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Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects
sciencehabit writes: Eating food contaminated with radioactive particles may be more perilous than previously thought — at least for insects. Butterfly larvae fed even slightly tainted leaves collected near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station were more likely to suffer physical abnormalities and low survival rates than those fed uncontaminated foliage, a new study finds. The research suggests that the environment in the Fukushima region, particularly in areas off-limits to humans because of safety concerns, will remain dangerous for wildlife for some time.
In other lingering radiation news, reader Rambo Tribble writes:
Forest detritus, contaminated in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (abstract), is decaying at a much slower rate than normal, building up and creating a significant fire risk. This, in turn, is creating a real potential for the residual radioactive material to be distributed, through smoke, over a broad area of Europe and Russia. Looking at different possible fire intensities, researchers speculate, "20 to 240 people would likely develop cancer, of which 10 to 170 cases may be fatal." These figures are similar to those hypothesized for Fukushima.
Normally ACs are the retards, but in your case, you're completely correct. :)
Yea, the long term damage caused by coal is easier to ignore... sad really...
Sr-90 has a half-life of 28.8 years. Practically no Pu-239 got out (too heavy to volatilize). The bulk of the lasting radioactivity is from the Cs-137 (~30 years). And there's a large amount of the nonradioactive versions of the Sr and Cs competing for the same biology that there will never be any bioaccumulation of radioactivity (rare mushrooms not withstanding).
Go to the original paper, not TFA, and scroll to the bottom for a comment from the authors with links to complete data and longer discussion of the subject. Your concerns are all answered.
http://www.nature.com/srep/201...
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The direcly linked fukushima article is very low on numbers (do journalists think people are allergic to them or something?), but it links to the actual scientific article. There we find this plot of the mortality rate as a function of ingested radioactivity for the pale green butterfly larvae. The changes in mortality are large, from 20% to 80%. The trend is positive, but noisy. The significance of a positive trend is about 3 sigma.
Radiation from Fukushima is not a human-extinction-level concern. It's a one-or-two-extra-people-die-of-cancer concern.
No it's not. That's just as blind to the facts as the "oh god NUCULAR WEAPONS" crowd is. Nobody (as far as I can tell) is saying you're going to die (or even be affected) where you live, who knows how far away from Japan. Nobody is saying this single event will cause the end of civilisation. It won't, because the vast majority of the radiation released was injected into a different food chain that we barely know anything about - the ocean. If you really think the pollution released into the air is the biggest problem here, you're ignoring nearly the entire effect of the catastrophe.
Remember, we're talking about reactor fuel meltdown, not a nuclear explosion. Just like Chernobyl, the explosions that did happen were relatively harmless hydrogen gas explosions that would have been incapable of damaging anything outside of the industrial compound. Once containment is breached, however, you are talking about large amounts of radioactive material submersed in a moving liquid/gas environment. The damage is no longer local and is cumulative, and increases with every minute spent dispersing unstable isotopes into the gas/liquid. You don't have to approach a lethal direct dose - anywhere - for it to spread through the entire food chain and alter life at the most basic level (cell and DNA reproduction itself).
This is a problem that you can't debug, or fix, or predict (irradiation effects only become predictable _well_ above random mutation level, where direct effects start happening, but if you get to that point in the environment your only option now is to leave the planet) once atmospheric dilution has begun, and it will start affecting us *long* before we notice any increase in cancer rates, deformed babies or miscarriages (look up the orphanages in Minsk, btw!). Before that starts happening, we will have extinguished or corrupted most of the species that are a lot less radiation-tolerant than we are. Like insects, which plants depend on for reproduction. Which, in turn, nearly everything else depends on.
Now realize that we are ACTUALLY discussing a triple reactor meltdown that *actually happened* right next to one of the largest material-carrying currents that exist in our atmosphere; containment was breached allowing liquid to flow right in and out of the 3 reactors; that contamination has been happening continuously for the past *THREE YEARS*.
I, too am frustrated by sensationalism and fearmongering surrounding nuclear power generation, but I swear since Fukushima happened and the initial scare faded, the "it's completely safe because you need a lot of radiation to kill someone" crowd has been doing more damage than the fear crowd ever did.
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