Scaremongering about Fukushima radiation is damaging

Let alone the infinitesimal amount released by the Fukushima event.

reply to post by Aim64C
That 'infinitesimal amount' shouldn't keep you from camping out for a few days next to the reactors at Fukushima, I suppose?

Might even be good for what ails you.

reply to post by butcherguy

That 'infinitesimal amount' shouldn't keep you from camping out for a few days next to the reactors at Fukushima, I suppose?

Might even be good for what ails you.

It's not going to stop me from going to Japan or the West coast of the U.S.

Let's not entertain scenarios constructed to be deliberately void of brain function.

reply to post by Aim64C

Let's not entertain scenarios constructed to be deliberately void of brain function.

I'm not the one that used the term infinitesimal in referring to Fukushima radiation amounts.

Originally posted by Aim64C
Yeah... there's a special word we use to describe people like you.

Shill?

Originally posted by Aim64C
Look, sunshine. Coal combustion releases Carbon-14, U-238 and 235, as well as radon gas and Thorium (and a host of other radioactive isotopes and compounds). More Uranium is released from coal combustion, the world over, than is used in nuclear reactors that same year (again, the world over). That's just Uranium. That doesn't begin to account for the other radioactive nonsense released freely into the atmosphere by coal combustion.

We all know burning coal is not a environmental friendly source of electricity. Doesn't mean nuclear energy is any better or safer. At least we know the types of radiation found in nature are not as volatile as those produced in nuclear reactors. Doesn't mean that they are safe:

Here's an interesting tidbit on cancer in 1771 related to Soot that collaborates illness related to the burning of Coal.

1775 Percival Pott: showed that chimney sweeps had an occupation-related cancer risk. Soot that collected under their scrotum was associated with scrotal cancer. This discovery lead to additional studies which identified other occupational cancer risks. The identification of these risks allowed public health measures to be taken.

Originally posted by Aim64C
Far more - nearly double the amount of radioactive material is released into the atmosphere by burning coal than is used in nuclear power plants.

Let's not mislead with this statement, nuclear reactors produce far more dangerous nuclear isotopes than what are found in nature: Plutonium, curium, iodine-181, cesium-137 etc. Many of these are far more volatile. and dangerous to our health. Not to when they escape, it happens in far higher concentration.

Originally posted by Aim64C
Let alone the infinitesimal amount released by the Fukushima event.

I doubt it's infinitesimal. 3 Reactors melted down, tonnes of spent fuel ejected everywhere. Far more concentration of actual radioactive material than a coal stack could produce in a single area.

Originally posted by Aim64C
If the disaster was everything you kooks cracked it up to be, we would have killed ourselves off from radiation poisoning back in the 1800s.

We seem to be doing that right now, cancer kills over 500,000 people a year. Fortunately, cancer treatment is reducing that amount by 1-2% so death by cancer is in a slow decline thanks to better treatment. Still the numbers are staggering. Will be interesting to see the rate of cancer in 2021, 2031 since Fukushima.

reply to post by YouAreDreaming

We seem to be doing that right now, cancer kills over 500,000 people a year. Fortunately, cancer treatment is reducing that amount by 1-2% so death by cancer is in a slow decline thanks to better treatment. Still the numbers are staggering. Will be interesting to see the rate of cancer in 2021, 2031 since Fukushima.

Populations of domestic rats have far higher cancer rates than those of wild rats. The human population is similar to domestic rats in their selection for longevity - which results in a systemic lengthening of telomeres that correlates to both longer cell-line life and higher rates of mutations becoming cancerous.

What am I saying? Far more to cancer than radiation.

I doubt it's infinitesimal. 3 Reactors melted down, tonnes of spent fuel ejected everywhere. Far more concentration of actual radioactive material than a coal stack could produce in a single area.

Well, since we're getting technical, perhaps we should think about the ways in which material can be released. In a "melt down" - the rods fuse together. In extreme cases, they become a molten pool of metal that literally burns through much of what it touches.

What separates Chernobyl from other types of releases is the manner in which the core was exposed (and the complete lack of shielding on the damned thing - but let's not get into reactor design). When the idiots working with the KGB (or whoever) flushed the coolant onto the superheated rods, it created an explosion that blew the reactor containment chamber to hell and back - exposing the core to the atmosphere (if not scattering it across the compound).

Nothing comparably similar happened at Fukushima. The reactor cores were never exposed to the open atmosphere (able to look out upon a town of confused people, staring at Cerenkov radiation).

Let's not mislead with this statement, nuclear reactors produce far more dangerous nuclear isotopes than what are found in nature: Plutonium, curium, iodine-181, cesium-137 etc. Many of these are far more volatile. and dangerous to our health.

In inconsequential amounts and concentrations, unless you are going to start chugging reactor coolant used to flush the rods.

Originally posted by Aim64CPopulations of domestic rats have far higher cancer rates than those of wild rats. The human population is similar to domestic rats in their selection for longevity - which results in a systemic lengthening of telomeres that correlates to both longer cell-line life and higher rates of mutations becoming cancerous.

What am I saying? Far more to cancer than radiation.

Radiation is not the only cause of cancer, pesticides, asbestos, food dyes and the list goes on. Even the sun can cause cancer, so it's really a wide spectrum of vectors which contribute to the over all epidemic we face.

Originally posted by Aim64C
Well, since we're getting technical, perhaps we should think about the ways in which material can be released. In a "melt down" - the rods fuse together. In extreme cases, they become a molten pool of metal that literally burns through much of what it touches.

What separates Chernobyl from other types of releases is the manner in which the core was exposed (and the complete lack of shielding on the damned thing - but let's not get into reactor design). When the idiots working with the KGB (or whoever) flushed the coolant onto the superheated rods, it created an explosion that blew the reactor containment chamber to hell and back - exposing the core to the atmosphere (if not scattering it across the compound).

Nothing comparably similar happened at Fukushima. The reactor cores were never exposed to the open atmosphere (able to look out upon a town of confused people, staring at Cerenkov radiation).

Are you forgetting all the spend fuel rods that were ejected during the explosion?

www.nytimes.com...

… The [confidential U.S.] document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown “up to one mile from the units,” and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be “bulldozed over,” presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed. …

Originally posted by Aim64C
In inconsequential amounts and concentrations, unless you are going to start chugging reactor coolant used to flush the rods.

Yet Tempco had to use sea-water to cool the reactors and this had to be dumped into the pacific ocean.

www.bloomberg.com...

The problem is the lack of transparency with this crisis and the fact Japan and the media seem to be caught in a cover-up just like Russia during Chernobyl.

Without all the facts, on is left wanting on a crisis with a magnitude we have never before seen. The radiation from this mess is now everywhere. And that's a fact Jack. It doesn't care how you spin it. Will be here for thousands of years bio-accumulating and moving through water, soil and food supply. We should be alarmed and concerned.

The US EPA sent monitors to the Marianas Islands, Hawaii, and the West Coast of the United States.

They were releasing all data to the public on what they were detecting....until the last week of March when they detected Tellurium 132...

It only has a half life of 100 hours. Pretty nasty stuff only found when nuclear reactors go critical.

After they detected Tellurium 132 on the Marianas Islands, Hawaii, and the West Coast......no more data from the EPA has been released to the public.

Presidential Order.....the data would stop commerce/tourism.

Translation:

The truth about Fukushima radiation is bad for the economy, and thus we should tell people it's okay and have them die of cancer so our shares grow.

Originally posted by m1991
Translation:

The truth about Fukushima radiation is bad for the economy, and thus we should tell people it's okay and have them die of cancer so our shares grow.

Well.. since we "went there".....

"... and think of how much money we'll make adjusting our actuarial tables and the insurance costs we can bill for "treatment."

reply to post by Maxmars

Imagine that. A radiation oncology specialist who has focused greatly on the Chernobyl incident claiming that "psychological damage" was the worst aspect of the accidental exposure to radiation..... Is it me? Or does that seem patently outrageous to state...

Uh huh. Whoever says it.

Corporate industry is rendering our world physically unfit for life - but public health policies and agencies focus on the psychology of health, and stress that health is a personal responsibility.

Pun intended, and the lines are drawn.


S&F& btw.

reply to post by Maxmars


Explanation: S&F!

I had the opportunity to watch a very credible and well recognized [in Australia] science show on abc tv [abc.net.au] and they just so happened to cover this very issue [kudos to them for doing that].

Here ...

Catalyst: Radiation 101 (Reporter: Dr Graham Phillips
Thursday, 1 September 2011) [abc.net.au]

NARRATION
What's a safe level of radiation exposure? Back in the fifties, they must have thought it was high. They planned to use nukes for engineering.

Fifties TV presenter
Excavations of new harbours, big dams, canals, passes through rugged mountainous terrain. Nuclear explosives for large projects that are simply not feasible with conventional methods, created in seconds, with the tremendous energy of the peaceful atom.

NARRATION
Today, we know safe exposure levels are low. Question is, how low? After accidents like Fukushima, when's it safe to return? Were people exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, and what are acceptable levels of contamination in food? As radiation expert Rick Tinker shows, take a few measurements around your home, and you can see why safety is not an easy question to answer.

NARRATION
So back to that original question - what is a safe level?

Dr Peter Karamoskos
In 2006 a major landmark study deemed that there is actually no threshold below which radiation does not pose a longer-term risk of cancer.

NARRATION
And that's the problem with trying to decide a safe level of radiation exposure.

Dr Graham Phillips
Even nature's radiation which is always all around us, causes cancer. So any increase on that from artificial sources, causes more.

NARRATION
The answer is to keep radiation from both artificial and natural sources as low as you possibly can.

Personal Disclosure: Now they made a nice segway with that ... into this article about Nuclear Fungi [abc.net.au] which just goes to show that mother nature is far weirder and tougher than anything we can throw at her!

These fungi may one day help clean up radioactive waste, or even lead to the development of new cancer treatments. But if there's a nuclear accident in the meantime, don't panic right away - that mushroom cloud might not be what you think it is.

Nice little doll you have there, too bad it needs so much help standing.

Stack filtration devices, such as electrostatic precipitators, baghouses, and scrubbers are routinely used to reduce the emission of fly ash to the atmosphere by at least 95 percent. A small fraction of the fly ash produced, typically 2-5 percent, is released into the air.

The EPA (eeeepa!) says and has the following to say about coal ash:

Coal ash is formed when coal is burned in boilers that generate steam for power generation and industrial applications. TENORM is generated when burning removes organic constituents, leaving minerals and concentrating trace quantities of naturally occurring radionuclides:

uranium
thorium
potassium
their radioactive decay products including radium. (The amount radium in coal can vary by more than two orders of magnitude depending upon the type of coal and where it was mined.)

No denying the inclusion of these radionuclides in the ash. In what quantities are they present?

In addition to TENORM, coal ash contains silicon, aluminum, iron, and calcium; these elements make up about 80 to 90 percent of all of the constituents of coal ash.

So let's be generosity and give you 20 percent of ash as radionuclides.

The average yearly generation of coal ash is about 61 million metric tons (MT). In 1990, the combustion of coal in utility and industrial boilers generated 61.6 million MT of coal ash and slags and 17.2 million MT of sludges.

61.6*.20=12.32 million metric tons of radionuclides for all types present.


A report by Oak Ridge National Lab says:

Trace quantities of uranium in coal range from less than 1 part per million (ppm) in some samples to around 10 ppm in others. Generally, the amount of thorium contained in coal is about 2.5 times greater than the amount of uranium. For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively. Using these values along with reported consumption and projected consumption of coal by utilities provides a means of calculating the amounts of potentially recoverable breedable and fissionable elements (see sidebar). The concentration of fissionable uranium-235 (the current fuel for nuclear power plants) has been established to be 0.71% of uranium content.

12,323,000*.0071=8,747.2 metric tons

A table at the World Nuclear Association shows us the current and planned plants need 69,971 tonnes. Granted that list shows a lot of plants yet to come online, but I think we still use more in reactors presently than 8,747.2 metrics tones per year.

And what about concentration?
EPA Tenorm Sources tables:

Wastes
Radiation Level [pCi/g]
low average high
Bottom Ash 1.6 3.5-4.6 7.7
Fly Ash 2 5.8 9.7

This online conversion utility shows us that 1 Bcq is equivalent to 27.027... pCi.

And how many petabcquerels of waste water has there been leaked?

Now someone please show me where I messed up my maths because I'm sure I did.

At least I provided sources for information rather than making ad hoc generalizations.

Let's face facts here.

At the moment it appears that things aren't getting worse in Japan. No news is good news? And no fresh earthquakes either.

Nothing has blown up lately, no jets of steam to indicate burning or that core material has reached the water table or is even threatening to do so, there's a record catch of Salmon in Alaska this summer, and nobody is dropping dead anywhere, yet.

Maybe those 3 "burning" reactors aren't doing much burning and are just laying there in the bottom of the containment vessels like they're supposed to do, and as the news tells us?

No government anywhere seems concerned either. Especially not Japan or its neighbors.

So apparently everything is fine for the moment. What's the squawk? Where's the problem?

Originally posted by ararisq
Yay! I'm thinking like a big-government liberal!

This is different from a big government conservative how?

Anyway the truth on Fukushima seems hard to discern.

Originally posted by Pervius
The US EPA sent monitors to the Marianas Islands, Hawaii, and the West Coast of the United States.

They were releasing all data to the public on what they were detecting....until the last week of March when they detected Tellurium 132...

It only has a half life of 100 hours. Pretty nasty stuff only found when nuclear reactors go critical.

After they detected Tellurium 132 on the Marianas Islands, Hawaii, and the West Coast......no more data from the EPA has been released to the public.

Presidential Order.....the data would stop commerce/tourism.

You wouldn't happen to have links/sources to anything solid for this, would you? Far from challenging what you are saying, I'm asking because I've been building a sort of 'record' of the Fukushima event since it started. What you're describing would sure make for a critical piece I've yet to see. Perhaps someone thought to screen shot anything related to this at the time?

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


This Forbes article will get you started.

This post also contains pertinent information for your topic.

And Here is yet another worthy post for you.

I don't have anything on a presidential order (first tme I recallthat being mentioned I think), but just about any topic related will have been covered at some point in the mega thread and with a bit of search usage, should be fairly easily unearthed.

Finally here is an entire thread dedicated to EPA shenanigans.

Hope these help.

All of the technical details regarding measurement and comparisons seem beside the point to me.

Not that I disagree or otherwise.. .the information is important.

But the OP (as I queried originally) is whether it is scientifically and or logically to state that the psychological impact of the morass of information is more damaging than the actual radiation itself.

But don't let that intention dissuade your arguments... thus far it has been very educational... and hopefully in the end we can say for certain that we accept the metrics of the situation... whatever they finally may coalesce into.

The propaganda machine is hard at work.

reply to post by jadedANDcynical

I appreciate the links. They do help fill in a couple blanks for me. Here is one in return that ought to prove useful and keep you busy for quite some time if you don't already have it.

Fukushima Disaster Photo Series

By starting around April 1 and following up, one will find hundreds of photos in a long running series of photo sets showing every conceivable angle of Fukushima from the start of the crisis to present. The media has used a tiny % of these....here are the rest. There are even several interior shots from file stock which show what some objects looked like inside before they became visible from the outside and most importantly, what was around those 'landmarks' before things were blown all over the place.

Addition: I'd put this together from Google Earth and their Ruler tool, but to put things in perspective while looking at the photos on the above link, the open, unprotected ocean water to the south of the plant is fairly close to each building that exploded. Exactly how close? Reactor 4 was 159 yards, Reactor 3 was 273 yards and Reactor 1, a distant 493 yards. The measurement is from dead center of the buildings to the discharge pipes which normally dump into open water at the S.E. corner there. This isn't fear mongering, just the cold facts...and they don't exactly paint the rosey picture TEPCO would have the world believe right now. The building explosions would appear to have literally blown higher than the distance was to open ocean water....


To keep with the thread, I don't personally see where any degree of fear mongering by the MSM or anyone else can really do more harm than the event itself is continuing to do. There wouldn't even be room to scare/fear monger if they'd been 100% up front from the start. In fact, I'll go so far as to say TEPCO and the Japanese Government could still recover some trust.....

They COULD make an outreach to the strongest organized opposition and skeptics to their version of events and together, place and monitor radiation sensors both around the plant and on buoys off-shore. I think the whole world would benefit from such an open display of data, good or bad. They just have to accept that without that outreach, they've blown their credibility so badly that declaring the sky was blue would still have a fair number of people looking outside to confirm it, IMHO.

reply to post by Maxmars


When the Spanish Flu outbreak occurred there were people in charge who said the same thing: "Don't be an Alarmist!!" So people kept congregating, not washing their hands, not wearing masks, gathering in parades and traveling etc....and millions died worldwide.

When Hurricane Camile was bearing down in the Gulf it was the same thing- "Don't be a fear monger!" When forecasters were first able to see tornado formation signatures on radar they were told "Don't be an Alarmist!" and weren't even allowed to say the word 'tornado' in their forecasts.

It was the corporations and industry that wanted the news on any possibly dangerous event or thing 'toned down' ...so people would keep smoking, shopping and traveling and working in their #ty factories and getting shipped out for their #ty wars.

So now whenever I see someone calling another person an 'Alarmist' or 'Fear Monger' I immediately suspect the name caller of nefarious reasons.

TPTB have done the same thing for too long, hiding facts from the people; following the same patterns (fear monger!) and language (alarmist!) and ultimately it almost always results in one thing: the common people dead, dying or in the midst of devastation while the elite skip town or observe the misery from their mansion on the hill. All the while of course, plotting how to make even more money from the disaster.

If people are in danger- they need to know and they need to have knowledge and a healthy fear so they will take positive, protective action - even if it cuts into industry profit margins. So kiss my ass.