Slashdot Mirror
New Radioactive Water Leak At Fukushima: 300 Tons and Growing
AmiMoJo tips this news from the BBC:
"Radioactive water has leaked from a storage tank into the ground at Japan's Fukushima plant, operator TEPCO says. Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), which measures nuclear events. This is the first time that Japan has declared such an event since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, equivalent to five year's maximum exposure for a site worker. In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea."
There was a significant leak back in April as well.
It's florescent fucking green! Do you know what that means?! It means it's toxic radioactive ooze!! Fucking OOZE!
Not nearly as reactive as this FUD however.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
They think it don't be like it is,
But it do.
...approx. 75k gals per day. or not quite enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Good thing it's a big ocean. Pity it's such a small island.
TEPCO is pleased to announce that additional capacity has become available in one of the radioactive coolant storage tanks, a development certain to ease fears of a capacity shortage.
300 tons of contaminated water doesn't seem like a lot when you consider there are (roughly) 784,430,000,000,000,000.00 tons of water in the pacific ocean alone. I think I'll still eat fish...
"A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation"
Wow! that's slightly more radiation than you'd get from a flight over the ocean! Let's all freak out!
"In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea"
So...how contaminated is this water? the same as the puddles? More? Less? What is it contaminated by?
-I only code in BASIC.-
Make my monster grow!
Go, go, Godzilla!
....this is how it ends.
Should I apologize to my kid before or after he's old enough to understand that humanity has no future?
The CB App. What's your 20?
The Paul Solomon Readings offered a solution to this more than 20 years ago: http://koogmo.com/?p=5670
Units matter guys. 300 tonnes = 330.693 tons.
What happened to the post just after the tsunami that explained that nothing bad could happen at Fukishima?
So fucking what?
This mess is unacceptable, and because better quality work in the
beginning could have prevented the disaster, it is UNFORGIVABLE.
May all those responsible suffer the tortures of the damned.
I swear it's going to come true in my lifetime.
homer simpson makes level 3's all the time
the 3 eye fish will get them before they can make it very far.
We've got 'leak' in the headline for three articles in a row. (If you have the same topics enabled as I do.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Except of course only ~300 tonnes of partially treated water IN TOTAL leaked (not 300 tonnes per day) and the leak has been stopped. Some of the water was recovered, and soil removed. It is also unclear if ANY of the water entered the ocean as nothing has been detected in any of the drainage ditches. And while 100 mSv of Beta radiation was detected at the surface of one of the puddles, only 1.5 mSv of Gamma radiation was detected (as the water was already partially treated to remove any Caesium). So don't go bathing in or drink the water and you'll be fine.
Water is hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen has 2 isotopes, Deuterium & Tritium. OK Tritium might be radioactive, but its not there. (Besides it's probably worth so much that there would be a race to get it). The longest life isotope of Oxygen is O15 which has a half life of 2 minutes, so its not a problem.
So water is not the issue.
It's the dissolved solids or suspended solids (sludge) in the water that is radioactive. If it's a sludge, it should be filterable. If its dissolved salts, there is probably a way to precipitate the radioactive bits. Failing that, evaporation should separate it out.
TEPCO has had a troubled relationship with the truth.
Before you kill the engineers, I'd like to meet them. I didn't even know it was possible for mankind to create a 30 meter wave that can kill 18,000 people.
Oh, wait, you meant the engineers that designed the nuclear plant that withstood the largest earthquake ever to hit Japan and then the subsequent tsunami? Hmmm, maybe we should agree to disagree.
The nuke plant gets all the play, and it is an ongoing expensive headache, but there are 18,000 people who would have rather been in Fukushima that day.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
the 300 tonnes of dihydro monoxide per day is the cooling system used to keep the reactor from burning its way deeper into the ground. it's been doing that for over 2 years. the only reason there is a possibility for news ventures such as this one to pick up the story and treat it like it's new is because the audience has a fucked-over attention span. anybody who has been keeping up to date on fukushima would know this and furthermore if you aren't keeping up to date on fukushima then why don't you just go hang yourself?
and to the idiot down there who's saying water can't be radioactive, here. this is a hypothetical glass containing heavy water. otherwise known as used reactor coolant. don't worry it's already chilled and this is the variety used without added coolants. just plain old good old water. so go ahead and drink it idiot. because water can't be irradiated right?
morons all over the fucking place.
And the regulators. They approved a design that, in the failure of grid power, a generator fault would guarantee a meltdown. A tsunami capable of reaching the plant had a near-100% chance of knocking out grid power and fouling the fuel. They approved a plant in a tsunami zone with a guaranteed meltdown in the case of a tsunami. The generator and fuel were at ground level. Putting them in a 10m tower (hardened for earthquake) would have prevented this meltdown. At a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars. To save pennies, a meltdown was guaranteed by bad design.
Learn to love Alaska
Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES)
The fact that its reported as a Level 1 incident is not reassuring, actually.
The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) seems to be highly subjective :-
And also, under Criticisms :-
Obama declared War on America.
America Answers and Declares War On Obama.
Operation 'Carpet Bomb'.
Operation 'Carpet Bomb' is ON.
Boeing Co.'s Narus subsidiary, Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. are the high priority targets to kill.
Killrate is est. 1000 employees per minute.
Then On To BIG WHITEY.
Holy crap. There is an International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. This thing actually exists.
All you read is "Surpise! New radioaktive water!" and think it's still because of the earlier catastrophe. I belive criminal guys around the world, likely you're goverment, are dumping radioaktive waste into the ocean near Fukushima because it's cheap and the damage is already done.
"morons all over the place". You said it. In case you didn't know, heavy water is water made with the deuterium isotope of hydrogen. Deuterium is not radioactive, so heavy water is not radioactive. (That is not to say heavy water is not poisonous to drink). As I originally stated, tritium is the only isotope of Oxygen or Hydrogen that could be dangerously radioactive in this situation.
I am surprised that morons have the sense to hide behind an anonymous nom de plume. Maybe you and the author of "somebody never took college level chemistry 2." above are only halfwits.
And TEPCO plans to test every level of it!
They approved a design that, in the failure of grid power, a generator fault would guarantee a meltdown.
Indeed. I remember as a kid with an interest in nuclear power in the 1980s, reading about the design of the GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor and boggling at the lack of a PWR-style containment building because the suppression torus "should be enough". But accidents always happen, I thought. What if some disaster caused a meltdown or explosion? Well, the article said, because there was no containment, the result of a meltdown would be unthinkable and therefore hasn't been investigated. Instead there would be failsafes to make sure a meltdown absolutely could never happen.
And I felt a cold shudder run down my spine at the casual engineering arrogance of that design and that, I think, was the moment when I switched from thinking of nuclear power as "cool" to "incredibly stupid".
There was a file photo in the article of a Mark 1 under construction - it was quite probably this one at Harper's Ferry - and the sight of the naked reaction vessel with the pipes reaching through the torus like an evil alien root, a cancer nodule built in steel, gave me nightmares for weeks. I had an instinctive feeling of revulsion and horror. This is a radiological disaster waiting to happen. Why would humanity build this monstrosity? Tear it out! Burn it! Bury it! Entomb the ashes!
Actually, looking at that photo, I still feel that feeling today. But at least we've learned from this... right guys?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
It's not an engineering fault, but a business and regulatory one. Make it as safe as possible, and have multiple redundant failsafes. That costs too much, so they are axed. And the regulators sign off on it.
Learn to love Alaska
Already been done by Carter, Reagan and Thatcher. It's just been a dead cat bounce since then with reactors living out their lifetime and nearly nothing being built. With a technology like that unless you keep on building stuff continuously you slide backwards because you've got to train a new bunch to build each reactor.
Don't pretend to be stupid, what was meant is the engineers that made the sort of mistake we used to laugh at the Soviets for - putting backup systems in places that make them as prone to failure as the main systems. The real problem however is the plant operators that took so many shortcuts that what should have been a relatively graceful failure was instead a serious of fuckups up to and including explosions. I'd say those are the people the above poster wants pointless revenge on.
The nuke plant gets all the play, and it is an ongoing expensive headache, but there are 18,000 people who would have rather been in Fukushima that day.
Sigh, I KNEW there was going to be one of these comments here.... Guess what, I know you don't know this, but I feel it's important to pass this info on: NO MATTER HOW BAD YOU FEEL ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO DIED, THEY ARE DEAD.
People like you really piss me off because you seem to think that if all we do is throw a big pity party then the people who died in the tsunami will come back to life. But you have really BELIEVE they will, and only talk about them and absolutely nothing else. Guess what, it sucks that they died, it sucks hard, but there isn't a god damn thing you can do about, no matter how much you talk about it. But the people's friends and relatives DO have to deal with the nuclear issue. They DO have to deal with being kicked out of their homes for who knows how long. Unlike the dead people their situation can be changed(for better or worse). So yeah, unlike your self-righteous claims to the contrary, talking about the nuclear situation is in fact more productive than a constant pity party. Moron.
Monstar L
And at 300 tonnes per day it could leak until the end of time and not cause (after dilution) 18,000 additional deaths.
To call this a mole hill made into a mountain is to overemphasize it's size... after this is diluted into the ocean this does not even make mole hill status.
I wouldn't want to bath in the puddle before it leaks into the ocean. But bathing in the ocean more than a few hundreds of meters off shore would be safe.
Sydney morning herald says
The severity warning about a toxic water leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant is to be dramatically raised, its nuclear watchdog said on Wednesday.
The deepening crisis at the Fukushima plant will be upgraded from a level 1 "anomaly" to a level three "serious incident" on an international scale for radiological releases, a spokesman for Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority said.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/fukushima-radiation-warning-over-toxic-water-leak-20130821-2sb4s.html#ixzz2caLLLn91
Ex-Fukushima Worker: High risk they’ll break fuel rods in Unit 4 pool —
Gundersen: Moving fuel risks nuclear chain reaction;
You can’t stop it, no control rods to control it.
1,331 rods need to be moved from just the #4 pool
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/us-japan-fukushima-insight-idUKBRE97D00M20130814
It was a 15m wave, and the plant was designed only to withstand 7.5m tsunami and magnitude 7.1 quakes. Both the tsunami and the quake damaged the plant. Japan had experienced larger tsunami and quakes before.
In fact the nuclear regulator warned TEPCO that defences were inadequate years before the disaster. The engineers knew there was a problem, they are not to blame. It is, as ever, the managers and profit motive.
Also, it's a slightly bizarre argument to say that because 18,000 other people died that somehow mitigates Fukushima. If you want to go down that route then millions starved in Africa in the 80s, 500,000 Iraqis died in the last war... I'm not sure what your point is. It's a disaster in its own right and deserves to be scrutinized.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That's an oversimplification of what happened. When the power failed there was a backup system in place that would have prevented a meltdown. The problem is that it was damaged by the quake and then again by the tsunami. In fact the pumps were working and a large enough volume of water needed to cool the reactors was pumped in, but due to values being in the wrong position and instrumentation not working a lot of it never got as far as the cores.
Even after the tsunami a meltdown could have been avoided, but a mixture of incompetency and a lack of information and understanding at the time allowed it to happen.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-09-19/fukushima-radiation-japan-irradiates-west-coast-north-america
In any case. Look at what's happening on this planet now with governments, governments organizations (nsa, ...) their corporation overlords, etc. You get the point.
Shouldn't it make sense that the world unites and helps Japan fix this problem ? At least the countries that can. I mean radiation is a global problem, not Japanese problem just because it happened in Japan.
Sometimes I think we're so ignorant and ... stupid (even though human race would think it's smart, especially the egotistical CS nerds) that we deserve to be wiped of this planet and replaced with whatever else.
Its confusing, but from the report it actually sounds like theres 300 tonnes total of the 'stand near a puddle for an hour to get your annual dose' stuff and 300 tonnes per day leaking of the less radioactive waste water they're using to keep the ponds of spent reactor rods cool.
But could you not run the water through reverse osmosis, remove the radioactive particles, and return the fresh and hopefully much less radioactive water into the environment? (Like the sea).
To put that into perspective, 300 tons per day are joining the ~153,000,000,000,000,000 tons of water in the ocean.
That said, the stuff is pretty hot. Definitely not something to be careless around.
but does anyone else feel this may be leading to a very Godzilla like situation.
> Also, it's a slightly bizarre argument to say that because 18,000 other people died that somehow mitigates Fukushima.
People fear the nuclear thing, which has killed nobody, more than this huge 18,000 death disaster which has happened before and will happen again. Therefore, they want people to spend all their time worrying about this... which happens at the expense of preparing for disasters like the one that killed 18,000 people.
Each level is considered 10 times more severe than the level below, just like earthquake intensity scales.
I live less than 100 miles south the Fukushima plant.
On behalf of the people around me, I'd like to tell the Godzilla and Ninja Turtles-type of posters to go fuck yourselves. This isn't a fucking Internet meme to some of us.
Some of us who weren't killed or hurt in the earthquake or tsunami still have financial problems from the economic downturn in our businesses. We're not all in a position to just be able to pack up and move. We don't all live in trailers like some of you Godzilla-spouting fuckers.
Some of us have had to dig deeply into our savings.
To be honest, I'm more worried now than I was a year ago. We're back to trying to contain events instead of making any progress toward cleaning up and decontaminating.
I think a bigger problem is this:
How are they going to continue to find people willing to work at the plant? They quit after a while.
Would you work in a sealed decontamination suit and breathing gear outside in a heat index about 140F for about the same money the night shift kid-manager at Burger King makes? Just how smart and competent can someone like that be?
That's scary.
And the problem is not the engineers, it's the reckless, cost-cutting zealot-assholes from the accounting departments who become the presidents of utilities instead of engineers.
Just thought of a use for all this radioactive water. Use it to wash money to be used for pirate ransoms etc. - those primitive morons have no way of detecting the massive doses of radioactivity (no, it will not glow in the dark) but if made radioactive enough it will kill in short order both the pirates and their families, fences, collaborators and everybody else that comes into contact with the illegally begotten cash. Also, it should be trivial to track the radioactive cash so it will easier to take out those not immediately killed by the radioactivity. Also, as a bonus, death from radiation poisoning is delightfully painful and slow enough to offer rich opportunity to enjoy watching them suffer.
It's been revised up to level 3 now, apparently (the wording seems a bit awkward and tenses conflict):
Oh, and this is interesting in an unhappy way:
Posting anon to preserve mod points used in this thread,
Maow
Some of us have a disregard for "Clean Coal" as well.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
They just keep adding fresh. They are near the ocean, not infinite, but they can keep topping it up for as long as they can find new heroes to run the hose.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I understand that there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding on all sides. I understand that there can be FUD.
Can anyone explain, like I am a 5 year old, why the measurement of liquid in every other situation including oil spills is done by volume, (US gallons, Imperial gallons, barrels etc) yet in this situation since day one, all reference to water has been given in weight ? also in particular, referencing tons, and with some interchanging tonnes and tons? No clarification of long tonnes vs short tons.
Regardless if we are talking about 2500# vs 2000# per unit, why are we talking weight and not volume ?
I appreciate anyone guiding my ignorance here.
cheers.
This is the wrong information. The question is, how much buring uranium and plutonium is in this water? It appears that 100 metric tons of corium is still burning at Fukushima site, at the three or four reactor sites. From this message, it seems, the coriums has finally left the containment and burned its way into the ground water. This is called China Syndrome, isn't it?
I guess their backup generators should have been renewables rather than fossil fuel based.
I would say the engineers who put the backup generators where they would get wiped out by the flooding, and the engineers who put the incompatible electrical connections that prevented them from using portable generators. While there is evidence that at least one core may have cracked from the earthquake itself, the lack of power to run the cooling system was the biggest problem. (The biggest problem after underestimating the possible tsunami size that could hit the site, or with the reactor design itself being so vulnerable to loss of cooling, that is.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Don't pretend to be stupid...
You give him too much credit.
... how nature points out the folly of man.
GO GO GODZILLIA!
...because with all that radioactive water dumping into the Pacific, any fish from that ocean will start absorbing radioactive elements. Bart's three-eyed fish will seem tame in comparison, because at least you can see the problem.
Even better? Radiation is cumulative, so propensity for tissue damage rises with each exposure and the radioactive elements build up in the animal's body. There is no safe level of radiation exposure (source: Hellen Cadicott)
Still even better? Expect the higher-order fish (the ones that eat other fish) to end up will even more radiation exposure. Guess what's at the top of the food chain? That's right: those hairless chimps are flocked.
Try the fish!
Yeah, right.
If they make a big enough explosion, there won't be a plant or water to worry about.
My point is that people lack perspective. The nuke plant problem is serious when viewed in isolation, but minor compared to the disaster that hit the area. If the meltdown had happened without any accompanying natural disaster (like Chernobyl), then I would be a lot more likely to be critical of the engineers.
Sure, the plant was not adequately protected from the tsunami. Neither were 18,000 people. Which is the bigger error in judgement?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The nuke plant problem is increasingly serious when viewed in isolation, and an ongoing threat compared to the disaster that hit the area.
FTFY
Also, it's a slightly bizarre argument to say that because 18,000 other people died that somehow mitigates Fukushima.
It's not bizarre at all. It's not just the nuke plant that wasn't protected - it was the whole damn coast! If the engineers knew that the plant wasn't safe, then they "knew" that those people weren't safe. Screw the stupid plant - why weren't those people moved or protected? I'm not sure why you brought up Iraq or Africa - they weren't part of the same disaster. If you want to play the analogy game, then it's like worrying about some oil that spilled into the Persian Gulf during the Iraqi invasion. Sure, it's a problem, but focusing on that completely ignores the big picture.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It is the BWR abortions that are inherently dangerous as hell. Prove that a safe proper PWR costs "too much". There are numerous PWRs operating in the US, France, and other countries. Many submarines and aircraft carriers have PWRs.
It is not "increasingly" serious... this leak pales in comparison to the meltdown. It is ongoing, and it will be for 60 years. What, you think the rest of the tsunami damage magically cleaned itself up? The whole coast is scarred, not just this one oozing nuke plant.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That's because clean coal doesnt exist.
Eighteen thousand people died in the tsunami. How many have died due to the reactor? Which was the bigger disaster, and which deserves more press?
Ah, but which disaster best serves the cheap political interests of the establishment? Coal plants are big big money, and closing down nuclear results in a lot of new ca$h for them. So we all know what's going on here, don't even pretend.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You have me completely wrong. I see two fuckups:
a) a nuke plant was left vulnerable and unprotected.
b) 18,000 people were left vulnerable and unprotected.
Fuckup (a) left no one dead, but maybe a few injured. Sure, it's an ongoing problem and yes, life for the people affected sucks. But fuckup (b) was way, way, way, worse. As you said, nothing can bring those people back. They are never going home. Better to lose your home than to die. Fuckup (b) also meant hundreds of thousands of other structures were destroyed or damaged. Fuckup (b) displaced more people than fuckup (a).
And frankly, both fuckups were really the same fuckup. If engineers "knew" that the nuke plant was vulnerable, then naturally they "knew" what would happen to the rest of the coastline. They took no action on the plant - just like they took no action on the rest of the coastline. Fact is, it isn't an engineering problem at all - but one of economics. The nuke plant is not detached from the economic decisions that affected the rest of the coastline and ultimately led to the deaths of thousands of people.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They weren't, as far as we know, acting with malice. I love how you armchair quarterback the plant design, but you have no strong words for the people who failed to protect actual human beings. It's a double-standard. The plant engineers haven't killed anyone - though even if a few die, they didn't allow people to live and work in the direct path of a tsunami.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Those towns were not built by a single entity, they developed over many years. There was no plan for safety from the start. Their initial location was chosen hundreds or even thousands of years ago, before such things were understood.
In actual fact the risks were understood which is why evacuation procedures were put in place. The problem is that the tsunami was not detected early enough and the evacuation message did not spread quickly enough. In other words an attempt was made to make those people safe, but it failed. Securing such a large area is hard.
On the other hand Fukushima was built relatively recently. It was known at the time what the largest earthquakes and tsunami might be. Even when it became known later on that there were potential problems the one entity responsible for mitigating them didn't. The cost wouldn't even have been that high, not like trying to defend kilometres of coastline.
Unlike the towns affected TEPCO made little effort to address the issues, even though it was well within its power to do so.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
300 tons (80,000 gallons) of water is approximately...
* A city swimming pool
* The amount they dropped on the ground
* The amount they are leaking into the ocean each day.
* The amount they are adding to the tank farm a day.
Wow!
I'm willing to accept the possiblity that carbon sequestration might be able to generate energy from coal -- potentially even with valuable by products like graphene generated via carbon vapor deposition. Radioactive waste is not a valuable by-product. Especially the shit that stays dangerously radioactive for either thousands or millions of years. Apparently there are 10,000 metric tons of it created each year.
where the eff are you going to put all the CO2 at powerplant scale? tests to date have been a mix of labbench and pilot project. Also consider that powerplants need to be located regionally. so you can't power the entire US from carlsbad caverns.
Totally different subject. Notice I'm also not talking about Christmas, onions or a variety of other unconnected topics in this thread.
Also as an engineer that has worked in power generation, though admittedly not nuclear, I'd like to point out that it is very amusing to be described as an "armchair quarterback" by someone like yourself.
Like you, I'm an engineer in an unrelated field. No one cares if one of my robots gets flooded, and no one cares if your conventional plant gets flooded. The tsunami/earthquake damaged at least 4 conventional power plants, and you barely heard a peep. It set fire to a pair of oil refineries that were extinguished after a couple of weeks, and the only news about those was regarding their role in oil shortages. The only engineers being flogged on this board are the nuke engineers, which is silly. NOTHING on the coast of Japan seems to have been protected against such an event - why single out the nuke plant?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How is it a different topic? It's the same disaster! Are you trying to separate out what happened at the nuke plant from the tsunami and earthquake? This wasn't Chernobyl.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, equivalent to five year's maximum exposure for a site worker.
If he would stay there for a whole hour then maybe it would be... I would prefer getting 100mSv over an hour instead of getting 100mSv exposure for a second...
But also to be put into perspective. The limits the workers have are for their own saftey to lower the risk of cancer in their future. Sure this is not good to be around, but it's not that dangerous and should be 'fairly' easy to clean up.
First of all there is such thing as a half-life for radioactive elements. Higher activity means shorter half-life and thus faster removal from the system. Lower activity means that it is active for longer, but not releasing as much radiation.
There is also biological half-life as living things recycle their building blocks. For cesium (one of the commonest radioactive stuff leaked from Fukushima) it is 1-4 months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_half-life
Furhermore, current best scientific data says that small doses of radiation are actually preventing cancer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens
For scientific papers about this:
http://bjr.birjournals.org/content/78/925/3.short
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00411-006-0032-9
Because it's caused shitloads of hassles with a wide area having to be evacuated and the others haven't. It's human nature to be pissed off in such a situation.
I understand it is human nature. I'm trying to argue that one should look past the emotional aspects and actually judge the nuclear catastrophe by the same criteria as the rest of the Japanese coast. Naturally radiation is way scarier than a big-ass wave, because at least you can see and understand the wave. But at the end of the day, the score is radiation:0, big wave: 18,000. The risks to the plant were known, but so were the risks to the people. Economics won out in both decisions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Unfortunately there's the twin aspects of it being a new threat instead of a well known one like a tsunami, and that the tsunami has been and gone while problems are still ongoing at the nuclear power station. Maybe this will finally be a wakeup call about storage of old fuel, which is one of the many stuffups in this situation which should be avoidable but requires co-operation between elements of the nuclear power industry that don't like to talk to each other and governments that want to pretend nuclear power doesn't exist.
It's been at Level 3 for several days already...