Posted on 08/11/2013 6:38:52 AM PDT by Java4Jay
Alaska fishermen and fish consumers shouldn't be concerned about the new disclosures of radioactive water leaking into the Pacific Ocean near the site of the hobbled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.
(Excerpt) Read more at adn.com ...
They might be surprise how often I look for the North Atlantic label (or southern hemisphere) when I buy seafood!
Japan’s nuclear body calls radioactive groundwater leakage at Fukushima ‘emergency’
http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=149925
The Fukushima Radiation Leak Is Equal To 76 Million Bananas
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/10/the-fukushima-radiation-leak-is-equal-to-76-million-bananas/?ss=business:energy
Most of us haven’t a clue what that means of course. We don’t instinctively understand what a becquerel is in the same way that we do pound, pint or gallons, and certainly trillions of anything sounds hideous. But don’t forget that trillions of picogrammes of dihydrogen monoxide is also the major ingredient in a glass of beer. So what we really want to know is whether 20 trillion becquerels of radiation is actually an important number. To which the answer is no, it isn’t. This is actually around and about (perhaps a little over) the amount of radiation the plant was allowed to dump into the environment before the disaster. Now there are indeed those who insist that any amount of radiation kills us all stone dead while we sleep in our beds but I’m afraid that this is incorrect. We’re all exposed to radiation all the time and we all seem to survive long enough to be killed by something else so radiation isn’t as dangerous as all that.
At which point we can offer a comparison. Something to try and give us a sense of perspective about whether 20 trillion nasties of radiation is something to get all concerned about or not. That comparison being that the radiation leakage from Fukushima appears to be about the same as that from 76 million bananas. Which is a lot of bananas I agree, but again we can put that into some sort of perspective.
Gigantic remotely operated demolition machines should already be onsite for processing these reactors and fuel into transportable sizes for shipment to burial sites.
The Castle Bravo crater at Bikini is almost radiation free. The islands will not be inhabited for centuries. The groundwater leaking into the ocean is far less a problem than the reactor bits scattered across the landscape.
I don’t buy the cover-up, this crap kills.
That'd be great!
How many bananas is that per day, per week, per year, and etc... How long till these bananas rot? How many bananas are possible? How big of a banana boat are we going to need?
Imagine an upstairs bathroom with a slow shutoff valve leak, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip… If not stopped, come back in two years and say minimal damage.
Let’s look at this issue as a glass of water that is half-full.
Fishermen will now be able to use instruments that detect radiation to locate fish they want. Since some fish feed differently than others (eg. bottom feeders, predators, etc) they will probably be able to calibrate their Geiger counters to specific species of fish below their boats.
This is a wonderful opportunity for the Japanese. They should be glowing.
I assume you reference K-40
Since bananas are strong potassium sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium-40
/johnny
The cores have burnt through, there is no containment. If ‘factual’ worst case scenarios were released, there would be worldwide chaos.
We also have that claim of 20 trillion becquerels of radiation having been dumped into the Pacific Ocean in the past couple of years. 20 trillion divided by two years by 365 days by 24 hours gives us an hourly rate of 1,141,552,511 becquerels per hour. Divide that by our 15 Bq per banana and we can see that the radiation spillage from Fukushima is running at 76 million bananas per hour.
Which is, as I say above, a lot of bananas. But it’s not actually that many bananas. World production of them is some 145 million tonnes a year. There’s a thousand kilos in a tonne, say a banana is 100 grammes (sounds about right, four bananas to the pound, ten to the kilo) or 1.45 trillion bananas a year eaten around the world. Divide again by 365 and 24 to get the hourly consumption rate and we get 165 million bananas consumed per hour.
We can do this slightly differently and say that the 1.45 trillion bananas consumed each year have those 15 Bq giving us around 22 trillion Bq each year. The Fukushima leak is 20 trillion Bq over two years: thus our two calculations agree. The current leak is just under half that exposure that we all get from the global consumption of bananas.
Except even that’s overstating it. For the banana consumption does indeed get into our bodies: the Fukushima leak is getting into the Pacific Ocean where it’s obviously far less dangerous. And don’t forget that all that radiation in the bananas ends up in the oceans as well, given that we do in fact urinate it out and no, it’s not something that the sewage treatment plants particularly keep out of the rivers.
Way less radioactivity than they expected.
That’s no reason to be stupid. The plant should never had been built next to the coastline. You can blame the environmentalists for that.
<< Alaska fishermen and fish consumers shouldn’t be concerned about the new disclosures of radioactive water leaking into the Pacific Ocean near the site of the hobbled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan. >>
Something about that sounds a little fishy, doncha think?
(Good grief, i actually said that out loud, didn’t I?)
Good, now carry your calculations forward and allow for increasing contamination, then throw in a SWAG for total bananas possible.
Nice thought, but it wouldn't work unless you're within mere inches of the fish.
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