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Fukushima Evacuations Too Late Outside No-Go Zone
High exposure to radiation possible before officials acted
FUKUSHIMA — Some residents near the Fukushima No. 1 plant might have been exposed to up to 19 millisieverts of radiation during the first four months of the nuclear crisis, the Fukushima Prefectural Government said Tuesday.
This indicates residents subject to the greatest exposure may have been outside the immediate evacuation area, in locations where radioactive hot spots were later revealed and prompted belated evacuation advisories long after the crisis started March 11.
The radiation estimates are based on atmospheric and other external readings and forecasts and do not include food, water and other means of exposure.
The prefecture released its estimates of radiation for residents in 12 municipalities near the plant — Namie, Kawamata, Iitate, Futaba, Okuma, Minamisoma, Tamura, Tomioka, Naraha, Hirono, Katsurao and Kawauchi. The plant occupies parts of Futaba and Okuma.
It said residents who evacuated from high-risk areas in the village of Iitate in late June might have been exposed to the biggest amount — 19 millisieverts.
The prefecture has distributed questionnaires to all of its roughly 2 million residents but had received responses from only about 18 percent of residents as of the end of November.
The prefecture said it based its estimated dosages of radiation from the plant on the timing and places of evacuation. Some residents who haven't returned the questionnaires said they don't remember how long they stayed in certain locations after the quake, resulting in the low survey response rate, officials said.
According to the estimate, residents in the 20-km no-go zone around the plant who evacuated in the early stages of the crisis were exposed to 0.8 to 2.3 millisieverts during the period.
Those in radioactive hot spots outside the no-go zone, where the government did not promptly urge residents to evacuate, may have been exposed to 0.84 to 19 millisieverts.
The prefecture is trying to learn how many people were in the hot spots and for how long. Thousands of residents left the prefecture altogether.
The average dosage is estimated at just more than 1 millisievert, the maximum limit of radiation exposure per year in normal times. The dosages don't include exposure to natural radiation.
Fukushima Medical University Vice President Shunichi Yamashita, who headed the team conducting the survey, said the estimated readings are much lower than those after the 1986 Chernobyl accident and should not pose a problem.
By announcing the estimates, the prefecture hopes more residents will respond to the survey, which would result in a better understanding of the exposure numbers.
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49 Comments so far
Show AllThe first day OF, was the "tell"- if people had their thinking caps on.
And ocean fish should be on the no-eat list.
It makes no difference how many young mothers have stillbirths, or give birth to babies with severe birth defects. The nuclear industry will deny it has anything to do with Fukushima and radiation.
Fukushima is one of several reactors that have poisoned a lot of the planet. Instead of a lesson learned, the nuclear industry wants to build still more plants, to extend the lives of worn out, poorly maintained reactors for another quarter century, increasing their output by a large percentage.
As always, it is Profit, Greed and Power that counts, not earth or humanity.
November's Vanity Fair magazine (with Lady Gaga on the cover) has a big article about the workers of Fukushima and states that it's estimated 19,000 people have already died from Fukushima.
So one article in a wide spread publication mentioned there are thousands of deaths. I haven't seen news articles pick up on that though and there really must be tons of birth defects and children already severely mutated who were already born and were under 12 when Fukushima happened, as you're pointing out.
Fukushima is going to be far higher in the amount of victims than Chernobyl, and has to be, already. The VF article mentions that over 100,000 workers have already gone to the plant since the disaster on 3/11/11
On Dec. 14, Sundome wrote:
"November's Vanity Fair magazine (with Lady Gaga on the cover) has a big article about the workers of Fukushima and states that it's estimated 19,000 people have already died from Fukushima.
So one article in a wide spread publication mentioned there are thousands of deaths"
I have read the Vanity Fair magazine and it clearly states that 18,000 courageous Japanese have been working at the plant to bring it safely under control. Obviously, you have mistakenly equated working at the plant with being dead already! To my knowledge no one in that workforce has died from radiation, and they are working within radiation safety standards to limit their exposure and risk.
It is an excellent, balanced article. But please re-read it. You then went on to state you believed there really "must be tons of birth defects and children already severely mutated" and that Fukushima is already worse than Chernobyl in terms of the number of victims. Your words are a perfect example of the hyperbole that characterizes so many of the comments on the subject of Fukushima at CD.
I'll have to get my magazine out when I get home tonight, I specifically remember the deaths stated as it was an eyebrow raiser to me that they mentioned it.
So how much are you being paid to shill for the nuke industry, anyway?
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/japan-201201
From this link that you posted it confirms that the article says it is estimated that 19,000 people died in the disaster.
Reply to Sundome inquiring about how much I am paid to be a "shill" for the nuclear industry:
Not a cent. See my response to John Ianetta about your bald attempt to mislead readers about the cause of death being radiation in that 19,000 parenthetical estimate given in the Vanity Fair article.
"IT IS ESTIMATED THAT 19,000 PEOPLE HAVE DIED IN THE DISASTER"
The article is linked a few posts above. It clearly is about the Fukushima disaster.
The only thing I got wrong was how many people have come into the plant.
RFinstone wrote (to Sundome):
'I have read the Vanity Fair magazine and it clearly states that 18,000 courageous Japanese have been working at the plant to bring it safely under control.'
Yes, it does. But Sundome is correct in that it also states that it's estimated that 19,000 have died in the disaster. The article may be read on-line at:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/japan-201201
John
Thanks for pointing out that parenthetical/unattributed estimate of "19,000 have died in the disaster". Clearly the author of the article was referring to those who were killed by collapsed buildings and drownings as no Japanese medical doctor or coroner has attributed any death to radiation at this point in time. Yet Sundome chose to couple that estimate in the next paragraph to malformations and mutations (radiation effects) and then in the last paragraph to Chernobyl radiation releases.
I apologize for confusing the 18,000 courageous workers with the 19,000 who have died, but not to Sundome who clearly sought to claim radiation was the cause of the deaths.
In the article he looks like he is referring to the Fukushima disaster.
"The worries about the spread of radiation have hardly abated, but the workers remain all but nameless and faceless; they rarely speak to the press—for fear of being fired—and all that most of us see of them are pictures of virtually extraterrestrial figures in HAZMAT suits and masks clomping around a wasteland eerily emptied of 100,000 people. (It is estimated that more than 19,000 people have died in the disaster.) "
You are DISHONEST about saying that I was steering that death estimate to be from malformations. I never stated anyone died from malformations and I never said the 19,000 dead had anything to do with malformations. I estimated that there ARE malformations. I never said they had anything to do with the article. I only estimated that in answer to the poster I was commenting to who brought up birth defects.
Nation in denial.
See? Another new rich man says there's nothing to worry about.
But at the same time, just a coincidence I'm sure, the government of Tokyo is planning to evacuate that city and build a government city 300 miles to the west.
And out of 600 babies born, over 200 are in the hospital with serious ailments. Just a coincidence you see, nothing to do with the still unreported triple meltdown and escaped corium (in the form of lava) that last week was reported to be a scant few centimeters from breaching the foundation/steel "inverted lightbulb" that GE brought us, even though the design team for the Mark I quit in protest saying it was dangerous and that the scaled-up backup coolant systems were unreliable.
All just coincidences. CEO Jack Walsh's predecessor must have failed to purge those few bad apples on the Mark I engineering team who wouldn't sign off on a hair-brained "inverted lightbulb" design scaled-up from a navy nuke sub.
Nuclear power is perfectly safe you see, for the shareholders in the Southern Hemisphere. And Radiation is actually good for you (if you're in a fallout shelter or Gates/Buffet seed vault, and get rich as the only one left alive after it's all over.)
But you silly anit-nuke protesters with your skin burns and clumps of hair falling out and broken DNA strands in you heart still don't get it: Big Brother says your ailments are all just mental.
TJ
Silly citizens, do NOT paste this in your browser window:
http://enenews.com/
Hi ~TJ~... See who's arrived....Amazing... He's been under his blanket sulking and practicing with his socks since the last article on Fuku... Thank you for that very interesting information.
Thanks Wayne, and thanks for your tireless posts, especially on methane. Oh dern, I said the "M" word, so I guess I can expect the appearance of the Null Unit. Sorry about that!
True to form, the troll won't even bother to read the link I provided him. He's just betting that CDer's will be too lazy to go to enews and read the horror for themselves. Guys, if you go there, scroll down to the bottom past the blue shortcut links to see the short subtitles and summaries of each article. Be sure to read the comments at the bottom of each article as the regulars there post frequent Japan stories which are apparently banned by the six company media monopoly in the US.
There appear to be hundreds of hits on google sick babies. Here is just one I ran across:
http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/children-sickness-linked-to-fukushima-radiation
I really hope I am "over-the-top" on all this and it turns out to be nothing. But even the NCR chairman claims the NRC is not adequately protecting the public in the U.S. (paraphrasing) so how the hell can the NRC provide any credible assistance to Japan, if they won't even implement their own safety work in the U.S?
This FukU disaster is not going to go away in our lifetimes; indeed, even the Chernobyl disaster is leaking again, and will again for millions of years.
Containment doesn't work after inevitable nuclear accidents because the cement used turns to sponge. Tepco is broke, therefore, they aren't even attempting containment. Private Nuclear power generation is insane, by any yardstick. But it's a Super Gravy Train for the Nuclear Mafia which can always blackmail all of us for safety, and then make the cleanup funds mysteriously disappear.
That's what nuclear power is really about: Taxpayer Extortion.
All my posts are just my humble opinions only; I am not a nuclear expert. Just a fleeced taxpayer who used to fly this stuff all over the world.
TJ
Dec. 13, 5:23 p.m. ThomasJefferson wrote:
"And out of 600 babies born, over 200 are in the hospital with serious ailments."
With all due respect, TJ, ENEnews is not a credible scientific/medical source for information about newborn serius ailments following the Fukushima event. I looked at the site and was unable to find the 'fact' that you posted earlier. May I know of a credible report, NOT from an anti-nuclear power website which supplies a slanted evaluation? If you can't, can you at least find one at ENEnews so that I don't have to plow through all the propaganda?
What are the ailments? Have they been assoicated with in utero exposure to radiation previously? Where did the pregnant women live? What dose levels were they exposed to from Fukushima and what was the stage of gestation when exposure began? As you well know "corelation does not prove causation".
~RFinston~,,, I'll go along with ~TJ~ on this... You know, of all of the hundreds of comments Thomas Jefferson's has posted here at CD which I have read over the years, I have only seen him err twice... That was when he had replied to you and said you were partially correct about something.. He was wrong.. But, none of us are perfect.
It isn't only in Japan where infant deaths have soared since Fukushima started melting down, it's a very serious problem here in the US and Canada too... In Philadelphia the baby death rate has increased 35% since Fuku and their water has tested the highest in the country for radioactive contamination... You are aware that babies and young children are more atp to become sick or die from radiation poisons than adults are.
The CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:
____4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)
____10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)
That amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for almost all of the U.S. rose about 2.3%), which is statistically significant.... Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster.
Hi ~Tom~,, the (M) issue... Mr. N and I have peacefully setteled our differences and he is now on the same page as I... He's Okay, not at all what we suspected.
He just posted these links,, not good,,, in fact it is really extremely bad... Dr. Semiletove is the world's top M expert ... We can stop worrying about Fukushima now,,, and everything else for that matter... The party is about over.
Arctic methane: Russian researchers report
Shock as retreat of Arctic sea ice releases deadly greenhouse gas
In his post the links were blue color.
This is good news to find that at worst, people very near the plant were exposed to less that 20 millisieverts, or in the older unit 2 rems. That is similar to the yearly limit for radiation workers. It suggests that there will be a very small chance that any individual, exposed to the highest dose, will be harmed from the exposure. The chances are on the order of one in 500 of developing a cancer. This can be compared with the 'background' risk of cancer of about 200 out of 500 over one's lifetime. This risk estimate is based upon the 2006 report from the BEIR Committee of the NAS/NRC. The dose is also below the threshold dose for birth defects and other acute effects from much higher doses. Only time will tell, but I would not support the cynical view of TJ and other 'over the top' anti-nuclear activists who comment here about the Fukushima accident.
How did I know you would show up, Johnny one note?
I see ~RF~,,, the fact that 1/3rd of the babies born since the 'minor' no problem accident at Fuku occurred are hospitalized with serious mediacal ailments, shows ~TJ~ is being cynical... Hmmm, okay Finny got it and thank you for the information. We know where you are coming from Finny... Yep we do know.
Hey Finny,, I have a serious question for you since you seem to be a self educated expert on medical issues... How does one manage to use a computer keyboard or a sock puppet while wearing a straight jacket? __ Would you know?
Where is the data in support of that 'fact' about birth problems post accident, other than "TJ" said it was so? May we know of a credible medical/scientific report on this?
Roland Finston,
To be so cold, so dismissive, of people's disease and death by human-caused radiation exposure, is simply monstrous.
In this specific sub-population among the much larger number exposed to this specific unnecessary human-caused death-cloud, you post an estimate that 1 in 500 will suffer from cancer as a result. You blithely call this "good news." You wanna draw straws, big boy? So ask yourself, punk: do you feel lucky? Ready for a fun game of Fukushima roulette? Really, you won't know what hit you! Good news!
Also, as has repeatedly been pointed out to you, your "background" risk of developing cancer is in our post-1945 world, in which all of us have suffered human-caused radiation exposure. How many of your 200/500 are getting cancer due to mining, transportation, refining, weaponizing, testing, bombing, Chernobyl, TMI, Fukushima, Windscale, Los Alamos, Hanford, Rocky Flats, Kyshtym, etc? You purposefully ignore it, but very plainly, millions of people have gotten cancers from human-caused radiation exposure. Good news! It could have been billions!
You always act so hurt when people here treat you as if you were a monster.
I see gangrene set in at 5:36 pm.
Mister Finston,
Can't find a single nit to pick in my response?
I repeat: This article is GOOD NEWS...in comparison to all the doomsday predictions from you and your ilk here at CD.
The risk in this small sub-population, located near the plant who have gotten the highest doses, is nonetheless low. Cancer rate increases have been identified in populations exposed to more than 100 millisieverts (Hiroshima and Nagaski) but not those exposed to 2 millisiverts (which is what happened at Fukushima, nearby on the average). Obviously I don't welcome any risk but it is not likely to be detectable statistically, which is how we ultimately identify causation for diseases with multiple causations.
You would have us to believe that the present rates of cancer are mainly from man-made ionizing radiation. This has been studied extensively for the past century and we know how much exposure humans receive in great detail, all around the world. We also know what its risk are. All the evidence concludes that man-made radiation is a small contributor. The effects can't be detected save for large populations exposed to enormous doses (sieverts) compared to Fukushima (milli-sieverts).
Natural background radiation is the largest source of radiation exposure world-wide.
No credible epidemiological studies suggest that a significant fraction of cancers today are due to man-made radiation. Nor is there an epidemic of cancer post-1945 attributable to man-made radiation. .
Of course Fukushima is a tragedy in many ways. But radiation exposure is not important for any population save those exposed nearby and for them it is a factor among many other threats to life produced by the earthquake/tsunami. Tens of thousands died from the immediate impact of collapsed buildings/floods. No one died from acute exposure to radiation. After all the effects are tallied in the coming decades the cancer toll is likely to be unnoticeable, as based upon the dose estimates given in this article.
Call this evaluation "monstrous" and call me any names you like (rat,fink, shill...), but it is the truth.
"You would have us to believe that the present rates of cancer are mainly from man-made ionizing radiation."
i neither say, nor imply, any such thing. But all you have are your boilerplate arguments, so you falsify me into someone you can use your boilerplate arguments against.
On Dec. 13, 8:05 pm Webwalk wrote:
".. your "background" risk of developing cancer is in our post-1945 world, in which all of us have suffered human-caused radiation exposure...You purposefully ignore it, but very plainly, millions of people have gotten cancers from human-caused radiation exposure."
No "iimplication" here that radiation is a main cause of cancer in our "post-1945 (Hiroshima/Nagaski) world"??
Me thinks thou doth protest too much, Mr. Webwalk
No, Mister Finston. My statement is plain: your naming as "background" the level of 200/500 humans getting cancer, PURPOSEFULLY ignores effects of human-caused radiation on that level. Absolutely NO "implication" or assertion that "the present rates of cancer are mainly from man-made ionizing radiation" as you pretend.
If even 1/1000 of those cancers (1/2,500 people worldwide, again accepting your 200/500 figure) are induced by your beloved nuclear industry, that is millions diseased and killed by your beloved nuclear industry. Reputable scientists do place this figure in the millions, and do not call it "good news" as you monstrously do.
And you are a shill: someone who publicly promotes the goodness of what is actually a scam. Whether you are a paid shill, or a volunteer motivated by sincere love for the nuclear industry, that is not name-calling, it is simply descriptive. And yes it is not a "nice name" but it is yours.
You also carry clear attributes of the common troll: someone who does not care if he convinces anyone of anything, whose actual role is to take up space, generate uproar, turn people off and derail threads. Again, whether you are a professional or a volunteer is irrelevant.
You misquote me again, Mr. Webwalk. I never said that any amount of extra radiation is 'good news' in and of itself. Nor did I say that millions of deaths were good news. I said:
"This is good news to find that at worst, people very near the plant were exposed to less that 20 millisieverts, or in the older unit 2 rems." and I gave a quantitative estimate of the risk, noting that it is much less than predicted by the cynical anti-nuclear activists like TJ who claimed among others things, just before I posted, that "the government of Tokyo is planning to evacuate that city and build a government city 300 miles to the west. And out of 600 babies born, over 200 are in the hospital with serious ailments." I challenged him to document those claims, You called what I said "monstrous".
And then I said in my next posting:
"This article is GOOD NEWS...in comparison to all the doomsday predictions from You and your ilk here at CD."
Finally you just wrote:
"If even 1/1000 of those cancers (1/2,500 people worldwide, again accepting your 200/500 figure) are induced by your beloved nuclear industry, that is millions diseased and killed by your beloved nuclear industry. Reputable scientists do place this figure in the millions."
No one has epidemiological tools to determine, for any of the known carcinogens, if it is increased by miniscule amounts, that an increase in cancer as small as 1/1000 has occurred. Sure if you extrapolate linearly from known effects seen at high doses down to the actual exposure rates you can make such a calculation. But that assumes a linear dose/risk extrapolation from high dose down to near background dose, which is unproven. Because you then chose to calculate the number of additional injured among the entire world's population of 7 billion, any carcinogen's increase will injure millions. May I inquire for the names of your "reputable scientists" and citations to their peer- reviewed research?
Your "...millions diseased and killed..." estimate makes for great morality claims and breast-beating but that is about all.
We'll just have to leave it to the few remaining readers of this exchange to decide whether I am a "shill" and a "troll", or whether you are a holier than thou claimant for all that is just and good but at the same time committed to casting derision on anyone who questions your exaggerations.
Mister Finston,
i am going to stop replying to you - playing into your troll practice - and return to my previous practice of simply pointing out what it is you are doing.
i'm sure Finston has convinced many readers here of - something - with his predictable boilerplate trolling tactics. But as a troll, his point is not to convince anyone of anything; his point is to waste time and space, so that we do not become more effective at organizing to shut down the nuclear power and weapons industry. Bye, Rat Finkston.
'Sorry to see you end our discussion in that manner, Mr. Webwalk. Good bye
Man, talk about pie in the sky denial....
From the article,,, ("Fukushima Medical University Vice President Shunichi Yamashita, who headed the team conducting the survey, said the estimated readings are much lower than those after the 1986 Chernobyl accident and should not pose a problem."
Contiued,, ("By announcing the estimates, the prefecture hopes more residents will respond to the survey, which would result in a better understanding of the exposure numbers.")... End article quotes.
If it is not a problem,,, why are they concerned about how many were exposed?
Perhaps they wish to learn if any had been breathing an had inhaled any of the deadly radio-active isotopes?
Gee, didn't anyone else notice that the dose estimates only include living near the reactor? It doesn't include exposure due to eating the food that is grown near there.
I'm glad this is online, as it's not even worth using as bird cage liner.
Denial is so not a river in Eygpt...and the running list of it makes a river of crap.
RFinston, Dec 13 2011 - 5:36pm, is a nuclear industry shill.
+1000
Well,
Well guys, now I've been accused of being "a nuclear activist." I am not a nuclear activist, all I've ever done is post my opinion on this one web site. But to a nuke-head, anyone who dares question the honesty of this dark industry is "an activist".
No, I simply know how to use google, and I don't watch MSM, so that paid-for disinformation does not bias my opinion. Speaking of credibility, of which now, the Japanese government and Tepco have none, here's this:
Radioactive materials: “No one trusts the measurement by the national government”, says the Ministry of the Environment ranking official
Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of the Environment Satoshi Takayama held a press conference on December 10 in Shizuoka City [in Shizuoka Prefecture] and said about the radiation measurement of the debris from the March 11 earthquake/tsunami, “No one trusts the measurement by the national government. We are measuring, but we would like the local municipalities to measure it also.”
Vice Governor of Shizuoka Shinichi Omura, who was with Takayama in the press conference, was visibly annoyed when Mainichi Shinbun asked him about the Secretary’s remark after the press conference. “To say ‘No one trusts the government’s measurement’ is to shake the very foundation of the safety standard.” [...]
http://enenews.com/category/japan
scroll about halfway down, then click on the story.
TJ
"No, you stay here. Perfectly safe. Nothing to worry about."
The Japanese version of RFinston.
I see RFinston is back... Where's good old Mark Abrams when you need him?
He's here... Mark has many names.
Here is a funny one.. Last week Finston wrote, (to pharaphrase), that he didn't like nuclear power and was some kind of a Dr or a radiological expert and gave testimony to some government commission and told them that nucler energy was too dangerous etc, etc, etc.... That's why we sometimes call him Funny Finny... Except he's as funny as a bathtub full of dead rats.
As usual, hello to the nuclear industry's low-paid boiler room bloggers.
I expect the Japanese government to attempt to keep birth defects secret. This is the month when one month old human fetuses would have been exposed to ingested radioactive isotopes. I expect that their government is pretty good at locking down stray news reports, but at the same time the Japanese protest movement will be looking for problems.
I found this article essentially a garble, as though someone had printed each paragraph on a separate sheet of paper, thrown them in the air and then printed them in the random sequence picked off the floor.
........ Those of us who committed years ago to studying nuclear power talked about exposure in REMs (and we did recognize such distinctions as internal vs external, and relative invasive capacities among such as beta, alpha, gamma, neutron, etc.). I am too busy these days with other issues to try to get my head around Miliseiverts or whatever, but my sense is that this unit was invented to confuse people. We learned, for example, that an alpha particle traveling through air would not penetrate a piece of paper, while if inhaled it could damage the nuclei of lung tissue and lead to cancer. The Japan Times as reprinted on CD is doing a horrible job; no doubt the Japanese have found better sources by now.
........ A related issue is, Who Tests This Snuff [sic]? Who is qualified to test, and how honest are they? Decades ago when I was politically active on municipal water/sewer issues, I discovered that neither my state (Ohio EPA) nor my municipality had the capacity to test drinking water for essentially anything other than chlorine and fluoride. They had to contract with private labs. Who owned the labs and why did some get the contracts and others not? Who do you trust to provide GENUINE measurements? How many of us own a Geiger counter or a dosimeter? How do we know they are accurate? Radiation: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.
....... Health care costs are growing nearly exponentially. Prior to 1945, cancers were VERY rare in humans. Most early deaths were due to infection until the fungal antibiotics came along (such as coal miner Black Lung and rural arsenic poisoning and industrial wearing down of young women being exceptions). Back then, there was no correlation between smoking tobacco and lung cancer, because the tobacco had not been irradiating [sic] by nuclear fallout sticking on the leaves. (Similar issues go to smoking pot, but any tobacco addict smokes at least eight times as much leaf as does a typical pot smoker.)
....... The most relevant point of the article is that the atmosphere blew chunks of Fukushima radiation way outside the protection zones. Lesson: the "experts" really do not know how they are killing us, more than a half century after nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and "curing" cancer by massive irradiation (while cancer rates are not going down!). YET, for those who might spend the time and learn, it turns out that the US Army has known for DECADES what are the effects on humans of radiation, while everytime they get more sophisticated in their measurements, they discover that the damage to life is worse than they had previously calculated. The article implies that Chernobyl was worse. Probably, it will turn out that Fukushima is far worse and ongoing.
Every nuclear power plant in the world needs to be decommissioned, even if we need to give the French an extra decade to figure out any alternative to their nuclear addiction. (I'd suggest start with tidal given their long coastlines...)
But where would we store all those radioactive MALE nuclear RODS? And what of the radioactive water and all those other detrites? After all, they don't want them at Yucca Mountain, where our government has spent BILLIONS over decades in salt caverns to store the waste.
We need a quiet REBELLION. You know who you are and where you are. Shut it down. It is killing us.
-30-
OMR,
Thanks for the excellent post.
Y'know you can do paragraphs in these threads? All you need is a < p > (without the spaces, just the angle-brackets around the p) at the head of each paragraph. That does it!
OleManRiver wrote:
'I found this article essentially a garble, as though someone had printed each paragraph on a separate sheet of paper, thrown them in the air and then printed them in the random sequence picked off the floor. ........ Those of us who committed years ago to studying nuclear power talked about exposure in REMs (and we did recognize such distinctions as internal vs external, and relative invasive capacities among such as beta, alpha, gamma, neutron, etc.). I am too busy these days with other issues to try to get my head around Miliseiverts or whatever, but my sense is that this unit was invented to confuse people....'
Not really. The sievert and the rem both measure exactly the same quantity (equivalent dose). The rem is the older cgs unit, and equals 100 erg/gram. The sievert is the SI unit, and equals 1 joule/kilogram. So 1 sievert = 100 rem.
'...We learned, for example, that an alpha particle traveling through air would not penetrate a piece of paper, while if inhaled it could damage the nuclei of lung tissue and lead to cancer....'
Yes indeed. The dangers of inhaled and ingested radioactivity were known long before the dangers of X-rays. And the x-ray hazard was known well before 1945 (when the fission bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). When I was a pup (during the early forties), all of the shoe stores in center-city Philadelphia had fluoroscopes (which emitted X-rays for a timer-controlled period) for shoe-fitting. A trip on a Saturday to several shoe stores could result in exposure to the feet that was much greater than that produced by a medical X-ray. And pelvic exams of young women routinely included taking X-rays. But well before then, the health of
workers in pitchblende mines (which contained uranium, radium, polonium, and thorium) had been found to be seriously compromised.
John
Stupid is as stupid does. I wonder if the rats and cockroaches who will take our place after we kill ourselves off with radiation, pollution, climate change, overpopulation, [add your own here], etc. will be any smarter than we have proven to be?
The human addiction to "cheap power" has been leading our civilization to a hell.
Seems to me that there have been warnings about the Faustian deal with providers of temporal power. Is this not so?