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Fukushima Actually "Much Worse" Than So Far Disclosed, Say Experts
PuceBaboon writes "The BBC is reporting that experts are casting doubt on the veracity of statements from both the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government regarding the seriousness of the problems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Not only are the constant leaks releasing radioactivity into the ocean (and thus into the food chain), but now there are also worries that the spent fuel rod storage pools may be even more unstable than first thought. An external consultant warns, 'The Japanese have a problem asking for help. It is a big mistake; they badly need it.'"
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Factsheets/English/ines.pdf
Anyone that has lived and worked in Japan with the local engineers and agencies knows it's not a good idea to take safety statements and claims at face value. Trusting the boys with nuclear reactors is asking for incidents like Fukushima to be downplayed.
Example - the locals in our apartment building told us if there was a fire to order a pizza before calling the fire dept. and tell the fd to follow the pizza delivery guy - they now the neighborhoods much better than the authorities.
Other example - our R & D center had a super-efficient furnace that was supposed to burn trash at 900. The furnace operators decided on their own to run at lower temps so the equipment would 'last longer'...that coked up the 2nd combustion chamber. One day someone tossed a 5 gal. container of cutting oil into the trash, and when they tried to burn it, the whole thing exploded, sending thousands of confidential documents out across the neighborhood. Everyone had to run out and pick them up. The community gave our company an award for being so good at the cleanup. No mention of the explosion.
Yet another example - to be counted as a highway fatality in Japan, you have to die in the first 12 hours. This isn't how other countries tally such stats, leaving Japan to appear to be much safer.
Final example - fire drills in the company were typically over-organized. We were instructed to gather at a pre-detemined location with our assigned fire monitor, and then leave the building in order. We told them that in our country, we simply get the hell out...
18 children already have thyroid cancer, 25 more waiting to be confirmed. For reference the usual incidence rate is one is a few hundred thousand, and these children are from a group of about 300,000 being monitored so the normal rate would be about 2-3 a year.
It's pretty bad.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
It's been years since the event, and Fukushima still doesn't have a radioactive water processing plant. The US has dealt with this problem before, both at 3 Mile Island and some Superfund sites. Water itself doesn't become radioactive (except for tritium, which has a 12 year half life); as with fallout, the radioactives are mostly solids in the water, and can be removed and converted to smaller amounts of solid waste.
With a processing plant, they could reuse the cooling water, instead of building more and more storage tanks.
Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?
This is a very good question and as a nuclear layman, it's difficult for me to get a handle on an exact answer. IANA health physicist, just a guy with Wikipedia and Google. But given that, I'll try to give some baselines from what I can see on the net.
First, in terms of "radiation", it seems like we're mostly talking about release of radioactive isotopes, rather than the initial prompt radiation of a nuclear explosion itself. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ( as, eg, this blog describes) were airbursts, so relatively radiologically "clean" - they did a lot of initial damage from blast, heat and gamma radiation, but didn't leave nearly as many "dirty" isotopes in the way of fallout. This is compared with, eg, a surface shot like Castle Bravo which was a huge dirty contamination event.
So when we're talking about "comparing" Fukushima with Hiroshima, we're talking purely about the isotopes, not the explosive power. Which is not really a straight comparison. But given that, Fukushima (or any other nuclear power station) is and/or has the potential to be much dirtier than a bomb (at least an airburst), because there's more nuclear material stored onsite. You'd want a nuclear engineer to give the precise bequerel ratings of all the isotope mixes in the fuel composition, but for a back-of-the-envelope estimate: Little Boy had 64kg of uranium fuel - Fukushima had 1,760,000 kg of fuel on the entire site.
So all else being equal, which of course it's not because we're not talking weapons-grade uranium and I'm sure power rods have lots of other alloys in them, Daichi has 27,500 times as much raw radioactive fuel as the Hiroshima bomb. Impressive, no?
Now most of that fuel probably won't be released, as not all the reactors were damaged, and the health impact of the various isotopes varies wildly based on the half-life of the isotope, its heaviness (ability to be transported far from the site), whether it can be ingested in air or water, how long it stays in the body, what the affinity is for various body parts, and what kind of radiation it releases - alpha, beta or gamma. Alpha particles are the biggest, so do the most damage, but also the easiest to block - I believe outside the body they're fairly harmless, blocked by cloth or skin. But inside the body, they can do more harm. So you really do need a health physicist to work out all the equations here.
However, the buzz on the net has always centered around three main radioactive isotope families: iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and strontium-90.
Iodine has a half-life measured in days to weeks so it was always going to be the initial problem. Theoretically, if all the fission occurred at the first meltdown, there shouldn't be any left. In practice it seems like some short-halflife isotopes are still being detected, which suggests spontaneous fission may still be occurring in the melted cores. Iodine goes for the thyroid and its effect is thyroid cancers, particularly in children. This is starting to show up but there's arguments over what the baseline rate is and how much is due to testing rather than fallout.
In terms of initial (not ongoing) iodine release, Fukushima was 2.5 times bigger than Hiroshima.
Most of the Fukushima-Hiroshima comparisions focus around the caesium isotopes, as these are long-lived (several years) and the body trea
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC