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Fukushima Radioactive Fallout Nears Chernobyl Levels
0WaitState writes "The cumulative releases from Fukushima of iodine-131 and cesium-137 have reached 73% and 60% respectively of the amounts released from the 1986 Chernobyl accident. These numbers were reached independently from a monitoring station in Sacramento, CA, and Takasaki, Japan. The iodine and cesium releases are due to the cooking off of the more volatile elements in damaged fuel rods."
Here it is again.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
It's ridicolous fear-mongering to post that we're at so-and-so percentage-level with regard to release of 2 specific radioactive substances, without mentioning that this in no way implies that we're even close to similar in general.
Like you point out, in particular iodine is a short-lived and thus mostly local problem (and even local radiation-levels have been very modest this far). Half-life of 8 days means that it's more than 99% gone in 2 months and 99.99% gone in 4 months and so on. (basically add a 9 every month)
There may yet be larger releases, but -this- far we've got ~20.000 dead due to earthquake and tsunami, and ~0 dead due to radiation released from the powerplants.
Reporting live from Tokyo (well, just on the outskirts, but def. part of the greater Tokyo area):
People here have bought up massive amounts of bottled water, though apparently the level of radioactive iodine has fallen below the maximum legal limit for infants (which is one third for that of adults). Milk is also in short supply. Two days ago, two supermarkets near me had no milk, or plain bottled water. (Haven't looked since then.)
On the subject of meltdowns, there is no "official" meaning to the term. But, I would say that at least a couple of the reactors have "melted down" (I haven't really been paying attention to the news, so I don't know if any of the others have or not). Anyway, fun facts, the "precautionary" safe limit of 80 KM set by the US government (and then the Australian government), for folks, was apparently worth setting. At least one village outside the 30 KM radius has had really high levels of radioactive iodine get into the water.
Me, I'm staying in Tokyo until things get really bad. But, I imagine, at least a couple of million of the other residents would also want to leave at that time too. So...
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I'd be watching for the lizards.
As for the levels in the water, they appear to have gone done quite quickly . Personally, I trust these guys because they give strict facts and no speculation. I have yet to see any reports of Hong Kong vegetables, but I admit I'm too lazy to google. That said, my (again, admittedly) knee-jerk reaction is to point out all the sketchy stuff in the past with China and other food products and ask if it might not be something else.
Things are slowly getting better. It wasn't the best two weeks, but life in Japan goes on as normal. That said, I'm down in Kyoto, which is pretty far from it all.
Several people have radiation sickness from high exposure already, high doses have been recorded up to 40km away, and radiation kills long term (unless it's a massive dose), so that's not a very useful statistic. It is useful to know what levels of radiation have been released.
All of these points are, I believe, at least hyperbole, and at worst outright scaremongering.
While it's true several plant workers have been taken to hospital for monitoring after receiving acute doses higher than safety recommendations (>100 mSv), this is many times lower than the typical onset of "radiation sickness". The safety threshold is chosen as the limit of detectability for increased cancer risk over a lifetime, which puts it on the order of 1 or 2 percent increase in lifetime risk of cancer. Given they're doing very valuable work, this is not that dramatic a risk - the risk to other emergency responders in the wake of the tsunami is probably much greater.
With regards to the "high" doses 40 km away, these need to again be put in perspective - it is "high" compared to the local background (although often only 50 to 100% more than usual, barring localised spikes), but there are places in the world where natural radiation is almost 100 times greater than the typically quoted "background dose", and people live there just fine. Combined with the fact that most of this radiation is short-lived Iodine isotopes, a ballpark estimate suggests that people living outside the plant would only see a dose of 1 mSv or less by the time the iodine had decayed away, even if they ignored all the simple safety precautions which can be taken to reduce that further. These doses are well known not to cause any significant increase in cancer risk - long term or not.
And your suggestion of a Chernobyl-style sarcophagus being required is still rather unlikely. Since it appears none of the reactors have actually melted down or suffered a substantial failure in containment in the immediate vicinity of the rods themselves, it's quite likely that they'll be able to take them through a more or less normal shutdown and decommissioning once proper cooling is restored, and the storage implications will be no more serious than if they reached their natural end-of-life. Indeed, if they weren't already near or past their expected end-of-life, they could probably be fairly readily repaired, refuelled, and set running again within a relatively short timeframe. (Indeed, there's talk that this is being considered for Reactors 4 through 6, although that may turn out to not be politically viable).
I'm not denying it's a serious issue - but in the perspective of tens of thousands dead, and many times more homeless and short on food and other supplies, it really shouldn't be dominating headlines in this way.
He's correct on everything else though, and the reason why those clouds are generally harmless to population is because they tend to rain microscopic amounts of radioactive cesium as it cools. Cesium-137 is dangerous if breathed in as small particles that get stuck in the lungs (iirc).
Iodine 131 is even safer. It's risks are based on the fact that thyroid gland tends to vacuum all the iodine in the body, including isotope 131 where it irradiates your body from inside for a long time. Of course, that requires significant ingestion of such iodine in the first place, which most typically comes with significantly contaminated water. Again, amount needed is fairly significant, and ones measured on the microscopic levels are barely notable to the human and animal bodies, and are several tens of orders of magnitudes lower then total ionising effect of background radiation on sea level.
Essentially you're far more at risk of getting cancer if you move to live 500m higher from sea level then from radiation in Fukushima if you don't live in Japan at the moment. The main risk in Chernobyl has been that essentially entire heavy part of radioactive isotopes of table of elements got into atmosphere. This is obviously not the case with Fukushima.
P.S. And please, don't even DARE flying. That's incredibly dangerous, you get irradiated!
Here. I've tried to do a better translation from the Spanish article, which is actually quite well-written
Andreyev: "In the nuclear industry there are no independent organisms"
"The most dangerous reactor in Fukushima is 3, because it uses a fuel that combines uranium and plutonium," he states.
He spent five years at Chernobyl. He was vice-director of Spetsatom, the Soviet body for the fight against nuclear accidents, and he knows deep internals of how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) works.
Yuri Andreyev (1938) is one of the most knowledgeable scientists in this area. For the case of Fukushima, he considers four potential scenarios of varying degrees of severity, from mild to very severe.
"In Fukushima, the most dangerous reactor is number three. This reactor uses MOX, a type of nuclear fuel that combines plutonium and uranium. France is currently using this type of fuel experimentally in two Japanese plants," says this expert.
In 1991 everything fell apart in Moscow. With the salary of a vice-minister of atomic energy --the position that was offered to Andreyev--, it was not enough to afford anything. Andreyev was invited by the Academy of Sciences of Austria to hold some conferences, and he eventually ended up settling in Vienna as an adviser of the minister of environment, at universities, and in the IAEA itself.
Chernoby is still surrounded by lies, he explains. The accident was not the responsibility of plant operators, as originally stated, but rather a clear design flaw in the RBMK reactors that resulted from cost savings. A proper design of those Soviet reactors would have required a large amount of zirconium --a rare metal--, as well as a maze of pipes, special techniques for welding zirconium, stainless steel, and huge amounts of concrete. It would have been a fortune, so they decided to reduce costs, said Andreyev.
Since uranium enrichment is a complicated and expensive process, one of the ways to achieve cost reduction was by feeding the reactor with relatively low-enriched uranium. All this effectively increased the risks, and it was against safety rules. However, the supervision of nuclear activities in the USSR was belonged to the Ministry of Atomic Energy. Something similar is happening today with the IAEA, as the UN agency "depends on the nuclear industry," said Andreyev. Under his view, the lies and secrets of Chernobyl are now fully present in Fukushima.
Security, money, irresponsibility
"Those who design nuclear power plants depend on two things: safety and cost. The problem is that security costs money. If you spend too much on security, the power plant it is not competitive. The accident at Three Mile Island is the perfect example. After the accident, it was clear that in order to convincingly prove that these type of accidents would not occur again would have required an improvement of security that would dramatically increase the cost of power plants, effectively rendering them useless. Not a single reactor was built in America for (the following) thirty years. Everything was very complicated in Chernobyl, but it also had to do with economy. Academician Rumyantsev showed that all RBMK reactors should have been shut down, but he was simply ignored. There are always people interested in hiding something ... "
What are they hiding?
They compromise on security in exchange for selfish interests. In the USSR, because of the cost of uranium enrichment, and in Japan simply for money. The location of central Japan, near the sea is the cheapest. Emergency generators were not buried and, of course, were flooded instantly .... Behind all this there is corruption. I have no proof, but they will not take long to show up. How can I design a nuclear power plant in an area of high seismic risk, near the ocean, with emergency generators at the surface?. The wave arrived and everything went out of service. This is not an error, but rather a crime.
What problems do you see with the poo
They are comparing a per-day value from Fukushima to a 10-day value from Chernobyl, that's why there's a factor of 10 difference, and they have taken it into account.
I wonder how far it will go though... Chernobyl actually really "exploded" and thus in contrast to what the officials say there is only very little radioactive material within the chernobyl sarcophagus (they say there is 97% left inside, but you can walk inside with little protection, check youtube - there are many videos of the inner sanctum of the sarcophagus ... there is only little left. the rest is spread around the ukraine, russia and europe mostly). Most of the material was pushed into the air when it exploded.
As there are no real (trustable) sources in terms of the Japanese nuclear catastrophe it wouldn't suprise me if there is a complete melt down of No. 3 and no public information available on the real scale of the disaster (e.g. plutonium 235, its byproducts and other radioactive material and spreading across continents and oceans).
It's not like there's a culture of honesty and openness in the US nuclear power industry.
More than a quarter of U.S. nuclear plant operators have failed to properly tell regulators about equipment defects that could imperil reactor safety, according to a report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s inspector general.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/a-quarter-of-us-nuclear-plants-not-reporting-equipment-defects-report-finds/2011/03/24/ABHYa2RB_story.html?hpid=z2
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Yeah, yeah, your fancy exponents, but try using percentages!
From TFA:
"Similarly, says Wotawa, caesium-137 emissions are on the same order of magnitude as at Chernobyl. The Sacramento readings suggest it has emitted 5 Ã-- 10^15 becquerels of caesium-137 per day; Chernobyl put out 8.5 Ã-- 10^16 in total -- around 70 per cent more per day."
Yeah, seventy percent. The same 70% by which 85 is 70% more than 5.
WTF, NewScientist? The error's in the original article too, but this is the sort of mistake I expect from the mainstream media. A pop scientist publication should be smarter than this.
Chernobyl put out 8.5 10^16 Bqin total. The emissions lasted several days.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Death toll from Earthquake and tsunami 10,000+
Death toll from the reactor accident so far 0.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.