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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.
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?
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]!"
Why are you comparing 3 reactors in the different country with three different regulatory control?
I would argue the Three Mile Island shows us the regulatory system working, since exactly no one was harmed from that event.
That said, I think the government should build and Run Nuclear power plants. Sell the electricity at cost to energy companies who can make money through.
Remove bonus and person gain from how a nuclear plant is run.
" Everyone of these disasters began with a coverup"
Not true.
I would say:
corporations do not have the moral authority to run today's generation of fission nukes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
I thought that Spanglish for Godzilla was Dioszilla?
Ezekiel 23:20
That said, I think the government should build and Run Nuclear power plants.
I'd might willing to get behind the notion of turning it over to the US Navy; decades of reactor operation without any significant radioactive releases or (nuclear related) accidents. Not so sure that we want to see it turned over a civilian bureaucracy though.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
TMI essentially ended up well by luck. The operators were clueless of what was going on for quite a while, and many procedures were unfit. We learnt a lot from this one exactly for that reason, there was so many mistakes to learn from. But essentially, the catastrophic outcome was averted because the conditions kind of resolved for themselves.
Cernobyl ended up bad by lack of luck. After the initial mistake (could have been averted with better procedures, but again, no design is perfect, so we should consider failure as something that will happen), there was little time for the operators to detect and correct conditions as the reactor self destructed almost immediately due to bad design and bad luck colluding. Everything that could go wrong happened simultaneously to make things catastrophic.
Fukujima is another animal. Its not luck or lack of luck, it's bean counting and greed. Proper procedures have been overlooked and regulatory measures ignored. Unlike TMI were "we didn't knew", Fukujima owners should have known better. The lack of emergency diesel to be deployed by helicopter is puzzling, most other nuke operating countries do have such a strategic reserve for "defense in depth". The reactor remained in critical but manageable condition for several hours, the operators knew what was going on and the risks they were facing, yet no help from outside the station reached. Had the owners prepared for the event, the operators would have had enough options to handle without going over a 2/3 on the scale, similar to TMI. Without external help, they were doomed. (I understand that offsite help was stuck in the consequence of the earthquake, but Japan is known for earthquakes and tsunamis, so such a scenario is not exactly a surprise. A procedure that relies on road delivery of help is clearly inadequate and the failure to double it with helicopter or boat delivery of help and supplies is inexcusable).
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..."
"The lack of emergency diesel to be deployed by helicopter is puzzling,"
Lack of electrical power was just the tip of iceberg.. Most of the electric motors driving the pumps, and their control systems located in Turbine Hall basements were flooded by salt water, thus requiring significant efforts(months worth) to restore. Backup Generators were onsite within 6 hours..
Purposefully deactivating all security mechanisms and automatic control of a reactor in order to try and get a chain reaction going despite Xenon poisoning of the core isn't lack of luck. Removing all but 12 control-rods from a reactor that needs at least 30 to maintain a negative void coefficient (which the automatic control doesn't allow) isn't lack of luck.
Chernobyl wasn't lack of luck.
In fact, after 1986, all RBMK reactors used somewhat higher enriched fuel (2.4% or so) with absorbers included into fuel rods to permanently give the reactors a negative void coefficient. A fact that is widely ignored by the public.
Also, as the WASH-1250 report pointed out in 1975 - before TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima - having a large containment with containment spray as was the case with all PWRs as opposed to BWRs built before the 1990ies isn't luck. But was credited back in 1975 with retaining a much larger amount of radionuclides compared to BWRs. That's because of larger retention times, as the larger volume has a much slower pressure build-up and containment spray can remove both iodine and caesium from the containment-air before venting. The accident in Fukushima proved this report to be accurate. (And unlike Japan, many European countries adopted counter-measures in the form of filtered containment vents that can remove 99.99% of Cs and 99% of iodine during venting.)
TMI wasn't luck.
As the WASH-1250 also pointed out, floods and tsunamis ('tidal waves') were known as a major risk that could lead to melt-downs and must be dealt with. Both Onagawa to the north of Fukushima and Tokai to the south of Fukushima were prepared for and hit by the tsunami, resulting in non-events, as the inlets for cooling water were sealed and no vital equipment was destroyed. Strangely enough, they were able to foresee what it takes to prepare for a tsunami, but the Fukushima power stations were not prepared.
Fukushima Daiichi and Daini weren't prepared. But out of ten reactors only five lost emergency power supply - those with Mark I Containments. All others had Mark II containments mong them only reactor #6 in Fukushima Daiichi (current generation BWRs would have a Mark IV or Mark V containment, if they hadn't stopped numbering after Mark III). Those retained at least one emergency generator. That wasn't luck either, but an advanced safety concept calling for two separate sections that could provide all functions necessary for the safety of the reactor. Including an air-cooled emergency generator. No additional air-cooled generators were supplied to any of the Mark I containments, even though the Mark II containment made it plonkingly obvious to anybody that they were needed. And those are cheap compared to a nuclear power plant.
What's worse is that the japanese regulator NISA specifically told plant operators that total station black-outs need not be included in safety drills. Personell could not properly deal with the situation, despite having the necessary equipment to mitigate it by using the firefighting equipment to pump cooling water into the reactor. Those had been equiped with the necessary joints to plug the pumps right in, as the (american) designers of the containment had the foresight to deal with this possibilty. Training would have included knowing how and when to properly vent the containment, without creating a backwash into the containment building and opening the blow-out panels to prevent hydrogen build-up in case of a meltdown - as was done in reactor #2 where no explosion occured.
Fukushima wasn't bad luck.It was lack of training, safety equipment and regulation that had been established decades ago in other countries.