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Elevated Radiation Claimed At Tokyo 2020 Olympic Venues
An anonymous reader writes "A citizens' group in Tokyo claims to have found elevated levels of radioactivity at 39 sporting venues earmarked for the 2020 Olympic Games. Expert and organizers are cautious about the findings but see no problem, as the levels do not pose an immediate threat to human health. From the article: '"It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation," said Pieter Franken, founder of the Japan office of the environmental monitoring organization Safecast."
to allow the glowing comments about the athletes.
'"It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation" -Pieter Franken. I always find this sentiment a little odd. People care too much about if the radiation is measurably above background radiation or what the source of the radiation is. What they should care about is if the radiation is at a dangerous level. We have gotten better at measuring this stuff, so just because we can measure (very small) increases in radiation from Fukushima doesn't mean we should change our lives around it. Anything that is on the same magnitude as background radiation is pretty much safe. For example, you get increased radiation from flying in a plane because the atmosphere is much thinner. Also, natural radiation is much higher near the poles than near the equator, but nobody gets upset about this because it is "natural" like kale.
Using my Safecast Onyx (hi Safecast folks!) I measure ~0.32 uSv/h in Dublin, next to a granite wall (granite is everywhere around here, and naturally radioactive). The article speaks of of 0.484 uSv/h, not much higher than that. On an airplane at cruising altitude I get about 2.0uSv/h. At home I might see 0.08uSv/h, and in the middle of the street somewhere around 0.15uSv/h. *
I just visited japan and took the Safecast everywhere I went. At no point did it go significantly above what were normal background radiation readings in Dublin (not even when I was passing by Fukushima station, though admittedly that was on a high-speed train).
Radiation is everywhere. Unless you can identify the source as the Fukushima disaster, it might be perfectly normal. Even if the source is Fukushima, at low levels, at some point you have to stop worrying about it and realize that plenty of other places on Earth have higher naturally occurring background radiation.
* Rough numbers pulled from memory in CPM and converted to uSv/h using the conversion factor in the firmware source code, since my Onyx battery is dead at the moment. Take with a grain of salt.
All stories about radiation not intended for a specialist audience should measure radiation levels in 'bananas/year.'
It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation
For anyone considering going then you can't know, and at this point it matters little what anyone says. There have been so many denials, and incorrect information put out by TEPCO and the government there how could anyone trust anything they say now?
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And sadly, for them, they will be exposed to much higher levels of radiation in the aircraft flying to japan - lets hope they all take ships!
Oh, and for a bonus they can avoid eating bananas, why havnt those radioactive horrors be banned yet? think of the children!
This appears to be the letter and the data that started all this:
http://olympicsokuteikai.web.fc2.com/encontents.html
Perhaps the most crucial part of the letter is this:
"Just before the Fukushima power plant accident, the mean value of the atmospheric radiation in Tokyo was estimated as 0.04 Sv/h, and radioactive Cesium was almost non-existent. Therefore, atmospheric radiation value above this level can be regarded as the effect of the nuclear accident."
Is that a valid assumption?
The pools didn't break during a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. The fifth most fierce ever on earth. Why should they break during a lesser earthquake?
Because magnitude doesn't correspond all that well to forces felt at the surface.
The Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake of September 2010 was a 7.1, and the peak acceleration was 1.26g. The Feb 2011 at the same location much less energetic at "just" a 6.3, yet its peak acceleration was 2.2g (among the highest recorded in an urban area) due to most of that energy being released over just 12 seconds.
The 9.0 Fukushima earthquake OTOH was spread out over 6 minutes, so its peak acceleration was 2.99g despite it being thousands of times more energetic than Christchurch's Feb quake.
Once again, possibility is not the same as probability.
Yes, it's possible that the elevated radiation levels will cause problems. Now, what's the risk, and what's the tradeoff between mitigating *that* risk versus mitigating some *other* risk?
Security is a tradeoff, always. The value of something is not the face value, but the face value times the probability of occurrence.
So if the probability of damage (say, the number of people getting cancer from going to the event) times the value of damage (taken informally as $1 million per human life lost, but depends on estimates and philosophy) is higher than other foreseeable risks, then we should address the problem.
Risks shouldn't be ignored, just compared to other risks. If the utility losses for other risks are higher, then we should spend our finite resources on the other risks first.
How much risk utility is embodied in this problem compared to, say dying from accidentally swallowing (and choking on) a bee?
...but journalism must sell news. I suppose someone swallowing something wouldn't be very interesting.
'"It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation,"
So as long as it's natural it doesn't matter how strong it is but if it's from the plant then any amount is too much? I wasn't aware that natural radiation was safer than man-made radiation, when did that memo come out?
Blue Oyster Cult should be hired to perform in the opening ceremony.
If I remember by Navy nuclear training correctly, the half life of Cobalt 60 is 5.27 years and it is one of the largest sources of radiation from fission decay products. It's a half off sale, take those measurements and lower them by 50% folks!
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
A sinusoidal vibration is not linear.
It can be. Linear means the acceleration is in the direction of travel, i.e. the acceleration occurs in one dimension. In a straight-line "back-and-forth" system, acceleration and speed can both be considered as dimensionless (beyond having a sign, which admittedly could be considered as bending the rules of "dimensionless" slightly). Certainly they act in a single dimension.
(This is in contrast to angular acceleration, where the acceleration is perpendicular to the direction of travel.)
Since linear doesn't imply constant, this applies to sinusoidal motion to, if it were constrained along a single axis. I'm not suggesting earthquakes are constrained to a single axis; merely that strong accelerations can exist in an earthquake, yet net displacement remains near-zero.
We have a distinct lack of knowledge of what is hapenning at low radiation level. The precautionary principle and some funky linear regression made us say there is no "safe radiation level", but this is not a fact. There are quite a lot of indication that the linear model is false. Look up Radiation hormesis. The most well known case indicating that the linear model is wrong, were steel bar used in building which were contaminated with radioactive cobalt, people lived 10 years irradiated with a factor of magnitude more than 10 time above the local radioactive background, and there was no increase in cancer/leukemya. IIRC it was in hongkong or Seoul, somewhere in that region.
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Sigh, more misdirection and sleight of hand from the nuclear power lobby.
The risk to health in Japan is from ingestion ... . Conflating these real risks with bananas and flights is unethical and misleading.
What do you normally do with your bananas? I certainly ingest mine.
And I don't think athletes will be ingesting much water from the storage tanks, broken or not.
Well, that's the Olympic motto, "Faster, Higher, Stronger" so I'm sure a bit of a radiation boost can help.