Fukushima - are we all going to die?

[ApatheticNoMore]

Well is Fukushima going to kill us all in a couple months or what?

Have people been following it? Are you scared @#$#less at this point? Really are we approaching a planet or at least half the planet extinction level event with Fukushima? It certainly makes thinking about retirement rather a moot point if that happened, right? But really, do you find the possible massive nuclear irradiation of much of the planet (at least the northern hemisphere) threatening?

[danna]

No body, including the news barely touches this subject.
Clearly to scary! Most people seem to be too busy line up to buy the latest new phone
to pay much attention to what is happening in the world.
If as many people lined up to vote the world would be a better place!
My rant for the day!!!

[Gregg]

There are a few reasons to not cash in the 401k just yet. So far the contamination is local. Sucks if you happen to be a sponge living in Sendai harbour, but its not having much effect beyond that. The soil around the plant is mostly clay which does a great job of naturally sequestering contaminates. The freeze wall technology they are now employing for additional containment is proven, works exceptionally well and in the worst case event of another massive earthquake it can be used to contain any additional leaks. In the big picture, if all containment is lost and every drop of contaminated water flowed straight into the sea the effect would be minimal. The Pacific is a pretty big ocean and dumping a (relatively) small amount of anything into it won't have much effect overall because of the rate of dispersion. Not defending any kind of dumping mind you, just stating the obvious. On top of that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has become quite involved and has ordered TEPCO to decommission the two operating reactors that remain on site so they can concentrate on the clean-up.

IMO, the interesting discussion to come out of this is what to do about nuke plants in seismically active areas. My overly simplified thought on the matter is to build them in stable areas and lay new transmission lines to the active areas. But that's just me.

[Yossarian]

You are subjected to radiation all the time. Here's a little perspective for you:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworst...llion-bananas/

We also have that claim of 20 trillion becquerels of radiation having been dumped into the Pacific Ocean in the past couple of years. 20 trillion divided by two years by 365 days by 24 hours gives us an hourly rate of 1,141,552,511 becquerels per hour. Divide that by our 15 Bq per banana and we can see that the radiation spillage from Fukushima is running at 76 million bananas per hour.

Which is, as I say above, a lot of bananas. But it’s not actually that many bananas. World production of them is some 145 million tonnes a year. There’s a thousand kilos in a tonne, say a banana is 100 grammes (sounds about right, four bananas to the pound, ten to the kilo) or 1.45 trillion bananas a year eaten around the world. Divide again by 365 and 24 to get the hourly consumption rate and we get 165 million bananas consumed per hour.

We can do this slightly differently and say that the 1.45 trillion bananas consumed each year have those 15 Bq giving us around 22 trillion Bq each year. The Fukushima leak is 20 trillion Bq over two years: thus our two calculations agree. The current leak is just under half that exposure that we all get from the global consumption of bananas.

Except even that’s overstating it. For the banana consumption does indeed get into our bodies: the Fukushima leak is getting into the Pacific Ocean where it’s obviously far less dangerous. And don’t forget that all that radiation in the bananas ends up in the oceans as well, given that we do in fact urinate it out and no, it’s not something that the sewage treatment plants particularly keep out of the rivers.

[rosarugosa]

I can state with complete confidence that we are indeed all going to die.

[Rogar]

I've tried to keep up with it some, and what Greg said is what I think the common sense reliable sources are saying and the most likely outcome or outcomes. This is obviously a very bad thing, but I think most of the damage and concerns are going to be local.

There are plenty of doomsday articles that are more fringe and some of them seem to be written or researched by educated people. But the bottom line is that we are not really sure exactly what will happen, and to complicate matters TOPCO and the Japanese Government have the idea of saving face build into their culture, so have not been totally honest about what is really going on.

[bae]

ANM - what data is causing you to worry that there is an extinction-level event brewing from this?

[flowerseverywhere]

Just as an FYI there is an alanta based company called Inpo. They evaluate Nuclear power plant safety and if you google Fukushima and INPO you can find all kinds of documents related to what happened there and what evaluations are going on here in the US to see if any of the catastrophic events could be duplicated. Several US plants are on the chopping block, including Vermont Yankee. Also, here is a very interesting wiki article on the health effects of Fukushima http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiati...clear_disaster It is a long article but has many details on what has happened healthwise and why.

[ApatheticNoMore]

ANM - what data is causing you to worry that there is an extinction-level event brewing from this?

The concern now seems to be the removal of spent fuel rods at Reactor Number 4 that will start in November of this year. The amount of radiation quoted that could be released is 14,000 times the bomb at Hiroshima (nuclear bombs are more powerful now too but anyway). I have no idea how many becquerels is. Hey if someone knows, they can chime in. But apparently bomb radiation is not so easily compared to nuclear power plant radiation anyway. Though I would like to know how this potential release from Fukushima compares to Chernobyl.
Chernobyl not easily compared to Hiroshima:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherno...ivity_releases

Anyway back to Fukushima:

Without downplaying the seriousness of the contaminated water, and the other setbacks at Daiichi, it is important to recognise that things could very easily, and very quickly, get much worse.

Understandably, most commentary on Daiichi focuses on the multiple leaks of water laced with high- and low-level radiation, but the oncoming challenges are far more serious. As Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Advisor at the US Department of Energy and one of the world’s top spent fuel pools experts, has warned, sites such as Fukushima Daiichi “have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.”49 They need to be handled by the most competent and best-equipped expertise available.

But sit down and take a deep breath, because from November, TEPCO plans to begin the delicate operation of removing spent fuel from Reactor No. 4 fuel pool. There was no fuel within this reactor per se, so the ambient level of radiation is lower than the neighbouring three reactors. So in that respect, this is the easiest of the cluster. Even so, there are 1,533 used fuel rod assemblies tightly packed together in the spent-fuel pool above the reactor.50 They weigh a total of 400 tons, and contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.51 The spent-fuel pool stands 18 metres above ground, was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami, and is in a deteriorating condition. It remains vulnerable to any further shocks, and is also at risk from ground liquefaction. One might add there is a significant terrorist threat, considering the damage that could be done with a light plane or some similar attack. Removing the spent fuel from No 4 and the other pools, bundles that among other fission products contain deadly plutonium,52 is clearly an urgent task but must be done properly.

Even under ordinary circumstances spent-fuel removal is a difficult task, normally requiring the aid of computers. But due to the damage, removal of the total 6840 spent fuel bundles from Daiichi No. 4’s spent fuel pool, the five other reactors’ pools,53 and the entire unit’s common pool will have to be done manually. This work will also be undertaken under arduous conditions, increasing the risk of yet another mishap. And if something does go wrong, the consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan, including the metropolises of Tokyo and Yokohama, and even neighbouring countries at serious risk.

http://japanfocus.org/-Christopher-Hobson/3991

I have heard that the risk may be more than just Japan as well, as in much of the world. Yes I am on the West coast, it doesn't help any But it doesn't mean even the East coast would emerge well if things went wrong either.

[ToomuchStuff]

I can state with complete confidence that we are indeed all going to die.

THANK YOU!

Someone had to state the obvious, for the "it won't happen to me" crowd.