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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.
I don't give a shit who the fuck submitted this; I'm [somewhat] pro-nuke and even I'm not interested in playing "shoot the messenger;" how about the rest of you refrain as well? (Yeah, right.)
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
- 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.)
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 :-)
Has been covered. http://science.slashdot.org/st... but you are asking for news for plumbers.
Turns out that not only would the uranium run out, but the very very high cost of nuclear power would hobble the effort. Renewable energy ends up saving money. https://100.org/
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
[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
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
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.
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?