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Originally Posted by giver99
I agree. This will be worse. Chernobyl 4 only had 192 tonnes of fuel with no spent fuel pools involved
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The only way it would be worse is if there was an explosion like Chernobyl that vaporized and put most of that into the atmosphere. Which isn't happening.
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Originally Posted by giver99
"The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant said on Tuesday that they are concerned that the radiation leakage could eventually exceed that of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
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What "could" happen and what will happen are two different things, I prefer to react to what is real rather than when someone keeps saying the sky is falling.
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Originally Posted by giver99
Comparing radioactive cesium or iodine with naturally occurring radioactive substances - even those which can become internal emitters (bannanas for instance) - is incorrect and misleading. For internal emitters, quantum effects dominate and the energies are very high due to the small distances involved. There is no legitimate comparison between a one-time X-ray and ingesting particles that continuously radiate you for the rest of your life.
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"Quantum effects dominate" is vague and sounds like a scary phrase rather than something meaningful, the distances involved aren't quantum, they're molecular. But the distances are still smaller and having the stuff inside does have the potential for more harm yes. That's why children are at higher risk because they are still absorbing Iodine.
Iodine has a half life of 8 days, so it's got nothing to do with the rest of your life. Cesium has a longer half life (which means it's less radioactive) but has a short biological half life and does't get concentrated like Iodine does, so radioactive Cesium will tend to get flushed from the body.
Potassium on the other hand is a source of constant radioactivity to the body, since a percentage of Potassium is always radioactive. From the internal potassium in your body you are exposed to 4,000 Becquerels (that's 4000 events per second), and Potassium is spread throughout your body like Cesium. And Potassium decay is more energetic than Cesium.
Carbon-14 is another one you are constantly exposed to, because you ingest it constantly, so it never gets eliminated from the body. And Carbon gets used right in the DNA! So by your reasoning radioactive Carbon-14 should be far more harmful if your "quantum effects dominate" phrase is true.. radioactive Iodine and Cesium are in the cells and can irradiate the DNA when they decay, but Carbon-14 is right in the DNA! So when it decays it can irradiate the DNA AND since it's changed from Carbon to Nitrogen now the DNA is damaged.
You are exposed to 3,700 Becquerels from Carbon-14, and 50 of those are inside your DNA. That means 50 times a second, a Carbon atom in your DNA is decaying into Nitrogen.
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Originally Posted by giver99
Water contaminated, air contaminated, animal life contaminated, food contaminated. No known solution in sight. We are all, globally, in the grip of a disaster that has no easy ending.
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Be more specific. This is just fear mongering hyperbole that's easy to hide behind.
Either that or your definition of contaminated is so loose your predictions are already true due to background radiation of living on this planet.
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Originally Posted by giver99
What impact?
For starters, they have lost the Kanto Plain where a lot of the Japan's food is grown:
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Lol, the first article says they'll ban planting where the measurements are too high, and the one area they've actually measured high levels isn't even on the Kanto Plain.
The second talks about measurements in one place, the place where it's been detected the highest, where it far exceeds anywhere else measured, so extrapolation from a small area to a big one isn't warranted. It also admits that the estimates are based on assumptions that the radiation isn't going to move, which it does, subsequent measurements from the areas around the plant are far lower. Plus the article gets some units incorrect and I can't even find a resource for some of their measurements.
Reacting to the reality is far better than hyperbole.
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Originally Posted by giver99
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That's the evaluation of one guy, using a risk model that doesn't seem to be accepted (from what I can see). From what I can read that risk model assumes
any increase in radiation always means an increase in cancer, and there's no evidence that that's true, and evidence to the contrary (cancer rates don't correlate to areas where natural radiation is far higher)
But come back in 10 years and we can evaluate, currently that number is zero.
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Originally Posted by giver99
What level of radiation?
Depends how close, which way the wind blows and how long it takes them to stop the continuous releases from the plant (still around 1 terrabecquerel an hour, I'll get you the link if you really want...)
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You're the one making the prediction of how awful it will be, you can't backtrack to "it depends".
Gamma dose rates across the 47 prefectures are tending to decrease at this point.
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Originally Posted by giver99
"The accumulated amount of radiation in the soil at Iitate, Fukushima Prefecture--which is located outside of the 30-km radius--calculated over a three-month period would exceed the annual accumulated amount of 20 millisieverts that the central government is considering as a guideline for evacuating residents"
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201104080169.html |
Sure, if you take one set of measurements for one area and extrapolate them over a larger area over a larger time frame you'll get a bigger problem.
But measurements not in Iitate are much lower (down to even background levels in some cases), and extrapolating over 3 months when one of the elements has a half life of 8 days exposes assumptions that aren't necessarily warranted.
Not to mention that areas of the globe where the background rate is 50 mSv/yr show no increase in cancers.
But better to induce irrational fear.
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Originally Posted by giver99
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That's about Radon (a gas), not radiation in general. Though it looks like an interesting study, I'll have to read it in detail to comment on it.
Though I will say the idea of a linear relationship between radiation dosage and risk is something that is used from a regulation point of view, but not something that is agreed upon by scientists (there's the radiation hormesis model and the threshold model as well).
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Originally Posted by giver99
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"a neutron beam that has landed a mile away", what you posted doesn't say anything close to that. I think I may have taken you too seriously.
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Originally Posted by giver99
If I could white board it for you, I would draw the secondary containment vessel with a box above showing the spent nuclear pool. Vessel explodes, pool above vessel gets taken along with it, nuclear rods, & fissile material launching into the sky.
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Sure, if it explodes. If we dropped bombs on it it would be a big problem too.
You'll notice one phrase in the PDF: "Recommendations are based on validity of above assumptions."
In some cases the assumptions are no longer valid; for example nitrogen purge capability isn't unknown, because it's being used. And where it's being used a hydrogen explosion is not possible, hydrogen being different than nitrogen.
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Originally Posted by giver99
You might want to bone up a bit more on radiation. Th EPA’s MCL for iodine-131 is 3 picoCuries per liter of water. (0.11 Bq/L) google it...
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And there was only one village that had a restriction on drinking water for Iodine-131 for infants, and currently the levels don't warrant the restriction but it's still in place as a precaution. The rest of the prefectures have levels far below that.
And the 3 piC/l MCL is based on a
70 year exposure; i.e. a permanent level for a lifetime of exposure.
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Originally Posted by giver99
I don't know if Tokyo will be abandoned or not when the south flow picks up in the coming weeks.
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I wish you'd said that first, it would have saved me a lot of time.
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