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Fukushima Fish Still Radioactive
the_newsbeagle writes "Bottom-dwelling fish that live near the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant still show elevated radiation levels 19 months after the accident — and those radiation levels are not declining. Researcher Ken Buesseler says this indicates the seafloor sediments are contaminated (abstract), and will remain so for decades. He said, 'I was struck by how [the radiation levels] really haven’t changed over the last year. Since cesium doesn't bioaccumulate to a significant degree, and in fact is lost when fish move to a less contaminated area, this implies that the cesium source is still there'"
Simpsons already did it.
I'm pretty sure that any of several dozen rubbery-and-poorly-dubbed monster movies can tell us what happens next...
They've been monitoring the fish for a year and the radiation levels have remained constant. Makes me wonder what the radiation level was before the tsunami. I wouldn't want to eat bottom feeding fish downstream from a large city anyway.
And Thanks for all the.... never mind.
They don't know if the reactor is still leaking, all they do know is that the fish are at the similar level as before. It seems to me that something is still reacting under all that water. The problem is that radioactivity is a pollutant at doesn't solve itself in a few years even if everything is cleaned up the waste is still creating reacting. The problem with earthquakes is that there is nothing to protect the fragile ..Do not shake stuff in our world.
Life is like untied shoe laces; it always tripping you up and getting in your way.
If the seafloor is contaminated with cesium and it behaves like it did in the sands of the Bikini Atoll, the radioactive substance is eventually buried so that the top sediments seem perfectly clean but the plant life attached to the seafloor raise the cesium back up and it returns to the food cycle. Then again, this is seafloor and the plant life is different.
I read both articles and the abstract, and couldn't find any actual numbers for how radioactive the fish are. And what I did find only made me want that answer more.
The only number that was being thrown around was "40%", in that 40% of fish caught in the Fukushima area exceed the limit for radiation, which is currently 100Bq/kg. But that's a rather low limit - before the accident, the limit was set to 500Bq/kg, but was tightened to reduce fears of contamination. And in the US (ever a paragon of strict food safety</sarcasm>), the limit is 1200Bq/kg.
So my question is, just how high *are* the radiation levels? Are the ones being rejected as unsafe doing so because the standards were tightened, or because they're genuinely highly radioactive?
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Blinky
Future nuclear tech holds promise but the generation of fission reactors deployed today requires an independent and transparent regulatory regime to watch over it. Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island tell us we don't have this today. Everyone of these disasters began with a coverup. Therefore we do not have the moral authority to run today's generation of fission nukes.
That's "Cue". Que/Queue and Cue have completely different meanings.
Maybe he meant "Qué Godzilla jokes!", a Spanglish exclamation roughly translated as "Such [wonderful/awful] Godzilla jokes [can be made/have been made]!"
So fugu (potentially lethal blowfish) sushi is insanely popular and expensive.... how long until we see Fukushima flounder sushi? The actual amount of cesium in two tiny pieces of fish can't be *that* harmful, can they?
bananas are radioactive. so is lots of stuff.
with a good gamma ray you can detect tiny traces of radioactivity. you can also identify the isotope it came from. if its potassium then its natural, if its caesium then its from a recent man made source. if the radiation from caesium is 1% the amount from the potassium you can still measure it, and write a scary headline.
probably the heavy metals in the fish will do you far more harm. and thats probably elevated with all the cars and junk that got washed into the sea. its a bit harder to measure though. whats the half-life of mercury or lead though?
I thought that Spanglish for Godzilla was Dioszilla?
Ezekiel 23:20
I personally use them as nightlights.
Rinji news o moshiagemasu!
Rinji news o moshiagemasu!
Godzilla ga Ginza hoomen e mukatte imasu!
Daishkyu hinan shite kudasai!
Daishkyu hinan shite kudasai!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The US can just sell yummy pink (well, on the inside) Gulf shrimp to Japan and in turn buy slightly radioactive Japanese fish.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The real problem is Global Warming.
Don't be distracted by this attempt by radiation alarmists to take your eyes off-the-ball.
We need more reactors, people!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They asked it and it said yes.
"Hello, IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again? Yeah... No problem."
Seem unlikely? Remember we're talking about a country that has vending machine for schoolgirl panties. You could use an image of Godzilla in the ads for it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
This comment is a wellspring of information.. Sadly, by continually raising the "safe" level of radiation faster than the increase in measured levels, it would appear to the uninformed that things are getting better. They've been unable to raise those levels here in Canada, what with our slow bureaucracy, so they have simply taken all the fallout detectors offline instead .. thinking what the public doesn't know, won't hurt them (except the "them" in this case is the officials in charge)
Apparently Health Canada has a 404 on the page where it was mentioned, but here's an article about it before it happened:
http://unhypnotize.com/weather-disasters-news/55853-epa-raise-limits-radiation-exposure-while-canada-turns-off-fallout-detectors.html
in the UCMJ there are things that you will get SHOT for that are not actually criminal otherwise.
Go Ahead and track down the number of Nuclear Accidents in the Navy that were not the result of
1 navy ships getting shot at for some reason
2 deliberate acts of Stupid/Sabotage
3 Nuclear Materials going "missing"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Why does it surprise anyone that fish dwelling near the reactor are still radiactive 19 months later? 19 months after what? after the leak began, and has been only slightly reduced? the leak didn't stop, and it's still ongoing.
the mainstream media stopped dwelling on this, all the while people in North America consume products with high radiation.
Cesium 135 has a long half-life, upwards of 2 Million years, but it's not produced much in nuclear reactions, It would be a real fluke if much of it had formed from this accident, because making it passes theough Xenon 135, and the Xenon is a great neutron capturer. Xenon 135 reaction poisoning, and its tendency to stop quickly as the resulting Xenon 136 decays (half-life less than 10 hours), made Chernoble really much worse on really dangerous decay products than otherwise, and if it had been present much at Fukashima, you would see lots of Cesium 135, but also the reactions would have died, flaired again and died back cyclicly for hours and hours in a distinctive pattern that's diagnostic for Xenon, and this cycling happens as people attempt to restart a damped reaction by pulling control rods, not continue shutting it down. (Yes, the Russians did that). I don't think anyone at Fukashima both had control of the rods and fought for hours to restart a damped reactor, from the existing accounts. There'd be a lot of other very hot decay products, much worse than what's being seen, to worry about. Right now, Cesium 137 is one of the most common products of many types of reactor criticalities, and it's a Gamma emitter, making it generally more worrysome than some alternatives. It has a half life of 30 years, so yes, 19 months is not enough to expect much difference, but by your 20,000 years, the stuff will be long, long gone.
Who is John Cabal?
There is also Cs-134 which has a half-life of 2 years, that's 1/15th that of Cs-137.
This means that the same amount of Cs-134 is 15 times as radioactive as Cs-137. It also happens to be the case that Cs-137 is 15 times more common than Cs-134 in fission product decay chains.
The result is that half the original radioactivty of Caesium basically disappears within 6 years along with 87.5% of the Cs-134. After that a 30 year half-life is a useful approximation. (Although this is not quite true for contamination, some of it is being washed away by rainwater and/or penetrates into the soil, where people are being shielded from part of its gamma radiation. Fortunately, Caesium doesn't accumulate in any part of the human body, so that there are no locally high doses as with Strontium, Radium or Iodine even after digestion. Which makes cancer formation much less likely, as the body has to deal with low levels of radiation anyway and can deal with it.)
This is the expected pattern, followed by a steady progression into the food chain as these fish are eaten by their predators.
And the expected reaction by the nukler fanbois
My ism, it's full of beliefs.