Posted on 06/16/2011 11:51:15 AM PDT by ransomnote
Did you see this? (Fukushima)
“”Today, our hospital received a written notice signed by both the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The notice says “The medical checkups and research of the residents in the areas affected by the nuke plant accident are allowed only if the permission to do so is given by the related scientific societies and associations; otherwise it would only increase the burden on the residents.”
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/06/radiation-in-japan-testing-of.html
I bet they try to hamstring the free clinic, too! Claim it’s putting a ‘burden’ on the residents?
Prayers for the people of Japan as they contend with radioactive waste, TEPCO and the Japanese government.
The Japanese health system is mostly government-run. A doctor who promotes a story that the government doesn't like being spread might find himself in difficulty.
"The medical checkups and research of the residents in the areas affected by the nuke plant accident are allowed only if the permission to do so is given by the related scientific societies and associations; otherwise it would only increase the burden on the residents."
Those poor people. Being sacrificed for a flash in the pan government structure.
Placemark - will return with link to an article.
Thanks for your luddistic knee-jerk response P !! All emotionalism and no science.......Like others’ comparison of Fukishima to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all that’s “proven” is a dearth of knowledge on radiation and radiological effects.
Blood tests will establish the real facts. As will “whole body counts”. Skin is an effective radiation barrier. Add clothing and it gets better. Most important is preventing ingestion due to the differing nature of epithelian cells lining our gut from those covering our outside. >PS
No, I want to find out if you have even a scintilla of mathematical background. Because your constant harping about theories of government conspiring to cover everything up is usually the hallmark of a liberal arts major.
OK, so you have some math background. And you therefore can understand the huge increase in complexity or force necessary to maintain a cover-up when, say, a dozen people know something their superiors don’t want revealed. In Japan, secrets don’t stay secret for very long post-WWII. TEPCO has a checkered past, to be certain, of some non-compliance with safety regs and reporting regs. I’ll grant that immediately. But that doesn’t even remotely rise to the level of mendacity and brutal repression of the truth present in the USSR. If you think they’re even remotely comparable, then you really need to learn a LOT more about the USSR. I’d suggest reading most anything written by Robert Conquest about the USSR. He’s big into numbers and the height, width and length of piles of bodies in the USSR.
To further illustrate the differences between the two situations, let me ask this: Did you know that there was a partial core meltdown in 1982 at Chernobyl? I didn’t (and neither did the rest of the world) until the mid-90’s.
Concealing cracks in cooling piping was a violation, to be certain. TEPCO sacked three execs over that. TEPCO employees pulled a huge boner of a safety no-no by mixing fuel in buckets (which would have had me moving out of the area rather smartly if I observed something like that). Two employees ultimately died as a result of their stupidity. That’s hardly a reflection on TEPCO, IMO. Guys used to die as a result something as mundane as not containing a split rim tire in a cage when they aired it up. Was that the fault of the tire industry? No. It was a well known issue, and if you took such a shortcut, you suffered from a fault of personal stupidity. Same for the two idiots who died at TEPCO as a result of their personal stupidity.
TEPCO and Japan don’t rise to the level of cover-up and mismanagement of Chernobyl. And that’s LONG before we get to the design and operational differences between the two situations.
Japan, since WWII, has been a pretty pacifist nation. The USSR... not quite so. Their government continued to quite happily keep tossing bodies on top of their historical pile of millions killed by the Soviet government in their sordid history. Telling me that the USSR is to be lauded, much less copied, in how they handled Chernobyl, flies in the face of evidence. They put that many people onto the job because they didn’t know what else to do, and the natural Soviet reaction, regardless of whether it is dealing with incompetence in military planning or reactor planning, is to throw bodies at the situation (literally). As Joe Stalin liked to say: A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. The USSR is filled with such statistics. Statistics like the number of Red Army soldiers who were simply ordered to grab hold of debris ejected from the reactor core onto the buildings’ roofs and chuck it back into the pit. The USSR couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to make a robotic bulldozer, so they just fell back on their tried-n-true mechanism of ordering men into perilous or fatal circumstances. I don’t see anyone at Fukushima *ordering* men to do anything remotely like that. Are there volunteers in both situations? Yes, absolutely. But at Chernobyl, rather than use robotics or remotely operated equipment, the Russians just did as they always have done.
Remember, Chernobyl was the result of human operator error - entirely. There was no attending extra-nuclear event that initiated the situation. The design of the reactor made it an unstable situation once the error was in motion, but the events that set Chernobyl into motion was not a 9-magnitude quake and attending tsunami. Chernobyl would not have happened on that day in ‘86 if someone decided to just sit on their ass on that particular day and not run a particular test scenario. You do realize that people were still working at Chernobyl until the late 90’s, right? That the other three reactors there were kept on-line and operating? That people were transiting the hot zone for 14-15 years to operate those plants to make electrical power for the Ukraine?
The operators at Fukushima have no such culpability. They had a lake’s worth of water dumped on their heads after they had scrammed the reactors (and therefore went to backup power) as a result of a quake. They followed protocol and procedures. The design failure that led to this turn of events was not planning for a tsunami of this magnitude. That’s it. How it has been handled since then, while not a model of brilliant master planning or luck, hasn’t been a case of brutal repression. Fukushima is missing that special brand of Soviet charm that made the USSR such a wonderful example of mass murder.
That to me is a huge difference in the handling of the two situations. At Chernobyl, the Soviets sent people to die to cover up (literally) the failures of idiots. At Chernobyl, the Soviets evacuated the area before telling the rest of the USSR or the world what was going on. Matter of fact, it was ONLY by external examination of radiation levels at a power plant in Sweden, with resulting international confrontation that the Soviets admitted *at all* that it had happened.
Neither TEPCO, nor Japan, ever made such a cover-up.
Now, as to why the Japanese resisted enlarging the exclusion zone? As far as I can see, this is a case of planning based on past operating experience, coupled with disaster response to the much larger, non-nuclear situation in the area. Enlarging the evac zone is a function of expected dose. They started with incomplete information, they still have incomplete information as to radiation levels and what isotopes they’re dealing with. They didn’t know how long it was going to take to get the situation under control, and they opted to err on the side of past experience of their own and other operators of similar reactors. As they get better estimates that it will take longer to contain the problems at the plants, they can see that the expected dose in the areas will go up before the situation is contained, and they widen the zone(s).
Basing evac plans on the Soviet experience at Chernobyl isn’t entirely rational, simply because the two situations aren’t remotely similar, and the Japanese military aren’t about to show up at people’s homes with an AK in hand, saying “Get on the bus, now.” The people surrounding Chernobyl effectively lost everything but the clothes on their backs. They were forced to leave it all behind. Tourists can go see this stuff now, since they’re opening the area to tourism, BTW.
At Chernobyl, the reactor had a positive temperature coefficient, and had a positive void coefficient, coupled with a reactor vessel there the lid was blown clean off. Chernobyl had pieces of flaming graphite flying into the air, along with chunks of fuel rods, et al. Any nuke-aware person could (and did) look at those designs and say “Boy, you’re making a deal with the Devil right there...” The pile was on fire, the plant was on fire. They had an explosion deep in the core that was the equivalent of tons of TNT. The worst possible scenarios of BWRs or PWR’s don’t reach the level of failure that was seen at Chernobyl.
There’s no fire at Fukushima, there’re dealing with a completely different situation, and their biggest problem is probably the spent fuel pool in #4, where they have no primary containment and there’s much less planning or experience in the nuke industry for dealing with that particular situation.
For all the problems they’re having at Fukushima, the number of deaths for ANY reason at those power plants still hasn’t approached the number of deaths we have in the US from coal mining accidents in a single year, every year. The flood, on the other hand... that death toll is now only officially 15K+. The local people, however, are contesting this:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/15/japan-death-toll-numbers-dont-add-up-tsunami-survi/
With that level of confusion (ie, that they don’t even know how many people they have dead from flooding), I’m supposed to expect that they have every little “i” dotted, every “t” crossed and everything cross-checked and verified WRT their handling of Fukushima? I don’t. Crap happens. There is no conspiracy there, just massive confusion with a veneer of incompetence on top.
The cores aren’t likely “still molten” - they’re still hot enough to boil water, but that’s a LONG way from the core being “molten.”
There’s a huge difference.
Giving off radiation? Yes. Even “spent” reactor fuel gives off radiation.
You can eat whatever you want. I just want to know if the people spouting this stuff have any appreciation for the mathematics involved. Chernobyl is, statistically, physically and engineering-wise - NOTHING like Fukushima. Comparing the two is about like comparing the first A-bomb at Trinity to a 500lb bomb. You don’t want to live the house targeted by either one of them, but they’re not comparable bits of physics or engineering, and the two governments involved are nothing like each other.
However, I would dearly appreciate it if the people currently driving power generation agendas in the US towards such farcical twaddle like windmills and solar panels would STFU and allow engineers to run the show, because the windmills-and-unicorn-farts crowd are clearly either frauds or fools. If we want to replace coal-fired power (and I’m not entirely sure that it is necessary at this point in time, but let’s *assume* that it is), there is no other viable technology other than nuclear power generation that can or will do it.
The Germans have decided to spin down all their nukes as a result of this sort of greenie-weenie hysteria. While I think that this is “unsinn” (German for insanity), I’m a-OK with this agenda of Germany, because if they self-implode their economy... hey, that leaves more of the US economy for US producers. If the Germans want to live life back in the 1800’s with ephemeral power sources, more power to them.
If Japan decided to pitch nukes overboard, hey, I’m OK with that for exactly the same reason. Let them go play with windmills and other power sources which won’t handle base loads. Leaves more economic potential for the US.
But as far as our power portfolio - we have coal. We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal, bar none, hands down. No one has as much coal as we do, with the *possible* exception of the Canucks. If we want cheap power, coal is the way to go.
If we want cheap power not from coal, there is only one option: nukes. Period. If we multiply our nuke power portfolio by three (which is about what it would take to supplant coal and account for future growth), there’s going to be an accident, somewhere, somehow, at some point in time.
BTW — I’d rather eat Fukushima produce than organic sprouts in Europe. Which produce has killed more people? Looks like the organic stuff is racking up quite the death toll to me. And, BTW, these deaths in Europe are consistent with what we’ve seen in e. coli deaths in organic produce and fruit juice here in the US. Cow poop is bad for you.
The best way to eliminate these food born pathogens would be (massive drum roll please....) irradiation of the food. But we don’t do that. Why? Anti-nuke hysteria.
I’m not going to bother reading your screed.
Go peddle nuke power to someone who will listen. That person won’t be me.
I’ve read and learned and one thing I’ve learned is that technology will not save humanity from anything. It’s a useful servant, at times, and a bad, bad master.
Go worship your nuke power god without my participation.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how long the period is between "the end of April" and "may".
THe quote from the doctor with the free clinic: "The pediatrician from The Bridge to Chernobyl, Yurika Hashimoto, told the mother it was hard to determine whether the nosebleed was the result of radiation exposure, but they should have the blood test done for white blood cells."
Now, I don't know why the doctor only spoke about ONE of the two children; maybe it was actually a translation problem and he said "nosebleeds", but I can only comment on what is actually written in the article.
Since the article never said how long the two-year-old's nosebleed was, maybe it wasn't really long enough to be a concern to the doctor.
Unless Japan has another month between april and may that I'm not aware of.
I did read the entire article, although from a different source (these anti-nuclear articles actually get posted all over the place, and only a few of them are accessable from my work).
Steam as a byproduct of the water being used to cool the reactors is hardly a smoldering coastline.
Otherwise, I guess I should be pretty worried, because we have “smoldering” buildings right here in my town.
Even if one of the reactors caught fire, it wouldn’t be the same as a “smoldering coastline”.
I was mostly commenting because I was actually impressed seeing a side-by-side picture gallery of Japan. A lot of cleanup (and a lot of boats still stranded in the middle of land, and a LOT Of work to do still to get back to normal, and a lot of people suffering still for reasons that have nothing to do with one failed nuclear power plant.
You posted an article, and in the article there was only one family example given, with two children with nosebleeds, and which from the article it seemed only one of those children were seen by the doctor, who said he couldn’t tell if the nosebleed (which was in April, and it is now June) was due to radiation.
I wasn’t minimizing the clinic, I was minimizing the news article. The report said 50 families came to the clinic; I’m not the one who decided that the best example of health issues was a 6-year-old with a bloody nose, that was the reporter.
I don’t think things you listed are predictions of apocalypse, those are the things most of us have been saying (somehow I knew from news articles that the cores had at least partly melted long before I’m told Tepco allowed me to know that information).
The people who said Californians should take iodine pills and that a killer radioactive debric field was going to wash up on our shores — that’s a bit more of an apocalyptic claim. Along with those who claimed that Tepco was going to open the doors of #2 at night so the temperature differential would sweep all of the highly radioactive air out of the building under cover of darkness — that was a bit apocalyptic.
Oh, and we can’t forget the whole “#4 is tipping over”, or the “dead body found in video”, or the “fuel pool empty and fuel rods are mostly scattered over wide area”.
Those were just some of the apocalyptic cries. We can also include the predictions that the “fukushama 50” would be dead in a month. And pretty much half of what Gunderson claimed in his videos.
Not sure about how much I can copy so more at link, posting an excerpt.
http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/06/hawaii-monitoring-stations-detect-spike-in-fukushima-radiation/
Hawaii Monitoring Stations Detect Spike in Fukushima Radiation
June 13, 2011
By Tim Flanegin
(graphics at link).
Early Friday morning (June 10, 2011), at about 3:00 A.M. local time, one of our new Monitoring Stations in Hawaii broadcast a Radiation Alert over the network, reaching a sustained level of over 100 CPM (Counts per Minute) for a period of about 15 minutes, peaking as high as 141 CPM at one point. The readings then subsided to normal background levels of about 37 CPM for that station, but within less than 2 hours, trended quickly up again to over 100 CPM for another 5 minutes or so. The graph at right depicts this activity.
For context, this is the Kauai station, and within the Hawaiian archipelago, Kauai is the main island at the far northwest end of the chain, actually 300 miles from the Big Island of Hawaii, placing it closest to Japan about 3,500 miles away. And to boot, the Kauai station is located on the north shore of the island, in Princeville. You can see the station on the map – the yellow, numbered circle at top left.
The station is operating a traditional Geiger counter, affixed with an external probe built around the same ultra-sensitive, oversized pancake tube as in the Inspector line of instruments, so it is capable of detecting low levels of Alpha, Beta, and Gamma radiation. Data output is through the headphone jack of the survey meter. The Geiger counter is set up for outdoor monitoring, protected from the elements under the eaves of the structure, with the thin mica end window of the Geiger-Mueller tube oriented downward to prevent contamination from possible fallout.
So those are the facts of the case. The question now is, “Did the Kauai station detect radiation emanating from Fukushima?” To answer that, let’s review these points:
First of all, the detection was not just a momentary spike in radiation which could be explained by an instantaneous background surge, a software glitch, or a connection aberration, all circumstances that have triggered false alerts before.
The level of detection was three times higher than normal background radiation for that station, and sustained for periods as long as 15 minutes, which rules out random spikes in background.
snipped
And with that, my tentative conclusion is that the Kauai station did in fact detect radiation from Fukushima – it looks like it, it smells like it, and it feels like it.
Don’t worry, the rest of us are reading it. You shouldn’t worry about being ignorant or anything, since i don’t think your lack of knowledge of what NVDave wrote will really make any difference. Ignorance is bliss, after all.
There will be some strange people coming out of this area.
You heap the crimes of Stalin in with the behavior of the Soviets re Chernobyl. I made clear in my response that I was isolated Soviet nuke response and saying that the Japanese seem to be intent in following in their footsteps - this is not over yet and the Japanese (TEPCO and GOV) have been withholding info from the citizens thus far.
Do you know WHY TEPCO officials apologized, with tears in their eyes, for not ‘sharing’ information? You realize that the Japanese had their SPEEDI projections but decided not tell the public? That the Japanese most likely knew that the cores had melted down months before they admitted it? That if they didn’t know the cores were melted down then there really is no excuse for them not requesting backup generators? You know that TEPCO requested to abandon the four reactors completely - let them go completely out of control - in mid march? That TEPCO grants daily interviews between senior officials and favored news outlets but only allows assistants to meet with ‘outside’ news reporters once per week? That the government just issued a statement saying that hospitals were prohibited from assessing the health of people living near Fukushima without consent from the Ministry of Health because it would place a ‘burden’ on the residents? You realize that the government and TEPCO release information on isolated isotopes sporadically so that the true radioactivity load in any one area cannot be calculated? That Japan is testing 1 plot of 1 farm associated with a city or town and then declaring the entire farm production of that town as proven safe?
Yes I am familiar with Soviets - I worked with them and I’ve read up on them - they told me about conscripts risking being shot in the back to get away from being forced into working to clean up Chernobyl. I was horrified.
“The USSR couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to make a robotic bulldozer, so they just fell back on their tried-n-true mechanism of ordering men into perilous or fatal circumstances. “
No - not true. They worked hard to get robots onto the roof to do the cleaning there but the electronics could not take the radiation. There’s video that describes one robot hurling itself into the reactor - out of control from radiation. Watching what the Soviets did - forcing men to run across the roof and pick up radioactive graphite with their hands was about the worst thing I’ve witnessed in a loongggg time. Until I heard that TEPCO asked to abandon melting nukes (and spent fuel ponds) with 40 times the amount of fuel in them compared with Chernobyl. What that would do to their people and their country?
The Soviets didn’t say ‘let’s get out of here!’ and leave Chernobyl to burn itself out like TEPCO wanted to do. Do you realize how much more fuel is at Fukushima compared with Chernobyl? And that the Japanese plan will allow Fukushima to send radiation into the air for months if not years? How much they’ll dump in the ocean? They are hoping things will be ok when it hits the water table?
And Fukushima was built in an earthquake zone despite warnings from scientists who warned of the likelihood of tsunami’s exceeding design spec? No - the Soviet reactor disaster was a series of bad management decision - as was the decision to build on fault zones in tsunami areas.
The Soviets told their people not to worry until they realized they would die unless evacuated. They lied and told them they could come back. That appears to be what the exclusion zone people face. The Japanese have made sure that children still go to school with contaminated playgrounds and eat Fukushima food and drink the water and milk - without testing the effects on the people.
I’m glad the Japanese are not living in an impoverished communist regime like the Soviets were when the disaster happened - but their relative freedom, education, wealth, technology, and armed with hindsight of Chernobyl should have guided their decisions to place their reactors in locations not on top of faults or in tsunami zones and to handle preparing the populace in advance regarding what actions to take in the event of nuke emergencies as well as acting on behalf of Japanese citizens once the crisis unfolded.
The worlds largest reactor is in Japan and it shut down with a 5.4 earthquake because it’s on a fault zone. The breeder reactor crew in Japan that didn’t have a section on how to manage fuel so the plant suffered an incident and the manager committed suicide? These are management decisions. And they happen to take place in a culture that requires conformity when that feature is damaging their response to the world’s worst nuke disaster. And it is not over yet.
The ‘conspiracy takes so many people’ comment you made doesn’t really apply here because the culture has melded conformity and politics. The gov tells the schools to remain open because it’s safe, the schools chide the parents for worrying about their children eating Fukushima produce and playing on a contaminated playground, the citizens gather playground dirt and deliver it to the gov. offials. The gov says Tokyo is free of hazardous levels of radiation, the people form their own monitoring network then independent scientist detect hot spots in many locations in Tokyo and then, the gov. announces it will test in Tokyo. None of the news outlets with whom TEPCO has a massive budget even asks if TEPCO is testing for plutonium. When, finally, an outsider reporter does ask he is firmly told ‘no - we are not testing for Plutonium’ and then the next day TEPCO announces it’s testing for plutonium.
The Japanese gov will continue to withhold information as long as it can - this worked partially for the Soviets because apologists still claim few people were killed by radiation because the Soviets made it illegal to report death by irradiation for the first 3 years after Chernobyl.
Yes - I see similarities - not of gulags and ‘Young Pioneers’ but of withholding what is known, denying the truth and letting it trickle out months later while telling their people that this is not going to be the lifelong problem it is going to be for them. They propose to cleanup this mess by January ‘12? On what basis? No one has ever cleaned up a single melt down before but they are going to cleanup three and address the crumbling spent fuel pool at number 4? How bad might Japan’s decisions be for the world? Well, this well regarded scientists think it might be mighty mighty bad:
‘As Dr. Michio Kaku, a world renowned CUNY theoretical physicist pointed out on CNN March 18, 2011, Chernobyl involved one reactor and only 57.6 Tons of the reactor core went into the atmosphere. In dramatic contrast, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster immediately involved six reactors and a whopping IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN Agency) documented 2,800 Tons of highly radioactive old reactor cores.”
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/28/fukushima-how-many-chernobyls-is-it/
I know, I’m a blasphemer to the god of nuke power. So be it.
Charles, are you denying that the Fukushima cores have escaped containment and are now venting radiation into the environment? And they are doing so because they are very hot? Have you been keeping up?
So Fukushima is just ‘one failed power plant’??? With 50 times the fuel of Chernobyl and no known way of containing it? THIS is why your distortion is a waste of time. If you have to exaggerate like that - you obviously had no reasonable points to make and had to ‘go there’. I am sure, that if the following months of deposition of radioactive contamination continue to build up in Tokyo - it will be a ‘minor rezoning’ issue according to you. And the contamination of the water table - can be adressed with a few Brita filters. The contamination of so much arable land - well it was time to ‘give the fields a rest’ anyway. See, I can play your game and minimize quickly and easily - but why should I take the time to assemble a reasoned rebuttal to your nonsense if you don’t spend any time on it yourself?
I am sorry to say that I agree. How many of them will have been avoidable?
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