NOAA Study: Radiation From Fukushima Very Dilluted, Seafood Safe

JSBiff writes "Ars Technica is reporting on a study by NOAA scientists who surveyed the ocean near Fukushima, which concludes that while a lot of radioactivity was released into the water, as would be expected, it diluted out to levels that pose little risk to wildlife or humans, and that the seafood is safe to eat. Perhaps we needn't worry so much about "millions of gallons of radioactive water" being released into the ocean, like it's a major environmental disaster, as it's really not — the ocean is many orders of magnitude larger than any accidental release of radiation which might happen from a nuclear plant."

Comments

Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

I wonder which will prevail ?

I lied. Heh. I wish I wondered.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[bigredradio]

Actually, which will prevail? Politically motivated scaremongering or corporations manipulating safety data to prevent a drop in stock price.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Moheeheeko]

Obligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[i kan reed]

If you're worried about contaminated fish, worry about mercury, from fossil fuel usage. Eating fish every day is basically a no-no these days thanks to the LACK of nuclear power.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[0racle]

Scaremongering it is.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[borrrden]

The Tokyo one seems mislabeled as milli instead of micro (especially going by the block sizes). I think there would be a huge problem with 40 millisieverts.....

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Baloroth]

Actually, which will prevail? Politically motivated scaremongering or corporations manipulating safety data to prevent a drop in stock price.

[citation needed]

Seriously, unless you have some evidence to back that up, simply claiming scientific fraud because you happen to disagree with the results is not a valid argument, sorry. The scientists give hard numbers to justify their conclusions, even mentioning that the released contamination was on the high sides of the estimates. Fortunately, the ocean is really, really big, so even an apparently massive amount of contamination (relatively speaking) amounts to an extremely diluted concentration.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[TheRaven64]

It's not stupid if there is no safe option. Our choices are something unsafe or something else unsafe. The rational thing to do is evaluate the problems with both and compare them.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[squizzar]

Nuclear material will decay, mercury will not.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Hatta]

Failing to realize that there are different degrees of safety, and that nuclear is much, much safer than coal, is even stupider.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[dragonhunter21]

Where do we put the waste from fossil fuels? Remember, a lot of those byproducts are toxic or carcinogenic, too. But we just pump them into the atmosphere.

Fossil fuels make a lot of moderately deadly waste that just goes everywhere. Nuclear power makes a little waste, which is admittedly very deadly, but we know exactly where it is. So far as storing it, the only reason it's a problem at all is that we're so scared of radioactive waste that we end initiatives to safely store it. How sick is that? If we had Yucca Mountain, we could stop storing nuclear waste at the plants and put it out in the middle of Fuckall Nevada under a mountain! How much safer can you get?

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Raul654]

"simply claiming scientific fraud because you happen to disagree with the results is not a valid argument, sorry." - while this is true a philosophy class, in the real world it falls down. In the real world, there are plenty of scientists whose results can be discounted a priori. I automatically discount anything a "scientist" employed by a tobacco company has to say about cigarette safety, or that an oil company scientist has to say about global warming or the safety of fracking. It's too easy for them to cause bias in their results in ways that are nearly impossible for a non-expert to figure out.

In this case, the results were from NOAA, which doesn't have a horse in the race, as far as I'm aware.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[GungaDan]

"the results were from NOAA, which doesn't have a horse in the race"

It has two in the ark.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Quiet_Desperation]

extremely diluted concentration.

Cripes, the homeopathic crowd will never go near a beach again.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[michelcolman]

On the contrary, they will all go to the beach to be protected from radiation. After all, a lot of homeopatic "medicines" work by diluting a harmful components so much that only its "memory" is left, and this supposedly protects you from that component.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[tnk1]

Given the homeopathic mindset, they're probably falling over themselves to head to the beach so that the extremely diluted radioactivity will give then 1950s era superpowers.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Americano]

It would be great to be absolutely safe in every way, but it just isn't realistic.

It is so realistic. It just requires bubble wrap. LOTS and LOTS of bubble wrap.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Raul654]

I'm not an expert on cigarette safety, global warming, or hydraulic fracturing. With each of these industries, there's an obvious conflict of interest between the people employed in those industries putting out data related to those industries. And, I should add, each of those industries have long histories of putting out scientific misinformation that is nigh impossible for a non-expert to spot.

Here's a little case study to prove my point. It's a classic 9/11 trutherism argument. Can you spot the fallacy? (Without looking it up, that is)
Fact #1 - Steel melts at 1300 degrees C.
Fact #2: Jet fuel burns at roughly 650 degrees C.
Conclusion - The Twin Towers could not have been brought down by jet planes because airplane fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel.

The fallacy in the above case lies in the assumption that steel has to melt in order to bring down the trade towers. At 650 degrees C, steel loses 90% of its strength. But how many ordinarily non-engineers know this off the top of their head?

As far as your claims about climate scientists, I'll be more skeptical of their conclusions when I'm shown that they have a horse in the race.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Anonymous Coward]

And replacing something unsafe with something unsafe is just as stupid.

This is one of the most patently stupid things I've ever read on /. (and that's saying a lot). *EVERY*thing in life is inherently unsafe. Get out of bed? Unsafe. Don't get out of bed? Unsafe. Eat? Unsafe. Don't eat? Unsafe.

Time to come to grips with the reality that every aspect of life is a calculated risk.

Or, feel free to return to your fantasy that you are somehow able to attain non-unsafeness. But expect rational and realistic people to continue to deride your fantasy.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[tnk1]

I am OUTRAGED by your OUTRAGE!

There you go, I've discovered perpetual motion.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[michelcolman]

How many molecules does a dose contain? I bet even at 1 PPB you'll still find plenty of allergen molecules in there. That's not the case for many homeopathy medicines, where the solution does not contain a single molecule of the "diluted" material.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Hatta]

Risk is damage * incidence. A high damage event with low incidence can be lower risk than a low damage event with high incidence. This is in fact the case when we compare nuclear with coal power.

If you can't understand this basic principle of risk analysis, you are too stupid to contribute anything to this discussion.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[Americano]

Are the child products safer than mercury etc?

As best I can see, yes - the products are much safer than mercury. As best I can tell, from the article and a bit of digging on the big radioisotopes released into the water and air around the Fukushima plant, there's just not a lot to worry about, even as these materials decay.

Cesium 134 decays down to Barium which is highly reactive with water to form Barium Hydroxide, which in turn reacts with Carbon Dioxide to form Barium Carbonate which in turn reacts with acids to form highly water-soluble salts (e.g., Barium Chloride) - which is toxic, but requires a 1-5g dose for toxicity in an 'average' person, and this amount of concentration in other life forms would pretty much render them dead long before they reached your table.

Iodine 131 will decay down to inert Xenon (and rapidly - about 8 day half life). Tellurium 129 has a half life of 6 days, and decays to low-energy Iodine 129, which has a half life in the millions of years, and will eventually decay to inert xenon-129.

Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 are the two "long-lived" isotopes released, and present the largest danger, but the materials are diluted to levels below even background radiation from isotopes normally found in seawater (e.g. Potassium-40), meaning you should be much more worried about naturally occurring radioactive potassium in your fish than you should be about the Cesium and Strontium released by Fukushima.

Not a chemist by training or trade, so feel free to offer corrections, but it certainly doesn't seem like there's much cause for concern.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[expatriot]

The world is in a bad loop. To build safer nuclear reactors, we have to make new reactors. We can't make new reactors because the old ones are unsafe. Instead we turn to dirty coal and fracking to get gas.

I heard a good expression recently "They were running too fast to get on the bicycle" with the conclusion that they never got on the bicycle where they could have gone faster.

Re:Sanity vs. politically motivated scaremongering

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Uh, as a firefighter... you know nothing of what you say.

Especially with high rises. A hole in one side of a building is a huge heat producer. A hole in two sides produces a f*cking blow torch. Every time.

You probably don't even know what a stack effect is, let alone should you be making comments on fire behavior.

radiation is from coal

[vlm]

Unless they were doing a lot of extra work to match isotopes, most of the "bulk" radiation in the ocean from power generation is from burning coal.
There's really quite a bit of U in coal, and if you burn a gigatons of the stuff a ppm here and there starts to add up.

Re:radiation is from coal

[miknix]

It is interesting to see that even with all of current scaremongering about nuclear power, the oil spills still were orders of magnitude MORE dangerous to oceanic wildlife than the Fukushima radioactive leak. This should be something to think about..

Re:radiation is from coal

[jeffmeden]

It is interesting to see that even with all of current scaremongering about nuclear power, the oil spills still were orders of magnitude MORE dangerous to oceanic wildlife than the Fukushima radioactive leak. This should be something to think about..

They aren't done cleaning up (and disposing of) all the square miles of land that was contaminated though, let alone the facility itself as it is pretty unusable as a power plant so the whole thing needs to be chopped up and processed as hazardous waste. Unless, of course, you think we are safe to just pitch it in the ocean since "its not as bad as an oil spill..."

Re:radiation is from coal

[Max Littlemore]

Yeah, but a decent infrastructure in hot salt works for most of the world, including your country. There's no need for fission or even coal

Re:radiation is from coal

[Solandri]

What do we do with the waste? It's mostly ( >90% ) more dangerous than ore. The biggest problem with Fuckishima (sic) is the ponds of waste. Scaremongering aside, when solar is cheaper for a country than nuclear, why go with nuclear? (as is the case in my country)

Off the top of your head, how much coal do you think needs to be burned to power your house for 30 years? How much high-level nuclear waste do you think is generated from powering it with nuclear?

Photovoltaic solar is nearly an order of magnitude more expensive than nuclear. If you live somewhere where it's cheaper, then you're probably failing to subtract out government subsidies from the equation. Hydro is cheaper, but already tapped out in most developed countries. Wind is getting close, at about 1.5-2x more expensive. If you live in an area with strong, consistent, and abundant winds (like one of the respondents in Portugal), it's probably already cheaper than nuclear/coal. Solar thermal can be the cheapest yet, but due to directly converting the solar energy into heat its applications are limited.

Back to my first questions. It takes about a train car full of coal to power your house for 30 years. That's how much mass is turned into pollution - either ash or particulates which get into the atmosphere (including trace amounts of atomic mercury, uranium, and thorium - the trace uranium in coal actually contains more energy than the coal itself). In contrast, nuclear can provide the same amount of electricity while generating about a tablespoon of high level waste. Yes when you scale up to the electrical needs of an entire country, the amount of nuclear waste starts to look scary. But only if you fail to scale the alternatives - the waste is a minuscule amount compared to pollution from fossil fuels. The U.S. generates about 20% of its electricity from nuclear. In the process, it generates about 2000 tons of raw high-level waste each year. 2000 tons would (if consolidated) fit into two tractor trailers. When I did the same calc for coal, it came out to something ridiculous like 15,000 oil tankers. And that's ignoring that a significant fraction of the mass is converted into high-volume gases (primarily CO2, with the O2 taken from the air) and released into the atmosphere. That's why the U.S. been able to run nuclear plants for ~60 years without a waste storage site. There's so little waste generated that the nuclear plants have just been storing decades worth of it on-site in pools of water.

As for what to do with the nuclear waste, it's only called waste because of politics. Our current fission reactors only extract a few percent of the fissile energy contained in the uranium. That's why the waste is radioactive for so long - it still contains almost all of the energy of the radionuclide decay chain. You can extract most of the remaining energy by using the "waste" as fuel in a breeder reactor, which in turn converts it into a form which can be used as fuel in regular reactors. This in turn results in waste which only needs to be stored for a bit over a hundred years. This is why a repository like Yucca Mountain was a good idea. Until fusion reactors become viable and widescale, future generations would probably view Yucca Mountain as a fuel source, not a long-term waste storage site. Unfortunately, one of the fissile products of breeder reactors is weapons-grade plutonium. So politically, reprocessing (as it's called) is unappealing.

It's all relative

[crazyjj]

1 million gallons of dirty water sounds bad--until you dilute it into 350 quintillion gallons of clean water.

And hey, compared to all the fecal matter you're eating with your seafood, a little cesium is nothing.

Re:Oh, yeah, but...

[SomePgmr]

basic clams end up with like 110,000 times the radioactivity of the surrounding seawater

I'm sure you're right that that kind of concentration happens, but I'm gunna guess the NOAA folks have some idea what they're talking about when they make claims like this.

In the seafood samples, the additional radioactivity from the cesium and silver was less than the naturally occurring sources, typically only about a third. The net result is that the 137 in fish was about 150 times lower than the legal limits in Japan. Even if all the isotopes were considered, the fish would be safe to eat.

Re:Conveniently ignoring the fact

[JSBiff]

Oh, I'm sure the NOAA people never thought of that, or thought to check higher predators in the food chain. Right.

I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that various living things don't absorb everything in the environment around them - they chemically reject certain elements or compounds they have no use for. My further understanding is that the main isotope of worry after a few months is Cesium-137, and Strontium. If I understand correctly, cesium and strontium tend to react like calcium, and tend to concentrate in bones and teeth, which most predators don't digest - they digest the meat and soft tissues, and leave the bones.

So, bioaccumulation may not be much of an issue, if the radioactive materials are all in the bones. Again, I'm no biologist or radiation health expert, but that's what I've heard.

Safe?

[kimvette]

Oh, sure, they'll keep saying it's safe until Godzilla rises from the sea and wreaks havoc on Tokyo!

Wrong - did you read the article?

[JSBiff]

I know, I know, this is slashdot, but there IS a link to a fine article summarizing the study. The study, in this case, wasn't a "statistical model" sort of study - they actually went around in a boat for months, sampling water, wildlife, etc. No assumptions - actual empirical evidence.

Re:Wrong - did you read the article?

[Sarten-X]

There are many assumptions. The scientists are assuming that random samples are indicative of a population, all the contaminated water has mixed evenly, and that the animals sampled didn't just migrate south for the winter. They assume that their instruments function properly, that they're reading them correctly, and that all the cables are properly connected. They assume that there are no magical cleansing fairies underwater removing radiation from the fish before testing. They assume that the world will still exist and be populated tomorrow, so that people will care about the results.

Many assumptions, and all reasonable. :)

Re:Wrong - did you read the article?

[Colin Smith]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

The hypothesis being for example; Some fish in the human food chain is heavily contaminated by pollution from Fukushima.

 

Re:Wrong - did you read the article?

[Chris Burke]

Don't forget they assumed that the universe obeys consistent, causal rules.

I once forgot to assume causality and man was my research a mess!

Re:Wrong - did you read the article?

[UnknowingFool]

Evidence? Surely you gest. I have it on good authority from my friend Bill who heard it on talk radio from a caller who read something on the Interweb that all these studies are lies. He also said that black is white and was killed at the next zebra crossing. True story, bro.

Re:Conveniently ignoring the fact

[Dr_Barnowl]

Sure, but I don't think it's like Minimata Bay (the textbook example of toxic bioconcentration).

Firstly, the important isotopes will not be heavy metals. Therefore

  * They will not tend to accumulate in marine life as they will be excreted as fast as they are ingested
  * They will not tend to accumulate in the local bottom sediment, but be dispersed more rapidly

Secondly, radioisotopes decay, unlike mercury.

Re:Oh, yeah, but...

[g0bshiTe]

I think all guys are bitten by that clam! It happens to expedite us moving out of mom's basement.

Re:As if science meant anything:

[g0bshiTe]

Oh great another **AA group. International Nuclear Advocacy Association. Suing for sharing of nuclear isotope test results.

Re:Yeah sure

[Sarten-X]

Eating coconuts or breadfruit from Bikini Island occasionally would be no cause for concern. Eating many over a long period of time without having taken remedial measures, however, might result in radiation doses higher than internationally agreed safety levels.

It was recommended that Bikini Island should not be permanently resettled under the present radiological conditions. This recommendation was based on the assumption that persons resettling on the island would consume a diet of entirely locally produced food. The radiological data support that if a diet of this type were permitted, it could lead to an annual effective dose of about 15 mSv. This level was judged to require intervention of some type for radiation protection purposes.

Sounds like it's fine for a little while. If you'll pay for the trip and convince my boss to let me go, I'll gladly feast in your honor.

Comparisons

[dragonhunter21]

Wikipedia says that an estimated 520 tons of radioactive water were dumped into the sea. That rounds out to a shade under 60,000 gallons of water. Compare that to the volume of the whole Pacific Ocean (174400000000000000000 gallons) and you start to see just how minor the release was in the grand scheme of things. Just to really show the difference, if we use the same ratio in terms of distance and make the Fukushima release as the height of a common housefly, then the Pacific Ocean is a trip to Pluto, halfway back, and a bit more besides.

Re:Comparisons

[TopSpin]

520 tons / 8.33 lbs = 124,850 gallons

A cube of water about 25 feet a side.

Re:Comparisons

[nojayuk]

The Japanese government science and education agency, MEXT has been publishing regular reports on seawater sampling and radioactive contamination around the Fukushima Daiichi plant, from just offshore at the inlet and discharge channels of the reactor complex to areas several hundred kilometres from the shore. You can find the reports going back to May last year here, as well as many other sample measurements such as land soil, sea sediments, air particulates etc: http://radioactivity.mext.go.jp/en/

Re:Conveniently ignoring the fact

[nojayuk]

Cesium doesn't linger in the human body. It has a biological "half-life", that is half the cesium taken in will be excreted between 50 to 120 days depending on what sort of tissue is collects in (bone, muscle, fat etc.). Strontium can collect in the bones but again it gets excreted over a period of time. Very little strontium was released from the Fukushima reactors as it is not particularly mobile unlike cesium compounds which make up nearly all of the radioactive contamination remaining in the environment since the short-lived iodine-131 (also mobile) died away.

Seawater is naturally radioactive due to potassium-40 (10 Bequerels/litre) and rubidium-87 (about 1 Bq/litre). Potassium is biologically conserved in the body and maintained at roughly stable levels absent disease. Measurements of seawater samples taken about 200km off Fukushima Daiichi a couple of months ago resulted in a combined value of cesium-134 and cesium-137 of around 0.1 Bq/litre, or 1% of the radioactivity from naturally-occurring potassium. It's possible some of the cesium-137 detected in these tests is not from the Fukushima reactors but residue from the 150 megatonnes or so of atmospheric thermonuclear weapons tests fired off by the US in the Pacific in the 1950s and 1960s.

Re:Thoughts

[wjousts]

So given your propensity to dismiss anything that doesn't conform to your paranoid fantasies, I wouldn't bother arguing with you.

They aren't NOAA scientists...

[j_schmoe]

The linked article/summary is inaccurate as the scientists who did the study are not NOAA folks. They're from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Stony Brook University, and the University of Tokyo. [author affiliations from the actual paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ]. The study was funded by the Moore Foundation, National Science Foundation, and WHOI.

So please redirect all government conspiracy comments to the university/academic conspiracy forum.