Food Monitoring and Food Restrictions (12 - 18 May 2011)
(...)
"In Fukushima prefecture, 175 of the 194 samples (more than 90%) had radiocaesium levels below the regulation values set by the Japanese authorities. However, 19 of the 194 samples (fewer than 10%) exceeded the regulation values for Cs-134/Cs-137. Samples above the regulation values were bamboo shoots (ten samples), shiitake mushrooms (five samples), and four samples of fish (two samples of whitebait, one sample of ayu and one sample of Japanese smelt)."
You never realize what a great country we live in until you've gone to another country and had the ability to be able to make a an unbiased comparison. Not what you read or hear on the news, but determine on your own, just how valuable what we do here in America.
What is your great country going to do after 2011-08-02 then:
This delays any breaching of the limit to 2 August.
Congress is currently negotiating an increase to the limit, without which the US risks defaulting on its debt.
What about the Strontium-90?
According to the Wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield, table "medium-lived fission products", the yield of Sr-90 should be a bit less than the amount of Cs-137 and the half-life also comparable (28 years vs 30 years).
It's chemically similar to Calcium and Magnesium which we need to live and build our bones and teeth from. We are exposed to the calcium in our bones all our life, from within our body, and our bones protect our bone marrow from irradiation.
Now imagine that a child grows up incorporating a tiny little bit of Sr-90 instead of Ca-40 in her shoulderblade (say it comes from Fukushima prefecture milk). I say imagine because I don't have a clear idea what the risk is and how it depends on diet.
Now imagine that this child develops leukemia. What are the odds that the bit of Sr-90 in her shoulderblade caused it, that it sickened her marrow? I don't know but I don't think it's negligible.
Yet, almost all the reports on the IAEA page (http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html) only mention I-131 and Cs-137. So where dd the Sr-90 go to???? it is only mentioned in the 13 april report.
Do Muslims have anything against pornography/nudity/sexuality like the Christians?
Where do you get the idea that Christians have anything against nudity/sexuality??
For example: (warning: image may be offensive in Afghanistan and USA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo%27s_David
Hint: there's 2 000 000 000 people described as Christians, 3 of which are Shakers.
I couldn't help noticing on the second map on that page, that the east-coast of Japan is a very long stretch of ocean coast. A bit like Britain and Ireland but probably lots windier.
TEPCO, are you paying attention?
I also wish to mention that TEPCO apparently did a lot of good work on Sodium-Sulfur batteries. With the shitstorm of negative commentary that they must get now, I hope somebody reads this: we don't hate you, we hope you have the energy (pun intended) to give Japan safe power in the 21st century. With money to spare to clean up pool #4.
I must say this sounds like a reasonable capitalistic plan to once and for all get rid of nuclear power.
But it should be implemented gradually so the power companies that already have nuclear plants can't shed their responsibility by suddenly going bankrupt; they must first take care of the dismantling and cleanup this century.
And the fact that spent fuel pool #4 was almost full indicates that the most cost-effective and safe solution for 40 years of nuclear waste produced by TEPCO was to, um, keep a few more years worth of the spent fuel in that pool on the first floor of reactor building #4 until... you know, someone has a better idea later this century.
After the TEPCO directors are retired.
And moved to another prefecture on the other side of Japan.
It's a bit tricky. See if you can find anything by Ilya Prigogine on the subject. IIRC he stated that complex systems (you really mean living systems, don't you?) can come into being if you maintain a steady-state equilibrium of a system that's far out of normal thermodynamic equilibrium. The easiest example that comes to mind is the hexagonal Bénard cells if you boil water. There is nothing in the water that makes it hexagonal; it's because you boil it.
This is also why living systems die when they lose the constant influx of their energy source for too long a period: it reverts to thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e. rots).
I think he stated also somewhere (sorry can't remember exactly) that some difficult problems in embryology (i.e. which side of the embryo becomes up if it starts from a completely symmetric ovum) can be solved if it is assumed that the chemical processes that steer the differentiation are chaotic like the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Living systems can create other living systems out of chaos and basic materials and energy. Pregnant women do need to eat more than normal, though, to build the baby inside them. Living and reproducing costs energy, it is not an equilibrium state but a steady-state.
Also, Maturana and Varela have shown that living systems (with humans possibly as an exception.. hopefully not!) can have a recurring loop with their environment where they shape their environment to be more amenable to them living in it, and their environment shapes them to fit it better. E.g. rainworms eat up the soil, but by doing that, they also make the soil easier to eat (better aerated) for future generations of rainworms.
I hope that this answers your questions somewhat. These things are not often discussed because they are (A) multi-disciplinary and (B) difficult. But don't fall into the trap that because you don't see documentaries on TV about it, it is not a topic of conversation. It just means you have to watch a better class of documentaries or read better books:-)
But start with Prigogine (e.g. Order out of Chaos is highly readable). He was not just a physical chemist but also a philosopher. *AND* he taught in Texas for a while, what a coincidence!
There was a year (1636) where it made smart business sense to put *all* of your money into buying tulip bulbs. This was not necessarily true the next year. The bulbs were still the same and still pretty, though... whereas software patents without the "magic" turn into a bunch of overcomplicated legal texts.
Software patents are 20 years old, that's hardly "200 years of law" or "the dawn of time" ffs.
But it's probably the wisest decision, if you make software larger then "Hello World", like Red Hat, to assume as a legal precaution that your software will infringe on someones sofware patents.
In the USA.
Therefore there are many possible solutions (just a bit limited if you also want to keep your industry or customers in the USA).
Politically, the situation will probably only be resolved once large companies actually leave or refuse to sell their products in countries strewn with patent minefields.
I shudder at the thought of the end result of Kamagurka and Herr Seele draw/paint/act/whatever about the Fukushima accident... intriguing though....
Or maybe I have my cultural references mixed up again.
Thing is, getting people off-planet is not going to increase racial survival unless they can form self-sustaining colonies.
I disagree about the racial survival: if it turns out to be extremely difficult to build a "Biosphere 4" on the Moon or Mars and have it not covered in mold / swamped in CO2 / all plants died of unknown causes in a year, then hopefully this will increase all people's appreciation of the only working example that we as a race have -- Biosphere 1 (Earth).
If a child has a toy and is told that he won't get another one if he breaks it, he's maybe a little more careful with it than otherwise. Especially if he sees his sibling's broken toy (/abandoned moon base).
Wow. That's pretty ignorant, even for slashdot. Do you not live in the US?
nope:-)
But I confess I'm *also* ignorant w.r.t. those newfangled mobile phones. I learnt today that USA phones don't use SIM cards (see my other less ignorant comment).
Learn something new every day...
I was confused by this discussion (easily done), and I've just read the Wikipedia page about the SIM card, so now
I can offer the following hypothesis:
US mobile phone users don't have a SIM card, therefore they are tied hands and feet to their mobile carrier unless they buy a new phone, and they think this is normal (monopolized market).
Mobile phone users in the rest of the world have a SIM card, therefore they can (with a bit of bother and sharp nails) switch carriers if the carrier does something obnoxious. They don't know why US mobile phone users complain so much, because with a free market (most of the world) it's just not such an issue.
Portability
Since 2000, all subscribers to fixed telephony services have the possibility to keep their telephone number if they change from one operator to another, while remaining at the same location. Portability of so-called non-geographic numbers is also possible both in case of a change of operator and a change of address.
Since 2003 the same Directive has required that similar number portability should also be available for all mobile service subscribers. Number portability has helped to stimulate competition and innovative pricing in the mobile sector.
So the only thing needed for the Americans is switch to "SIM-carded" phones (and get a law through that they can for a small fee get to keep their phone number when switching carriers).
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding it.
What are you going to do with a Verizon phone and no carrier to put it on?
What do you mean by "a Verizon phone", can't you buy another abo or prepaid and stick a different SIM card in? I don't know much about mobile phones but I've learned that at least.
You talk as if it's not your phone, but Verizon's.
Seriously, Hydrogen and Oxygen refueling sounds like they want to push the resulting water molecules out the back of the rocket with a standard rocket-fuel-burning momentum.
But what happened to that Colombian company's idea of the VASIMR drive; they were ready to test one out in space, on the ISS, but there are only 2 shuttle missions left and I haven't heard of a mission carrying that drive.
Basically it would work like a giant microwave that accelerates Argon atoms to much higher speeds than a normal rocket, more like a Xenon ion drive, but cheaper.
Can anyone comment as to whether this idea was shelved and why? Does it have problems, does it not work? Or is it because of politics
Argon is a bit uncommon but hardly as rare as Xenon.
It's a good idea to compare the hazards of *all* different major power sources, but for some reason in all the Fukushima discussions on Slashdot I've only heard rehashings of the same argument:
"You're against nuclear, therefore you must be in favour of coal, which is even worse".
as if there are only two choices.
Obviously both coal and nuclear should therefore be phased out in favour of sustainable energy sources such as hydro, solar power, wind and solar photovoltaic.
"Pu is forever" only if you do not extract it from spent rods and burn it again to convert it into something else.
Thank you! I think I've spotted another pro-nuclear weasel word! Pity I'm not a real specialist so I can't honestly be very clear about it but I'll give it my best:
"Burn" implies, in common language, to put something on fire until it is reduced to harmless ashes and smoke. (If you burn PVC plastic it can be nasty though.) But, if you'd burn something in a high-tech waste processing facility, at really high temperature, and then you filter out the fly ash (mildly toxic) and scrub the flue gases (hydrochloric acid etc.) really well, then you probably still end up with netto energy (heat) and only 5-10% of the original waste remaining, in a quite inert form. The idea is that everything in the waste is burnt with oxygen and broken down to small molecules that are relatively easy to deal with (i.e. instead of dioxins, you burn them to CO2 and a bit of hydrochloric acid).
But.. You shouldn't be allowed to use the word "burn" here in this context of nuclear waste. Because you're not talking about burning with fire, you're talking about transmuting it with neutrons in a fast breeder reactor. If you are allowed to use the word "burn" here then this puts the analogy with fire in peoples minds. And that analogy is flawed.
If a fire is hot enough, you can manage to burn everything in it down to the constituent atoms, which will form small and simple molecules when they escape from the fire as ash or gas.
If you build a special, intensely radioactive nuclear fission plant, with special cooling fluid (liquid sodium -- burns in air and water! it is needed because the more common water or heavy water get too radioactive), you can have excess radioactivity in the form of neutrons, that can react with anything suitable nearby and make it more radioactive. If the stuff those neutrons react with is a rod of spent conventional nuclear fuel such as the ones in the pool nr. 4 in Fukushima Dai-ichi, or worse a "MOX" rod from reactor 3, then in addition to transmuting part of the radioactive waste that you want to get rid of, you will produce some new radioactives. Some quickly transmute to something stable, some to high-radioactive but short-lived isotopes, and some to medium-radioactive but longer-lived isotopes. Some are relatively harmless, and some others have half-lives of 100 000 years instead of the 20 000 years of Plutonium.
What is exactly produced is kind of vague and the specialists probably can tell you it has to do with the size of a barn and what atoms look like when they are bombarded and how slow the neutrons are. But it is *NOT* *LIKE* *BURNING*.
IANANE, but I'd like to see your proof that you can "burn" all of it cleanly, or show experiments that prove that at least the end product will indeed be safer after about 100-200 years than the beginning product.
A thought experiment: what if Fukushima had been a breeder reactor, they'd have had the earthquake, and that the primary coolant loop had been breached? It would look something like the Monju accident, at least until they'd started pumping seawater on it.. I don't know what it would have looked like after that, but you could probably see it from Tokyo: "is it a bird? is it a plane? no, it's the roof of the Fukushima fast breeder!"
I'm a bit disappointed that the article doesn't mention the cosmonauts that are already on their simulated way back from their simulated 520-day Mars mission:
Mars 500 timeline
Only half a year more and then they'll be let out of their Moscow container!
I don't think the modern readers get your joke--you forgot the tags.
I read it and I thought "he's doing a PhD thesis in physics and he chooses Office over LaTeX... yeah right..";-)
LaTeX! WYSIWYM!
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Piero Manzoni, is that you? Please use a better canning process this time, thank you.
Meego, what Nokia was working on as their Symbian successor platform just before they suddenly "jumped from their burning platform", was a Linux smartphone OS that was almost ready to run Android apps:
Dalvik ported to MeeGo, promising instant Android app compatibility
Mixing Ozzy and Adam Osbo(u)rne: "STOP! Don't buy our shiny model 7 smartphone!
NO! Not one of the competition either, you fool!
Wait until we come out with our even newerer model 7.5 Microkia smartphone later this year or next year-ish, or I'll bite your head off! "
What fishing grounds?
What is your great country going to do after 2011-08-02 then:
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Second is the very light autofactory we send by starship to build the receiving side matter transmission station, obviously :-)
What about the Strontium-90?
According to the Wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield, table "medium-lived fission products", the yield of Sr-90 should be a bit less than the amount of Cs-137 and the half-life also comparable (28 years vs 30 years).
It's chemically similar to Calcium and Magnesium which we need to live and build our bones and teeth from. We are exposed to the calcium in our bones all our life, from within our body, and our bones protect our bone marrow from irradiation.
Now imagine that a child grows up incorporating a tiny little bit of Sr-90 instead of Ca-40 in her shoulderblade (say it comes from Fukushima prefecture milk). I say imagine because I don't have a clear idea what the risk is and how it depends on diet.
Now imagine that this child develops leukemia. What are the odds that the bit of Sr-90 in her shoulderblade caused it, that it sickened her marrow? I don't know but I don't think it's negligible.
Yet, almost all the reports on the IAEA page (http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html) only mention I-131 and Cs-137. So where dd the Sr-90 go to???? it is only mentioned in the 13 april report.
Where do you get the idea that Christians have anything against nudity/sexuality??
For example: (warning: image may be offensive in Afghanistan and USA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo%27s_David
Hint: there's 2 000 000 000 people described as Christians, 3 of which are Shakers.
Yes, you seem to be looking at a brave new world ...
I couldn't help noticing on the second map on that page, that the east-coast of Japan is a very long stretch of ocean coast. A bit like Britain and Ireland but probably lots windier.
TEPCO, are you paying attention?
I also wish to mention that TEPCO apparently did a lot of good work on Sodium-Sulfur batteries. With the shitstorm of negative commentary that they must get now, I hope somebody reads this: we don't hate you, we hope you have the energy (pun intended) to give Japan safe power in the 21st century. With money to spare to clean up pool #4.
I must say this sounds like a reasonable capitalistic plan to once and for all get rid of nuclear power.
But it should be implemented gradually so the power companies that already have nuclear plants can't shed their responsibility by suddenly going bankrupt; they must first take care of the dismantling and cleanup this century.
Please e-mail your smart idea to Greenpeace!
And the fact that spent fuel pool #4 was almost full indicates that the most cost-effective and safe solution for 40 years of nuclear waste produced by TEPCO was to, um, keep a few more years worth of the spent fuel in that pool on the first floor of reactor building #4 until... you know, someone has a better idea later this century.
After the TEPCO directors are retired.
And moved to another prefecture on the other side of Japan.
It's a bit tricky. See if you can find anything by Ilya Prigogine on the subject. IIRC he stated that complex systems (you really mean living systems, don't you?) can come into being if you maintain a steady-state equilibrium of a system that's far out of normal thermodynamic equilibrium. The easiest example that comes to mind is the hexagonal Bénard cells if you boil water. There is nothing in the water that makes it hexagonal; it's because you boil it.
:-)
This is also why living systems die when they lose the constant influx of their energy source for too long a period: it reverts to thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e. rots).
I think he stated also somewhere (sorry can't remember exactly) that some difficult problems in embryology (i.e. which side of the embryo becomes up if it starts from a completely symmetric ovum) can be solved if it is assumed that the chemical processes that steer the differentiation are chaotic like the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Living systems can create other living systems out of chaos and basic materials and energy. Pregnant women do need to eat more than normal, though, to build the baby inside them. Living and reproducing costs energy, it is not an equilibrium state but a steady-state.
Also, Maturana and Varela have shown that living systems (with humans possibly as an exception.. hopefully not!) can have a recurring loop with their environment where they shape their environment to be more amenable to them living in it, and their environment shapes them to fit it better. E.g. rainworms eat up the soil, but by doing that, they also make the soil easier to eat (better aerated) for future generations of rainworms.
I hope that this answers your questions somewhat. These things are not often discussed because they are (A) multi-disciplinary and (B) difficult. But don't fall into the trap that because you don't see documentaries on TV about it, it is not a topic of conversation. It just means you have to watch a better class of documentaries or read better books
But start with Prigogine (e.g. Order out of Chaos is highly readable). He was not just a physical chemist but also a philosopher. *AND* he taught in Texas for a while, what a coincidence!
"windhandel"
You are assuming that those patents are entities that will exist for a while longer so that they can deliver an increase in value to you.
But what if software patents are abolished next year, then you've just spent your company's fortune on a small pile of toilet paper.
Let me put it this way with a historical analogy: How much would you pay to buy a Semper Augustus tulip bulb?.
There was a year (1636) where it made smart business sense to put *all* of your money into buying tulip bulbs. This was not necessarily true the next year. The bulbs were still the same and still pretty, though... whereas software patents without the "magic" turn into a bunch of overcomplicated legal texts.
Software patents are 20 years old, that's hardly "200 years of law" or "the dawn of time" ffs.
But it's probably the wisest decision, if you make software larger then "Hello World", like Red Hat, to assume as a legal precaution that your software will infringe on someones sofware patents.
In the USA.
Therefore there are many possible solutions (just a bit limited if you also want to keep your industry or customers in the USA).
Politically, the situation will probably only be resolved once large companies actually leave or refuse to sell their products in countries strewn with patent minefields.
I shudder at the thought of the end result of Kamagurka and Herr Seele draw/paint/act/whatever about the Fukushima accident... intriguing though....
Or maybe I have my cultural references mixed up again.
I disagree about the racial survival: if it turns out to be extremely difficult to build a "Biosphere 4" on the Moon or Mars and have it not covered in mold / swamped in CO2 / all plants died of unknown causes in a year, then hopefully this will increase all people's appreciation of the only working example that we as a race have -- Biosphere 1 (Earth).
If a child has a toy and is told that he won't get another one if he breaks it, he's maybe a little more careful with it than otherwise. Especially if he sees his sibling's broken toy (/abandoned moon base).
Otherwise, I think spot on about the self-sustaining colonies, the Russians probably do a lot of the "heavy lifting" boring research here, as in long-term bone-loss prevention, long-term crew aggression prevention, etc.
Incidentally, did you know that "Biosphere 2" failed badly in the end?
I wonder if anyone is working on practical mining and manufacturing yet, that should be interesting.
Wow. That's pretty ignorant, even for slashdot. Do you not live in the US?
nope :-)
But I confess I'm *also* ignorant w.r.t. those newfangled mobile phones. I learnt today that USA phones don't use SIM cards (see my other less ignorant comment).
Learn something new every day...
So the only thing needed for the Americans is switch to "SIM-carded" phones (and get a law through that they can for a small fee get to keep their phone number when switching carriers).
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding it.
What do you mean by "a Verizon phone", can't you buy another abo or prepaid and stick a different SIM card in? I don't know much about mobile phones but I've learned that at least.
You talk as if it's not your phone, but Verizon's.
Why not Argon instead of Hydrogen and Oxygen?
Seriously, Hydrogen and Oxygen refueling sounds like they want to push the resulting water molecules out the back of the rocket with a standard rocket-fuel-burning momentum.
But what happened to that Colombian company's idea of the VASIMR drive; they were ready to test one out in space, on the ISS, but there are only 2 shuttle missions left and I haven't heard of a mission carrying that drive.
Basically it would work like a giant microwave that accelerates Argon atoms to much higher speeds than a normal rocket, more like a Xenon ion drive, but cheaper.
Can anyone comment as to whether this idea was shelved and why? Does it have problems, does it not work? Or is it because of politics
Argon is a bit uncommon but hardly as rare as Xenon.
It's a good idea to compare the hazards of *all* different major power sources, but for some reason in all the Fukushima discussions on Slashdot I've only heard rehashings of the same argument:
"You're against nuclear, therefore you must be in favour of coal, which is even worse".
as if there are only two choices.
Obviously both coal and nuclear should therefore be phased out in favour of sustainable energy sources such as hydro, solar power, wind and solar photovoltaic.
Thank you! I think I've spotted another pro-nuclear weasel word! Pity I'm not a real specialist so I can't honestly be very clear about it but I'll give it my best:
"Burn" implies, in common language, to put something on fire until it is reduced to harmless ashes and smoke. (If you burn PVC plastic it can be nasty though.) But, if you'd burn something in a high-tech waste processing facility, at really high temperature, and then you filter out the fly ash (mildly toxic) and scrub the flue gases (hydrochloric acid etc.) really well, then you probably still end up with netto energy (heat) and only 5-10% of the original waste remaining, in a quite inert form. The idea is that everything in the waste is burnt with oxygen and broken down to small molecules that are relatively easy to deal with (i.e. instead of dioxins, you burn them to CO2 and a bit of hydrochloric acid).
But.. You shouldn't be allowed to use the word "burn" here in this context of nuclear waste. Because you're not talking about burning with fire, you're talking about transmuting it with neutrons in a fast breeder reactor. If you are allowed to use the word "burn" here then this puts the analogy with fire in peoples minds. And that analogy is flawed.
If a fire is hot enough, you can manage to burn everything in it down to the constituent atoms, which will form small and simple molecules when they escape from the fire as ash or gas.
If you build a special, intensely radioactive nuclear fission plant, with special cooling fluid (liquid sodium -- burns in air and water! it is needed because the more common water or heavy water get too radioactive), you can have excess radioactivity in the form of neutrons, that can react with anything suitable nearby and make it more radioactive. If the stuff those neutrons react with is a rod of spent conventional nuclear fuel such as the ones in the pool nr. 4 in Fukushima Dai-ichi, or worse a "MOX" rod from reactor 3, then in addition to transmuting part of the radioactive waste that you want to get rid of, you will produce some new radioactives. Some quickly transmute to something stable, some to high-radioactive but short-lived isotopes, and some to medium-radioactive but longer-lived isotopes. Some are relatively harmless, and some others have half-lives of 100 000 years instead of the 20 000 years of Plutonium.
What is exactly produced is kind of vague and the specialists probably can tell you it has to do with the size of a barn and what atoms look like when they are bombarded and how slow the neutrons are. But it is *NOT* *LIKE* *BURNING*.
IANANE, but I'd like to see your proof that you can "burn" all of it cleanly, or show experiments that prove that at least the end product will indeed be safer after about 100-200 years than the beginning product.
A thought experiment: what if Fukushima had been a breeder reactor, they'd have had the earthquake, and that the primary coolant loop had been breached? It would look something like the Monju accident, at least until they'd started pumping seawater on it.. I don't know what it would have looked like after that, but you could probably see it from Tokyo: "is it a bird? is it a plane? no, it's the roof of the Fukushima fast breeder!"
I'm a bit disappointed that the article doesn't mention the cosmonauts that are already on their simulated way back from their simulated 520-day Mars mission:
Mars 500 timeline
Only half a year more and then they'll be let out of their Moscow container!
I don't think the modern readers get your joke--you forgot the tags. ;-)
I read it and I thought "he's doing a PhD thesis in physics and he chooses Office over LaTeX... yeah right.."
LaTeX! WYSIWYM!
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