FYI: The Chernobyl Cloud did not get up to the Jet Stream.

[denem]

It meandered round Europe, heading north, then south west, then south, west, north - following local weather patterns. When it got to France, it headed over to the UK - which we were told was "very unlikely", then went on to Ireland. Later the UK got one of the worst doses of all. It hit an incoming Atlantic Storm. and got dumped all over the place in torrential downpours.

Chernobyl was quite a blast. Without graphite, blasts at Fukushima can't be on that scale. The radioactivity in the worst case could be off the scale, but it will be falling locally, People think of the jet stream because of Atmospheric Tests. Chernobyl did not and could not reach thermonuclear critical mass. Compared with April 26th, 1986, blasts at Fukushima are small.

It's China, Korea and Russia who are sweating bullets at the moment.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Russian TV tone changed from the morning

[denem]

4. Yeah. They've got 'Assets' nearby.

to the wast.

[KT2000]

5. How did it change?

My SIL is in Shanghai and I wonder if she is getting accurate news.

[Name removed]

7. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[pokerfan]

2. Just had a doctor on the local news here (Washington State)

and he was practically begging people to not take the KI as it's not worth the side effects if it's not warranted.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. He is correct, mostly

the side effects are nasty.

I am stocking on milk though, since it does concentrate on milk. But even with the worst of case scenario, we should get a very small dose, not even wheat I got when my foot was x-rayed. It is when te cows eat it and it concentrates in the milk that we could start talking a more serious situation.

It wil hit the west coast, but ... I wish they went into things like oh milk, but there is an industry to protect.

[pokerfan]

10. Not being snarky but are you a medical doctor?

Just curious.

FWIW, dairy's not part of my diet, so not worried about that.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. No but I trained for this crap

and the principle to remember here is time (of exposure) and distance. It does go down exponentially.

Now that does not mean you could not have hot zones... aka local areas with a higher fall out. But in general, why I said mostly correct... the further away you are... think of a spray gun. At the point of origin you will get soaked... further away...

[pokerfan]

13. I think I'll trust the MDs all the same

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2014504647_apusmedradiationpills.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014504194_nukehealth16m.html

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Suit yourself

I would not take them, though I need to get them for oh San Onofre.

Oh and of note, we said the dame thing.

have a good day.

[KT2000]

21. I would not

MDs are well versed in saying what is acceptable. There are some who will speak out on various topics but they usually do not get featured on tv.
I remember doctors laughing (as noted in the New York Times) at a woman carrying an air cleaner to work near Ground Zero right after 9/11.
Our state poison control director calls agent orange a hoax, says no child has ever been poisoned by lead etc.
The largest medical organization for environmental/occupational medicine is funded by corporations and is made up of corporate medical directors.

Medical societies, insurance companies and peer pressure keep MDs in line. Unfortunately, many of us have had to learn that truth the hard way.

Although ....in the case of KI I would not take it now either.

[Xithras]

16. There is NO point in stocking up on milk.

The normal reasoning is that "fallout lands on grass, cows eat grass, cows make milk...and the milk becomes radioactive".

That's not really a concern right now. Why not? Because the weather has been cold and rainy on the west coast (there are only a few days left, but it IS still winter) and the cows are all eating hay and silage that was harvested last year. It will be at least a couple more months until they begin feeding the dairy cows in the big dairies anything harvested during the spring planting. I doubt your milk will keep that long.

Of course, if you buy your milk from a small family dairy with free range cows, the story is a bit different, but relatively few people do that.

[nadinbrzezinski]

17. I got it in tetrapack packets

so I got milk for there months

:-)

[JVS]

36. I didn't know we had tetrapack milk in the US. Was it a normal grocery?

[cui bono]

24. What about cheese? I use soy milk and rice milk so not worried about that. n/t

[nadinbrzezinski]

28. To be safe right now stock on it

after it gets here, get cheese from the east cost or the midwest...



It should be really, really small

[flamingdem]

15. Just baack from Whole Foods where they said people were popping pills in the store!

They were all out of iodide of course, and kelp caps.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. Poor folks it is not even here... not even half way across the pacific

now that is panic

[Taverner]

40. No but stocking up on milk, perhaps using powdered milk would be sane

Chances are, the fallout won't affect the west coast, and if it does, we probably won't get the worst of it

However, our cows might. And that could affect the most defenseless of us: our kids

They can't take as much radiation as we could, and it becomes a bit concentrated in milk

When Chernobyl happened, Scandinavia and Northern Europe had to destroy a lot of contaminated milk

[KT2000]

3. Thank you -

no one else is mentioning China, Korea and Russia.
My SIL is in Shanghai and I want her to come home now. I can only imagine the kind of news she is getting in China, probably minimizing the problems. The American company she works for could care less too.

[denem]

6. You're welcome. I guess that's one good thing to come out of

living through that nightmare.

[Xithras]

9. I pointed this out a few days ago. It was ignored.

Radiation is not "buoyant" and will not rise in our atmosphere without an external force acting on it. Fallout from nuclear blasts makes it into the upper atmosphere because it's carried upward by the tremendous heat of the blast itself.

Atmospheric mixing did eventually carry a small portion of Chernobyl's radiation into the upper atmosphere, and an even smaller portion of THAT was eventually detected as far away as Canada, but at levels lower than you'd experience on a regular airline flight.

There's no indication that this meltdown would behave any differently. The spread of any radiation leakage will be controlled by surface level air currents, and not the jet stream. Asia would be screwed, but barring any extreme weather events, very little would make it across the Pacific. In a way, the cold weather that is making Japan so miserable right now is protecting us by keeping their ground level currents relatively stable.

[denem]

11. OK. I thought maybe if people knew the fallout basically headed west

then, as someone who lived through that horror, it might put it in perspective.

I didn't know about the readings in Canada. I guess I was sipping my UHT milk. hearing the endless reassurances that everything was quite OK.

[Xithras]

20. People tend to forget about the Trade Winds, which run counter to the jet stream.

Surface winds as of two days ago:



Unless there is a blast large enought to carry the radiation out of the surface winds and into the jet stream (at least 20,000 feet), most of it will end up in south Asia.

On edit: Stupid anti-imagerip script. There's supposed to be an intellicast map there showing the surface winds currently blowing across Japan and down to Taiwan and the Chinese mainland.

[MadHound]

19. Except that the fallout from Chernobyl did hit the jetstream

""The radioactivity spread around the entire northern hemisphere," from the devastated Ukrainian plant, he said.

Harvey Wasserman, a senior adviser to environmental group Greenpeace in the US added that after Chernobyl "fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within ten days.

"It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States," he said."
<http://news.discovery.com/earth/japan-nuclear-radiation-cloud-west-coast-110315.html>

The attempts to downplay the risks involved are getting to be ridiculous. Making statements that a simple Google search can repudiate.

[denem]

22. Oh please.

The danger headed west. Atmospheric mixing may have carried a percent or two up to the jet stream, but the cloud as such did not reach those heights.

You do not have to convince me of the danger of radiation, I lived through. But fretting about the Jet Stream when China is in line for a nasty dose, stinks of American exceptionalism.

[MadHound]

23. Oh please yourself,

I'm supposed to believe the word of some anonymous internet poster who claims that "When it got to France, it headed over to the UK - which we were told was "very unlikely", then went on to Ireland. Later the UK got one of the worst doses of all.", when maps of fallout pattern clearly show that isn't the case?

<http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/glbrad.html>

Thanks, but I'll stick the facts and the experts, not some unsourced anonymous internet poster.

[denem]

29. I was there

were you?

1986 was ten years before Google.

[MadHound]

37. Yes, I was.

Around for TMI as well. Your point being?

The fact that you were alive during these incidents doesn't make you an expert on them. Baldly stating that the UK got the worst of Chernobyl, when that simply isn't the case, well, what does that make you? A person with a poor memory, at best.

Meanwhile experts have stated and shown that yes, indeed, the fallout from Chernobyl did hit the jet stream. They know what they're talking about. You, not so much.

[denem]

43. OK - I've done some searching for you.

"On 2 May 1986, the plume finally passed over parts of the UK and, with fateful timing, so too did a column of cloud carrying heavy rain. The rain fell hardest where it always falls hardest – on the uplands. As the droplets of water fell from the sky, they carried with them the radionuclides – in particular, caesium-137, iodine-131 and strontium-90 – that had been dispersed from Chernobyl. It is estimated that 1% of the radiation released from the reactor fell on the UK."

http://www.meattradenewsdaily.co.uk/news/010110/uk___sheep_farmers_still_stuck_under_a_chernobyl_cloud.aspx

Chernobyl: A poisonous legacy

20 years after a blast in the nuclear plant at Chernobyl spread radioactive debris across Europe, it has been revealed that 375 farms in Britain, with 200,000 sheep, are still contaminated by fallout ...

The Chernobyl disaster turned public opinion in Britain against civil nuclear power overnight. The land still poisoned by Chernobyl's radioactivity lies all along the Welsh hills between Bangor and Bala, much of it in the Snowdonia National park. There is also a large triangle of contaminated land in Cumbria, south of Buttermere - though the number of farms affected is smaller than in Wales.

Some of the Scottish hills are also still affected. No sheep can be moved out of any of these areas without a special licence, under Emergency Orders imposed in 1986. Sheep that have higher than the permitted level of radiation have to be marked with a special dye that does not wash off in the rain, and have to spend months grazing on uncontaminated grass before they are passed as fit to go into the food chain.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/chernobyl-a-poisonous-legacy-469830.html

Does that sound like TMI, France, Germany,, Netherlands or Spain to you?

[CabalPowered]

25. There's just one problem with your argument

The Ukraine is landlocked at a latitude of 51 degrees. Japan is a chain of islands at 35 degrees latitude. Atmospheric conditions, orographical features, place in the hydrological cycle, major wind systems.. all completely different.

http://www.zamg.ac.at/aktuell/index.php?seite=1&artikel=ZAMG_2011-03-15GMT08:26

[denem]

31. The wind will blow where it blows but it's local

not stratospheric .

[cui bono]

26. American exceptionalism??? wtf? I guess you don't live on the west coast.

Some of us do and are concerned for our and our loved ones' health. Especially the young kids. Forgive me for caring. Should I apologize to you now that it won't hit us as bad as somewhere else? Does that mean I should not be concerned about my fantastic niece and nephews?

How insulting. Sheesh. Ah... Ohio. Figures. I hope you don't ever have to worry about radiation coming to your town and if you do I hope that no one is that rude to you.

[denem]

30. OMG

more falls in house prices. Spare me..,

China - chinks
Vietnam - gooks
Cali - flip my house.

Do you think the Russians, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans don't love their families. THEY are in the firing line. You are way out of left field..

[JVS]

33. Where do you get that from?

[denem]

35. There are tens of millions in the immediate firing line

from any large, off the scale, release of radiation from Fukushima.

It depends on the local weather - Out to sea to be rained down on the Pacific. Due east, to be carried over to China. North West, threatening Russia/ Siberia. South West threatening, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Korea.

But the fetish around here is bout the possibility that a blast many times less powerful than Chernobyl might reach the Jet Stream and be carried over to North America, delivering a tiny fraction to the West Coast. A tear drop of the flood locals have to fear.

It's not only more than blue moon improbable, it sickens me.

The price of a house in California (because no one expects a danger to health) is more worrying than thousands of asians.per street lot. The USA has form on this one. Difficult decisions at the Pentagon.

[denem]

34. .

.

[cui bono]

38. Ah okay, got it.

You're just a complete ass. Plain and simple.

You accuse me of using being bigoted and I'm in left field. That is rich.

[denem]

39. OK - Talk to me about this when it's all over

Do you have a right to be 'concerned our and our loved ones' health' - of course you do, and more. The joy love and laughter shared with our families, your niece and nephews , are the things that make our lives shine.

But can a significant dose of radiation cross the pacific from Fukushima? From any angle, I just can't see how: It's too low to get to the jet stream , so, if the local wind is blowing east, it MUST be greatly dissipated within a thousand miles, on my basic understanding of weather.

I don't want to be wrong on this. I don't want to see significant radiation on the West Coast, and I firmly believe we won't. That's probably why I've being insensitive.

If the winds are blowing north west, west, or southwest, and a catastrophic release occurs, unthinkable numbers of people will be directly in the firing line. Japan is a small island. In the worst case, much of it could become uninhabitable.

I hope, if we discuss then again, there will have been no catastrophe, so we will never know, and never want to.

1% of Chernobyl's radiation fell in the UK. I was scared, and even more scared that nothing the Government was saying made sense.

Peace.

[flamingdem]

27. I saw a map of the radiation fallout in California too nt

[denem]

32. How may micro Rads was it?

Care to share?

In Europe there was nothing theoretical about it.

[meow mix]

41. chernobyl also had only a fraction of the fuel present at fukushima

which is including plutonium.

you people and your minimizing, are dangerous

[denem]

42. "you people"

say no more.