TOKYO (MarketWatch) -- Tohoku Electric Power Co said Friday it found water leaks at its Onagawa nuclear power plant in Japan's Miyagi prefecture after a strong aftershock Thursday night, according to media reports. The operator said water leaked out of spent-fuel pools of the plant's No. 1 and No. 2 reactors and from other parts of the plant, but that there was no change in radiation levels outside the plant, Reuters reported. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/water-leaks-from-onagawa-nuclear-plant-reports-2011-04-07 You don´t worry. Everything just "radioactive"...
All that s$%t will be hitting the California coast in a few years... there is a current that carries debris across the Pacific.. maybe it's all heavy and will distribute along the ocean bottom...
u kno how japan's buildings are equipped to handle earthquakes.... what would the damage be to LA?!?!?!
Don't fret too much about it. Here is the trend in radiation readings for Ibaraki Prefecture (right next door to Fukushima). The highest reading is now about twice European background levels - and still lower than many places on earth which have higher background levels but no demonstrable harm to public health.
I believe that the situation is more dire than anyone is saying. I've been keeping up with the news about radiation from this tragedy and it really bothers me. here is a very important article about it; <B>No Safe Levels' of Radiation in Japan By Dahr Jamail*</B> http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=55118
If you believe that "no level of radiation is safe", you would never have a dental or other x-ray, allow smoke alarms in your home etc etc. In the case of smoke alarms, the risk from radiation is far less than the risk of being burned to death in a fire - which is why any rational person installs smoke alarms. Ditto for x-rays. Harm from low radiation dose is certainly not proved - see this position statement from the US Health Physics Society (the people whose job is radiation protection): "Radiogenic health effects (primarily cancer) have been demonstrated in humans through epidemiological studies only at doses exceeding 5â10 rem delivered at high dose rates. Below this dose, estimation of adverse health effect remains speculative. Risk estimates that are used to predict health effects in exposed individuals or populations are based on epidemiological studies of well-defined populations (for example, the Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings in 1945 and medical patients) exposed to relatively high doses delivered at high dose rates. Epidemiological studies have not demonstrated adverse health effects in individuals exposed to small doses (less than 10 rem) delivered in a period of many years." [ 5 - 10 rems = 50-100 mSV] http://hps.org/documents/risk_ps010-2.pdf Harm from low exposure is a hypothesis, and it is by no means accepted by all scientists. Of course avoiding unnecessary exposure is prudent.
DC, the strenght of nuclear religion seems to pass that of all other religions. As with all other believers it makes you even immune to radiation, be it alpha, beta, gamma or whatever. As you are such a radiation hero maybe you should set an example and buy a ticket to Tokyo. You know they are paying handsomely for men like you who are not afraid of the invisible. You could make it a double or lets say triple. 1. Make a decent salary. 2. Help the poor Japanese clean the mess. 3. Have a break from your dull job and even have a kind of holiday as you would have plenty of spare time since the men are only allowed to work there for a short time per shift. As there are no nuclear plants in Australia, I just can't understand how anyone would want them there in the first place. You have millions and millions of acres of wasteland and lots of sunshine. That would make it possible to produce all your electricity with PV. Wouldn't that be great?
It's got nothing to do with religion - it's got to do with the science and a rational approach to risk. Nuclear power remains one of the safest forms of electricity generation - far safer than coal, safer than nat gas, safer than hydro. Here is what I mean by rational approach to risk. According to the officially adopted LNT (Linear No Threshold) hypotheses, a radiation dose of 10 mSv will have 1% of the effect of a 1000 mSv dose. The latter is enough to cause acute radiation sickness and has an estimated effect of increasing the chance of fatal cancer by 5%. Therefore a 10 mSv dose increases it by 0.05%. Why should an individual worry about this - other factors such as obesity, diet, lack of exercise, alcohol, tobacco, other drugs, other pollutants and so on simply swamp any effect from a low radiation dose of say 10 mSv. But there is no proof of LNT. There may well be a threshold below which there is no harm. But what is certain is that low dose does very little harm. There are places in the world where natural background radiation is ten times higher than the average and studies have not shown any measurable effect on public health. In the city of Ramsar in Iran, there are extremely high natural radiation levels. In some places in Ramsar, the yearly dose is approaching that received by the emergency workers at Fukushima. The place should be evacuated, but epidemiological studies have not managed to show adverse effects on public health. A hysterical attitude to radiation risk serves no one's interest except that of the fossil fuel corporates. It does not help make rational decisions about low emission energy, and it does not help those exposed to some increased level of radiation at Fukushima who may be lead to a state of distress far out of proportion to the risk they face. Why is Australia not solar powered? Because it's way too expensive. Most of Australia's electricity is generated by burning coal. It's practically shovelled out of the mine mouth into the boilers. In Victoria, brown coal is cheap as chips, and has even higher emissions than black coal. Nuclear provides 14% of the worlds electricity and non-hydro renewables (wind, solar etc) less than 3%. In oh-so-green Germany, despite a huge amount of money spent on PV, it provides no more than 3% of electricity and Germany is building new coal fired power plants. Now why is that?
Don't worry folks. Three Mile Island took fourteen years to clean up. That was a lesser incident so maybe the six reactors at Fukushima should be safe by 2030-40. These nuclear leaks probably occur every year in India, Pakistan, Iran,...,just you never get to hear to about it.
dcraig is right. It is perfectly safe. You can even visit Chernobyl, it's just that everyone got "hysterical" and left:- http://forums.filefront.com/s-t-l-k...-trip-chernobyl-pictures-56k-ultra-death.html