Radioactive Tokyo tapwater HARMS BABIES ... if drunk for a year The Japanese government has announced that radioactive iodine from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant has been found in tapwater, and that infants should not drink it. However there is little reason for concern once the facts are understood. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare says that tests have …
> On the whole though, the Japanese government seems to be facing the classic
> dilemma following a nuclear incident of any type. If you say there's no cause for
> concern, people will assume you're lying: if you then say there is cause for concern,
> you actually are lying.
I smell a troll. Flame on!
PIf you decide not to get one, please, please write your next post from the Chernobyl Alienation Zone. Preferably, do it while having a road-side picnic. The iodine should be all gone by now, so make sure to drink plenty of water in the meantime.
You are, wittingly or not, participating in the global Chernobyl coverup. Before you accuse me of being a conspiracy nut, I will point out it's not a conspiracy-driven coverup... it's just that many sub-humans in many countries have decided at about the same time that the truth is too hard to swallow for the plebs.
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Ex-French_nuclear_chief_charged_over_Chernobyl_cover-up.html
http://articles.latimes.com/1992-04-25/news/mn-883_1_chernobyl-documents
I don't know French, so I haven't been able to find anything that says whether or not Pellerin was convicted, or whether the case even went to trial. I also gather from the article you linked that it's not been proven that any cover-up took place; further, that at least one person has actually been convicted of libel for lying about Pellerin's statements regarding the Chernobyl accident; and further still, that the rising trend in Corsican thyroid cancer rates apparently began roughly a decade before the Chernobyl accident took place.
As for your other link, I find it hardly surprising that the Soviet regime would not only lie to the world about the severity of a major industrial accident, but would actively injure the health of many hundreds or thousands of its subjects in order to perpetuate the cover-up. That's just one of the many remarkable traits which made the Soviet regime so well-loved around the world, and it's certainly not as though they only behaved that way with regard to Chernobyl -- take the loss of the Kursk, for example, in which the Soviet government also did their best to downplay the magnitude of the problem for as long as they possibly could.
On the other hand, depending on how you count it, this year marks either the 20th or the 22nd anniversary of the Soviet regime's collapse, so I'm not sure what point I'm intended to take about the behavior of those political regimes which a) are not totalitarian oligarchies and b) actually still exist. Similarly, I'm not sure how it is that, from a five-year-old news story about an 83-year-old man being hounded into a courtroom by a bunch of leftist idiots who think radiation is worse than pedophile zombie Satan, I'm expected to draw the conclusion that the world's power elite are conspiring to conceal the true flipperhand-baby horrors of Chernobyl.
You're not proving your point here; you're just saying "A + B = X-Files" and expecting people not to argue. Obviously there are better places to try that sort of thing than the Reg comments section; there's always going to be some saddo with nothing at all better to do in the entire breadth of his life than to sit down, put a clothespin on his nostrils, and explain at painfully pedantic length exactly why you're full of it.
is radioactive contamination of tokyo's water supply one of these "triumphs of nuclear engineering" that mr page was keen to tell us about?
i look forward to further articles from him about how the titanic was a triumph of naval engineering, the hindenburg was a triumph for the aviation industry and gordon brown's chancellorship was a triumph for the world of financial engineering.
Here's a rather fun little graphic from the national safety council that illustrates the risks of dying due to various causes.
http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Picture%20Library/News/web_graphics/Injury_Facts_37.pdf
It rather looks to me that even tripling your chances of dying from radiation exposure, you are still at far greater risk from activities such as being a pedestrian, simply sitting in a car, motor vehicle accident, riding a motorcycle, falling, etc....
The risks involved here are not very significant compared to other risks we can assess in our lives. That's not to say that there are no risks of course, but if you stack the risks, even the cumulative exposure of those who've worked longest at the accident site, you are still struck by the contrast against the far greater risks we take every day just getting out of bed.
Assuming there was a once off event that deposited he iodine it will be within the safe limit in 16 days and almost gone in 72 days. Even if a bab drank the water every day it's average exposure over a year would be well under 100 bequerels.
Table For those interested :
Bequerels. Days
210. 8
105. 16
63. 24
32. 32
16. 40
8. 48
4. 56
2. 64
1. 72
You come here and don't even write consecutive powers of 2 in binary? You get 10 (twice a unit) demerits and you're hereby stripped out of your nerd badge.
As for all people who don't understand units (Bq/yr) and what half life means (yes, yes it IS a game, but it also has a scientific meaning), I've got a tip I use myself: when I don't know about a topic, I refrain myself from commenting on the said topic.
The level measured in tap-water was 210 bequerels / l. Assuming you drink 2l per day, that is 420 bequerels per day.
What you are saying is that 1l of water has no more effect after 72 days, but can you last that long without additional water to drink?
It is 5 years old. Where's the follow up? What happened in the case? The article itself details an initial investigation into what is basically a 'he said, she said' legal argument where neither side has a strong argument. On the one hand there are claims of a cover-up of the chernobyl nuclear cloud extent. On the other hand, the claims of thyroid cancer caused by the cloud are not proven (the article even states that the investigation of thyroid cancer rates goes back to the 70's - Chernobyl was in 1986).
If anything the article merely serves to increase the confusion around Chernobyl. I t does NOT suppiort the contention fo a 'cover up'
"Doctors also question the supposed link between Chernobyl and the rise in thyroid cancer, a trend which began in the mid-1970s but which Bertella-Geoffroy is also investigating, notably in Corsica."
That is all.
However, since you are clearly concerned, I'd suggest you head straight for Vault 101 and stay there for 20 years.
How dare you present the facts in a calm and deliberate manner - don't you realise there are scare stories to peddle, newspapers to sell and hard disks of forum postings to fill??
I demand a snappy headline that indicates that the world is about to end. Preferably one that uses minimal syllables and misspells the word "nook-yoo-luh-r"
Hell it's practically misinformative. Let's review the basic facts of the situation:
1. at some point in time health experts determined that infants should not be served water of greater than 100 Bq/L of iodine-131
2. in Tokyo, recent water samples exceed that level for iodine-131
3. the Japanese government notified Tokyo residents of the issue and recommended that they not serve the water to infants
How is that anything other than the perfectly rational, intelligent, and technically correct thing to do?
Frankly I find your reporting shoddy, unprofessional, and counterproductive. You sound like an ass, and you offend me and many other somewhat intelligent people. Please stop.
"""1. at some point in time health experts determined that infants should not be served water of greater than 100 Bq/L of iodine-131"""
You forgot to mention the 'for a year' part of the 100 Bq/L limit. Which is the important bit. Since there's probably not a continuous supply of Iodine-131, the water will be under the limit (long) before anyone can get 100Bq*Year/L of exposure.
Seems to me that leaving the time dimension out of an inherently time-related issue is rather careless.
That the half life of iodine 131 is 8 days which means in 1 month, the level of radiation will be a little under 6% of the current level - even if the material causing the reading were to remain in the water constantly. However since the water will cycle through the plant, and the equipment will, where possible or appropriate be decontaminated, the levels of material in the water will be below the levels of any risk within a few weeks.
Points:
1. As the previous responder reminds us, you'd have to drink the water for a long time to get that exposure.
2. You couldn't do that if you tried, at least, for iodine-137. The half-life is only 8 days. (Ce-131 is much longer, though).
3. There is a tendency for a lot of people to interpret the boundaries at which an agency starts recommending taking certain actions for safety as the boundaries at which something becomes dangerous; that is, for example, if the government says that radiation levels have just increased to the point where they start evacuating people, that means levels have reached the point where it's dangerous to remain.
That is incorrect, at least, if the government is on the ball.
You make these decisions with a safety margin, that is, you start evacuating when levels are still well below the point where it's dangerous to remain, but on the rise. Going into chicken-little mode the moment someone says you should refrain from drinking the water or eating the spinach or breathing the air is overreacting.
So you're basically saying screw it, it's just a long term limit and we only have one set of detects?
You're making an assumption that the Japanese government officials weren't willing to make--that the nature of the source, extent, and duration of the contamination are well understood. They simply aren't; it's practically impossible to project the contaminant transport from the plant based on available information. Hell, people can't even agree on what the exact damage is at the reactor yet.
And it's not as if the government told everyone to don respirators and hide in basements for a year drinking distilled water. They said give infants bottled water until further notice if possible, otherwise it's safe enough to drink.
For what it's worth, I'm not advocating that we blow the problem out of proportion. I'm reacting to the ongoing negation of reasonable people's concerns by the Reg writer. Why not do a story about how the lack of clear information coming out of TEPCO and various government agencies about the power plant causes tremendous anxiety for reasonable people? Or how the history of secrecy and misinformation around the nuclear power industry has undermined its credibility with the public in a crisis. People are in a panic because they no longer feel they can trust what the government and industry says at face value. They think if there's a warning the problem must actually be a whole lot worse than is stated, because that's what happened in the past.
...for some values of "radioactive", in function of what exactly this "radioactive" depends on and furthermore on what else is in that tap water. Dioxins, Benzene, Arsenic, Organophosphates from Pharming, PCBs from old transformer oil and Human Hormones of the contraceptive kind are the first to come to mind.
People doing parenting these days don't know nothing anymore.
Levels will drop to acceptable after roughly 2 weeks. So:
- is 364 less than 365? Not much, I'll grant it to you.
- is 15 less than 365? Yes, quite a bit.
For comparision purpose, it's similar to:
- not understanding calculus, complex numbers and hamiltonians=not being a math genius
- not being able to divide by 2=sucking real bad at math
It's the humans that manage that: <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-23/fukushima-engineer-says-he-covered-up-flaw-at-shut-reactor.html>.
"Mitsuhiko Tanaka says he helped conceal a manufacturing defect in the $250 million steel vessel installed at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 4 reactor while working for a unit of Hitachi Ltd. (6501) in 1974. The reactor, which Tanaka has called a “time bomb,” was shut for maintenance when the March 11 earthquake triggered a 7-meter (23-foot) tsunami that disabled cooling systems at the plant, leading to explosions and radiation leaks. "
...
"Kenta Takahashi, an official at the Trade Ministry’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said he couldn’t confirm whether the agency’s predecessor, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, had conducted an investigation into Tanaka’s claims. Naoki Tsunoda, a spokesman at Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the plant, said he couldn’t immediately comment"
...
"When Tokyo Electric sent a representative to check on their progress, Hitachi distracted him by wining and dining him, according to Tanaka. Rather than inspecting the part, they spent the day playing golf and soaking in a hot spring, he said. "
...
"“These procedures, as they’re described, are far from ideal, especially for a component as critical as this,” Robert Ritchie, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of California of Berkeley, said in a phone interview. “Depending on the extent of vessel’s deformation, it could possibly lead to local cracking in some of its welds.” "
etc. etc.
If in doubt, Lewis, close your eyes and answer the wrong question.
<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-18/japan-disaster-caps-decades-of-faked-reports-accidents.html>
"Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.”"
...
"“Containment engineering has been vindicated. What has not been vindicated is the site engineering that put us on a path to accident.”"
...
"The cascade of events at Fukushima had been foretold in a report published in the U.S. two decades ago. The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event."
...
"Tokyo Electric in 2002 admitted it had falsified repair reports at nuclear plants for more than two decades."
...
"Then in 2007, the utility said it hadn’t come entirely clean five years earlier. It had concealed at least six emergency stoppages at its Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station and a “critical” reaction at the plant’s No. 3 unit that lasted for seven hours."
...
"The Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant was only designed to withstand a 5.7-meter tsunami, not the 7-meter wall of water generated by last week’s earthquake or the 6.4-meter tsunami that struck neighboring Miyagi prefecture after the Valdiva earthquake in 1960, Ito said." [Well, shit. How dumb can you get?]
...
"Kansai Electric Power Co., the utility that provides Osaka with electricity, said it also faked nuclear safety records. Chubu Electric Power Co., Tohoku Electric Power Co. and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. said the same."
...
"The world’s biggest nuclear power plant [Kashiwazaki Kariwa] had been built on an earthquake fault line that generated three times as much seismic acceleration, or 606 gals, as it was designed to withstand, the utility said. One gal, a measure of shock effect, represents acceleration of 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) per square second."
...
Please read the article so there's no risk of me selective quoting. There's more grim crap in there too.
This is why I don't like nuclear. The tech can be made arbitarily safe but it's homo expediensis that ensures it won't be.
Lewis, do you actually give a damn about this or is it just prod-the-proles so we start posting? WTF is going on?
Keep it up! Perhaps the Barclays will begin inviting you through the front door, or even make an offer. At the present time, pathological optimism in Britain mostly begins in the newsroom of the Telegraph and ends between David Cameron's ears but the infection appears to be spreading down the food chain.
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