It's looking more and more like it's getting worse and worse. And speaking of Greg Jaczko's session in Congress, did anyone else catch his reference to helping "the Japanese car, uh, Japanese government". is it wrong that I found that to be humorous?
Give him a break; he's a career politician, and among the sea of common cliches floating around in his head, "Japanese" goes with "car" just like "fellow" and "Americans". Focus- I won't pretend to know anything about nuclear reactors beyond an educated layman level, but I hate the constant mention of "not as bad as Chernobyl!". I mean, do these people not realize how fucking catastrophic and awful that was, and how the land had to be abandoned? Even if it's not as bad as the worst nuclear meltdown in history (by far), how is that a source for encouragement?
It's not hard to understand why the comparison is being made. People have little to no understanding of nuclear power, and the only thing they can really relate it to, especially when it comes to "disasters", is Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island. Failing that, there's Hollywood's depiction. If you were to keep it strictly scientific and discuss radiation doses and the like, nobody would have any understanding of what that means. At least by providing a comparison, even if it's just "not as bad as", gives it some context. Even then, I doubt if anyone really understood what happened at Chernobyl, other than it resulted in some pretty eerie pics and bike tours years later. As an aside, if you didn't seen this when it made the rounds a few years ago, this Chernobyl photo essay is quite interesting.
I left out two key points: First, I live in Ontario. Second, nobody has any. You can't even order any from the wholesalers, so fuck if I know where to get some of it. But I do rather like the principle that these paranoid ninnies aren't having their paranoia indulged.
My folks are off in Mexico on vacation, and they've been watching the various US-based news for information on the nuke situation in Japan. My dad, who's normally a pretty normal/sane guy, is freaking out over the potential radiation in Ontario, Canada, based on the "news" he's seeing, especially since they're flying home on Sunday. I pointed him to some other, more reliable/sane sources, and he's amazed at the difference. I loathe those talking heads on the North American "news" channels. Too bad we can't nuke them.
I'm not a scientist either but from what I have read this is the gist of it... The fuel rods are made from a nickel alloy and cooled by moving water. When the water stops moving (the pumps fail) it starts to boil. When it boils the nickel takes the oxygen out of the water/steam and turns into nickel oxide (it's not an exact analogy but think of steel rusting.) The hydrogen in the water (the H in water's H2O) is released as gas and waits to explode when it is vented. The formation of nickel oxide means that the fuel rods which contain lots of pellets of uranium are degrading. Degraded fuel rods are more likely to rupture and release their fuel pellets. Once the fuel pellets are released from enough rods there's nothing (except reactor design/luck) to stop them from accumulating in a big enough pile to go critical on the floor of the reactor, at which point you're fucked and it'll almost certainly burn its way through containment. I have no idea how quickly or likely that scenario is but it seems pretty clear that the formation of hydrogen means that they aren't getting enough coolant/coolant circulation to the fuel rods and things are probably trending worse.
Exactly this. I spent a few hours on wikipedia today reading up on Chernobyl, nuclear radiation sickness, and the like, and I still don't really understand it. Even with all the useful links posted in this thread, I'm still having trouble really understanding it. I have the weakest bit of a grasp on the difference between Chernobyl and Fukushima (completely different reactor designs and safety measures, differing sequences of events, etc.), but I couldn't explain the difference between the two in a way that would be helpful to anyone. I tried to a few days ago, and the look I got was completely blank. Nuclear power just isn't something that's converted to layman's terms easily.
Yeah, this can't be good. Here's a Japanese TV screen cap: Taken from a BoingBoing link: Take into account that just a few hours ago TEPCO said this: Seems like it hasn't been "adequately cooled" after all.
This seems a good a time as any to bring on the ultimate in contrarian arguments here: <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis</a> I had previously been under the impression that there was a ring around the blast sites of the H-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki where there was lower mortality than areas closer to and further from the sites but I see no reference to that here, and this being Wikipedia, it must not be true. Nonetheless: even if a tiny amount of radiation finds its way to North America, maybe that's a good thing. For us. Which is, of course, the only thing that matters.
I know next to nothing about this situation but here is something I found interesting on news.com.au (not a great source of info) today. Professor Paddy Regan, Professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Surrey, puts the "danger" to Tokyo in perspective. "Tokyo is approx 200km from the edge of the Fukushima site. This means that, assuming that any radiation is spread out evenly if was to get airborne, the dose of radiation would be 1 part in approximately 40,000 of that seen at the edge of the plant (assumes that the edge of the plant is 1 km from the source). If this radiation kept up at this level for a full year (also extremely unlikely), this would translate to an ADDITIONAL dose of approximately 0.2 mSv/year for people in Tokyo (or about the same as a chest X-ray and about 1/10th of the annual dose UK people get from the environment). Even the max values quoted so far (spikes at approx 200 msV/hour briefly at one on the reactors) translate to a maximum of approx 40 mSv per year which is approx 20msV, but still below the dose likely to cause significant increases in cancer." To put that 20mSv in perspective, here's a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to mSvs (per year): * 2mSv - typical background exposure from the environment * 2.4 mSv - average dose to US nuclear industry workers * 9 mSv - exposure to airline crew flying between New York and Tokyo * 20 mSv - current limit (averaged) for nuclear industry employees and uranium miners * 100mSv - lowest level at which any increase in cancer risk is clearly evident * 1000mSv (1 sievert) - cumulative. Estimated to cause a fatal cancer many years later in 5 out of every 100 people exposed to it * 1,000mSv (1 sievert) - single dose. Temporary radiation sickness - not fatal * 5,000mSv (5 sieverts) - single dose. Fatal within a month to half of those who receive it * 10,000mSv (10 sieverts) - single dose. Fatal within weeks Read more: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.news.com.au/world/magnitude-quake-strikes-japan/story-e6frfkyi-1226019903430#ixzz1GooMlRbz" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.news.com.au/world/magnitude- ... z1GooMlRbz</a>
The point is this: Chernobyl the city is uninhabitable by humans, and won't be for hundreds of years to come. If the situation in Japan isn't quite as bad as that, it's no great encouragement. Anyways, I'm definitely not buying the line of thinking that "Japan's government is being overly safe, and it's making it look worse than it really is!" Come on now; when have you ever seen any government, least of all Japan's, be "overly safe"? When the level of radiation is 800 times higher than the maximum "safe" level (and the latter is about a hundred times than what most humans experience), it's definitely "safe" to say there is a major fucking problem. Edit- So in other words, the amount of radiation delivered to the average citizen in Tokyo, a city 200 km away, and the second largest urban center in the entire world, will be 10 times as much a typical worker in a radiation plant is exposed to? Wow. That's simply awful, and makes me think the situation is far worse, not better.
Gee, sorry, we didn't all go to Harvard to learn the vital difference between the A-bomb and the H-bomb and which was used to bomb Japan. Furthermore, you are quite free to think that by posting a link about hormesis that I've endorsed homeopathy, but you'd be committing a graver error than I did in confusing the A and H bombs. If even a milligram of a radioactive substance were diluted throughout all of the molecules on earth, it still wouldn't reach the level of dilution that homeopathic remedies use, by several orders of magnitude. Hormesis is an interesting effect that has in certain specific situations been shown in either lab results or real life findings. There is some scant evidence of radiation hormesis shown from a few labs. If you can't tell that this was a mildly sarcastic "hey, maybe all this radiation leakage isn't so bad!", then I'm not sure what to say.
Oh? Edit- Keep in mind I have no clue whether the radiation levels mentioned in the article itself are accurate, but there's nothing wrong with the "math" I posted.
The article said... Temporary spikes of up to 200 msV/hour aren't the same as sustained levels of that amount. Assuming these figures are accurate (and I suppose that's a rather big assumption), the more likely figured quoted is 0.2 mSv per year - and that's if the current level of radiation leakage is both sustained over the course of a year and distributes perfectly evenly to the surrounding areas. Unless kuhjager hops on a plane to Tokyo and calls out some live updates with his geiger counter, it's all just hypotheticals, anyways.
There is no "point", other than to give it context against something that some people have already experienced, even if only peripherally. Don't read more into it than there is. Right now nobody really knows what the fuck is going on, or what the short term consequences are going to be. Never mind the long term. About the only thing anyone can say with any certainty is that it's not good. Everything else at this point is wild and rampant speculation, a lot of which is being done to further political crap in the US. And nobody's saying, that I've heard, the government is being overly safe. Quite the opposite. TEPCO has a history of covering shit up. If anything, they're making it look not as bad as it really is, which is why every nuclear power on the planet has sent their own investigators on-site to report back what's going on.
And as to Ghetto's point about the lower mortality rate, he was close. There are actually reports that some mildly nuked people (that were some distance from ground zero) did actually show a decrease in cancer when compared to the norm. It was quite a low change from the norm, but it was present. I remember reading a few non-BS links about it on another site, but can't find the links right now.
<a class="postlink-local" href="http://www.theidiotboard.com/viewtopic.php?p=112769#p112769" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">viewtopic.php?p=112769#p112769</a> And I totally agree. I'm just responding to the insane assertion that the Japanese government is being "overly safe" anything.
The crazy thing is, I think the Government is just getting pissed off with the BS coming from TEPCO. The fact that the Emperor went on TV (which shocked the FUCK out of a major part of the population), and demanded more candor from TEPCO speaks volumes. At least that's their public stance... might just be setting up the public scapegoat. Who knows?