Slashdot Mirror
First Cancer Case Confirmed From Fukushima Cleanup (nhk.or.jp)
AmiMoJo writes: Japan's labor ministry has confirmed the first cancer case related to work at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Following on from reports of elevated levels of child cancer and 1,600 civilians deaths from the evacuation, this is the first time that one of the 44,000 people involved in the clean up operation has been diagnosed with cancer resulting directly from the accident. The worker was involved in recovery and cleanup efforts at the plant after it suffered a meltdown in March, 2011. He was in his late 30s at the time, and has been diagnosed with leukemia. The ministry has approved workers' compensation. Radiation exposure has been linked to the onset of leukemia.
It takes a lot longer than 4 years for irradiation-related cancers to form.
Complete nonsense Slashdot as usual.
His workers compensation was part of his contact.
Plenty of people get Luekemia.
There is not a single person in the world who can determine what caused this.
Comparing that with the odds of getting cancer, it's safe to say that Fukushima PREVENTS cancer.
It is important to know their criteria for the decision, not just the decision itself.
From TFA:
"Ministry experts determined that he was likely to have contracted leukemia following cleanup work at Fukushima Daiichi. They found he had been exposed to a total of 19.8 millisieverts of radiation from his work at various plants. He was exposed to 15.7 millisieverts at the Fukushima plant.
Compensation is granted if a nuclear power plant worker has been exposed to annual radiation of 5 milliseverts and has developed cancer more than a year afterward."
Over 1% of the population will be diagnosed with leukaemia at some point in their lives. So of 44,000 people, that is many hundreds. One case is statistical noise. If his exposure was really only 19.8 millisieverts, its probably not the cause.
He was entitled to a payout regardless of the cause.
The only thing confirmed was that.
About a half-dozen people worldwide received the same news at their doctor, thanks to exposure to emissions from diesel vehicles and coal-fired power plants.
Ric Romero will not have more on this breaking story tonight at 11, though, because those cancer cases are boring. No scary glow-in-the-dark stuff, no chanting protesters, no sit-ins at administration buildings, no outraged editorials.
Life goes on, except when it doesn't.
Albeit for the U.S. since I can't read Japanese. The death rate from leukemia in the U.S. (p. 401) is about 3.8 per 100,000 for males aged 45-54 (figure a few years between diagnosis and death, since he was diagnosed in his late 30s). It's tough to say for certain without a demographic breakdown of the 44,000 clean-up workers. But 1 case per 44,000 (2.3 per 100,000) is pretty close to what you would expect from the general population.
I know there's a lot of speculation and argument as to why but I think we're losing focus.
The fact is that a person who is sick because of this disaster and helped lessen it's influence is ill.
God speed to them and my best wishes.
You did great for your country and your people, and you have my respect from thousands of miles away.
"Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter"
You are welcome on my lawn.
But 1 case per 44,000 (2.3 per 100,000) is pretty close to what you would expect from the general population.
The actual rates in the general population are much higher.
You are quoting based on numbers of deaths vs. number of people contracting Leukemia.
The actual numbers a 13.0 per 100,000 people, for 2014, per the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society:
https://www.lls.org/sites/defa...
Even for a much bigger mess like Chernobyl, radiation leakage causes few cancer cases, either among people involved in the cleanup or bystandards. For example, see this World Health Organization report on Chernobyl:
http://www.who.int/ionizing_ra...
Recent investigations suggest a doubling of the incidence of leukaemia among the most highly exposed Chernobyl liquidators. No such increase has been clearly demonstrated among children or adults resident in any of the contaminated areas. ...
While scientists have conducted studies to determine whether cancers in many other organs may have been caused by radiation, reviews by the WHO Expert Group revealed no evidence of increased cancer risks, apart from thyroid cancer, that can clearly be attributed to radiation from Chernobyl.
So the people who get a large dose of radiation are twice as likely to develop leukemia, which sucks, but leukemia isn't that common to begin with. Among bystanders, the only measurable increase in cancer was thyroid cancer, and that happened because the USSR did a crappy job (no surprise there) and fed a bunch of kids contaminated milk (see previous link). In short, the thyroid cancer could easily have been prevented -- especially because potassium iodide pills are supposed to be an effective way to prevent thyroid cancer caused by radioactive materials. Thankfully, thyroid cancer has a very high success rate for treatment. (I forget the number, but IIRC it's something like 95%.)
Not surprisingly the "elevated levels of child cancer" linked to in the description applies _only_ to thyroid cancer. Moreover, it's not clear that thyroid cancer in children really spiked. For example, see http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...
Considering that Fukushima was much more contained than Chernobyl, I doubt that we'll see that many cancer cases from Fukushima.
I did some reading on Chernobyl several years ago, and going in, I expected that the disaster would have caused a lot of cancer deaths. I was surprised to learn that it didn't, but it makes sense now that I think about it. Yes, a lot of radioactive material got released, but the world is a _big_ place. One reactor's worth of radioactive material diluted over a large area isn't _that_ big a deal. Yes, it's a big enough deal that it's probably unsafe to live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, but the effect beyond that is quite limited. Even if a reactor goes pop every few decades, it'll still probably cause less environmental damage than all the coal we use in the same period.
In the US, they've entertained the idea to stop testing donor's blood for HTLV-1/2 because it's so rare in North America, but in Japan, the virus is epidemic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Based on the criteria for compensation described in the article, it looks like the HTLV status of this worker has never been taken into any consideration, so just because his claim was valid and was accepted, doesn't at all mean that there's a correlation between the events.
So they can tell exactly where you 'caught' your cancer from now? I dunno. It sounds a lot like Astrology and Climatology to me. Not real science.
It is the radio-isotopes ejected from the exploding reactors that are the threat to people, as opposed to the radiation. Radioactive *isotopes* analogue other elements when presented to a metabolism in the food chain. Take plutonium for example, it analogues iron when presented to a human metabolism, is a high energy alpha emitter and is extremely toxic.
Oppenheimer's work found that 1 millionth of a gram of plutonium is a carcinogenic dose in the human body and Leukemia is a consequence of absorbing plutonium chloride. Whether you believe this was related or not to Fukushima depends on if you think this man absorbed a microgram or two of 239 pu from cleaning up a recently exploded nuclear reactor.
Some radioactive isotopes analogue appear to be nutrients to living metabolisms, so they bio-accumulate in the food chain. They cannot be detected with the senses like (taste, touch etc) no matter how toxic to life processes they are.
Once a radio-isotope is inside the body, the body identifies it as a nutrient and uses it as such. If it is deposited in the bones, in the case of a calcium analogue like strontium 90 as an example, it will continue to emit radiation creating a condition for cancer to incubate (typically 6 years). An iron analogue, like plutonium 239, will most likely end up where all the other iron in the body goes.
When the subject dies and is buried or cremated those radionuclides are released back into the environment where it is available to be ingested again. This is the nature of radioactive isotopes and the primary reason containment of Nuclear industry radio isotope effluent is so important.
Looking to the patterns of absorption, six years after Chernobyl the W.H.O were recording the incidents of thyroid cancer in children increasing in thousands per month before their funding to continue recording the data was pulled by the IAEA, who maintain interdiction powers over the WHO publishing about matters involving the Nuclear Industry and health reporting.
So it is reasonable to expect 2017 as the *start* of seeing the direct effects of people who have been exposed to radioisotopes either in the air (through fallout) or the water table as directly from the accident, hopefully there will be very few. That these cases are happening in 2015 suggests that the people working at the reactor suffered much more exposure than we were led to believe by TEPCO.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I have watched this site from the 90's devolve from tech buffs excited for the future to cowards afraid of it. What the hell happened? /, is nothing but tech hating wussies who would be better off protected by their mommies. Can we PLEASE get back to being news for nerds instead of cowardice for libertarians?
(1.5% leukimia rate in the US {..} In the US, approximately 1.5% of people will be diagnosed with leukemia, {...} we should expect to see over 10 cases of Leukemia per year, but we've only seen one in 3-4 years. Why is that?
Why is that? That's because the number you have are for the US, and this happens in Japan.
Numbers might differ (e.g.: Among cardiovascular Japan has lower rates of heart stroke, and more brain stroke) for a whole range of reasons.
(Different environment, different habits lifestyles, some slight genetic difference, specially given Japan high tendency to remain isolated/insular across history, etc.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Ministry experts determined that he was likely to have contracted leukemia following cleanup work at Fukushima Daiichi.
The Ministry confirmed nothing.
Compensation is granted if a nuclear power plant worker has been exposed to annual radiation of 5 milliseverts and has developed cancer more than a year afterward.
The claimant does not have to even show that the cancer is related to the work. It may or may not be but based on the chance they get compensated.
I know it is strange for some countries but some governments compensate based on likely causes and not absolute proof.
Crappy clickbait from the nip-loving SJW.
The diagnosis itself is not a causal one, and the exposure "is nearly four times the annual dose allowed for nuclear workers in Japan but is less than half the amount US nuclear workers can be exposed to in a single year." (BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...).
As for the 1,600 deaths in the evacuation - not one of them was as a result of exposure to anything except the hysteria that comes from exactly this kind of overblown fluff.
Disgusting.
Elevated by increased screening, not by radiation. http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...
This isn't the last case. I also have a hard time trusting official statistics. Goverments can't be trusted when it comes to anything nuclear.
I'm sure there are way more deads related coal plants than nuclear plants but that is an other discusion Goverments like to avoid.
And is this how you're going to keep pretending that nuclear is entirely safe? Because if so, solar power is entirely safe. After all, those deaths from installing it weren't due to solar panels, they could have been because of any number of reasons, such as he was drunk, or messing about. Or just poor work practice, nothing to do with solar power.
Yeah, right. And the fear of anything labelled "toxic" or "Deadly", or "dangerous materials". How DARE people be afraid of radioactivity, it made Spiderman a superhero! We only put warning signs up to make sure people notice the lovely shade of yellow we use!
You should only be afraid of solar panels falling on your head and killing you, because that could happen! WATCH THE SKIES!