The Panic Over Fukushima

An anonymous reader points out an article in the Wall Street Journal about how irrational fear of nuclear reactors made people worry much more about last year's incident at Fukushima than they should have. Quoting: "Denver has particularly high natural radioactivity. It comes primarily from radioactive radon gas, emitted from tiny concentrations of uranium found in local granite. If you live there, you get, on average, an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year (on top of the .62 rem that the average American absorbs annually from various sources). A rem is the unit of measure used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue. ... Now consider the most famous victim of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Two workers at the reactor were killed by the tsunami, which is believed to have been 50 feet high at the site. But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?"

Comments

Red Heading

[stephenmac7]

Off topic but: What's with the red heading?

Re:Red Heading

[Osgeld]

they are red when they are freshly posted

Re:Red Heading

[SuperSlacker64]

The red heading means you're a logged in user with enough karma to get a preview of the story before it goes live for everyone. I've seen it a few times, but it usually doesn't take long before its public and open (typically by the time I've refreshed the page).

Re:Red Heading

[Compaqt]

It's a red hot topic.

I'm still blown away

[93 Escort Wagon]

Not by the Fukushima thing - but by the fact that the tsunami was 50 feet high at the plant. I understand how it can happen; but that is truly awesome (in the literal sense of the word).

Re:I'm still blown away

[Anne_Nonymous]

If that is awesome, what is this?

Re:I'm still blown away

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's quite understandable, a 50 feet high tsunami would blow away just about anyone.

Re:I'm still blown away

[artor3]

Apocalyptic?

Re:I'm still blown away

[93 Escort Wagon]

That is amazingly cool - but it wasn't an open-ocean tsunami.

Re:I'm still blown away

[jamstar7]

What gets me is, everybody bitches that Fukushima 'failed'. Yeah, after taking an earthquake and a tsunami. What were they expecting, the Japanese to armor it against a direct impact from an asteroid the size of Texas or something? It was what, a 1 in a billion chance they took? The gods of statistics hated them that day.

Re:I'm still blown away

[abirdman]

The problems with the plant were not caused by the earthquake or the tsunami, they were caused by the electricity going out. It was not the freak failure of some madly over-spec'ed equipment, it was the simple failure to anticipate a lack of electrical service to power the pumps that were supposed to cool the plant. Once cooling failed, the accidents just happened randomly -- the roofs blowing off two reactors from hydrogen build-up, and various cracks and leaks caused, or highlighted, by pumping sea water through the plants for emergency cooling. Basically, once the power went off, none of their emergency response protocols were relevant.

This confirms (for me, at least) Amory Lovins' assertion that the US will never build another nuclear plant because there's no way it will ever be cost effective, even when most of the liability risk is assumed by the government. This WSJ article is snake oil being sold by some would-be investors (or sellers of investments).

Re:I'm still blown away

[jamstar7]

Um, it did The wave was 50 foot when it hit Fukushima, after losing a shitton of energy moving over the land.

Scary thought, eh? And yet everybody bitches that they didn't design Fukushima to handle it.

Re:I'm still blown away

[dbIII]

It was a long string of bad choices that meant that a loss of cooling had far worse effects than it should have. The dice had been well and truly loaded before the "gods of statistics" threw them, and anything else that endangered those pumps or the pipework to them would have had exactly the same impact.
The disaster is really more about bad management not taking the consequences of failure seriously and cutting corners than a failure of nuclear power generation.

Re:I'm still blown away

[borrrden]

They had systems in place for a loss of power event. The problem was they didn't anticipate the length of time the loss of power event would continue. There was a steam/battery powered system designed to cool the reactor without any external power but the batteries ran dry before any help could arrive due to the devastated state of the roads and land around them. I suppose they assumed that if they lost power, they could sound the alarm and quickly get a generator truck in place while they worked on restoring the main power.

Re:I'm still blown away

[godel_56]

What gets me is, everybody bitches that Fukushima 'failed'. Yeah, after taking an earthquake and a tsunami. What were they expecting, the Japanese to armor it against a direct impact from an asteroid the size of Texas or something? It was what, a 1 in a billion chance they took? The gods of statistics hated them that day.

If you read the the official Japanese report, it clearly says that the Fukushima disaster was a man made failure. Such as putting all the backup generators and their controls (all but one) on the ground floor, and not having filters for radioactive materials on the outlet vents.

While giving lip service to a policy of “safety first,” in actuality, safety suffered at the expense of other management priorities. An emblematic example is the fact that TEP-CO did not have the proper diagrams of piping and other instruments at the Daiichi plant. The absence of the proper diagrams was one of the factors that led to a delay in venting at a crucial time during the accident.

A nuke plant without equipment diagrams?

Re:I'm still blown away

[dirtyhippie]

Umm, you do realize that most tsunamis happen with earthquakes, right?

Re:I'm still blown away

[Solandri]

I've been saying since March of last year, it really looks like a case of probability analysis failure, like happened with the O-rings in the shuttle's boosters. In the boosters, they noticed sometimes the propellant could burn through two O-rings. So they added a third O-ring, on the theory that if there's a 1 in 100 chance of burning through two O-rings, then each O-ring has a 1 in 10 chance of burning through, and there's a 1 in 1000 chance of burning through three O-rings.

That ain't how it works. For the probabilities to multiply like that and provide redundancy, the vulnerabilities have to be independent events. Burning through O-rings isn't an independent event. A condition which causes one O-ring to leak and burn through (cold weather) is highly likely to affect subsequent O-rings. So you aren't really making things safer by adding an extra O-ring.

At Fukushima, it looks like they had a dozen or so backup generators on the theory that if one has a (say) 1 in 10 chance of failing, then the chance of all of them failing is 1 in 10^12. But nearly all of them were located in the same place, so a single event (a tsunami) which took out one generator took out all of them. Having multiple generators situated this way did not provide redundancy because they weren't vulnerable to independent events. They were vulnerable to the same event.

What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.

This confirms (for me, at least) Amory Lovins' assertion that the US will never build another nuclear plant because there's no way it will ever be cost effective, even when most of the liability risk is assumed by the government. This WSJ article is snake oil being sold by some would-be investors (or sellers of investments).

Actually the WSJ article is by a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. And he is spot on about the huge mischaracterization of the risk assigned to nuclear power (including by insurance adjusters). People in general suck at rationally analyzing extremely rare events with huge consequences. For nuclear power, fear of another Chernobyl overwhelms the rational fact that historically it's the safest power source man has ever invented. For lotteries, the desire to hit the jackpot overwhelms the rational fact that nearly everyone who plays loses money, and even on average you lose money.

Re:I'm still blown away

[Forty Two Tenfold]

The disaster is really more about bad management

Sorry, but the disaster being about bad management shows the inherent instability of the whole system. If bad management can lead to a catastrophic failure, the system is useless. Conversely, the worst case scenario caused by a complete neglect of solar field or windfarm is... loss of power.

Re:I'm still blown away

[AmiMoJo]

Actually there was an NHK documentary this week about how the earthquake did damage the plan and contributed to the disaster. Critical ductwork was damaged purely by the force of the earthquake alone.

It wasn't simply a lack of electricity that doomed the plant. Cooling systems were crippled by these duct failures and by problems with a critical valve. They had batteries on-site which could have activated the value (they even used their own car batteries) but the valve was stuck. The earthquake also prevented TEPCO getting emergency batteries to the site due to infrastructure damage.

This all added to the general confusion and panic at the plant, making dealing with the situation harder.

We still don't know exactly what happened at Fukushima and likely won't for several years as the wrecked plant is explored. The duct damage only came to light recently and nothing has been done at the recently re-started Ohi reactors to prevent the same thing happening to them in a strong earthquake (they are only specified to withstand a magnitude 7.2 quake).

Re:I'm still blown away

[AmiMoJo]

At Fukushima, it looks like they had a dozen or so backup generators on the theory that if one has a (say) 1 in 10 chance of failing, then the chance of all of them failing is 1 in 10^12. But nearly all of them were located in the same place, so a single event (a tsunami) which took out one generator took out all of them. Having multiple generators situated this way did not provide redundancy because they weren't vulnerable to independent events. They were vulnerable to the same event.

What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.

They did actually do that. TEPCO had plenty of reserve equipment stored at a location about 50KM from the plant, so it would cover both Fukushima Daiichi and Daini. Unfortunately infrastructure damage prevented them getting the equipment to Daiichi, even by helicopter. The plant itself was damaged so that even if the spare generators had been located up on a hill it wouldn't really have helped much anyway because there was no quick way of attaching them to the cooling system. The entire plant design was flawed in that respect.

The cooling system was also damaged by the earthquake and tsunami. Valves failed and even though they had power available (taking car batteries out of staff vehicles) they couldn't operate them.

This is only now coming to light and data is analysed, CCTV footage released and the wrecked plant explored. The initial assumption that there was a single point of failure and that the tsunami caused all the damage has turned out to be wrong.

Re:I'm still blown away

[Gibbs-Duhem]

This seems from the reports I've read to be pretty spot on. I would add an addendum to an earlier comment about this being why no nuclear plants will ever be built in the US again though; the current designs are generally "passive fail", meaning that unless electricity is supplied to the control systems, the plant will just... stop being just sub-critical and will go non-critical very quickly. For instance the pebble bed designs. My (somewhat, I'm probably giving myself a little too little credit) understanding is that these plants use nuclear fuel that just... can't react on it's own due to the sheathing materials. I think those are pyrolytic carbon still though, so of course there will still be problems with burning if they are exposed to air, the accompanying release of hydrogen, etc (I think).

This seems very honestly to be the entire focus of the nuclear industry -- designing plants which are safe to operate no matter what, which maintain reasonable cost-effectiveness. It's basically the holy grail.

I think the current problem is:
1. Natural gas is cheap, coal is cheap, they are cheaper to build and easier to maintain.
2. The regulatory process and validation work to get a new plant design is intimidating. Probably even intimidating as compared to the design of fighter jets.
3. Nuclear *is* scary to the vast majority of people. This is residual in large part from Long Island, and based in concerns over running reactors commissioned in the 60s still being operated. *That* part I am scared of. But as a scientist and engineer, I think that these are solvable problems so long as safety and the concepts of "fail safe" systems engineering based on the Therac-25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) which seem to have very permanently changed the way that people fundamentally think about how to do system engineering. These problems had not arisen and become understood when those plants went into operation. A current plant definitely would do a far better job of that.

Heck, it even effects me on a daily basis (at this point in my career I would classify myself as a systems engineer); I think all the time "What happens if all this equipment just stops working" and the answer is always "go to a safe operational mode". The are different ways to do that. You have the F-16 style of doing that, which includes crazy amounts of unstable control algorithms. But by *far* the preferred mechanism is physical. For instance, if I have a furnace I expect to go to 2000C, and monitor the temperature with one thermocouple while I use a single additional thermocouple as a safety, is not really enough. I would *far* rather have a thermal fuse that blows hard when a temperature exceeds some set ultimate super failure limit and shuts everything off immediately. I don't trust thermocouples to be reliable, and I don't trust the controls equipment to respond properly in an emergency.

But in one of these pebble beds, the sorts of controls they are integrating are way beyond "having power", by far the best safety integration is to design it such that electricity failing causes large physical things to happen. Dumping the pebble bed entirely, or dumping immediately a mediator into the reactor that is only prevented from triggering by constant electricity. Some of the designs I've seen literally place the reactor under a ridiculously large tank of water held closed by electricity. I don't know in what way that would fail, but it would be far superior to what happened in fukoshima.

Re:I'm still blown away

[dbIII]

Hence my line "not taking the consequences of failure seriously".
Larger consequences demand greater care.

Re:I'm still blown away

[multipartmixed]

Maybe they could.... oh.. Hm. Use boron control rods held up by electromagnets, so that they fall down and quench the reaction when the power goes out.

I checked with my high-school physics teach to see if this design would work, and he said, yep! Can-Do!

Re:I'm still blown away

[drinkypoo]

I've been saying since March of last year, it really looks like a case of probability analysis failure, like happened with the O-rings in the shuttle's boosters.

You mean, they were told in no uncertain terms by GE that the reactors were vulnerable to power failure due to natural disaster, just as Norton-Thiokol warned NASA that the O-Rings would not work properly at the temperatures at which they finally found up failing? I'd like to see some evidence of that.

Re:I'm still blown away

[dr2chase]

How do you separate "bad management not taking the consequences of failure seriously" from any human endeavor? Isn't human hubris/stupidity/greed/impatience ubiquitous?

Think, also, of how managers are often selected over time. Do they choose people who learn from their mistakes, or do they choose people who are lucky enough to experience only success several times in a row?

Re:I'm still blown away

[AmiMoJo]

Pebble bed reactors have their own problems, but even passive safety reactors are vulnerable to the types of failures that Fukushima experienced. For example the earthquake was of a magnitude beyond what the reactor was designed to survive, and damaged it in ways we still don't fully understand.

Re:I'm still blown away

[kantos]

Many People seem to have the same misconception you've perpetuated here, that a reactor can be SCRAM'd just by dropping the rods into it. The fact of the matter is that a reactor has a MASSIVE latent heat of reaction (this doesn't tend to happen as much in military reactors because they are near weapons grade and thus have less radioactive by-products that need to decay). This heat MUST be dissipated or the core will melt. One way to get around this issue is to use a natural circulation reactor. Or to maintain an extra supply of coolent on a gravity feed.

Re:I'm still blown away

[ed1park]

You are wrong on all three counts.

O-rings. It was a stupid/deadly management decision.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/roger-boisjoly-73-dies-warned-of-shuttle-danger.html

Fukushima. “They completely ignored me in order to save Tepco money,” said Mr. Shimazaki, 65
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/world/asia/critics-say-japan-ignored-warnings-of-nuclear-disaster.html?pagewanted=all
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2920525&cid=40351611

WSJ article author is retarded and doesn't take into account bio-accumulation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

Do you just make this stuff up? Read up on my other responses in this thread and learn a thing or two.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3057855&cid=41041571

Re:I'm still blown away

[maxwell demon]

Yeah, those proprietary tsunamis suck! All tsunamis should be open ocean! :-)

Re:I'm still blown away

[b4dc0d3r]

A splash.

Based on the graphic, it was 1720 feet right at the point where the rock fell into the water. Once it got out of the Gilbert Inlet, it hit the opposing shore with 600 feet (less than half), and very quickly dissipated. Even the Crillon Inlet, where you would expect water to be channelled, was only 200 feet.

And at the outlet, where the land should be pushing it together and therefore higher, it was only 25 to 30 feet. The maximum depth is 720 feet, but the outlet sill was only 32 feet deep.

Wait, let's fact check. Is there an eye witness?

"The wave definitely started in Gilbert Inlet, just before the end of the quake. It was not a wave at first. It was like an explosion, or a glacier sluff. The wave came out of the lower part, and looked like the smallest part of the whole thing. The wave did not go up 1,800 feet, the water splashed there."

Yup, a splash, from rocks falling 3000 feet.

Re:I'm still blown away

[overmod]

What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.

No, what they needed to do was:

1) Provide rapid-connect points for emergency power of KNOWN compatibility, hardened and/or sealed against environmental damage;

2) Provided 'offsite-backup' portable generators (vehicle- or aircraft-mounted) again of KNOWN compatibility, with appropriate procedures to get them on site, connected, started and sync'd with minimal time, and minimal exposure;

3) Provided some form of 'protocol translation' between the connections and wiring at the plant and those for ordinary industrial 'package' emergency generators, so that 'emergency-response' devices provided from other sources could be synchronized and put on line even if the dedicated ones weren't available. (This might include either rotary or solid-state frequency conversion between 50 and 60Hz as needed).

IIRC, the problem wasn't that emergency generation wasn't available to replace the tsunami-damaged generators (or seawater-contaminated diesel supply systems) -- it's that nothing could be found that would work, or even be kludged in the time available.

I could go into the question of 'what sane engineer puts the spent-fuel pool on the roof, in a known seismic zone', but that's just more of the same sort of thinking that gave us the Fukushima emergency generators...

Re:I'm still blown away

[Mr.CRC]

The reactors didn't melt due to uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction. They melted due to un-cooled decay heat. So a "passive" safety to control the nuclear reaction wouldn't have helped. The problem is decay heat. Remove it or melt. Hence, some sort of active cooling must be provided until cold shutdown is reached. There is essentially NO way to guarantee this. Building the plant below the elevation where there are ancient markers saying "don't build below here" makes clear that this was not a one in a billion event. Perfection can't be achieved, and I can accept a non-perfect world. But they could have done a lot better.

Re:I'm still blown away

[Mr.CRC]

Oh joy, so we are sure a pebble reactor won't undergo uncontrolled fission reactions if power is lost. But we can't let the glowing balls of graphite-encased fission fuel touch any water or air until they cool down, right?

Guess what is sure to happen then? They will contact air or water, inadvertently.

I have been pro-nuclear for a long time. Still am in principle. But at this point, solar is the way to go for the most part, with wind after that. If we let markets decide the real cost of nuclear (not subsidizing risk and liability via government), it would be relegated to a few niche markets like remote and difficult to access locations.

Re:I'm still blown away

[cbiltcliffe]

That wasn't caused directly by the earthquake, though. At least, not in the conventional sense.

That was caused by over 30 million cubic metres of rock falling nearly a kilometre into the water.
No matter how you look at it, that's going to make a heck of a splash. In fact, one of the witness accounts on the linked page states that it wasn't a wave at that 1700 foot height, but the water splashed that high from the initial impact of the rock.

Not that this isn't an awesomely powerful event, though....

Re:I'm still blown away

[cusco]

You'd be surprised what frequent management changes will do to documentation. Even hospitals, those paragons of paperwork, frequently have no idea where plans and diagrams of their vital infrastructure actually are. It's not at all uncommon for us to have to search closets, storage rooms, IDFs and boiler rooms in order to find where their access control hardware, camera power supplies or even security servers are located, because no one has any clue. We hear the same thing from the elevator guys, the electricians, the plumbers, etc.

Re:I'm still blown away

[bill_mcgonigle]

even when most of the liability risk is assumed by the government

That's actually a detriment, not a benefit. Private insurers would have pushed the insurance rates for light water reactors beyond profitability at this time. The Integral Fast Reactor was built and ran for years two decades ago. We probably would have been almost done converting over by now, had the normal market pressures been present and all that nuclear waste onsite would now be being consumed.

Oh, but no, we'll let the Hank Johnsons of the world decide what kind of technology will work best.

Re:I'm still blown away

[AmiMoJo]

Japan regularly has earthquakes in the magnitude 7 range, and a magnitude 9 quake seems to be about a 1 in 50 year event. Fukushima, and all other nuclear plants in Japan, are only rated for a magnitude 7 quake.

The tsunami was thought to be a 1 in 1000 year event, but it turns out it is probably more frequent than that. Even if it was 1000 years then it was still very short-sighted to not account for it, especially since the total time the plant will exist for (from first arrival of nuclear material to final removal during decommissioning) is likely to be over 10% of that.

Re:I'm still blown away

[multipartmixed]

Got it, thanks.

Has anybody considered using the heat from the reactor to power emergency pumps? Maybe even old-school, like in a steam locomotive?

Re:I'm still blown away

[TaxDoktor]

People need to give up on Breeder type reactors and go with a much safer Can-do reactor design, that also is more flexible with the fuel it uses. imo

Re:I'm still blown away

[Magius_AR]

I doubt your claim that a passive system can't work. Decay heat can be used to passively power a cooling system. Hell, why doesn't this simple equation work: Heated water produces steam pressure, steam pressure can be used to pump in cool water -- this passive cooling cycle continues until heat decay is at a safe level.

Re:I'm still blown away

[Mr.CRC]

Oh, I think you are right that a passive convection or whatever cooled *design* could be much more inherently safe than the actively cooled thingy which actually blew. Note that I didn't claim that a passive decay heat removal couldn't work. I stated that a passive shutdown mechanism wouldn't have helped in this case.

My purpose was mainly to clarify something which a lot of people continue to misunderstand--which is that the Fuk. meltdowns were from decay heat, not fission reaction heat as the reactors were already scrammed prior to melting.

Even a passive decay heat removal involves some complex machinery which may fail. But still, it would be better than active.

Does anyone know if it is even theoretically possible to design a passive cooling system which can handle the full fission thermal output of a reactor running full-bore in which the active/passive shutdown mechanism jammed and left the reactor without primary cooling but NOT scrammed? That's the real scary scenario!

Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[DMUTPeregrine]

Radiation in Denver is unavoidable. Radiation in Fukushima was manmade, and the inadequate safety features and inept management seem to be common problems with nuclear (and other) power plants. The furor is because the Fukushima radiation release could have been avoided, but wasn't.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[ATMAvatar]

That serves as a good thing to keep in mind moving forward, but the article is about the (now unavoidable) radiation level in the area. The "hot spots" are 1/3 the radiation level that your average Denver resident experiences. The point is that people should stop going into hysterics about the radiation, not that they should ignore the lessons learned by the reactor failure.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[asicsolutions]

I've avoided it my entire life here in New Hampshire.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Anonymous Coward]

Radiation in Denver IS avoidable. It's called "moving." Surely you've heard of it?

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

Radiation in Fukushima was manmade, and the inadequate safety features and inept management seem to be common problems with nuclear (and other) power plants.

Yeah, for definitions of "common" of perhaps one in a thousand.

Of course, coal plants kill people when working as intended, but it doesn't look scary on CNN, so nobody cares.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Anonymous Coward]

Radiation in Denver is unavoidable. Radiation in Fukushima was manmade.

And everybody knows that natural radiation is good for you, while manmade radiation is bad... wait what?

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. Coal plants on average emit more radiation per kWh than nuclear plants. Including all the disasters of the past few decades.

People suck at dealing with low probabilities of very high magnitude. Which is why we're so scared of terrorists we can't leave our homes...except to get in a two ton killing machine to which tens of thousands die per year in the US alone.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[garyebickford]

I doubt it - if you're near granite, you're getting dosed. Isn't New Hampshire the 'Granite State'? Unless NH granite is special, it's got similar levels of uranium in it, and the resulting radon escaping from it. Granite, from what I've read, is almost always a 'good source' of radiation. Granite from Canada, Washington and Oregon is the primary source of the radiation that makes the Columbia River the most radioactive river in the world.

I did a quick Google to find the typical levels in NH but didn't find a number in a minute or two, and gave up.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Boronx]

"Yeah, for definitions of "common" of perhaps one in a thousand." Where did you pull that number from?

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Radiation in Denver is unavoidable. Radiation in Fukushima was manmade, and the inadequate safety features and inept management seem to be common problems with nuclear (and other) power plants. The furor is because the Fukushima radiation release could have been avoided, but wasn't.

But remember: Responsible, Serious, Journalists have dismissed any displeasure you might feel about having health risks you don't understand imposed on you become somebody higher up the food chain doesn't give a fuck as 'hysteria', so go about your business...

Honestly, that's what really annoys me about the tone of this article... Do I have the slightest belief that Fukushima residents(or, for that matter, just about anybody else who isn't an epidemiologist or involved in some aspect of medical physics) has an accurate understanding of the risks it poses to them? Hardly. Does this mean that it is 'hysteria' to be worried when your local operators have been exhibiting negligence and incompetence indistinguishable from malice while issuing bland statements about how you have nothing to worry about? Also hardly.

Really, a lot of anxiety about 'nuclear' this and 'GMO' that is pretty tepidly supported; but stems from the (overwhelmingly more robust) sense that the people deploying the technology being fretted about don't actually much care whether it is safe or not, cannot be relied upon to do what is necessary to ensure that it is safe, and are more than happy to lie about it for as long as they can get away with it. It would be nice if the anxiety were a bit more carefully focused; but there is a quite legitimate locus for it...

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. Coal plants on average emit more radiation per kWh than nuclear plants. Including all the disasters of the past few decades.

This has already been debunked. Due to nuclear accidents coal can never catch up to the radiation emissions from nuclear plants, even if all of the coal in the world was burned.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

What, do I look like a librarian? It's the glasses, right?

Operational power reactors, worldwide: Approximately 430

Research reactors: Approximately 250

Ship/submarine reactors: Approximately 180

Formerly operational but decommissioned commercial and research reactors: Approximately 350

Total # of scary asploded nucular reactors I can think of offhand: 3
(including Three Mile Island which resulted in negligible radiation leakage and no deaths)

Source: Yahoo Answers and associated links to world-nuclear.org

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

Nobody cares about total radiation emitted. Nothing matters except where the radiation ultimately ends up.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[angel'o'sphere]

Rem != rem.
It is a difference whether you get one rem by inhaling radon gas or if you get one rem by inhaling iod or caesium.
Comparing rems is utter nonsense. Also I find the numbers quoted not realy convincing.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[jon3k]

You're missing the point entirely. He's asking why the furor over the radiation LEVEL. Obviously the incident shouldn't have happened.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

You choose this post, which reveals your bias

Actually it reflects my understanding, which is backed by scientific evidence, that particulates spewed into the air by coal plants as far away as mainland China are more likely to end up in my body than emissions from the damaged containment structures at Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Do you have evidence to the contrary that you'd like to share with the class?

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[mbone]

Radiation in Denver is unavoidable.

Radon is mostly an indoor ventilation problem, as it accumulates in basements and other low places; the solution is to vent to the outside. In most cases, there is not a problem in the open air.

I bet that the 1 REM Denver average is a lot of people with no to moderate exposure, and a smaller bunch that really get hit, and the latter's exposure could certainly be reduced with a little engineering.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[mbone]

Yep, although there is a lot of sand and muck down near Portsmouth, which is where I think a lot of the NH people live, so the majority may be OK.

But, if you have a granite basement, you should worry about ventilating it.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[aaarrrgggh]

Woosh!

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

... don't undersell the very real risk of idiots in charge of large dangerous equipment.

Indeed, no argument there.

But at least the potentially-dangerous incidents you mention were documented by someone, even if they ended up buried in an obscure NRC report. These reports don't always make the five o'clock news, but they are certainly useful to the regulators, engineers, and environmental scientists involved with designing the next generation of nuclear power plants.

On the other hand, nobody is documenting what happens when you and I inhale radionuclides that were released into the atmosphere by fossil-fuel combustion, potentially thousands of miles away from us. We can draw general conclusions about pollution levels and trends, but at the point where the damage is actually done, it always goes unnoticed. The prevailing attitude in the media is, "Hey, nobody saw it. It must not be a problem, right?"

That's the point that has to be made in threads like this one, over and over, to keep everyone honest.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[zill]

You're comparing the total number of currently operational reactors with the the number of all historical reactors accidents. You should compare historical numbers against historical numbers.

I don't have the numbers, but I do know that the total number of all past and present nuclear submarine hulls is 509, with some hulls carrying multiple reactors. I suspect the total number of nuclear reactors ever constructed is well over 10000.

But then again the total number nuclear accidents is much higher than just 3.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[jamstar7]

That's assuming every last nuclear reactor on the planet Chernobyls over its expected lifetime. The nastiest isotope is still iodine, with a halflife of 8 days. So, move everybody out of range for a couple months and the iodine level will be around normal. Kill and bury every livestock animal in the exclusion zone WAY deep in a land fill someplace where it can decay over the years, and the seepage won't matter as the iodine has already decayed. Seriously, guys.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

No. I have seen no evidence that the one-time release of a small amount of radioactivity into the ocean five thousand miles away could possibly be a significant threat to my health.

If I were worried about "orders of magnitude difference," I would be much more concerned the long-term effects of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific than I would be about Fukushima.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[tmosley]

>Implying that the coal ash from China doesn't go over, and thus get dumped into, the same water.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[abirdman]

Evacuating large groups of people for months at a time, and killing and burying their livestock "WAY deep" constitutes a magnitude of liability no private company is prepared to take on. Your comment suggests you are in favor of large, coercive groups of quasi-governmental officials with the power to evacuate or temporarily relocate populations, organized and financed by the government, and all for the sake of continued profits for the power companies. Seriously.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[dbIII]

Near me a sand mining company got in a bit of trouble after they donated some of the waste sand at the end of their process (simple gravity separation) to parks for children's sandpits. It turns out that by removing all the saleable material in the mineral sands they had unknowingly concentrated radioactive sand to a point where it could expose the children in the sandpits to about thirty times normal background radiation.
A lot of that mildly radioactive granite eventually ends up as sand and just water and gravity is enough to concentrate it a lot, so some of that beach sand might be irradiating people more than in Denver.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[dbIII]

This again? OK readers, here's a little exercise to cure yourselves of this failed 1970s propaganda which attempted to trivialise nuclear waste but instead backfired. Do the calculations to find out how many hundreds of thousands of tons of the most radioactive coal on the planet you would have to stand next to before you would be exposed to a "banana dose".
The internet has all you need to work this out for yourselves without any bias from me.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[evanbd]

There have been several more disasters, depending on where you set the line. If you accept anything in the "accident" range, that's 8 total events, one of which didn't involve a reactor, just some nuclear material. So, either 7 or 8, depending how you count. See International Nuclear Event Scale.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

Sorry, I'm not a researcher. Any actual figures are going to have to come from you, or a source you trust, not me.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

By the way, yes, you've shown me "numbers", but my point is that numbers referring to the masses of radioactive material released by various events are not, in themselves, meaningful.

So, if you insist, here are my numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42, 69, 105, 3.1416, 2.718, 1.414, 12. They're just as useful in this discussion.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Rhys]

100k deaths of coal miners by accident only in the US alone, 1900-2000 if you believe wikipedia. Excludes various exposure diseases (black lung), other environmental effects, and everything bad about burning it (radiation, ash/particulate matter, the whole CO2 problem).

Those nuke plants been slakin'. We need some bodies now. I think our only hope is that Fuka wakes Godzilla up and we count those under the death-by-nuke-plant statistic. I suppose you could toss in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that'd help some...

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Charliemopps]

No there's not.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[SydShamino]

Far more generally, people fear sudden or unusual events far more than they fear regular smaller events, even if those regular smaller events add up to far more damage over time. The panic over such low levels of Fukushima radiation compared to Denver radiation may be an example of this. Another example is the panic in Dallas over the West Nile virus. The virus has killed 13-15 or so people this year, mostly the old and infirm. Guess what also kills the old in infirm? The regular flu. How many have been killed in Texas this year? No one knows, because the government doesn't bother to collect that information. The most recent information indicates some dozen children died of the flu in the 2010-2011 flu season in Texas. Numbers of adults and seniors aren't tracked and aren't available, but the CDC estimates somewhere between like 4000 and 30000 flu deaths a year, depending on the severity of that year's outbreak.

So, a dozen+ people die from something slightly unusual. Odds are pretty good that they all would have died from the flu in a few months anyway. But now the citizens and the government all in a panic to "do something" so they start aerial spraying of pesticides. How do you opt out of aerial spraying of pesticides where you live?

Car crashes, the flu, heart disease, cancer from Denver's background radiation - no one really cares. But risk or kill a small fraction of that number of people - but do it all at once and in some novel way - and people will react with exponentially higher fervor.

I think I saw someone on Slashdot once explain this as human instinct. Things that are unusual are more likely to get cave-man-proto-humans killed, so humans developed or evolved enhanced reactions to them. All I know is that we as a species are smart enough to overcome our instincts and react appropriately to situations, so we should do it in these types of situations, too.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Charliemopps]

I'd even rule out Fukushima from your list. Chernobyl was basically a LARGE, totally unsecured reactor being operated by people that had no idea what they were doing. It was the equivalent of setting a bunch of 5 year olds loose in a room full of old news papers and gas cans.

Fukushima was more like a 1950's cadalac getting hit by a freight train. Could it have been upgraded and had more safety features? Yes... would they have done any good when the wrath of God was unleashed upon them? No...

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[CptNerd]

Speaking as someone who was born and spent the first 5 or so years of my life when everyone was setting off megaton atomic warheads ABOVE GROUND and living with more fallout than you can shake a geiger tube at, all I can say to both sides is: SHUT UP. Your worst experiences are nowhere near the reality that used to be, and isn't liable to be again. Shove the nukeFUD, shove the "your pollution is worse than my pollution", shove the "GMO are going to kill us all", drag all the fear of science and technology back into your little dark holes and hide out while the rest of us get on with the future. Not directed specifically at any poster, just in general.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Aardpig]

Better solution: install a sub-slab depressurization system, which pumps air out from under the basement slab and vents it above the roof line. I had one put in a few years ago, because after I sealed all the air leaks in the basement I found the radon levels had gone over the EPA recommended limit.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[ArsonSmith]

both give you shiny happy people.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Anonymous Coward]

meanwhile. mutant butterflies https://www.google.com/search?q=mutant+fukushima+butterflies&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=fflb

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Carewolf]

both give you shiny happy people.

holding hands?

happy happy

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[MtViewGuy]

If I remember correctly, the Fukushima plant was scheduled for permanent shutdown by 2012 anyway due to the sheer age of the reactor plant and the fact the reactor lacked a truly modern containment structure like what you see at American nuclear plants.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[AmiMoJo]

You are not comparing like with like. At Fukushima the radioactive material is of a type that can get inside the body, which is where it is dangerous and leads to health risks. Merely comparing levels is pointless, you have to look at the nature of the radioactive material.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[FishTankX]

One more had to be buried forever.

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

Windscale was a plutonium production reactor. Air cooled graphite moderated.

Basically tons of uranium caught fire and after all attempts to extinguish the fire failed for a long time and if John Cockcroft hadn't stubbornly insisted in putting in a filtration system for the ventilation system, there might've been alot more deaths. ALOT more. As somewhere close to 15 tons of uranium was burning for days in a fire so hot it could strip the carbon off liquid carbon dioxide pumped in to quench the flames, and would've probably just went up into a plume in the atmosphere.

But not many people remember the windscale fire. Not nearly on the same level as a power generation plant going (Thank you John Cockcroft), but still an accident.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[AmiMoJo]

Actually a lot of the opposition to nuclear power isn't related to radiation fears at all, but the impact the disasters have on people. In Japan 180,000 people were displaced from around Fukushima. There is also the fact that we don't really understand exactly what went wrong with Fukushima. Yes, there was a big tsunami, but in the last few weeks it has emerged that the earthquake did some significant damage too and there were flaws in the design of the plant and the reactor monitoring systems which prevented and effective response being made. The problem is more complex than at first thought, and all the stress tests and improvements that were made to other nuclear plants did not address these issues, meaning they are still vulnerable.

I have yet to see anyone from the pro-nuclear side on Slashdot address these issues, they just keep ranting about this imaginary hysteria. It would appear that the average Japanese person who watches TV is probably better informed about the current understanding of the Fukushima disaster and the issues surrounding it than the average /.er.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[AmiMoJo]

Strange, people don't see to be hysterical (start about 1:40 in). Can you point to some examples of Japanese people being hysterical over Fukushima?

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[EdZ]

Pumped into the atmosphere rather than being sealed in hilariously strong casks to eventually be buried in a geologically stable area, or reprocessed in a fast-neutron reactor to inter isotopes?

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[dunkelfalke]

Thank $DEITY uranium doesn't have to be mined and refined but just magically appears in a ready-to-use pellet form.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[DMUTPeregrine]

Both are bad, but if we can avoid exposing people to radiation we should. Programs to replace old reactor designs with newer designs that have better passive safeties would be a good idea for safety.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[angel'o'sphere]

Rofl, no wonder the us economy is going down if people dont know the difference ....

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[khallow]

Well, this is one case where that cynical saying "dilution is the solution to pollution" holds.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[nojayuk]

You don't remember correctly. Three of the four damaged reactors were running normally, the fourth (no. 4) was shut down for a scheduled inspection and refuelling operation -- power-generating reactors in Japan get inspected every 13 months and the operators usually refuel them at this point. The oldest reactor, no. 1 was coming to the end of its 40-year operating licence. It would have been relicenced after a thorough inspection if nothing substantially wrong was found although given its age it might have been tagged for decommissioning anyway. The other 3 damaged reactors still had a few years to go before they would need relicencing, and the undamaged reactors, no.s 5 and 6 were built around 1980 and they still have nearly a decade before their operating licences run out.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[ultranova]

Do the calculations to find out how many hundreds of thousands of tons of the most radioactive coal on the planet you would have to stand next to before you would be exposed to a "banana dose".

Zero, since the coal plants spew all that radiactive material into the atmosphere where it will reach you no matter where you are. But that's okay, since they don't have "nuclear" in plant name, and thus are non-scary, just deadly.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[dbIII]

Zero tons? Please try again while sober.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Teancum]

Evacuating large groups of people for months at a time, and killing and burying their livestock "WAY deep" constitutes a magnitude of liability no private company is prepared to take on. Your comment suggests you are in favor of large, coercive groups of quasi-governmental officials with the power to evacuate or temporarily relocate populations, organized and financed by the government, and all for the sake of continued profits for the power companies. Seriously.

What happened at Fukushima was a very rare event that had national consequences. The moving of people and killing livestock would also be a government function in any situation, including similar situations where something like an oil refinery blows up or some other similar significant industrial accident.

Just look at what BP had to do with their oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico. Even that involved government actions to deal with the general public.

This isn't just for the sake of profits of power companies, but a vital national resource where power from an energy plant is necessary for economic vitality. Without power being produced in some form, a country like Japan simply couldn't survive as a nation and millions would die due to starvation, disease, and simply being without shelter of any kind. In this regard, I dare say that nuclear power plants actually save lives and most definitely improve the standard of living for not just the shareholders of the power plant but for everybody that uses the power from those plants.

In fact it could be argued that a better gauge of poverty is to calculate how much energy is at the disposal of the person being measured instead of calculating monetary wealth. Certainly people in developing nations (or frankly "undeveloped nations") don't have access to nearly the same amounts of energy that people in developed countries have.

I have seen massive evacuations for wildfires (sometimes started by people and not natural), tornadoes, hurricanes, and many other kinds of disasters. A problem with a nuclear power plant is unfortunate and experience should try to improve the situation because it is a man-made device, but that doesn't mean you need to have a knee jerk reaction against the idea due to irrational fear of the technology like some sort of Luddite.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

What he's saying is that nobody is offering you the choice to "stand next to" radioactive byproducts from coal emissions. If you breathe the air on planet Earth, the decision has been made for you.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[AmiMoJo]

Around 600 people died during the evacuation. You can't move 180,000 people, some of them ill and infirmed, without some of them suffering serious consequences.

Wikipedia tries to spin this as a reason not to evacuate people (nice NPOV BTW). Problem is in the immediate aftermath of the accident when the plant is still in critical condition and things are still exploding it is hard to know just how bad the situation is going to get, so there isn't really any option.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[maxwell demon]

More importantly, radiation that hits you from outside is far less dangerous than radiation from sources you ingest. You rarely eat granite.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[aminorex]

I think you meant "the moving of livestock and killing people would also be a government function in any situation"

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[aminorex]

You're undercounting the exploded reactors by a factor of at least 3.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[FirstOne]

"Speaking as someone who was born and spent the first 5 or so years of my life when everyone was setting off megaton atomic warheads ABOVE GROUND and living with more fallout than you can shake a geiger tube at,"

You forget that back then our government ordered Iodine supplements to be added to dairy cow feed. And the sharp rise in baby boomer cancer rates.

Thus you may never know that you're already paying the price for our previous follies. Don't make it worse for the next generation by building upon the follies of the past..

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[terjeber]

Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

...and, as we all know, the avoidable (particularly if it is man-made) radiation is incredibly much more dangerous than unavoidable and "natural" radiation.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Fred Ferrigno]

Does this mean that it is 'hysteria' to be worried when your local operators have been exhibiting negligence and incompetence indistinguishable from malice while issuing bland statements about how you have nothing to worry about?

If the public would show at least as much concern for coal, which has all of those same problems plus much worse effects on human health, it would be harder to chalk it up to irrational fears about anything attached to the word nuclear.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[svirre]

Radon (And its decay products) can most certainly get inside your body through your respiratory system. Exposure to radon is associated with lung cancer. A quick google search finds the following article: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/radon

While radon itself has a very short biological half life since it is an inert gas, it also have a rather short physical half life decaying into various heavy atoms (polonium, lead, bismuth, thallium and mercury). This turns into airborne dust that can get lodged in your lungs. Of the decay products pb-210 might be of most interest having a half life of 22 years.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[pipedwho]

It's called fearmongering and is really all about how it's covered in the press by pandering to people's inherent fear of change.

It's much easier to make a bogeyman out of something or to blow it out of proportion when it's something that people don't understand, are unfamiliar with, or is a change to the status quo. Since people are interested in what changes are happening around them - those kinds of articles end up selling more newspapers / ad impressions.

Let's say a random guy runs around the USA, and once a week he pops a bullet into someone's head. Statistically, this would be insignificant and just another unsolved murder. However, if in each case he left a calling card identifying him as a common element, that would be easy pickings for front page news. Suddenly, everyone is locking their doors and hiding under the bed. If the paper had simply reported the random deaths along with the amalgamated regular murder stats, the article would be boring and people would ignore it. ie. no change to the status quo.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[mdielmann]

All I know is that we as a species are smart enough to overcome our instincts and react appropriately to situations, so we should do it in these types of situations, too.

The more I observe people, the more I believe this isn't true for the vast majority of them.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[cusco]

Indeed. The say that Carbon 14 dating will never be useful for any date after the 1950s because of the amount of radiation we dumped into the ecosystem. And yet we're mostly alive, and almost all cancers are caused by something else.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[kazekirifx]

I'd say widespread demand to politicians to shut down all nuclear plants is pretty hysterical.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[sl149q]

Almost as expensive as leaving them where they can be killed by a tsunami ... remind me again how many people where killed and / or force-ably moved by the tsunami and how many from the reactors...

Assuming that there is not an unlimited pot of money to spend it would seem that spending it on saving people from the direct effects of a tsunami would be a higher priority.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[PiMuNu]

And relative to Fukushima - how many conventional chemical/oil plants got destroyed by the tsunami? How much junk did that spew into the environment, and how many people will die of poisoning from that stuff? Heck, why are they discussing investing many billions in improving nuclear plant safety, which might save few people rather than improving flood defences and emergency response which might save thousands? This whole discussion is just crazy.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Herve5]

At least, the correct answer to the OP question, in two concise lines, and less than 1 meter below the question in the thread. Not so bad after all, Slashdot. Author friended.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[dbIII]

That's a very major shift of the goalposts, and somewhat dishonest since it avoids the issue of there being very little radioactive material in there in the first place. There are plenty of real reasons to be worried about coal but here you are worried about an imaginary one just because of a bit of very stupid failed propaganda from the head of a section at Oak Ridge Labs in the 1970s.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Boronx]

I think it's safe to say that the risk of meltdown at Fukushima was pretty low without the tsunami, but it was still incompetently run.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[rogerz]

Yeah, but the quantity of stuff that needs to be mined to produce the same amount of energy is quite a bit different and impacts the likelihood of mining accidents:

Coal - ~6,150 kilowatt-hours (kWh)/ton
Uranium – 2,000,000,000 kWh/ton
Uranium, Fast Breeder reactors (up to 100x more) - 200,000,000,000 kWh/ton

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[rogerz]

The jury is still out on radiation hormesis. Look it up.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Akzo]

Probably because we've been burning coal for over a 100 years so we have a fair idea of what it does.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[dunkelfalke]

You forget one small but important thing: the coal you mine is almost ready to use, but you don't mine pure uranium, you mine a lot of rock to extract pitchblende, gummite, torbinite and so on. Then you process it to yellowcake. Then you purify that and for most current reactors you have to enrich it. Only then you've got usable fuel.
And as for breeders, IIRC there is just one commercial breeder on the whole planet currently in operation. They are notoriously complicated to build and to maintain.

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Sansonaa]

The source of radiation in Denver which he was referring to was radon, which is an alpha emitter in a gas phase. Thus, this "type" of radiation IS the kind that can get into your body and radon decays into some very nasty daughters. Radon exposure is a very large concern indeed.

Because science is boring

[Gothmolly]

The news channels can't educate people on what a rem is, or why its important, in under 30 seconds, and nobody knows that from school anymore, so the news spin cycle is forced to sensationalize.

Re:Because science is boring

[artor3]

Nonsense. The news channels could easily explain it in thirty seconds. Something like:

"Radioactive exposure is measured in rems. The average American is exposed to 0.6 rems a year. People around Fukushima will be exposed to an extra 0.1 rems, which won't hurt them at all. Now, back to our coverage of the entire villages that were swept away by the actual disaster."

They choose to sensationalize and fan the fires of ignorance because it makes for more exciting news, which gets them better ratings, which gets them more money. Simple as that.

Re:Because science is boring

[garyebickford]

They choose to sensationalize and fan the fires of ignorance because it makes for more exciting news, which gets them better ratings, which gets them more money.

I think our attraction to disaster is biological - I'm not sure _why_, but we all tend to slow down at accident scenes, just for one example. How much of our interest in Fukushima is just the fatalistic viewing of the tide coming in and washing people away? IIRC there is evidence that other primates do this as well.

I suppose destruction derbies and horror movies are successful for similar reasons. Then there's the infamous Roman spectacles.

I used to live in Pittsburgh(early 1990s). One of the local stations was not getting very good ratings for their 11:00 PM news, and decided to chase ambulances. They began showing video footage of every car crash they could get to. Soon they had among the highest ratings in the area.

Re:Because science is boring

[SplashMyBandit]

Science is fascinating. There are two main problems:

The first problem is that most journalists are so poor at science (many are barely numerate) they can't distinguish good science from pseudo-science so counter-factual stories get published all the time, plus because the journalists don't grok science they have a hard time breaking down the essential ideas so they can be presented for the target audience.

The second "problem" is that most people simply don't care about science (or biology, or mathematics,or politics, or history, or art/theatre, or exercise, or philosophy, or reality, or ...). Some people do, but most don't. The extreme apathy of most people leads those in television to conclude that putting out scientific articles is a waste of time. You get more articles about who an actress is having an affair with, which sports team will will the same competition that has been running year after year (Piggers are number One. Piggers are gonna go all the way this year! : The Oatmeal), what some gay guy thinks you should be consuming (shoes, handbags, makeup, clothes, accessories, etc). Blah blah.

So there are a lot of factors in play other than the simplistic (and IMHO inaccurate) "Science is boring" myth. When presented correctly, most people can probably stomach 30 seconds of scientific facts once in a while.

Re:Because science is boring

[repapetilto]

You know this, I know this, the "media" knows this. They know that radiation is scarier than water, and that scarier things get more eyeballs... so they run with that story. People need to learn that the purpose of the news is not to inform, but to get you watching commercials.

I don't see how that is a rebuttal. (maybe it wasn't meant to be).

Re:Because science is boring

[jamstar7]

The news channels can't educate people on what a rem is, or why its important, in under 30 seconds, and nobody knows that from school anymore, so the news spin cycle is forced to sensationalize.

More like, the news channels in the US won't educate people in a 30 second sound byte. They get better ratings when they pile on the hype. Remember dirty bombs? How they kept saying they were the end of the world and no nuclear knowledge was needed to kill kill KILL with them? The few stations who actually did the math and figured out the (conventional) explosive component was far more deadly than any radioactive jacket you could cover it with, and the radiation 'released' by one could only seriously injure you if 1) they cemented your feet in place for 5-10 years in the 'radiation zone', and 2) nobody cleaned up after it, not even the rain, didn't get the ratings that the stations who went all 'OMGOMGOMG!!! It's the end of the world!! Tune in at 5 tomorrow and we'll show you how you can possibly survive this massive danger!!' did. And with the ratings, so go the advertising dollars. Being businesses that had to answer to their stockholders, guess which way the tv stations went, especially in a low income slot like the news? Hell, the US Army studied dirty bombs, did the math, decided they were a humongous waste of time, and had their contractors develop better artillery shells. Yeah, some of those use depleted uranium, but that's because DU goes through light to medium armor extremely well.

Re:Because science is boring

[Waccoon]

Safety is boring. The fact that life today is safe and cushy is why we use the world's largest electronic library to watch a cat playing a piano.

I hate injustice, am cynical of the future, and bash my health care system at every turn, but I will never complain that life sucks. It's easy to forget how easy we have it these days, so long as some rich asshole isn't trying to ruin it.

Re:Because science is boring

[AmiMoJo]

In Japan NHK shows hour long documentaries about Fukushima regularly, even this long after the event. People there have a fairly good understanding of the problem.

Just because US media (and I have to say UK media) is terrible at science reporting and people are all the dumber for it doesn't mean the situation is the same everywhere.

Wrong scare

[pe1rxq]

Fukushima wasn't scary because of what happened. It was scary because one of the most developped countries in the world had absolutly no control over what happened.
Untill now everybody was reassured that these things only happened to old sovjet reactors.
Fukushima learnt the ignorant masses that when nuclear shit hits the fan it doesn't matter much which country the fan is located in.

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

I think it makes a rather huge difference. Things went far worse at Fukushima than they did at Chernobyl. However the government was able to evacuate effectively, maintain health levels, control the situation.... I'd say the lessen is more or less the opposite.

Re:Wrong scare

[Microlith]

Things went far worse at Fukushima than they did at Chernobyl.

They did? The reactor cores at Fukushima exploded? The live fuel was exposed directly to the atmosphere and started burning?

Re:Wrong scare

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It was scary because one of the most developped countries in the world had absolutly no control over what happened.

Huh. If you expect even the most developed countries in the world to have any control over tsunamis and earthquakes whatsoever, I'd say that you're overly optimistic about mankind's ability to control its environment.

Re:Wrong scare

[ModelX]

According to NRC transcripts there were fires in several fuel pools which were exposed to the atmosphere (the roofs were blown away by explosions). Many people believe the hydrogen was not enough to cause the mess at #3 so until the Japanese show the lid of #3 reactor an impartial observer cannot exclude the possibility of reactor itself blowing sky high.

Re:Wrong scare

[artor3]

I think the GP's point is that the Fukushima plants were exposed to far worse conditions than the Chernobyl plant, and yet emerged much better, thus proving the efficacy of the safety devices and procedures in place.

For the requisite car analogy: Fukushima is a modern sedan in a head-on collision, from which the driver walks away. Chernobyl is a Pinto getting into a fender bender and exploding.

Re:Wrong scare

[ColdWetDog]

Maybe we're not talking about the same Fukashima but I distinctly recall pretty much total confusion and paralysis by the Japanese government and TEPCO. It was clear they did not have a good handle on the situation. They clearly lied, obfuscated and just refused to talk at times.

THAT is what was so scary. Nobody believed what the government was saying. It was extraordinarily hard to figure out exactly what was going on. Waving Geiger counters around isn't the best way to determine health risks but that is exactly what the general public was forced to do given the poor official response. This went on for months. So, I'm supposed to believe them now?

Note the similarities between Chernoble and Fukashima. Both governments caught unawares. Both governments go into minimize mode. The real situation turns out to be, in fact, pretty bad. People distrust official statements, get upset, get hyperbolic, perhaps panic.

SNAFU....

Re:Wrong scare

[ColdWetDog]

Define "worse." Because, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Chernobyl is still a disaster area, NEARLY THIRTY YEARS LATER.

Fukushima will be back to normal in a couple years and we'll forget all about it.

Really? You have an rather expansive definition of normal.

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

Define worse. The loss of control of the fissionable material and things like power failures and flooding at the time they were working to get them under control.

What happened after is proof of my point above.

Re:Wrong scare

[Microlith]

Link to the NRC transcripts. And "many people" is not exactly a reliable source.

until the Japanese show the lid of #3 reactor an impartial observer cannot exclude the possibility of reactor itself blowing sky high.

If the reactor core had exploded there would be no way in hell for them to hide it. Impartial observers would exclude it by the fact that there were no radiation readings anywhere near intense enough to indicate that as a possibility. On the other hand, anti-nuke fearmongers would suggest this to be a possibility and prey on people's ignorance.

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

Exactly! Thank you.

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

No they didn't. The Japanese handled a worse objective situation. On the other hand, yes the fuel was exposed.

Re:Wrong scare

[cheesybagel]

They also distributed iodine tablets to the general population. That takes some serious stockpiling and preventive efforts.

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

Maybe we're not talking about the same Fukashima but I distinctly recall pretty much total confusion and paralysis by the Japanese government and TEPCO.

When exactly was this paralysis? Though out the whole thing the Japanese government and TEPCO were managing the reactor everyday. There was a lot of time they didn't know about what was happening exactly or how to handle it. But more or less they had very effective teams working through how to handle a truly tragic situation effectively. This was the first time humanity ever faced this situation and they did rather well, for a first time.

It was clear they did not have a good handle on the situation.

They had as good a handle as could be expected on a situation that no one had ever encountered before where the monitoring and safety systems failed.

They clearly lied, obfuscated and just refused to talk at times.

People wanted more definite answers than they had.

THAT is what was so scary. Nobody believed what the government was saying. It was extraordinarily hard to figure out exactly what was going on. Waving Geiger counters around isn't the best way to determine health risks but that is exactly what the general public was forced to do given the poor official response. This went on for months. So, I'm supposed to believe them now?

Why not? In retrospect I think they were mostly as honest as they could be. A bit overly optimistic and a bit concerned in trying to reduce panic. But I don't see widespread deception. And the panic is over.

Note the similarities between Chernoble and Fukashima. Both governments caught unawares. Both governments go into minimize mode. The real situation turns out to be, in fact, pretty bad.

Wait a minute. In Russia they deny it all together and have people (like my wife) out in streets getting radioactive rain. Nothing like that happened in Japan.

Re:Wrong scare

[eric_herm]

I think people do not realize that when a disaster strike, most people have better thing to do than communicate in real time. When choosing between spending 2h for a press conference or doing a more urgent coordination work can be the difference between life and death for others, I think this is perfectly ok to focus on not losing lifes.

To remove the emotion out of the equation, imagine you having to finish a very important project. Will you focus on the project, or focus on doing meeting, filling timesheets, etc ?

Sure, if such disasters were routine, governement officials would be able to manage it. In this case, that was far from being routine and it was 2 disasters ( 1 for the nuclear plant, with the whole fear that this can produce (true or not, that's not the point, since fear was real) , one for the tsunami ) at the same time. And yet, people expect more informations, like real time complete report , in a easy to digest form ? I am not sure people do realize what "catastrophic events" mean really, and how this can affect concerned people.

Re:Wrong scare

[dgatwood]

Uh, you may not have control over tsunamis, but you certainly have control over whether you put your nuclear reactors along the coast, and, for that matter, whether you allow nuclear reactors within a few hundred miles of an active fault....

Re:Wrong scare

[garyebickford]

The father of one of my co-workers has spent essentially the entire time since a week after the tsunami, in Japan assisting with the planning and execution of the clean-up. As has been recently exposed in the media, he has been saying all along that things were and are much worse than TEPCO, the government and the Japanese media have been saying, that the response and cleanup efforts have been pathetically bad, and that the exposure for many people and the surrounding area has been much worse than have been let out.

Among other things that have been publicized recently, it's been discovered that TEPCO executives had been instructing their workers to either not wear their radiation monitor badges or to cover them (with lead? I dunno, don't recall) to reduce the workers' apparent exposure.

I've also read that an area of some hundred square miles may remain uninhabitable for decades if not centuries. Sorry, don't recall where - it was a couple of months ago.

Re:Wrong scare

[cgaertner]

The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission disagrees with your assessment - this is what the chairman has to say in the official report:

Message from the Chairman

THE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI of March 11, 2011 were natural disasters of a magnitude
that shocked the entire world. Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent
accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural
disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster – that could and should have been foreseen
and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response.
How could such an accident occur in Japan, a nation that takes such great pride in its global
reputation for excellence in engineering and technology? This Commission believes the
Japanese people – and the global community – deserve a full, honest and transparent answer
to this question.

Our report catalogues a multitude of errors and willful negligence that left the Fukushima
plant unprepared for the events of March 11. And it examines serious deficiencies in the
response to the accident by TEPCO, regulators and the government.

For all the extensive detail it provides, what this report cannot fully convey – especially to
a global audience – is the mindset that supported the negligence behind this disaster.
What must be admitted – very painfully – is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.”
Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture:
our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with
the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.

Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident,
the result may well have been the same.

Following the 1970s “oil shocks,” Japan accelerated the development of nuclear power in
an effort to achieve national energy security. As such, it was embraced as a policy goal by
government and business alike, and pursued with the same single-minded determination
that drove Japan’s postwar economic miracle.

With such a powerful mandate, nuclear power became an unstoppable force, immune to
scrutiny by civil society. Its regulation was entrusted to the same government bureaucracy
responsible for its promotion. At a time when Japan’s self-confidence was soaring, a tightly
knit elite with enormous financial resources had diminishing regard for anything ‘not
invented here.’

This conceit was reinforced by the collective mindset of Japanese bureaucracy, by which
the first duty of any individual bureaucrat is to defend the interests of his organization.
Carried to an extreme, this led bureaucrats to put organizational interests ahead of their
paramount duty to protect public safety.

Only by grasping this mindset can one understand how Japan’s nuclear industry managed
to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; and how
it became accepted practice to resist regulatory pressure and cover up small-scale accidents.
It was this mindset that led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.
This report singles out numerous individuals and organizations for harsh criticism, but the
goal is not—and should not be—to lay blame. The goal must be to learn from this disaster,
and reflect deeply on its fundamental causes, in order to ensure that it is never repeated.
Many of the lessons relate to policies and procedures, but the most important is one upon
which each and every Japanese citizen should reflect very deeply.

The consequences of negligence at Fukushima stand out as catastrophic, but the mindset
that supported it can be found across Japan

Re:Wrong scare

[angel'o'sphere]

Ask some people living in Japan. The government was not capable of anything, the least it was capable of what you claim ... eavacuation, securing, control ...

Re:Wrong scare

[angel'o'sphere]

Why do you ask that, when it covered the news for weeks? Was it two or three reactor cores that "exploded"? Yes, plutonium leaked into the atmosphere ... on what planet did you live when it happened?

Re:Wrong scare

[symbolset]

I'll just leave this here.

Re:Wrong scare

[angel'o'sphere]

The design of the reactors and the way how the desasters evolved are so different, there is nomway in comparing them.
Efficiency of safety devices and procedures are absolutely not comparable.
Except you want to compare butter with steam engines.

Re:Wrong scare

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, I would suggest you talk to some japaneese guyes.
Your perception is completely wrong.
I was on a kenjutsu seminar last week in germany. The japanese instructors, about 15, where totaly ashamed about the incompetence of their government regarding fukushima. They where completely upset about the inability of anyone to act on that emergency.
Sorry, if you want to talk about global matters, you should stop listening to US media and inform your self from global news sources.

Re:Wrong scare

[jamstar7]

Dingdingding, we got a winner!! Fukushima was designed to withstand an earthquake. It got hit with an earthquake AND a tsunami. A billion to 1 freak occurance that nobody planned for because it was so bloody unlikely. You have better odds hitting the Lotto, and everybody knows how bad those odds are. Yet, as I said in an earlier comment, everybody's bitching that it wasn't armored from a rock from space the size of Texas and looking to crucify anybody in sight. Every environut from Greenpeace on out snagging sound bytes to hype the shit outta it certainly didn't add to the solution, and as my old man used to say, if you ain't part of the solution, yer part of the problem!

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

I understand they were not perfect and there is a lot of self flagellation going on. But the fact is: the disaster was unbelievably bad, the consequences were moderate. Its hard to look on the bright side, but they did a pretty good job in a god awful situation. Of course not all expensive safety measures were implemented. Of course people were arrogant after decades of success. These plants were run by real people with normal human flaws.

The opposite of perfection is not total incompetence. They did pretty good, made some serious mistakes and did a good job mitigating them.

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

How did people get evacuated so quickly? You had 4 nuclear reactors explode with 0 deaths. You tell me how that happened?

Re:Wrong scare

[Microlith]

That's not the core exploding. But go ahead, leave offtopic things behind.

Re:Wrong scare

[medv4380]

Fukushima plants were exposed to far worse conditions than the Chernobyl plant

You consider doing something deliberately stupid and clearly dangerous less dangerous than Earth Quake and Tsunami that hit Fukushima? The Japanese did not DELIBERATELY disable the reactors safety devices like the crazy Russians did at Chernobyl. They also didn't proceed with a WORST CASE test with safety equipment turned off and physically removed from the reactor. Chernobyl is like Driving a Formula 1 race car driven at a Wall at full speed with all breaking devices removed to see if the driver can find a way to survive if he waits till he's 5 ft from hitting the wall before he even considers turning.

Re:Wrong scare

[cgaertner]

we can test the radiation levels

It isn't (or shouldn't be) about background radiation levels, but concentration and type of radioactive isotopes: The problem is continued direct exposure through bioaccumulation.

Re:Wrong scare

[mvdwege]

Mate, you just have been given the exact words from a Japanese high-level bureaucrat saying the exact opposite, and you persist in saying "[they] did a good job"?

How much of your finances is tied up in nuclear energy?

Re:Wrong scare

[AmiMoJo]

Have you seen the CCTV of the control centres that was recently released. Panicked and disorganized are accurate adjectives to use.

Plus 180,000 have been displaced from their homes and lives, and TEPCO is trying its best to wriggle out of compensation. People are now in the really nasty situation of wanting to go home but not wanting the exclusion zone re-opened early because it will be used as an excuse to cut compensation. What use is being able to go back to your home for a few hours a day to decontaminate the area when your neighbourhood and livelihood have been destroyed?

Re:Wrong scare

[AmiMoJo]

In both cases the accidents were caused by known design flaws that the manufacturers were warned about. In the case of Fukushima and every other reactor in Japan they are just crossing their fingers and hoping that there isn't another very large earthquake, rather than spending the large sums of money needed to fix the problems.

Re:Wrong scare

[angel'o'sphere]

Why don't you read the news about it or a wikipedia site?
The time from tsunami till explosion of the first reactor was what? 4 weeks?
The first weeks there was no evacuation at all! That is not what I consider fast!

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

I'm not saying the opposite. I'm saying his standards and expectations were too high. I'm also saying that part of the problem is countries tend to self flagellate and overcorrect after a disaster. Look at what happened to the USA after 9/11.

Re:Wrong scare

[drinkypoo]

As for bioaccumulation that requires a higher level of radiation in the background

We've already seen radioactive bioaccumulation in tuna.

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

Lets break this down.

No I haven't seen video of people in the control center when they lost control of the situation. I'm not surprised they were panicked. The claim was that the government and TEPCO were paralyzed with fear not that the guys on-sight were a little freaked out. Freaked out or not they worked their post, stayed and most importantly they called up the chain and new stuff was tried. I'm not saying they were robots but that's what people look like in a crisis who are handling the crisis.

Again remember this was people responding to something that had never happened before and was incredibly dangerous.

Re:Wrong scare

[ColdWetDog]

You are correct in noting that the situation was unprecedented, fluid and complicated. However, even at the time of the accident it was clear that TEPCO was out and out lying and most of the subsequent reports have shown a culture of deceit and subterfuge lasting for decades that certainly didn't improve under stress. They taped over exposure badges, they prevented third parties from entering areas (it's for their own safety, of course). They fudged measurements.

Fukashima was and is both worse and better than has been generally reported. The acute exposures were relatively benign - at least in most cases. Chronic exposure and long term fallout (so to speak) from continued, fairly high volume and intensity, leakage from the plant has been stuffed under the mattress. Of course, Fukashima was so last year - we have new disasters to get hyped about.

I don't think it's useful to discuss if Fukashima and Chernoble were 'worse' than each other. They were both very bad. They were both caused by the collusion of operators and their respective governments. They both serve as shining examples of what not to do.

The only real take home lesson is that at the current stage of development of homo industrialis, we're not quite ready for nuclear power.

Re:Wrong scare

[drinkypoo]

The only data I've seen is radiation levels 10x above normal for Japan which is way under a danger level. Is that what you are talking about?

Oh, now the goalposts are "way under a danger level"? Thanks for keeping me updated.

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

I strongly disagree. I think if we look at disasters in terms of oil drilling, oil transportation, coal leakage, that nuclear's long history is far safer than oil or coal. Fukashima was a good taste of what is the worst that can happen in a 1st world country. And the answer is, not too much.

Now in terms of long term exposure I live in a radon neighborhood. There is are rooting roots of plants contaminated from the radon leaks in the 1930's under my driveway. People fly in planes some quite regularly and get elevated levels of radiation. The fact is those contaminations statistically increase chances of complications. Multiply them by a large population and you are looking at many thousands of deaths.

On the other hand how many people died this decade alone fighting for the rights to oil fields?

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

Yes that's always been the goal post in industrial accidents.

Re:Wrong scare

[ModelX]

If the reactor core had exploded there would be no way in hell for them to hide it. Impartial observers would exclude it by the fact that there were no radiation readings anywhere near intense enough to indicate that as a possibility.

Radiation readings were reported by the same company that took a year to finally admit triple meltdown, you can trust them if you want.
Reactor blowing up does not necessarily mean a huge nuclear explosion. Going only a few percent overcritical for a fraction of a second can build up enough pressure to blow up. There's this educational video from a US experimental reactor showing what I'm talking about.

Re:Wrong scare

[aminorex]

#3 was too exothermic to be hydrogen

Re:Wrong scare

[jbolden]

I agree. There is distrust. People think the situation is worse than it is as a consequence. Which is different than saying the situation is as bad as the Japanese population seems to think it is.

Because silence is the worst reaction.

[bmo]

But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?"

Because the government and the electrical utility had been completely opaque and not forthcoming with any useful information and preferred to treat the public like children and tell them to go pound sand at public meetings. The government's handling of this from the beginning was a textbook example of how to *not* handle something like this.

So what do people do when they can't get any valid information from their own government? Assume the government is covering it up and assume the worst. And there are plenty of people out there willing to fill the information void with the most outlandish "facts" going.

That's why.

--
BMO

Re:Because silence is the worst reaction.

[bmo]

You're going to have to be more artful and sincere than that.

--
BMO

Re:Because silence is the worst reaction.

[manwargi]

An unfortunate day not to have any mod points for you. Between misinformation and lies and the flood of disinfo attempting to fill in the blanks, how can anyone know for sure what to think? Only a couple of days after the incident that fallout map started making its rounds, and when the question comes up of how dangerous 750 rads is... yeah. Not terribly surprising people in New York were flipping out and hoarding radiation pills. While I don't condone mass hysteria, I agree that silence is worse on subjects like this.

Re:Because silence is the worst reaction.

[bmo]

but there was also a private enterprise involved that was equally incompetent

I said:

>the government and the electrical utility

Did I actually have to come out and say TEPCO? Really?

--
BMO

Re:Why? This:

[ATMAvatar]

That map would be useful if there were any units or legend presented to demonstrate what kinda scale the heatmap is attempting to display. Without knowing this, the map is good for nothing more than to scare people.

Radon

[drwho]

Radon, from unventilated places, is the leading cause of radiation induced death. Not nuclear power, nuclear weapons, or nuclear medicine. People need to wise the fuck up, and look at the actual facts and see what is going on. Not only is nuclear power safe, but efforts are underway to make it safer still. Modern nuclear reactor designs using liquid fuels instead of solid are the way to go. But all this anti-nuclear sentiment from alarmists (some of whom are funded by the petroleum industry) make utilities wary of funding the replacement of aging plants.

Re:Radon

[chartreuse]

I don't know if many humans would be willing to take essential medical advice from a fictional alien doctor, much less one who could probably eat nuclear waste and crap out Daleks. Why not eat some nuclear waste from the pits at Hanford and get back to us on its health benefits?

Re:Radon

[symbolset]

Not until they start dry casking their spent fuel, they won't.

Re:Radon

[angel'o'sphere]

Nuclear power plants are only safe as lomg as the plant which is exploding is on the other side of the world. They become miraculary unsace when it is the plant next door.
Strange, isn't it?

Re:Radon

[SvnLyrBrto]

Oh, it gets better than that.

For over thirty years, the US Navy has been operating nuclear reactors which can be run at a reduced power level with the pumps turned off entirely. It's called natural circulation. You know... hot water rises, cold water sinks, and all that. They came up with the technology for the Los Angeles and Ohio classes of submarine, because subs hide by being quiet, pumps make noise, and you can make the sub stealthier if you can run the reactor without pumps. So why not require ALL reactors to have this ability?

The Navy, by the way, has a perfect operational safety record with its submarine reactors... not a single reactor accident in about sixty years.

Re:Radon

[Anonymous Coward]

That is totally not how the Daleks came to be.

Re:Radon

[ed1park]

You are incorrect along with the author and the others trivializing the problem.

It's not about the radiation. It's about the bioaccumulation.

To compare the radiation from radon gas to the insanely toxic radioactive isotopes that were released into the air, water, and soil is retarded. (e.g.: Caesium, Plutonium, Strontium, Iodine, etc) It has gotten into the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. And when it gets into the body, it will cause cancer. BTW, Radon has a half life of 4 days. Caesium-137, 30 years.

How it's poisoned the food supply, etc. Scroll down to the table of contents and learn something:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

Fellow Slashdotters, swallow your pride, accept your ignorance, and think before you type and moderate like fools perpetuating fallacies.

BTW, I am pro nuclear power. But Fukushima was a failure in accountability coupled with a corrupt regulating agency. Nuclear power will only work when management and owners are held directly responsible with their lives. Both physical and financial.

Re:Radon

[bcrowell]

Radon, from unventilated places, is the leading cause of radiation induced death.

I don't think this is quite right. Do you have a source for this claim? First off, I don't think radon is the leading source of radiation dose to the population; the leading source is natural radioactivity. It may be true that radon is the leading source of artificial radiation dose to the population. But even then, that's not the same as saying that it's the leading cause of death induced by artificial radiation. To assert that, you would have to be able to verify some hypothesis such as LNT. But LNT doesn't hold in animal studies, so there's no reason to expect that it holds in humans; we just can't say for sure, because we can't do controlled experiments with humans. We actually don't know anything quantitative about radiation hormesis in humans, but if humans work like other animals, it may be that radon actually prevents more deaths than it causes.

Re:Radon

[WalksOnDirt]

First off, I don't think radon is the leading source of radiation dose to the population; the leading source is natural radioactivity. It may be true that radon is the leading source of artificial radiation dose to the population.

Why would you think that radon is unnatural? It is a decay product of naturally occurring uranium and thorium. Perhaps CT scans, which feature artificial radiation, are more important for some people, but there are a large number exposed to high radon levels.

LNT may or may not be correct, but it is the most conservative model.

Re:Radon

[dasunt]

To compare the radiation from radon gas to the insanely toxic radioactive isotopes that were released into the air, water, and soil is retarded. (e.g.: Caesium, Plutonium, Strontium, Iodine, etc) It has gotten into the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. And when it gets into the body, it will cause cancer.

Shouldn't you say "it may cause cancer"? After all, at low enough doses, the radiation a victim is exposed to is probably unlikely to cause cancer. I base this assumption on the naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in our body that also expose people to radiation. For example (using numbers from Wikipedia), we have 140 grams of potassium in our body, which naturally would dose us with about 4 kBq. (31 bq per g of potassium, .14 kg of potassium in the average human body.)

Presumably, considering that many people do not suffer from cancer in their life-times, exposure at low enough levels of radiation is not guaranteed to cause cancer.

Also, I just want to point out again: 4 kBq. That's 4,000 atoms decaying every second. In the 2 minutes or so it took me to write this post, my body had about half a million atoms decay. And I survived. It sounds rather impressive, doesn't it?

Re:Radon

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, during the 1960's Oak Ridge National Laboratory built a small 5 MW reactor based on what we call molten-salt reactor (MSR) design, using thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel. The design actually worked quite well, but was discontinued because it didn't produce uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the two main fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

But now, they're dusting off the old research and studying the idea of scaling up this MSR design (best known today by the name Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR) for a new generation of extremely safe nuclear reactors that offer these advantages of conventional uranium-fueled reactors:

1. Uses a cheaply-made form of nuclear fuel, and thorium-232 is widely more abundant than uranium.
2. Doesn't need an expensive pressurized reactor vessel.
3. Reactor shutdown happens in only a few minutes just by dumping the fuel from the reactor.
4. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, eliminates the need for expensive cooling towers or locating the reactor near a big source of cooling water such as a lake, fast-flowing river or ocean.
5. Can even use spent uranium fuel rods or plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel.
6. The amount of radioactive waste generated is tiny compared to a uranium-fueled reactor, and more importantly, the radioactive half-life is under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal (it can be dumped into any disused salt mine or salt dome). Mind you, the nuclear medicine industry wants that "waste," since the byproduct of an MSR has enormous medical uses.

Re:Radon

[AmiMoJo]

Nuclear power will only work when management and owners are held directly responsible with their lives. Both physical and financial.

Even that isn't enough. History is littered with examples of people failing to take proper precautions and run things properly resulting in their own deaths. Aircraft pilots are the most obvious example, ignoring safety protocols or idly chatting in the cockpit during landing despite the fact that they know a mistake could result in their own demise.

We just have to accept that if things can go wrong due to human error then eventually they probably will. That is just a fact of life and shouldn't stop you flying.

Re:Radon

[ed1park]

Not all radioactive isotopes are equally toxic because of types of radiation and their half lives. (Alpha, beta, and gamma). Cesium-137 alone and it's by-products produce beta and gamma (more damaging) along with a half life that is 30X longer. And it's even more dangerous when ingested and keeps accumulating from everything you eat, breathe and drink on top of the K-40 already in your body.

"March 2012 up to 18,700 becquerels per kilogram radioactive cesium was detected in yamame, or landlocked masu salmon, caught in the Niida river near the town Iitate, which was over 37 times the legal limit of 500 becquerels/kg."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Agricultural_products

Click the link to learn about the other radioactive materials:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Isotopes_of_concern

And you are correct. Not everyone will get cancer. Others will suffer from crippling genetic mutations.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/fukushima-radiation-causes-insect-mutations-researchers-20120817-24cy2.html

In this case, someone really should think of the children.
http://chernobyl.typepad.com/chernobyl_childrens_proje/people_their_stories/

Re:Radon

[ed1park]

*sigh* Not all radioactive isotopes are equal.
gamma decay for C137 @1.175 MeV vs K40 @ 1.461 keV

Debunking K-40 to Cs137
http://www.fukushima311watchdogs.org/biblio/36/Debunking%20the%20potassium%20(K40)%20vs%20Cesium%20137%20%E2%80%9Eargument%E2%80%9C.pdf

As for the plutonium...

1.2 trillion Becquerels of Plutonium is almost none? Hey, with a half life of 24 thousand years and being the worst as an Alpha emitter, no big deal. None of that for sure will get ingested or inhaled. Right?
http://enenews.com/leaked-tepco-report-120-billion-becquerels-of-plutonium-7-6-trillion-becquerels-of-neptunium-released-in-first-100-hours-media-concealed-risk-to-public/comment-page-1

And remember all this is in ADDITION to the K-40 ALREADY in our systems causing cancer along with the other isotopes *ACCUMULATING* in the food chain. Read the damn link for chrissakes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Agricultural_products

Re:Radon

[ed1park]

I am referring to the radioactive isotopes of caesium, strontium, iodine that were released.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Isotopes_of_concern

Re:Radon

[ed1park]

Here's a better quote:

*It takes thousands of grams of potassium 40 to produce the same biological effect as 1 gram of Cs 137.*

"The fundamental error implicit in the industry argument re K40 and Cs ** is
this : We are not talking, in the first instance, of radiation as normally thought of (eg x, CAT
scan type stuff) We are talking radio-chemicals. And this means, because each specific radio
chemical differs in rate of radioactivity, the weight of each substance required to produce a
given biological impact is key the argument. But nuclear industry, portraying itself as zero
emission, does not want us to think in terms of Lbs or kilograms. It takes thousands of grams
of potassium 40 to produce the same biological effect as 1 gram of Cs 137. What is the curie
a measure of ? The mass - the weight of a radio chemical required to deliver a given number
of radiation tracks per second. or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie " 1 Ci = 3.7 × 1010
decays per second.
Its continued use is discouraged" I don't wonder why. Using it forces the thought that weight
of subsance is part of the equation. And nuke industry claims to be zero emission. So they
want us to think in terms of Sieverts. There are many problems with that."

http://www.fukushima311watchdogs.org/biblio/36/Debunking%20the%20potassium%20(K40)%20vs%20Cesium%20137%20%E2%80%9Eargument%E2%80%9C.pdf

Re:Radon

[WalksOnDirt]

Debunking K-40 to Cs137

Why do you bring up potassium? I never did. Potassium-40 is indeed much less dangerous. There is an alpha emitter in the decay chain of radon, too. It is pretty nasty.

1.2 trillion Becquerels of Plutonium is almost none?

From Wikipedia, compare: "The highest levels found (of Pu-239 and Pu-240 combined) were 15 becquerels per square meters" and "up to 35 bq / kg plutonium 241 in leaf litter" to "4.7Mbq / kg" for cesium contamination. I consider 50 to 4,700,000 to be almost none. (I'm not sure how to compare a square meter to a kilogram, though).

Re:Radon

[chitokutai]

Cesium has a biological half life of one to four months. Removing yourself from the source of exposure, or diversifying your source of food to include produce from out of the affected area can almost completely eliminate internal contamination.

Certainly bio-accumulation is going to be a concern, especially after what we saw in Chernobyl. But unlike the Soviet disaster, most people in Japan don't acquire their food stuffs solely from local farms, and the contamination outside of Fukushima prefecture is almost nothing.

I live in one of the most contaminated areas outside of Fukushima, and the majority of food samples are testing free of cesium. Here are the testing results for August 2012; nothing detected. Here are the testing results for August of last year; only blueberries show cesium contamination at 44.6 bq/kg. Landlocked, fresh-water fish in my area have shown the most contamination, and as a result, they have been prohibited from consumption. Also, my family can avoid produce from Fukushima and Ibaraki prefecture as we live in a first-world nation with access to lots of alternatives.

The people living to the N/NW of Fukushima Daiichi (like in Iitatemura) got screwed the most because of government incompetence and lying. Most of those areas with the highest levels of contamination, including the more dangerous alpha emitters, are now in the exclusion zone, which means that farming is prohibited there. As for actual urine tests, the most cesium tested in a child was 17.5 becquerels per liter with the average being 2.2: Urine Tests These are levels are similar to when nuclear testing was being performed in the 60s.

This was a disaster of epic proportions, but we dodged a huge bullet. Most of the massive amount of radiation was blown out to sea, and even in areas like mine where contamination is high, it's now on par with cities like Hong Kong. In fact, the hospital by my house did a glass badge test for children in the area to test for yearly exposure levels, and not one child tested over an additional 1mSv/year.

Re:Radon

[ed1park]

I'm glad you brought that up, because my solution would work with aircraft pilots as well. You see, it's about aligning the goals of owners and management to that of the public's good. In this case, owners/managers would be highly motivated to ensure all reasonable safety considerations were followed if they didn't have insurance, corporate golden parachutes, etc. to protect them and instead faced personal financial devastation and/or jail time.

And having a regulating agency with zero conflict of interests would be necessary. Unlike the nuclear agency that was in bed with Tepco in the Fukushima case. All cases of corruption should result in financial devastation, jail time, or death.

Individual actions such as drunk drivers and lone pilots are not the concern. It's the wide ranging effects of corporate greed and stupidity this would solve like the BP oil spill, Challenger disaster, Too big to fail, Nuclear meltdowns, etc. Hey, want to run a nuclear facility? Then you are personally liable for damage and cleanup in case of an accident and must prepare and practice emergency procedures. Cut costs while violating safety standards and hide it from the people? Goto jail and get financially devastated. If people die from your stupidity? You die.

When your ass is on the line, you act differently. Corporate shields remove accountability and responsibility.

Re:Radon

[ed1park]

Sorry. That K response was meant for another thread:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3057855&cid=41043675

Re:Radon

[ed1park]

In case you didn't see this response.

It takes thousands of grams of potassium 40 to produce the same biological effect as 1 gram of Cs 137.
gamma decay for C137 @1.175 MeV vs K40 @ 1.461 keV

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3057855&cid=41044905

Because denver politicians hate their voters?

[Snaller]

Am I right? Did I win something?

it made Exxon happy

[JosephTX]

I guarantee you that "journalists" were being paid to sensationalize the issue. And people are STILL comparing the fukushima plant to some 1970s Soviet power plant? Incidents like Chernobyl happened due to cheap building and cheaper maintenance; the Fukushima "incident" happened due to a giant tsunami and record seismic activity.

But just look at what's going on now. Japan's shutting down ALL their nuclear power plants so they can import oil from foreign companies, and several European politicians have been pushing for the same thing; meanwhile in the US, this sensationalism has just been cannon fodder for the mindless ranting made by people who own $100 in Exxon/Shell/etc stock.

And these people wouldn't be able to get away with it if it wasn't for the idiots who eat all this up. If you're one of those people who bought into the scare tactics, you share just as much blame as the companies behind it.

Re:it made Exxon happy

[bmo]

Incidents like Chernobyl happened due to cheap building and cheaper maintenance;

No, Chernobyl happened because they completely botched an experiment in one of the worst reactor designs going - a graphite reactor known as the RBMK design. The Russians got the Latvians to finally shut theirs down like a year or two ago. Graphite reactors are *old* and basically unsafe if you do anything outside the design envelope. They will reliably produce heat for your boilers, but don't fuck with them.

You should read the wikipedia page on the accident. It's pretty thorough and one of the better pages in wikipedia.

--
BMO

PS: How old are graphite reactors? They go as far back as the Chicago Pile-1 in 1942. Nobody designs graphite reactors anymore because the hot graphite has a nasty habit of catching fire when exposed to oxygen, as in the case of Chernobyl.

Re:it made Exxon happy

[angel'o'sphere]

So, the reactor engineers running itnwhere under direct comand of the general secretary of the USSR.
Wow, did not know that! How many reactor teams did the general secretary comand simultaniously?

Re:it made Exxon happy

[celle]

"Incidents like Chernobyl happened due to cheap building and cheaper maintenance; the Fukushima "incident" happened due to a giant tsunami and record seismic activity."

    NO!! Both happened because of mis-management, Chernobyl's management ignored design requirements and safety limitations and Fukushima's management were corrupt and cheap.

Re:it made Exxon happy

[hansbrix]

PS: How old are graphite reactors? They go as far back as the Chicago Pile-1 in 1942. Nobody designs graphite reactors anymore because the hot graphite has a nasty habit of catching fire when exposed to oxygen, as in the case of Chernobyl.

I don't wish to demonize graphite as a moderator because it works quite nicely but another major safety issue with RMBK (or other graphite moderated) reactors is that the moderator and coolant are completely separate. If you lose the coolant the nuclear reaction continues. Not to ignore the myriad of other reactor designs out there, but light water reactors in contrast to RMBKs use water as the coolant and moderator. In a loss of coolant type scenario the nuclear reaction will essentially stop. This is not to say that you'd be completely out of the woods since you'd still have all the various sources of decay heat and whatnot (as was seen in Japan) that can still make one hell of a mess.

Propaganda

[santax]

The author: —Dr. Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. This essay is adapted from his new book, "Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines." Oh, he doesn't even mention that we have to find a way to keep the nuclear waste safe for 150.000 years. We are destroying the world with this. Sure, those reactors can be quite safe, but anyone know of a human-made building that is 150.000 years old and still intact? Didn't think so. Even mountains go and come over that period of time.

Re:Propaganda

[the eric conspiracy]

Well homo sapiens hasn't been been around long enough to have created buildings that are that old, so the premise behind your question is blithering nonsense.

However there are certainly lots of geological formations that have have been stable for 150,000 years. In geological scale that's an eye blink. For example Canada's Acasta Gneiss is 4 billion years old.

There are lots of practical ways of dealing with radioactive leftovers. The best is probably recycling combined with deep geological placement, something the French are getting along with pretty well.

Re:Propaganda

[santax]

Well, let's hope he will see things a bit more clear on this subject as well in a couple of years. People learn as they go, maybe Muller too.

Re:Propaganda

[santax]

Yes, let's poison the inner core of the world until plates move around enough to fuck shit up really really good... I don't have a problem with nuclear energy... but first there has to be a solution to actual clean the garbage up. Destroy it, make it a non-hazard. We are talking about an awful long time that this stuff is really really dangerous. Putting it in the ground and saying, well it's gone... isn't a solution.

Re:Propaganda

[yndrd1984]

we have to find a way to keep the nuclear waste safe for 150.000 years...

...or find a way to reprocess it.

Re:Propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

This "stuff" has always existed, and even does so in the very depths of the earth. Uranium is not a man-made material, after all. Yes it needs to be disposed of safely, but spent-reactor rods are a lot less dangerous than air pollution, no matter how you cut it.

Re:Propaganda

[MacDork]

According to wikipedia 1 Sivert == 100 rem. 0.1rem would be 0.001 Sivert or 1 mSv. According to a quick google there were hotspots = 5.82 microsiverts per hour. That's about 51 mSv per year or an increase of 5.1rem.

Where is he measuring this 0.1 rem increase? On Japan's south island?

Re:Propaganda

[fruitbane]

Well, the WSJ article calls Muller a physicist, not a climatologist, so I'd like to think his handling of energy and radiation topics will be more spot-on than an unrelated field.

Re:Propaganda

[santax]

Eh that is not correct... the uranium is enriched! A huge difference!

Re:Propaganda

[santax]

Yeah I agree. Correct.

Re:Propaganda

[symbolset]

"This "stuff" has always existed"

Pretty unclear on the whole fission thing, eh?

Re:Propaganda

[nbauman]

That goes to his credit. He reviewed the research, came to conclusions, and bit the hand that feeds him.

There's a big difference between

(1) a scientist who is a contrarian who tries to debunk the conventional wisdom and pick fights (and is maybe a pain in the ass sometimes) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller and

(2) a scientist who is a hired gun and makes a case for whoever is paying the bill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Milloy#Links_to_tobacco_industry

Re:Propaganda

[cyfer2000]

I found a map likely supporting your post, I really don't know where those people on WSJ pulled their number.

Re:Propaganda

[MacDork]

WSJ probably got it from We're too lazy to write our own story dot com. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, let's poison the inner core of the world until plates move around enough to fuck shit up really really good...
I don't have a problem with nuclear energy... but first there has to be a solution to actual clean the garbage up. Destroy it, make it a non-hazard. We are talking about an awful long time that this stuff is really really dangerous. Putting it in the ground and saying, well it's gone... isn't a solution.

Vitrification followed by dumping into a subduction zone sounds like a stellar plan to me. If you think that even a thousand tons a year would make a difference to the makeup of the earths mantle and core, I don't think you understand the size of the core or it's natural makeup. It's already chock full of billions of tons of radioactive isotopes that have sunk there, literally because they are atomically heavy elements, from the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago. And it's not like the rate of tectonic movement is such that it'll come up in less than several million years....we won't even be the same species by then!

Re:Propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

That is just not true. Hell irradiated stuf has 1750 curries after 1000 years! That stuff will kill you after 25.000 years before you can call your mom to say goodbye.

I don't mind being corrected, but I'm curious what "stuff" is so radioactive after 25,000 or even 1000 years.

So I looked up some common irradiated isotopes.

Antimony-124 has a half-life of 60 days.
Barium-133 has a half-life of 10.51 years.
Cobalt-60 has a half-life of 5.24 years.
Caesium-134 has a half-life of 2.0652 years.
Caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years.
Californium-252 has a half-life of 2.645 years.
Selenium-75 has a half-life of 120 days.
Strontium-90 has a half-life of 28.90 years.
Thulium-170 has a half-life of 128.6 days.

None of those are going to last more than a few hundred years, if that.

The longest-lived and most common isotopes of americium have half-lives of 432.2 and 7,370 years, but are either alpha or beta emitters; i.e. not a serious hazard with even modest shielding.

The Plutonium isotopes with the longest half-lifes are also alpha or beta emitters; still not a serious hazard.

So I'm genuinely curious, what did I miss?

Re:Propaganda

[no-body]

...or find a way to reprocess it.

Who will pay for it? The stock owners repaying their dividends for that or what?

Re:Propaganda

[Xyrus]

You don't need to keep it safe for 150,000 years. The biggest problem with the waste is that most of it is still mostly fuel. If we allowed reprocessing we would gratly reduce the waste.

Re:Propaganda

[dasunt]

Yes, let's poison the inner core of the world until plates move around enough to fuck shit up really really good...

Technically, the earth is already "poisoned".

Radioactive elements are in the earth's crust and mantel, and contribute to earth's geothermal heat.

However, even if we buried nuclear waste deep inside the earth's crust, as far as I can tell, it is unlikely to make its way to the inner core of the earth. From what I can tell, most of elements in nuclear waste is lithophilic - that is, it tends to stay in the mantle, or so states several webpages I checked on geology.

Re:Propaganda

[cffrost]

"This "stuff" has always existed"

Pretty unclear on the whole fission thing, eh?

I'm sorry to differ with you, but I'm afraid that the AC is correct. The first four matches for "natural fission" on Scientific American's website confirm the AC's claim. I've omitted the fourth match below, which was a 2005 article discussing the same subject as the first:

Nature’s Nuclear Reactors: The 2-Billion-Year-Old Natural Fission Reactors in Gabon, Western Africa

Nuclear Fission Confirmed as Source of More than Half of Earth’s Heat

Do transuranic elements such as plutonium ever occur naturally? (The answer is "Yes")

My apologies if you were disputing an aspect of nuclear fission not addressed in any of the above articles; your reply was a little bit cryptic. =)

Re:Propaganda

[periol]

the author is playing games. Denver gets .3 rem PER YEAR hotspot measured at .1 rem (no time length given, but probably per hour) as you say, that adds up over a year pretty significantly. suffice to say it's well over 100x the background radiation in Denver.

Re:Propaganda

[Hast]

(I'm no nuclear scientist so the following is what I've found after googling for a bit.)

That map is measuring in milli-roengen per hour which is a unit of Exposure, the nature article is talking about micro-sieverts which is a Equivalent Absorbed Radiation Dose measurement. The difference is basically that roengen is measuring how much energy something is beaming out, the Absorbed Dose is how much energy (of that type) human tissue absorbs, and equivalent dose is a normalized measurement of how much damage an absorbed dose does to living tissue.

To rephrase, the chart you linked is talking about how much light is given out at a specific point. The absorbed dose is how much of that light is converted to heat as it interacts with your skin. And the Equivalent dose is talking about what that heat is doing to your body.

There are ways to convert between these units but I'm guessing it depends on what type of radiation you're talking about.

Re:Propaganda

[Hast]

That article is talking about hotspots, not the general increase of radiation. One of the hotspots they mention (the one in Tokyo) wasn't even caused by Fukushima, it was caused by abandoned radioactive materials once used in self luminous ink. (This is mentioned in the article as well.)

The article ends by concluding that "No matter where you go in the world, if you take a radiation instrument with you and look around, you'll eventually stumble across something that's above what the background for that area normally is" (the quote in the article is attributed to "Christopher Clement, the scientific secretary of the International Commission on Radiation Protection in Ottawa, Canada, an independent international organization that provides guidance on safe levels of radiation").

Re:Propaganda

[Hast]

Looking over his wiki page and other stuff it seems like he never argued that global warming wasn't happening nor that humans were not the culprit. His point was that some of the climate scientists were not understanding the math and statistics they were using and that caused them to interpret global warming data incorrectly. (Naturally the same is true for "climate change deniers", but in that case even more so.)

He was criticizing the data they used and he was criticizing the way they used it. That's what scientists do.

Re:Propaganda

[multipartmixed]

The CANDU reactors run just fine on natural Uranium, thank you very much.

Re:Propaganda

[yndrd1984]

Require reprocessing on-site as waste is produced. Safer than moving it, and a built-in, predictable cost.

Re:Propaganda

[cyfer2000]

There are always some people writing somewhat accurate converting tools. I am not a nuclear scientist too, but there is a nuclear reactor in my building and I do a lot of X-ray and neutron research (hope this increases my credibility).

Re:Propaganda

[Mashiki]

but anyone know of a human-made building that is 150.000 years old and still intact? Didn't think so. Even mountains go and come over that period of time.

Man, I don't know about you, but we've got this thing up in Canada called the Canadian Shield the rocks there are the oldest on the planet and the most geologically stable on the planet. Still in tact? Oh yeah, without a doubt. 3.5-4.8 billion years old in tact last time they figured it out. We still do get the rare earthquake, but they're minor. Usually under a 4.0

Contradictions

[paleo2002]

I always find it funny that the generations of people who grew up living in absolute terror of all things nuclear are the same generations that believed hiding under a piece of furniture would protect them from all things nuclear.

Re:Contradictions

[ScentCone]

I always find it funny that the generations of people who grew up living in absolute terror of all things nuclear are the same generations that believed hiding under a piece of furniture would protect them from all things nuclear.

No, what's funny is people pretending - even though they know better - that cover-seeking drills aimed at mitigating injuries from marginal damage like shockwave roof collapses from shockwaves were really people thinking that it would save them from "all things nuclear." Please just stop with that idiotic meme.

Re:Contradictions

[danomac]

But back then all the furniture had lead in it! Or is that current furniture... meh.

There's an obvious difference

[cvtan]

The radiation in Denver is natural organic radiation, but the toxic killer rems in Japan were made by an evil corporation.

Re:There's an obvious difference

[sjames]

Yes, but radiation from nuclear reactors is fresh and natural, mined from Mother Earth.

Hindsight is 20/20

[PNutts]

It's easy to look at the data today and form an opinion. But back when their reactors were exploding on TV and Japan and the US couldn't agree on how far to evacuate with no end to the disaster in sight other than a real possibility of all the fuel escaping containment a little panic was justified. Had TEPCO been forthcoming about conditions instead of hiding them the panic would have been worse. It's the unknown at the time that caused the most concern. And had there been a SSW wind for the first few days then it would be a much different story instead of most of the radiation going into the toilet that is the Pacific ocean so I don't buy the argument that "See, it's safe because it wasn't worse."

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[sjames]

Mostly when they discovered to their embarrassment that the nearly arbitrary number they picked was less than the natural background and so wasn't attainable.

It's easy to make relative comparisons of risk

[joeflies]

if you're a nuclear radiation expert dealing with a invisible substance. however, the general public are not radiation experts, they can't see what is and isn't dangerous, and the only guidance they get is from the government, who has not been a reliable source of information. In fact, nobody seems to have the complete story because there were a lot of variables involved in just how much risk there was, due to changing conditions. Perhaps the government provided all the information it had, and it still isn't enough to declare "yes it's safe". It seems like it's relatively easy to monday morning quarterback how to handle a nuclear meltdown. But if I was a resident of Fukushihma, I would have chosen erring on the side of caution rather than being overtly assertive over the radiation readings provided by so called experts.

Re:Ignorance is king

[Anonymous Coward]

It would help if the apologists got their science together. What do you get from this, for example: "an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year" on one hand an "radiation at the level of .1 rem" on the other hand? One or the other can't be correct. Either rem is a unit of accumulated dose or a unit of dose per time, but not both (it's the former). If a hotspot delivers 0.1 rem per day, that should worry you (because that's 100 rem, or 1 Sv, in about 30 years, which carries a 5.5% chance of developing radiation induced cancer). If a hotspot delivers 0.1 rem per year, that's not very much. So these things matter, but once again, there's no reliable information from the people who have vested interests in the success of nuclear energy - even if that vested interest is just to avoid the cognitive dissonance of seeing that a technology which they've always portrayed as safe and manageable turns out to present us with design exceeding accidents in not quite as long intervals as have been predicted.

The people who tell us that it's all really not that bad and not even worse than natural sources of radiation should put their hide where their mouth is and move there.

Not a good comparison

[todfm]

While the Fukushima disaster may have increased the background radiation by a small amount, this isn't the end of the story on radiation exposure from that event. Fukushima also released radioactive particles that, when inhaled or ingested by humans, will expose their tissues to ionizing radiation for the rest of their lives. This is why you can't compare the exposure from events like international flights, which are distributed across your entire body and are transient in nature, to the total effects of a nuclear disaster. Some of the exposures from Fukushima were and will be much more than tolerable, transient increases in the background radiation a la living in Denver. For many people, the hot particles they inhaled or ingested will stay with them forever and will lead to significant cell damage and cancer.

Re:Not a good comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

And pretty much all of those isotopes have completely decayed away and are no longer present anywhere.

Chernobyl

[Bananatree3]

I remember hearing about the Soviet response to Chernobyl, and how they initially said things were less dangerous than things actually were. It's a survival instinct to run and question something invisible and dangerous. It's safer to be wrong and flee, then be wrong and stay.

Re:Ignorance is king

[cheesybagel]

I guess you never heard of radon gas.

Re:Why? This:

[cheater512]

Which is exactly why it was created without a scale.

In another related story...

[Man On Pink Corner]

I posted a reply to a comment in a story a few days ago where I pointed out the same thing, namely that peoples' common sense and ability to assess risks both go straight out the window when the word 'nuclear' is mentioned.

But further down the thread, someone responded with some fairly disturbing links describing what sounds like an extremely high incidence of thyroid damage (or at least potential damage) in children near the Fukushima site. How seriously are these claims being taken? If even some of this stuff is true, perhaps we aren't doing a good enough job at gathering data about the effects of the Fukushima accident. If that's true, then my existing opinion becomes harder to support.

The truth was certainly the first casualty at Chernobyl. In addition to the usual prompt pronunciations of global doom from the simply-uninformed, other people with specific political motives waved monstrous images of deformed children around, claiming that they were harmed by radiation during pregnancy. Only later did it come to light that the photos were taken in an existing home for special-needs children who were nowhere near Chernobyl and whose health problems had no possible connection to it.

So... is someone trying to pull the same bullshit again... or should ozmanjusri's post be taken seriously?

Re:In another related story...

[Required Snark]

There is significant evidence that long term health problems from exposure to low levels of radioactivity is not limited to cancer. People in the Chernobyl region, both children and adults, have many other diseases, including heart disease and shortened life expectancy. The psychological effects are also very bad. In Japan even people who moved away are shunned and have trouble with employment and in school. This can be just as devastating as physical conditions.

Here is a link to some of the other health problems of Chernobyl survivors.

http://www.llrc.org/health/subtopic/ecrrchapteronesynopsis.htm

Diseases of the cardio-vascular system and blood are one of the most common consequences of the Chernobyl radioactive pollution:- anaemia, illnesses of the blood circulation system, arterial hypertensia or hypotensia, disturbances of heart rhythm and digestive systems, macrocitosis of lymphocytes, diseases of the blood and circulatory organs in adults, early atherosclerosis and ischemic heart disease, leucopenia, infringement of the blood supply in legs, changes in abundance and activity of leukocytes.

There is much evidence correlating fallout levels with endocrine/hormone diseases, e.g. incidence rate for Type 1 diabetes mellitus in Belarus. Similarly thyroid gland diseases (autoimmune thyroiditis, thyrotoxicosis, diabetes etc.). In 1993 more than 40 % of the surveyed children in the Gomel area of Belarus had an enlarged thyroid gland. Experts think up to 1.5 million people in Belarus are at risk of pathology of the thyroid gland.

In some of the Chernobyl-polluted territories immune systems are compromised, with changes to cellular and humoral immunity, decreased maintenance T- and B- lymphocytes, reduced resistance to infections and other diseases, raised frequency and expressiveness of tonsillitis, lymphadenopathies and lowered resistance to cancer. In the radioactively polluted territories the typical consequence of infringement of the immune system appears as an immuno-deficiency. An increase in frequency and intensity of both acute and chronic diseases is observed everywhere in the Chernobyl polluted territories. Sometimes the weakening of the immune system in these radioactively polluted territories is referred to as Chernobyl AIDS.

There is accelerated ageing among the people in radioactively polluted territories in the Ukraine: their biological age exceeds their actual age by 7 - 9 years. In highly polluted territories in Belarus the mean age of men and women who died from heart attacks was 8 years younger than the average across Belarus.

The array of diseases commonly considered exclusive to the elderly is now typical for children in all of the heavily polluted territories. The immune system activity of these children is similar to the type of immune system activity experienced in old age. The pathology of the digestive system epithelium in children from the polluted areas of Belarus also shows similarities with elderly people.

This is only a partial list from the linked page.

So I have a suggestion for all of you who claim there is no problem in these radiation polluted areas: move to Fukushima or Belarus. Put you life, and that of your family, where you mouth is. It's real easy to say it's not a problem when it's not you ass on the line.

Re:In another related story...

[Man On Pink Corner]

In Japan even people who moved away are shunned and have trouble with employment and in school.

Are you seriously suggesting that nuclear technology should be blamed for this?

This is only a partial list from the linked page.

That site has all the credibility of Art Bell, Jenny McCarthy, and the Drudge Report, all rolled into one. I would like to see specific peer-reviewed studies in credible literature, not vague hand-waving gestures from people who don't understand the difference between correlation and causation.

Re:In another related story...

[ceoyoyo]

People don't have the ability to assess risks. There are lots of studies. We simply can't do it. The word nuclear isn't necessary.

Re:In another related story...

[Required Snark]

I'll hold you to the same standard: you show me the peer reviewed articles that there is not a problem. It's easy to impugn someone's else's reference when you don't have anything to back up your assertion either.

Frankly this was just the first reasonably close reference I could find. I could have spent more time looking, but I wanted to make the point that just looking at cancer rates was not he end of the issue.

You didn't even bother to find any website to back up your position. So my off the cuff quick web search has, in a simplistic sense, 100% more credibility then your response.

So when are you putting your ass on the line and moving to Fukushima or Chernobyl? It's easy to talk about there being no risk when you are literally on the other side of the globe.

Re:In another related story...

[Man On Pink Corner]

I'll hold you to the same standard: you show me the peer reviewed articles that there is not a problem

I'll get around to that as soon as I document the nonexistence of God to settle an argument with some creationists two stories down.

Re:Ignorance is king

[eric_herm]

So you would believe them based on where they live and not what they say ( ie, the messager is more inmportant than the message ? )

Re:Why? This:

[bmo]

>naturalnews

These are the same people who spread anti-vaccine propaganda and all sorts of nonsense. It's ad-hominem, but to say that they are not reliable is putting it mildly.

>no scale on map

Well that's useful.

--
BMO

Re:Disinformation from the nuclear power industry

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There have been a number of predictive models that indicate there will be 5-10M+ cancers caused by Fukushima, mostly in Japan and the western US.

Whoa, stop right there, cowboy. Either give us links to those "studies" or stop spreading that crap. These numbers are so outrageously off it's not even funny.

Re:Disinformation from the nuclear power industry

[couchslug]

" There have been a number of predictive models that indicate there will be 5-10M+ cancers caused by Fukushima"

Not shit next to smoking.

Re:History,perhaps?

[cheesybagel]

There are people living in both of those cities today and the war was not 10000 years ago which you keep hearing bandied about as how long you need to clear a radioactive area. Besides the levels of radioactivity are completely different. Any nuclear power plant meltdown is going to produce much less radiation than a nuclear weapon explosion.

Re:radioactivity in granite

[yndrd1984]

and I thought living in a cave was safe!

You still need the tinfoil hat. Then you're OK.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[buchner.johannes]

I am not an expert, but I think you can not compare radiation that easily. It really depends on how you come into contact with the radiation, and where it is stored. For example, eating fish from effected may be more serious than just breathing air -- with the same measured radiation content. I think people at least on Slashdot where well-aware of how to compare Sieverts (or rem) from https://xkcd.com/radiation/

We know Fukushima expelled a third of the radiation of Chernobyl, we know how widespread the mutations are there (people still can't live there), we know Japan is not exactly underpopulated and predominantly fish-eating. That can be a serious concern, especially if you at some point lived in the parts of Europe where radiation from Chernobyl rained down and still today you can't eat mushrooms for example, because they are too poisonous (>1000km away, 25 years later).

Re:Disinformation from the nuclear power industry

[yndrd1984]

there will be 5-10M+ cancers caused by Fukushima, mostly in Japan and the western US

Citation-free warnings of apocalypse! We've never seen that on Slashdot, please post more!

The Denver rems are organic.

[John Hasler]

They come from nature. That makes them ok. The ones in Japan, on the other hand, come from CHEMICALS!!1!!!

Makes one really wonder

[no-body]

why there are no permanent decontamination facilities in Denver?

"Many People"

[SuperKendall]

Many people believe the hydrogen was not enough to cause the mess at #3

Many People also believe in Santa Claus.

At least the ones believing in Santa Claus have an excuse.

INFORMED people know that the reactor building was designed to explode exactly as it did when hydrogen gas built up.

Apples and oranges

[charrington]

Radon is not cesium. Different things happen when you ingest them. While the level of background radiation is an easy metric to report, the real dangers are from ingesting or breathing material directly or ingesting that which has entered the food chain, which has happened to a significant extent around Fukushima.

Comparing a nuclear accident with a place with high background radiation is ignorant at best, willfully disingenuous at worst.

Why Fear?

[SuperKendall]

Average kids pool in Denver:

http://community.avid.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.UserFiles/00.00.04.28.10/red-square.png

Far bigger issue

[Grayhand]

Cherry picking low levels isn't the issue. I'd be far more concerned with multiple sources. So the background in some areas is .1, how about food and water? They've detected much higher levels in working farms around the plant that are still producing food for sale. The problem isn't whether your house is safe but whether you are getting too much exposure for multiple sources. Your new leather couch could use cow hide from an animal that couldn't be eaten but maybe it was considered safe for industrial use. I'm just saying you could have dozens of sources for exposure from sea food to milk and even your drinking water. Ultimately we'll never know the harm or damage since the numbers will be dispersed in national statistics. Even if there's a spike in cancer how do you know it wasn't from a more western diet or industrial toxins from Chinese goods?

Even more reason why it's nonsensical to fear

[SuperKendall]

Radiation in Denver is unavoidable.

Yes, and yet hundreds of thousands of people live in Denver, by choice. Many people in Colorado have lived here their whole lives. And yet they are not a city of cancer-ridden tentacled freaks.

So what does it mean when people like you get freaked out by even lower levels of radiation that obviously harm just about no-one living in Denver their whole lives?

It means your luddite fear of anything nuclear is utterly stupid, irrational, and you are causing way more harm than good by being freaked out about the tiny levels of radiation present in the area and trying to freakout others too.

Re:Even more reason why it's nonsensical to fear

[fermion]

About three million people choose to live the greater houston, tx area. In any year, more than 300 people are going to be murdered. Irrational people might think this is a high rate, and might want to move, or spend large sums of money to reduce this rate of murder. But clearly 3 million people think that this is a reasonable compromise and have no problem with it. Now compare this to where the WSJ is, NYC. Even with more than double population, the number of people who are going to get murdered is much less half of houston in any given year. Yet these irrational paranoid people spend huge amounts of money paying officers to randomly accost people on the street. Given the logic this is stupidity. The murder rate is much lower, and could stand to rise a bit. Spending money to keep it this artificially low is simply insanity.

Re:Even more reason why it's nonsensical to fear

[10101001 10101001]

Yes, and yet hundreds of thousands of people live in Denver, by choice. Many people in Colorado have lived here their whole lives. And yet they are not a city of cancer-ridden tentacled freaks.

So what does it mean when people like you get freaked out by even lower levels of radiation that obviously harm just about no-one living in Denver their whole lives?

I think you're conflating two different groups of people. The GP was speaking about the type of people who "freaked out" because "nuclear movie disaster" actually happened. It's the same of thing when people "freaked out" about Three Mile Island. The problem was never the amount of radiation that leaked out. Like the GP points out, it's that radiation leaked out out of something that wasn't by design but by accident. It's the same sort of legitimate "freaked out" people had about 9/11 and planes crashing into skyscrapers and the Pentagon and skyscrapers collapsing and people dying.

It means your luddite fear of anything nuclear is utterly stupid, irrational, and you are causing way more harm than good by being freaked out about the tiny levels of radiation present in the area and trying to freakout others too.

And this brings up the second group of people. Journalists, anti-nuclear/Muslim/Afghanistan/whatever, etc groups take a legitimate fear in people and stoke it, either by calmly reporting the truth (which inherently puts a focus on it that drives fear into an already panicking person) or drives up potential worst case scenarios (either to simply drive up readership or to, you know, report the worst case scenario as part of a "see, we told you it could happen" journalistic/anti-whatever clairvoyance). Saying "you don't have reason to be alarmed" just doesn't work because, you know, the people are panicking. It doesn't help when it's clear that people are trying to downplay the significance of an event by covering up what happened/is happening.

I'm not saying that people don't simply combine a little bit of fear and a lot of predisposition or pre-made opinion and stick with it against the adversity of fact and truth. But talking about someone being a "luddite" because they note that a nuclear reactor's design failed resulting in radiation exposure and that's what people are miffed about is clearly wrong headed. It would be much more sensible to be open and honest and spell out (a) actual design plans for worst case scenarios, (b) show how that relates to both natural, on-going risks as well as other similar man-made technology (both the on-going radiation from coal plants and the worst case scenarios), and (c) to stop being a general dick calling people "luddite"s because they don't want to be surprised by stuff even the designers of a potentially deadly thing didn't foresee and plan around.

PS - A bit off-topic, but since I brought it up anyways... The whole Afghanistan/Iraq War thing could have likely been avoided if precisely the above had been followed. Instead of acting shocked and angered that, you know, a huge plane full of fuel could take down a skyscraper, they really should have effectively shrugged it off as yet another terrorist attack no more fundamentally different than the many, many terrorist airplane bombings that had occurred before. It doesn't mean not acting. But it does mean not turning tail based on fear. At the same time, it doesn't mean not being angered at the fundamental senseless death or mourning the loss of life; but, that same logic fundamentally translates into not turning that angry into the senseless death and mourning the loss of life that is inherent in starting wars. In the end, flipping the bird at people who are afraid does no real good because those people will keep searching for someone who will give them an answer they want to stomach; and odds are good it'll be a person who will play their fears instead of helping them overcome those fears. Some of that is unavoidable of course as people too frequently choose the easy route. But your sort of response is simply to turn people away as if that provides some sort of answer.

Re:Even more reason why it's nonsensical to fear

[DMUTPeregrine]

I don't fear nuclear. I support replacing old nuclear plants with newer, safer designs. I think building more nuclear plants is an overall good idea.

The question is not "can we avoid all radiation?" it's "can we avoid large scale accidental releases of radioactive materials?" The mismanagement of the Fukushima disaster may not occur at other plants, but my experience with bureaucracies indicates that similar mishandling is probable. That's not a reason not to have nuclear energy, that's a reason to have nuclear energy that humans can't screw up.

Denver's radiation levels are higher than Fukushima's, but Fukushima's levels are now higher than they were before. Even if they're still harmless over most of the area it's still a large spill of an industrial pollutant. Just because it led to harmless radiation levels this time doesn't mean disasters will always lead to harmless radiation levels, especially with old reactor designs dominating.

Re:Even more reason why it's nonsensical to fear

[Immerman]

It's a question of bio-accessibility. Radon can accumulate in contained spaces, but vent the spaces and you're fine. Iodine or Cesium on the other hand get absorbed into the body and incorporated into tissues - so while the average environmental concentration isn't an issue, the levels within your body may well be much higher. And the inverse-square law most definitely applies to radiation exposure, where something actually *inside* your body pegs you at 100% exposure where even just moving it to your skin reduces that to 50%(half the radiative space is away from you), and it then falls off rapidly with distance.

Not that there isn't there's considerable overhype as well, but simply comparing ambient radiation levels doesn't really tell you all that much.

explanation

[buddyglass]

People worry because they fear the authorities might lie to them (or be mistaken) about the levels of radiation.

Also See http://xkcd.com/radiation/

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

However, the Fukushima numbers are off on the chart due to fudging by the Nuclear plant operators and officials.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/27/141776752/report-fukushima-released-more-radioactive-material-than-japan-estimated

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=157194628

Re:Also See http://xkcd.com/radiation/

[dirtyhippie]

Right. The horrifying thing wasn't the scale of the disaster. To say the panic was out of proportion with the scale of the disaster misses the point. The horrifying thing was that Tepco and the Japanese government totally mismanaged it, failling to release data, telling people that things were under control when they weren't, releasing bad data, and bumping up their estimates of how bad it was by an order of magnitude more than once. Fukushima was not Chernobyl (catastrophic international disaster), but it wasn't much ado about nothing like Three Mile Island either.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Where things get hairy is when dealing with various isotopes and how they do(or don't) get picked up by biological systems or absorbed by humans.

It is certainly possible to be injured or killed(horribly) by direct, penetrating exposure to a source of ionizing radiation; but that's pretty rare. The Therac-25 cases, that physicist who accidentally stuck his head in a particle accelerator, shoe salesmen from the good old days, the occasional poor bastard who gets caught in a criticality accident, that sort of thing.

Much more dangerous, at a population level, is absorbing a zesty isotope that, although too scarce in the environment, or not sufficient to penetrate skin(as with alpha emitters), can build up in specific tissues and irradiate them over time.

The trouble is that the risk presented by these sorts of sources depends a lot on biochemistry, lifestyle factors, and other annoying-to-measure stuff.

I'm not so sure

[KliX]

Who cares about background radiation, I'd be terrified of inhaling reactor core dust.

Do the insects know that?

[angel'o'sphere]

I wonder if the mutated insects around Fukushima know that the radiation is only increased by 0.1 rem ...
Especialy if you consider that insects can stand roughly 100 times the radiation a human can ...

Re:Do the insects know that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the mutated insects around Fukushima know that the radiation is only increased by 0.1 rem ...
Especialy if you consider that insects can stand roughly 100 times the radiation a human can ...

You must have missed this in TFA:

A recent study of butterflies near Fukushima confirms the well-known fact that radiation leads to mutations in insects and other simple life-forms. Research on those exposed to the atomic bombs shows, however, no similar mutations in higher species such as humans.

Overreacted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Denver also have mutated butterflies flying around, like at Fukushima? Or might the fear be justified after all, and this 0.1 rem be a gross unrepresentative measurement?

If someone would be so kind to illuminate.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[symbolset]

This is actually the huge issue that is completely missed - probably deliberately - in the article. Radioactive iodine is absorbed by plants and fish, and bioconcentrates in humans in the thyroid gland where it causes thyroid cancer. Over 30% of Fukushima schoolchildren show thyroid irregularities already. Cesium isotopes are likewise bioactive, being taken up as if they were calcium in bones. This leads to Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Myeloma. Cesium is particularly pernicious because it is retained by the body permanently.

The article pooh-poohs radiation exposure as not as threatening as people think, without considering these quite serious contaminant issues.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[Capt. Skinny]

The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity?

I think you can not compare radiation that easily

Exactly. There's a time component left out of the 0.1 rem figure. I probably took Tylenol every week last year. 400 milligrams per dose * 52 weeks = 20,800 mg. That doesn't mean I'd take 104 Tylenol in a day.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[sjames]

That would not be one of the mostly cases. But then it's a bit of a strawman since nobody claims with a straight face that Chernobyl was minor anymore.

How much waste? Hint: less if you reprocess

[rsborg]

There is a whole lot more use for nuclear waste if you have reprocessing plants - France makes money reprocessing nuclear waste then providing energey for their neighbors like the UK and Germany who are too chicken-shit to properly manage nuclear power. Even the US, due to the "proliferation" scare has basically killed nuclear power by crippling reprocessing as an option for at least several generations (until we have no other choice).

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[epyT-R]

The official tallies still only count the firemen and control room staff.. The 600,000 'liquidators' are not. With this kind of behavior, the IAEA does a better job of toppling public trust in nuclear power than greenpeace.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[Mr Z]

You partially touch on this (eating fish vs. breathing air), but it's worth pointing out an additional component explicitly: What's radioactive, and is it something that your body will absorb and hold onto? For example, your thyroid uses iodine to make hormones. It'll happily absorb up a bunch of radioactive iodine, which is Bad News.

Colorado cancer rates

[michael_cain]

Here.

Colorado is in the lowest sixth of US states for overall cancer rates. This despite being in the top third for skin melanoma. When you go in for a check-up, the docs don't ask you whether you've checked the radon levels in your house. But they will ask you if you wear sunblock, and UV-blocking sunglasses (UV has been linked to cataract development). Cause the UV levels that go with living at 5,000 feet are much more dangerous than the other radiation exposures.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[repapetilto]

How many showed irregularities before?

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[jamstar7]

Never been to Denver, eh? They not only use those radioactive blocks for foundations and basements, they also build walls out of them. So, when you spend 8 hours a night in bed trying to get some sleep, you're breathing in that lovely radon gas. And air, as you might know, goes readily into the bloodstream in your lungs. Biology 101. When I was a teenager on the Western Slope of Colorado back in the lat e60's, the hype was that those radioactive cinderblocks would cause cancer, mutations, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Didn't happen. You get a much higher dose from cosmic radiation in Denver every year due to the thin air.

As far as mutations go, it usually takes a few years for them to show up. Most mutations are not viable, so they die shortly after birth and don't reproduce. End of problem.

Ignore the hype from places like rt.com which claims that Fukishima 'has nuked Kalamazoo, MI' and 'thousands of Russian troops have died trying to cover Chernobyl'. Even Greenpeace admits the radiation is only 70 times background level, at 5.7 becquerels and they have a vested interest in hyping everything out of proportion, so take their numbers with a grain of salt until you see a peer-reviewed report by a PhD. . When it's all said and done, though, even at Greepeace's probably highly inflated numbers, it's still about 1/50th of what's allowed for a nuclear reactor worker in the US to recieve per year. The radiation absorbed from a week at Chernobyl was less than a chest CT scan. A 2 week stay in the Fukishima exclusion zone would give you a quarter of the average yearly background radiation exposure. At the Fukishima town hall, you'd get about a quarter of the radiation you'd get from your yearly potassium decay in your own body, in a two week period, roughly equivilent to 20 dental xrays over 2 weeks.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[Stormthirst]

Ironically, radioactive iodine is what's used to treat thyroid cancer via the same process

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[jamstar7]

Know what the leading cause of lung cancer in smokers is? The decay of potassium in the smoke that came from the fertilizer for the tobacco. Know how liable you are to get lung cancer from cigarette smoke? Less than 10% chance for an active smoker, less than 1% for a nonsmoker. Yeah, it's a risk factor. So is breathing. Hell, the leading cause of death is life. Some light reading for shits & giggles. And he shows source materials. Nice guy, he did the cites for us...

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[symbolset]

A typical sample from this area would be well below 1%. Even in the shadow of Chernobyl five years after, the rate was only about 5%.

If it doesn't matter...

[EGNyquist]

Well, to those who are comfortable with the idea then: Build your house next to a reactor. Or on top a disposal facility.

Re:If it doesn't matter...

[John Hasler]

> Well, to those who are comfortable with the idea then: Build > your house next to a reactor.

The authorities won't permit that.

> Or on top a disposal facility.

Or that.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[treeves]

If you read the article and look at the chart it contains, you'll see that they mean 0.1 rem/yr, though they should have given those units in the text as well.

Fear of the Unknown.

[xpwlq]

People are afraid of what they don't understand. Many people don't understand how nuclear reactors work, how much radiation is bad for the body, or even that they're getting low doses of radiation from the general environment.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Keep in mind this week also posted an article that Fukushima could have destroyed all life on Earth.

May have been BS, but that's not the point.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[repapetilto]

Thank you. I really don't mean to sound like a dick but if you are worried about this I just want to ask these questions rather than spending the time to seek out the data myself. I have no opinion either way on nuclear power. Once again I completely realize repeatedly asking these questions is making me seem hostile, but I am not trying to be like that.

It is common for definitions of vague concepts like "irregular" to change over time. Has that occurred in this case? Why have the researchers failed to use a parametric approach (ie quantify "how irregular")? Why is the term used "irregular" rather than one that more strongly implies damaging to health?

How does the sampling strategy of children's thyroid glands differ between before fukushima and after?

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[ceoyoyo]

A ten percent chance of getting lung cancer is very, very high. That's approaching Russian roulette territory.

power industries are also bored to science

[causeless]

There is a discussion in SlashdotJapan about the power industry tried to conceal worker's exposure statistics.

They tried to seal radiometer by thin lead plate and it reduce energy of radiation. But as you know, the affection by Gamma-ray is not related to photon's energy but related to total photon number.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[Internetuser1248]

Precisely. Does Ceasium-137 in the soil noticeably increase the background radiation in an area? No. Does this map showing C137 concentrations around the Fukushima area make you want to move there? Also no. I probably wouldn't want to live in Denver either but that is a separate issue.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[symbolset]

A pop 250 adults study was done in Nagasaki in 2001 and constitutes a baseline for the Japanese population. The comparison is to Belarous, in the shadow of Chernobyl. As the only country ever to be attacked with nuclear weapons Japan is acutely sensitive to radiation hazards, and knowledgeable about the effects. "Irregular" in this case refers to the presence of abnormal cysts of a specific size detected through ultrasound. Thyroid cysts in children is quite rare, and for them to occur in 36% of the population is definite cause for concern.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[ozmanjusri]

It doesn't help when the industry involved refuses to collect real data and has massive social media presence dismissive of real evidence.

Children in Fukushima are just getting lymph abnormalities and diabetes. That's why nuclear Pollyannas are talking about "natural background in Denver".

We do have hotspots in Tokyo Metropolitan Area that have led to these physiological disorders — some of the disorders that have been observed are as shown here. Things like diarrhea, nasal bleeding, headache, eczema and so forth. We are expecting thyroid disorders in children, but also cancers (bladder, leukemia, lung), diabetes.”

http://midnightwatcher.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/japan-physician-radiation-levels-are-4000-higher-than-reported-by-the-japanese-government-radiation-already-causing-health-problems-around-tokyo/

http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-children-have-abnormal-thyroid-growths-2012-7

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[jamstar7]

That's less than 10% chance to get lung cancer by smoking. People get lung cancer all the time, from things like asbestos, air polution, whatnot. But develop lung cancer without smoking, and people will automatically assume it's from the second hand smoke you picked up when you walked past a room somebody had a cigarette in 20 years ago. It just ain't so. Primary cigarette smoke is a contributing factor to lung cancer, but nothing like the hype they'd have you believe, like, light up just one cigarette and you'll die of cancer. It's hype.

A couple people in my family died of lung cancer. My whole family is Mormon, they never smoked. They didn't hang around smokers other than me. I've been a heavy smoker since 1969, when I started. I smoke more than 2 packs a day, full flavors, none of that 'ultralight' shit, those just have no taste. Almost 45 years now, no lung cancer yet. My old man had emphysema, from being a professional welder for over 30 years. Never smoked a cigarette in his life. He just did an awful lot of welding in very enclosed spaces without a resperator, like, inside a 10,000 gallon tank (he did a LOT of those). . He was also half blind, because he'd strike his arc with the hood up so he could see what he was doing, then nod his head to bring it down. The light did cause retinal burns, and he ended up with something on the order of 20/200 vision. And people wondered why his driving made me nervous...

Re:Why? This:

[abirdman]

OMG, it's headed right toward Larry Ellison's island!

Re:Disinformation from the nuclear power industry

[yndrd1984]

Citations don't turn the legions of pro-nuclear corporate meat puppets on Slashdot into rational, life-loving, people. Once a zombie, always a zombie.

Yes, yes. All outsiders are irrevocably corrupt.

The spinsters will point out that 1 in 20 children developing thyroid cancer is only a mere 5% of the population.

All I get searching for this phrase is a paranoid blogger's back-of-the-envelope calculations based on an unsourced partial sentence. In addition, his results are more than ten thousand times larger than the high estimates of actual experts. I've seen more evidence for the "expanding earth" theory.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[lightknight]

Well, when you do the nuclear equivalent of sticking your ass out a car window...I don't think that's a design flaw of the car.

Could have easily been worse

[oaksey]

I think a lot of the fear is because it could have very easily been a lot worse than it turned out.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[repapetilto]

As far as I can tell, that paper does not say anything about schoolchildren from the fukushima area having irregular thyroid glands. Maybe I missed it?

Re:Disinformation from the nuclear power industry

[jamstar7]

From the 'About' link at ENEnews:

ENENews is an online service dedicated to covering the latest energy-related developments. Established shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in March 2011, ENENews has grown rapidly to serve approximately 2,000,000 pageviews per month — and with over 200,000 comments and counting, our active community of registered users is one of the most engaged on the internet. These figures represent a vast audience that includes not only nuclear industry professionals, but also scientists, researchers, journalists, opinion and policy-makers, as well as the general public.

Sounds like some spin site cranked up to cash in on the fear to me. Lotta 2nd & 3rd hand reported stories, damned few going on the record as named sources, just anonymous 'Fukushima worker' etc. Time for a grain of salt, methinks...

Re:Disinformation from the nuclear power industry

[jamstar7]

Ah, but the spinsters don't give us any idea where they came up with that '1 in 20' number of cases of thyroid cancer in children supposedly developing, nor do the antispinsters make any more sense by saying 'The spinsters say 5% of the children. In a country with 300 million people, that means 15 million will develop cancer'. They have 300 million children there???? And of course they give no cites.

Re:1500 deaths

[jamstar7]

While the author concedes that 1500 deaths will be the long term impact of this accident, I love that he maintains that Nuclear power is safe and clean.

3000 died in the Twin Towers. Something like 50000 die every year in the US due to auto accidents. There are 7 BILLION people on Earth. 1600 people of a pool of 7 billion really isn't statistically significant. Hell, you take your life in your own hands when you get out of bed in the morning. You DO get out of bed in the morning, don't you?? Do you know how many people die in bed every year???

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[symbolset]

That is the prior study. Google "fukushima thyroid" for the other.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[ceoyoyo]

Of course you can get lung cancer from things other than smoking. But smoking does in increase the risk, and by quite a bit. Smoking is the leading cause (by far) of preventable death. It's just an incredibly stupid thing to do.

And your 10% figure understates the danger. Smoking carries around a 30% chance of premature death from all causes. That's like putting two bullets in the chamber and putting the gun to your head because just one is for pussies.

Re:Isn't it obvious...

[jamstar7]

Yup.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[repapetilto]

This one:
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120712/srep00507/pdf/srep00507.pdf

?

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[Spazmania]

As I understand it, and I'm very far from an expert, the issue is that the radioactive particles released at Fukushima tend to get ingested and then concentrate in a gland near the brain where the radioactivity does quite a bit of damage. The particles in Denver don't tend to be ingested; they stay embedded in the granite. So the issue isn't exposure to background radiation, its ingestion of radioactive particles scattered by the meltdown.

You have no idea on what you speak

[Anonymous Coward]

Long term waste are *weakly* radioactive. If it was not for the heavy metal toxicity you could hold radioactive Uranium or plutonium im hand. The problem are short term waste (a few dozen year to maybe 300-400 years) which is dangerous because it emits dangerous radioactivity in short term, and are dangerous for a few helf life (so maybe up to 1000-2000 years). And for those time period we had building which stayed up. Heck even longer. Radioactive material which has half life much longer are much less dangerous because the radioactivity they emit is very low per second. So a 10.000 year half life is much less dangerous than a 10 year one.

Furthermore the TYPE of radioactivity is important , alpha can be stopped with a glove or clothing (see above rubber glove holding an alpha emitter). Beta or gamma OTOH I would not like to be near, but I can't recall long term element waste for which we have them in a lot of quantity.


So when you say " Oh, he doesn't even mention that we have to find a way to keep the nuclear waste safe for 150.000 years. " this is pure bullshit propaganda from greenies which have no idea which radioactive waste pose us the biggest problem.

This is bullshit. Unscientific bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look up banana equivalent dose. You ingest radioactive particle all your live. The particle in fukushima were not that different, if any were ingested by human. "hot aprticle" please , this is pure BS. Radioactivity is characterised by the type , alpha, beta, gamma, energy, and the half life of the atoms. You ingest radioactive particle all the time like 14C, and various element. Saying in fukushima were "hot particle" without saying which atioms, which radioation type, and which quantity was ignested is pure FEAR MONGERING BS. Hint for you : the nuclear scientific are not as much concerned as you for a good reason.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[dryeo]

Lung cancer was quite rare up till about the 1930's even though people had been smoking for hundreds of years and quite a few lived till their '70's. (All the lung cancer cases I've known have been in their mid 60's)
While there is very good correlation between smoking and lung cancer there is still not as strong of a correlation between tobacco and lung cancer. There is a huge list of chemicals that are added to tobacco for flavour, even burning and even to make it more addicting. There is the polonium in the soil as a by-product of fertilizing. There is the residuals from the days when they used lead arsenic as an insecticide. As the saying goes, correlation is not causation.

The greatest problem with Nuclear radiation...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is that it is so easily measurable.

My kids' summer sailing camp is routinely disrupted for the same reason: it's trivially easy to have a pimply adolescent lower a white disc into the river to measure algal bloom.

As a reasonably numerically literate parent, I'm far more worried about the crap they're exposed to that can't be so easily measured.

Re:1500 deaths

[Uberbah]

Care to try again, only with relevant comparisons this time? WTC wasn't an industrial accident, just for starters.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[WindBourne]

Odd. We have those issues all the time here in Denver. Hmm.

Re:Why? This:

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on estimates of the amount of radioactive material leaked into the ocean (a few petabecquerels) and the approximate area over which it has spread, the average density should be around 100 bananas per square meter.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[Xyrus]

Yeah, radioactive Iodine has a half-life of 8 days, so I find it rather unlikely that these "abnormalities" were caused by Fukishima. That would make the incidence rate higher than Chernobyl, and that was a much bigger release.

Cesium has a half life of 30 years, so hangs around for a while. And no, cesium does not remain in the body permanently. The biological half-life of cesium is 70 days. So unless you're constantly ingesting it, it leaves the body on it's own accord.

Strontium can remain in the body for considerably longer, so that's the one to look out for. Depending on where it is absorbed it has a biological half-life from anywhere as short as 14 days (soft tissue) to 60 years (bone). It has a similar radioactive half-life to that of cesium.

Radioactive exposure does not mean you will get cancer or suffer any extreme health effects. It depends on the type of exposure. It takes a considerable amount of exposure to even marginally increase the likelihood of developing cancer.

Define "should have"

[eyrieowl]

people worry much more about last year's incident at Fukushima than they should have. Who gets to say what the proper degree of worry is? People at papers like the Wall Street Journal like to claim that the free market is good at deciding what value things should have, both negative value and positive value. If you subscribe to that view, than whatever degree of worry people have about something reflects the importance they place on it, and is fundamentally correct, no matter how strongly or weakly they feel about the subject; and, furthermore, taken in agregate, that value reflects exactly the value that particular item/scenario has in the context of society. An alternate view would be that maximizing GDP is the fundamental good. In fact, I think that's what people usually mean to strive for when they claim that the free market should decide things...they make a tacit assumption that the free market would always choose that course of action. Using that rubric, yes, of course people worry too much about Fukushima. The true economic damage which would be caused by the radiation is much lower than the hit to GDP for ditching nuclear power, assuming you relax safety standards and put all but the hottest of hot-spots back into productive use.

Re:Define "should have"

[dr2chase]

One way to determine the proper amount of worry is to look at how people behave when confronted with other risks, assuming that they have full knowledge of risks. Unfortunately, most people don't have full knowledge of other risks, and there are also other people (usually corporations with economic interests) hard at work ensuring that we lack that full knowledge (for example, tobacco industry propaganda, and is it coal, or nuclear, that emits more radiation? It's clear from reading above that various people believe both sides of that one.)

Just for example, consider the various risks from terrorism and falling out of bed -- beds are more dangerous. It's not as if we cannot control the bed risk, either -- beds can be lower, at-risk populations (very old, very young) can have side rails, floors near beds can be padded (carpeted).

A particularly unfortunate example of poor risk estimation (or alternately, an indicator of extreme risk tolerance) is our lack of exercise in the developed world (we get other benefits that offset this risk, but quite a few of us uncritically accept this risk). There's been plenty of studies indicating that the mortality rate for people who don't get much exercise is 25-50% higher, and expected lifespan is shortened by 2-5 years. You can see suggestions of this in life expectancy figures for New York City -- they're higher, presumably because people walk more. If you assume that this all reflects a rational expression of our actual risk tolerance, then you can justify lots of crazy risks.

How the military thinks about radiation

[paulxnuke]

Actually, the Navy (I was there.)

Radiation from natural sources is ignored; radiation from Navy reactors and related sources is all important.

Example: a sailor took his TLD home on leave (personal dosimeter, attached to your belt. You don't think about it.) His parents ran a veterinary clinic that had an old fluoroscope. When that TLD was read at the end of the month all hell broke loose, resulting in a new Navywide rule that TLD's be turned in to (and signed for by) the officer signing one out on leave. The main concern was proving that the exposure wasn't from a Navy source; hanging around that clinic might have been... unwise, but wasn't a problem for the Navy.

I was underwater for Chernobyl, and not scheduled to get surface air for a month or so. We were concerned that when we did, we might 'suck in' some radioactivity and set off alarms (yes, they were that sensitive.) If that happened, everyone in the ship would have to wear respirators for an hour or two while we proved it wasn't our reactor, after which we could relax and breathe freely, radioactivity and all. (Nothing happened, but we were standing by.)

Why? Not so much legal liability (though I'm sure that's considered), but the Navy's delicate relationship with the NRC. As one senior officer observed, during any given Christmas week there were at least a dozen reactors floating in the river at Norfolk, tended by a couple of (admittedly highly trained) 20-something high school graduates and one sleepy officer and CPO. No one gave that much thought, but imagine the outcry if someone suggested building a commercial reactor nearby (with much greater oversight and safety features than a submarine) to provide power to the city. The Navy, by virtue of its overachieving training, documentation, and safety programs, not to mention Cold War precedents and institutional secrecy, gets to run its reactors without NRC or much civilian involvement; anything that goes wrong and reaches the press threatens that arrangement, without which the program realistically couldn't exist.

I'm not complaining or trying to blow some kind of whistle, BTW: the program works. I probably averaged less rads underway than on a sailboat; certainly less than on a fossil fuel fired ship. I don't live in Denver but I would, and I don't worry about chest x-rays or long airline flights. I'm glad the Navy took good care of me, but I also understand their reasons.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[repapetilto]

It was published July 2012... what are you referring to?

They didn't want to anticipate

[stooo]

>> They had systems in place for a loss of power event. The problem was they didn't anticipate the length of time the loss of power event would continue

They didn't want to anticipate long power losses, so they pick the cheap option. Anyway, there is evidence that the reactors were badly damaged before the power loss
They didn't want to anticipate faults directly under the complex (and there can be unknown faults everywhere !) so they just took the most economic option of ignoring strong earthquakes
They didn't want to anticipate tsunamis, so they just build a ridiculous but cheap protecting wall.

and the list goes on.

Take risks, be "cheap" when possible, but give a false illusion o security. It's just the way the whole industry works

Re:They didn't want to anticipate

[tomhath]

They had generators that would have provided power, had they not been damaged by a fifty foot tsunami. The mistake they made was locating the generators where a flood could knock them out.

So Colorado is safe?

[taj]

Why are Leukemia, prostrate and ovary cancer happening at a significantly (measurable) higher rate in Colorado? It's not a fair question just as the original post's strawman is invalid. The level in Colorado isn't safe because it's natural. Given the slightly better lifestyles measurable in lower obesity rates, one would 'expect' Colorado to be slightly better than average except for melanoma because of the thinner atmosphere/UV radiation.

http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/pp/cccr/1997-2007/CIC9707%20First%20Half%20(web).pdf

Would media covering bad places to live ever of that nature be tolerated excluding political motivation or a disaster event? There is a consistency in how information is filtered. There is a natural tendency for the media to keep a wet finger in the air to know which way the wind is blowing. The blowback from standing against the wind and being wrong is far riskier than standing with the wind and the wind being wrong.

Don't compare even exposure with hot particles

[stooo]

>> No. I have seen no evidence that the one-time release of a small amount of radioactivity into the ocean

small amounts ?
ocean ?

We don't speak about the same event.
In the 2011 fukushima disaster, big quantities of dust went in the athmosphere, and go worldwide. Any particle in your lungs is a potential lung cancer.
For the ocean, you probably never eat fish, do you ? and you probably never heard the term "food chain"

Re:Don't compare even exposure with hot particles

[Man On Pink Corner]

Lots of scary-sounding talk, no citations as usual.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[ozmanjusri]

We have those issues all the time here in Denver.

The closest study from Denver I could find suggests "The incidence of thyroid nodules in children before the onset of puberty is less than two percent" as opposed to the 36% of children from Fukishima affected.

After confirming the validity of the report, Caldicott (pediatrician) reinforced the alarming nature of the findings:

1. "It is extremely rare to find cysts and thyroid nodules in children."

2. "This is an extremely large number of abnormalities to find in children."

3. "You would not expect abnormalities to appear so early — within the first year or so — therefore one can assume that they must have received a high dose of [radiation]."

4. "It is impossible to know, from what [officials in Japan] are saying, what these lesions are."
 

http://www.jmedicalcasereports.com/content/1/1/29

Panic? Misleading title

[mrjb]

This isn't panic. It's more of a "Houston, we have a problem" sort of situation. You've got a problem, you deal with it. "Panic" means people going "AAAAAAAAAHH!" After screaming for a year and a half, they must be getting pretty hoarse. On the other hand, the must have been screaming "AAAAH" for just about long enough to warm up a cup of coffee. So my advice would be, by now, Keep calm and have a cuppa.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[Sique]

One problem seems to be with relatively low doses of radiation, that it's not so much the level that is dangerous, but the change in doses. There was some research in the fauna living in the immediate environment of Tchernobyl, and it showed that animals living all the time on site had a nearly normal rate of genetic defects, while in animals that live only a limited time on site like migratory birds, the defect rate was much higher. So even though migratory birds had on average only a fraction of the exposition than on site animals, the effects are much stronger, albeit it contradicts current theories which link the defect rate to the total exposition.
Purely speculative, but maybe the sudden surge of radiation in the environment of Fukushima (which might have had spikes much higher than .1 rem) has caused the defects?

Re:Why? This:

[Another, completely]

If by 'heatmap' you mean the map that shows 1st year expected radiation exposure in REM?

I think it refers to the link referenced in the comment being replied to (by Mr. Spoilsport, with Score 1 so your filter might have skipped it). That is an image that looks like the last frame of a video and just shows a yellow plume going east from Japan. I can find no scale on that diagram to indicate the meaning of yellow or red.

Typical

[craigminah]

Not sure why the OP is surprised by the fear of an unlikely horrible event v. the fear of a more likely daily event. Easiest example is the fear of flying v. the fear of driving. Far more people are scared they'll die in a plane crash but have no fear or driving a car. Similarly, people are fearful of a nuclear reactor killing them via a radioactive release or meltdown but happily live near or downwind of coal fired power plants which have a much more deleterious effect on people's lives. People fear things they know little about but aren't scared of the things they see daily and have grown accustomed to.

Re:1500 deaths

[shadov]

IIRC pollution from coal plants kills hundreds of thousands every year. 1500 not even nearly every year is a very low number.

Re:Japanese take shame to a new level

[angel'o'sphere]

"Some workers" (heroic or not) are not the same as the government or TEPCO.
The plant did not survive a magnitudes greater desaster it was designed for ... thats an urban legend. The 9.1 quake was roughly 500 miles away. At the plant site the quake was perhaps 5.5 to 6.3. Which was enough to cut it off from the grid.
The main destruction was done by the tsunami wave. Easy to be avoided with a one or two feet higher dam.
Locals demanded since decades an at least 5 yards (roughly 15 feet) higher dam, like some other communities along the coast have.
Now you will claim, that so large waves are without precedence ...
That is only true if you just say to every historical mentioned tsunami: they must have mismeasured.
How hard might it be to judge the hight of a tsunami by the dirt traces at the wall of a fortress, or from the remainings left on ghe fields that floated there with the wave?
Tsunamies like that have historically happened a few dozen times ...

Silly comment

[sonamchauhan]

And I'd like to see this article's author be one of the brave Japanese nuclear plant workers that exposed themselves willingly to cancer-causing levels of radiation in order to get the fuel rod temperatures down.

Remember, the desperate times... if they had not done that, there was the likelihood the fuel rods would have melted into a self-heating, critical slag (China Syndrome). That would ultimately melt straight through the ground until underground water caused a massive steam explosion, with a much larger fallout area hit by radioactive debris.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[sgbett]

I'm into reef (as in coral) stuff. This sounds exactly like what you see with the tolerance of these animals to environmental change (temperature, ph, alkalinity etc)

Take a specimen from a stable environment and subject it to sudden changes and it will suffer - perhaps die. However some species seem to be able to build tolerance to environmental change - this can be seen by taking a 'frag' (like a cutting in plants) from a coral, then exposing it to small changes and gradually increasing them until you reach a point where your now 'tolerant' coral can live and grow happily through sudden environmental changes that would kill (bleach) identical specimens that have not been acclimated in this fashion.

There is a lot of research going on into bleaching events at the moment and why some corals are fine and others don't survive. Some research suggests that certain corals/regions that have experienced prior bleaching events are faring much better than other regions that until now were very stable.

It sounds to me like a similar 'acclimatisation' process is at work here with radiation.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger indeed!

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[flyneye]

Notice the article assumes that the worry is over the immediate levels and short exposure times.
Nothing is said of the decades to come with cancer, mutation and the same crap we've observed in the U.S. over the period of time from bomb testing to present.
Pay no attention to the Chernobyl behind the curtain, it's irrelevant. Look a bird. Did you see that bird?

Why the Denver/Fukushima comparison is bogus

[hey!]

You can't talk about some parameter in two different populations without talking about how the parameter was measured, specifically the sample chosen and methods used to estimate.

In Denver, people receive 0.3 rem per year excess radiation purely because of elevation. The sample we're talking about is everyone who doesn't live in a lead-lined house.

In Fukushima, presumably different people received different doses. What does "[some hot spots] showed radiation at the level of .1 rem" even mean? Did they measure? If they measured, how big was the sample? As an extreme example, suppose the estimate was based on measurements of a single person? Or did they estimate? Whether they estimated or measured, what do the data actually say? That the *average* exposure was .1 rem or the *maximum possible* exposure was .1 rem?

mutant butterflies!

[Tuipveus]

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/14/mutant-butterflies-a-result-of-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-researchers-say/

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[sjames]

That would be ignoring the actual level rather than playing games with the acceptable level.

Re:1500 deaths

[jamstar7]

Okay then. To keep working from your examples, wake me up when Fukushima has caused 1500/3000 = 0.5 times the fuss we saw after the Twin Towers.

Well, I really don't see that happening. There were no reported terrorrorrorrists at Fukushima. It's not likely to spawn 3 & a half wars to supress terrorrorrists and force regime changes. I kinda doubt if Japan will pass anything like the PATRIOT Act or implement anything remotely like the TSA Comedy Hour. So, sleep well.

Bad Journalism.

[Zoson]

My faith in the WSJ has just fallen significntly.

"The maximum external dose recorded is 199 mSv (0.19 Sv), and the maximum internal dose that has been calculated is 590 mSv (0.59 Sv). The maximum total dose recorded to one worker was 670 mSv."

That's 19, 59, and 67 REM/HOUR. Not to mention these are actual readings from people who had geiger counters on.

http://www.hps.org/documents/ANSFukushimaReport.pdf
Straight from a recent and official Fukushima report.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[bogjobber]

Obviously your anecdotal evidence disproves the massive amount of research on the effects of tobacco use that has happened over the last 60+ years.

Listen, I know you like your cigarettes. God bless. I used to smoke, I get it. But if your argument for smoking is "science is bullshit, it's really not that dangerous" then you're flat-out delusional.

Male smokers lose an average of 13 years of life. At least half of all lifelong smokers die early. Smokers are three times as likely as non-smokers to die before they reach the age of 60. You are 20x as likely to die of lung cancer. Smokers are more than 5x as likely to have a heart attack before age 40. Impotence is 85% more prevalent in smokers than non-smokers. These are all facts, and there are a lot more of them to go along with that. Smoking affects nearly every part of your body, particularly the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, and makes it massively more likely for you to fall ill.

Just look at this graph! It doesn't get much more obvious than that.

Any justification you give for smoking that doesn't include "Yeah, I know I'm killing myself slowly, but it's worth it" is absolute bullshit. If you want to smoke anyway, fine, but you're dead wrong about the dangers of smoking.

Why rem instead of the correct Sv?

[gullevek]

Why is the article using rem? rem is a complete obsolete unit for radiation. One that has been replaced by Sv since ages. Trust in WSJ fallen very strong.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[DarenN]

From the WHO

A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.

As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.

The whole report is worth reading - there's a lot of information in there and a FAQ on the second page.

The estimated 4000 casualties may occur during the lifetime of about 600 000 people under consideration. As about quarter of them will eventually die from spontaneous cancer not caused by Chernobyl radiation, the radiation-induced increase of about 3% will be difficult to observe. However, in the most highly exposed cohorts of emergency and recovery operation workers, some increase in particular cancers (e.g., leukemia) has already been observed.

The report also notes that there is a tendency to attribute all health problems in a wide area to Chernoybl, and that the major problem is trauma from the panic.

I believe it's arguable whether Chernoybl should be included in any discussion - the cause of the incident was not an accident, it was deliberate (even if those doing it clearly had no idea of what they were doing). So, yeah, you turn off all the safeties and backups, then scram the reactor and ignore the subseqent alarms. Uh... not the greatest idea?

Radiation Protection Concepts

[MercTech]

I see some misconceptions in the comments and offer some clarification. Having worked in radiation protection for a while (30 years this October) I'll offer some basic information.

Radiation can't be carried. If you get out of the radiation field, you get no more exposure. Think of getting out of the sun and you won't get a sunburn.
Radioactive contamination (radiation emitting material where it isn't supposed to be) can be carried with you. The type of the radioactive material, the chemical form of the radioactive material, and the solubility of the material will effect how it can be carried. The same factors will apply to bio-concentration of radioactive material.

The limits of exposure to radiation, both exposure and from radioactive material internal to the body, have limits based on studies published by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and the ICRP (International Commission on Radiation Protection) as far back as 1954. Some revision was recommended in 1976 in the accounting for internal dose received from internal radiation sources. The ICRP recommendations from 1976 gained the force of law in the United States with the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) revision to 10CFR20 (Volume 10 Code of Federal Regulations Section 20) in 1994.
(Note to the non U.S. world: In the U.S. many still use the old CGS unit of REM as most radiation workers are accustomed to that unit. The SI unit of the Sievert was formulated in the 70s but didn't come into use in the U.S. until the 1994 NRC regulation revision. for reference: 100 Rem = 1 Sv) .. To paraphrase a bit on how this is implemented in the U.S.:
The general public is limited to 0.1 REM per year from sources, internal or external, due to the operation of any licensed facility.
Radiation workers are limited to 5 REM per year. Most radiation workers work under administrative limits of 1 REM per year and rarely reach that.
If a worker gets an uptake (radioactive material taken internally) the amount is measured and the exposure he would receive over the following 50 years is calculated and assigned as his dose in his records for that year. If that exceeds a limit, the licensee is liable for severe legal penalties.

For reference: You get about a Rem a year for existing on planet earth with more at places with high background levels due to granite or basalt in the area such as Denver, Colorado or Reading, Pennsylvania. I once did an empirical experiment and wore a dosimeter when getting medical diagnostics. I read 0.1 rem for a Dental X-Ray and 0.2 Rem for a chest X-Ray. (Thermoluminescent Dosimeter tucked behind my ear while I was getting X-rays for a military physical.) I hope this puts things in a bit of perspective.

Radiation exposure from an accident at an electric power producing reactor will mainly be from a release of radioactive material to anyone but the trained radiation workers directly working on the facility.
What can escape? The main things that will get out are those nuclides that can be carried off in a steam plume.
What can be carried off in a steam plume?
Nitrogen 16: Activated Oxygen, 7 second half life, It will be gone very quickly.
Iodine 131: Half life of 8 days. Since it can be concentrated in the Thyroid it is a hazard to personnel. Prevention of exposure is to take Potassium Iodide pills to flood the system with Iodine so it won't be accumulated. Iodine 131 will be a problem for about a month and a half until it decays away.
Tritium (Hydrogen 3): 12 year half life. Radiation emitted is not very high energy. If taken internally treatment is to flush system by hydrating to flush it out. (I still giggle over the beer locker at a tritium producing facility I once worked at. If a worker got a Tritium uptake, they would be issued a 6 pack of beer to take home to flush their system.)
These are the main things that would be carried out in the air with a steam plume.

From an operational BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) the other

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[cusco]

People smoking more than a pack or so in a month was quite rare until the 1920s. Very few people got addicted to tobacco because only the upper class could afford more than the occasional pouch of tobacco that they mostly shared at parties or lit up on special occasions. The industrialization of tobacco cultivation didn't really get started until WWI when it was distributed to the troops by the Army.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[dryeo]

Hard to find info on how much tobacco was consumed by individuals. It does seem it was immensely popular long before the WW I. Cigars were popular for a long time and one big cigar must be equal to a few cigarettes. Tobacco excise taxes accounted for a third of the American Federal governments revenue up till 1883, The rolling machine was invented in 1881. The American Tobacco Co. revenue went from $25 million in 1890 to $316 million in 1903. IIRC they also became a monopoly during this time so once again it's hard to say why revenue went up so much.
This would be about 50 years before the '30's so it is quite possible that it was increased smoking that led to more lung cancer. Also possible that tobacco mixed with other carcinogens also led to raising lung cancer cases.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[cusco]

Interesting. $316 was a frack of a lot of money at the turn of the century, but that would not have been mostly domestic consumption because many (if not most) farmers grew their own. My great-great grandparents grew tobacco in northern Michigan for their own use and to trade with the Indians. North America was pretty much the world's only source for tobacco at that time, IIRC it wasn't even grown in Turkey until just before WWI.

Yeah, a cigar is more than a few cigarettes, but most people didn't smoke the whole thing at once. They were expensive and often came in glass tubes with a stopper so that you could smoke an inch or so of the cigar, put it out, and save the rest for later. I remember my great grandfather still doing that in the 1960s, and that's still they way they're smoked in parts of Latin America.

Possibly a larger cause is that cancer wasn't well diagnosed at that time. Remember it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that having a doctor present actually increased a patient's chance of survival. It's quite possible that many of the people diagnosed with consumption (TB) and other respiratory diseases actually had lung cancer and the quack physicians didn't know the difference.

Were they a legal monopoly, or just a defacto one?

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[cusco]

Oops. $316 million. Clicked Submit too soon.

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[dryeo]

The American Revolution forced other countries into being tobacco producers. England burned a lot of American tobacco and started importing from other countries and other countries were affected by the blockades. Tobacco caught on in Turkey in the late 17th century and I'd guess they were growing it as England was importing it from the middle east after the Revolution.
You are right though about America being the major source of tobacco and farmers growing their own. Of course by the end of the 19th century more people were becoming urban and needed to purchase their tobacco.
The question of whether lung cancer was very rare a hundred odd years ago may have been lack of diagnosing, it's hard to say. Same with whether it is tobacco additives or tobacco that causes lung cancer. I can think of studies that could be done but they're not practical. It's mostly just a thought. As is the idea that it is not tobacco that is bad, but cigarettes including the additives.
The American Tobacco Co. got their monopoly honestly through a combination of luck (and taking advantage of it) and innovation. They (Duke Tobacco(?) at the time) licensed the first cigarette rolling machine then innovated the paper cigarette package at a time when everyone used tins and innovated heavily in marketing. They invented baseball cards, signed up all the major stars to exclusive contracts and marketed them to hell. They were successful enough to buy up most all the competition and became a monopoly. The justice department broke them up in the 1910's if I remember correctly. (actually 1911) I found out most of this when reading a history of baseball cards and haven't checked it out too much. Quickly looking at the entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Tobacco_Company#History_of_the_American_Tobacco_Company I don't seem too wrong.

One cigar is actually less

[jeko]

Cigars were popular for a long time and one big cigar must be equal to a few cigarettes.

I really need a cite here, but the explanation I got in school went like this, FWIW. Take it with a grain of salt, but it seems within shouting distance of the truth. It basically all comes done to particulate size and time of exposure. The smaller/"finer" the particulate size of the smoke, the deeper it gets into your lungs, the harder it is to get out, and the longer the exposure time it has for any carcinogens to wreck havoc.

Wood smoke from campfires has a large particulate size in the smoke. Burn an oak tree, and your nose and lungs do a pretty thorough job of filtering it out and hacking it back up. The thinking is that natural forest fires have been around long enough to actually influence evolution. This large particulate size is why putting sawdust in a pipe would be unpleasant.

Dried tobacco leaves have a smaller particulate size in their natural form than woodsmoke. Pipes and cigars produce smoke "finer" than wood, and carry carcinogens in the smoke, so pipes and cigars will produce higher rates of lung cancer than being downwind of a campfire. Additionally, since pipes and cigars sit on your lip for extended periods of time, they also produce higher rates of lip and mouth cancers.

Cigarettes produce extremely fine particulates that penetrate deep into the lungs. The particulates are fine enough that you have less ability to clear them out of your lungs, so you get even more exposure to the carcinogens. In addition, cigarettes undergo other industrial processes and additives that may contribute to the problem. This makes cigarettes by far the greatest danger.

Or at least, that was the explanation handed out in a public high school decades ago... :-) Consider it as reliable as the explanation of Bournelli's Principle. :-)

This was at least the explanation they were handing out in health class in public schools long, long ago. :-)

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[symbolset]

You are being deliberately disingenuous. We're done here.