Radiation From Fukushima Disaster Reaches Oregon Coast (nypost.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New York Post: Radiation from Japan's 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has apparently traveled across the Pacific. Researchers reported that radioactive matter -- in the form of an isotope known as cesium-134 -- was collected in seawater samples from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in Oregon. The levels were extremely low, however, and don't pose a threat to humans or the environment. In 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered a wave of tsunamis that caused colossal damage to Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The disaster released several radioactive isotopes -- including the dangerous fission products of cesium-137 and iodine-131 -- that contaminated the air and water. The ocean was later contaminated by the radiation. But cesium-134 is the fingerprint of Fukushima due to its short half-life of two years, meaning the level is cut in half every two years. Cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life. Particles from Chernobyl, nuclear weapons tests, and discharge from other nuclear power plants are still detectable -- in small, harmless amounts. While this is the first time cesium-134 has been detected on US shores, Higley said "really tiny quantities" have previously been found in albacore tuna. The Oregon samples were collected by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in January and February. Each sample measured 0.3 becquerels, a unit of radioactivity, per cubic meter of cesium-134 -- significantly lower than the 50 million becquerels per cubic meter measured in Japan after the disaster.

Comments

Who's to say?

[PopeRatzo]

"How do we know this radiation isn't actually good for you? I mean, the Sun's heat is radiation, right?"

- Trump's new director of the Department of Energy.

[Note: If you think I'm somehow exaggerating, you might find tonight's story about Trump's new Department of Energy "enemies list" an interesting read:}

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Re:Who's to say?

[dbIII]

Since it's been a more than a couple of hundred years since the USA has had to deal with a King I suppose a reminder of how petty and spiteful autocrats can be was due :(
From the link above:

The questionnaire requests a list of those individuals who have taken part in international climate talks over the past five years

How petty is that?

Re:Who's to say?

[quenda]

Since it's been a more than a couple of hundred years since the USA has had to deal with a King I suppose a reminder of how petty and spiteful autocrats can be was due :(

The first US states were founded more than 400 years after the Magna Carta. By the time of the revolution, Britain was ruled by parliament, and the king had very limited powers. The US presidential role was modelled on the monarch, but elected rather than hereditary.

    Since then the power of the President has increased dramatically, while the monarch's role has declined. I'd say the US has never had to deal with a king as remotely autocratic as the current president (how many executive orders?), never mind the next one.

Re:Who's to say?

[Sarten-X]

If it were true that long-term low level radiation were unquestionably harmful, you'd expect to find a clear negative trend.

No, that's not what we'd expect to find at all.

We'd expect to find at the high end a certain level of radiation that is absolutely lethal, and as the dose is reduced, the impact would drop down steadily, until a zone where life expectancy is reduced. However, that life expectancy is more or less on an absolute scale, and must be compared to the life expectancy of the species being exposed. An insect may survive high doses of radiation simply because it wouldn't normally live long enough to exhibit symptoms, while a longer-lived animal like a human will likely survive long enough to get cancer that ultimately causes death.

At a very low dose, the chances of having any noticeable symptom from radiation is unlikely enough that it could equally likely be caused by millions of other factors, so usually nobody cares. There is still a negative trend in survivability, but it's dwarfed by all of the other fatal conditions.

Too little radiation and the species dies due to inability to keep pace with changing environmental conditions.

Radiation isn't the only mechanism for mutation, though. Rather, it's the fast and cheap way to make a lot of mutations really fast, usually in places that cannot possibly contribute to evolution.

In order to change the species, an offspring's DNA must be mutated. That's dependent on a few thousand cells out of the trillions in a human body. Those particular cells are the ones involved in meiosis, splitting and reassembling the DNA that will become half of the offspring. During that reassembly process is where most mutations happen, usually by random chemical processes rather than any radiation. This enzyme doesn't successfully react with that protein, so a gene gets skipped or altered or inserted... It is extremely rare that a gene is altered by radiation during the process.

Once an offspring's development begins, though, the effects of mutations become more pronounced. If radiation mutates a single cell during early stages of growth, that fetus will develop with a cluster of mutated cells. Unless those cells are destined to become a gonad, however, the mutation will die with that generation, and the species will not change.

Similarly, radiation affecting a mature individual is is unlikely to have any positive effect, as the mutation is almost always either destructive or irrelevant. The proper functioning of a human body requires millions of interactions between tens of thousands of proteins, so randomly changing one protein is more likely to break something than to add new functionality. Of course, as before, even breaking something is only going to affect the species if it happens to occur in a cell involved in reproduction.

It is important to remember that evolution is never towards anything. It is away from an inability to reproduce (usually due to death). As an illustration, you must realize that you are the result of an unbroken line of millions of ancestors dating back millions of years, and every single one of those millions of ancestors were fertile and successful in mating. There is no scorecard in evolution. Either you pass on your genes, or you don't. It doesn't matter if your changing environment caused you severe illness or discomfort. As long as you manage to find a mate and make a child, you've won the natural selection game.

In short, radiation is a purely random occurrence with purely random effects, and the odds of any particular radiation-caused mutation being beneficial are so absurdly small that it is absolutely safe to say that overall, there is no safe dose.

Re:Who's to say?

[ChunderDownunder]

Solar, eh?

Didn't Donald want to bring manufacturing home? Becoming the world's largest panel manufacturer to blanket *every* dwelling in the united states could be a job creation program.

Re:Who's to say?

[dbIII]

Colonies.
See also the Belgian Congo under King Leopold for an example only a hundred years old.

If you think Obama was autocratic you are in for a massive shock.

Re:Who's to say?

[AmiMoJo]

The other thing to remember is that even if the amount detected is small, that's just what was detected on spot checks.

Fishermen around Fukushima have found that they need to check every batch. Most will be fine, but occasionally a higher concentration is found.

Compared to bananas

[LynnwoodRooster]

It's nothing. One cubic meter of seawater weighs about 1026 kg. The same mass of bananas would have about 133,400 bequerels of radiation. This is about 4.4 MILLION times higher than what is being discussed here. So - if you're worried about the Fukushima radiation in the water off Oregon's coast, you better steer clear of the banana pile at the local grocery because it will bathe you with orders of magnitude more radiation.

Re:radiation was detected

[geekprime]

You really need to take a look at the harm all the other energy sources actually do, Nuclear Power is far far safer for people AND the environment than coal, oil or gas.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Being kneejerk against nuclear power just shows you haven't studied the facts.

And YES we DO need to develop renewables to replace fossil AND nuclear, but nuclear is in fact the safest of all our current options.

Re:radiation was detected

[Anonymous Coward]

You can measure very, very small amounts of radiation very easily. 0.3 becquerels means a single count every 3 seconds, which is only about 20 million cesium 134 atoms in a cubic meter of water, or about one part in 10^20 (one part in a ten billion trillion).

If one wanted to, smaller amounts could be measured if it mattered, but at some point it doesn't. I remember shortly after the earthquake and problems at Fukushima, there was someone who did some atmospheric modeling and worked out how much radioactive material made it by air to the west coast of the US. Their plot showed something made it, but if you read the scale of the plot, you could work out that the activity of the air would be less than that from carbon-14 in a single fart (we need a new unit for that, for things way, way less than even a banana equivalent dose).

This is what, the third or fourth time?

[cirby]

We've had warnings about "radiation reaching the west coast of the US" a few times already. We've seen similar stories in 2015 and 2014 (a couple of times in each year).

In those, it was Cesium-137. Now, this group is all about Cesium-134, apparently because people didn't get upset enough about the Cesium-137.

"Possible false positives" may be their excuse, but no, it's not the first time someone made the claim of radiation reaching the west coast.

By the way: they weren't kidding about the amount being very small. It's 0.3 decays per cubic meter per second - which is a really, REALLY small number. The most amazing thing about the story is that we can manage to detect something that's so close to zero in real world terms. Three-tenths of a disintegration per second times (approximately) 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water in a cubic meter of seawater...

(Someone check my math on this: it's late, and I'm sleepy...)

Re:We need progressive nuclear programs.

[Alwin Henseler]

Give me free electricity and compensation for every screw up and I'd gladly live next to a reactor.

Second that. I've been a long time green party voter, and as much as I like seeing solar panels on an ever increasing # of homes, reality is that solar + wind can't cover 100% of our energy needs right now. Period. Not unless / until the storage problem is solved. The sun doesn't shine at night, the wind doesn't always blow (and sometimes too hard!), and no amount of solar panels will fix that. Hydro could be used as backup, but has its own drawbacks & only possible in a few places. Geothermal etc is interesting, but again: far from practical everywhere.

So for filling in the gaps we NEED something else, no way around it. Between 'cheap' coal, oil, natural gas, or covering land masses with biofuel crops, a modern design nuclear plant isn't a bad option. Yes environmentalists may have speeded up investment in solar projects etc (and I applaud anyone for that no matter the reasons), but in resisting (modern) nuclear they've kinda lost sight that thus we're currently on an energy mix where fossil is still king. That could have been very different if modern nuclear plants were common today.

And no, nuclear waste isn't the be-all-end-all-problem it's made out to be. Right now it's choosing between evils, and btw nuclear waste: it's all about what exact substances, how much, stored how & where. The waste from eg. a fast breeder reactor is very different stuff than what comes out of another type of nuclear plant. Stuffing it in rockets & shooting it at the sun, has different risks & costs than burying inside a mountain. Material with 300 year half-life needs a different approach than material with a 30,000 year half-life. And so on.

For comparison

[Solandri]

1 Bq = 1 radioactive decay per second. It's a tiny, tiny amount. For further reference:

• The amount of K40 and Rb87 in your body gives off about 4600 Bq.
• The K40 (same radioactivity source as in bananas) dissolved in seawater gives off about 12 Bq/L, or about 12,000 Bq per cubic meter. (Cue the alarmists crying that the amount of K40 in your body is static and so we should subtract it. No, you don't subtract it, you divide by it. 0.3 Bq / 4600 = 0.006%. So it's increased the radiation your body normally withstands while staying hale and hearty by 0.006%)
• The Rb87 dissolved in seawater gives off about 0.11 Bq/L, or about 110 Bq per cubic meter.
• The U238 dissolved in seawater gives off about 0.04 Bq/L, or about 40 Bq per cubic meter.
• Heck, the amount of Tritium in seawater gives off about 0.0006 Bq/L, or about 0.6 Bq per cubic meter.
• A granite countertop gives off about 1000 Bq per kg.

If 0.3 Bq / m^3 were dangerous, you'd be dead ten thousand times over just from the natural radioactivity in your own body, a hundred thousand times over from natural radiation from other sources. These measurements of residual radiation from Fukushima are a testament to how good our instruments are at detecting minute quantities of radiation. Not a sign that our oceans are dangerous.

Re: We need progressive nuclear programs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear energy is cheap.

Nope. It's expensive. Just the concrete alone is costly. Mistakes are often extremely costly.

We need more progressive programs.

True, but that won't be happening. Not healthcare. Not pollution control. Not military downsizing.

We should have been doubling the number of reactors every 15 years.

I'm reminded of the Popular Mechanics covers which proclaimed some glorious thing, but it never added up.

Besides, you'd probably juat get blamed for killing the coal industry. You monster.

All the first gen reactors should have been torn down and rebuilt already.

Oh great, more expenses!

Have an excellent track record for 15 years? Well then if you rebuild your current plant with a newer design then you can build and be in charge of a second one...

This would be less of a concern if not for the lies about safety that they've been known to make.

The irony is that if there weren't all the anti nuclear environmental activists then that plant would have been upgraded a long time ago. There are ways to build reactors now that if you drop a bomb on them they still won't melt down.

Thre irony is that you think it is environmental activists that were the problem, when it was one in the TEPCO boardroom. Just like in California during its electrical crisis, the problem was blamed on environmentalists, but the truth reveals it was elsewhere. That was Enron. Fukushima was a bunxh of suits who couldn't admit they had a problem, and one with a solution at hand. The Japanese tend to fall into that trap. They're too concerned about face and shame to address problems.

Give me free electricity and compensation for every screw up and I'd gladly live next to a reactor.

They will not give you free electricity and the compensation will likely be moot since you'll be dead for anything significant.

Feel free to try that at Bellafonte though.

Re:radiation was detected

[angel'o'sphere]

Renewables are cheaper than nuclear since years.

Installation wise as in $ per GW as well as in production of energy as in Cents per kWh.

Re:radiation was detected

[ChumpusRex2003]

Quite a lot less. 1 banana contains typically around 3-4 kBq of activity.

The activity detected in this study is 300 mBq/m3; so in terms of activity per unit mass, bananas are contain approximately 8 orders of magnitude more naturally occuring radioactivity than the pollution detected in the sea water.

While both K40 in bananas and Cs134 from nuclear fission are beta emitters, the energy per decay is lower in Cs134, so effective dose per decay is also lower.

Re:radiation was detected

[ChumpusRex2003]

Doh. Off by 2 orders of magnitude.

30 Bq per banana and 6 orders of magnitude for the ratio.

Re:radiation was detected

[Mashiki]

Renewables are cheaper than nuclear since years.

You're pushing pure bullshit. In some cases the cost of wind and solar are even worse. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gen costs of wind and solar are between 0.32kWh and 1.5kWh(that's $1.50kWh aka one dollar and fifty-cents per kilowatt hour) depending on where it is and who's getting the payment. Installation wise, per GW nuclear is still cheaper. Hell I live a literal stones throw from the 2nd largest nuclear generating station in the world.

This is the exact same thing that's happening in US states like Illinois and Minnesota as well. "Green energy" is not cheap, is damned expensive. Around here it's drive the "peak energy" costs from 0.07kWh to 0.18kWh in less then a decade.

Re:radiation was detected

[Mashiki]

You are listing ages old US installations.

No idea why they are such expensive.

New installations in Germany are cheaper than nuclear since years. And Germany is not a particular good country for either wind (except the coast) or solar.

Thanks for showing that you're nothing but a shill pushing an agenda. Those are "brand new CANADIAN" installations.

The fact that you don't understand why, explains a lot. I know why, because of FIT programs. These are exactly the same programs that cause electricity prices to skyrocket in Germany, Greece, UK, Norway, Sweden. The fact that you don't understand that Ontario generate more electricity then it uses, and consumers are charged an outrageous amount to off-set the costs of green energy is the problem. You're trying to turn around and claim that green energy isn't the reason that it's driving electricity rates through the roof. When not only the energy producers say so, but the leftist pro-green energy media and government itself says so.