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Fukishima Springs Water Leak
sl4shd0rk writes "The Japanese Fukishima crisis took a turn for the worse this week as it was found a barrier built to contain contaminated water has been breached; a leak defined by 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium. This is yet another problem on top of a spate of errors plaguing the 2011 nuclear disaster site. Nuclear regulatory official Shinji Kinjo has cited Tokyo Electric Power Company as having a 'weak sense of crisis' as well as hinted at previous bunglings by TEPCO as the reason one cannot 'just leave it up to Tepco alone.' If Nuclear energy is ever to move forward, these types of disasters need to be eliminated."
Actually, this is a relatively small amount of radiation, a Curie is 3.7 * 10^10 becquerels, or roughly 40 billion becquerels, roughly 1/1000 of this leak. If this were a point source, and you were 1 meter away, your dose would be 1000 rem per hour, which would reach a 50% probability of being lethal (300 rem) in roughly 20 minutes. Since it is a disseminated source, and there's no one anywhere close to that near it, I'd say this is pretty much overblown hype. I used to work in the radiation measurement industry, and the preceding is pretty much quick and dirty shortcuts (ignoring quality factors and the conversion to rads, for instance,) but it's close enough for government work.