Posted on 05/28/2011 9:09:42 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
High radiation found on seabed in 300-km stretch off Fukushima
Saturday 28th May, 05:07 AM JST
TOKYO —
Radiation levels up to several hundred times normal have been detected on the Pacific seabed in a 300-kilometer-long area off the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the science ministry said Friday.
The ministry said high-level radioactive materials were detected on the seabed in a north-south stretch ranging from Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, to Choshi, Chiba Prefecture, and warned the contamination could affect the safety of seafood.
(Excerpt) Read more at japantoday.com ...
P!
I notice those FReepers who said it was safe and nothing to worry about are posting all over your update threads - not.
Amazingly some of them still do. Some of them ran off in shame though.
How many people have died as a result of the plant situation?
How many people have been confirmed dead and are missing in Joplin, Mo? How many square miles were completely flattened? You folks are a hoot.
Ruh-Roh !!!
(can anyone say) GODZILLA !!!!!!
Where were those Freepers in the first place? Never saw any of them. I did note some that said the hype and drama were misplaced. It looks like from all reports, the nuclear incident was in some ways worse than originally thought. That said, I don't see any reports of Cs or I levels. Its the CS that would worry me most, it lasts a good long time (30+ years half life). Still, "100 times background) does not tell me anything, other than there is more than normal. It would be nice to see the absolute levels.
Wow...will it take 50 plus years for Japan to recover from these horrific series of events?
Bernard L. Cohen (b. 1924 - Professor Emiritus of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh)
(excerpt) Plutonium is constantly referred to by the news media as "the most toxic substance known to man." Ralph Nader has said that a pound of plutonium could cause 8 billion cancers, and former Senator Ribicoff has said that a single particle of plutonium inhaled into the lung can cause cancer. There is no scientific basis for any of these statements, as I have shown in a paper in the refereed scientific journal Health Physics (Vol. 32, pp. 359-379, 1977). Nader asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to evaluate my paper, which they did in considerable depth and detail, but when they gave it a "clean bill of health" he ignored their report.
When he accuses me of "trying to detoxify plutonium with a pen," I offered to eat as much plutonium as he would eat of caffeine, which my paper shows is comparably dangerous, or given reasonable TV coverage, to personally inhale 1000 times as much plutonium as he says would be fatal, or in response to former Senator Ribicoff's statement to inhale 1000 particles of plutonium of any size that can be suspended in air.
My offer was made to all major TV networks but there has never been a reply beyond a request for a copy of my paper. Yet the false statements continue in the news media and surely 95% of the public accept them as fact although virtually no one in the radiation health scientific community gives them credence.
We have here a complete breakdown in communication between the scientific community and the news media, and an unprecedented display of irresponsibility by the latter. One must also question the ethics of Nader and Ribicoff; I have sent them my papers and written them personal letters, but I have never received a reply.
http://russp.org/BLC-3.html
I guess you find thyroid cancer, as well as others that don’t show up right away a hoot as well.
I guess we have a choice - listen to LAWYER and Terminator of Autos that self-combust, Ralph Nader, or old fogy PHYSICIST Cohen.
Well, let’s just say I won’t go to the old fogy for advice on the law.
I’m enjoying this Cohen piece about plutonium. Thanks for the link.
Just like a liberal I sure you'll come up with a billion straw man points. Obama is good at that as well. Did you notice that the Hospital in Joplin was pretty much destroyed, how much radiation was released by that or just think about the Bio hazards let loose on the community? Do you think anyone will do a study? Why aren't you concerned about the potential long term health risks involved?
You’re welcome. Kinda revealing isn’t it. (;o)
Well, if I AM going to be manipulated and lied to by a physicist, at least let them be as entertaining as Cohen.
I mean, there are no funds set aside to build ‘caffeine plants’ that must perpetually be cooled to avert epic disaster. Should the public protest placing a caffeine factory so near seismic faults or population centers, the government will not, in THIS case, build them anyway. There are no laws permitting such a plant to routinely emit toxic levels of caffeine into the bloodstream of surrounding residents (well - airborne caffeine is not an issue so I had to ‘got there’ to make a comparable statement) as there are laws permitting nuke plants to release radiation ‘with limits’.
Caffeine released into the environment in say, Japan, will not arrive on the west coast of the US in 2 days nor after a month of uncontrollable caffeine releases - build up in dairy products in France to a point where CHIRAD advises pregnant women and young children to avoid dairy. No history of caffeine plant ‘melt downs’ and all the lying of it’s supporters. (ALL THAT LYING AND POSTURING BY PRO NUKE supporters...I’m so tired of it).
Caffeine is suspended in either plant biomass or beverages, at present so each of us gets to choose how much caffeine we imbibe and we usually choose to keep it below toxic levels. Plutonium is imperceptible and I don’t get to choose how much I consume in my food or breath in my air because I am powerless to stop the nuke industry from sending into the environment I have to live in. Actually...even the nuke industry is incapable of controlling the amount of radiation being released by those 3 core melt downs in japan and hey...they don’t know when it will stop. Caffeine just doesn’t have that power does it? Try to think of a single catastrophic caffeine release lasting for months with no known resolution and the possibility that spent caffeine fuel pools will fail in the approaching typhoon or the numerous aftershocks...
Radioactive material like Plutonium can’t be removed from the food supply yet caffeine is removed from coffee and tea and drinking water.
Oh and caffeine doesn’t have a half life of thousands of years. Notice caffeine does not require special regulation, transportation, special containers, special shielding and then continuously maintained ‘spent caffeine pools’ lasting generations just to harbor it after it’s used? No talk of using caffeine in warheads? Now that’s odd - why wouldn’t we have dropped a caffeine warhead on Japan?
No tight security surrounding coffee plants - the public can inspect coffee selling establishments at will without donning TYVEC suits and respirators.
A green tea plantation (yes - containing caffeine) south of Fukushima was tested and it was found to have 570Bq/kg of radioactive material (they didn’t test Plutonium because they are being careful not to let the public know where plutonium is - but the public knows that caffeine is present). The public was fine with sending school children into the tea fields each year on a school trip to see how tea is harvested and to eat some leaves. The public was rather upset that school children visited the tea plantation this year in the rain where they were given tainted tempura tea leaves to eat...because the public is sufficiently aware of medical history (and that of Chernobyl etc.) and they simply want to avoid ionizing radiation, not the caffeine in tea.
Interesting that Cohen’s work, as a physicist, is selectively appealing to you when John Gofman’s Nobel winning work as a physicist(discovering isotopes of plutonium and others) and as a medical physician (discovering HDL and LDL lipids and the toxicity of Plutonium and other forms of radiation) does not. The National Academy of Sciences upheld Gofman’s work regarding the hazards posed by radiation as do countless other scientists. Why do you think that, from it’s discovery, the ‘safety’ limit for exposure to radiation has always gone down...unless you count instances of the nuclear industry wanting it’s activities to be legal rather than safe?
Say, why doesn’t the NRC permit nuke workers to inhale plutonium on their breaks instead of equal amounts of caffeine? Curious.
BUT anyway, John Gofman, NAS, and the medical community in general...well...they lack Cohen’s ‘hahahaha’ style so I can see why you gravitate toward his propaga...uh...work. I hope to see Cohen’s pointless apples to oranges grandstanding comparison (first time I saw anyone TRY to equate ionizing radiation to a chemical stimulant found in coffee) cited more often.
By the way, why did the Japanese foolishly rebuild Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Even now it's not too late for residents to better their condition by moving away from those cities - what with the long-term half-lives of various substances around them. Are the run-of-the-mill Japanese people that ignorant?
“Why then, in your opinion, did Ralph Nader and/or the major media, after the faked gasoline tank explosion played so well, not set up an eating/breathing match between Nader and Prof. Cohen?”
1. Public Safety
2. Ethics
Safety: Because after Cohen inhales...he must exhale. The air he exhales is then contaminated. The portion of Plutonium that may lodge in moist lung tissue would irradiate the surrounding tissue as long as it remains there but what if he should, 2 weeks hence, cough? Hmmm? Visualize it: Put him in a glass box (wait...glass isn’t rated to contain ionizing radiation safetly). Ok put him in a lead vault with a camera and...hmmmm...how do ‘administer the dose’...ah have him inhale on a shielded lead tube. But wait - there are laws controlling the transportation and use of this supremely hazardous material. Who would willingly supply it? Perhaps a pro nuke scientist? Do those guys own their own plutonium? Nah...usually owned by government or academy. Ok ok let’s just assume...no wait. Really WHO would transport a regulated material to a TV studio where it would have to escape containment once Cohen exhaled? It would be illegal. Where does he exhale? The portion embedded in his lungs may leave his body in a coughing fit but who knows.
Ethics: Because Cohen chose a test that cannot ethically be conducted - that was certainly wise of him wasn’t it? He need not have any ethics but others have them and just as they wouldn’t accept a televised challenge to witness someone chop of their arm, they would not watch Cohen inhale plutonium. They would also be unethical to televise Cohen ingesting toxic levels of caffeine.
“By the way, why did the Japanese foolishly rebuild Hiroshima and Nagasaki? “
Since the half-life of Plutonium is thousands of years and the Japanese rebuilt Nagasaki, we can deduce that if the soil in that region is at low levels comparable to background levels elsewhere - then the radiation MOVED. See? If it is not there - it moved. Hopefully not into human bodies. Dispersal by erosion, rain, wind...it spreads the harmful effects of radiation around so that ‘risk’ levels rise elsewhere and decrease at ground zero.
If the levels are higher than background in that area, Japan has made a decision to accept higher illness and mortality rates. The US did that with above ground testing in NV - it accepted that ionizing radiation would be dispersed. It does that with routine releases of radiation from nuke plants - spreading it around ultimately elevates global risk but decreases local risk.
Damn, I love liberals or wherever the heck you fit on the political scale. Brilliant just brilliant.
We need information about parts per million, in the seabed, and in the seafood, in order to truly make a determination about the possible danger of the situation.
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