Fukushima radiation taints US milk supplies at levels 300% higher than EPA maximums

Have you heard of John W. Gofman?
While a graduate student at Berkeley, Gofman co-discovered protactinium-232, uranium-232, protactinium-233, and uranium-233, and proved the slow and fast neutron fissionability of uranium-233.

On the following page ( http://ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/nwJWG.html)starting about 20% down from the top of the page, is clearly marked chapter 4 of Gofman’s account of his work. Both his time working with radioactivity under Seaborg and his time studying, as a medical doctor, the effects of low level radiation. Makes for very interesting reading. I was heartened that Gofman and his colleague repeatedly thwarted those who tried to silence him and his colleague because their medical studies indicated that there was no safe level. The routinely told those who tried to silence them to go to..ah...heck. Seems like his work with radioactivity and medicine qualified him to weigh in on this issue but he and his colleagues were shunned - repeatedly told to lie when their work proved that low level radiation was not safe their services were not needed and they were portrayed as cranks etc. Funny Gofman was not a crank when discovering radioactive isotopes that people wanted.

Here’s an University of California San Francisco interview with Gofman http://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/synapse.html

There are many publications by Gofman - here’s another titled Radiation-Induced Cancer From Low-Dose Exposure
John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D. 1990
http://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/RIC/contentsF.html

“There is a range of exposure to ionizing radiation within which the impact will be beneficial to health and longevity. This has already been demonstrated in inhabitants in the regions around Chernobyl, in inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in inhabitants of higher versus lower regions of natural background radiation in the U.S. and other places, in healthcare and other workers with occupational exposure to ionizing radiation.”

These examples you give are ‘exposure to ionizing radiation’ and not ‘ingestion of radioactive contaminants’ (food chain etc.) That’s the most glaring distortion. The other distortions have to do with suggesting that there are health benefits in being exposed to radiation. I do recall a thread where a woman lectured me that “Cancer went down in Nagasaki!” but considering that death rates increased with Nagasaki and dead people don’t develop cancer this sort of unqualified perky outlook is unscientific. Another person posted ‘Cancer rates decreased with proximity to Chernobyl’ without noting that death rates increased with exposure and that exposure suppresses immune response (temporarily or permanently depending on dose) so people may have been dying of otherwise survivable illnesses. You may know that the Soviet government lied and continues to lie (in it’s present Russian form) about the severity and illnesses - with the break up of the Soviet Union, the public gained access to epic levels of deception to conceal actual dosage, illness, and death rates so I can just imagine WHERE that perky idea of the beneficial range came from. Oh there’s the radon thing (radon tourism) that gets tossed around as a ‘health benefit’ as if there is any conceivable comparison between a group of adults choosing to perform a medical experiment on themselves by going into underground chambers where dose rate is known and staying for periods of time they elect to get the dose they want with the current situation of unwilling persons receiving unknown dosages for an indeterminate amount of time not restricted to exposure but projected to include ingestion.

According to your link:

"We understand that all of the BWR Mark 1 containment units at Fukushima Daiichi also addressed these issues and implemented modifications in accordance with Japanese regulatory requirements."

Sounds like they did the retrofit.

That was to strengthen the containment, not the part of the building that blew apart when the hydrogen blew up.

The link also mentions the problem of the fuel pools being outside the containment vessel (inside the outer containment buildings which blew up). We haven't fixed that in U.S. plants either, and the link says:

"(...) The United States has 31 boiling-water reactors with similarly situated spent fuel pools that are far more densely packed than those at Fukushima and hence could pose far higher risks if damaged," Lyman said on Wednesday to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

It does seem to be a cause for concern that we have fuel rods separated from our atmosphere by nothing more than the water in the pools, with no way of sealing it off. If I were over-designing those plants, I would have included a moving metal door set which could close off the top of the pools in a catastrophe.

But I should note that there could be a good reason not to do that, or else they would have flown something like that in by now. Probably trapping the fuel in a pool with no water would end up making things worse. That would be something I'd expect to come up at a design review meeting.

Let me ask you this.

from an engineering/construction perspective...

Look at reactor 3 compared to Reactor 4.

What caused the fire in 4.

Reactor 4 was still intact after Reactor 3’s explosion so none of the damage is from Reactor 3.

Don’t pay attention to the annotations because they are discussing photos on another forum and some of these may be off
just look at the detail of the buildings

http://www.houseoffoust.com/fukushima/fukushima.html

Have you seen any pictures or video of the supposed explosion in reactor 4?

So what do we have today on fukushima versus Chernobyl???

A big ...they have no clue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/world/asia/13japan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=asia

“Mr. Shiroya also said there was a threefold margin for error involved. The outside estimates of total releases would range from as low as 6 percent to as high as 51 percent of the unofficial totals from Chernobyl.”

What is a threefold margin of error??

“Although [Seiji Shiroya, a commissioner of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission] did not provide a comparison to Chernobyl, [a release of 630,000 terabecquerels] works out to 34 percent of the official Soviet estimate of emissions and 17 percent of the unofficial higher estimate.”

So what does that mean...a threefold measure of error means it could be the same as Chernobyl and thus the warning from Tepco????

It doesn’t really matter if it is worse than Chernobyl or if it is less than Chernobyl

There is no end in sight and there are a lot of people paying the price for this disaster.

The presumption is that there was hydrogren buildup in #4. My guess based on what I’ve read from the time was that they weren’t paying attention to #4 since it wasn’t operating, that somehow water was leaking out without them knowing, that the fuel became partly uncovered, generating hydrogen, and there was an explosion.

I don’t remember seeing a video of an explosion in #4. There are some videos labelled #4, but I can’t tell if they are the 4th explostion, or an explosion in number 4. It is clear from the pictures that #4 didn’t blow up as spectacularly as the others. But it did blow up later, so you’d think someone had film on it. I guess if it blew up in the dark, and didn’t make a really cool flash, there might not be enough to see.

#4 is the most curious to me, simply because it wasn’t running at the time, and it seems like it would have been so easy to maintain it, if they just had paid attention and realised they were losing water (assuming that was the problem).

I think someone else suggested there was a fuel load shift from the earthquake that might have put fuel too close together — but I’m not sure the assemblies CAN be moved “closer together” in any meaningful way, and I haven’t read any non-alarmist work on that matter.

On that last point — I don’t mean to sound dismissive of alarmists, as sometimes they are right. What i mean is that for general descriptions of what COULD happen, if the only people saying something are alarmists, I discount it.

For example, it might make sense that an alarmist thinks the water drained out, while others don’t. Water COULD drain out. But if the alarmists say the rods moved too close together, and no competent non-alarmist will admit that they COULD be put closer together, there’s no point in speculating that it might have happened.

That’s also why I spend a lot of time calculating weights and measures — it’s a good way to independently verify certain facts to determine if the author should be taken seriously. If someone talks about hundreds of tons of nuclear material in a reactor, when I know what the reactor actually holds is much less, then I can guess they aren’t seriously evaluating the situation.

After all, I’m mostly guessing. I’m not there, I don’t have my own measurements, and in this case, I have only a layman’s knowledge of nuclear reactors. I know about twice as much now as I did a month ago; but I’m not ready to work at a power plant (I certainly could have done so if I had chosen that field of study, but a few days browsing the internet does not make up for 4 years of focused college learning on the subject matter).

Back to the #4 question. I thought they had reported the fire before #3 blew up, but I could be mis-remembering. If not, I wondered at the time if the explosion at 3 could have shot debris THROUGH the wall of #4 small enough and on the side that was hard to see such that we wouldn’t notice in the overhead or side pictures, but if that debris couldn’t have done something to trigger the fire.

I assume there’s nothing really flammable in the buildings, so it had to be a hydrogen explosion, but what if I’m wrong and they had flammable liquid stored and it was hit by a hot projectile from the #3 explosion? Just speculation of course.

Here is a picture that shows 4 still intact after 3 exploded .one explanation for what you see is debris from 3. EXCEPT

http://www.digitalglobe.com/downloads/featured_images/japan_earthquaketsu_fukushima_daiichi_march14_2011_dg.jpg

TEPCO said there was a loud explosion and then fire in Number 4

It happened during daylight hours.I have seen nothing on that explosion- no video no photo- but have seen video of others.

4 does not look the same.
Note the rebar for the concrete. Note the many panels in place and structure maintained. Roof decimated, concrete blown out..but those panels remain. One poster thought it might be an oil vapor explosion but there is no soot. Lower decks have concrete stripped away from rebar. Dont see the same thing from reactor 3.

There are a lot of clues in Reactor 4. I haven’t found anyone has been able to figure out what they mean except that it is odd for a hydrogen explosion to leave damage like that as you can see from the explosion in reactor 3

Since my theory is that TEPCO was working on weapons in at least one facility somewhere...I am always looking for clues.

4 is a puzzlement that no one on the net really has been able to figure out - at least not that i have found.

One person suggested there might have been something shielding all those panels.

4 does look like it might have smoke but that could wafting over from 3.

Also,in that undamaged picture there is no truck. In the damaged picture there is a truck in that chute which I thought had something to do with loading and unloading fuel.

There were unspent fuel rods in that facility. Were they in the pool? How did they lay them out. Did they checkerboard them or just lump them all together. Someone said there is about a million pounds of fuel in that pool. (dont know if that is right)
We dont know what they did with those spent and unspent rods

So , the only thing people can do is look for clues based on photos and readings and info released from TEPCO.

btw, the 27 year expert who has worked and maintained and tested BWRs said that 4 would have been easy to maintain in the first few hours. All they had to do was use rig up a temporary pump and add some water.

4 was the simple issue to resolve as there was no fuel in the Reactor vessel

Why didn’t they???
his conclusion is that:

“My only conclusion on this event is that the Japanese had INADEQUATE planning, procedures and training to deal with a relatively simple issue for Unit 4.”

But perhaps something else was at play in Reactor 4.

The 20 years that expired since the interviews have not changed the fact that radiation damages cellular genetic material and can lead to cancer and other health problems. This is why, since x-rays were introduced into medicine, that the ‘safe’ dosage, which assumes an increase in cancer risk, is lowered over the years, why the technician gets behind shielding for x-rays, mammograms etc. This is why there is controversy over the use of mammography because the screening technique uses radiation which introduces a cancer risk but not screening may allow a tumor to grow undetected. The known properties of radiation have not changed - the way it’s used has changed. Medicine is currently using targeted doses to turn the cellular destructive force of radiation on tumor cells. But there is an acknowledged risk - it’s an attempt at balancing the risks.

The 20 years that expired since the interviews have not changed the fact that radiation damages cellular genetic material and can lead to cancer and other health problems.

30 years since that 1990 article. You're acting as though radiation is something new. The human genome was developed at a time when the earth's radiation load was much, much higher than it is now. The one-shot cancer initiation hypothesis is to current disease theory what the phlogiston theory of heat is to thermodynamics. Animal cells especially have means of dealing with chemical, radiological, and even heat insults. These means are not constitutively active at the same levels but, like heat shock protein expression, are stimulated by the environment and confer a survival advantage on the organism.

You are behaving as is radiation is something new. The history of radiation in science has been one of surprises. Year after year, researcher after researcher discovered the hard way that assumptions about the safety of radiation exposure were unfounded. For example, year after year, the ‘safe’ levels of medical xrays have been lowered not based on public opinion, which is generally but not universally trusting, but medical science. So that now the gov argument to reduce mammogram use in women is based on the argument that exposure to the radiation used to create the mammogram increases the risk of getting cancer and this is weighed against the potential for not having mammograms and missing cancerous cells early. Now that’s a measured dose that can be authorized by the patient.
What is also instructive about John Gofman’s experiences is the degree to which the gov and nuclear agencies told him to lie and then halted research on studies revealing that low level radiation was not safe -you should read it sometime.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.