China Detects 10 Cases of Radiation Contamination, 2 In Hospital

According to an article at The Sydney Morning Herald, "China has detected 10 cases of radioactive contamination among passengers, aircraft, ships and containers arriving from Japan since March 16, quarantine authorities said on Saturday. On Wednesday, radiation exceeding permitted levels was detected on two ships from the Japanese port of Chiba, near Tokyo, in the ports of Nantong and Zhangjiagang, Li Yuanping, spokesman of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said on its website." Meanwhile, airborne radiation from Japan is detectable in China, but thus far not considered a danger.

Comments

from china ...

[Anonymous Coward]

this being from China, we must assume this is a political maneuver, and that any truth behind it is incidental.

PR perhaps?

[cptdondo]

Given the long standing animosity between the Japanese and the Chinese, and the Chinese Gov't's total control of information, now much of this is true and how much is PR to smear Japan?

My personal guess is that it has just enough truth in it to be irrefutable but little basis in actual fact. The chinese immigration goons could just have been told to grab 2 passengers at random and tell them they're contaminated and haul them off to the gulag^W hospital.

Re:PR perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

There a wide margin between analysis and throwing shit at the wall to see what will stick...

Guess on which side you are...

How aboot 'unrelated considerations'. Yes Japan and China are not always in good terms. But China immediately send support and search teams after the quake/tsunami/nukesplosion.

They are close to Japan. The plant is throwing up 24/7 for the last month or so.

And when a neighbouring country detect radiation from ships or people coming from japan you decide it's a political move ? /yeah sure...

Re:PR perhaps?

[DMiax]

Given the long standing animosity between the Japanese and the Chinese, and the Chinese Gov't's total control of information, now much of this is true and how much is PR to smear Japan?

It does not look even remotely true. The ship where they found "radiation" arrived in china on 22nd of March, which does not look enough for the contaminants to reach the ship. Moreover the stopped passengers are Japanese, and China has already an experience of stopping Japanese men for bogus reasons (some of them were taken as "spies" for retaliation in the Fisherman incident a few months ago).

Re:PR perhaps?

[MidnightBrewer]

I live in Japan and I can tell you that China did not immediately send support; they sent a handful of people after several days, and finally ramped things up when it became the media circus it is now and people started commenting that China wasn't really participating much.

The Chinese government's radiation scare is just that; with the exception of Japanese TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) workers, nobody's been allowed close enough to suffer any significant exposure. If they were exposed, then they voluntarily traveled inside the 20-km evacuation radius and it's their own damn fault. The cases of contamination were mostly due to radiation detected on ships, which was most likely on the ships' hulls themselves, picked up from trace amounts in the ocean.

The Chinese themselves say it's trace amounts. However, they also don't usually use radiation detectors at the airport, either, and they don't disclose their definition of abnormally high levels.

This is business as usual for relations between Japan and China. Google last year's scuffle when a Chinese trawler rammed a Japanese coast guard ship and see what you get.

They really don't like Japan huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the radiation level dropping lower and lower to 0.1-2 uSv/h, way below what you'd get from a single flight (40 uSv), this is just another case of the Chinese hating the Japanese. Maybe I'm not so used to the way "mainlanders" think anymore, having move from liberal Hong Kong to Europe years ago, but IMO it really is time to leave the past behind. Sadly, judging from the timing of broadcasting nationalistic WW2 documentary directly after the quake and now this, I guess it will take another generation at least.

Re:They really don't like Japan huh?

[lennier]

With the radiation level dropping lower and lower to 0.1-2 uSv/h

I'm sorry, but - what?

Which "radiation level" are you referring to? There's not one "the". There's the trace emissions in the jetstream worldwide, there's the iodine and cesium contamination locally within the evacuation zone (in one hotspot measuring higher than in the Chernobyl exclusion zone), there's the over 1Sv/hr extremely hot water (like, stand next to it for an hour and you get radiation sickness) in the drainage pit under the plant, there's the thousands times normal iodine contamination leaking into the seawater, with the potential to either make a lot of fish very sick or worse, bioaccumulate in fish tissue for decades to come. There's the "jumpers" being recruited to work onsite in multi-Sievert conditions where you get your lifetime's exposure in 15 mins...

Somewhere in the world, yes, there is "a" radiation level associated with this Situation Normal All Fukushima'd which is still in the microSievert range. That does not mean everything everywhere associated with it is peachy keen and shiny.

It's entirely possible, for instance, that the 20km zone might not be usable for farming for the next 300 years.

Re:They really don't like Japan huh?

[compro01]

there's the thousands times normal iodine contamination leaking into the seawater, with the potential to either make a lot of fish very sick or worse, bioaccumulate in fish tissue for decades to come.

What exactly is going to bioaccumlate for decades? Iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days and decays into stable Xenon-131.

Re:They really don't like Japan huh?

[AliasMarlowe]

What exactly is going to bioaccumlate for decades? Iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days and decays into stable Xenon-131.

The question is whether or not they are detecting Iodine-129, which decays into Xenon-129, but has a half-life of 15.7 million years. I know nuke bombs and fission reactors create it, but haven't heard how much of this isotope has been found.

Unlike I-131, I-129 IS a problem in the environment over the long term.

On the other hand, to detect comparable rates of beta emission, you'd need about 700million times as much I-129 as I-131. The half-life determines not just the time scale of the emission process, but also its intensity per gram of material.

Re:They really don't like Japan huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow FUD much? about 2% of all boars shot have radiation levels too high to eat, and the level of radiation found is no where near the level linked to cancer.
http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/312515/germanys-radioactive-boars-a-legacy-chernobyl

You would have to eat 3 lbs of boar meat that is 10x the legal limit to get the same dose as just living one year longer.

Re:The next trend in air travel?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do it like with radiation (uranium, thorium, etc.) in coal - you burn the stuff where radiation is and then you say you don't have radiation anymore since it went "up the chimney"! Problem solved!!

Maybe the nuclear industry could take a hint from coal - just burn the radioactive waste on big pile! Problem solved! DUH!!

Slashdot should know better

[RanBato]

Than to allow these type of false alarm / fear mongering articles on their main page. No actual numebrs mentioned in article 1. Article 2 makes it pretty clear there is no danger. Nothing to see here, please move on.

Re:The next trend in air travel?

[Hittman]

And then you ship it to the US.

Detectable means nothing!

[kombipom]

You can detect (and identify) the radiation from the atmospheric bomb testing that took place decades ago! Radiation detection equipment is extremely sensitive. Without numbers (and units) "detected" means absolutely nothing. Please /. stop reporting this non-news, it's just infuriating to anyone with even a basic understanding of radiation safety/physics.