisphere"
Being near sea level, the radiation levels in Tokyo are normally about 35 nanoSieverts per hour (nSv/h). This doesn't include dietary sources of radiation.
According to this chart, the radiation level for the past couple days has been 50 nSv/h. (the chart uses microGrays per hour (uGy/h), but 1 uGy = 1 uSv)
Mexico City, being about 2.2 km elevation, has a higher background radiation because the atmosphere is thinner. They average 90 nSv/h there, almost double what's in Tokyo for the past two days.
The real kicker? Each cigarette contains at least 1000 nSv, smoked directly into the lungs. Every cigarette someone smokes is like spending at least 20 hours standing in downtown Tokyo right now.
:(){
13mSv = 13,000 uSv = 13,000,000 nSv
547 packs * 20 cigs/pack = 10,940 cigarettes
13,000,000 nSv / 10,940 cigarettes = 1188.3 nSv / cigarette
:(){
FWIW I am in Tokyo.
The "authorities" by which I suppose you mean TEPCO, NISA and the Cabinet have been releasing large volumes of information. TECPCO was reticent at first, becuase they had no clue what they were doing, but a personal visit from the PM and a frank exchange of views fixed that last Wednesday.
I have been graphing the TEPCO data: http://www.paddon.org/wiki/mwp/Fukushima
In any case, please don't make comments without educating yourself first (sigh, I know. this is slashdot).