Time to revisit Fukushima

[dieseltaylor]

It is not with any great pleasure that I post this article. We had quite e lenghty discussion from both pro and anti sides. The argument included statistics showing how benign atomic power had been in the 50 years of its use as a power source compared to more traditional forms:

Full Meltdown: Fukushima Called the 'Biggest Industrial Catastrophe in the History of Mankind'

Scientific experts believe Japan's nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public.

June 16, 2011 |

"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

Japan's 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.

"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"

Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.

"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."

Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive "hot spots" around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.

"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."

Radiation monitors for children

Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.

TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.

In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.

The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.

"There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to children," Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.

Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, but added: "There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese government's 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well."

Gundersen points out that far more radiation has been released than has been reported.

"They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this," he said. "The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."

According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles".

"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."

Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.

The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer.

"These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant," he explained, "One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April."

Blame the US?

In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear reactors over the next decade. In a referendum vote this Monday, 95 per cent of Italians voted in favour of blocking a nuclear power revival in their country. A recent newspaper poll in Japan shows nearly three-quarters of respondents favour a phase-out of nuclear power in Japan.

Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?

Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in Japan.

He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the fact that most of them are of US design.

"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes," Dr Sawada told Al Jazeera. "I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan."

Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US, something Dr Sawada feels is also a large component of the problem.

"Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use," he explained. "The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese government not use this technology yet, but the government accepted to use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power stations, and was thus subjected to US government policy."

As a 13-year-old, Dr Sawada experienced the US nuclear attack against Japan from his home, situated just 1400 metres from the hypocentre of the Hiroshima bomb.

"I think the Fukushima accident has caused the Japanese people to abandon the myth that nuclear power stations are safe," he said. "Now the opinions of the Japanese people have rapidly changed. Well beyond half the population believes Japan should move towards natural electricity."

A problem of infinite proportions

Dr Ramana expects the plant reactors and fuel cores to be cooled enough for a shutdown within two years.

"But it is going to take a very long time before the fuel can be removed from the reactor," he added. "Dealing with the cracking and compromised structure and dealing with radiation in the area will take several years, there's no question about that."

Dr Sawada is not as clear about how long a cold shutdown could take, and said the problem will be "the effects from caesium-137 that remains in the soil and the polluted water around the power station and underground. It will take a year, or more time, to deal with this".

Gundersen pointed out that the units are still leaking radiation.

"They are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount of radioactive liquid," he said. "It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids."

Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how to cool two of the units.

"Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple," he said. "After the earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you're at a point where, if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They've not figured out how to cool units three and four."

Gundersen's assessment of solving this crisis is grim.

"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor."

Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely.

"Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations," he explained. "To do otherwise is simply an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing."

Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan.

"So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water," Gundersen said. "We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come."

Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen's assessment.

"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."

[Magpie_Oz]

Just goes to show ya, you can look at any situation from any angle and draw what ever conclusion you wish

" In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.

The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster."

What was the spike in these cities after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ?

" Fukushima Called the 'Biggest Industrial Catastrophe in the History of Mankind " by whom ? Certainly not the people of Bhopal.

Not that it really matters but Fukishima is not an industrial accident, it got hit by an unusually large Tsunami.

The biggest concern at the moment is the plague of leg injuries from all of the knee jerking.

[Wicky]

There seems to be some bad analysis (logical error) on the part of Sherman & Mangano. They note that:

"4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)"

but they fail to note that the Tohoku earthquake occurred on March 11. Thus their study period is for three weeks prior to the Fukushima inundation. Furthermore, the explosions which lofted "hot" particles into the atmosphere occurred on March 12. According to the modeling

[ http://tinyurl.com/4z3h27p ]

done by Dr. Jeff Masters of the atmospheric release, the soonest that any materials could have traveled from Fukushima to the U.S. West Coast was approximately 5 days later, or March 17. Thus any infant in the U.S. could not have been exposed to any hot particle from Fukushima for more than 2 days out of the 28 days in the period in question.

Interestingly enough, if you change just a couple of cities so your looking at (Looking at: Berkeley, Fresno, Glendale, Long Beach, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Tacoma)

You see a drop of about 30% in the Infant Mortality instead of a spike.

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 49 deaths (avg. 12.25 per week)

Also applying the maxim 'Correlation does not imply causation' and plenty more research and peer revue needs to done before alarmist headlines are published.

[dieseltaylor]

Wow wicky you sure now how to pick your data!

The recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)

10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)

http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

Incidentally it may be that there is a monthly repeatable pattern for April- May every year but it is not for me to start that test. Certainly the average rate for the whole US was only up a couple of per cent for the period. But that cuts both ways as the farhter east and south you go in the US may be reporting significantly lower figures.

Another possibility is that there are a lot of returned servicemen in the area and that is reflecting a different problem. It may also be a stress-induced response that has caused an upsurge rather than a physical effect.

Maggie - I think given the extent of the affected area and the continuing problem even the Bhopal sufferers might feel theres is not that big a problem. After all it only cost a few million dollars to sort it out.

[Charlie Marlow]

Wow wicky you sure now how to pick your data!

It may also be a stress-induced response that has caused an upsurge rather than a physical effect.

If there actually is any effect, it certainly isn't from radiation from Japan. That it is even suggested boggles the mind.

[Tarquelne]

The figure for the same 10 week period in 2010 is 122 deaths. This took 11 min. after I found the proper webpage. That's 122 with no data from San Jose for three weeks - it could only go higher with the complete dataset. Can we assume the paper authors chose 8 cities with complete datasets over the periods in question?

We should be speculating about a 2% "spike" in mortality, not 35%.

The numbers are small and pretty variable. You're going to need to look at several years - not several weeks - worth of data to draw any conclusions.

[Michael Emrys]

How is it possible that infants in the US could be immediately dying of airborne radiation? Seems to me that the amount of radiation would be infinitesimal and would require a lot of time before symptoms began showing up.

Michael

[Other Means]

Oh my God "Scientific experts" have said this?

Jesus dieseltaylor, have you caught Kettlitis?

[Magpie_Oz]

Maggie - I think given the extent of the affected area and the continuing problem even the Bhopal sufferers might feel theres is not that big a problem. After all it only cost a few million dollars to sort it out.

What an appalling thing to say

"A total of 36 wards were marked by the authorities as being "gas affected", affecting a population of 520,000. Of these, 200,000 were below 15 years of age, and 3,000 were pregnant women. In 1991, 3,928 deaths had been certified. Independent organizations recorded 8,000 dead in the first days. Other estimations vary between 10,000 and 30,000. Another 100,000 to 200,000 people are estimated to have permanent injuries of different degrees"

But hey it only cost a couple of bucks to fix it up and really they were just impoverished peasants anyway, so who gives a ****.

Far more concern that some ill informed moron thinks that the infant mortality rate in the US is effected by non atmospheric fallout (i.e. no big boom to spread it to the upper atmosphere) across the worlds largest ocean.

I think this article should be placed on Wikipedia as being the quintessential definition of the term "Crock of Utter Bull****"

[gunnergoz]

In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.

Did they bother to talk to any radiation and climatology experts before making this claim?

The infant deaths, as tragic as they are, may as just as easily be blamed upon nervous parents smoking more in the household due to stress and panic incited by an ignorant media.

[Magpie_Oz]

Did they bother to talk to any radiation and climatology experts before making this claim?

The infant deaths, as tragic as they are, may as just as easily be blamed upon nervous parents smoking more in the household due to stress and panic incited by an ignorant media.

Also given the low rate of infant mortality it doesn't take much to create a high percentage change. e.g. If you average infant mortality is 1 per 100,000 if 2 happen to die you have a 100% increase in infant mortality.

[dieseltaylor]

Interesting to see how all the action centred around the statistics : ) No comment on the eventual clear up, the much more dangerous state than previously advised, and the cancelling of German and Italian nucler plans.

Tarq. thank for looking up further data. If there is indeed a spike could it be people being stressed, taking iodine tablets, or is it another factor. From the Chernobyl Wikipedia entry there is an interesting surge in Berlin of Downs syndrom babies nine months after the event. It will be interesting to see if there are any similar hotspots coming up following Fukushima. I did consider stress for this Berlin report but then surely more areas would have reported spikes so a physical cause is feasible even if very unlikely.

I am slightly surprised that not one has mentioned that despite this nuclear is a necessary option. I am not a great lover of nuclear but I can see a limited use being necessary.

Maggie - I mentioned Bhopal twice here last year, the mention of a few million to solve it was actually meant as a barbed comment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

[Other Means]

The whole article is bollox and you're undermining your credibility posting it.

[dieseltaylor]

-Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.

-TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

- Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.

Yep complete bollocks.

Other Means

CMSF Beta Tester

Join Date: Dec 2007

Location: Liverpool, UK.

Posts: 4,085

..........

There hasn't been a spill of radioactive material in Japan that has any health complications. Hell, even Chernobyl only killed 56 people - and that was a million times worse.

Other Means...interesting ideas.

Steve of BFC.

So lets avoid the unfortunate news that it is worse the Chernobyl in terms of radioactive release. That in fact there appears to be no real plan on how to sort out this mess. And what other news yet to come.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Except the imagined pile of bodies has failed to materialize, no matter what dubious data you put up to shore up the anti nuke hysteria.

Or are you saying that a car crash with no injuries at 200kph is worse then a car crash at 100kph that killed family of four?

[dieseltaylor]

What is with the hysteria stuff? If we re-wind a couple of months the talk from some was how well the olld reastor design had withstood the disaster. That is obviously a false view derived from the information made available at the time.

So we now have further information relevant to the scale of the disaster. IT IS WORSE THAN CHERNOBYL in terms of radioactivity release.

I am glad I cannot provide heaps of bodies as an immediate proof for you Elmar. I think, and I hope I am wrong, is that we will find that there is damage to humans. Or possibly the fish that the Japanese rely so heavily upon , in coastal waters may not become dangerous.

The quality of the Al Jazeera article may be spotty in parts but I unfortunately have been distracted by a new Battlefront game coming out which is eroding my serious time.

[Charlie Marlow]

My big problem with the article is that it is not talking about health effects in Japan. It is trying to link Fukushima radiation with health effects on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. At a distance where there has been no significant increase in radiation from the disaster. The "scientists" who promote such a link are either idiots or scare mongers.

[Bigduke6]

Well I think that article is just awful, and I am an Al Jazeera fan. There are plenty of errors in the case of things that I know, which makes me suspect there are errors viz. the things I don't know.

Let's take it point by point. Here's Arnold Gunderson:

- "Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,"

This is misleading. Exposed to what? The reactor containment vessels in the worst case, i.e. not all the reactors at Fukushima, were as I understand it cracked. True this meant cooling water, which is certainly radioactive got out.

This is not the same as a hydrogen/steam explosion blowing the roof off of a reactor and exposing the core itself to the sky, and with burning reactor materials pouring radioactive smoke and dust through the hole in the roof. That is what happened at Chernobyl.

The fact is, at Fukushima, if Chernobyl is the yardstick, containment worked. The containment shells mostly held and where they didn't the engineers succeeded in keeping a lid on the nuclear reaction.

- "TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of."

Who says it's a greater problem, besides this guy? It sure doesn't seem that way to me. If the main pollution from Fukushima is radioactive sea water, then there is not better place in this solar system if not this arm of the galaxy to dilute that radioactive sea water, than the Pacific Ocean. Which is of course the largest body of sea water on earth whose volume compared to what Fukushima is astronomically larger, by probably more orders of magnitude than us humans can grasp.

It is not nice for the local sushi business, but frankly radioactive water can be disposed of in the Pacific just fine, I think.

"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."

This statement avoids describing the critical bits, the scale of the alleged melt through and the relative amount of water needed to keep the "blob" from continuing reaction.

History - again Chernobyl - shows us that when a reactor core does go out of control and melts down, the accelerating atomic chain reaction does not keep speeding up to infinity, this largely because the nuclear fuel is not weapons grade. At Chernobyl, when the fuel stopped getting cooled it got really damn hot, melted through and destroyed the floor of the reactor, really did sort of become a blob - and then sort of stopped flowing when it hit water, dirt and sand. Basically the atomic reaction got damped by hitting earth; I assume this is a function of the fuel itself degrading as it melted earth and mixed with it etc.

At Fukushima nobody probably knows for sure, but in the worst off reactor it seems the heat of the atomic reaction cracked the steel containment vessel - which did not exist at Chernobyl at all - meaning that indeed when water gets pumped onto the hot materials, the water will get irradiated and drain through the cracks to some extent, although full drainage is unlikely as the dirt and rock under the Fukushima reactors is not perfectly permeable.

Sure there is fuel inside some of the Fukushima reactors that is still hot and reacting, but again, for the most part the bad stuff that follows from that is staying inside the containment vessels. Radioactive water that you can dump into the Pacific is a whole lot nicer, than dust and debris entering the fresh water table and recycling into dairy products.

Finally, "incredibly radioactive" is a useless statement, misleading, and by most standards just wrong. I would call something "incredibly radioactive" if it induced a lethal dose in a human in say several minutes. I would call something "dangerously radioactive" if it would induce a dose likely to sicken a human over say several months.

With the exception of some staff inside the plants, this level of danger was never threatened by Fukushima.

"The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."

Lots of problems with this statement. WTF is a "hot spot"? Lethal radiation over hours? Days? Possible sickness induced over a normal lifetime? Simply detectable?

You can find hot areas from Chernobyl 100 - 150 km. away even today, depending of course on what you define as hot. (You can also find patches that are perfectly clean, even inside the Zone, and if you look hard you can find people living there.) The normal definition is "higher than normal background radiation."

Another thing to remember is, most of these radioactive materials have reasonable half-lives. Sure the plutonium in the core will emit radioactivity for bazillions of years, but most of these other isotopes emit for days or weeks, fewer months and years. And as they stop emitting, the "hot" area cools. Therefore, finding a bunch of hot areas around Fukushima is not the same thing as long-term uninhabitability. Radioactive materials are unstable, they deteriorate, the rate they do it is known.

Simply saying "hot spots around Fukushima" is not evidence of permanent or even long-term damage. It could be, if a chunk of fuel got tossed somewhere by an explosion - something of which we have no evidence of course - then sure where that fuel is would be a hot spot for 10s of thousands of years. But what Fukushima has created, basically, is sea water and steam with radioactive materials possessing half lives in the days to decades range.

Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.

TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.

On the meltdowns, I say "so what?" A meltdown is the fuel rods getting so hot they melt. That happened in three reactors, but evidence suggests the containment vessels, er, mostly contained the melted fuel rods. We certainly don't have any evidence of a hot nuclear blob melting through rock and into the Earth's crust with nothing to stop it.

On the 960 square km. uninhabitable, well, maybe that's right now but in a couple of months or years, if Japanese radiation acts like other radiation, that area is going to shrink as various isotopes reach the ends of their half-lives.

The Chernobyl Zone in Ukraine is about 2,600 square km., and in terms of polluted territory in Belarus the area is roughly the same. Saying Fukushima polluted more territory than Chernobyl, worse than Chernobyl, is just wrong, there is no justification for a statement like that.

As I understand it one of the bigger problems the Japanese are grappling with is not the fuel rods in the reactor but the spent fuel rods outside of the reactor, which are typically dumped in adjacent pools - these are the cooling ponds - to wind down their radioactivity enough so they can be handled and disposed of. Some of these spent fuel rods were in pools that lost their water and that created more heat and uncontrolled radioactivity release. The solution is pumping in more water; this the Japanese are doing.

As to MD Janette Sherman Dr MV Ramana and the spike in infant mortality in NW cities, my main question is who declared today "Don't use your brain day" and didn't tell me?

It's ludicrous, we're supposed to believe tiny bits of radiation flew across the Pacific (or swam, or hitched rides on attack submarines) and killed children in San Francisco? Over 10 weeks? How is it that all the Japanese children seem to be surviving, at least, we haven't heard about a spike in their infant mortality and you'd figure the Japanese might be looking.

I really have trouble deciding what is more appalling, the idiotic logic that asserts somehow Fukushima radiation is harming US children, or the reporter/source assumption there are people out there stupid enough even to take a piece of lunacy like that seriously.

"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."

Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.

The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer.

"These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant," he explained, "One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April."

Again: What is "hot"? How bad is "hot"? Radiation detection equipment can be very sensitive, and it is easy to detect a tiny bit more radiation than normal. Is that "hot"? After all, if you stand out in front of the Chernobyl station, you will be exposed to something like 2-3 times "normal safe" radiation. Were you to stand there several years, it might affect your health. Or maybe not, people differ.

You can obtain the same radiation dose, for practical purposes, lying on a beach near the Equator. The sun after all is a nuclear explosion, it creates radiation, some of it gets through the atmosphere, etc. etc.

The bottom line here is, detectable radiation higher than normal does not equal deadly, it does not even necessarily equal dangerous.

A statement like "clearly there are people on the West coast that were affected" is misleading. How much? Why clearly? Is "people" hundreds, thousands, or maybe just two? Affected significantly? Or just enough so you can say they were exposed to something and it's impossible to tell what the exposure did, if anything?

And why, oh why in the world should we take the word of a skin specialist and a medical doctor on the potential effects of air and seaborne radiation from a nuclear power accident? Just because the went to school for a long time and now get paid a lot of money to take care of sick people, doesn't make them smart about radiation. What, a person gets a license to treat acme and eczema, and somehow she magically can pontificate intelligently on what a deteriorating atomic fuel rod might, via steam or irradiated sea water, release into the environment?

For the critical reader, actually, this is perhaps the most damning bit of the whole article. If the best the reporter could manage for "experts" to back up a Fukushima scare story, was a retired nuclear power engineer, a skin specialist, and a general medical practicioner, that is very close to a guarantee no proper expert on nuclear power accidents would touch such a loony POV as pushed by this article with a 10-foot pole. Not with a 20-foot Serb, even.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

One last point: the article says there is no way to clean all this up. Wrong. Radiactive decontamination is not complicated, it is just time-consuming and expensive. At Chernobyl it was basically removing the topsoil, sandblasting the buildings, and picking up whatever radioactive debris got thrown there by the explosions. This is not to say a cleanup is easy or preferable to making nuclear reactors safe in the first place.

But the bottom line with Fukushima is, at the end of the day the Japanese controlled it. Not perfectly, but the serious radiation was contained, and the great bulk of the the unavoidable radiation is getting dumped into the Pacific. Not a great outcome, but in any case the actual one.

[dieseltaylor]

SOrry to be absent from the thread for so long but I have been busy, and secondly making sense of what is being bruited about in the Press and the Web makes it difficult who to believe.

Firstly the number killed at Chernobyl is one of thos figures which starts almsot from the first phrase to be a game of semantics.

"Killed at Chernobyl"

as in killed in the explosion

Killed as a result of the Chernobyl explosion"

Hurt at Chernobyl died elsewhere later

"Killer by Chernobyl explosion"

[ no time limit?]

However let us say that it is more than 56 quoted by Other Means.

Now what has been unfolding is the story of hot particles. So radioactivley not hugely significant unless lodged in your body where they can creat cancers. Obviously a non-story if no fine radioactive particles were blow skywards and inhaled by humans. Unfortunately there is no definitive answer. However here is a substantial thread on the matter which pretty much covers the situation to date:

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4459?page=1

If I had more time I would be looking to see if the birth figures were a big anomaly etc etc compared to its own area, to the whole of the USA. Incidentally the US has the highest infant mortality rate of civilised countries but lets not worry about that.

Not that I subscribe to it being fall-out as the cause. I am just interested in statistics revealing anomalies and trying to figure out why. Incidentally I see no one has wanted to comment on the Berlin Downs syndrome spike mentioned in the Wiki article. Is it not interesting enough?

BD6 is right Al-jazeera needs a new correspondent.

[__Yossarian0815[jby]]

Sure there is fuel inside some of the Fukushima reactors that is still hot and reacting, but again, for the most part the bad stuff that follows from that is staying inside the containment vessels.

This can´t be stated with any certainty. Considering that we´ve gone from "The plant will be up and running in a few weeks" to confirmed multiple meltdowns, I would be careful with the optimism.

[Other Means]

However let us say that it is more than 56 quoted by Other Means.

You have no basis for this assertion.

[Bigduke6]

;1290573']This can´t be stated with any certainty. Considering that we´ve gone from "The plant will be up and running in a few weeks" to confirmed multiple meltdowns' date=' I would be careful with the optimism.[/quote']

Not optimism, just my best guess. I certainly am not taking the Japanese at their word, if there is one thing Chernobyl taught us it is that those who run nuclear reactors think they are to a great extent super-cool engineers and they HATE HATE HATE to admit to the rest of the world their cool atomic energy experiments went awry and that their engineering, frankly, came up short. They are used talking down to a general public which is at once ignorant and terrified of atomic energy.

They are awful, just awful, at providing the public the information it needs, and even worse at admitting where they simply don't know.

Still, based on the news reports, I see no graphite fires nor death counts, and at the same time I see a long-term process where the Japanese engineers seem to be balancing the problems of keeping the atomic reactions under control with the problem of figuring out what to do with the water that becomes radioactive, as they use it to keep the nuclear reactions under control. I have not seen any catastrophic explosions, demolished nuclear reactor buildings or - and I think this may be the most telling bit of all - the Japanese departing substantially from the techniques they normally use to control the atomic reaction.

I understand they just got a bunch of the cooling equipment on line, ipso facto, they never got to the point where they abandoned the idea of using in-plant cooling equipment to control the nuclear reaction. This implies substantially less damage to the cooling equipment by the tsunami and whatever meltdowns took place. And since a meltdown is not a joke, and can reasonably be expected to destroy pretty much anything it comes into contact with besides a containment vessel designed, er, to contain meltdowns, I am guessing that when the Japanese say the containment vessels are basically whole, I tend to believe it. Not intact, but basically doing the job.

Finally, since a big if not the most important contributing factor to the scale of the Chernobyl disaster was, there was no containment vessel, I tend to think the mere presence of containment vessels at Fukushima make very probable that some, er, containment took place.

This is not to say I think the Fukushima containment vessels are in ideal condition and that I exclude, say, a subsequent earthquake cracking one wide up, dropping a reactor building, and opening up a hot reactor core to the sky. I'm not saying the chance of a real disaster has gone.

But from the evidence I've seen so far, again my two cents', at Fukushima I haven't yet seen a nuclear power disaster. Serious accident, yes. But not a disaster, not in my book anyway.

[__Yossarian0815[jby]]

Just stating that nobody knows the real state of the containment vessels.

The real reason that this hasn´t been worse than it already is is that the wind was blowing out to sea at the right moment. That IMO is pure luck, not an engineering feat.

As for deaths and stuff, I say compare when it´s over.

[dieseltaylor]

Just as it seems so aposite

If Japan replaced all of its 1.6 billion light bulbs with LED varieties, the country would save the annual electricity output of 13 nuclear reactors.

So says the Institute of Energy Economics, a research group overseen by the country’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

IEE analyzed the benefits of switching to LEDs following the March nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Meltdowns prompted the country to abandon expansion of a nuclear industry that has provided 30% of Japan’s electricity with 54 reactors - 35 of which remain shut for safety.

IEE’s findings surfaced this week in the Mainichi Daily News.

“Promoting the introduction of LED lights will serve as energy-saving measures that have immediate effects and sustainability,” the Tokyo-based online paper quotes an IEE representative as saying.

LED light bulbs use only about 10%-to-20% of the power consumed by incandescent light bulbs, and about 60% of fluorescents, including common energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs. IEE figured that Japanese homes, offices and manufacturing sites use some 1.6 billion bulbs, annually eating up 150.6 billion kWh of electricity.

If people replace those with LED bulbs, the country would cut annual consumption by 92.2 billion kWh, to 58.4 billion kWh, according to IEE. It says that’s the equivalent of 13 nuclear reactors, a quarter of the country’s total.

Cost is a challenge. As we’ve noted before, LED bulbs in the U.S. can have retail prices of $40. If you have, say, 40 bulbs in your house, you’d pay $1600 to replace them all at once.

IEE tallied the bill in for 1.6 billion bulbs in Japan at ¥15.7 trillion ($194 billion). However, the upfront cost provides long-term savings not only in electricity bills, but also in longevity. Manufacturers say LED bulbs can last for 25 years, although it will take a quarter of a century to find out if that’s true.

Another knock on LEDs, especially for home users, is that lighting designers and architects note that they lack the warmth of incandescent bulbs. But the good news from Japan - 70% of the 1.6 billion bulbs in Japan are fluorescent, to which many people would prefer LEDs for glow.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/how-to-eliminate-japan-8217s-nuclear-reactors-led-light-bulbs/7384?tag=nl.e660