Japan earthquake + tsunami + nuclear problems

Would you perhaps like to provide some science in a science forum instead of nonsense and broken links?
All you are doing is more unsupported fear mongering about something you clearly do not understand.

People live their lives here

[FONT=Times New Roman,Times][SIZE=+2]High Background Radiation Areas of Ramsar, Iran[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman,Times][SIZE=+1]S. M. Javad Mortazavi (EFN)[/SIZE][/FONT]


[FONT=Times New Roman,Times]Biology Division, Kyoto University of Education, Kyoto 612-8522, Japan
Member of the [/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times]Scientific Committee of EFN[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times]([/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times]www.ecolo.org[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times])[/FONT]


[FONT=Times New Roman,Times][SIZE=+2]H[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times]umans, animals and plants have been exposed to natural radiation since the creation of life. Interestingly, life evolved in a radiation field that was much more intense than today. The annual effective radiation dose from natural and man-made sources for the world's population is about 3 mSv, which includes exposure to alpha radiation from radon and its progeny nuclides. Nearly 80% of this dose (2.4 mSv) comes from natural background radiation, although levels of natural radiation can vary greatly. Ramsar, a northern coastal city in Iran, has areas with some of the highest levels of natural radiation measured to date. [/FONT]The effective dose equivalents in very high background radiation areas (VHBRAs) of Ramsar in particular in Talesh Mahalleh, are a few times higher than the ICRP-recommended radiation dose limits for radiation workers[FONT=Times New Roman,Times].[/FONT]
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http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/ramsar-natural-radioactivity/ramsar.html

the outcome


[FONT=Times New Roman,Times][SIZE=+2]T[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times]he preliminary results of cytogenetical, immunological and hematological studies on the residents of high background radiation areas of Ramsar have been previously reported (Mortazavi et al. 2001, Ghiassi-Nejad et al. 2002 and Mortazavi et al. in press), suggesting that exposure to high levels of natural background radiation can induce radioadaptive response in human cells.[/FONT] Lymphocytes of Ramsar residents when subjected to 1.5 Gy of gamma rays showed fewer induced chromosome aberrations compared to residents in a nearby control area whose lymphocytes were subjected to the same radiation dose[FONT=Times New Roman,Times]. Despite the fact that in in vitro experiments lymphocytes of some individuals show a synergistic effect after pretreatment with a low dose(Mortazavi et al. 2000), none of the residents of high background radiation areas showed such a response.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman,Times][SIZE=+2]B[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times]ased on results obtained in studies on high background radiation areas of Ramsar, high levels of natural radiation may have some bio-positive effects such as enhancing radiation-resistance. [/FONT]
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don't fly in planes ( high radiation )
Don't ride a donkey ( high risk )

for heaven's sake don't drive...the risks are horrible ....almost like going for treatment in a hospital :garfield:

You are a victim of your own unfounded fears and all you do is delay closing coal plants which actually do kill people every day, day after day, year after year.

Look at real risks.

If you claim to be pro-nuke then understand the actual risk of radiation instead of fear mongering.

Yes Tepco could have done things differently and as with any plane crash -lessons will be drawn from this once in a thousand years situation to improve reactor design and safety.
These were 50 year old designs and performed admirably given the over stress.

We weren't there.
 
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The link was fine when I posted it.

Here's the Google cache

The day after the quake, authorities issued an evacuation order in areas within 10 kilometers from the nuclear power station. In response, 209 patients at the hospital and care home who were able to walk on their own, as well as many of workers, fled the area. However, bed-ridden and seriously handicapped patients were unable to do so.
. . .
Although the direct distance between the health office and shelter was about 70 kilometers, the bus was forced to take a detour to avoid coming close to the crippled nuclear power station, and spent nearly six hours before arriving at the shelter.

School principal Masaaki Tashiro was shocked to see the patients in the vehicle -- two of them were already dead and others had had incontinence, with their intravenous lines disconnected. The school has no medical equipment and the identities of the patients were not known.

School officials and medical staff laid tatami mats and sheets on the floor of the school gymnasium and spent two hours to transport the patients to the gymnasium using tables as stretchers. Nurses dispatched to the school tore curtains and used them as diapers.

Despite their strenuous efforts, two of the evacuees died in the early hours of March 15. The principal even appealed for assistance on a local FM radio station, saying, "Help us!"
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So yes, there have probably already been deaths due to the meltdown because the meltdown is what made the evacuation necessary.
 
Something else I thought of:

If this kind of earthquake happens once in 1000 years, and a nuclear power plant is operational for 50 years (perhaps they would have kept using it even longer), that means that there's a 1 in 20 chance of it happening during the lifetime of the plant.

1 in 20 is not rare enough to dismiss. They were specifically warned about tsunamis too and dismissed the warnings. Not to mention the falsified inspection records.

Anyway, most of the damage here is economic damage, not deaths. The economic effects of this are huge. The farmers, the tourist industry, all the people and businesses that had to evacuate.

Being pro-nuke doesn't mean condoning irresponsible behavior. In fact we should be mad at Tepco for hurting public trust in nuclear power.
 
Puppycow said:
The link was fine when I posted it.

Here's the Google cache



So yes, there have probably already been deaths due to the meltdown because the meltdown is what made the evacuation necessary.
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That's a stretch. The evacuation was bungled, that's what killed those people. The reason for the evacuation is irrelevant.

The evacuation also might have been bungled because resources were stretched thin because of the quake and tsunami.

Unless you can show me that the evacuees were killed by radiation sickness, I would not attribute them to the reactor disaster, but to the quake+tsunami.
 
Puppycow said:
BTW, even TEPCO themselves have admitted that their safety precautions weren't adequate.
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Exactly what sources are you using to make this claim?

I suspect what you are referring to a case of falling on one's sword, even when one isn't really at fault.

And a case of Japanese politicians looking for a scapegoat when they themselves may be at fault.

If the politicians and public wanted the plants designed for a 9.0 quake and the tsunami that would result, perhaps they should have said so. And been willing to pay the price for that kind of safety. And there would have been a price. It might have been called "folly". As in the example below:

http://articles.philly.com/2011-05-15/news/29545974_1_tsunami-seawall-floodgate

A visionary mayor saved town in Japan

FUDAI, Japan - In the rubble of Japan's northeast coast, one small village stands as tall as ever after the tsunami. No homes were swept away. In fact, they barely got wet.

Fudai is the village that survived - thanks to a huge wall that once was deemed a mayor's expensive folly and that now has been vindicated as the community's salvation.

The 3,000 people living between mountains behind a cove owe their lives to a late leader who saw the devastation of an earlier tsunami and made it the priority of his four-decade tenure to defend his people from the next one.
His tsunami wall was once considered a costly folly.

His 51-foot-high floodgate, between mountainsides, took a dozen years to build and more than $30 million in today's dollars.

"It cost a lot of money. But without it, Fudai would have disappeared," said seaweed fisherman Satoshi Kaneko, 55, whose business is ruined but who is happy to have his family and home intact.
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Puppycow said:
Here's another thing: How come there was such a disaster at Fukushima but not at Onagawa, which is operated by a different company?
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Because, Onagawa was lucky. Thanks in part to the terrain, it was built 15 meters above sealevel. In fact, the design wave at Onagawa was (http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110408b3.html ) only 9.1 meters and the wave they experienced was 13 meters high ("wave marks were found at the edges of the plant, indicating the tsunami fell just short of reaching the main buildings"). As I say, lucky.

Whereas at Fukushima, the design tsunami was 5.7 meters high. The plant owners didn't set this requirement ... government regulators did. So who is to blame when a tsunami THREE TIMES HIGHER hit the plant? Did you and government regulators think nothing was going to break? :rolleyes:
 
Puppycow said:
They were specifically warned about tsunamis too and dismissed the warnings.
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This is outright false, as my previous post proves. They did design for tsunami ... for a tsunami height determined by government regulators. They did not dismiss the threat at all. Seems to me you should be pointing your finger at the government which allowed more than 15,000 to die ALREADY from that threat?
 
elgarak said:
That's a stretch. The evacuation was bungled, that's what killed those people. The reason for the evacuation is irrelevant.

The evacuation also might have been bungled because resources were stretched thin because of the quake and tsunami.

Unless you can show me that the evacuees were killed by radiation sickness, I would not attribute them to the reactor disaster, but to the quake+tsunami.
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A claim was made that the number of deaths due to the reactor disaster was zero. My claim is only that the number of deaths is unknown. The evacuation was clearly due to the reactor disaster. So, I disagree.
 
BeAChooser said:
For a 8.0 earthquake? YES.
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I'll repeat what I posted above, which has not yet been answered:

If this kind of earthquake happens once in 1000 years, and a nuclear power plant is operational for 50 years (perhaps they would have kept using it even longer), that means that there's a 1 in 20 chance of it happening during the lifetime of the plant.

1 in 20 is not rare enough to dismiss.
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Puppycow said:
I'll repeat what I posted above, which has not yet been answered:

If this kind of earthquake happens once in 1000 years, and a nuclear power plant is operational for 50 years (perhaps they would have kept using it even longer), that means that there's a 1 in 20 chance of it happening during the lifetime of the plant.

1 in 20 is not rare enough to dismiss.
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And I'll repeat what I posted ... which does indeed address your claim. NOONE dismissed the threat of tsunami here. They designed to a threat supplied by the government regulators. If that threat was wrong (i.e., not for a once in 1000-1200 year earthquake), that is not the fault of the nuclear power company. That is the fault of the government funded scientists who came up with the threat the nuclear power company designed for. Had they provided a once in 1200 year threat, they'd have designed for that and I'm sure it would have performed as designed. So the fault doesn't lie with the nuclear power company. It lies with the government. And the design they came up with clearly would have survived the design threat with flying colors. So again, you are unfair to blame the company for this.
 
macdoc said:
Would you perhaps like to provide some science in a science forum instead of nonsense and broken links?
All you are doing is more unsupported fear mongering about something you clearly do not understand.

People live their lives here

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/ramsar-natural-radioactivity/ramsar.html
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Of interest as well may be this:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/health_impacts.html

It is information about public health effects of the Chernobyl Accident. About halfway down is a section entitled "Lessons of Chernobyl - with particular reference to thyroid cancer" by Zbignew Jaworowski, Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection - CLOR, Warsaw, Poland. In it he strongly insists that the linear no-threshold assumption, the assumption that very low levels of radiation are linearly as harmful as the larger doses that we have lots of data on, does not hold, and that the Chernobyl cases prove it.
 
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/30/germany-nuclear-idUSLDE74T00A20110530

BERLIN, May 30 (Reuters) - Germany will shut all its nuclear reactors by 2022, parties in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government agreed on Monday, in a reaction to Japan's Fukushima disaster that marks a drastic policy reversal.

"It's definite: the latest end for the last three nuclear power plants is 2022," Roettgen said after the meeting. "There will be no clause for revision."
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