Slashdot Mirror
Japan's Nuclear Refugees, Still Stuck In Limbo
mdsolar tips this story at the NY Times:
"Every month, Hiroko Watabe, 74, returns for a few hours to her abandoned house near the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant to engage in her own small act of defiance against fate. She dons a surgical mask, hangs two radiation-measuring devices around her neck and crouches down to pull weeds. She is desperate to keep her small yard clean to prove she has not given up on her home, which she and her family evacuated two years ago after a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami devastated the plant five miles away. Not all her neighbors are willing to take the risk; chest-high weeds now block the doorways of their once-tidy homes. 'In my heart, I know we can never live here again,' said Ms. Watabe, who drove here with her husband from Koriyama, the city an hour away where they have lived since the disaster. 'But doing this gives us a purpose. We are saying that this is still our home.' While the continuing environmental disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has grabbed world headlines — with hundreds of tons of contaminated water flowing into the Pacific Ocean daily — a human crisis has been quietly unfolding. Two and a half years after the plant belched plumes of radioactive materials over northeast Japan, the almost 83,000 nuclear refugees evacuated from the worst-hit areas are still unable to go home."
That you give us actual fucking measurement numbers in millisievert per unit of time instead of scaremongering with ambigious definitions.
If I were 74 years old and my home had an annual 5mSv radiation dose(technically in excess of 2x civilian limits). I would live there, whole fucking year. And if I die of cancer, I'd have done so anyway.
How about letting the elderly live there? It takes time for low level radiation to cause tumors. If you're old enough that you won't be around to see the cancer, you have nothing to worry about.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Umm, just exactly what problem are you asking them to solve?
I thought the subject was Fukushima, which is NOT "a threat to all life on our planet".
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
You want them to spend their money fixing a problem in a rich country? A problem well within the financial ability of Japan to pay on its own? Gee, where do I sign up for donations?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I am really friekin' confused as to the radiation around Fukushima.
She considers weeding her driveway so risky that she waved away a visitor who offered to help, pointing to her dosimeter showing readings two and a half times the level that would normally force an evacuation.
Why is the radiation in her driveway so high? Why is it safe to walk around there, but not to weed the driveway?
Every time she visits, she said, she receives a dose equivalent to one or two chest X-rays even if she remains indoor
Where is that radiation coming from if they are inside their house?
I guess then the new cover building and fuel transport crane that has been built over unit 4, doesn't exist. Not to mention all of the work to restore the service floor and fuel handing machinery plus the testing and inspections that are being done in preparation of starting to remove stored fuel next month is a figment of peoples imagination. The 123 pgase updated TEPCO decomissioning plan approved June 27 by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry must be a fairy tail. Care to try again with some facts instead of "AHHHHHH WE'RE ALL DEAD!!!!!!!!!"
You don't see four nuclear reactors leaking radioactive substances directly into the ocean as a threat to life on this planet?
You got it right in my case as well. I don't see that because it isn't a threat to life on this planet.
TEPCO is in charge of this mess...and they do next to nothing. Do you have any better ideas?
Sure, move that stuff aside, recycle what nuclear fuel you can, and let the rest cool down for a few centuries. Meanwhile, build a new group of reactors there. You have this great place for nuclear reactors - plenty of land, water, and it even has a nice wide exclusion zone. And now you know how bad earthquakes and tsunami can get. So that particular disaster will never catch you off guard again.
For the land of the exclusion zone, you can now use it for industrial purposes or green spaces.
The problem seems to be not knowing if the clean up will happen or not. Since no one knows how to do the job, that is not too surprising. But, at least there is a promise of compensation for lost property if the clean up is a no go. If the same thing were to happen at Indian Point, the NRC has said there would be zero compensation. http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2013/09/new-york-wonders-where-nuclear-cleanup-funds-would-come/70800/?oref=ng-dropdown And, if you check your home owners policy, there is nothing there either.
No, I don't. Perhaps because I have an idea of how much natural radioactivity is already in the oceans of the world (hint: grind up the four reactors in question, and dump them into the oceans, and you won't even be able to measure the increase over backgound).
The numbers for Fukushima sound really big, But once you spread them through 1,250,000T tons of water, they don't look so significant....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Idiot.
Radiation levels & evacuation
The Japanese government is coming close to lifting the evacuation order; the radiation is declining quickly. Here are the cumulative numbers from 3/23/2011 to 5/2/2011:
5/2/2011: 24.14 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 5/1); +2.99 milli-sieverts from previous week)
4/25/2011: 21.15 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 4/24; +3.17 milli-sieverts from previous week)
4/18/2011: 17.98 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 4/17; +3.5 milli-sieverts from previous week)
4/11/2011: 14.48 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 4/10; +4.14 milli-sieverts from previoius week)
4/4/2011: 10.34 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 4/3; +5.527 milli-sieverts from previous week)
3/28/2011: 4.813 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 3/27; +3.276 milli-sieverts in 3 days)
3/25/2011: 1.537 milli-sieverts (3/23 - 3/24)
Source: http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1304002.htm
They intend to allow unrestricted repopulation of the area in early 2017. To get the 20 mSev level for 40 days, they had to pick the days right after the disaster.
The radiation levels are actually not that high these days, since most of the continuing leakages is from the poorly isolated holding pond, which they have failed to repair, into the the ocean, as opposed to into the air, which is what happened initially.
Yeah, just keep trashing this place, we don't need it, we will have that 8 billion seat interstellar transport ready any day now. When will space cadets understand that if we can't rebuild the life support system on our current circum-stella spaceship, we can't possibly build a brand one into the boot of your imagined interstellar ship.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Let me start by saying that the govt's policy about not giving compensation if they think that people's homes can be cleaned isn't right. For all homes within regions that are over 20 mSv/year (the evacuation threshold), the owner should be given full compensation, to buy a new home elsewhere, if they want it. Not only is it uncertain how long cleanup will take, but it should be their choice. I also take the point about how if an area has been evacuated, it is hard to restart a society and economy, which makes it even more true that the evacuees should have the choice. (It should be noted, however, that the same applies to areas destroyed and evacuated by the earthquake and tsunami.)
The article also suggests that they're trying to avoid paying compensation because it will help make the case for restarting reactors (be reducing the estimated "cost"??) If so, they've got it 180-degrees wrong. Making these people whole and allowing them to get on with their lives will restore some faith in the govt. and utility, and make the restart case easier. Also, the continued suffering of these people in limbo makes for continued stories (like this one) that can't be helping the industry's image or popularity.
That said, having to move somewhere else (perhaps only a few miles) is a hell of a lot better than being killed (or sickened). People are losing perspective, of the things that really matter. The fact is that Fukushima, the only significant release in non-Soviet nuclear's entire 50-year history, has caused no deaths and is projected to have no measurable health impact. Meanwhile, fossil fueled power generation, like that Japan has decided to use in lieu of nuclear, causes several hundred thousand deaths every single year, along with global warming. Also, ~20,000 died in the tsunami.
It should also be noted that in most of the areas, including yellow and much orf the red areas on the map, radiation levels are actually below the (~100 mSv/yr) level at which any clearly measurable (statistically significant) increase in cancer risk is observed. So, many of the comments here that have a premise of significant cancer increases among people who would choose to live in these areas are off base. Any increases would be slight, at most, especially for older people (as some have pointed out). Also, I believe that they're (logically) focusing their clean up efforts on populated areas, so the dose rates in the villages are actually lower than what the map shows. It is true that radiation drifts back in to some degree, requiring continuous recleaning. Nonetheless, residents shouldn't be getting nearly as much as the map suggests.
Oh, an finally, it's not like such situations are unprecedented. After hurricane Katrina in the US, large sections of New Orleans were destroyed and were permanently abandoned. Many if not most of the displaced population never came back, but instead moved to other cities like Houston, or Chicago, etc... I believe that any compensation from the US govt. that these people got was meager at best; nowhere near enough to buy a new home. Jobs, you say? They were on their own in that respect to. And the size of the affected population with Katrina was ~10 times the size of the population being affected by the Fukushima meltdown. Of course, that received nowhere near the coverage that Fukushima's evacuees have, simply because nuclear power is involved.
There are already effectively volunteers - There's a fair number of old folks who moved back into their homes on the outskirts of Chernobyl. Thus far their cancer rates are tracking with that of those outside the affected area.
It's my understanding that it's a group a lot like one set of my grandparents - they consider that one spot home and want to stay there, risks or no risks.
I don't read AC A human right
What a tragic example of ignorance and innumeracy.
The overwhelming majority (>95%) of radioactivity released into the environment was realeased in the first week after the accident. All other releases are extremely minor; a trickle. That includes all the enormously hyped water "issues" that everyone is hearing about. The entire amount of radioactivity released into the Pacific Ocean since the accident is only on the order of one millionth the overall amount of naturally-occurring radioactivity in that ocean. No significant radioactivity levels have been found in seafood caught anywhere but in the immediate vicinity of the plant. Nobody outside the local region will ever recieve any significant dose, from seafood or anything else.
They have detailed plans to empty the spent fuel pools and decommission the reactors. It just takes time, especially given the extreme caution being taken. Spent fuel removal from the pools is scheduled to start soon I believe (next year at the latest). As for the water problems, the plan is (or should be) to filter the water to greatly reduce contamination levels, and then discharge the water into the sea. They're having problems because 1) one of the filtration systems went offline recently, and 2) they're having trouble getting permission to release even post-processed water (with trivial radiation levels).
Again, the lack of persepctive is astonishing. Ongoing releases are tiny compared to the main event, and even the main event is projected to have no measurable health impacts. Meanwhile, Japan's fossil fueled plants will kills thousands of Japanese every year and contribute greatly to global warming. The ongoing impacts from the Fukushima plant (e.g., water leaks, etc..) are less than those of a single coal plant (under normal operation). Certainly less than the fleet of fossil plants being used to replace nuclear. And yet, there is no press coverage at all of that much larger risk.
Jim Hopf
Do you realize that TEPCO has no plan to even decommission these reactors, let alone clean up the mess that they have now?
Arguably "decommissioning" Fukushima Da-ichi isn't a problem because the reactors are already way, way out of commission. Decommissioning is what you do to unexploded reactors. The problem now is containment (very difficult because of groundwater flow) and then cleanup (a very long-term job).
There is no current plan to remove those spent rods--they just sit there.
Actually TEPCO is planning on moving the spent fuel rods from the mostly-unexploded reactor come November, but they're going to want to do it very very carefully. Getting them moved seems like an important thing, but actually doing it is probably the most dangerous part.
Seriously, nobody has any idea what to do about this.
And there's the rub. The problem is that there basically isn't any way to clean up a situation like Fukushima where there's a meltdown in groundwater; this has been known to the nuclear industry for decades, and the answer has always been "we know this is an unsolveable problem, but we believe the odds of this happening are so low as to be unthinkable, because we have multiple redundant safety systems." The GE boiling water reactors especially took this philosophy to extremes; they don't have containment to deal with a meltdown because the suppression torus was supposed to make a meltdown impossible.
This kind of tempting-the-wrath-from-high-atop-the-thing reasoning from the industry is exactly why the anti-nuclear-power protest movement started gaining traction in the 1970s. Activists kept asking "yes, your active failsafes are shiny, but what if the unthinkable happens? How will you clean it up?" And the industry kept saying "we can't, but don't worry, it won't! Stop worrying!"
As anyone in IT should know from bitter experience, you can have all the multiple redundant disaster planning you want, but reality always tends to come up with interesting disaster scenarios your plan didn't account for. And "we're betting the worst case will never happen" is your cue to sell stocks and head for the door.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I know that feeling, it can be a challenging game at times. But I'm sure these refugees are smart enough to figure out the puzzles if they persist.
Where is moderation: -1 False?
Sievert is the unit of what is called "equivalent dose". As such, it takes biological effects into account, and different types of radiation are taken into account differently. The measure of "dose" is the Gray, which is J/kg (energy per mass).
I suddenly have a mental image of Fat Bastard (from Austin Powers fame) in a full train waggon, having just farted, and kindly admonishing his fellow travelers: "Oops! Sorry that was a horrible fart! But, if you all breathe deeply for a few minutes, it will be filtered and diluted enough that nobody has to die from the concentrated stuff. Go on, then!"
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
You don't see four nuclear reactors leaking radioactive substances directly into the ocean as a threat to life on this planet?
You got it right in my case as well. I don't see that because it isn't a threat to life on this planet.
Personally I go off of evidence. The evidence for this danger is in the nature of bioaccumulation and the quantity and type of radionuclides being released, which is being suppressed. I get really tired of people ranting about "it isn't a threat to life on this planet" who couldn't even figure out basic risk management. Risk management can handle long term risks as well as short term ones.
In reality there is a threat, it's just difficult to quantify. A more accurate statement would be "We don't know what threat Fukushima poses to life on this planet". I'll giving you the benefit of the doubt here, I wouldn't blame you for not being able to work it out, it's a hard problem, but saying it isn't a threat is just foolish optimism.
However if there is no danger why do anything at all? So there must be some danger otherwise why not just bull doze the entire thing into the ocean?
The answer is in the way radioactive elements accumulate in the food chain like some other dangerous chemicals like Poly Chloride Biphenyls. However radioactive isotopes also analogue a variety of elements that living creatures need to survive. Compounding this further they are emmiters of alpha, beta and, gamma radiation at various energetic levels.
So, pu-239 presents to the metabolism as a micro-nutrient. In Plutonium's case it presents as Iron to a metabolism. In the ocean a *lack* of iron is what stops metabolic processes, so Iron is readily absorbed ergo Plutonium is readily absorbed. So a small sea creature absorbs the plutonium and it gets eaten by steadily larger creatures, like a fish and then it's in the human food chain. Considering the size and variety of the human food chain, this is inevitable more than once.
This is the main reason to arrest the flow of Fukushima cooling water into the ocean, as plutonium is only one of the elements that it contains that has this property - but I'll follow with this single radioisotope as an example.
A single micro gram of plutonium is a fatal dose to a human being when ingested. As more isotopes are released into the environment the likelihood of exposure increases. The amount of time it takes to move through the food chain introduces a random amount of time before eventually ingested - by an actual person. From there a gestation time passes, like the flu is approximately 7 days, cancer is approximately 6 years. So even if someone ingests something immediately from Fukushima you still have a 6 year wait before you notice aything wrong.
Depending on the radionuclide, there are different cancers, radon 220 that causes lung cancer, or radium 226 that causes bone cancers, strontium 90, americium, iodine 131, cesium 137, the list goes on. The exposure vectors are many and varied. What has protected us is the likelihood of encountering one was low. Everyday this continues the possibility increases.
For airborne fallout, say just like TMI, the jetstream was the perfect carrier to the west coast of the US ensuring good coverage of land based produce. A cow eats radioactive grass, accumulates, say, strontium 90 in the milk, the milk is made into chocolate and you eat it in one of those multi-colored candy covered chocolate treats you so enjoy. Do you enjoy sushi? You can be exposed one or multiple times and after you die cremation makes the radioisotope airborne fallout amd decay allows it back into the watertable.
As for the risk, it's somewhere above 0% that some people will be exposed. However using an established case of Chernobyl. 5% of a 160 ton Nuclear reactor core that was about to be refueled - let's call it 100 tons, that's 5 tons of radioactive core into the atmosphere. At conservative estimates thats 5000,000,000,000 fatal doses. If
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Personally I go off of evidence. The evidence for this danger is in the nature of bioaccumulation and the quantity and type of radionuclides being released, which is being suppressed. I get really tired of people ranting about "it isn't a threat to life on this planet" who couldn't even figure out basic risk management. Risk management can handle long term risks as well as short term ones.
At least, you have the language down. Now all you need is the thinking. I suggest starting by looking at evidence.
So, pu-239 presents to the metabolism as a micro-nutrient. In Plutonium's case it presents as Iron to a metabolism. In the ocean a *lack* of iron is what stops metabolic processes, so Iron is readily absorbed ergo Plutonium is readily absorbed. So a small sea creature absorbs the plutonium and it gets eaten by steadily larger creatures, like a fish and then it's in the human food chain. Considering the size and variety of the human food chain, this is inevitable more than once.
Scary, dangerous radiation isn't the only thing that dissolves in water. Let us keep in mind that there is a lot of steel in the structure of Fukushima and that dissolves in water as well. So we have trace amounts of plutonium mixed in with non-trace amounts of iron. Iron bio-accumulates too.
A single micro gram of plutonium is a fatal dose to a human being when ingested.
Nope. If it is breathed in, that's the claimed lethal dosage. We need to recall that this may be a bit of Cold War fiction since exaggerating the danger of plutonium would hinder nuclear proliferation to some degree.
Depending on the radionuclide, there are different cancers, radon 220 that causes lung cancer, or radium 226 that causes bone cancers, strontium 90, americium, iodine 131, cesium 137, the list goes on. The exposure vectors are many and varied. What has protected us is the likelihood of encountering one was low. Everyday this continues the possibility increases.
Not really. These things have a half life too. So while there are ways for them to enter the environment, there are also ways that they exit the environment.
However using an established case of Chernobyl. 5% of a 160 ton Nuclear reactor core that was about to be refueled - let's call it 100 tons, that's 5 tons of radioactive core into the atmosphere.
Complete bullshit. There was a fire pushing considerable mass into the atmosphere from Chernobyl. Even the fuel rod fire wasn't comparable.
At conservative estimates thats 5000,000,000,000 fatal doses.
A completely laughable claim.
If we accept that an extremely conservative estimate of 1% of this makes it into the food chain via bio-accumulation and of that a conservative estimate of 1% of people are exposed and a conservative 1% of those exposed actually get some sort of fatal cancer that's 5,000,000 fatalities.
Why I grant your first number may be close to accurate, the other two are laughably off by orders of magnitude. Nobody eats fish directly from Fukushima. The biosphere of the Japanese coastal area is vast and people don't eat 1% of that mass. And that's a ridiculous exaggeration of the chances of getting cancer.
As I pointed out, the evidence is not being made available which is why I said it's just difficult to quantify. A more accurate statement would be "We don't know what threat Fukushima poses to life on this planet" . In absence of hard data the only thing that remains is estimations, known facts about operational characteristics of the reactors, the status of the reactor during the disaster and the behaviour of the radionuclides.
Thinking does not begin with statements like "I don't see that because it isn't a threat to life on this planet" which indicates dogmatic skepticism on this subject and unprepared to accept any evidence.
Iron isn't toxic as a micronutrient, and it isn't a highly energetic radionuclide. It's also a component of haemoglobin, plutonium isn't.
The science was conducted In 1944 by J. Robert Oppenheimer with an original lethality of 50-100 micrograms later revised down by Evans. Calculation led to answers between 0.5-5.0 micrograms [.033-.33 uCi of Pu-239].
That's not fiction, it's information.
In sr-90's case that's 600 years, so eventually. The question is where it ends up decaying, in the earth not to bad - in your body, not to good.
So says you
and an explosion that blew some portion of the core, the reactor head and the building above it into the sky.
I wasn't claiming that was the case with Fukushima, I was claiming it was the case for Chernobyl. I don't have enough data I can use to make an estimation for Fukushima yet as that information is being suppressed. There is a much larger mass of fuel material and surface area there though because of the spent fuel in the pools from previous refuelling efforts and that it is going into the ocean where it is impossible to control. What we know is the explosion at Fukushima was from vented hydrogen exploding as opposed to extreme pressure and heat in the core of Chernobyl.
It's important to remember that the result is cumulative doses from both these disasters in the environment. The Fukushima disaster took that from 160 to roughly 1000 tons of uncontrolled pu-239 in the environment.
These manifest as a long term "threat to life on this planet" over time. How much of a threat that is depends much on the human capability to contain and control the release of all the radionuclides, not just plutonium. To be specific though, humans are "life on this planet" and the various threats, via implications to human health, will increase everyday more radionuclides released into the environment.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.