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I presume the 1/10,000 represents an age controlled incidence increase in pediatric thyroid cancer. Certainly some increase was expected eventually and there's probably been enough time passed to start to see it. I don't have pediatric, much less appropriately controlled baselines at my fingertips, but certainly thyroid is, overall, a fairly common cancer. American Cancer Society expects 60k US cases this year, and that number has been increasing for a long time. I have a cousin who's survived it. It's reliably the first cancer to increase after such exposures and its cases should occur in a narrow time span. Thyroid cancer is highly curable; the vast majority of those kids will do well with no more long term consequences than a lifetime on thyroid replacement. However the number of excess thyroid cancer cases should give better ideas on just how many other cancers to expect in the years ahead. There doubtless will be people who lie about the size of the problem — in both directions — but I doubt the cancer registry data in Japan will be falsified. There are plenty of very bright motivated doctors and statisticians in Japan to correctly analyze that data, peer review it and get it published. They'd need to take into account those who took iodine tablets to prevent thyroid cancer (the only cancer those tablets can prevent), but I suspect they'll overcome that hurdle and reach some useful estimates on the true size of the future cancer problem, aka "whether we're panicking too much or too little." Either way, we need to know. Such predictions, of course, presume additional releases of radiation are avoided or at least small compared to the large initial release. Which, as I stated, is a significant if.

I came into this thread initially to answer questions of why distillation alone couldn't remove all the radiation from the water. There had been news articles complaining that their intended purification process only removed 99 or whatever % of the radiation. So my thought first focused on the tritium. IF (again) they can keep the tritium in tanks it is not a problem there, its radiation won't penetrate any tanks walls and it will decay to irrelevancy within a humanly manageable time. Obviously leakage and evaporation from the tanks are less than perfectly controlled, much the less capture of the T2O into the tanks so some T2O is escaping. However "a drop in the ocean" is proverbial for a reason; it's the most extreme dilution possible on earth. I don't recall how much tritium was created in the accident, although I presume it's roughly known. As I presume is how much tritium is in the escaping water. Which water certainly is much less than 100% T2O or THO. Wiki says there was an estimated 3-4kg tritium on earth's surface prior to the atomic tests, presumably mainly as water and mainly with most of the other water in the ocean. Nuclear testing increased that 2-3 orders of magnitude, so maybe to 4 tons of tritium worldwide. "We" survived that. Who’s “we” Kemosabe? Mankind is "we!" Although some individual persons and non-human lifeforms suffered harm Mankind as a whole thrived during the nuclear test era with large increases in population, life spans and wealth. It was certainly not an end of the world problem and objectively did much less harm than some of mankind's other bad ideas and habits. I'd be surprised if Fukishima threatened us with more escaped tritium than the nuclear testing plus the similarly "survived" Chernobyl. Obamacare is a MUCH larger medical risk. Just compare cancer survival rates in the US and the UK.

What the Soviets did in the Urals was horrid. Dumping pure waste straight into an arctic river. Storing it by pouring it into shallow lake, which subsequently dried out exposing it. But the beliefs and culture of the USSR did much more damage in other ways than even their dramatically bad nuclear crimes. The affected area of the Urals was sparsely populated even before their accident. Some in the west knew 'something' had gone terribly wrong in the Urals, but they were able to keep the details hidden for decades. That level of coverup is impossible in Japan post McArthur and the Japanese would not tolerate that level of inaction. If humanly possible they will do better than the Urals. The USSR hid the existence of Chernobyl as long as they could and downplayed its consequences as long as it could. Which was about four years. But are you saying subsequent, independent, free government of the Ukraine has continued to cover up the late consequences (cancer and others) for the benefit of Russia? Russia has bullied the Ukraine at times, but at least some Ukrainian governments have been very pro-western and anti-Russian. They could have destroyed records of cancers during the Soviet years, but hiding any current cancer outbreaks at the time of that 25 year UN review would be a different matter. And if pre-Chernobyl radiation induced cancer theories were correct there should be a large one to hide.

Citing a 2000 act of Congress as evidence that low levels of radiation are harmful — on FreeRepublic.com — isn't going to get you very far. Whether or not low levels of radiation are dangerous, Freepers understand that Congresscritters are generally scientific ignoramuses who are quite willing to act politically and claim science as an excuse. And 2000 would have been leading up to the hoped for replacement of President Clinton with Al Gore who hyped everything conceivably environmental... except Daddy's toxic waste dump in his own back yard. Worse than worthless as a talking point here.

I knew radiation was immunosuppressive. It is, or at least used to be, used medically that way to treat some diseases. It takes a fair dosage to do so significantly. We doctors suppress immunity in a lot of folks intentionally. Relatively few get into significant trouble from it. For that matter ultraviolet light is immunosuppressive. It takes about 1/4 as much UV to produce measurable immunosuppression as it does to burn you. It can make for some odd patterns of poison ivy rashes. I'm not saying it's desirable, just putting it into perspective.

The big question is can the Japanese keep things mostly under control, remove the stored spent fuel, dismantle the buildings and recover the escaped fuel. They claim they'll start recovering the stored spent fuel in the next year. If they do it will reduce the potential for future problems and give hope that their announced future stages are possible. Failure there would be BAD. Success still leaves those future stages requiring new engineering be developed. Raising that sea wall higher is also important; I don't want another tsunami there! Assuming the damaged buildings, and the 1000 water storage tanks, can survive typhoon winds the most the extra rain could do is rinse out to sea those radioactives that were already leaking out. It won't wash the escaped cores out to sea. The PR stink would be larger than the long term actual incremental damage.

Fairly soon after the accident it was clear there were plenty of Freepers in both the "problem is too big to solve" and the "problem is less bad than advertised camps." Some of that was probably based on prior attitudes to nuclear power, some on how cynical they were regarding behavior of governments and large companies, some on whether they were optimists generally or pessimists. I've long known, as much as my curiosity hates it, that I am neither able nor have the time to understand everything about everything. When I want to know more, but can't do so directly I try to do so indirectly. I look for less controversial indicators that over time may point me in the right direction. I look at who and what others are saying on the matter. Sometimes someone I've otherwise found reliable will have useful opinions. E.g. Michael Crichton wrote highly of the UN's report on Chernobyl and how it showed the worst damage from Chernobyl was psychological, damage from bad information scaring folks. Sometimes people I've found to be reliably wrong will have useful opinions. I've long liked what I call the "Klink Test." In one episode Col. Hogan was defusing a bomb and didn't know which wire to cut. So he asked Klink which one, then cut the other one because he didn't know which one was right but was confident Klink would chose the wrong one. History has proven the environmental movement to be full of reliable Klinks, wrong about everything and crying "Wolf!" at every loose hair seen. When I can't decide positively, I like my odds betting against the green Klinks every time.

Still I want your side to keep pressure on TEPCO and the Japanese government. Absent pressure they'll default to trying to sweep the problems under the rug which is the worst option. Just be careful not to push in ways that make them hazard the forest to save one tree. Aiming for perfect zero risk is unwise as inaction carries significant risk here. Structures will weaken and fail with too much delay, and will do so faster than normal in high radiation areas. Releasing some radiation to remove larger potential sources of radiation from harm may be a good trade. Releasing some radiation to speed up other steps may be a good trade. Bargain for better trades, but bargain quickly. You can't completely stop ground water flowing through this site anymore than Colorado could have completely prevented its recent flooding. Site and build future plants better. Some radiation is going to get out. Do what's practical to minimize it, but don't let it distract from working the bigger problems. And if you can't solve the big problem than don't complain about the — relatively — little ones. So enough of this subject, I'm back to working Obama problems.