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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."
OMG, we're all gonna die! Again!
From TFA:
That's a really important difference. It means the total release of radioactive material is far smaller. And the iodine, at least, is a lot less scary than the sort of stuff you get from fuel particles -- it has a half-life of only 8 days, so there's no real long-term environmental threat from that. (The cesium is rather worse -- half life of ~30 years.)
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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
And the "something" that just doesn't work is Slashdot fact-checking.
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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From TFA:
The amounts being released, he says, are "entirely consistent" with the relatively low amounts of caesium and iodine being measured in soil, plants and water in Japan, because so much has blown out to sea. The amounts crossing the Pacific to places like Sacramento are vanishingly small – they were detected there because the CTBT network is designed to sniff out the tiniest traces.
"Relatively low amounts" in Japan. "Vanishingly small" amounts elsewhere. Yeah, they're really sensationally hyping this one up. /sarcasm
I don't doubt the claim, I do doubt the presentation. Have some respect.
So you think the claim is true, but it should not have been presented? Reporting simple facts now is sensationalism? They should have had enough respect to simply not report it? (No doubt you'll claim they could have been presented in a less sensational manner, which is utterly ridiculous considering, but whatever. Clearly any reporting of these facts at all would be considered sensationalist by you.)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The article uses scientific notation to give the radiation release in becquerels.
It is impossible to be sensationalist when using scientific notation!
May the Maths Be with you!
DO NOT discount reports of contamination. DO NOT dismiss out of hand comparisons of Fukushima with Chernobyl.
I can't find a way to sugar coat that. Sorry.
The scary contamination in Tokyo is between 0.3% and 1.5% of the radioactive exposure you get from smoking one cigarette. Scary, isn't it?
"Spending a year close to Fukushima itself will have ZERO observable health effects."
Go for it. I'm sure they could use your assistance there.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Both Iodine and Cesium are only dangerous if you ingest significant quantities of them. Additionally they have halflives measured in hours
No.
I-131 8 days.
Cs-137 30.2 years.
The problem at Chernobyl was release of Uranium and Plutonium in clouds, which then spread around the site, and irradiated everything.
In the long term the problem was the Cs-137.
Does it really need to be said that the Japanese lost control of exactly 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000% of their nuclear fuel.
If exposure of the rods and burning off of radioactive isotopes is zero loss of control, then stabbing someone is zero loss of blood unless they die.
Wanna bet the author of this story is a "green scientist" ?
The only thing I'd bet is that you're thoroughly annoyed that an out-of-date power plant has demonstrated that humans need to try much harder when deploying nuclear power. You're deliberately polarising it as greens vs nuclear advocates when it's really the desire for safe nuclear power vs the desire for maximising profit at inappropriate risk.
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.
"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.
You rang?
SSC
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!
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?
Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion. Apart from initial explosions and the like, there's no good reason any sizeable number of people in an informed populace has to die because there's plenty of time to react. That doesn't mean you can ignore them or that they don't cause tens or hundreds of billion dollars in damages. You have to put forth heroic efforts to try to stop a catastrophe from becoming a megacatastrophe. You have to order the evacuations. You have to destroy produce and milk. You have to leave areas closed off to settlement and larger areas to agriculture. You have to find new water supplies. You have to seal off any sources of further radiation leakage, whatever the cost. And so on, all depending on the scale of the accident.
Everyone focuses on deaths with nuclear accidents, but apart from the sudden explosion/etc deaths and the deaths caused by a poor response to the disaster, nobody has to die in even a major nuclear accident. They're just really freaking expensive to deal with, in terms of containment, in terms of ruined property, and in terms of protracted economic damages.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?