Uncertainty as Japan's radiation levels surge

[Liberal_in_LA]

The Japanese government says it does not know when its nuclear crisis will end as radiation levels surge near the stricken Fukushima power plant.

The amount of radioactive iodine in the sea near the plant has increased tenfold since Tuesday, reaching more than 1,000 times the legal limit.

Inside the plant, workers have found pools of water with radiation levels 10,000 times higher than normal.

"It is becoming very important to get rid of the puddles quickly," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, an official at the nuclear safety agency.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/27/3174814.htm

[Cronus Protagonist]

1. "puddles"

They come from "lakes". Japan is over. Let's start offering them a place to stay.

[Bonobo]

8. About as intelligent as saying: "Gulf Oil Spill. America is over."

"Let's start offering them a place to live."

[Cronus Protagonist]

9. ummm Bonobo....

Your underestimate of my intelligence is amusing. Japan is a small island(s) with a worse catastrophe of nuclear contamination than Chernobyl. Chernobyl is over. Japan is over. Anywhere there is this much of a nuclear catastrophe, it is out of commission for thousands of years. That is as good as gone. Done. Toast.

By the way, this country would NEVER take in refugees from Japan. I thought we all knew that already. Apparently there's always one who doesn't know these things, but the irony of my pithy comment is surely not over the heads of everybody. I apologize for assuming my joking manner would be interpreted in the way it was intended.

[Name removed]

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[Name removed]

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[BeHereNow]

2. No words. Simply no words.

Personally, I'm going to have a stiff drink.
We are so very powerless in this situation.
My thoughts are with the people in Japan
and damning the people who thought up nuclear reactors as
a safe energy source.

BHN

[Kablooie]

3. I don't know about Fukushima but here is a live geiger counter readout from Tokyo:

http://www.denphone.com/denphone-tokyo-office-geiger-counter

They list a 4hour - 24 hour and one week reading.

[CountAllVotes]

5. thanks for the link

I'll take any bit of information I can get that may resemble the truth.

Thanks again!

:kick:

[bananas]

6. Too bad they don't go back to March 10

so we could compare with the readings before the 3/11 disaster.

[flamingdem]

7. Look all safe now, except the winds will blow there today again, no more nukes nt

[TheMadMonk]

12. A little bit less than those readings. 0.15 ish IIRC.

For some perspective. Those readings, are still within normal ranges for background radiation levels worldwide. Yes they are high for Tokyo, but would be considered normal or even low in other parts of the world such as the Tibetian Plateu.


The babies shouldn't drink Tokyo's tap water scare, was just that. A scare.

At the highest levels reported, they do indeed exceed daily consumption limits for short periods of time. HOWEVER, those limits are set based on the pressumption that the consumption will continue for a full unbroken twelve months. A day here and there is not even the beginning of an issue. I also suspect that the limit itself is set so low that it would actually take extendend exposure at several times the set limit, for any ill effect to become statistically distinguishable from background noise.


Even the 10,000 times normal dose to which a few of the workers have been exposed (in those puddles mentioned in the OP as it happens) is highly unlikely to do any lasting harm. Even if every single worker were to receive a similar dose, the chances of even one of them developing a cancer actually caused by the exposure remains quite remote. The total dose received by each of the exposed workers was roughly equal to the minimum exposure necessary for cancer effects to become discernable in a LARGE population.

Under normal circumstances, nuclear workers actually enjoy an appreciably lower than average incidence of cancer than the general population. And even at the exposure levels they are receiving in this emergency, their long term health prospects remain far higher than those of millions of ordinary workers in some of the "dirtier" industries such as mining and some forms of manufacturing, where it takes something like mesothelioma, Minimata or Bhopal to get any action at all.

[CountAllVotes]

4. frightening - worse than Chernobyl

:kick: & recommend.