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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."

6 of 537 comments (clear)

  1. Interview with Chernobyl cleanup director by FriendlyLurker · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Speaking of Chernobyl, below is and interview with a former director of the Soviet Spetsatom agency handling the Chernobyl case. He has plenty of published papers out there and apparently now teaches and advises on nuclear safety in Vienna. In the interview he gives four scenarios for the Japanese reactors... I wonder what the verdict is not a week later.

    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

  2. Re:Misleading summary by Glock27 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    radiation kills long term (unless it's a massive dose)

    That is commonly accepted thinking, but is apparently incorrect.

    The tens of thousands more distant from Ground Zero, and who received lower exposures to radiation, did not die in droves. To the contrary, and surprisingly, they outlived their counterparts in the general population who received no exposure to radiation from the blasts.

    These findings come from the Atomic Bomb Disease Institute of the Nagasaki University School of Medicine, which has been analyzing the medical records of survivors continuously since 1968.

    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
  3. Re:Sensational! by nospam007 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.

  4. Re:Sensational! by NoSleepDemon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Sensational! by rjstanford · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!
  6. Re:Sensational! by Rei · · Score: 5, Interesting

    He's correct on everything else though

    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?