Won’t kill me in Maine, though.
Tough situation in Japan, just awful.
OMG! You mean that after a Quake and Tsunami that probably already killed more than 20,000 people, a couple more may die of radiation poisoning?
The horror!
How convenient. B/S!
I wonder what the odds are now of him committing Seppuko Hara-Kiri?
Not so sure I buy the cabinet secretary’s excuse about not being able to forsee this. It is an older nuclear plant on a beach in a major earthquake zone. To be fair they had an 8 hour window to contain this when the plant was still on battery power and the cooling systems still worked.
Sadly in Japan there has been a lot of corruption and coverups before the accident. The containment vessels may not be as sound as expected.
Wonderful to know our tax money goes to agencies like the Dept of Energy and Int Automic Energy Agency who essentially spend billions and do nothing. They should have had a SWAT team to get gas turbine generators to Japan to get those cooling pumps going by the second day. yeah it would be miving heaven and earth but the alternative is what is happening now.
Based on the crocodile tears - at least one fo the containment vessels must have been breached. I hope it is not the MOX one.
Never let another energy independence crisis got to waste.
Japan has had an earthquake, tsunami, nuclear reactor crisis....and their stock market is down a WHOPPING 12% since the quake.
The media has Japan down to bankruptcy, insolvency, evacuate the planet, run for the hills, sky is falling again...
God bless the Japanese.
Prayers for those who labored, and still labor at the plants.
Thanks.
Ping.
There's only one hero that could allay all of our fears, but he has retired to the Peanut Farm, so we have The Emperor Noclothes to follow Jimmah's example of visiting the control rooms of each and every stricken reactor, and stay there until the danger has passed ~
passed like a 3 year old intestinal blockage ~
passed so he'd have someone besides a roomfull of teleprompters to keep him company, and no one would do like Mr. Hanky does.
Mr. Hanky.
For our own POS, no one else could pass like he do.
He is just an anti-nuker trying to scare people. There is not and never has been any danger, and everything is and always has been under control. sarc/
Normal dosage from background radiation is 2-3 millisievert annually: a chest CT scan delivers 7 millisievert. The highest radiation level detected anywhere beyond the site was a single brief reading of 0.17 millisievert at the boundary of the evacuation zone, but on average readings at the zone boundary are hardly above background.From the same article:
Occasional brief readings of slightly heightened radiation – occasionally reported in scaremongering fashion as "10x normal" – have been detected as far afield as the outskirts of Tokyo, but these are insignificant in a health context. Even if they persisted unbroken for a year, local dosages at such a level would be no more than powerplant workers are allowed in normal times: and nuclear powerplant workers' cancer rate is actually lower than in the general population. Measurable blips in background radiation may be detectable around the world in coming weeks, and will no doubt be heavily reported on, but they will be more insignificant still.
The renowned US nuclear engineer Ted Rockwell, who quite literally wrote the book on reactor safety, has harsh words for this position. He writes:[Consider] the Three Mile Island (TMI) incident, where 10 to 20 tons of the nuclear reactor melted down, slumped to the bottom of the reactor vessel, and initiated the dreaded China Syndrome, where the reactor core melts and burns its way into the earth ... In the real world, the molten mass froze when it hit the colder reactor vessel, and stopped its downward journey at five-eights of an inch through the five-inch thick vessel wall.
And there was no harm to people or the environment. None.
Yet in Japan, you have radiation zealots threatening to order people out of their homes, to wander, homeless and panic-stricken, through the battered countryside, to do what? All to avoid a radiation dose lower than what they would get from a ski trip.
Other than this boiler plate statement in regards to what a level 5 event rating equates to and could entail as per some international body:
Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency admitted that the disaster was a level 5, which is classified as a crisis causing 'several radiation deaths' by the UN International Atomic Energy.
I see nowhere where the 'Japanese', let alone the weeping nuclear plant chief, are quoted as stating that people will die?
I am pretty sure that this event rating system is based upon plant conditions and NOT deaths anticipated. The deaths anticipated estimates are premised upon many assumptions dealing with Time Distance and Shielding relative to the event.
Level 5 is what Three mile Island was classified as -where are all those deaths?
I will admit to being a nuke worker myself and a product of the nuclear navy (submarines) -I am not a novice; however, neither am I an expert... In my opinion, there is much more hype than facts right now.
Any with expertise care to comment?
Here’s the EPA’s RadNet monitoring data for the left coast and Hawaii:
http://www.epa.gov/japan2011/rert/radnet-data.html#california
See what the graphs look like for yourself.
If you think the EPA is cooking the books, about the only thing you can do is a) buy your own geiger counter (Whoops, no you can’t, because they’re sold out, just like KI pills), b) learn how to operate and interpret the readings.
Actually, I think the exercise of buying, calibrating and operating your own Geiger counter would be a very useful thing for some people to do. It would teach them a great deal about nuke physics, instrument capabilities, interference issues, background radiation and the different spectrums of radiation.