Local responses to Japan's global nuclear disaster.

Mods: move if you think if fits elsewhere, I'm looking at global effects here

First, a few words of reason, caution, and advice:

There is no doubt whatsoever the situation is bad, getting worse, and will persist for at least months, well into typhoon season. Not pretty to think about, but necessary. However, we must keep proper perspective. No one is going to drop dead tomorrow from the fallout outside the bounds of that plant. Inside...well, they are heroes and their sacrifices should be honored, not with unwarranted panic but by intelligent use of what they are buying us: time. Time to absorb the enormity and accept it. In 'Nam we had a phrase that covered everything from a "Dear John" to the most unsettling, horrific things you can imagine:

"There it is...Sorry 'bout that."

Reality acknowledged, accepted, and placed in context, allowing you to move and function in extreme emotional environments.

So steel your will, forget your fears and look dispassionately at what is real and what the foreseeable consequences of that reality are going to be, so that we may take the appropriate precautions in time to avoid those dangers we can, mitigate those we can't, and identify those requiring concerted effort.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is wrecked beyond hope of recovery and it will be months, if ever, before the situation will be brought under control:

cryptome.org...

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said a full-scale recovery of cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is needed to stem the leakage of radioactive substances, but that work will take several months.

A senior official of the agency, Hidehiko Nishiyama, made the comments at a news conference on Sunday. Highly radioactive water was found inside turbine buildings and also in tunnels under the plant. The radioactive water is flowing directly into the sea.

The agency said it will take several months to remove the contaminated water in the turbine buildings and to take measures to protect workers from radiation.

www3.nhk.or.jp...

At least one core, Unit 1 has melted down and is undergoing localized criticality and emitting an enormous amount of radioactivity and an exotic array of isotopes whose half-lives range in length from seconds to several hundred thousand years, including neutrons, chlorine 38, iodine 131, and cesium 137, to name a few.

[yvid]

Good post, some good points raised there.
How exactly would your average Joe Bloggs go about "making sure these threat assessments are carried out"? I have no equipment or idea how to monitor radiation, I assume that ambient radiation has already increased worldwide, to the ignorance of the majority who likewise have no idea what levels currently are or indeed, what "safe" levels should be.
It`s pretty easy information to hide or manipulate, as from what I have seen there are few reliable, up to the minute resources.

reply to post by AnnonymousLurker


Do what I have done: this morning I called Washington and asked for precisely this monitoring. I called the FAA, and sent an email to JAL.

If you are flying, be sure to question the flightcrew about the issue and ask if the engines have been screened recently for radioactivity.

Call your local water company and question them about it.

Keep asking questions of the relevant people and eventually a few will begin to actually monitor these things and report back.

Well I`m in the UK, won`t be flying ( unless TSHTF here of course ) and doubt very much if my local authority would get back to me within 6 months, if at all, based on my previous dealings with them.
Good call on the water companies though, I will email and telephone my local water company and ask them if measures are being taken to measure any contaminants that may be getting into the supply as a result of this fallout.

Here's a conversion from bequerels per liter to sievert equivalent for those who need help translating, like I did:

www.llrc.org...

Calculating doses from Iodine.

Take the figure for Becquerels per litre (Bq/l). (There is information on the internet. LLRC has no resources for monitoring it all). If, as in USA, the radioactivity levels are expressed in picoCuries (pCi), convert pCi to Becquerels (Bq) by multiplying by 0.037.

To convert a dietary intake into a dose multiply the Becquerels by 0.11 and the answer will be the dose in microSieverts. For example, if a litre of water is contaminated with 0.5 Bq, drinking it will give 0.5 x 0.11 = 0.055microSv. (This uses the ECRR adult dose coefficient for Iodine 131 which is slightly different to the ICRP dose coefficient - see ECRR 2010 p. 244).

The cancer risk associated with this dose is small. It can be calculated by dividing the dose in microSv by 1 billion. For the above example this means that if a billion people each drank a litre of water contaminated with 0.5 Bq then 5.5 of them would develop cancer over a period of 50 years. The individual person would increase his or her chances of getting cancer by 1 in 182 million. (This uses the ECRR cancer risk coefficient of 0.1 per Sievert which is different to the ICRP risk coefficient 0.05 per Sievert - see ECRR 2010 p. 180).

Note that this calculation is for a single intake. Iodine 131 loses half of its radioactivity in 8.04 days. This means that if your water supply comes from rainfall and if the rain becomes contaminated in a single episode the radioactivity will decay to 1/16th of its original concentration during a month and so on. That's assuming no further releases from the reactor affect your region.

Black Ops on CRIIRAD?

In the last few days many websites and newspapers have misreported Iodine dose figures from the French NGO CRIIRAD. It is claimed that CRIIRAD has said if a child under 2 years ingested 50 Becquerels of Iodine 131 the dose would be 10milliSieverts. At best, this is a transcription error; at worst it's a propaganda attack intended to discredit good sources of independent advice by making them look like scaremongers.

CRIIRAD actually said: Les enfants en bas âge (0 – 2 ans) sont les plus vulnérables : l’ingestion d’une cinquantaine de becquerels d’iode 131 suffit à délivrer à leur organisme une dose de 10 µSv. (Children under the age of 2 are the most vulnerable. Ingesting about 50 becquerels of Iodine 131 is enough to give them a dose of 10 µSv.) That's 10 microsieverts, a thousand times smaller than 10 millisieverts.

We have checked the calculation. It appears that CRIIRAD has used ICRP dose and risk coefficients and a ten-fold multiplier to correct for the small body mass of these little children. This is reasonable (for any given intake, a small body mass means a larger dose). According to LLRC's arithmetic the effective dose to the child is 11µSv. Using ECRR dose coefficients it would be 27.5µSv.

So beware of nonsense on the net. The micro / milli confusion can arise because the International System of Units (SI) uses the letter m to stand for milli or 1/1,000. The Greek letter mu (µ) stands for micro or 1/1,000,000. Some software packages use the Symbol font to allow Greek characters and the key you press to get µ is the "M" key. If someone pastes the resulting text into an editor that doesn't recognise Symbol it will give an m. It looks like a small error but in this case it's a thousand times wrong.

I contacted my local (Southern California) water agency and discovered that they are just beginning to start "accelerated" testing our local water supplies for radiation levels. They are doing this in response to calls from locals questioning the safety of the water due to Fukushima. My contact stated that not much is being done statewide, and so far as he knew, no one was monitoring the snowpack for accumulations of radioactives. He did acknowledge that radioactives would probably accumulate and become a problem with the melt, but no one he knew of had considered the possibility yet.

In an interesting conversation with one of my Senator's Washington DC staff, during which I criticized her for failing to keep the public informed and failing to acknowledge the seriousness of the fallout threat to US citizens, the staffer said:

"It isn't the place of a senator to declare a state of national emergency, that is the duty and perogative of the President."

It makes me wonder if they are contemplating declaring a national state of emergency eventually, and if so, when.

Received no response to my first or second emails to local water authority. Rang them on 29/3/11 and they were pretty disinterested and said someone would get back to me within 7 days. Still nothing.