Posted on 04/25/2012 2:54:32 PM PDT by ransomnote
This is the copy of the printed version of Fukushima Minpo on April 25, 2012, a local newspaper in Fukushima:
snip
What does it say?
The series title in the upper right corner: "New Happiness in Japan - Measure"
The article title in the middle: "Think what "food safety" means"
The subtitle of the article: "Cesium beef offered at an event"
From this information, if you conjure up the image of the gist of the article as "OK, the happiness in Japan in post-Fukushima is to gladly eat beef known to contain radioactive cesium to help producers as long as it is measured and disclosed properly, and that's food safety", I'll give you an A.
Quick translation (main article only, subject to revision later, maybe):
It was quiet in the office district on Sunday. It was March 11 afternoon, one year anniversary of the disaster. Couples with children, middle-aged men in jeans were entering a 12-story public building off the busy streets in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
On the tables in the kitchen that is used for cooking classes were the plates with hamburgers just cooked. Mitsuhiro Anada (age 40) told the people in the kitchen, "These contain 6 becquerels/kg [of radioactive cesium]. Please let me know if you don't want to eat them. We have also prepared cesium-free ones." About 30 people then sat at the table and started to eat.
Mr. Anada is the head of "Mo-ton Family", a meat processing company located in the northern Iwate. The event, "Let's eat cesium beef" came about after calling the customers who buy ham, hamburger meat and sausages from his company by mail order.
The main dishes are the hamburgers and beef stew made from the beef that had been detected with radioactive cesium.
(Excerpt) Read more at ex-skf.blogspot.com ...
cesium burger grill themselves.
Let’s see...your first paragraph is irrelevant so I’ll skip it.
The second paragraph begins to hint at but...still tries to obscure the fact that your body will only take in a tiny amount of potassium but takes in much more cesium and as you may have read, isotopes do not behave the same in the human body so Strontium is a ‘bone seeker’ and cesium is a ‘muscle seeker’ and potassium....isn’t. See it’s a problem if cesium is a muscle seeker (terms common among doctors treating patients living in radioactive waste in the Ukraine) because the heart is a muscle so potassium isn’t known to concentrate in the heart whereas for some reason, cesium consumption is coorelated to cardiac events (heart attack, heart failure, heart damage). Oh but you knew this...we all kind of knew it...because bananas are not considered harmful and radioactive cesium is proven to damage human health in controlled medical studies and that big big region around Chernobyl where people still suffer terribly and the nuke apologists pretend the effects of radiation are mysterious, unknown, and made up.
I find fault with your entire premise. Physicians KNOW what happens to people who eat bananas and they KNOW what is happening to people living in Belarus and consuming radioactive cesium. Radioactive potassium and cesium are not the same. Obviously. VERY VERY OBVIOUSLY. All radioactive sources are NOT equal and the EPA issues reports on the threats various radioactive isotopes relative to human health wherein cesium is hazardous but cobolt is even more hazardous based on damage done.
My comment about ‘transparent’ refers to gamma radiation which is more damaging to the body than beta. SO, according to the EPA, higher energy gamma emissions are less damaging to the human body than are lower energy gamma emissions. I had to stop and investigate that because it is counter intuitive to me. So, only 10 percent of radiation from potassium is gamma radiation and it emits higher energy gamma radiation that is less damaging to the body than lower energy gamma radiation emitted by radioactive cesium.
To Summarize: Smaller amounts of potassium are retained in the body compared with cesium. The potassium doesn’t have the rep for the same localizing problems that strontium (bones and bone marrow=leukemia) or cesium (muscles=tumors and heart attacks) have and that is a plus. More of the radiation released by cesium is gamma and it is at a lower, more damaging energy level and it is retained in much higher amounts in the human body and has a crappy medical track record still being recorded in the Ukraine today.
This business of trying to get the public to equate bananas with radioactive cesium is unethical.
I’m glad I hate bananas. I mean I hate bananas. I hate the smell of bananas, the taste of bananas, the look of bananas the very thought of bananas. I really hate bananas.
Now a little cesium beef who knows? When the grid goes down glowing in the dark may be a good thing.
That is why I did the dose calculation. Dose is dose, regardless of the source. The LNT model, which I assume you accept, quantifies risk in terms of absorbed dose. That is what I calculated. Show where in my calculation where there is a mistake. Absorbed dose accounts for energy. Comparison of absorbed dose as a proxy for overall risk is a very appropriate and acceptable manner of risk comparison.
My comment about ‘transparent’ refers to gamma radiation which is more damaging to the body than beta.
You seem to lack a basic understanding of radiobiology. Absorbed dose is what causes damage. My dose calculation included both beta and gamma emissions. If you calculate things in terms of absorbed dose, you are doing an apples-to-apples comparison. The fundamental unit of absorbed dose is energy absorbed per unit mass. If the "unit mass" is taken to be the whole body, then absorbed dose is the quantity of energy deposited in the body by the source material intake. You can calculate that based on decay properties and specific activity, which I did.
SO, according to the EPA, higher energy gamma emissions are less damaging to the human body than are lower energy gamma emissions.
That is only true if you do not assume electronic equilibrium. If you don't, then you are going to have to do a very detailed stochastic model of the system, so you account for escaped energy in some fashion. I see none of that in the article cited, or in what you have presented. Lacking that, a very reasonable assumption is to assume electronic equilibrium and total absorption. That is almost certainly true for the case we are discussing.
I would pay a premium for this niche market beef. Where can I buy it?
I want a rib eye now....
So we agree to disagree. I point to medically recorded damage to human beings for radioactive cesium and the presence of bananas without Department of Transportation regulations in place in the grocery store. I cite EPA guidelines detailing some isotopes as being more hazardous than others based on emissions, medical observations of cesium, strontium and their differing behavior in the human body (e.g., strontium collecting in bones and teeth, cesium distributed through muscle) and common sense and you continue to insist none of this actually exists. So your attempts to equate bananas to radioactive cesium should no doubt motivate the Department of Transportation to lift all restrictions and licensing and lead shielding requirements for those transporting even small amounts of cesium or....more likely, creating certification and lead shielding requirements for bananas. I’ll keep a close eye on my local grocer’s produce section to see if you have succeeded in convincing the regulatory agencies to adopt your theory that the radioactive potassium in bananas is equivalent to radioactive cesium. I can’t wait to see the results!
The dose comparisons of the beef and the bananas were made to put the risks in perspective using a quantifiable number. Absorbed dose is absorbed dose no matter how you slice it, whether you get it from beef, bananas, x-ray machines, airport scanners, medical procedures, nuclear reactors, or a nuclear bomb.
Anyway, evidently we've said what we want to say. Thanks for taking the time to respond to (challenge) my posts.
Unfortunately the amount of cesium emissions from #2 reactor Fukushima Plant 1 increased 700 percent last month. Pressure also increased by over 100 % the past month. Unfortunately, there were 14 nuclear reactors in Japan damaged just from the earthquake alone. All 14 lost external power due to earthquake damage. And aftershocks keep coming. We will be living with elevated cesium for decades. Also rumors of a partial meltdown in a reactor in Fukushima plant 2 (Danai). Japan is also now abandoning some decontamination efforts and admitting some areas will remain off limits for decades.
FUD gets squashed again.
The robot spent over two hours performing almost a full circuit of the catwalk above the torus, ..
That states ABOVE the torus. IE - The upper torus areas. They did not survey the lower bottom section of the torus where gravity would have taken the corium. Personally will never ever again expect truth from organizations that flat out lie about meltdown for 2 months and delay for one year letting people know that 14 reactors lost external power that day.
Justa-hairyape said:
Personally will never ever again expect truth from organizations that flat out lie about meltdown for 2 months and delay for one year letting people know that 14 reactors lost external power that day.
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Could not have said it better. They never have and never will accept any responsibility for the damage they cause. They lie proactively, they lie re-actively, they lie retroactively, they lie theoretically and all the while, they talk down to the citizenry as if WE are the ones with the credibility problem????!!!
Sorry, should have been Sv without the /hr.
No, it was right the first time. Damn SI units. Sv/hr. Back in the day we used R/hr, so I recall rates of something like 400 R/hr at 20 feet for a single decayed assembly. That would be 4 Sv/hr.
Awesome! I remember last year reading about seniors volunteering but I never knew what happened. Thanks for the update!
And there would not have been an entire core that slid down into the Torus. Just a partial amount from the splash effect, that the NRC documented could occur, when a large scale core meltdown happens. All you need is enough corium to cause the reported explosion from down deep within the torus. That small amount of corium bore down through the bottom of the Torus and into the concrete catch. You do realize that Tepco has stated it is impossible to survey the bottom of the Torus. The only section that matters in this case.
And if you read the article I linked, the Torus has to have been breached to produce the amount of emissions that have been measured to have been emitted from #2.
So how many temperature sensors are currently working in #2 RPV ? Why are they failing ?
Probably because of radiation damage. I replaced some thermocouples in a reactor a few months ago that had drifted out of calibration range. We did a PIE and saw evidence of radiation embrittlement. Nothing terribly surprising. In this case it is not a dispositive indiccator of PV breach, although some time ago in a similar thread I acknowledged that the one Oak Ridge study identified the possibility of failure around the instrument tube penetrations. Those would be relatively small areas individually, but there are a fair number in total, so if enough were damaged you could have drippage of melted material out of the PV, but given the relatively low exposure rates reported it is unlikely there is much material in the drywell, if any. More likely is that we're still seeing the fission products from the initial venting operations. If there was significant leakage of core material into the drywell those readings would be a lot higher, just based on what I know uncovered fuel can produce in terms of dose rates, even shielded by the containment and drywell walls.
Look, all I'm saying is now we have hard evidence that a great deal of the FUD generated here and elsewhere in the early days of this event has been debunked. I know many will find that disappointing and hard to accept, but the evidence seems to be indicating that a lot of the FUD was just speculative hype, things like the torus blowing up (it didn't), that this would be "Chernobil on steroids" (it wasn't), that millions would die (no one has, not one person), that the Pacific Ocean would become lifeless (it hasn't), that the fission reactions continued long after shutdown (they didn't), that the SFP went dry and burned up (it didn't), that Japan would become a contaminated zone uninhabitable forever (it hasn't, and won't). IOW, the FUD has been debunked.
The problem as I see it, is that if high radiation is causing the temperature sensors failures in unit #2, why are the temperature sensors not failing in #1 and #3 at the same failure rate ?
What concerns me is that they found the water level in the CV of #2 to be much lower then they had predicted. Now that points to additional possible leakage and/or the possibility that the #2 RPV and CV are more damaged then thought.
There was an explosion in the lower Torus area of #2. People heard it and reported it. Tepco claims it was really the explosion in #4, and that the workers were confused. These workers have reported that there was no explosion in #4. They have reported that building #4 just disintegrated before their eyes without an explosion.
We are only in the middle phase of this disaster. Much more to go yet, and you know that. Very premature to say anything about this situation, but to say people should not be concerned with the resulting increase of radiation exposure, is just flat out irresponsible. And to not warn the US west coast that they are one significant earthquake away from dealing with major nuclear fallout from Japan, is also irresponsible. Heck, our own government has a faulty radiation sensor network. They cannot even tell us the radiation levels before, after and during an accident accurately.
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