Japan's efforts to ease nuke crisis hit setback

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By ERIC TALMADGE and MARI YAMAGUCHI

FUKUSHIMA, Japan (AP) - An unexpected rise in pressure inside a troubled reactor set back efforts to bring Japan's overheating, leaking nuclear complex under control Sunday as concerns grew that as-yet minor contamination of food and water is spreading.

The pressure increase meant plant operators may need to deliberately release radioactive steam, prolonging a nuclear crisis that has consumed government attention even as it responded to the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that savaged northeast Japan on March 11.

In a rare rescue after so many days, a teenage boy's cries for help led police to rescue him and an 80-year-old woman at a wrecked house.

Beyond the disaster area, an already shaken public grew uneasy with official reports that traces of radiation first detected in spinach and milk from farms near the nuclear plant are turning up farther away in tap water, rain and even dust. In all cases, the government said the radiation levels were too small to pose an immediate risk to health. Still, Taiwan seized a batch of fava beans from Japan found with faint - and legal - amounts of iodine and cesium.

Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20110320/D9M2VH600.html

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People shop for produce at a makeshift store at a devastated area in Kesennuma, northern Japan, Sunday, March 20, 2011, after last week's earthquake and tsunami. (AP Photo/The Yomiuri Shimbun, Kaname Muto) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

[thereismore]

1. No amount of radiation poses an immediate risk. nt

[pocoloco]

2. Armchair nuclear physicist, I presume?

[buddysmellgood]

3. What does that mean? If that were true, there would be no limit on exposure.

[plumbob]

4. It means, it does not kill you instantly.

Bullets tearing into you are an immediate risk.

Having an untreated internal bacterial infection is not an immediate risk.

Having a cancerous tumor on your (name your favorite organ here) does not pose an immediate risk.

Hope this helps.

[buddysmellgood]

9. Yes, thanks. It's not true. A massive dose of radiation is certainly an immediate risk.

[thereismore]

13. Does not occur in practice. Not even at Chernobyl did people die "immediately". nt

[buddysmellgood]

14. Not all bullets kill immediately.

[thereismore]

15. Some do. Radiation from reactors never kills immediately. nt

[thereismore]

12. Thank you. That's exactly what I meant. It's the weasly way the government uses language. nt

[Aerows]

5. Unless you were standing near the reactor at Chernobyl

50 Sieverts would tend to be immediate, if you didn't drop before you got that close to the reactor.

[mrJJ]

6. The levels of radionucli­des released were always known

Low, Med High... They know the exact amt of radionucli­des released into the enviroment... They just dont want the populous to know.

(CTBTO)http://www.ctbto.org/

Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), is transmitting detailed data on the spectrum of radionucli­des and their levels in the air in and around Japan and the Asia-Pacif­ic region to its member states each day, but that the CTBTO could not release these data to the public because it lacked a mandate to do so.

Austria has the right to use the data, and says that his centre will be publishing CTBTO data in the daily updates of the Fukushima fallout that it is providing on its website http://www.zamg.ac.at

Lars-Erik De Geer, research director of the Swedish Defence Research Institute in Stockholm, which has access to the CTBTO data and uses it to provide the foreign ministry and other Swedish government department­s with analyses, says that the data show high amounts of volatile radioactiv­e isotopes, such as iodine and caesium, as well the noble gas xenon, but so far no high levels of the less volatile elements such as zirconium and barium that would signal that a large meltdown had taken place – elements which were released during the 1986 reactor explosion in Chernobyl in the Ukraine.”

[Aerows]

7. Don't certain Xenon Isotopes...

...decay into Strontium and Cesium, which are fairly deadly?

[mrJJ]

8. Cesium 137 is the bad boy on the block so far

Here is the Cesium 137 and iodine 131 plume tracking from the 20th... I am not literate in German but the entire data released is contained at the Ausrian site.

http://www.zamg.ac.at/aktuell/index.php?seite=1&artikel=ZAMG_2011-03-20GMT10:21

[fascisthunter]

10. Can the Dust be Deadly?

[Hannah Bell]

11. this news is almost a day old.

it's no longer the case.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/20_23.html