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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.
Just being alive exposes you to about 4 mSv a year of background radiation.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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)
https://hps.org/publicinformat...
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)
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.
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.
On Usenet, I had "Kill files" that could trim the idiots out of my newsfeed. Can we get something similar on Slashdot? Please? Pleeeeease???
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
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.