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Radioactive Concrete From Fukushima Found In New Construction
mdsolar writes "The Japanese government is investigating how radioactive concrete ended up in a new apartment complex in the Fukushima Prefecture, housing evacuees from a town near the crippled nuclear plant. The contamination was first discovered when dosimeter readings of children in the city of Nihonmatsu, roughly 40 miles from the reactors at Fuksuhima Dai-ichi, revealed a high school student had been exposed to 1.62 millisieverts in a span of three months, well above the annual 1 millisievert limit the government has established for safety reasons."
While the use of contaminated materials is something to be concerned about, let's not forget how much radiation this actually is. It's roughly the equivalent of one chest CT scan per year.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Why are the building new housing complexes in the Fukishima Death Zone? Build prisons instead.
to spawn tentacle rape demons, have you never watched anime?
Clearly you weren't on Slashdot in 2003 and 2004, when the GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) troll group dominated the early posts in a comment thread. A handful of scattered, rather pathetic comments like the OP is nothing to be concerned about.
It works...
The gravel used in the cement came from a quarry in the town of Namie, located just miles from the Fukushima plant. While Namie sits inside the government mandated 12-mile “no-go” zone because of radiation concerns, it wasn’t completely closed off until the end of April, meaning the gravel was exposed to radiation spewing from the Fukushima plant during that time.
Mystery solved. The only thing we need to know is if the contractors got the gravel at a "special discounted price".
I guess one important question is, what's the half-life of this particular contamination?
And is it (relativly) sealed in, or can it become airborne?
Because radiation is not THAT dangerous?
Or, which I'm more inclined to believe, it is just a risk some governments are willing to take, with their underlying sentiment "A few retards born every now and won't hurt the polls too much."
Cynicism.
Thankfully the Japanese have much more common sense than the person and people like him spouting this prison crap.
Prisons are built to take away freedoms, not cause lifelong implicit bodily harm from radiation exposure. I cake a couple of guesses where you're from, that being some first world country who treats their citizens like third world crap and their prisoners like dogs and feel justified in doing so. You are the problem with humanity.
Why are the building new housing complexes in the Fukishima Death Zone? Build prisons instead.
They haven't developed the prison-industrial growth complex like the Americans have. Japan is a civilized society and does not have enough prisoners.
Before someone heartlessly suggests imprisoning the Fukishima workers, the guys who designed it / built it are retired / dead of old age, and a heck of a lot of the operators downed when they were sent home after the earthquake before the tsunami, and you don't need to build an entire prison to house the small number of fall guys left, and there seems little reason to punish the temps sent in after the disaster.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
From memory, they didn't post as AC though. Although it may just be wishful thinking that leads me to remember it that way.
Take a look at their drug laws, and how they sentence about a third of non-violent drug offenders to hard labor. I don't think you picked the right country to make a statement about enlightened treatment of prisoners. They may not have the sheer volume that the US does, but then again, who does?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
1.6 mSv is 1600 uSv. Just clarifying.
Cynical Idealist
Why are the building new housing complexes in the Fukishima Death Zone? Build prisons instead.
All they need is one kid with a homemade lab growing guppies in that apartment complex to brew up the first in Godzilla's family tree. Hollywood is that desperate for a blockbuster sequel.
And that dose was in only three months, so it is 64 chest X-rays per year.
Wow, talk about a blast from the past. I had all but forgotten the GNAA.
Funny thing about that, is locally there is a adolescent/teen sports league called the GNAA. I laugh whenever I see the fliers.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
So, the cesium is in the concrete. We need a way to block the radiation. Lead is usually a pretty good material for blocking radiation.
Oh... Lead Paint!
You're welcome.
John Hodgeman would be proud.
On a more serious note, does this actually matter? Kids don't stay at home 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so any estimates of the increase in exposure should, I hope, include the fact that kids are going to be gone something like 1/4 - 1/2 of the time they live there?
We live in a constant bath of low-level radiation. I'm not too worried about a slight increase in that background level of radiation.
Life evolved to live in varying levels of low-level radiation and survive. I'd have no fear of living there, or having my kids live there (I don't currently have kids, but I have no fear of low levels of radiation).
I believe he's talking about the legend of the cocktopus.
Wait, why is it the Fukushima Death Zone? Because of the people that died there when they drowned or were crushed by the tsunami?
Nobody has died from the radiation released by Fukushima, and likely no one will.
So should we continue to buy Honda's and Toyota's? I certainly don't want a vehicle that's going to expose me to radiation.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
They're already receiving glowing reviews.
I expect that even if they had not, still no one would have died.
Since you so sincerely believe that not to be true, would you mind working up the cumulative dose of radiation over the past year for someone inside the evacuated region near the plant?
Or are Slashdot posters that infatuated with nuclear? Seems like no matter what news comes out on that disaster, we've got apologists crawling out to explain how we don't need to worry about it and any concerns are the ignorant fears of the anti-nuke brainwashed.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Right.
There is nothing wrong with a little work, it is better then forcing all the prisoners to do nothing.
The absolutely least likely thing to stop someone from continuing to do drugs is putting them in prison.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It wasn't Japan that lost the war. It was Japan's army, it was there fault.
In this case it's not the Japan government letting their people get radiation, it's radiations fault.
If I lived there, I'd have radiation meters weaved into my clothes.
People go 'OH it's not that much' FINE, let government leaders live in those places. I wouldn't want my life shortened at all, I'm thinking 40 years down the road I don't want to die from horrible radiation inflicted disease, nor do I want to find out some sort of penis monster finds me attractive.
I don't think you picked the right country to make a statement about enlightened treatment of prisoners.
I was commenting on their quantity, both numerically and as a population rate, not their quality. Kind of like saying a heck of a lot more Japanese rent than Americans rent is talking about percentages, going on about how much our apartment buildings suck compared to theirs has nothing to do with the numbers.
Honestly, if they only have 1/10th the percentage of prisoners per population that we have, and we optimistically assume they only incarcerate what would be our worst 10% of inmates, they probably deserve whatever they're getting...
I don't think the Japanese have done the concentration camp / death camp thing since the 1940s, but we're proud patriots because we have Guantanamo Bay, so again I'm unimpressed.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
well above the annual 1 millisievert limit the government has established
1.62 mSv is not "well above" 1 mSv - it is practically the same.
Physics courses should be mandatory for "journalists"- as usual, they have no fucking clue what the hell they are writing about.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
The chart says 40 microsieverts for one chest X-ray. TFA says 1.6 millisieverts in three months. So, the rate is 640 chest X-rays per year, not one. That is much higher than the NRC's public exposure limit of 100 mrem/year (1 millisieverts/year).
I'm Japanese and I actually live about 20 minutes from one of the largest prison complexes in the country. The "hard labour" thing is true but it's not like they're smashing rocks in chain gangs - the prison I'm near they build and repair boats. Other prisons apparently make them do construction or factory style work. Most female prisons they apparently have them do things like cook and clean instead of harder labor. They are awarded the ammount of money for the work they've done at a set rate at the end of their sentence and in many cases they end up with skills (and a work ethic) they can use to make a living.
For juvenile offenders there is some physical labor (cleaning of their living quarters, etc.) but mainly they force them to study.
So the Japanese prison system just tries to make use of those imprisioned to reduce their societal debt, and in the process hopefully make them into valuable members of society by release. Of course if you are making the argument that they shouldn't imprison non-violent drug offenders to begin with it's not like other countries don't do the same. Prisons are societally treated like generic rehabilitation facilities anywhere you go in the world.
Nice troll. Attack a meaningless aesthetic issue (someone's knickname on /. - btw, my name isn't Biff, that's just part of a knickname) instead of something meaningful, then put words in someone's mouth that have nothing to do with what they said.
There are some "hotspots" where people should definitely not live till it's cleaned up. The immediate evacuation of the zone was certainly the right thing to do, until the fallout had fallen out, and measurements could be made of actual contamination. At this point, there are many parts of the zone where people can return and live safely, because the increase in radiation in those areas is just too low to be a hazard.
The more contaminated parts of the zone could be cleaned up; that might be happening, I'm not sure, but when you have a few small hotspots, you can clean those up, and leave the areas with very low contamination alone.
Outside of nuclear power, there's very few industries where you can pretty easily save pretty much everyone's life by doing a simple, orderly evacuation for a few weeks, then let people return to their homes. People somehow view nuclear accidents as worse than other Industrial Accidents, but I don't. Industrial Accidents are part of life (a part we try to take as much precaution as possible to avoid, but they will happen from time to time).
It's just that Nuclear Accidents, if you look at it rationally, are mostly much more benign than any other type of industrial accident.
I'd happily go live in the evacuation zone, except, I have no interest in living in Japan. My job, family, and life are here in the US.
Prisons are built to take away freedoms.
Clearly you've never been to an American prison.
can be boring without slashdot. If they are not here, they are probably napping....
You forget that cleaning one's room counts for 'hard labor' in the US.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The limit is 1 millisievert PER YEAR. The dose was accumulated in three months so the rate is 6.4 millisievert PER YEAR, well above the limit.
If you've got a Geiger counter, orange Fiestaware is the cat's meow.
1.6 mSv is 0.00162 mrem.
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/fiesta.htm Estimates for consumer exposure to the uranium in the glazing of orange Fiestaware show you could rack up to a mSv in just a few hours exposure.
Who wants to bet, that this batch of concrete had some orange Fiestaware mix into it, or perhaps just a natural concentration of pitchblende, and it has nothing to do with Fukushima?
When there are still questions regarding how much radioactive material is still being spewed out and contaminated debris is being incinerated (and reintroduced into the atmosphere) through-out the country, I would have to say that concrete is a safer place to have radioactive contamination. At least it is better than the lungs, kidneys, and other vital organs . . . which is much harder to measure and remains one of the great unknowns of this crisis.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Happy MLK to you, too.
Yes, a disproportionate number of inmates in the US are black.
Look at the punishment meted out for possession of crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine. Answering the question of "why" will probably explain a lot. Racism isn't dead yet. Better, but not dead.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Sorry for misreading.
Truth hurts and some people just can't accept it. I'm sure someone will say those numbers are made-up.
Immigration difficulties. That and there's no real tech industry out that way. I'd gladly live in Ibaraki or Chiba though (both of which are much closer to Tokyo.)
He said CT scan not a simple X-ray, much more radiation.
It is that there are some smart people who post here, people who can look at numbers and do a bit of math, and thus realize that this story is in fact a complete non-story since the levels are so low.
The anti-nuke crowd gets all worked up over radiation as a boogeyman without any thought. None of them seem to appreciate that you are exposed to radiation every day, every where, just by living. They seem to think ANY amount of radiation is evil.
Also plenty of people on Slashdot can do risk analysis and understand that yes, nuclear power has risks but so does everything else in the world. They've looked at the risk, and decided it was worth it.
I was commenting on their quantity, both numerically and as a population rate, not their quality.
Yeah, it is quite low. The US is ridiculously high. Good point. I'm just saying that drug penalties are ridiculous in Asia in general. The low incarceration rate may be as much culture as "system"... of course the two are intertwined, but that makes it even harder to look to another culture's system as a model.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm pretty sure it does for teenagers in most of the world...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
We have "hard labor" in the US as well, but I wouldn't hold the US up as a shining star of a justice system. Hard labor has an uncomfortable resemblance to slavery - especially if the "criminal" didn't actually hurt anyone. In the US after the Civil War, blacks were often arrested on bogus or inflated charges just so that they could be used for cheap labor.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Actually, for most teenagers that I know (I'm looking specifically at my niece), cleaning up their room would be hard labor. Probably on the order of a Superfund site.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#SI_multiples_and_conversions 1.6 mSv is 160 mrem
Your personal experience is but a single data point...
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
I don't know about that. I haven't heard many bad things about Chinese prisons; I think it's because, for any kind of serious crime, they simply execute them. It's the US where we keep people in concrete cells for decades at a time, subjecting them to daily anal rapes so that we can drive them insane.
>some first world country who treats their citizens like third world crap and their prisoners like dogs and feel justified in doing so
Arizona. Or Texas.
You are the problem with humanity.
Er, aren't criminals and crime one of humanity's biggest problems?
Geckos, not guppies.
Godzilla is a lizard, not a fish.
At least you picked a vertebrate.
The important statistics are the per-capita ones. Obviously, Japan doesn't have the population of the US, while China has far more, so you have to compare using per-capita statistics. According to those, the USA leads the world easily in incarceration, not Japan.
Japan might not treat some of their prisoners well, but obviously they have less crime and many fewer people (per capita) in prison. Why this is, is up for debate; I imagine it has a lot to do with their society, rather than their treatment of prisoners or drug laws. They have an extremely homogeneous society where honor is considered very important, and people commit suicide when they don't do well in school or whatever. That's totally different from here (USA), which is basically the complete opposite: people are completely different (though they largely speak the same basic language), with completely different values and beliefs, and doing well in school is seen as bad.
I'm just saying that drug penalties are ridiculous in Asia in general. The low incarceration rate may be as much culture as "system"... of course the two are intertwined, but that makes it even harder to look to another culture's system as a model.
Oh I donno, here's a statistical model. Assume They lock up only 1% the drug offenders We lock up. Assume people are the same here and there, and 99% of drug offenders follow Cheech and Chong as their role models, and 1% of drug offenders follow the bad guy in the movie "Scarface" as their role model. Here we lock up 100 people and say our lax laws are still too harsh, because Cheech and Chong are funny and cool. They lock up one dude and leave Cheech and Chong wannabes alone, hopefully they just lock up the bad guy from the movie "Scarface" and they give him a really hard time, well, heck, he deserves it, so of course his penalty will be ridiculous.
I think most of the flack the "asian drug laws" like death to dealers get is not bad legislation, but bad judiciary. The bad guy from Scarface, yeah, he would have earned the death penalty, nothing wrong with that legislation. The problem is when their judges completely F-up and they wanna give Cheech and Chong the death penalty, especially if its just killing them to make a political point. Bad judges are not the fault of bad drug legislation, they're the fault of bad judge appointment legislation, bad laws about judicial corruption, etc.
Or in summary, if you're only gonna punish the worst 1%, well, to a westerner used to giving everyone a slap on the wrist, those 1% are getting an overly harsh sentence, but if their judges are competent (if only...), its weirdly enough not a bad idea.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Prisons are societally treated like generic rehabilitation facilities anywhere you go in the world.
It might be that way in other countries, but here in the USA it's just a place for people to be tortured by anal rape, and for prison corporations to make a lot of money. There's no serious effort at rehabilitation there, though they might make than claim.
A couple of the Fukushima workers were exposed to some pretty heavy dosages. Only a matter of time for them.
And the statistical nature of exposure and the way radiation does its thing means that it's unlikely but possible for anyone exposed to the initial releases of material, or to material that travelled long distances, can ultimately die from it. Japan's population density is much thicker than almost any other place, so this tiny likelihood becomes a statistically significant likelihood across the larger number.
So it's very likely someone will die from the radiation released by Fukushima, but unlikely anyone will ever be able to connect it conclusively.
Shall we compromise and call it the Fukushima Danger Zone?
But you don't arrest people because they are statistically likely to be criminals, you arrest people for crimes they actually commit. The crimes for simple possession in Japan are far higher than they are even in the US. Hell, marijuana possession in the US is a misdemeanor in many places under a certain amount. In Japan you can't possess even a tenth of a gram.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Let's see... various things that have been and still are criminal: Having sex in an unsanctioned way between two consenting adults. Speaking against the elite of the region you're in. Drinking alcohol.
I'd say "no". I'd say that crime in itself isn't a problem at all - various things that are crimes are, but the fact that something is a crime doesn't make it wrong.
Japan is extremely efficient and wastes little. That makes contamination containment a lot more difficult. I doubt any comprehensive high level mapping of the interactive supply chains exist, but that is what will need to be created to really contain anything. Concrete is a nice dead-end, at least for however long the structure will last. However, how will they dispose of these structures without reintroducing radioactive dust into the atmosphere again?
I think the Fukushima accident will show that the NRC and all other similar regulators have grossly, grossly underestimated the amount of intricate planning and updating of plans is required to prepare for such accidents. Costs of maintaining such plans will be the enormous but insignificant to the costs of not having a viable plan when an accident does occurs.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Umm... all concrete is radioactive. All. Perhaps this concrete is a wee bit more radioactive, but last time I checked, rocks contain traces of things like Potassium, Uranium, and virtually every other naturally occurring radioactive element. It's no big deal unless you eat it... and if so, you're probably a person that also eats silica gel and has a host of other medical problems.
Explain? I've never been to an American prison either, but from what I understand they're meant to lock people up and stealing their labor for whoever owns the prison. Sounds like taking away freedoms to me.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Yes, I'm sure. That Mangano-Sherman "Study" has been roundly criticized as using extremely flawed methods and cherry picking data to come to a pre-determined conclusion.
Don't believe me? Try Scientific American.
Mutated vegetables? Please, that kind of thing has been going on forever. You'll find wierd looking produce in any garden or field of appreciable size. If you can show that the rates of mutation are much higher, statistically, than *normal*, that's one thing, but having a smart-ass blog with a few mutated fruits and veggies doesn't prove anything.
You could almost certainly even find babies from Japan with Birth Defects that have been born since Fukushima, but again, humans have been being born with Birth Defects for as long as their have been humans. That doesn't mean Fukushima caused those defects.
This might sound crass. . . while I do feel bad for those workers, and their friends and family, a couple of deaths in a large industrial accident would be no worse than almost any other heavy industry. Does that mean we should shut down all industry?
My OP was a reply to the claim that there is a "Fukushima Death Zone", and is really more focused on the perceived threat to public health, not a couple workers at the plant.
As for those workers, however, there is a good possibility that they will be fine. Radiation exposure at those levels can increase the risk of cancer, but is by no means a guarantee they will get cancer. Jimmy Carter got a large exposure to radiation as a young naval officer, it doesn't appear to have shortened his life - he's lived to a ripe old age, it seems to em.
Of course, not everyone will be so lucky in the same situation as Jimmy, but the point is, 2 people getting a large exposure which may or may not give them cancer in 10 or 20 years doesn't seem an unreasonable risk for such a hugely beneficial industry as electricity generation.
since that movie Back to the Future, I've seen this pattern. Is everyone named Biff an idiot?
Then you fail at pattern recognition - or perhaps you have not seen all three. Yes, Biff Tannen is an idiot, and in every version of history/reality shown, he is an idiot. His descendant Griff Tannen is an idiot, and his ancestor Buford Tannen is an idiot. But there is only ever one Biff Tannen.
Hey, is your surname Tannen, by any chance?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
There weren't 2 million deaths from Chernobyl. Crackpots keep spewing out junk science studies that are deeply flawed, and people who have a pre-existing bias to accept every bad thing said about nuclear power keep latching on to such studies (just like the one the previous post mentioned about the 14,000 deaths from Fukushima) with no skepticism at all. They have plenty of skepticism for anything good said about nuclear power. Anything that contradicts their bias.
Seriously, the only "study" which concludes 2 million deaths from Chernobyl has basically been retracted by the New York Academy of Sciences, who published a translation of it in the U.S.
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
On that page, they have a link to a review of the "study" by a scientist that NYAS decided was important to link to. Here's some enlightening quotes from that review:
"In the opinion of this reviewer, the authors unfortunately did not appropriately analyze the
content of the Russian-language publications, for example, to separate them into those that
contain scientific evidence and those based on hasty impressions and ignorant
conclusions."
"The value of this review is not zero, but negative, as its bias is obvious only to specialists,
while inexperienced readers may well be put into deep error."
"Yablokov's
assessment for the mortality from Chernobyl fallout of about one million (!) before 2004
(Subsection 7.7) puts this book in a range of rather science fiction than science. It is obvious
that if such a mass death of people occurred, it would not have remained unnoticed, even
more because it is not so much about the population of the three countries, than about the rest
of Europe and even countries outside Europe (!)."
"1.62 millisieverts in a span of three months"
Big Fucking Deal. Here around due to the granitic rock and radon , we are getting in average a bit less than 5 mSv per year. For Japan it is about 1mSv. Assuming that radiation dose per 3 month is in addition to the normal natural dose, they are geeting per year about the same as we got in our house : around 5 mSv per year. And the world average is around 2.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation. Anything under 10 mSv per year I would not even bat an eye.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The "hard labour" thing is true but it's not like they're smashing rocks in chain gangs - the prison I'm near they build and repair boats.
Do not for a second underestimate the wretched misery of boat construction and repair. If you only knew of the forbidden rock smashing chain gang fantasies of those pitiful sons of bitches...
The Admin and the Engineer
That chart prompts a really interesting question. To those taking it to heart as some sort of proof of the inferiority or superiority of some particular group, I have to ask, are you male or female? Because if you're male and looking at that chart and sneering down at blacks and hispanics as inferior, are you also acknowledging vast superiority of women on those same criteria? Or are you being a hypocrite?
perhaps we should substitute "crime" with "antisocial behaviour"?
gimme your hard disk and i'll find something in it that will have you hanged.
That article on the study you quote is not honest. As a person trained in radiation safety I can tell you that this quote:
is blatantly FALSE. For simple proof of this consider that every x-ray facility in the US has signage that says something like this:
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
With modern "private" browsers the harddisks of his provider may be more revevealing.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Doubting the conclusions drawn does not mean doubting the data itself.
Disclaimer: none of the above should be seen as an indication of my personal opinion. This can be used as such: Racism (the first conclusion) is always to simple an assumption. The differences between individuals are to big for it to be otherwise. Even if there was large scale data, the results would be changed other factors.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Maybe it's rehabilitation combined with training for the porn industy?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
The fact that not only Biff is an idiot does not invalidate the assumption that all Biff's are idiots. From his POV, all data points indicate all Biff's are idiots. /. Biff is an idiot. I assume he isn't, he's just pro nuke (while AC is anti-nuke).
Note: I do not know whether this
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Somebody has forgotten, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.