Slashdot Mirror
Fukushima Soil Contamination Probed
AmiMoJo writes "New research has found that radioactive material in parts of north-eastern Japan exceeds levels considered safe for farming. The findings provide the first comprehensive estimates of contamination across Japan following the nuclear accident in 2011. An international team of researchers took measurements of the radioactive element caesium-137 in soil and grass from all but one of Japan's 47 regions. The researchers estimate that caesium-137 levels close to the nuclear plant were eight times the safety limit, while neighbouring regions were just under this limit."
A huge earthquake and a tsunami both well above the level the plant was designed to withstand and it took it, with just some slight explosions and making great swathes of land uninhabitable for generations.
Nuclear power ftw!
Lets not forget the reactor up the coastline that took just as big of a hit..and came out relatively unscathed because someone took the time and knowledge to build it higher than sea level in a country prone to Tsunami.
Poor Engineering FTW!
It will be fine. The next generation of henti will just include the tentacles on the girls to begin with
They built a plant that was supposed to last 100 years, and only set it up to survive smaller earthquakes. At the time of build, there had been 10 earthquakes in the last 1000 years big enough to f Fukushima up. Divide 1000 years by 10 earthquakes that bad = 1 per 100 years. And it was supposed to operate for 100 years. The arrogance of "maybe we'll get lucky this 100 yrs" vs. "let's make it work for 0.2 higher on the richter scale" is what is at fault here.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The only thing that surprises me is that someone seriously came out with a study prior to this one saying the soil was A-OK after what happened.
You'd have to be pretty dense to believe that.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The study seems to be based on few actual measurements, it is mostly a modeling of how the material spread. Additional measurements are needed in the areas where the model predicted high dosage.
If memory serves, protocol for maximizing survival after a nuclear 'event' requires feeding the most contaminated food materials to elderly people, or people without useful skills, as the former are likely to die of natural causes before radiation-induced cancers get them and the latter do not enhance group survival chances.
Already been done. You're not into monster girls I take it?
Oh, no! How will humanity survive???
BTW Cesium-137 half life is about 30 years, so "uninhabitable for generations" is a bit of a stretch. The only way that statement could be true is in the area immediately surrounding the plant, and only If they do absolutely nothing at all - no treatment, no cleanup, nothing. Then, yeah, it would take 90 years to get down to the limit.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
With radiation levels of 8 times the safe level for farming, it'll take 3 half-lives for them to decline to the safe level. Or, about 90 years, as Cs-137 has a half-life of about 30 years and it decays to the stable barium-137.
Although the land won't be suitable for farming for many years, botanists already know how to accelerate the cleanup by using plants that soak up radiation and contamination like sponges (phytoremediation.) Such contamination studies have been done at several major universities (including my own local one, which cleaned up an area that had been contaminated with non radioactive mercury within one year.) The question is whether Japan will swallow its pride and have its farmland turned into short term radioactive gardens.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Except the earthquake is not what caused the problems. The generators that were shut down by flood waters, effectively killing the cooling system, causing overheating and eventually meltdown, Did.
And of course you can just skim the soil off of the worst areas and put it in a big pile with a "do not touch until 2100" sign. Expensive for farmland, but definitely within the scope of human endeavor. Hell, Cesium-137 even has industrial uses - maybe there is a way to extract it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...And what created the biggest flood waters to hit the plant ever? An earthquake. Tsunamis aren't an unknown phenomenon that they didn't know about when the plant was built.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Except that it is farmland. So they'll just plow it in, diluting the concentration.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So this is a computation using a statistical model to give estimates of the soil contamination, and it becomes facts and measured quantities in the ground. But worse, look at the original scale provided by the authors of the paper: it clearly shows the areas under 2500Bq/kg, but the journalist conveniently merged it with the upper-bound area and also avoided the use of the green/blue colors usually associated with safe values in any mapping. Maybe the original map had not enough red and orange area for effective scare-mongering ? BBC I am disappointed...
http://www.transparency.org
AND except for the Japanese government still hasn't come clean about the extent of contamination. And seemingly has no plans to do so.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We do have numbers regarding natural radioactive substances in the environment and human bodies. Among them potassium-40 which decays into Argon-40, the third most common gas in our atmosphere - about 250 times more common than CO2. We also have numbers regarding decay products of uranium in areas where there are above-average levels of those in the soil. The results show that there is no difference in health even in areas contaminated more heavily than this.
Note that it takes about 60-120Bq of Cs-137 to equal 1Bq of Alpha radiation - because there is a quality factor ("damage multiplier") of 20 involved and Alpha decay has energies between about 3 and 8 MeV, whereas Cs-137 only has a quality factor of 1 and about 1MeV. All those are measured in Bq/kg, because it is a pervasive property of the soil that won't go away.
Fortunately, Japan is more or less free, so studies like this can run around taking measurements and publishing them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
To be fair there were a lot of towns build in areas that no-one expected to flood. The Japanese spend a huge amount of time and money preparing for natural disasters, after all they do have very regular earthquakes and tsunami. Fukushima Daiichi survived the tsunami fairly well except for the backup generators which were its Achilles heal, and which at Fukishima Daini up the cost were made flood-proof.
So rather than is being a problem of where the plant was built it was the failure of TEPCO to fix the backup system's vulnerability to flooding which they were warned about.
Most Japanese people do not blame anyone for failing to predict the scale of the tsunami. Everyone did their best and it was simply an event beyond what anyone thought was possible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sooner or later consumer confidence will be destroyed because of radiation risks. It will be difficult for the food consumers to develop any trust in the food they can buy and eat. Chances are high that any domestic product will contain some ingredient that is contaminated. I expect gradual, hidden poisoning of the Japanese people even in uncontaminated areas.
But half the current radioactivity of Cesium is Cs-134 with a half-life of 2 years (thus being 15 times as radioactive for equivalent amounts). Which basically reduces the time by 30 years outright. It is known from other sites (Sellafield, Chernobyl) that a lot of the Cs will inevitably be removed by erosion, migrating deeper into the soil and being absorbed by clay minerals - thus not being bio-available (that is, staying in the soil and not being taken up by plants growing in the soil).
Without decontamination we're still talking about decades.
But it's not like Sellafield or Chernobyl, because the problem is limited to Cs. There is no Sr-90, no activation products or Plutonium to speak of (some 0.6Bq/kg were found right next to the power plant - it is not clear whether this is from the powerplant or Cold War residue which has similar concentrations in Japan.)
i love it when "balanced reporting" involves putting the "sky is falling" and the "nothing's happening" people in the same room.
shades of grey suck. it's all about contrast.
I hate it when establishment-defenders mods a perfectly good post down (not referring to your post, but to moderators).
Exactly why I de-bookmarked /. years ago. Too many closed-minded elitists who seek to mute those opinions that disagree with their own world-view. Good luck believing this latest propaganda-piece which is not based on any real measurements, but on theoretical models.
Can't be bothered reading facts of course. Cognitive dissonance with the establishment would hurt too much. Cowards.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I hate it when establishment-defenders mods a perfectly good post down (referring to moderators).
Exactly why I de-bookmarked /. years ago. Too many closed minded elitists who seek to mute those opinions that disagree with their own world-view. Good luck believing this latest propaganda-piece which is not based on any real measurements, but on theoretical models.
Can't be bothered reading facts of course. Feelings of cognitive dissonance with the establishment would hurt too much.
This is not even worth my time. Cowards.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
That's still a touch too black-and-white ; the earthquake and tsunami were always possible, but they were not considered a sufficiently high probability to be designed against. Those probability assessments have no doubt been revised.
Other commentators are forgetting that there is a reason the reactors were built at sea-level : they need the cooling water. Putting them (say) 100m above sea level would increase the power requirements for pumping cooling water up to the plants, which would mean that you need more (or bigger) power stations. (Plus, of course, putting them on hillsides would increase the risk of ground instability in a large earthquake.)
The design of these structures was rational. Some of the design assumptions (e.g. the probability of earthquakes of magnitude X) may have been incorrect, with hindsight, but that is a different thing from being recklessly negligent.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Some of the design assumptions (e.g. the probability of earthquakes of magnitude X) may have been incorrect, with hindsight, but that is a different thing from being recklessly negligent.
I don't think many people would accept that. When it comes to nuclear safety they expect that all conceivable dangers are addressed, no matter how remote. For example new reactors in France are airplane proof, just in case someone decides to crash a jet liner full of fuel into one. Highly unlikely but the consequences are so severe it is deemed necessary.
TEPCO should have improved the emergency cooling system when they were warned about it. Even if the probability was extremely low they should have done it. And in actual fact the nuclear regulator thought that the chance of great enough to be worth it anyway, it was TEPCO that disagreed on what appear to be financial grounds.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm not disagreeing that TEPCO's various technical and financial calculations were incorrect. But that is a different thing to being "reckless", in both legal and moral senses.
(There are specific charges in the legal system that I work under that make a very clear distinction between actions that are "reckless" and ones that are ill-advised or poorly judged. For example, a case that a friend of mine in the trade union business was involved in a couple of years ago involved a building contractor one of whose workmen was injured when a trench collapsed. The contractor claimed that he'd been planning to shore the trench up when it got to a certain depth, and had made an error of calculation about what that depth should have been. The trade union (acting for it's injured member) asserted that, because there was no shoring material - boards and scaffolding poles - nor a plan for the shoring on site, then the contractor had been reckless - he'd completely ignored or not considered that risk. The judge found the contractor had indeed been recklessly negligent, and doubled the damages.)
What did Churchill say? Something about "two countries being so divided by sharing a common language"?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Being "recklessly negligent" has a very specific meaning
I know, which is why I didn't say it. My point has nothing to do with the definition of phrases in your comment, it is based on the fact that people in general are unlikely to accept that any decision which involves calculating the odds of a particular disaster happening. As far as they are concerned when it comes to nuclear if there is any danger at all which can be defended against failure to do so is unacceptable.
That is why French reactors are now being made suicide-jet-aircraft-attack proof. With re-enforced cockpit doors and more screening before boarding the plane the chances of it happening are very very low, but the people through their government demand it anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'd like to respond to this, merely out of respect for such an opinion contrary to the /. mantra of: "getting high moderation means insightful or interesting posts". Long long ago, when I started /. I was fascinated by the moderation system. However, I also read posts by people complaining only finding the real gems at -1 or 0 (I do not have the time nor inclination for such tasks).
Now having posted with karma bonus, and getting moderated down, just for posting sincere videos and articles, I see what those people _10_ years ago meant.
I'm not saying I know everything. In fact, I'd LOVE to get a contrary opinion to my links, which do include independent nuclear scientists and medical experts, as well as ordinary people with children STILL IN Fukushima. However, when the "discussion" is promptly moderated down to 0 or sometimes -1 (they didn't have the nerve this time), then it just stops. No. Exchange. Of. Ideas. Anymore. Period.
See the videos. It's absolutely amazing: Japan is handling its nuclear crisis hundred times WORSE than Russians did Chernobyl. Something to think about while the media and politicians cheer on Japanese "efficiency".
My .sig also explains perfectly WHY /.ers have such problems with contrary opinions and free exchange of ideas. It's pretty sad really, thinking how highly intellectual they think of themselves. Myself, I do not have all the answers, but I know I have experienced enough to see that /. and mainstream do not have it either, and that you have to dig quite thoroughly in the unknown to find anything new. Yes, there's alot of mud and superstition, but there's gems also, and often, it's hard to know which is which.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Well all I can do is thank you for your post and hope that you will persist, this is where I find gems too. As for the Dogmatic Nuclear fanboi Skeptics found here on slashdot all I can suggest is that you draw a real sense of entertainment from disassembling their psyches after demolishing their arguments, after all you may find that it serves you in face to face situation when you encounter the same arguments.
Believe me I share your sense of frustration. If I see your comments, I'll mod them up as I'm getting the impression that the sane, independent and rational thinkers here have been diluted by the masses duped by social proof.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.