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Merged nuclear power safe?

is nuclear power safe?

not bloody likely.....
Fukushima Radiation sickness spreading to Tokyo
http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/fukushima-radiation-sickness-spreading-to-tokyo.html

At least one billion becquerels a day of radiation continue to leak from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant after the March earthquake and tsunami.
Experts say that the total amount of radiation leaked will exceed amounts released from Chernobyl, making Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.
 
bikerdruid said:
Experts say that the total amount of radiation leaked will exceed amounts released from Chernobyl, making Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Click to expand...

By that logic isn't the sun the worst nuclear disaster in history? That sucker hemorrhages radiation. :p
 
bikerdruid said:
is nuclear power safe?

not bloody likely.....
Fukushima Radiation sickness spreading to Tokyo
http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/fukushima-radiation-sickness-spreading-to-tokyo.html

At least one billion becquerels a day of radiation continue to leak from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant after the March earthquake and tsunami.
Experts say that the total amount of radiation leaked will exceed amounts released from Chernobyl, making Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Click to expand...

Sounds legit ..
 
bikerdruid said:
At least one billion becquerels a day of radiation
Click to expand...

Sorry, but whoever wrote that has no idea what they are talking about. The becquerel is a rate of activity, not an amount. The only way that makes sense is if the rate of decay is increasing by a billion Bq per day, which I rather doubt.

Actually scratch the whole "not knowing what they are talking about" thing... what that reeks of is a person who does know what they are talking about and is intentionally trying to have big scary numbers. Assuming it's 1 billion decays per day, that's about 11,500 Bq, which is about 200 times background radiation levels. That's certainly high, to be sure. But it's also utterly useless as a measure of how dangerous the exposure is since there is no reference to the type of radiation and other such factors.
 
I dropped a billion atoms of arsenic in your coffee, are you going to drink it?

If not, I'm not going to waste coffee.

1 billion becquerels a day is 27 millicuries per day, about 2 or 3 PET scans worth.

If one person got it all, every day, would probalbly kill him within a year or two.
 
bobdroege7 said:
I dropped a billion atoms of arsenic in your coffee, are you going to drink it?

If not, I'm not going to waste coffee.

1 billion becquerels a day is 27 millicuries per day, about 2 or 3 PET scans worth.

If one person got it all, every day, would probalbly kill him within a year or two.
Click to expand...

As Seismosaurus explains, a Bequerel is a single disintegration per second, and Bikerdruid and planet.org added "per day" to that, which is nonsense. A curie is a commensurate unit, equivalent to the amount of radiation released per second by a gram of common radium, which is about 37,000,000,000 Bq. If the release is one gigaBq right now, that's 27 millicuries right now. These units are used to express an amount of radiation; the Sedan atomic test in Nevada released 880,000 curies (33 petaBq) of radiation into the atmosphere. Chernobyl is said to have released between 50 million and 9 billion curies altogether (it depends on who you ask; see http://pulse.pharmacy.arizona.edu/math/chernobyl1.html , a very good resource for this question). If Fukushima could be stated to have released a billion Bq, then that is obviously not much of a statement; even releasing 1 billion Bq new every day is not very much.
 
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shadron said:
As Seismosaurus explains, a Bequerel is a single disintegration per second,
Click to expand...

Hence my billion atoms of Arsenic analogy

and Bikerdruid and planet.org added "per day" to that, which is nonsense. A curie is a commensurate unit, equivalent to the amount of radiation released per second by a gram of common radium, which is about 37,000,000,000 Bq. If the release is one gigaBq right now, that's 27 millicuries right now. These units are used to express an amount of radiation; the Sedan atomic test in Nevada released 880,000 curies (33 petaBq) of radiation into the atmosphere. Chernobyl is said to have released between 50 million and 9 billion curies altogether (it depends on who you ask; see http://pulse.pharmacy.arizona.edu/math/chernobyl1.html , a very good resource for this question). If Fukushima could be stated to have released a billion Bq, then that is obviously not much of a statement; even releasing 1 billion Bq new every day is not very much.
Click to expand...



The per second per day doesn't make it nonsense, as the curie and the becquerel both refer to an amount of a radioactive substance, as you have pointed out. If you know the isotope, you can convert curies or becquerels to grams as you have pointed out. And if you know the isotope and the path of ingestion/exposure you can calculate the health effects.

Hence my PET scan analogy, because I know the total dose from a PET scan and the approxiamate likely chronic dose required to cause death, from the cobalt table leg incident in Mexico. Because it is not enough radiation to cause any immediate effects, but over time if one person got the whole dose, then it might be bad for that one person.

But I don't think it is good data, and for sure it is made to sound extreme.
 
What could be true is fact, that amount of radioactive isotope I137 indeed could raise that much. But that's only because this element does not naturally occur AT ALL. All we can detect is human made, as result of accidents and over 2000 nuclear tests.
I know for sure that here in Czech Republic I137 in air raised about 100 times after Fukushima. See this plot (sorry, the page is in Czech) :

http://www.suro.cz/cz/rms/ovzdusi/tyden

As for radiation alone, this is still NOTHING. It's basically unmeasurable with anything but very specialized instruments. It's much less then what you get during airplane flight, not even comparing it medical X-rays.
But .. I137 is not just about radiation dose. Problem is it can cumulate in thyoric gland, and can cause its cancer. Yes, it is especially more problem for children, as the gland is more active in childhood and cancer is more probable to occur. And yes, there was high amount of such cases in Chernobyl. On the other hand this kind of cancer has relatively high rate of successful treatment, and the doses in Ukraine are nothing like what was measured in US after Fukushima. Still even in Ukraine only about 5000 (IIRC) cases of this kind of cancer are blamed on Chernobyl. Since Chernobyl.
So 18.000 in US in not even a year .. now that would be something never seen before.

That site is full of nonsense though .. so I would not panic .. same thing as the video above .. someone just wants people scared .. or sell some Geiger counters ..
 
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babycondor said:
MEDICAL JOURNAL ARTICLE: 14,000 U.S. DEATHS TIED TO FUKUSHIMA REACTOR DISASTER FALLOUT

http://www.radiation.org/press/pressrelease111219FukushimaReactorFallout.html

Can anyone determine what is wrong with this study? Something doesn't smell right to me. You know what they say about lies, damn lies and statistics.
Click to expand...

It's hard to determine what is wrong with a study when all we have is a press release. The fact that it's being published by an almost unknown publication isn't a good sign.
 
Kestrel,

Sorry...from the linked article above, here's the link to the actual study pdf:

http://www.radiation.org/reading/pubs/HS42_1F.pdf

Abstract: "The multiple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima plants beginning on
March 11, 2011, are releasing large amounts of airborne radioactivity that has
spread throughout Japan and to other nations; thus, studies of contamination
and health hazards are merited. In the United States, Fukushima fallout
arrived just six days after the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns. Some
samples of radioactivity in precipitation, air, water, and milk, taken by the
U.S. government, showed levels hundreds of times above normal; however,
the small number of samples prohibits any credible analysis of temporal
trends and spatial comparisons. U.S. health officials report weekly deaths by
age in 122 cities, about 25 to 35 percent of the national total. Deaths rose
4.46 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese
fallout, compared with a 2.34 percent increase in the prior 14 weeks. The
number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80 percent, compared
with a previous 8.37 percent decrease. Projecting these figures for the entire
United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of
the expected. These preliminary data need to be followed up, especially in the
light of similar preliminary U.S. mortality findings for the four months after
Chernobyl fallout arrived in 1986, which approximated final figures."
 
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babycondor said:
MEDICAL JOURNAL ARTICLE: 14,000 U.S. DEATHS TIED TO FUKUSHIMA REACTOR DISASTER FALLOUT

http://www.radiation.org/press/pressrelease111219FukushimaReactorFallout.html

Can anyone determine what is wrong with this study? Something doesn't smell right to me. You know what they say about lies, damn lies and statistics.
Click to expand...

Correlation does not equal causation. That "study" is reporting on total deaths (from all causes) in some U.S. cities during the 14 weeks after the Fukushima incident as compared to the same period of time a year previous, and extrapolating those cities' data to the whole U.S. population. In other words, it's bollocks. There's no reason to assume that any of those deaths are caused by radiation from Fukushima.
 
babycondor said:
Kestrel,

Sorry...from the linked article above, here's the link to the actual study pdf:

http://www.radiation.org/reading/pubs/HS42_1F.pdf
Click to expand...

Thanks.

My impression after a quick read is that the claimed effect is within the noise level of the source data. A lot of things can cause the raw number of deaths in a city to go up or down. And the deaths didn't seem to be correlated to the radiation levels.

There could however be a Fukushima effect. The radiation levels were insignificant, but stress from worrying about radiation could have resulted in some excess deaths.
 
bikerdruid said:
is nuclear power safe?

not bloody likely.....
Fukushima Radiation sickness spreading to Tokyo
http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/fukushima-radiation-sickness-spreading-to-tokyo.html

At least one billion becquerels a day of radiation continue to leak from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant after the March earthquake and tsunami.
Experts say that the total amount of radiation leaked will exceed amounts released from Chernobyl, making Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Click to expand...

1st, "nuclearfreeplanet.org" is about as biased a source as you could get. They don't have a bloody clue what a becquerel is and it shows.

2nd, In addition to the skeptical smackdown delivered by above others, I should mention, as I have before, that the amount of naturally occurring radioactive materials in an adult human body is 8,000 to 10,000 becquerels. It takes 100,000 people to equal 1 billion becquerels. This means that the radiation being brought into Tokyo through Haneda and Narita International airports is more than three times the amount claimed by your bogus nuclearfreeplanet story.

Epic Fail BD. Your argument crashed and exploded on take off.
 
bikerdruid said:
is nuclear power safe?

not bloody likely.....
Fukushima Radiation sickness spreading to Tokyo
http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/fukushima-radiation-sickness-spreading-to-tokyo.html

At least one billion becquerels a day of radiation continue to leak from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant after the March earthquake and tsunami.
Experts say that the total amount of radiation leaked will exceed amounts released from Chernobyl, making Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Click to expand...

A site named "nuclearfreeplanet" just has to be fair and balanced on the issue ! :rolleyes:
 
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