They claimed to have achieved 'cold shutdown' 22 months ago. IF (a significant if) they can maintain that, production of new radiation will be limited, accumulated fission products within will decay away and they will become safer to handle over several years, just as do cores removed during normal refueling. We survived all the uncontained nuclear testing of the cold war, the sinking of multiple nuclear subs, all the nuclear dumping by the Soviets into the Arctic and the Urals (much worse than our dumping at Hanford, etc.). This, presuming shutdown can be maintained, will be less of a hit than that.
The Russian's ability to coverup Chernobyl effects took a large hit with the fall of the Soviet Union a few years later. Free Ukrainians were much less willing to hide what Russian stupidity had done to them. My comments regarding its eventual death toll being much less than expected were based on imperfect recollections of the UN's multiagency (including IAEA), 25th anniversary report, which can be found here. It didn't admit to potentially 40k+ extra deaths as you'd claimed they'd admitted and as you claimed was too low. The report estimated merely 4000 excess deaths — 3% over baseline cancer rates — an increase they said would be difficult to detect.
It looks like pretty reasonable science to me. Of course there will be loads of anecdotal stories about dire consequences. It was a big, scary, REAL event. There was dramatic physical damage and certainly major psychological trauma. God knows we've had GB full of stories of dire alleged consequences from events we now KNOW weren't real problems generated by fear of the unknown in scared honest people fanned by fear mongers and a media blessed with either an agenda, or at best with incompetence. The stories are data; they aren't, alone, science.
The atomic bomb survivors, the experience of 100+ years of medical radiation use and the experience of sundry other accidental exposures gives us some ideas of the risks resulting from exposure patterns and dosages. It also gives us an idea of the timing of those risks. Thyroid cancers and leukemias happen early. Other cancers take longer to develop, longer than the 'Soviet' propagandists lasted. Skin, the largest organ and the one with the most cancers (over half of all cancer in the US is skin cancer of various types) As a Dermatologist I do know something about that. Fortunately radiation mostly seems to cause low risk basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas; melanomas aren't much increased.
Most radiation induced skin cancers will be indistinguishable from their epidemic sun induced cousins, but sometimes they stand out. My non-nudist patient presenting with three at once on his scrotum, 30 years after curing testicular cancer with radiation therapy, was one such. My literature suggests the skin cancer risk starts rising 15 years out and probably remains elevated for life. I've not seen reports of increases in weird skin cancers coming out of Kiev, etc. and I've been paying some attention. That dog isn't barking in Chernobyl. Yet I've heard it barking in Bangladesh. Even with less media attention and with coverups by a guilty UN. I've seen reports of weird skin cancers from UNICEF's mass arsenic poisoning there.
Maybe it's still too early, but I haven't heard of any spikes in thyroid cancer or leukemia in Japan either. Or maybe the harm there is less than feared also. Japan will collect and release solid data on this. In very few years we'll KNOW whether there were any such spikes — the first solid biomarker whether we're panicking too much or too little.
Skin, the largest organ and the one with the most cancers (over half of all cancer in the US is skin cancer of various types) is a relatively common site for radiation induced cancers.
Your information is rather outdated, plentiful but limited and slanted the direction of optimism.
31 isotopes were detected in Japan, according to the IAEA. Tritium and the other 31 isotopes (there may be more with radioactive decay) cause genetic damage which exceeds a human lifespan. And some of those radioactive contaminants have half lives of thousands of years.
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For example, since the disaster, school children have been fed “untested” beef which was later found to be radioactive. In fact, in a never ending nightmare of conscience free propaganda, Japan continues to beg it’s inhabitants to “support Fukushima” by eating contaminated foods and the government continues to help growers, sellers conceal the origin of their contaminated foods. Here’s search results on “beef” from a good site if you want to do some research (the blogger is quick to point out inaccuracies or uninformed panic reportage) http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/search/label/radioactive%20beef
Tea is contaminated with cesium but sold anyway - after all, it’s tea, right? Peaches etc. Lots of contaminated food being consumed. Contaminated rice mixed with non contaminated rice and “spot tested” (one sample per 3 or 4 farms).
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Since tritium is almost always found as water, it goes directly into soft tissues and organs. The associated dose to these tissues are generally uniform and dependent on the tissues’ water content. Saying the skin can stop the beta of tritium ignores the fact that it is consumed and irradiates soft tissues, increasing the risk of cancer.
Are you aware that a well in Fukushima contains intense concentrations of isotopes, thousands of times over the “safety limit” and that this indicates corium has reached the water table - which it shares with Tokyo? (possibly much of Japan?) And there’s no way to stop it nor to prevent more corium from reaching the water table? http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2013/10/21/fukushima-watch-parsing-the-latest-radioactive-spike-in-zen-beta/
They lied about cold shutdown. Radioactive iodine were detected after their “cold shutdown = we lost control and don’t know where it is.” Presently, steam is sporadically venting out of the reactors. Steam....there’s your “cold shutdown.” Here’s search results for “steam” http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2013/07/fukushima-i-nuke-plant-reactor-3-steam.html
“accumulated fission products within will decay away and they will become safer to handle over several years” Are you aware that they have detected plutonium and other fuel grade isotopes in the surrounding areas and that these take MUCH MUCH longer to become safe? “It is unclear how the underground water is being contaminated,” Araki said, speculating that it’s the result of plutonium near the reactor core having melted and dropping somewhere inside the reactor.” (Kenji Araki, a nuclear engineering guest professor at the Fukushima National College of Technology)http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-japan-nuclear-20131020,0,3287177,full.story
“We survived all the uncontained nuclear testing of the cold war, the sinking of multiple nuclear subs, all the nuclear dumping by the Soviets into the Arctic and the Urals (much worse than our dumping at Hanford, etc.).” Who’s “we” Kemosabe? People developed cancer and died from nuclear testing. Research “Down Winders” and read of the financial settlements the US government settled on the remaining survivors. In 2000 the US congress created laws to protect Defense department workers from litigation - prior to that law workers would be sued by the government if they tried to collect compensation for cancer or other illnesses related to working with radiation. Congress acknowledged that even below the “safety limits”, radition can cause cancer and now allows workers to collect.)
Part of the cancer toll in the US and world wide is related to radiation released (burped) or vented from nuke plants but 20 years from exposure, the victim cannot prove where the cancer originated - there’s no cellular marker. (Oh I’ve seen maps of cancer clusters for breast cancer which form rosettes around the NP’s in the US and I’ve seen the same kind of map someone created for leukemia in England) The government(s) doesn’t like to settle so it denies that incidents ever happened and only counts it’s official measurements as valid. BEIR VII and medical science dating back to John Gofman’s work proves exposure = cancer risk and some cancer cases. Medical science has proven that their is no “safe limit” for exposure, all exposure is cumulative and increases risk and an individual’s body has individual capacity to repair itself (there isn’t one response to exposure, we respond differently). US plants are legally permitted to vent radioactive gases based on the nuke power industries baseless insistence that their is a safe limit below which they “try” to stay.
THe catastrophes you mentioned don’t have the nuclear payload of Fukushima - bombs have little fissile material by comparison with fuel in a nuclear reactor and are more efficient at converting it to energy than are the three core melt-throughs and, shudder, the vast amount of fuel suspended in open, damaged buildings (let’s call them shacks).
Your comparisons are too optimistic and unrealistic. If it’s an isotope then you focus on one that is beta and shorter lived than all that nasty gamma or heavier fuel isotopes. Areas in Japan are awash in serious contaminates and will be for the foreseeable future. The radioactive wastes are being distributed world wide starting with the northern hemisphere and right now, most actively in waterways.
Re the Urals, there weren’t any survivors there, were there? Miles of trees knocked down, their tops falling pointing away from the blast. Russia also had a region where they cooled water directly from a river which supplied the local population with water. People were dying in gruesome ways there - it’s offensive to me to read that “we’re’ fine” when the human toll of nuclear incompetence is ghastly.
“This, presuming shutdown can be maintained, will be less of a hit than that.” This sentence indicates that you are not aware of the physical circumstances of Fukushima.
“Free Ukrainians were much less willing to hide what Russian stupidity had done to them.” But records weren’t kept in fact, records were intentionally destroyed. For example, the government let the local populace hold a parade under the shadow of smoldering reactor, all photographs of the parade have been destroyed. Russians went to Japan to share their expertise re Fukushima. Japanese officials declared they were learning “The Lessons OF Chernobyl” from them. Around that time it was announced that medical doctors are not allowed to examine Fukushima residents without government approval. Reports are now leaking out about illnesses and indicating the physicians have been told not to tell their patients if they are ill from exposure (and these physicians are horrified).
I do believe that the IAEA admitted to more than 4k, I’ll try to search my links from FR going back but I sure find it a needle in a haystack process using the FR search engine. Internal group of scientists analyzed medical records from the region and spikes in death tolls which coincided with Chernobyl in countries world wide (spikes in spontaneous abortions etc.) and came up with a much much larger number (1 million). Some of the science is individual medical records based (doctors treating patients), some is analysis of spiking death tolls reported by country coinciding with timing of Chernobyl (and you probably know that radiation from Chernobyl was distributed throughout Europe in “spots”). Their research is controversial (do you believe that decades of obfuscation on the part of the IAEA and others would pave the way for acceptance of this kind of research?) but having read portions of the 400 page document, I find some of it quite good and it gives the best picture of the real toll of Chernobyl in that it details so many other illnesses and syndromes we never hear about, taken from the records of physicians treating patients. FOr example, early dementia from accumulations of cesium in the brain. Many syndromes which are not organic illnesses but seem to be the result of irradiation knocking down single chemical processes or little understood functions of the body resulting in human suffering previously unknown. Here’s a wiki web page describing the research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment
Here’s an excerpt of the webpage: “The IAEA’s exclusion of data where estimated dose is below a certain threshold (following ICRP recommendations) is contrary to normal practice, even the ICRP’s own practice, and contradicts the linear no-threshold model (LNT). The ICRP’s recommendation in this regard is inconsistent with LNT and its own practices.”
Here’s a comment critical of the report: “A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry[12] points out that the book achieves this figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the Chernobyl accident. There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease.”
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This gets at something seldom discussed - irradiation of a population suppresses immune functioning. I read a pro nuclear international report on Chernobyl when I first started studying the issue. A sentence in the literature caught my attention indicating that “all illnesses” in the Ukraine increased. Doctors reported increased levels of all illnesses. We know that radiation suppresses immune functioning, it’s a key concern when patients are treated with radiation therapy. SO, irradiate entire populations and then all diseases increase. With immunity down, more people dying from more diseases and many not “directly related to radiation exposure”. This is no doubt why the report counted spikes in death toll. I agree that it’s a controversial approach and yet I don’t want to ignore the obvious medical effects of radiation. SO I look at their overall death toll of 1 million and look at how much of it was documented by physicians treating patients and the fact that the contaimination is causing illnesses and killing today and will continue to do so and I don’t think they are that far off. Divide by 4 if you like, you’d still have about 250,000. WHatever it is, 4k or 40k is too low. And key to my study of this issue - there’s far more human suffering then that which is quickly captured in terms like “cancer” or “leukemia.”
But, decide for yourself. Here is the report: WOW! No longer available! I knew the industry was outraged by that report but I’ve never seen a PDF pulled as “unavailable” or “out of stock”! WEll it is out there in the wild. Many people downloaded it. If you are interested, I hope you find a copy. WOW!
“It was a big, scary, REAL event.” Was? Is. It is an ongoing unprecedented disaster and for the next few decades, much more fuel can be vented into the environment if the damaged fuel pools are compromised. Say....another typhoon headed for eastern Japan. *sigh* And earthquakes etc. or the NP becomes too radioactive for people to maintain those precious pools. Is.
“Maybe it’s still too early, but I haven’t heard of any spikes in thyroid cancer or leukemia in Japan either. Or maybe the harm there is less than feared also. Japan will collect and release solid data on this.” Japan is demonstrating that it has learned the lessons of Chernobyl and is suppressing information and lying to the public. In the months following the disaster, a Japanese official went to the most contaminated region to educate the public. WHile there he assured pregnant women that as long as they smiled and were happy, their baby would not be harmed by radiation but if they were scared or worried, then that could harm their child. Can you imaging a)lying and b) causing women to experience guilt if they lose the baby or it is otherwise unhealthy?
Re thyroid cancer Fukushima:
“The prefectural government has so far released thyroid testing results for 193,000 children. The number of children who have been diagnosed as or suspected of having thyroid cancer totaled 44, up from 28 as of June.
Eighteen of them have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and 25 are showing symptoms of the disease. The remaining child was suspected of having the cancer but was later diagnosed with a benign tumor.”