Radioactive Disaster Debris Arrives in Tokyo from Iwate Prefecture (Fukushima)

I've told you already that the one and only contractor who can burn according to the Tokyo Metropolitan government specs (which was clearly designed so that there would be nobody else) is a TEPCO's subsidiary.

NHK reports that the first container from Miyako City in Iwate Prefecture arrived by rail in JR Tokyo container terminal in Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo at 7AM on November 3. It was promptly transported to one of the contractors selected by the Metropolitan government, and the debris was sorted, and crushed into smaller pieces. Flammable debris will go to the TEPCO's subsidiary (Tokyo Rinkai Recycle Power) located on the landfill and be burned after November 6, and non-flammable debris will be simply buried in the same landfill.

According to NHK, they did measure radiation at the contractor's site, by putting a bit of the debris in a lead box and measuring the radiation. If you say to yourself "WTF.." you are not alone.

Now, I found three interesting pieces of information on Twitter, though not independently verifiable.

First, Hirofumi Yanagase, Tokyo Metropolitan Assemblyman from Ota-ku, who was on the scene when the container arrived and accompanied the container to the contractor's site, tweeted:

At the terminal station, there was no measurement of radiation by the Tokyo Metropolitan government.

It is encouraging to see that Free Republic readers are according these regular bits of fertilizer about the horrors associated with yet another unverified incident from the only large scale energy technology which commercial implementation has not caused a single death or injury. Particularly impressive is that an old design endures a giant earthquake and tsunami with causing a single injury of death from the nuclear attribute of the technology. Someone may have died of a heart attack, or was injured in one of the fires.

There no energy technology with a safety record approaching that of nuclear power. That is reality. There may also be no technology about which there has been such a continuous scare campaign, executed by many of biggest idiots in the film, broadcast, and print industry. Needless to say, few of the media, if they have any formal post high school education, know a thing about nuclear engineering or physics.

That the wonderful medical diagnostic technology born as “nuclear magnetic resonance” was renamed “magnetic resonance imaging” forty years ago, and Lawrence Radiation Laboratory was renamed, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is a testament to the success of the growing success of the left, which knows that energy is at the root of the growth and success of capitalism.

What happened to the Taiwanese apartment dwellers when it was discovered that over 10,000 people were exposed to from 40 to 60 microSieverts continuously over about 15 years - 3 microsieverts is about the natural background at sea level? Cobalt 60, perhaps from medical waste, found its way into the foundry which produced the steel used in the framework of a large apartment complex.

What happened to those inhabitants was that their incidence of a large variety of cancers was reduced between twenty and thirty fold. Similar reductions were observed, but never explained, to residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where homes were rebuilt on ground zero. Statistical toxicology is fraught with opportunities for misinterpretation, but studies and data came from Taiwanese government agencies. Double blind studies are difficult to justify, but wouldn't we all want to know whether exposure to moderate levels of radiation provided resistance to many cancers? Government-controlled research such as we have, filled with crony capitalism, exploring the prophylactic properties of radiation is almost impossible to get funded, and that is how research works.

Continue to smile when propagandists throw out nonsense about the dangers of radiation, but you needn't be a health physicist or nuclear engineer to ask anyone lamenting the dangers of nuclear power how many deaths or injuries they know of? The answer, none, is a remarkable testiment to human ingenuity and engineering discipline. We are bathed in radiation every day. Our bodies have adapted to the cellular damage, and that may be why we see the the reduction in cancers in Taiwan, Japan, Nevada, where radiation levels are elevated.

Real concern about radiation would generate scare articles about coal, since burning coal produces hundreds of thousands of times the ionizing radiation as that produced by nuclear power. Coal contains natural radium and uranium, and there is no attempt to scrub it, if that is possible. That is why the Sierra Club, when it was an environmental rather than a legal profit center, promoted nuclear power as the answer to a clean environment. That all illustrates the hypocrisy of California bureaucrats at all levels who shut down a brand new nuclear plant, with the able assistance of Berkeley's and now Obama's Chief Science activist (he is a science activist, and never did science), John Holdren, so that California could buy coal generated electricity from another state (or 4 states, in the case of "Four Corners," one of California's major suppliers).

And what is their motivation? Many have honestly admitted that the objective is to defeat capitalism. For Holdren, and his associates. one mantra was to reduce overpopulation - reduce the world's population by five sixths. They'll come at us from every direction. Antinuclear activism, once actively sponsored by the USSR, is just one we need to stay aware of.

It's almost as if a little radiation, like a glass of wine each day, is good for you.

Amazing isn't it. It surprised me and I went looking for the original scientific studies, which were all from scientists and engineers, mostly health physicists, from Taiwan. If I hadn't had some direct experience with our politically-driven scientific community I would have dismissed it. But the data absolutely warrant funded studies. Imagine the virtual elimination of lung and breast cancer. There was nothing unusual about the residents of the housing complex that inquiring minds could find. That is obviously the question. On the other hand we have towns, several in Brazil, and I'm sure there are more, with extremely high natural background - over fifty microsieverts. I didn't go looking for confirmation by looking to see if there were cancer data in those places, but it should be done. Look at the suffering that could be alleviated if exposure to higher background radiation, and perhaps radiation in a particular energy range, has the effect the Taiwanese observed?

Could Taiwan have created phony data to counter prospective law suits? I can't answer how litigious a society is Taiwan, but unlike of the group writing supportive studies about the global warming because the NSF grant money was flowing generously toward the objective of their predetermined conclusion, these Taiwanese scientists seem to have little to gain by falsifying their data. The study group was unuaually healthy. Careful analyis of their data by independent bodies needs to be done, but we have some corroborating data from our test sites, national laboratories, and the fact that Karen Silkwood drank plutonium-laced soda and suffered not at all (Sarcasm!).

For those following the lawsuits against the DOE claiming increased cancers in Nevada and Utah, claims which had to try to deal with the significantly lower cancer rates in those states, presumably because of the Morman lifestyle, the Taiwan data, of a very large sample of people literally surrounding by radioactive Cobalt, made for a good study group. There were nearly identical apartment complexes built without the benefit of Cobalt 60 (just kidding, but seeing the data, don't you think some renters might opt for the 40 microsieverts just in case?). The socioeconomic classes of most renters were very similar, and these apartments held mostly families who moved very infrequently. So there was a reference sample. I think we should look with open minds, but don't we all wish that could be the case? All Gore and Kleiner Perkins stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars by promoting a myth, while the Taiwanese scientists observed a phenomenon which might alleviate the suffering of millions and millions of people if the analysis is confirmed and moderate exposure to radiations is a palliative.

from the only large scale energy technology which commercial implementation has not caused a single death or injury.

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You have included alot of out dated information in your posts. I don’t know that i have the time to respond point by point. It astounds me that there are those who still claim that nuclear energy has not caused a single death or injury. You may want to read up on Chernobyl. There’s also a good video called “the Battle For Chernobyl” on youtube (includes interviews with Gorbachev and Hans Blix that I found interesting): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o

There’s a comprehensive study of the impact of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl here: http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
And a wiki page devoted to that report here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment

Then there is the state of the art publication by the US titled BEIR VII which states that there is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation and backs it up with studies. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11340&page=R1

Here’s an excerpt:

“Recently, data from atomic bomb survivors suggest that high doses are also connected to other health effects such as heart disease and stroke”

Note that nuclear bombs distribute far less radioactive material than Chernobyl or Fukushima. The BEIR VII evaluated A-bomb surivors and found 44% of those who died from leukemia died as a result of exposure to the A-bomb radiation.

I heard about the cobalt claims (radiation is good for you) but science has not found them to be true. That apartment building gets cited alot in word of mouth stories but I’ve never seen solid scientific research on it - it’s wishful thinking. The cobalt was in the walls - not consumed or breathed as much as is true of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

You may want to read up on Chernobyl.

I suggest you read a bit about the Ukraine, part of the USSR when its plant in Chernobyl melted down. That was a communist country where safety concerns needn't be observed as they were and are in countries where government is by and for the people. I specified “commercial” plants. Chernobyl was designed to produce weapons grade plutonium, with heat and electricty as a byproduct. The design was a scale-up of the graphite core reactor built by Fermi and his associates at Chicago, an inherently unstable design, and still, the pile was not provided with containment. It may as well have been a warehouse. To reach the pile one walked through swinging doors. There was not six to eight inches of steel, surrounded by four to six feet of massively reinforced concrete in a building with negative pressure and more concrete walls.

At least you cite wikipedia, and El Baradei’s group so we have some sense of the source for your propaganda.

The linear hypothesis for radiation exposure, BEIR, has the credibility, outside of political operatives, of the garbage surrounding man-made global warming studies. Were there data it would be too deep in the noise to detect. There are thousands of towns and cities where the natural background is three times that of others and those correlation studies show no reliable trends which could be attributed to background radiation - unlike the Taiwan Cobalt 60 “accident,” with studies funded and performed by Taiwan universities and their government.

Some with degrees have made a career out of searching for data to prove their political positions. These are often people who, for one reason or another, had their industrial careers terminated. One of the most famous proponents of the linear hypothesis, John Gofman of Lawrence Livermore Labs, wrote research papers which were at odds with his political positions. Who knows why.

Cite one injury or death from the nuclear attribute of nuclear power plants. My data are current because what meltdowns there have been, somewhat fewer than what were predicted forty years ago by the Rasmussen study and subsequent report, are splashed all over by the ignorant media. There has never been a technology which has come close to nuclear power for the power generated/human death, injury, nor any technology so benign to our environment. That is why it has been so important for you on the left to try to remove that resource from the free world. Low priced and clean energy feeds free and productive economies. That is why Marxists organized the campaign to shut down a brand new plant, just as it came on line in California, so that California could buy its energy from states burning mostly coal. The hypocrisy of the left never ceases. But then, their objective is to destroy capitalism.

Of course, and sadly, because a nation of laws needs specialists in the law, nuclear energy, like asbestos, has been a basis of legal careers for those who see it, because of public ignorance, as a gold mine for civil suits. That is why once legitimate environmental organizations like The Sierra Club, and Natural Resources Defense Council have become litigation factories. They both have their non-profit and for-profit divisions, the for-profit divisions focusing on environment law, and on legislation to insure that new laws will generate more business.

Incompetent mismanagement and then lying about it (nuke industry standards)- this is what caused the disaster in Chernobyl and this is what brought about the scale of ongoing disaster in Fukushima - not reactor design. SOMEBODY insisted on building that nuke plant on a seismically active zone and then disregarded scientists’s warnings about epic tsunami potential.

“That was a communist country where safety concerns needn’t be observed as they were and are in countries where government is by and for the people.”

You mean like Japan? Where TEPCO was in already in hot water (and admitted it publicly) for falsifying safety reports, ignored warnings from scientists re Tsunami risk, seismic risk, ignored warning about low retaining walls and placement of fuel tanks, refused to release SPEEDI data when it would protect the population because they didn’t want to admit Fukushima had already melted down, refused to signal the release of Potassium Iodide when it would have protected the population because they were concealing the melt downs? Like that? It’s not the hardware, it’s the incompetence and lying inherent in this high risk industry where no independent insurer will insure a nuke plant so the government steps in as insurer but has no intention of paying damages so uses government influence to lie, distort, deny etc. Did you know that about a year before the melt down in Fukushima, TEPCO rewarded a man for concealing damage to a reactor vessel (pulled out a mighty big dent that would mean the vessel would have to be discarded per safety regulations)intended for reactor 4? TEPCO made him company hero - he feels bad about it now and wonders what would have happened if that containment vessel would have been in place during the earthquake. Oh and radiation was discharged immediately after the earthquake and prior to the arrival of the tsunami, according to US and European scientists, but of course TEPCO denies this and TEPCO has such a track record for honesty!

“The linear hypothesis for radiation exposure, BEIR, has the credibility, outside of political operatives, of the garbage surrounding man-made global warming studies.”

John Gofman, the ‘father of plutonium’ pioneered work, at the request of the nuke industry, proving the hazards of ionizing radiation. They loved all the isotopes he helped to discover and he was well regarded by Oppenheim and others when he managed to pull together needed isotopes in record time. THEY asked him, a medical doctor with a medical career that he wanted to pursue - to work with radiation. He reluctantly stopped his medical research for a limited length of time to work with nuclear isotopes. THEY (Nuke industry) asked him to research the human safety issue because he was the only nuclear physicist who was also a medical physician in their inner circle at the time. His work withstands peer review well. He also had many other medical successes and is credited with HDL/LDL cholesterol research. He was shocked and dismayed by his research that showed that what he had been working on and discovering (radioactive isotopes) with huge success - was hazardous to human health and he was a doctor. What set him against the nuclear power industry was working with nuke industry liars who didn’t care about harming human health - as a physician, he couldn’t understand their attitude. One manager he argued with said “So what! So people will get cancer 30 years from now! We need nuclear power now!” As a physician, this was repellent to him. He knew from experience working in the lab for a few decades and having studied the risks associated with plutonium, what level of containment would be necessary - and he realized that human error and physical limitations would mean that too much would be released and the use of nuclear power would be catastrophic ultimately, for human health. From the time he and other scientists started putting forth their research - the nuke industry has a standard mode of operation - do everything to strip funding and destroy the reputations of scientists who say things the nuke industry doesn’t like. So now, there’s a big hole where more research would ordinarily have further investigated the proven links between cancer and radiation but medical scientists know that their reputations will be destroyed and they’d be stripped of funding etc. if they study the hazards of radiation so research is inhibited.
But the National Academy of Sciences stood by Gofman’s work when the nuke industry attacked and his work has never been disproved, nor has the BEIR VII. Oh I know -the nuke industry is reaching for it’s favorite tools - discredit and strip funding. The World Health Organization was hamstrung for years by the IAEA which got a law passed saying WHO couldn’t speak honestly about damage from radiation unless the IAEA says so. This year, WHO is beginning to say they will no longer be silenced. Research is beginning to flow past the traditional controls of the nuke industry so all you have left really, is the groundless assertion that years of medical research is equivalent to global warming.

“I specified “commercial” plants. “

Yes, you did, and that is especially pathetic. Incompetence and mismanagement of a commercial plant that melts down and releases radiation is no different from incompetence and mismanagement of a military plant that melts down and releases radiation. It’s the mismanagement. There were other reactors like Chernobyl - but they didn’t melt down. Management put in place a man already responsible for a nuclear accident on a sub that killed others but not him. Watch the videos - he never should have been put in power over more competent people. There never should have been a dependent culture that meant subordinates would lose their standard of living unless they let him do the dangerous things he did the night Chernobyl melted down -obviously a disastrous management decisions about how to structure human activity around a nuke plant. He took the reactor offline in a hazardous manner. It’s always mismanagement and lying with the nuclear industry. So all it comes down to is the pathetic assertion that Chernobyl happened due to a reactor designed to produce weapons? Hey Fukushima has molten cores in the basement and no way to stop it - does it matter whether that was commercial or military? Obviously not. Still mismanagement and lying.

Oh and that pathetic assertion that anyone who objects to the abuses of the nuke/gov power industry is a leftist just gets moldy with age. It’s not like Republicans are impervious to the effects of radiation. The internet has really change things though - the nuke industry really did have alot of success controlling the media. Even now in the US, due to an almost complete media blackout, most people think Fukushima was small, limited, and contained back in March. Wonder why our universities are silent? Federal funding? ‘Matters of National Security’? Wonder why reporters who offered to pay US university scientists to analyze soil samples couldn’t find anyone who would do it?
But the internet is informing conservatives of the actual circumstances this time - the genie is out of the bottle and all you nuke pimps can do is stress that designs are better and lie about all the incompetence and deception on the part of the nuke industry - old tactics that really aren’t effective anymore.

It is the nature of science and engineering that people who whose objective it is to promote a political position bury the audience in words and data which very few have the time to corroborate. The propagandist often doesn't mind being wrong. His or her ego is not tied to truth. I asked a simple question which begs every bit of nonsense presented by ransomenote. “Cite a single human injury resulting from the radiation emitted by a commercial nuclear plant.” The rest is palpable nonsense.

Claiming that Gofman was the only medical doctor who was also a nuclear physicist is an interesting invention. Ransomenote don't you realize that Free Republic has a wide readership. I worked with John Gofman from time-to-time, and with half a dozen of our contemporaries, who were also physicians as well as physicists. The doctor who perfected the PET scan was an associate at Lawrence Laboratories, and he was an atomic physicist as well (there is a distinction made between atomic and nuclear physicists, but it isn't relevant; Gofman's specialty, though I could be wrong, was atomic physics).

Hundreds of scientists have been injured, and numbers have died, some famously, like Enrico Fermi, working with non-commercial nuclear technology (he was building the first graphite piles to produce material for a bomb), though there is still a reasonable question about whether Enrico's cancer was caused by the very high radiation levels to which he was exposed. His co-workers, like Leona Libby, who wrote a wonderful account of the time “The Uranium People”, were also exposed, and have lived long and normal lives. Their exposures were in the several REM/Hour range, day after day in Chicago and at Brookhaven. Cite a single death or injury due to radiation from a commercial nuclear plant. That you can't makes your diatribes complete nonsense.

It also sounds as if you see no difference between private corporations and government-run 'corporations.' California gives a sample of what we have to look forward to if we relinquish more control to Obama's Marxists. California's Marxist propagandists succeeded in duping the public to shut down a brand new, and modern nuclear power plant, and then proceeded to poison one hundred twenty thousand fresh water wells when, in spite of good scientific evidence, the government required an active oxygenate, MTBE, be added to gasoline "to make cleaner air." It made dirtier air, it made cronies of government operatives lots of money, and cost taxpayers about ten cents for every gallon of gasoline they bought. The antinuclear movement is worse, because it is crippling our productivity, jobs, health, and, because of our dependence upon the Middle East, our safety.

Perhaps you will help the public understand what the Chinese clearly know, and will use to surpass the wonderful efficiency which once made us a leader in manufacturing exports, that nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, and, without opportunistic litigation, the most cost effective source of electrical energy yet discovered. Fukushima has, if anything, proven the resilience of nuclear power, and shown that with a few changes, the Fukushima plant might have operated right through an enormous earthquake and tsunami. By far the largest contributor to environmental radiation is coal, which is entirely replaceable by clean nuclear. The second source of ionizing radiation comes from medical applications. The man sitting next to you in the bus could have an implanted radioisotopes to kill his prostate cancer or the person with pituitary or thyroid cancer could also be radioactive, emitting very measurable radiation as a function of his or her distance from you, orders of magnitude higher than that to which residents of Japan were exposed, and more than most employees of the evil TEPCO - a big evil corporation don't-ya-know.

By the way, it's Robert Oppenhiemer, not “Oppenheim.”

“Cite a single human injury resulting from the radiation emitted by a commercial nuclear plant.” The rest is palpable nonsense.

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The rest of your responses have been palpable nonsense. Until the nuke industry can admit to Chernobyl, Fukushima and the harm it is doing it’s always going to be this kind of nonsense from you. Even the amoral IAEA now grudgingly admits to 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl - oh we all know they’ll never admit to more. But you won’t admit to one death?
I said Gofman was the only medical doctor in the inner circle in which he was working at the time - I was paraphrasing his own book where he explains why he was asked to head the lab at, I think it was Lawrence Livermore, to study the impact of radiation on human health. And he did. And he found that it is harmful. And it still is.

I look through the rest of the chaff you threw and see nothing of interest or worth.

It’s the pairing of the government with an industry that it then favors, defends lies for etc. that is the problem and the liability issue pretty much insures that the people heading places like TEPCO are master CYA’s. There are different incentives for different industries - unfortunately the incentive for top nuke CEO’s is money and deception and denial etc. The so-called ‘safest energy industry’ in the world cannot get insurance because the costs would bankrupt any company who insured a nuke plant if something goes wrong. Yet somehow other energy industries can get insurance because if something goes wrong there - insurance can cover it. Not to say that there is zero lying in other industries but you gotta give nuke industry officials credit for lying and deceiving on an epic scale. TEPCO insisted for months that they had the reactors under control when they already knew that the cores had melted through. The IAEA and nuke industry execs around the world knew it too - but their loyalties are not to people, their countrymen etc. - their loyalties are for their industry so they all went along with the game and some of them came on FR to lecture us all about bananas and dental x-rays and airflight.
So the government ‘insures’ the nuke plants and the government then denies responsibility when things go wrong with a nuke plant. Without the government’s help, the nuke industry would have been kept accountable and the incentives for CEO’s there would not be all about defense/denial/lying etc.So no, it’s not that corporations are evil, it’s that if you look back to the inception of nuclear power, at least in the US, the people who were willing to lie to the public rose to the top and from there, the culture was born and rewarded.

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