fukishima and the end of the world

Ill post more as i find them.. the big batch of radiation is set to hit march of this year so lets see it get worse.
The un needs to step in and take over the clean up and repairs.. not some idiotic company

Theres a lot that can be done but the company running the damn site won't step down and let others help.
The water can be pumps and contained and sealed but they just let it leak and leak and leak.
Theres people who are willing to go in and fix this and risk their lives to help save japan and the rest of the world this effects but again its not happening.

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_bXRomCtPs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RspHyKohBmU

Haven't watched the videos, but I did look at the date of those two articles, and they're almost three years old.

Neither articles say how much radiation there is.

The guy might live near a coal-fired power station. That dose per hour is marginally higher than the normal around the globe. 10 microsievert per day is a super common dose for people.

I watched parts of some of the other videos, but I laughed too much.

Come back with some numbers, and hard figures please. In units of Bananas, because eating a banana will give you a 0.1 microsievert dose of radiation.

theres one if you search radiation his cha was ......stars like st4rz had numbers from sites. again ill try to find it. also search up the tuna findings with high levels from pacific and melted starfish ................. yes there are idiots making lies but if bald eagles are dating the fish and dying soon anything we buy or eat thats contaminated that japan says is clean but isnt and kills you. theres another video of a farmer admiting he wont eat what he grows but he sells it because he is forced to even though theres high levels. if the readings from there match here then this is the wake up call. tepco admitted lying about the readings already.
also now there going to move the rods.... thats like plying operation with a shakey hand. damage will be worse

also the jet stream will carry this all over the world... water spreads then we absorb it. never mind ww3 with iran the problem is japan opening thier arms for help rather then dealing with tepco. sadly they are too stubborn and the government is so secretive of the real damage done.

Don't tell me to search. You're the one claiming that the problem exists. You need to do the work to convince us.

This pretty much sums it up nicely.
To quote George Carlin on this matter:

"I have lost the faith in my own species a long time ago."

Read the counter readings and look at when it says dangerous.
You clearly havnt.

Really then go fishing in the pacific ocean and catch yourself some nice tuna

If radiation kills you, you're pretty lucky something else didn't get you first. Unless you're swimming in pools of nucleair waste.

Oh boy someone to challenge me to cross half the planet to get myself some tuna, I can't possibly argue with that, you got me.

Heres your numbers
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/california-radiation-levels/#measurements
http://mysite.verizon.net/Zeissler/Geiger/

heres a reading from tahoe

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/10/28-signs-that-west-coast-is-being.html

I read the counter readings on the first. Then I did some research on what normal readings were. Then I realised the video was filmed by a scaremongering fool.

Let's follow that link and see what is says about radiation...

Does it mention Fukushima? NO!

Does it mention the dreaded radiation? Yes. Once. Here, let me quote the passage.

It's the natural biotoxins that are to blame. Or the auto-immune diseases. Or the hormonal factors.

Basically. They don't know. They're being awesome by checking for everything, before panicking and posting onto forums, blogs, and Tumblr.

This doesn't give any hard evidence that Fukushima is to blame. Even checked this guy's source. It's lots of emotive words, rheotoric, and highlighting of cute, digestable, phrases that don't reveal any light on the story.

Well of course nobody wants to see anchovy stocks wiped out! What are we going to put on our pizzas?

And elevated levels of Cesium-137? I didn't know that there were non-elevated levels of Cesium-137. Fun fact: Cesium-137 does not occur in nature. If you detect any amount, it's elevated.

Oh, and guess what?! It gets worse. Cesium-137 spits out an electron when it decays. Yes. A single electron. Electrons don't cause mutations. Electrons don't cause cancer. That's how dangerous it is.

See his source? What he used as evidence? Yeah, that. I clicked on it and had a read.

Nobody blamed Fukushima, or radiation.

At.

All.

Source: Sorry, this article is no longer available.

Don't worry, we all know it was the radiation. A blogger I follow said so. </sarcasm>


I'll run through the rest in the next few days. But right now I'm about to head out to see the Hobbit.

I'm not going to wade into this discussion much as I've seen it all before. Unfortunately, the fear of radiation has always caused more harm than the radiation itself ever has, and there are a lot of misconceptions that people have aired in this thread. I know argument from authority is not a definitive standpoint, however when dealing with complex issues, it is generally a good idea to trust people who have devoted a lot of time and effort to studying them, rather than dubiously sourced youtube videos made by people with a poor comprehension of the underlying science behind these issues.

With that in mind, I will say this. I have spent the last 4 years of my life gaining a PhD in materials science relating to nuclear applications. I have spent a great deal of time and effort studying radiation and nuclear technology. I have been an author on three well received scientific papers in this field, with more to be published soon, as well as having presented at both national and international conferences. I have visited multiple nuclear reactors, at various different nuclear-licensed sites, and I'm very familiar with both the operating characteristics of a number of different reactor builds, and just how dangerous they can be if things go wrong. Although I myself have not been involved in the analysis of the radiological data being collected around Fukishima, I am familiar with it. People working in my research group have been involved in analysis of the data from Fukushima, and their recommendations have formed part of the UK government's international policy towards Fukushima, and nuclear technology in general. I suspect that non of this will mean anything to those who are desperate to believe that nuclear technology is the most evil thing on the planet, but I feel it is important to describe my background.

The biggest problem I have noticed in nuclear public relations is the perception of risk. Every action I perform carries a risk associated with it of causing me death or injury, even if it is something as mundane as arguing with people on the internet. It is true that there is a risk associated with using nuclear power, however that risk is incommensurate with most people's estimation of it. If you were to live 10 miles away from an active reactor, and even work at that nuclear power plant every day of the week for your entire life, the biggest risk in that scenario would still be the drive to work.

I would love to do an exhaustive and thorough de-bunking of many of the myths brought out about Fukushima, however that is a lengthy process. I will happily answer any questions anybody has, as this is my area of expertise.

The point I do not like about this way of thinking is that it ignores how big of a worst case scenario you can get. The worst case scenario of driving to work is a very local small incident.
The worst case scenario of a nuclear power planet is making potentially very large areas uninhabitable.
Yes the chance that it happens is very low for one plant. But if we increase the amount of plants and the time they run accidents will happen. It is basically only a matter of time until the next one blows up. Let's hope it is not near some giant town that is impossible to evacuate.

Not to forget: The whole waste problem is still unsolved. Basically all responsible people seem to work based on a "so let's store it until I am retired"-concept. But the waste will stay even after that and I don't know of any way to get rid of it.

What I find funny about the thread's creator is that he seems very concerned about the USA's west coast getting affected by radiation. Let me guess, you actually live in the USA, don't you? You didn't say a single word about how the Japanese people had to live through the earthquake, the following tsunami and the initial radiation created by the defecting reactor in Fukushima. No concern about the people who actually had to live through the hell of that day and who lost their homes, family and friends. Not even an inch of solidarity. But as soon as your country is getting affected even in the slightest you start to get worried. People like you, who only think of themselves make me sick. People like you are the reason why this planet is going down the toilet.

Sorry if this sounds offensive (because it pretty much is), but some things just need to be said sometimes.

This is precisely what I'm talking about when I discuss poor evaluation of risk. There is a perception that when nuclear reactors fail, they fail big. Indeed the phrase nuclear disaster has come to mean a disaster of epic proportions in common vernacular.

Except it's not true.

Take a little look at Chernobyl, which is widely and correctly regarded as the worst nuclear disaster in the history of the technology. Many people would instinctively estimate that the death toll from such a disaster to be in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions. However the actual direct death-toll of people we can say definitely died from radiation poisoning is 28, and the number of thyroid cancers that we can say are definitively caused by radioisotope release is 15 [1]. The rest is a case of increased risk of cancer, spread across most of Europe, which we estimate may lead to an additional 4000 deaths [1]. This is the total death toll expected over the lifetime of the released isotopes, meaning it is spread over many decades. If this is spread out over the next century, then that means 40 deaths per year on average. The thing is that there is already a significant risk of developing cancer in the modern world, mostly down to increased life expectancy meaning that long term diseases kill a larger proportion of people as opposed to more mundane things such as malnutrition and poor drinking water. The cancer rate due to natural causes varies from year to year, and given that 2012 saw 3440 cancer cases in Europe [2], it only takes a small variance (about 1.1%) in the yearly figures to completely eclipse the potential death toll from Chernobyl. Non of this excuses the ridiculous negligence of the reactor operators, or denies the existence of the human tragedy which followed, but it does help put it in perspective.

Now go back to the car example. If we are going to compare the two, given that we have only compared Chernobyl on a continental level, it is only fair to do the same with road accidents. 1 car crash is indeed a small incident, most likely fatal only to those directly involved. However across all of Europe, there isn't just one car crash - there are hundreds of thousands. The death toll is in-fact over 40000 a year [3]. I personally think that it puts things in perspective that our roads cause 10 Chernobyls every year.

But of course, it is slightly disingenuous to compare motoring to nuclear power considering that they are two completely different activities. Lets look instead at other forms of power production. If I were to ask most people what the most dangerous accident in electricity production was, Chernobyl would probably be the most common answer.

But that's not true either.

The most horrific accident in the history of power production was the Banqiao Dam disaster in 1975. In this, a dam failure precipitated the failures of a series of other dams in the Ru river system. approximately 26,000 people were killed in the initial flood, while a further 145,000 people died due to the resulting collapse of infrastructure and sanitation in the region, leading to mass epidemics and famine. It was a disaster so horrendous that it makes Chernobyl look like a paper-cut, yet because it doesn't have the word "nuclear" in it, it is almost completely ignored.

Indeed, if we want to sensibly compare deaths caused by power production, we need to look at a large number of different factors, including construction deaths, waste production, actuary rates of deaths caused by transport, raw materials manufacture and fuel mining, as well as the accidents. Furthermore, it makes sense to normalise it with respect to the amount of power produced. As every form of power production will have some deaths, and sources that are used more will therefore naturally have a higher death toll, we need to divide the total number of deaths by the total amount of power produced. This is a difficult calculation, but these are the most complete estimates I have been able to find [4]:

Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal (elect, heat,cook –world avg) 100 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal electricity – world avg 60 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal (elect,heat,cook)– China 170
Coal electricity- China 90
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (0.2% of world energy for all solar)
Wind 0.15 (1.6% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

Coal is the king of power related deaths. In fact if you crunch the numbers, the deaths caused in mining, and the pollution released by burning result in the equivalent of a coal Chernobyl every two weeks. This is what I mean about people being bad about estimating risks. A nuclear disaster may look flashy, but thousands of people dying every week from emphysema, lung cancer, bronchitis and mining accidents are a massively more pressing concern. It's also why we need to look at the actual figures as dispassionately and as rationally as possible.

Actually, that's factually incorrect. We do have a very simple solution. Bury it. The global high-level nuclear waste inventory stands a little shy of 35,000 tons. When you realise that this is the product of generating approximately 6% percent of all the world's energy production over the past 50 years, you start to understand why it really is a tiny amount. The amount of nuclear waste produced by a person if their entire lifetimes energy needs were produced by nuclear reactors is about the size of a large orange. That really is a pitifully small amount when compared with the other massive quantities of waste we produce.

Further more, we even know empirically that it can be stored safely for millions of years without leaking. Take a little look at the natural nuclear fission reactor at Oklo in Gabon [5]. This is, to me, a fascinating discovery. It turns out that a rock formation with a high enough uranium concentration had sufficient water flowing through it to achieve criticality about 1.7 billion years ago. All via entirely natural mechanisms. And like all nuclear reactions, it produced nuclear waste. Over the years, scientists have become very adept at measuring isotopic ratios and determining rates of radioactive decay. This allows us to plot precisely how far that nuclear waste was able to move through the surrounding geological strata. The result, over a few hundred thousand years, it barely got a few centimetres before it decayed to the point of being harmless. This site is well studied, and considering that it successfully contained nuclear waste without any special thought in terms of a selection of the geological strata, or designed containment barriers, we know that humans can do even better. This highlights that there is no physical problem with storing waste for long time periods, only a political issue. Indeed some countries have already come to terms with this, and Finland is well under-way in constructing a long term geological repository [6].

I hope this clears up some of the misconceptions.

References
1. http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf
2. http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/Ferlay J_EJC_2013.pdf
3. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/...al/23056088&accessItemIds=&mimeType=text/html
4. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
6. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/Finland/