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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."
Full translated interview:
17/03/2011 Rafael Poch, Berlin Correspondent
Andreyev: "In the nuclear industry there are no independent bodies" "The most dangerous reactor in Fukushima is 3, because it uses a fuel of uranium and plutonium," said Yuli
He spent five years at Chernobyl. Spetsatom was deputy director of the anti-Soviet body nuclear accidents and knows very well how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) works.
Yuri Andreyev (1938) is one of the most knowledgeable in this area. To Fukushima includes four scenarios of varying severity, from mild to very severe.
"In Fukushima, the most dangerous reactor is three, because it uses MOX fuel more plutonium uranium that France is being used experimentally in two Japanese plants," says this expert.
In 1991 everything fell apart in Moscow. The salary of deputy minister of atomic energy, the position he was offered Andreyev, not enough for anything. The Academy of Sciences of Austria was invited to lecture and eventually settled in Vienna as adviser to the minister of environment, universities and the IAEA itself.
Chernoby is still surrounded by lies, says. The accident was not the responsibility of plant operators, as stated, but a clear design flaw in the RBMK reactors result of cost savings. Proper design of those Soviet reactors required a large amount of zirconium, a rare metal, and a maze of pipes, special techniques for welding of zirconium, stainless steel and huge amounts of concrete. It was a fortune, so they decided to save money, said Andreyev.
One of the resources of savings was to feed the reactor with relatively low enriched uranium, since uranium enrichment is a complicated and expensive. This increased the risks and was contrary to the rules of safety, but supervision in the USSR nuclear part of 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 which lies and secrets of Chernobyl are now fully present in Fukushima.
Security, money, irresponsibility
"Those who design nuclear power plants are pending on two things: safety and cost. The problem is that security costs money. If you spend too much on nuclear power plant it is not competitive. The accident at Three Mile Island is the perfect example. After the accident was to improve security in a convincing way to avoid repetition of the accident both plants more expensive, they lost all meaning. For thirty years in America was not built a single reactor. Chernobyl was all very complicated but also had to do with economics. Academician Rumyantsev showed that we had to close all RBMK reactors. Simply ignored. There are always people interested in hiding something ... "
What are they hiding?
They lend themselves to compromise on security in exchange for selfish considerations. In the USSR for the cost of uranium enrichment in Japan simply for money. The location of central Japan, near the sea is the cheapest. Emergency generators are not buried and, of course, were flooded instantly .... Behind all this there is corruption. I have no proof, but will not take long to appear. How can I design a nuclear power plant in an area of ââhigh seismic risk, near the ocean, with emergency generators at the surface?. Wave arrived and everything was out of service. There is no error, this is a crime.
What problems do you see wi
Appeal to Authority fallacy much? Michio Kaku is an *American* Theoretical physicist whose work has little if anything to do with nuclear engineering. He is Japanese only by ethnicity (his parents both being immigrants), not that it's actually relevant to his views or their accuracy anyway. He's freely admitted in the past that he's biased against Nuclear power, due apparently to some radio programs he heard as a student, and is prominent in the anti-nuclear movement. He's also made similar alarmist remarks about nuclear power before, most notably in regards to the Cassini probe and its fuel. The guy is a great ambassador to the masses for science generally, but in this case he's just flat wrong.
radiation kills long term (unless it's a massive dose)
That is commonly accepted thinking, but is apparently incorrect.
Quotes are from Lawrence Solomon: Japan’s radioactive fallout could have silver lining.
Sometimes reality is surprising.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
"Of course, that requires significant ingestion of such iodine in the first place, which most typically comes with significantly contaminated water."
Milk.
Chernobyl results showed that cows eating the contaminated grass had almost all the radioactive iodine in the milk and children who drank that milk got sick.
Apparently 90% of the children thyroid cancers could have been prevented if the government had issued a warning not to drink milk.
There's a documentary on the scientists trying to find the radioactive fuel / core inside the chernobyl structure on google video. They had to use robots to scout ahead because some of the rooms had pockets of radiation that could emit a lethal dose in seconds. One difference between Chernobyl and the Japanese reactors is that Chernobyl wasn't contained. Even if the Japanese reactors melt down, it's very likely that the melting cores will be captured in the containment structures built beneath them. As long as the containment holds then you won't be seeing plutonium anywhere except where it's supposed to be.
And those thyroid cancers - while exceedingly unpleasant - killed about 40 people.
Nuclear is not 100% safe. Nothing is. It does happen to be about 4,000 times as safe as Coal though, measured in terms of human deaths per megawatt generated.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The half-life of I-131 is 8 days, and effectively all of the volitiles have burned off at this point. Early this week, levels in Tokyo briefly reach levels where a baby in arms shouldn't be drinking (formulae made with) tap water - but it was only about twice safe levels for a baby, and no risk at all for those over 40. In a week that problem will have solved itself natually.
I'm sure there someone, somewhere who somehow didn't hear the warnings and a baby now has a slightly elevated risk of thyroid cancer. That's not a good thing, but it's unfair and sensationalist to compare that to Chernobyl. As my friend in Japan wrote
For us, we think (a) these amounts shouldn't matter and (b) our activated carbon filtration systems will take care of this, but carefully consumed wine and beer this evening just to be safe
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Quite true. Only the volatiles (Cs-137, I-131, etc) make it any significant distance from a nuclear disaster. The non-volatile elements end up attached to or as part of larger particulate matter and are generally deposited within 100km of the accident -- aka, significant amounts wouldn't even make it to Tokyo if the winds at the time of release were pointing straight at it.
A lack of those means it's less likely Fukushima will involve a permanent exclusion zone around it, but the overall health effects for regions beyond will be similar to that for Chernobyl after adjusting for prevailing wind direction.
Note that this accident isn't even close to over. There's several times as much nuclear decay waste products at Fukushima #1 as there were at Chernobyl, only a small fraction of those have been released into the environment so far, and the disaster is still clearly ongoing. There will almost certainly be more volatiles released by Fukushima than Chernobyl when this is done. The question is how kind will the winds be over the coming months and whether there will be even more "oh noes".
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Citation please yourself. There's a distinct lack of conclusive evidence in either direction because controlling for such large population based studies on something that varies so much with other factors is extremely difficult. Nuclear proponents often cite this absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Nuclear opponents counter that barring research to the contrary, due caution requires assuming that the same effects that occur at the larger scale (DNA damage by ionizing radiation leading to cancer, for example) are problematic at the smaller scale as well.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
He pulls the spitting high-tension wires down...
You know, I once came up with the notion that if you wanted an *incredibly* loud speaker, and had a large budget, you could encode music into detonating det cord by varying its radius and thus the force of its pressure wave. Depending on how thin you can make the cord, a normal length song would take a couple dozen to a couple hundred tonnes of explosives (not cheap), but you would have the volume to broadcast across a huge area.
I was then thinking of, "What song would be best to play to people out of the blue, no warning, as part of a crazy art project?" And then it hit me: Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult. In Tokyo Bay. As you inflate a Godzilla parade float in the water with helium, causing it to rise up and out of the water head-first (ultimately releasing it to float away over the town).
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
No, he's not. I went one step further and followed his link. Proof by Ghost Reference. It does not say what he claims it does.
The main reason why elements with low half lives are dangerous is precisely *because* they have low half lives. U-238 is all over the bloody planet, but with a half life similar to the age of the planet, it poses little threat. Iodine poses the primary threat initially after a nuclear accident, followed by cesium and strontium over time. The Chernobyl exclusion zone may be opened for development and agriculture again up once the cesium and strontium decay sufficiently.
What sort of ridiculous-looking hat are you pulling your figures from, like your "500m higher" one? Fukushima City's radiation levels are ~100 times their normal background level -- and they're 30km *west* (against the prevailing winds) of the reactor. Tokyo today is at 4x their normal background, and they're *150km* away and tangential to the prevailing winds. And the accident is still ongoing, and will be for quite a while. And we're talking about external radiation, not inhaled/ingested particulate, which is orders of magnitude worse for the body than radiation from external sources (like most background radiation, like the radiation from X-rays, like the radiation from flying, etc).
Could you please put down the nuclear power pom poms for just a minute and enter the real world where this is a serious disaster having a serious effect on a first-world country?
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Inside Chernobyl's Sarcophagus - BBC Horizon (1996): http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B98ECEE5D787AABE
This is an amazing and terrifying retrospective, and a must watch for any fan of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.