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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.
To all you fucktards who think nukes are "the solution" :
1) Germany, which has arguably the best engineering talent in the world,
doesn't agree.
2) If you like nukes so much, why don't you move to Fukushima or Chernnobyl.
http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/123/e/7/mother_gaia_by_humon-d3fh24i.jpg
I'm still more likely to die from coal?
Call me callous but +100 people with cancer, +50 with terminal is in the noise as far as these things go. Not going to get concerned about it. We killed more people telling everyone to use margarine.
I thought all the trés fashionable propaganda on Slashdot said there could be no harm from Fukushima!
Posting anonymously because of all the spiteful, furious nerds who still dishonestly think there really can be no harm from it.
Glad I'm not one.
Chernobyl went back to nature, it's beautiful there and animals are thriving with minimal defects.
We haven't seen the worst of Fuki though...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
... and it's a hell of a lot safer than being downwind of coal (or chinese solar manufacturing).
These types of studies have been debunked.
as the previous paper, two years ago, about butterflies near Fukushima, that was seriously flawed and thoroughly debunked? Yes.
This is in the realm of 'What proof do we have THAT was what killed them/caused cancer?'
Honestly, put another way, this is in the realm of 'We can pay for all 150 people's treatment for less than a futile attempt at cleanup which will most likely result in the same level of contaminated subjects requiring treatment.'
Heal the people, do the fiscally responsible level of cleanup (IE highest concentration areas only), and let nature take care of the rest. We're talking radioactive dust, not some early recovered and transported 'material'.
Radiation == bad, got that. What I didn't see in the article is any mention of baseline data. What was the radiation level in the area before the reactors blew their tops? What naturally occurring radioactive material was in the leaves fed to the butterflies? How much radiation did that produce? What is the rate of naturally occurring mutations in the butterflies without the radioactive cesium in their diet?
I've got even more questions about this study but they didn't seem concerned with actually collecting data, they wanted to tell us that radioactive stuff can cause mutations. We knew that, but they neglected to state how much of a real effect this has on the environment.
This "study" would probably be good for a "B" grade in a high school science fair. This does not look like something worth publishing in a scientific journal.
A few more quick thoughts. We can detect radioactive cesium in the grass miles from Fukushima. We can also detect the radio transmissions from a space probe that has left our solar system. Just because we can detect it does not mean it has any real effect on our lives.
Nuclear power is the greenest energy source we have in carbon output per kWh produced, even better than solar and wind. Yet we hear people scream, "What about the radiation!" I thought that if we don't reduce our carbon output now every coastal city will be under water in a decade. Seems to me that a few mutated butterflies is a pretty good trade-off to having the Statue of Liberty up to her neck in sea water.
The risk of having radioactive cesium getting blown miles from a nuclear reactor accident is something inherent to solid fueled/water cooled reactors. If we use liquid fueled/gas cooled nuclear reactors we remove that risk. Molten salt reactors simply cannot melt down and blow up like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Not only do MSRs not blow up they eat radioactive waste from current solid fueled reactors.
To get rid of the scary radioactive stuff we need more nuclear reactors, not fewer. We just need the right kind of reactors.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It's all fun and games, until one of those butterflies mutations end up like this
And this is how Mothra got started (not really, but still, Mothra, Godzilla, radiation. See, it all links together...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Be seeing you...
"A new study finds that insects who ate radioactive food had defects." I'm not an academic here, but someone sounds like their in need of a good project idea.
Soon radroaches and radscorpions... That's OK, they're easy to kill, just stack Small Guns early on.
"Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects"
(Swats air) "You say that, like it's a BAD thing..."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm thinkin radioactive laser sharks
This is what the consequences of radionuclides in the food chain looks like. The next step are the lizards and birds that eat these insects. It's not surprising that this is hard to understand, because it happens so slowly.
We are seeing the slow consequence of releasing radionuclides into the environment, they are absorbed into metabolisms because they present as micronutrients that biota can utilise for growth and maintenance. Once ingested into the body they act in two ways.
The first, as alpha, beta and gamma emitters they act directly on the surrounding tissues to gestate cancers in the body, a process that takes about 6 years in humans depending on how energetic the radio isotope is.
The second is through genetic damage to the DNA. These damaged genes are passed down through generations and when certain combinations meet the result is transgenic disease.
These cover the radioactive effects of the emitter, however there is also some elements that are highly toxic as well which introduces a third vector based on toxicity. For those people directly exposed who ingested radio-isotopes at 3/11 it will be roughly 2017 when the cancer rates start increasing, following that bio-accumulation inserts a random period of time and distributions of radioactive materials before they are absorbed causing a statistical increase of particular types of cancer deaths in humans.
Over time we will no longer be talking about death rates but failed births and an overall reduction of the capacity for species, including humans, to reproduce. This will be coupled with a higher rate of mutations and abnormalities for successful reproductions. This will continue to occur for the halflife of the isotope multiplied by 20 daughter products before an isotope is benign. For sr90 with a half life of 600 years this means a 12000year decay cycle, for pu-239 it's a 500000 year decay cycle, from humanities perspective this is effectively permanent.
If anyone wanted a plausible explanation for the Fermi Paradox I believe this is a candidate.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What about ants? :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Roachzilla!
Table-ized A.I.
The word "outlier" is used only once in the whole study. It is in the section on mortality.
Show this graph to anybody and let them point out which of the 6 data points is the "outlier". I highly doubt that they would pick the data point labeled "Motomiya".
"Fukushima Still Radiates Poison Insects", and I thought "That was weird!".
Every time I see the word "radiation" used interchangeably with "radioactivity", I cringe.
And then I start wondering what else they got wrong....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
NC
I know, but I'm afraid it's no use pointing out facts. I'd like to think anti-nuke religious zealots could be reasoned with, and maybe a small percentage of them can, and possibly it's worthwhile trying, but for the most part they will just cotinue frothing. It's not as bad as the berserk murdering kind of religious zealoutry, but that doesn't mean the worst elements should get to dictate humanity's policy.
I have very serious reservations about nuclear power implementations, but it's about real problems, not boogeymen. As disappointed as I am with design shortcuts, safety levels which I feel must be made far better, whistling a happy tune instead of dealing with waste, and lackadaisical oversight, I still am in awe of the potential, and I believe that science and engineering are equal to the task if we will just unleash them in the commitment-equivalent of the manhattan project.
Let's face it. Human failings exist. We have a choice stemming from that axiom. We can either give up daring to advance, or we can learn from our mistakes, ensure that we never repeat the same ones, and expand our efforts to foresee new ones and avoid them. Specifically, both Chernobyl and Fukushima were perfectly foreseeable with the knowledge and insight that existed beforehand.
There is actually a reasonable solution to the waste, but anti-nuclear people say it is a proliferation risk and cannot ever be built, unfortunately. It seems on-site reprocessing can never overcome being a security issue and will always be a proliferation issue despite several countries already pushing forward with Gen IV technology that can run on it (because breeder reactors can make it into fuel). Most designs being implemented (like Russia's BN-350/600/800/1200) are once through without reprocessing, but largely because the US design had reprocessing, it was killed in 1994 and never resurfaced. Russia is actually using the BN-800 to reduce their weapons grade plutonium supply
In other words, Russia is using this reactor for the exact opposite reason of proliferation, consuming weapons grade plutonium for energy.
"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."
The wildlife which have bountifully populated the Chernobyl exclusion zone for many years think the damn humans are far more dangerous. And they're right.
These are possibly both true.
Chernobyl happened nearly 30 years ago, but it was 100+ times larger than Fukushima and released a lot more long-lived radionucleides.
Fukushima's footprint is a lot smaller and will dissipate a lot more quickly.
Both affected areas are small in comparison to their isolation zones. In general there are areas with much higher naturally occuring radiation/radioactivity levels than the isolation zones, many of which are inhabited.
Even with these accidents (and all the other incidents combined), the risk factor of nuclear power is much higher than the _direct_ dangers of coal or hydro power.
"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"
Someone! Anyone! award this person a Nobel Prize. Such a poignant statement.
How many people will be displaced by global warming that could have been mitigated if we were using nuclear instead of fossil fuels?
'climate change' lies squarely at the feet of the willfully ignorant hippies.
Yet, Coal kills 200 thousand people worldwide yearly. Gas and Oil kills conservatively 10 thousand people worldwide yearly. Hydro killed 200 thousand on its worst accident ever, and kills a few thousand every year.
Nuclear has killed over its entire lifetime a fraction of what gas and oil kills every year.
So your concerns are fears. Why don't you instead go demand all coal power plants in the world get shutdown with a year ?
Every form of energy is dangerous. Rational stats show solar and wind kill a little more people than Nuclear per TWh of energy produced, because both solar and wind are intermittent, low energy density sources, Solar PV combines two of the deadliest professions (roofing and electrician).
Nuclear is safe. We have solutions to make nuclear much safer, but we can't get it done in a world hostile to nuclear power. Politicians are too afraid to invest on nuclear power in modern democracies.
We don't even need to invoke climate change to show nuclear saves lifes.
Studies show that if all nuclear power plants in the world were instead coal power plants over 2 million lives would have been lost !
If we had 3x more nuclear in the world than today (going from 16% to around 50%) millions of lifes would be saved yearly.
Nothing against deploying lots of solar and winds where it makes sense. Australia is doing a great job. In Germany its mass stupidity because solar is extremelly crappy in the winter and wind is just too intermittent. You need to install solar in equatorial/tropical places, and wind in areas that get near constant tradewinds or that have a boatload of hydro to load follow wind+solar without burning gas or coal. Brazil is great for solar and wind. USA not so much (very little hydro and very little wind installed in areas of regular wind intensity).