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32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1 Got High Radiation Dose, Tepco Data Show (japantimes.co.jp)
mdsolar writes: A total of 32,760 workers at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant had an annual radiation dose exceeding 5 millisieverts as of the end of January, according to an analysis of Tokyo Electric Power Co. data. A reading of 5 millisieverts is one of the thresholds of whether nuclear plant workers suffering from leukemia can be eligible for compensation benefits for work-related injuries and illnesses. Of those workers, 174 had a cumulative radiation dose of more than 100 millisieverts, a level considered to raise the risk of dying after developing cancer by 0.5 percent. Most of the exposure appears to have stemmed from work just after the start of the crisis on March 11, 2011. The highest reading was 678.8 millisieverts.
In the US nuclear workers have a yearly limit of 50 mSv
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Just being alive exposes you to about 4 mSv a year of background radiation.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Radiation doses can detect THC?
I'm shrugging over here. This reads like a feel good fluff piece in a scary voice.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
A total of 32,760 workers at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant
Just 8 more workers. All they had to do was set the threshold a smidge lower.
Still better than thinking that should be a bit more!
Employees who work at a nuclear reactor during and immediately after a meltdown should get their healthcare and compensation for life, no questions asked We are asking them to stay and potentially risk horrifying deaths in order to give the public surrounding them time to evacuate; it is a heroic sacrifice for the good of the community and should be built into the cost and risk model of power companies installing nuclear plants.
That is the equivalent of a single CT Scan.
I'm going to go with there's an issue with units here. The mSv of the highest does is 64,000 (or 64 Sv).
how about the rest of you
Sorry, no. The messenger has using Slashdot to push anti-nook FUD for years. The well is poisoned. Fuck him and his agenda.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
First, I am STILL waiting for an apology from those Slashdotters who insisted at the time there was no meltdown.
Second, we've known for a long time that there was a high level of incompetence resulting in excessive exposure to radiation. I'm not sure what new information is being included here.
Third, I am much more concerned about the reported design flaw in ALL U.S. reactors that could result in meltdowns. Fukushima, although tragic, is in the past. We should learn from it by studying it closely, but there's really no point in rehashing the lessons already learned. Except amongst the nuclear inspectors and nuclear plant operators who have NOT learned those lessons. There, you're more than welcome to rehash all you like.
Nuclear fission is an intermediate technology that will be required to deliver power until fusion is developed. Provided there is sufficient funding, fusion should be mastered within a decade and go commercial within two. However, that's twenty years in which we can afford NO fossil fuel power plants whatsoever. Given that U.S. reactors are of a critically unsafe design, those should all be replaced. At this point, about fifty additional fission plants will be required in the US to bridge the gap. Construction should be started yesterday. Failing that, actually fault-tolerant fail-safe designs should be drawn up ASAP and work started on them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't think it was actually 32,767 workers... I think its actually -1 on a 16-bit-system.
Where did the missing 7 go?
They want to cook your babies with newcuelar rays. It is the way of their kind. Best to solicit voting advice from mdsolar. You'll be glad you did. Ron Paul 2016.
Outstanding what money can buy
http://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/radi...
The firehose voting is not enough. There are too few people voting on firehose article, making it more open to abuse by those with multiple sockpuppet accounts. There should be a way to downvote articles on the front page, and a karma-like score pre-applied to those people's firehose submissions.
Why this submissions is flamebait anti-nuclear energy FUD:
- 5 mSv is background radiation and is a ridiculously low threshold
- 50 mSv is the standard in places like the US
- of those 174 workers exposed to the highest radiation dose, we can expect that one will get cancer -- pretty damn good for what's supposed to be one of the worst nuclear disasters!
- in comparison, how many people got killed by the total lifetime (production to decommission) per energy generated by mdsolar's preferred methods? here's where nuclear stands in comparison: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...
Of course, those that have been here for a while already knew this submission was going to be utter bullshit the moment we saw who posted it.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
50 mSv is an allowed maximum yearly dose for workers in a radiation environment. At least here in Sweden you can get ordered to take 100 mSv in an emergency (or wartime), and then another 100 if neccessary, and so on up to a maximum of 500. Of course, thats if there is no other option. 5 mSv is, as many others have said, not very much. Hell, its less than medical techs get every year.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
Well, that "32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1 Got High Radiation Dose, Tepco Data Show " gets my vote as Worst SlashDot Headline of 2016.
5 millisieverts = pretty darn close to background radiation dose for a bit more than 1 year.
10 millisieverts = Radiography (X-ray)-Upper GI Tract
There sure are some scary comparisons of doses and suggestions of risk without any references in the TFA.
The problem with many exposure limits and risk estimates is that they are all based on the worst case scenario, ultraconservative exposure model: linear no-threshold (LNT). Basically, this model we created in the 1940s assumes that all radiation is bad and more is worse in with a linear dose to risk relationship.
However, there is not much evidence to support this simplistic model, which is what NRC uses to establish dose limits! We've known it is wrong for a long time. There is evidence that other models, specifically radiation hormesis, are correct. We won't change anything policywise because imagine the gnashing of teeth from the Greens when the newspaper article reads "Government loosens radiation rules! FEAR!"
But radiation hormesis is supported by the evidence. It suggests that below a certain level, radiation stimulates cellular and DNA repair mechanisms so that there is an opitmal dose of radiation that is ABOVE zero and that only when you go high on a dose in a given time (threshold) does the damage outweigh the stimulated benefits, but the response may be nonlinear for dose vs risk after the threshold.
Here are just two of the more recent articles on the subject (research goes back a LONG time)
2009, "The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data" Radiology
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
2013, "Linear No-Threshold Model VS. Radiation Hormesis"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Other fun pieces of information:
A chest X-ray is ~1.5mSv.
An abdominal Cat Scan (CT) is usually 10-20mSv per study.
Natural radiation exposure for Denver, CO (5280ft): 12mSv per year.
I work a Swedish nuclear plant with an output close to Fukishima and we are about 800 employees!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant
On Usenet, I had "Kill files" that could trim the idiots out of my newsfeed. Can we get something similar on Slashdot? Please? Pleeeeease???
Do nuclear power plants normally have this many workers?
in the usa will need to get on the SSI/SSDI list to get that and your income can only go so high before you get kicked off of that.
Who is the boss that got 678mSV? That dude rocks. Cumulative, but still. awesome! Hopefully he can file suit and get settled for the rest of his life.
External ionizing radiation is a crap shoot. You know things get bad if you get acute radiation sickness, ala whole body dose of 1Sv in a short time, hours/days, but stretched out over months or years? No one really knows, and the historical cases are always polluted with people who got external doses of gamma and x, and _also_ inhaled or ingested the same and beta and alpha emitters, which violently raises the 'you're doomed' ratio.
One article here and there is one thing.... how many fucking posts by him in the last week alone?
Even with the past accidents, "N-power" is statistically safer than the fossil-fuel (FF) alternatives. This is largely because FF causes a general lung cancer increase, and other ailments such as asthma.
N-power seems scarier in part because the deaths and illness tend to be sporadic, typically once-a-decade kinds of accidents, while FF death and illness is more or less constant: low-level but ever-present.
It seems political "safer" to spread the risk evenly rather than have occasional accidents that attract big news. It's reminiscent of the Office Space trick: if you rip a few pennies off from tens of thousands of people you are less likely to be noticed than if you rip thousands off from a few.
Table-ized A.I.
"Shoot the messenger" means that you treat the bearer of bad news as if they were to blame for the news.
It has noting to do with decrying the messenger as an frequent source of biased and incomplete information, nor the site's unusually frequent use of his submissions (a la Bennett Hazelton and others).
So, no.
With declining population and China breathing on their necks, Japan has had no choice but to create an army of super-powered soldiers. Imagine 32,000 sword-wielding, laser-eye shooting, Godzilla-riding Japanese storming the beach.
And the added risk of getting cancer is stated as 0.5%.
How I read the title.
That sounds like really good news.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
one will get cancer -- pretty damn good for what's supposed to be one of the worst nuclear disasters!
He should put that on his tombstone!
Duration of exposure matters, of course, but one should always keep in mind this rule: one sievert is dangerous. It's not always fatal, but sometimes it is. Some corollaries:
The fellow who got dosed with nearly 700 mSv has my sympathy and gratitude. The mantle of leadership and duty falls where it falls, and we all owe a debt to the ones who bear the burden.
Slashdot seems to be a largely anti-science political site.
Damn, where are the 8 missing guys ?
So in a disaster area a nuclear power plant can cause some radiation leakage and it affects the people who work there. Ok.
Under normal operating conditions the Sun causes cancer and kills people with Renewable Solar Radiation!!!!!
Headline: SUN CAUSES CANCER AND KILLS MILLIONS OF PEOPLE!!!
From WHO:
Currently, between 2 and 3 million non-melanoma skin cancers and 132,000 melanoma skin cancers occur globally each year. One in every three cancers diagnosed is a skin cancer and, according to Skin Cancer Foundation Statistics, one in every five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetime.
In 2012 alone 232,000 people had new incidents of melanoma, and 55,000 people died from it.
The SUN is MURDERING people! We need to find safer methods to produce energy, I suggest nuclear.
You can't handle the truth.
Especially for a place where you do not want a lot of workers.
How about posting with your account, troll? How about addressing the statistics in the link I posted showing wind and hydro cause far more human deaths per amount of energy generated than nuclear? (Not to mention the huge environmental damage caused by dam construction!)
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I'm shrugging over here. This reads like a feel good fluff piece in a scary voice.
Its not even news. A bunch of workers at the plant got some very low exposure to radiation, on the order of what a pilot gets in his/her job. Throw in some minute mention of increase in cancer risk, and you have the recipe for a FUD meal served up for the uninformed.
The wording of the summary is a good indication of not even knowing the information.... "a level considered to raise the risk of dying after developing cancer by 0.5 percent". So, IF you develop cancer, your chances of death go up by 1/2 a percent? These are the front line workers, and there is essentially no danger. And this is from the same people telling us what a human health disaster Fukushima is? They wont' even try to reconcile that.
Summary has a few hundred people with a moderate radiation dose and even the single highest dose is well survivable.
Compare with Chernobyl. How many dead within minutes? How many dead within weeks?
So yeah. Fukushima is mostly a non-disaster, even though I still have a lingering suspicion that if they hadn't tried to shut the thing down, nothing at all would have happened. The big problems with tepco center around the company being dishonest in various creative ways. The released radiation is by and large insignificant or at worst, relatively easily dealt with (like those pools around the reactor of "dangerous leaked water" that emits mostly alpha radiation: Just don't skinny dip in there, doofus). It wasn't exactly good what happened there, but it was and is well in hand except where the company had deliberately fscked things up. Even the cleanup is doable, if a nuisance compared to how you'd usually dismantle a decommissioned reactor--that too takes years. It can be and will be cleaned up.
Quite different from Chernobyl where a bunch of bozos did massively stupid things and then lots of people died, leaving an unfixable disaster area.
There is a 100% chance that we are all going to die. Perhaps some will get there sooner than others, but we need to think of the species as a whole and nuclear power definitely is good for the human race. I consider it one of our crowning achievements.
- of those 174 workers exposed to the highest radiation dose, we can expect that one will get cancer -- pretty damn good for what's supposed to be one of the worst nuclear disasters!
No, we can expect NONE will get cancer, or at least statistically there will be no more cancers than if they were not exposed.. The already low risk of getting cancer is increased by 0.5%. So if the risk of cancer is 8%, the new risk is now 8.04%
32,000 Employees exposed at a facility that normally only has around 800 people in it? Even if you brought in an entirely new crew every day, you'd need forty days to cycle that many employees. Or how about this: 32,000 is half the population of the entire Futaba district all working at the same place (A district is roughly comparable to a county in a US state.)
Someone pulled that number right out of their posterior random number generator.
I suppose 32,000 is a lot more impressive than 176 received a significant dose and 1 a concerning dose.
Several of them will get cancer anyway. We expect one extra to get cancer.
But even that is bullshit, since that is based on a model called "Linear, No Threshold" or LNT.
At large doses, ibuprofen will kill you. I've got a bottle of 160 pills in my desk drawer, which should be plenty. According to LNT, since 160 pills at once into one person would cause one death, one pill each into 160 people would also cause one death. So if I gave one pill, one time, to 160 of the Fukushima workers, one more than normal of them would die of liver failure eventually.
Where the analogy breaks down is that in reality, everyone would be getting 1 to 10 ibuprofen pills per day from their environment, and the people living and working in places with higher natural doses get less liver failure. (See hormesis)
See that "Preview" button?
This is Slashdot. Why has no one pointed out how close to a power of two the number of irradiated workers is?
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
"32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1 "
Stop right there: there were 32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1?
First - Nuclear plants would be safer if contractors were shot for cutting corners ( 10 years in PMITA prison would do OK, too ).
Second - Newer designs have better safety features.....
Third - Any time there is a release, there will be exposure on some level. This one is fairly small, which is a good thing...
Fourth - On slow days ( no MS news, no Linux news, no Apple news ) anything that can be an inhalant or suppository is used here.
Fifth - Radiation exposure is continuous... Everywhere. Cosmic, coal ash, rock kits for kids ( mine had uranium ore..), lotsa sources. Get used to it.
Sixth - see Second - AGAIN - and do some research.
Seventh - Just so you know - I took all the nuclear classes in college.... reactor and engineering, as well as physics... SO...
STOP PUCKERING YOUR ASS when 'nuclear exposure' is read, heard, written, posted, or merely whispered.
Eighth - The workers were exposed less than many american soldiers in the 1940s when we were doing testing/development.
Ninth - Watch where you step around here, the cows have been grazing...
If the numbers had been larger and the dose lethal, would you still call it flamebait/FUD?
If the numbers had been larger and the dose lethal, you wouldn't be referring to an event that actually happened. So, yes, making stuff up is certainly FUD.
I predict a polite slashdot discussion with well-thought out posts and and properly researched and cited information.
Oh who am I kidding...
Most of posts here are quite rightly burying mdsolar as the biased shill (s)he is. 5 mSv is zip, nada, nothing...
@Whipslash, please ban the idiot.
Tim, get with the program and stop falling for this crap, even if it's good for a bunch of flaming posts.
The only counter-rant I will offer is that this information purports to come from TepCo and....they've been proven many times to be completely full of shit.
So, yea, voting conflicted on this one,
At least this time mdsolar isn't posting top-level replies to his/her own damn submission just to fan the flames.
...which always comes up with 1000 dead for the smallest release of radioactives because they apply a teeny number to billions of people...this news is that the Fukishima incident has almost certainly released enough radiation that somebody will die who would not have done so had Fukishima never melted down.
Maybe even two people!
Meanwhile, Japan had some 16,000 dead from the other seismic deaths, and over 20,000 died prematurely in the USA last year from the effect of coal-fired power generation on their breathing.
Every discussion of nuclear power needs to start and end with the 100,000 people worldwide who die every year for the lack of our replacing coal with nuclear, decades ago. It has cost millions upon millions of lives.
And the middle of every discussion should add the question: How come it works so well in France - and with so little opposition, the French being noted for their enthusiasm for street demonstrations?
I hope they're not using a signed short to keep track of that number.
It's a modest dose that's unlikely to cause any problems. Ever had a CT scan? Then you've had around the same amount of radiation.
With that said, it's not a trivial amount of radiation either. Radiologists routinely think about whether exposing a patient to this amount of radiation is worth the benefit. Generally it is, but for a mass screening of an otherwise healthy patient, it's not.
At this level you'll get around 1 in a few thousand more cancers. So no, that's not "high", but it's still of some concern as a public health issue.
Actually, most of the proponents of nuclear power consider nuke plants to be safer than a coal plant, because the coal plant is constantly spewing carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, particulates, and creates fly ash ponds that are extremely toxic, and sometimes breach and destroy entire river ecosystems.
The normal operating condition of a coal plant is fucking horrendous, where the nuclear only causes a problem when a whole string of problems happen at once.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
For every post here that contains factual data and independent references, such as your own, there will be five (or 50, or even 500) that are just pro- or anti- nuclear shilling devoid of any true informational content.
Your own post, which is quite good, would be even better without that somewhat childish sniping at scary, tooth-gnashing greens... next time leave that out and you'll have the best post in the thread.
(It's not like somebody else won't be telling us all how terrible the evil, scary environmentalist hippies are if you don't mention it. Green is the new Jew.)
174 got enough of a dose to increase their chances of dying after developing cancer by 0.5%. Which means there's a 87% chance that ONE guy will die of cancer as a result of Fukushima.
Wow. The second-worst nuclear disaster in history, and it MIGHT cause ONE death. In thirty or forty years....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If the numbers had been larger and the dose lethal, would you still call it flamebait/FUD? It's quite ridiculous how many posters here consider nuke plants as safe as having a coal plant. It's time to eradicate nuclear plants and replace them with wind farms connected to hydro-electric dams that store any excess energy that is not immediately consumed.
You're right, that is ridiculous. Nuclear is in fact much safer.
No. But Tepco probably pulled engineers and technicians from every nuclear facility they operate (there's a lot of them) in order to spread out the dosage, and have more hands available to deal with the issue.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
He is probably on the Koch brothers payroll.
Remember anti-nuclear propaganda was created by the fossil fuel industry.
2^15 = 32767 :-)
Meanwhile, while Fukushima FUD gets posted here on a regular basis, there is only one submission posted on the Flint lead poisoning situation, which has real health consequences. But, that carries no agenda......
Has been covered. http://science.slashdot.org/st... but you are asking for news for plumbers.
Years? He's up to 16 articles now in the past week!
Not really. Slashdot is not afraid of nuclear power or radiation, and it makes far more sense as a baseline power source than coal. We're also generally in favor of renewable energy, and tend to have a mixed opinion on subsidies for it, which is reasonable because the programs have had mixed results. There are very few nuclear advocates who do not think that renewables should be a large part of our energy budget. On the other hand, there is a substantial minority of ignorant persons for whom the fear of radiation overwhelms any potential rationality on the subject. Most of the time these people have zero knowledge of nuclear physics or the effects of various types of radiation on the body, and less ability to gauge risk factors concerning it.
In this case, mdsolar is simply ignorant and reactionary. He sees the word "nuclear" or "radiation", and his propaganda senses start tingling. He also has an interest in promoting these stories as he works for a solar power startup.
If you don't have any sense of perspective when it comes to the risks of nuclear power, then you might get the sense that Slashdot was somehow "anti-science" for viewing it favorably. Similarly, if you are entirely ignorant of climate science, you might think those of us who do understand it to be "anti-science". See also homeopathy, anti-vaxxers, creationists.
You are the problem you're complaining about.
Even Bennett Hazelton didn't submit 17 stories in 1 week.
Seriously look at the history. He's averaged over twice a day.
Hang on folks. The highest exposure is 680 mSv or 68 rem. This is NOT a minute amount; 500 rem kills half the exposed within days or weeks from cellular function disruption, forget cancer. 68 rem is enough to do both, at a NOT insignificant level. Ionizing radiation can kill you, that's why there's a limit for workers.
What I find very interesting is all the discussion about the safety of nuclear power because one failed in a one in 500 year tsunami while at that same time a hydro power dam failed and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds of people.
Also, how many people in total were washed out to sea and drowned because of the tsunami? Somewhere around 5000 as I recall. Are people rebuilding their homes within that washed out area? I hope not. Forget the nuclear reactor, look at the hydro dams and the threat another wave like that would pose.
One thing I predicted and saw that came to pass was that people would be talking about all the radiation and the threat it posed to the health of the people in the area for about two months. Why two months? Because that is how long it would take for the radiation in the area to return to background levels.
IMHO, nuclear power is unsafe only because we stopped building new reactors. Had we kept building more year after year we'd be seeing improvements in safety in every new one built and the old and unsafe reactors could have been shutdown. Instead we operate nuclear reactors well beyond their intended lifespan. If we shut them all down now then we'd see either electricity prices spike or we'd have a real environmental disaster as we build more coal and natural gas.
So we predict one dead from a nuclear power failure when dozens died in a hydro dam failed. While it is certainly preferable that no one died we should do what we can to minimize death. You can call a slow painful death from cancer a terrible way to die but would you rather be buried under several feet of mud and suffocate?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I'll add on to this by asking some very basic questions on the safety of other power sources. What is the increased chances of cancer for handling the radioactive dust from a COAL powered plant? What of other threats to health like industrial accidents, particulate matter in the lungs, and so forth? Some of those balance out with nuclear given that the steam turbines and such are effectively identical between coal and nuclear.
What of wind and solar? What are the chances of dying from falling from a windmill pylon or a rooftop solar installation? Again some hazards like electrocution balance out because nuclear, solar, and wind all produce electricity. These hazards do need to be counted though since while the hazards exist in both the threat level may not be identical.
I suspect that hydro power is exceedingly safe but when it fails I'd expect massive loss of life. Entire communities can be washed away.
Let's speculate on the increased cancer risks to nuclear power because that is scary. Never mind that you'd be just as dead if you fell off a roof.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Last year tens of thousands of people were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in excess of 5 milli-sieverts.
How?
They went on vacation to the beach in Brazil for a week or so.
"Radiation levels are highest at Guarapari’s beaches, a popular seasonal tourist attraction, where readings of up to 175 mSv (millisieverts)) per year have been measured." Global Hot Spots
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Nuclear power may be good for the current two generations. For the next 20000 generations of human beings, it will be a nightmare.
All things leak, diffuse and mix with each other. That's the way entropy works.
aaaaaaa
>>174 got enough of a dose to increase their chances of dying after developing cancer
Wrong. 174 were shown to have external rad doses in that range. ( with some dosimeters shielded in special lead cases....)
No serious quantification has been done on inhaled, ingested particles, because, nah, that does not happen.
aaaaaaa
The radiation does is meh, unless you're in the over 100mSv crowd, what's impressive to me is that 32,000 people were engaged working on this reactor - that's a decent sized city.
The world press isn't running stories about how many people drowned in the Tsunami, they aren't running stories about how many people died from fires caused by gas leaks. They aren't telling stories about how many people died from diseases caused by the Tsunami. They are only reporting possible high levels of radiation exposure, in an attempt to sensationalize everything nuclear.
Similar situation happens if you shoot a person. If they are the same color, nothing happens. But if they are white, and you happen to be black the world press will go ballistic and run stories about the inherent racism of all white people.
The fact that someone got shot is not a tragedy. It is only tragic if there were racial differences. It isn't a tragedy that a Tsunami struck Japan and killed a lot of people. It is only tragic that some of those people may have died due to NUCLEAR POWER. People who sensationalize shit like this should have their balls / pussy cut off and fed to endangered South American tree frogs.
Call me when you can do base-load. All you have to do is be absolutely certain your power delivery will go on 365x24, with no drops.
Cue the shills screaming 'Nuclear is safe!!!'
As long as it does not explode.
As long as it does not leak.
Yes it will explode at the neighbour's plant, ours are much much safer. Everybody says that.
Yes it will leak, but only when our children will benefit from those leaks. At least that was the assumption. Often it leaks earlier.
But hey, there's at least one really safe nuclear plant : Zwentendorf
aaaaaaa
good for the current two generations. For the next 20000
Thats kind of backward. The biggest hazard after Fukushima was iodine-131, which has all gone already. next, the caesium-134 with a 2-year half-life will soon be gone. Caesium-137 is most of what remains, and has a 30-year half-life. So the atoms will be around up to 10 or 20 generations, but it is highly water soluble, so ...
All things leak, diffuse and mix with each other.
Yep, the small proportion of remaining caesium will be long washed away to become an insignificant part of the background before the "current two generations" are gone.
20,000 gen? Pure propaganda. Even now, the radiation from plutonium etc around Fukushima is miniscule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The total number of people seems pretty high to me, too. But remember: (a) the whole plant was trashed by the tsunami and most of these people were involved in cleanup *around* the reactors as opposed to working *on* the reactor, and (b) Tepco has been swapping out teams on a continual basis since the disaster because there are regulations on maximum exposure limits that they need to take into account. I'm sure those 32,000 people weren't all there at the same time.
Suddenly, nuclear stories are appearing endlessly on Slashdot, each more inane than the last.
mdsolar, how much do they pay you? Surely you aren't actually this thick?
If they could just expose another eight workers I'd feel a lot better about it. The number 32,760 just seems wanton of one more octet.
Truncated instead of rounded?
Did anyone else get annoyed while reading the summary that the number of workers who received (trivial) radiation doses is 32760, rather than 32768? I mean, it's so close to a very nice, round number, but not quite there.
That's exactly what all the excitement is about. Turns out very little new storage is needed.
[W]hat's impressive to me is that 32,000 people were engaged working on this reactor
It's an incredible number of people to be working at one reactor!
does one nuclear plant really have that many workers? sheez it must take 10$$ of the plants power just to support the workers homes
Easy enough to look up: there are various places which tabulate deaths per kilowatt hour of various electrical energy generation sources. I won't spolierize the finale, but guess who wins in terms of fewest death by quite a margin?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In many basement gas cumulate. Mostly due to lack of circulating air. While it is not a problem in most region, if your region has granitic grounds (rather than say clay or calcifer) then chance are that minutes quantity of radon infiltrate your basement and cumulate to the point that you have to check them for radon and clean it up if radon cumulate. Example : limoge in france has a radon problem and you can read story there of people basement being so full of radon as to endanger greatly people with lung cancer. Even school were evacuated.
;).
So don't trust that because it is your mom's basement it is safer. It might actually be a death trap
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
680mSv will cause radiation sickness if the exposure is within a short time span. You do not know the timespan of this exposure. It may be more than five years in total.
Who but nerds want to read about the collapse of the nerd's equivalent of the buggy whip industry?
The average yearly radiation dose globally for the general public is 4 millisieverts. If you fly, or had diagnostics done at a hospital, you got substantially more than that. This is a non-story by a troll.
Yes, maybe 1 death in 30 or 40 years for the nuclear "disaster" vs the earthquake and tsunami that killed 15,894 with another 2,562 people missing (probably dead too) in minutes, hours, or days.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Hydropower is not exceedingly safe. I don't know where statistics on deaths due to power station failures might be collected, but I'd be willing to bet that this one incident dwarfs all non-hydropower plant disasters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sadly, it's not an isolated incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Nor is it something that isn't a risk in modern times:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Even with all the nuclear disasters in history, and even including the many nuclear tests and two bombs dropped on Japan, coal still puts out more radiation in its ash.
Even when nuclear has the biggest disasters, it still is nothing compared to a coal plant in normal operation.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I got a higher probability of dying of cancer by living in Mexico City, and I lived there 20 years.The altitude and the ozone alone would get you, let alone the heavy metals, the sulfur, the lead and the constant threat of eruptive diarrhea.
Since TEPCO has (as of 2010 according to Wikipedia) 38,671 workers, I wonder how they decided which 6,671 didn't get to go to the plant in the first few days after the accident to get a dose?
> Caesium-137 is most of what remains, and has a 30-year half-life. So the atoms will be around up to 10 or 20 generations, but it is highly water soluble, so ...
Nope. Caesium 137 concentrates up the food chain, it doesn't just dissolve down. If it did dissolve it would be no problem, but that's not the case. That's why it's one of the biggest issues long term. Grasses suck it up, cows eat the grass, humans eat the cows... gets laid down in your bones, and you get cancer. Yummy!
The reason that people aren't so up in arms about it, is that the cancers that result are hard to distinguish from naturally occurring cancers. If you can't tell precisely who died from fallout, it must be all OK, yes???
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!". Caesium 137 concentrates up the food chain, it doesn't just dissolve down.
Same thing. Its all methods of dispersal. the caesium will be rapidly depleted from the topsoil.
With food contamination, fortunately it is very easy to detect and measure. And very temporary.
BTW, the animals are thriving around Chernobyl. Complete with the usual number of eyes and heads. Older people are allowed to live there permanently, and young people while working. Farms nearby will be growing non-food crops for a while.
The reason that people aren't so up in arms about it, is that the cancers that result are hard to distinguish from naturally occurring cancers. If you can't tell precisely who died from fallout, it must be all OK, yes???
There it is again - the memorised 25 word speech. Already answered.
If 10000 people died as a direct result from Fukushima i would still be pro-nuclear.
If you want to fight something that's actually killing people every day and in large numbers start by having a look at coal-plants that is killing people in the millions per YEAR(!)..
Nuclear-power is probably the only viable option for stable power that does not cause global-warming. (At least until we can build working fusion-reactors)
The biggest issue with nuclear-power is that there is such a big fight against preventing companies to actually build new, safer, reactors. There is actually reactors that we could use to "burn" up the old spent fuel-rods to removing the need for storing them securely for 10000 years in some bunker.. It would be less than 1% left and that 1% would have to be stored for ~300 years, and that is actually doable in a safe way.
Allow building new nuclear-plants and each year raise the safety requirements and lower the allowed amount of waste from them..
Nope. Caesium 137 concentrates up the food chain, it doesn't just dissolve down.
On land yes. In water, where most of the Fukushima pollution ended up, not so much. It was spread out over a much larger area/volume in no time flat. This is a good thing. You either want it all in one big pile, or spread out as well as possible.
And as someone living in a country that was actually hit with fallout from Tjernobyl, the silver lining with bio-accumulation is that it's really easy to measure. So it was relatively easy to keep out of the food chain. (The only foodstuff that was really affected to any mentionable degree were reindeer. Turns out you can live a full live without snacking on Rudolph every other day.)
Someone's already dealt with the chameleon cancers.
Stefan Axelsson
It also affected sheep in Wales, and they had to stop sheep farming for quite a while; that was more of a nuisance I think.
Note that there was recently a big spike in the radioactivity of the reindeer population, like this year; the problem simply hasn't gone away. Apparently mushrooms also bioaccumulate it or something, and they had a big crop.
Even with reindeer; people do farm reindeer, presumably they're in big trouble.
Really, nuclear power is a waste of money; it's expensive and a few percent of all nuclear reactors ever built have melted down. That's too many, and there's no signs that the rate is decreasing, in spite of claims with EVERY generation of reactors that this generation of reactors is perfectly safe. Fukushima was fortunate in that it was on the east side of Japan, if a reactor on the west coast, the fallout pattern would have been much, much worse.
And statistically speaking we still haven't seen the worse case meltdowns; winds vary- imagine if a reactor melted down upwind of a capital city.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!""Rapidly"
In Wales it took 20 years to get down to levels where farming could begin again.
This year, there was a HUGE spike in the radioactivity found in reindeer from Chernobyl; that's like 30 years later, and levels aren't remotely down to levels where the meat is safe.
And Chernobyl probably wasn't even the worse case meltdown; it's just the worst we've had so far. There's a subtle fallacy that we cannot get a worse meltdown than that.
Nuclear power is just too expensive and too dangerous. It's also too inflexible; it can pretty much only give you baseload power. If you run a nuclear reactor at 50% load, the price of the electricity doubles. So then you have to have pumped storage or hydroelectricity anyway. In which case why are you bothering with it, you might as well use cheaper renewables, which can be much more rapidly deployed.
It's just a total waste of time.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!""Rapidly"
In Wales it took 20 years to get down
Agreed we are talking decades. I used "rapidly" in the context of some idiot talking "20,000 generations" :-)
Also, rapidly compared to the centuries needed for decay of caesium with a 30 year half-life.
This year, there was a HUGE spike in the radioactivity found in reindeer from Chernobyl;
That is a very specific and unusual example. It is interesting because the animals are so far from Chernobyl. The reindeer eat moss, which concentrates caesium exceptionally well. Note the reindeer are still perfectly healthy, and while the meat is well above EU limits for radiation, there is no evidence it is harmful. We just don't know enough about the risks of low levels of radiation.
that's like 30 years later, and levels aren't remotely down to levels where the meat is safe.
30 years is just one half-life. And you are taking a very specific problem. 99.99% of meat in Norway is perfectly safe.
And Chernobyl probably wasn't even the worse case meltdown; it's just the worst we've had so far.
Its not even remotely as bad as the worst hydroelectric disaster (Banqiao 1975). Hydro causes far greater areas of good land to be unfit for agriculture or habitation for longer. Many, many coal accident have each killed more people that Chernobyl did. Coal and hydro are too dangerous when you add the numbers. Just less scary to the layman.
And Wales is well over a thousand miles away from Chernobyl; and yet it was very affected by it. Think about what that means for nuclear power.
Banqiao was a once in 2000 years flood that caused the dam to fail. We almost certainly haven't had the one in 2000 year nuclear accident YET.
Imagine trying to evacuate Tokyo or Paris; that's the kind of thing that could happen.
You can't imagine it. Your brain is too small.
If Nuclear was super-duper cheap, maybe it would be worth it, but actually it's fairly expensive and pretty inflexible. Meanwhile the cost of renewables are dropping like a stone, and they don't mix very well with nuclear. When building a power generation system, you start with the cheap, easily built stuff, and build it around that. Doing that will largely or completely squeeze nuclear power out of the equation.
Complex, dangerous, expensive nuclear power just isn't very good from very many different angles, and that's why it has not taken off, and nor will it ever.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"And Wales is well over a thousand miles away from Chernobyl; and yet it was very affected by it.
Bollocks it was. All that was affected was the needles on very sensitive instruments. But Wales *is* very affected by climate change from global warming due to fossil fuels from all over the planet.
Imagine trying to evacuate Tokyo or Paris; that's the kind of thing that could happen.
Don't be obtuse. Nearest reactor is 120km away from Paris. The city of Fukushima is half that distance from the failed plant, but still well outside the evacuation zone. You do realise Fukushima was not evacuated? Not even close? Why would they build a major power plant within 30km of Paris?
Your brain is too small.
And there we have a fine example of the standard of argument of nuclear-phobes.
Oh I'm not scared of nuclear reactors, they're just a waste of money.
The reason (say) Fukushima was not evacuated was because of the winds at the time, if the winds had been different the result would have been different. Of course prevailing winds are normally from the West due to the rotation of the Earth, so a reactor meltdown on the East coast next to a huge ocean like the Pacific is about the best possible place for it, but even then winds can go in any direction.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"