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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 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.
Of course, if you read TFA, you find that the legal limits are only exceeded in the area immediately around the plant, and that everywhere else it's fine.
In other words, we have this exclusion zone. And we shouldn't be farming there....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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!
I have to quote each time this topic pops up those two idiots on slashdot on March 16. 2011:
AnonGCB (1398517) says:
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
Containment chambers indeed!
On which kannibal_klown (531544) answers:
Hey, I know it. But Joe Sixpack is gonna say "But look at their problems now, I don't want that here." Bla bla bla
Beavis and Butthead anyone?
I just read through a lot of that thread. It's really telling how many well-educated, smart people here on Slashdot, who really SHOULD know better, always run and start parroting whatever the media the tells them and sticking their heads in the sand when the shit REALLY hits the fan.
Fukushima is STILL emitting dangerous radiation, and the crisis is STILL far from over, while it may not be over for at least a decade. That's the reality, and that so many people who claim to be in the upper echelons of intelligence choose to ignore it, frankly scares the shit out of me.
The coal crisis begins the moment a plant goes into operation. A coal plant operating normally spreads deadly (carcinogenic and even radioactive) pollution over a huge area. Coal proponents such as yourself accept the damage, even though it's greater than the damage of a nuclear plant by a large margin, because it's spread over a greater area. Whether or not you realize it, you're advocating for the entire world to become an exclusion zone.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
Show me one anti-nuclear protagonist mentioning risk assessments and mitigation procedures. If they would, they would have to admit that effective procedures are in place wherever people cared about the placement and number of emergency generators (2 per reactor is not enough, 4 per reactor is standard. The shutdown German reactor at Isar-1, for example, had 8 emergency generators.), wherever they installed filtered containment vents and catalytic converters to prevent hydrogen explosions. All that is standard at least is France, Germany and Sweden. (I don't mention other countries, because I don't know anything about them and I stopped making assumption about such things on March 12th or so.) They would also have to admit that Fukushima Daiichi was one of the worst governed nuclear power plants in the world.
Hence, they don't. It is the pro-nuclear side that must make those points. All argumentation about lack in safety standards undermines the position of the anti-nuclear side, because of the anti-nuke dogma that nuclear power can't be safe, safety standards must not be talked about unless it is to dismiss the present state of safety of some plant. Talking about a lack of safety standards of a plant after an accident reinforces the revolutionary notion that safety standards can actually improve safety (as you could see in the accident-free shutdown in all other tsunami-hit powerplants) - which is not in the interest of the anti-nuclear crowd.
So what does it say about the situation, when the pro-side has to argue with arguments that the anti-side should have brought forth, while the anti-side has basically decided not to argue and resorts of FUD and dogmatism instead?
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
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.)