Posted on 03/13/2011 9:40:01 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Health risks from Japan's quake-hit nuclear power reactors seem fairly low and winds are likely to carry any contamination out to the Pacific without threatening other nations, experts say.
Tokyo battled to avert a meltdown at three stricken reactors at the Fukushima plant in the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, triggered by Friday's tsunami. Radiation levels were also up at the Onagawa atomic plant.
"This is not a serious public health issue at the moment," Malcolm Crick, Secretary of the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, told Reuters.
"It won't be anything like Chernobyl. There the reactor was operating at full power when it exploded and it had no containment," he said. As a precaution, around 140,000 people have been evacuated from the area around Fukushima.
Crick said a partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant in the United States in 1979 -- rated more serious than Japan's accident on an international scale -- released low amounts of radiation.
"Many people thought they'd been exposed after Three Mile Island," he said. "The radiation levels were detectible but in terms of human health it was nothing." Radiation can cause cancers.
The World Health Organization (WHO) also said the public health risk from Japan's atomic plants remained "quite low." The quake and devastating tsunami may have killed 10,000 people.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said that the winds in the area would shift from the south to a westerly on Sunday night, blowing from Fukushima toward the Pacific Ocean.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Yah, right...”experts say”...
The greatest concern however is what effect is this tragic chain of events in Japan going to have on global warming? /MS
Well if not experts, who do we listen to?
Aww c’mon man, we got some top notch hysteria going on here.
Fire up those coal burners, Japan is gonna need em.
LOL!
Like I said yesterday.
Holy F*(k! We are doomed! Were all gonna die! Live like its your last day and party like hell! Give everything you have away because it aint gonna do you no good anyway.
Just lemme know where you intend to give it away so I can see what you got...
Unless something changes...again.
Well, for a start, let's listen to idiots who know nothing about the situation, but have a political axe to grind?
Radiation is treated like some kind of mystical substance with magical properties but its actually very well understood.
A radiation leak doesn’t equal fallout because radiation isn’t affected by the wind any more than sunlight. Fallout is radiated particulate matter like dust or smoke.
Back in 1945 there were two major radiation leaks. I’m pretty sure that the whole West coast of the United States was contaminated and everyone died. /s
All you’re saying is experts can be wrong and experts can be right, but when it comes to fixing the problem (like this nuclear power plant ), if we don’t turn to experts, who else do we turn to?
RE: Back in 1945 there were two major radiation leaks. I’m pretty sure that the whole West coast of the United States was contaminated and everyone died.
I’m sure everyone WILL DIE. I’m also sure that a lot of people have already died since then. The question is this — how many died AS A RESULT of the radiation leak?
I checked your profile page and I would commend you on the great P51 pix...it’s my favorite aircraft of all time!!!
Thanks, it's a gas to fly in too!
Back in the '80's I worked on and help reconstruct war birds.
Back in the good ol' days when we had the Confederate Air Force.
I’m 80 years old and I’m not a pilot. I do remember WW2 vividly.
I’ve owned some fast motorcycles and cars over the years, flying over the handle bars of a dirt bike is as close I’ve gotten to flying.
I did pilot a big rig truck for 31 years. :):)
The P51’s V12 engine at full chat is a wonderful sound.
SNIP -
The established worldwide practice of protecting people from radiation costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year to implement and may well determine the world's future energy system. But is it right?
SNIP-
It was under the same assumption that an ad hoc Soviet government commission decided to evacuate and relocate more than 270 000 people from many areas of the former Soviet Union where the 1986–95 average radiation doses from the Chernobyl fallout ranged between 6 and 60 millisieverts. (See the definition of the sievert.) By comparison, the world’s average individual lifetime dose due to natural background radiation is about 150 mSv. In the Chernobyl-contaminated regions of the former Soviet Union, the lifetime dose is 210 mSv—and in many regions of the world it is about 1000 mSv. The forced evacuation of so many people from their—presumably—poisoned homes calls for ethical scrutiny. Examining the physical and moral basis of that evacuation action and other radiation policies is the subject of this article.
Long read but good, comparing man made(minuscule) with natural and background radiation.
“Aww c’mon man, we got some top notch hysteria going on here.”
The other night someone here was screaming Americans on the west coast need to be taking potassium iodide.. NOW!
Maybe they were joking, but clearly some people really seem to enjoy freaking out.
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