Photos Show The Lingering Radioactivity At Chernobyl And Fukushima (mashable.com)

mdsolar quotes a report from Mashable: In areas of Russia and Japan that have been decontaminated by the government, allowing for people to move back, life has tried to continue but evidence of radiation remains. Greg McNevin, a photographer working with the environmental group Greenpeace, set out to visualize the radiation that persists in many of these areas. The resulting project juxtaposes radiation data onto long exposure photographs from the affected regions. Using a programmable LED rod that when connected to a Geiger counter (a device that measures ambient radiation) translates the analog signal into a light display, McNevin walked through long exposure photographs he was taking of affected areas, showcasing the live radiation data his counter was reading.

Comments

radiation compared to what?

[cowdung]

for it to be meaningful they should show other parts of the world for comparison.. I'm sure they'd find some inhabited places with higher levels of natural radiation.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

I was expecting something like a map, but turns out it's just a photographer being cute and pretending it means something. N'mind there's a note "it's only art"; that's not how it's gonna be taken and he knows it. And really, this is just too sensitive to cherry picking for the prettiest pictures with the most LEDs lighting up.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[coastwalker]

The artist is welcome to do my basement, my house is built on granite and radon gas is a recognized problem in this area. The photos are interesting and have artistic merit, Greenpeace however are just behaving like cancer. I support environmental awareness and have done since the 70's but I regard Greenpeace as an enemy of the environment because of their moronic publicity.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[Harlequin80]

Here is something actually useful. http://ramap.jmc.or.jp/map/eng...

It is a map of the area surrounding fukushima with radiation measurements in microsieverts

Re:radiation compared to what?

[michelcolman]

The pictures are indeed quite deceiving.

"A school in Starye Bobovichi, Bryansk Oblast, Russia.", oh my, look at that white trail of radioactivity going up the stairs of that school!

Then you read the explanation: the bars are just where the guy passed with the detector, and white means "background radiation". That means that there's absolutely no extra radiation at all. But that's not what it looks like when uninformed people see the picture.

Then orange and red mean a "higher radiation dose". How much higher? Twice the background level? Three times? Ten times? That's still way less than you get when living in the mountains or visiting a Brazilian beach.

If they would make the same kind of pictures in other places, they would look the same or a lot worse while no nuclear incident has ever happened anywhere near them, and local people are perfectly healthy.

The only picture that worries me, is the one of the nursery school in Soramame Fukushima City. Radiation levels there are so low there, I wonder if those children are getting enough bananas.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[michelcolman]

When looking at that map, bear in mind that the scary red threshold, 19 microsieverts per hour, corresponds to the natural radiation level of Guarapari’s beach, a popular Brazilian tourist attraction.

And background levels in Ramsar, Iran, are even higher: 250 mSv per year, which is 28.5 microsieverts per hour. Yet studies showed that people living there had a slightly lower rate of lung cancer.

http://webecoist.momtastic.com...

Re:radiation compared to what?

[AmiMoJo]

I take full decontamination to mean nothing measurable above the background level.

Then you have a different definition to the Japanese government and the residents of Fukushima. They consider decontamination to be fully complete when the danger is reduced to a level safe for human habitation. Unfortunately we are a long way from there, because while the ambient radiation levels are acceptably low there are still many areas with dangerous levels of contamination.

The main issue is that much of what was release from Fukushima Daiichi is now in the environment, in the soil and in plants and animals. If it gets inside humans it can damage internal organs that are normally protected from radiation by skin and flesh.

This sort of contamination is hard to detect and hard to clean up. You can't just wonder around with a dosimeter, you need to do a careful inspection and dig up the surface soil. Digging is inevitable, as construction takes place, animals forage, children play, people tend their gardens etc. The government was hoping that removing the top layer of soil would mostly fix the problem, but it hasn't. Material from un-decontaminated areas keeps migrating back, or they miss some spots and have to return multiple times.

Even once that is complete, it doesn't do anything to address over five years of decay, lack of repairs to the initial earthquake damage and the fact that many key parts of the community no longer exist or have moved away permanently.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[michelcolman]

It's not a photographic art series. It's a piece of public deception to further Greenpeace's agenda. They try to silence critics by adding the disclaimer "it's just art, it doesn't mean anything" but meanwhile they have reinforced the image of "nuclear power is dangerous" in the minds of the majority of people who don't even bother to read what the lines mean and who don't know that it's perfectly normal for granite stone to emit higher radiation levels.

Typical of Greenpeace. Scare tactics with total disregard of the facts, and hiding behind some lame excuse like "it's just art, it doesn't mean anything".

Meanwhile you can expect news networks to pick this up and show the pictures while saying how all this radiation is threatening the health of those poor school children.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[Mashiki]

The artist is welcome to do my basement, my house is built on granite and radon gas is a recognized problem in this area.

They're welcome to do Ontario too. My house is built on limestone and radon is a recognized problem here as well, some parts of Southern Ontario have higher radon levels then Michigan where the homes are built directly on granite and require venting. The problem of course, is that radon detection isn't a requirement here, even though it's one of the leading causes of lung cancer in Canada for non-smokers. But I can go out on a 10 minute walk and find entire neighborhoods in my city where radon venting is done, and one area where the levels are so high that building houses was fully scrapped back in the 1970's and was considered a threat to human health. The area is was built over as a park in the 1990's, but they had to install a mitigation system to reduce the chance that people would develop lung cancer even being in the open air.

The photos are interesting and have artistic merit, Greenpeace however are just behaving like cancer. I support environmental awareness and have done since the 70's but I regard Greenpeace as an enemy of the environment because of their moronic publicity.

Agreed, artistic merit but that's about it. Greenpeace has long since become a hyper-partisan political group, and they'll happily whine about nuclear power, or GMO foods while people die from lack of refrigerated medicines, foods, or simply starving to death. A good reminder is that Greenpeace is against drought resistant corn(for Africa), and vitamin A-enhanced rice(for Africa and Asia), despite millions of people either dying due to a lack of food or having increased serious illnesses risk or other serious health problems(like childhood blindness which is easily treatable) due to a lack of proper nutrition.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[AmiMoJo]

If everything _could_ be decontaminated what other problem is there?

Firstly, due to the evacuation the area was not repaired after the earthquake, and has not been maintained for over five years now. There is a lot of damage, and paying for fixing it is now complicated by the fact that TEPCO is partially liable and legal time limits for insurance claims have run out. This has now moved to the lawsuit stage.

Actually fixing the damage is going to take much longer now. Some areas have huge amounts of contaminated waste that needs to be disposed of, and discussions about where to put it are still on-going. In other areas nature has been left unmanaged. Animals need to be culled, plants removed and cut back, and damage done by roots fixed. Many buildings now need to be simply pulled down and replaced.

Then you get to personal possessions. Most of them need to be discarded (contamination) and replaced. Lots of insurance claim wrangling. People can't go back until that is at least substantially completed, because they need basic things like home appliances and furniture. Of course, all utilities need fixing, e.g. the water network has decayed and started severely leaking in places with full restoration estimated at several years.

Services need to be replaced. Hospitals and schools refurbished. New staff need to be found and hired because many of them have moved away. New shops need to be brought it. Existing businesses have suffered massive losses, with all their stock being lost and employees simply moving away. Keep in mind it has already been five years, so people who could get work elsewhere often have, and most of the people returning will be elderly and retired, and thus in need of care and reliant of local services.

It isn't clear if those communities will ever fully recover now, and if they do it will take decades.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[ChromeAeonium]

Bingo. It doesn't have to be scientifically accurate or in any way meaningful, it just has to be bounced around on social media with a scary caption to the point where the FUD moves faster than the facts. Standard Greenpeace MO. Notice how they opted to use images of schools and nurseries too, gotta work in that nice 'think of the children!' bonus.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[Mr D from 63]

Its even worse than that. They claim they can distinguish between background and Chernobyl radiation, but that is impossible to do with a radiation detector. What they erroneously assume is that background radiation is steady, and that all that changes while you walk around are due to Chernobyl. This demonstrates the ignorance of the author, because background radiation varies as you move around, and probably accounts for all of the measured radiation they show.

Evidence of their ignorance is even further shown in the schoolhouse, where they assume there is no background radiation.

Basically, they just arbitrarily decided what to call Chernobyl radiation. They have no clue.

Re:radiation compared to what?

[Mr D from 63]

You are correct, there are chemical testing methods and others to define the source, but as I said it can not be done with radiation detectors/Geiger counters as were used. I didn't mention the fact that background radiation actually varies while staying in one spot.

Art

[Elledan]

I agree with the only knowledgeable person in that 'article' that this is just a type of art, with no scientific or social usefulness. Without the data being recorded (was the sensor calibrated?) known, realising how useless official 'safe limits' for radiation are (often lower than naturally occurring background radiation), and the Linear Non-Threshold (LNT) model having been discredited decades ago, one can at most say that they put it together in a pretty fashion.

But since we're talking about Greenpeace here, the PR mouthpiece for both the fossil fuel and solar/wind industries, I'm not shocked at this.

Re:Art

[michelcolman]

It's to draw attention to the problem, since many people seem to either be in denial about it or just hoping it goes away.

What problem? The problem of abnormally low radiation levels in nursery schools near Fukushima? Because that's what that picture is actually showing: lower than background level.

If they took the same kind of pictures in the Alps, they would probably be all red.

Re:Art

[Mr D from 63]

The problem it illustrates is the utter ignorance of Greenpeace and those that push this crap around like it has some merit. Think how many people will look at this and believe the creator actually could distinguish between background and non-background radiation. Or that the levels shown need be even remotely concerning.

Chernobyl is not in Russia

[fraxinus-tree]

update your fears

I'm pretty sure I clicked on "Don't show this"

[blind biker]

I am quite sick of mdsolar's crap. How does this shill get all his diarrhaea on Slashdot's front page?

Three Mile Island and natural radiation

[jfdavis668]

After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, people were pointing out radiation found all over the state. The problem was, they had no baseline. The radiation was naturally occurring and had been there all along. At the nearby Limerick power plant, they installed monitors on the entrances to make sure workers were not getting exposed at work and taking radioactive dust home with them. One worker keep setting the sensors off, when he came to work. Here his house had a serious radon problem in the basement. This is what brought the problem of radon in homes to national attention. This shows the problem with detecting and cleaning accident contamination. How do you know you have taken the area back to the natural level before the accident, when it has been radioactive all along?

Schrodinger's cats fight!

[AchilleTalon]

It seems to me like a Schrodinger's cats fight. You are both right and wrong at the same time.

You just do not take into account there is no such thing like two types of radiation: internal vs external. These are only the exposure to the actually four types of radiations: high-energy photons (UV, X-rays and gamma-rays), beta radiation (electrons in fact), alpha radiation (helium nucleus or any other atom fragments) and neutrons. Some of these are actually blocked by the skin and a very thin layer of it in fact and others are not.

But skin cancer is due to exposition to high-energy photons which are penetrating (think about why we use X-rays in first place).

However, it is true, if the radioactive isotopes are ingested, they are much more likely to reach, damage critical organs and cause death. It doesn't mean exposition to radiation without ingesting it is harmless.

So, in conclusion, both arguments are strictly wrong. Opening the box shows us both cats are dead.