Posted on 03/28/2011 9:10:33 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Plutonium detected in soil at Fukushima nuke plant
TOKYO, March 29, Kyodo
Plutonium has been detected in soil at five locations at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday.
The operator of the nuclear complex said that the plutonium is believed to have been discharged from nuclear fuel at the plant, which was damaged by the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
While noting that the concentration level does not pose a risk to human health, the utility firm said it will strengthen monitoring on the environment in and around the nuclear plant.
Meanwhile, high levels of radiation exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour have been detected in water in a trench outside the No. 2 reactor's building at the nuclear plant, with the contaminated water suspected to have come from the reactor's core, where fuel rods have partially melted, authorities said Monday.
(Excerpt) Read more at english.kyodonews.jp ...
Officials Alter Removal Plan For Plutonium The Material At Fort Dix Spilled From A Nuclear Warhead In 1960.Since 1960. In 1960 a missile containing a plutonium warhead caught fire. A Fire! Melting! Soil! Air! Plutonium! Less than 50 miles from Manhattan!
Panicked yet? People dying all over? FIFTY ONE YEARS AGO WE HAD A PLUTONIUM INCIDENT -- where's all the dead? Where's a single dead person?
Thanks for the sanity.
TEPCO CANNOT BE TRUSTED
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/power-company-failed-to-maintain-safety-checks-20110320-1c2fr.html
The revelation raises more questions about the scandal-tainted past of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the government’s perceived soft regulation of the industry.
The operator of the Fukushima No. 1 plant submitted a report to the country’s nuclear watchdog 10 days before the quake hit on March 11, admitting it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment in its six reactors.
A power board distributing electricity to a reactor’s temperature control valves was not examined for 11 years, and inspectors faked records, pretending to make thorough inspections when in fact they were only cursory, Tepco said.
It also said that inspections, which are voluntary, did not cover other devices related to cooling systems, including water pump motors and diesel generators.
Plutonium not a problem and everything is A-OK,..is that your story?
Those in Japan surely know by now that TEPCO can’t be trusted. Just a very short time before the earthquake hit they admitted they hadn’t done safety checks on equipment. It is documented they have lied about the safety of their equipment.
Those people in Japan darn well better be worried about what kind and how much Plutonium they might be subjected to when they inhale.
http://www.hss.energy.gov/HealthSafety/ohre/roadmap/achre/chap5_1.html
Deadly exposure: Plutonium-related cancers plague children of the Manhattan Project
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Local%20News/Deadly-exposure
I have to say I’m extremely suspicious of newbies spewing disingenuous hyperbole.
Ping.
Hi, how are you? I will be glad when we get some really warm weather that will stick around for more than a day.
Yes! There are idiots posting this anti-Anne stuff. Read her column, and anyone can see that she’s right on the money. And I’m not that big a fan of hers,,,, but I’d like to get my hands on her!
This weather boingin’ around is just creating havoc! I went to the super market today, and it was a symphony of coughing and hacking!
The question is, "Elevated by how much?", or "Elevated to what level?"
Modern detection techniques can detect and quantify almost unbeliveably low levels of radiation.
I notice that the news media almost never give details on the actual values of any levels detected, and never put it into context, e.g., compared to what background level.
I agree with all of that.
That is not true. One of the processes that occurs in a nuclear reactor is the conversion of Uranium into Plutonium. Therefore, although it is not originally in the fuel, it is created from some of the fuel.
I said that we’ve have Plutonium exposure before Fukushima, from bomb fallout. That’s a fact, we were bathed in radioactive nuclide fallout. There’s still Pu-239/Pu-240 in soil all over the northern hemisphere from nuke testing. That’s simply not open to debate. We had hundreds of above-ground tests. In some areas of the world, you can find emitters in the soil from tenths to ones of Bq/square-meter from Pu-239.
The workers at Los Almos were exposed. That’s also not open to question. From ‘44 to ‘late ‘45, there were at least 37 men who were *highly* exposed at Los Almos, because they didn’t have sufficient protective equipment to trap plutonium in the air. There was plutonium dust, filing, shavings, etc all over their workbenches, their tools, etc. These men were studied after the Manhattan Project and found to have had huge rates of ingestion via inhalation of Pu-239. At least one of them has a flesh wound that had particles of Pu in his wound for decades emitting hundreds of Bq. The doctors examining the wound over the years expected tissue death and necrosis surrounding the wound. Nope. None, zip, nada.
Now, if you had read the paper I mentioned to find via Google, you would have known what happened to those workers exposed at Los Almos who were the parents of the children in the story that you referenced. The net:net was that the follow-up with these men (and the government has been tracking their health for decades) could not find elevated levels of mortality from cancer above the control populations of a) white males in the US that shared their age cohort and b) workers at Los Almos who didn’t directly handle Pu.
And yet, from the amount of plutonium these men have inhaled and gotten into wounds, we would expect to see a rather elevated mortality from cancers. If we believe the popular press accounts of the lethality of plutonium (all the “most dangerous stuff invented by man” nonsense - ignoring, of course, the known and proven lethality of substances like VX), then we’d expect to see the Los Almos workers’ exposure to plutonium be very highly predictive of cancer mortality.
Instead, we don’t see that.
The levels of exposure are unequivocally high in the Los Almos subjects. In at least one case, absurdly high, as in “how did this guy live for a year after 1945?” Yet he did.
Still, with all that exposure and all those years, there isn’t a clear signal of an elevated cancer level. And I’m supposed to be concerned about what is a piddling amount of plutonium exposure compared to what these guys got? I’m not getting the rationality of that.
Their children are now making legal claims upon the government. But I have not found a published statistical test of children of Manhattan Project workers exposure vs. a control population. Anyone can make a claim. The liberal arts’ majors in the US media lap up such claims and breathlessly publish them. There’s hundreds of people making claims of health issue causality every day. I could claim that incidental auditory exposure to NPR gives me irritable bowel syndrome, and sue the idiots at NPR to recover the costs of my time and toilet paper... maybe I should get on the NPR gravy train while it still lasts!
Until I construct a statistical experiment with at least 30 subjects and prove causality, I’m not going to get too far in court, tho.
That’s what is required in science. Construct a statistical experiment, state a hypothesis, identify a control and test group, and start cranking out some numbers using good methodology. Individuals claiming “X caused my cancer” when they get cancer isn’t science. It is an anecdotal claim. This is the problem with most cancer clusters, claims of power line magnetic field exposure, people who think that microwave ovens have given them cancer, cell phone radiation next to one’s skull, etc. I’ve read dozens and dozens of these studies over the last 25 years. For all the supposed hazards we’re exposed to, an astonishingly small number of environmental exposures show a statistical signal of causality. The best ones to debunk are the proponents of organic farming. They want to claim that pesticides are killing us. Really? Why does the life expectancy for the general population keep going up then? Why was the expected lifespan of people before WWII (and the advent of modern pesticides in farming) so much shorter than it is now? The organic zealots have been trying to pin the tail on the donkey with 2,4-D for 50+ years now. They haven’t been able to do it.
The actual statistical studies done on atomic fallout of nuclides to date do not say “there is no problem, this stuff is safe to eat.” They say “so far, we do not see the level of dangers presupposed” - ie, the statistical studies do not show an elevation in the numbers of cancer mortalities that one presupposes if one believes the popular media.
And that’s the key. People have been getting cancer since, well, forever. There is no data to support the idea that until man discovered how to split the atom at his command that there was no cancer. None, zip, nada. People have been dying of cancer for as long as humans have had a diagnosis of cancer. Before that, people were dying of cancer, we just didn’t have a diagnosis and taxonomy for it and it went under the general category of “consumption.”
The failure to find a clear, unequivocal statistical signal of “elevated level of exposure of X nuclide results in Y elevated incidence of cancer(s)” is true of the stats I’ve cited for general I-131 and other fallout from nuke testing, cancer cases near TMI, or the 37 men with histories of handling Plutonium at Los Almos during the Manhattan Project.
I’ve cited to you other studies that DID find a clear and convincing statistical signal of elevated lung cancer risk of non-smoking people who lived in homes with elevated radon levels. You’re getting pissed off because I refuse to be alarmed by the breathless reporting of Fukushima, yet you are ignoring the fact that I have taken note of the available statistical studies that actually show a cancer signal from radioactive exposure through radon in homes. I said it before, and I’ll say it again: I go where the numbers lead me. And in environmental exposure, the numbers I see say “don’t worry about fallout, worry about radon in your basement.” I act accordingly.
I’m walking my talk on both sides: Where there is no statistical signal, I refuse to become alarmed. Where there IS a statistical signal, I take prudent action.
A question for you: if uranium oxide in this type of reactor generates plutonium as a byproduct of operation, is said plutonium (and I imagine this varies according to the particular isotope of plutonium, but perhaps this view is in error also) used subsequently as fuel by the same reactor, or is it (temporarily, at minimum) simply a waste product which has to be removed over time?
Many thanks for your reply, and FReegards!
Please change “Los Almos” to “Los Alamos” in my posting as you read it. Dunno why the spellcheck didn’t flag it and I didn’t see it.
That’s the central issue I have with the reporting. I want to know Bq/m^2 or Bq/l for water, and then I want a pre-March 11 reading as well. I want to know the radionuclide for which there is a reading, the background levels, the trend of samples over time, etc. The Japanese have some of this data, and it puzzles me why they’re so disorganized in presenting it.
Giving me a number out of a vacuum of comparative data makes me say “Hmmm, OK. That’s interesting.” I just can’t get excited unless I have something to which I can compare - and that’s true of most everything. Numbers in a vacuum are just cocktail party factoids, they’re not worthy of too much action.
This is part of what I depend on in investing. We can say that “Company X has a low PE ratio, therefore it is a screaming buy, buy, buy!” until we look at all companies in that sector, then we see that they all have low PE ratios, and what is more, they’ve always been low. In other words, the bigger comparative data picture tells us to not expect a PE expansion any time soon... and so on.
There’s tons of applications of math in real life, and the brutal truth is that the people that go into journalism show us the best possible evidence that without mathematical critical thinking, it is possible to have a master of arts degree and still be every bit as suspicious and open to irrational behavior as the early cavemen, who listened to some shaman during a lunar eclipse as he said “The evil Night Wolf has swallowed up the Moon Princess - give me hides and your daughters so that I can make him spit her out!”
“The workers at Los Almos were exposed. That’s also not open to question. From ‘44 to ‘late ‘45, there were at least 37 men who were *highly* exposed at Los Almos, because they didn’t have sufficient protective equipment to trap plutonium in the air. There was plutonium dust, filing, shavings, etc all over their workbenches, their tools, etc. These men were studied after the Manhattan Project and found to have had huge rates of ingestion via inhalation of Pu-239. At least one of them has a flesh wound that had particles of Pu in his wound for decades emitting hundreds of Bq. The doctors examining the wound over the years expected tissue death and necrosis surrounding the wound. Nope. None, zip, nada.”
And the people who did die and dd have problems mean nothing because some didn’t have a problem?
I can’t fathom a person who believes ingesting lots of Plutonium is not a problem..but go ahead and volunteer for an experiment of having plutonium injected to you so researchers can see how much you can tolerate.
Your debate tactic is called “reductio ad absurdum,” in which you’re trying to disprove my facts by trying to posit that the my rebuttal of your unproven apocalyptic health effects in people exposed to low levels of plutonium means that I should outright consume plutonium, for no reason other than to prove your point. Because whether it is inert, poisonous or beneficial, there are lethal limits to ingesting any and all substances.
I’m already wise to debate tactics like yours - if I ate a 100 micrograms of Pu-239 and didn’t die, you’d say “Well, then, you wouldn’t mind consuming 1 gram...” and so on, until I was chowing down on a mass of metal with the heft of a Buick bumper.
I don’t have to ingest plutonium to prove *my* point. The existing studies, stats, and people already prove my point, which is that the apocalyptic claims of health effects from low-level exposure to Pu-239 aren’t supported by the statistical evidence.
Your position is about like saying “Well then... since a majority of people shot with handguns survive, you should volunteer for wound ballistic test dummy.”
One more time, and I’m going to type slowly so you can understand it:
My argument isn’t that ingesting plutonium is “good” for you or that it is “no problem.” Everyone who ingests plutonium dies... but then again, everyone dies, whether they were exposed to radioactive nuclides or not. Got that? Everyone dies.
Second big clue I’m going to rent here today: You have to die before you get to heaven. Many Americans seem to have forgotten this inconvenient truth. Want to live a lifestyle of industrial convenience and luxury? Well, then, as a result there’s occasionally going to be issues that are rather a bit more complicated than “the fire at the mouth of our cave went out last night” problems our ancestors faced.
My point is this: The apocalyptic claims of health effects by you and other people pointing a quivering, hysteric finger at very low to low levels of radiation are not borne out by the data. Want to point a quavering finger? Show me some stats.
We have actual data, and the data do not support your position. You have offered only anecdotal evidence. I’ve offered up structured statistical studies with unequivocal exposure to plutonium. Not ephemeral, nor second-hand exposure, nor guesses as to when and for how long the exposure occurred. Those 37 men were exposed to, ingested or absorbed through wounds weapons grade material, because they were working on the bombs that were set off at Trinity and Nagasaki. They were exposed for months upon end to a high level of plutonium. They personally ingested more than most anyone who isn’t a reactor plant worker at a full-scale containment failure ever will.
Would the guy who got plutonium into a wound want to do it again? Heck no. I’ve had steel shavings, aluminum shavings embedded in wounds. Metal under in your flesh hurts like hell for a long time, regardless of systemic health effects. I can imagine that it bugged him for years and years that the doctors couldn’t get it out. Still, the expectation by MD’s was to see tissue necrosis from radiation exposure. This didn’t happen. At some point of increased radiation, flesh will die from radiation exposure. We know this. What was learned was that that level wasn’t reached in that subject, even tho it was thought to have been well exceeded.
I would have preferred that the reactors never failed. I would have much more greatly preferred that 10K+ people were not killed by the tsunami. But the tsunami has happened, my wishes don’t matter, the reactors have disgorged some radioactivity into their surrounding environment, here we are, and now it has to be dealt with. An rational person looks at the problem and deals with the biggest issues first, and low levels of contamination, while not desirable, are small issues compared with everything else they’re dealing with there.
That people here, an ocean away, are buying iodide and geiger counters... pfah. I haven’t seen so much irrational hysteria since the Y2K build-up. You can still buy gensets at dimes on the dollar as a result of that.
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