Makes you stop and wonder about the techs and others who have remained at these facilities in order to stop a catastrophe. I wonder if they have given up their lives to protect us all.
Odd that nobody has talked about these people and the sacrifices they may be making.

@1, I did in my initial post on this disaster.

And, indeed, they deserve our utmost respect.

Kyodo is reporting radioactive substances detected in Tokyo, and BBC that the wind is now blowing in that direction.

@1 Exposing your body to gamma radiation is bad. Do you know what's way worse? Exposing your body to radiation from the inside, by ingesting or inhaling alpha or beta emitters. The people working on site in proper environmental gear only have to worry about external exposure, and as long as they don't exceed the limit for radiation sickness/syndrome, this one-time event in their lives doesn't have guaranteed dire consequences. On the other hand, should significant quantities of fission products end up in the environment, a huge number of civilians could have very nasty effects. So, these men are taking a measured risk on themselves to prevent a much greater risk to their countrymen. You have to admire their dedication. Let's hope they have enough other people available to replace them as they get rotated off-site as their limits are reached.

As things get worse, those limits will become shorter and shorter.

I am now quite concerned about the state of spent fuel rod storage pools. If those go, it could produce more significant amounts of radiation release.

Mr. Author, Could you explain this reading to us laypersons? Has the reading in Tokyo increased to a level that would be normal background to someone living next to a granite quarry? Or is this a level that would start affecting at-risk species?

@1

Have you ever heard the stories of the chernobyl workers? It rarely ends well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_d…

That's a bit far for N-16 to blow, and a bit far for just gamma radiation. What was the likely carrier?

I wonder if they are able to do some of the work remotely? All of City Light's dam operations are done from Ballard, and I'm sure that's nothing unusual.

Granted, the situation on the ground there is chaotic and the infrastructure is in shambles, but if they could establish communication lines over a few kilometers they could at least lessen the amount of exposure for the system operators. But even so, there must be front line workers who have to be directly on the scene.

"100 milisieverts would be enough to cause infertility in exposed males; at 500 or more the lymphocytes in the blood will decrease.

From the Guardian UK, quoting an unnamed NHK expert.

Also, the fire at the #4 reactor has been extinguished.

Still trending down from the 40 of the last update. Just above 20-ish as of a couple minutes ago. Thanks for the great link, Dr. G.

@5 Since the spent fuel pools are located on top of the reactors at least two of them are now pretty much exposed. From the photos it looks like they are partially filled in by fallen roofs and other clutter from the explosions. Could the other stuff in the pools compromise the spent fuel or is it just a matter of keeping things cool by maintaining the water level?

Golob--so, 100 microsievert = 1 sievert? So this Geiger output would have to crank all the way to 10,000 counts per minute (cpm) to equal 1 sievert?

Curious as I was looking at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_p…

Their venting steam so it makes sense there would be a small rise. The Navy was detecting similar things off the coast before. Still more than a full 100,000 times less than the permanent injury level Golob mentions.

@7 Please don't compare this with Chernobyl. The facility in Chernobyl was a facility where the reaction of the fuel rods had a positive void coefficient of reactivity. This means that if left alone they continue to get hotter. 100% of the reactors in Japan have a negative void coefficient of reactivity. Also the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl was simply housed in a standard building make of wood and steel like you would see in Seattle's SoDo neighborhood. The reactors in Japan have several layers to contain even a complete failure.

The two situations are pretty damn close to apples and oranges.

The conversion to microsievert depends on the type of radiation and a geiger counter alone can't tell you the specific type of radiation present. A sievert is 1 million microsievert. As a reference I regularly work with equipment and material that reads out at over 100,000 cpm. I wear a dosimeter and a neutron detector to monitor my dosage. My annual limit is 100 mrem which is 1000 microsievert and I've never gone over.

This is nothing. I'm skeptical that it was even directly related to the release at the plant. There's currently an active sunspot and that's a much more likely cause.

Another good blog on this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/…

@17: where do you work where your annual limit is 100 mrem? The annual limit for total dose for radiation workers in the US is 5 rem as per 10 CFR 20.1201.

@ 13 and 5: The spent rods in storage are not stored in a fashion that allows them to generate significant heat, they should not need to be cooled. There may be some concern about losing some shielding around them (water can be used as a radiation shield) but that still won't release much in the way of radioactive particles. Fuel rods are all sealed so as not to release radioactive particles.

I am a former reactor operator and I and have to say this whole topic drives me absolutely bats. 10,000 - that's TEN THOUSAND - people just died in a horrific natural disaster and we are worried about the one part of it that didn't kill ANYONE and is almost certainly not going to? What the fucking fuck, guys. Grow some perspective.

Hey, it's time to start donating to Japan. Don't wait for a new version of We are the World (the last one was so horrific). Maybe it was the Beebs. There are numbers set up and you can text like you did (or should have for Haiti). Don't wait for a Celebrity marathon. Do it. You can do amounts as low as $10 on your cell phone bill. That's jack in the scope of things. Google donate to Japan, and make sure it's legit first as always.

Update, you can donate through iTunes, actually easier then finding my phone which is in the other room. Just go to the app store, click on the link then the amount then enter your password and done.

@19, paragraph 1: any organization is free to set a cap below the federal limit, as appropriate to the methods and materials being used. In a former life I used radiolabeled biomolecules as tracers in a university research setting in the dark ages when DNA sequencing and various other electrophoretic blotting procedures all required slapping a piece of X-ray film on your experimental materials to visualize your results. As I recall my annual limit was 40 millirem. I think I hit 7 one year. Some people were sloppy and got into the 30s.

@19 I work on particle accelerators and neutron sources at various DOE labs. The DOE limits are stricter than the national limits. Radiological workers are limited to 2000 mrem/year by the DOE and individual labs have even lower limits. The 100 mrem limit is for non rad workers in radiologically controlled areas.

I completely agree on your last point. It baffles me that the thousands of dead bodies washing up on the beaches is not the lead story.

@19's "what the fucking fuck" seconded!

Golob: I am sorry that you seem unaware of or just have not reported on stochastic effects (e.g., cancer) from various levels of radiation exposure.

I urge you to read the BEIR VII report (Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation) from the National Academies, paying special attention to Tables 12-6 and 12-7. At the risk of repeating myself (for the third time in as many days), here is the link to the table that projects cancer risk at various exposure levels: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_i…

1 mSv per year is not "harmless". At 1 mGy per year throughout life (equal to 1 mSv per year of gamma radiation), the excess lifetime cancer incidence risk is estimated to be about 6 per 1000 males and 10 per 1000 females (that's 1% for the ladies).

Stop trivializing exposures at the mSv level.

I think there are a lot of people laboring under the vague idea that exposure to this kind of radiation means 80% of future children will be born without heads, rather than that 4% of the population will die earlier than otherwise of cancer.

Not that I want any percent more cancer.

I got an email from my twin sister, who is serving in the Navy. She's in Yokosuka, Japan on the USS George Washington. Apparently they're limiting outdoor activities and being very cautious about Navy personnel being outdoors because of detected radiation-- although it's less than the average person is exposed to in a month. She signed up to go north for humanitarian aid, but now they may not go. I'm not panicking and I'm not too worried about my sister (she's a fantastic adult), but she says it's pretty grim over there (even in Yokosuka), whatever our news outlets are saying.

Could you please rescale the vertical axis to go from 0 to the lowest dangerous dosage, and label it as such? Laypeople have no clue what a Sievert is, and I'd wager a very small minority have any understanding of SI units or units in general. The increase in radiation in Tokyo so far is trivial, and so imho it is your journalistic responsibility to make it look trivial.

I'm sure there's no way that people will panic based on this kind of reading. After all, it would take about 28.5 years of continuous exposure at 40cpm on this counter to reach acutely damaging levels (assuming your body doesn't repair such damage, as it's designed to do)

Then again....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42083890/ns/…
"Panic swept Tokyo on Tuesday as radiation levels surged in the city, causing some to leave the capital and others to stock up on food and supplies." Surging levels, mind you.

Can we put to rest definitively the debate over a threshold in dose-incidence relationships? Until we can, I'd really like to see the "extra radiation analogous to X is no big deal" crowd moderate their dismissals.

Thanks for the really interesting plots and Geiger counter cpm to uSievert/hr conversion factor. If I have done my math correctly, 20 cpm (normal background for Tokyo) is equivalent to 1.8 mSievert/yr, which looks consistent with typical annual doses I have seen on other sites (for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert).

@32: That same wikipedia page says a one-time, short-term (one day) exposure of up to 0.25 Sievert has no effect. If you assume the delivery of the dose is spread evenly over 24 hours, the Geiger counter would have to read 10,000,000 counts per minute.

@26: BEIR VII relies on a "linear, no threshold" (LNT) interpolation to project effects at low dosages. This assumption is somewhat questionable since, for example, cancer rates in high altitude cities are not noticeably different than in sea-level cities even though the annual background radiation dose is different. See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collec…, or http://www.radscihealth.org/rsh/docs/fp8… for example.

Thanks for the really interesting plots and Geiger counter cpm to uSievert/hr conversion factor. If I have done my math correctly, 20 cpm (normal background for Tokyo) is equivalent to 1.8 mSievert/yr, which looks consistent with typical annual doses I have seen on other sites (for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert).

@32: That same wikipedia page says a one-time, short-term (one day) exposure of up to 0.25 Sievert has no effect. If you assume the delivery of the dose is spread evenly over 24 hours, the Geiger counter would have to read 10,000,000 counts per minute.

@26: BEIR VII relies on a "linear, no threshold" (LNT) interpolation to project effects at low dosages. This assumption is somewhat questionable since, for example, cancer rates in high altitude cities are not noticeably different than in sea-level cities even though the annual background radiation dose is different. See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collec…, or http://www.radscihealth.org/rsh/docs/fp8… for example.

@33-34, I am glad that puts your mind at ease but I am not talking about 40 cpm in Tokyo, which still will cause ionizing events that can be potentially unrepaired, misrepaired, etc. as happens with background! Also, cancer is not the only outcome of radiation exposure.

I'm talking thresholds in general. Even if you throw out LNT (which is fine with me) there are infinite number of regressions that we can use--and then apply best fit etc.
It's also nice that the studies you're throwing around (published in A journals right--with totally independent analysis) are promoting the equally questionable theory of radiation hormesis.

@33: Sorry, jrholm, but LNT is the best we have at the moment. The studies you tout of high-altitude populations are ecologic in nature, the least-convincing epidemiologic design possible. Well designed studies of low-dose, low dose-rate exposures (e.g., nuclear workers with individual monitoring information) also support LNT. This is why I pointed to the National Academies' report, not to some industry shill group like the NRC or the Health Physics Society.

@36: I would be interested in reviewing any references you could provide regarding nuke worker exposure. This one - https://www.cna.ca/english/pdf/studies/r… - seems to find no statistical significance in mortality between the nuke workers and general populace.

I'm also interested in why you would consider the US government's Nuclear Regulatory Commission a 'shill group'. The paper on the Health Physics Society web site was actually presented at the 8th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering.

@37, which is comprised mostly not of epidemiologists or medical physicists with some semblance of independence but people who make their money in the nuclear industry.

@36 That's the thing. I've seen plenty of attacks against linear-quadratic dose incidence response, even people calling it junk science, yet no one has given an alternative hypothesis.

@37: the key is not to compare nuclear workers to the general population (an inappropriate comparison group, since the former are much more highly educated and therefore healthy on average than the latter), but to compare high-dose to low-dose workers. For a good assessment of what an overview of such studies is telling us, look at the following paper and the references cited therein:
Walsh L Radiation protection in occupational and environmental settings. Occup Environ Med oem.2010.058909Published Online First: 10 February 2011

There was 600k spent rods storebd in the buildings, and in sooling pools out side! The Mox fuel reactor is the deadlest known, and will make Chernobyl look like a walk in the park! As far as numbers and illness's after Chernobyl's one reactor went into melt down, 1 million people have died! - This stuff circled the earth for 5 years!

This "MOX" fuel in the one reactor used in Japan - is way worst than what melted down in Chernobyl! - Look, get the facts at prison planet dot com. You will die listing to main stream media!

There was 600k spent rods storebd in the buildings, and in sooling pools out side! The Mox fuel reactor is the deadlest known, and will make Chernobyl look like a walk in the park! As far as numbers and illness's after Chernobyl's one reactor went into melt down, 1 million people have died! - This stuff circled the earth for 5 years!

This "MOX" fuel in the one reactor used in Japan - is way worst than what melted down in Chernobyl! - Look, get the facts at prison planet dot com. You will die listing to main stream media!

Wow bad spelling check on the last post!! lol

There was 600k spent rods stored in the buildings,7k blew up in the mox fuel reactor, and many in the cooling pools out side! The "Mox" fuel reactor is the deadliest known, and will make Chernobyl look like a walk in the park!

As far as numbers and illness's after Chernobyl's one reactor went into melt down, 1 million people have died! - This stuff circled the earth for 5 years! They're lying about how bad it is!

This plant was a nuke waste dump! They had no-where to ship it off to!

This "MOX" fuel (Plutonian) in the one of the reactor's that blew, was used here - this is way worst than what melted down in Chernobyl! - Look, get the facts at prison planet dot com. You will die listing to main stream media that is hiding this info from you!!

Listen to infowars dot com to stay ahead of the bull that the CIA owned and controlled main-stream meida wants you to hear! Go else-where! They are lieing, and there is so much proof to make you puke!!

Be aware that Plutonian is not detectable with a Geiger counter, or the many other isotopes that cause cancer. Speiale units can only detect it! They're only giving us the common radiation numbers. Its what comes with this ionizing radiation, in a gaseous form known as alpha particles that will kill you the fastest from the inside-out.

Still - If a Geiger counter reads high radiation, get the hell out because of the other stuff that comes with it!

Just go to prison planet dot com and learn for your-self's! At least they back up the info, and until they shut down the internet you better learn or you'll only have the CIA contrioled media! Like you'll you'll be sheeple!!

130 cpm is the Alert Level! -
http://www.radiationnetwork.com/

Don't panic!! Be Just ready, and protect yourself's! - Get your iodine level up. Eat sea-weed, and I love the ready made salads made with a rice wine vinaigrette as long as its fresh. Don't panic,, but keep updated, and build up your body with the things needed to prevent cancer.

The S510 Bill was to take all these supplements away from you! They want us dead while feeding the Pharma system with cash! What the heeLL is going on?

Look into what is still coming out from Chernobyl as far as numbers and illness's after their one reactor went into melt down! - This stuff circled the earth for 5 years! Only a million people died in the plume! - This "MOX" fuel in Japan is way worst than what melted down in Chernobyl!

Ingesting anything affected will eat you from the inside-out!

Be aware that Plutonian is not detectable with a Geiger counter, or the many other isotopes that cause cancer. They're only giving us the common radiation numbers. Its what comes with this ionizing radiation, in a gaseous form known as alpha particles. This will kill you the fastest from the inside-out. If a Geiger counter reads high radiation, get the hell out because of the other stuff that comes with it!

Geiger counters detect ionizing radiation, like beta particles and gamma rays, - the stuff that burns you on the surface like the sun, but there are certain models that can detect the alpha particles. The top Geiger detector sales sites that come up in a search right now are sold out with back orders that say up to 12 weeks

The plume is heading for Southern CA., and splits off to the Aleutian Islands that will see it first today. It will hit the West Coast by tomorrow. Without knowing what is going on because they shut down the EPA's real time monitoring web site, we can hope some people should have set up some monitoring sites on there own? We don't even know how bad this thing is?

The aircraft carrier took off from Japan, and someone that knows a Navy guy on a support ship to the carrier said the meters were pegged! ~ They had to wash the ships down, and hauled azz out of there..

You can only hope it burns into the ground and does not blow up the core, then we're all gonna get sick! The world has never seen anything like this before! Cancer is way up now, and study's that have been done that show the rates are the highest near the nuke plants here! A plant in Canada just dumped some radioactive water into a lake yesterday.

Make sure you eat foods high in iodine. Or take supplements. Just keeping your iodine level high in your thyroid, - will help if this gets really out of control. They used this stuff Spirulina after the disaster in Chernobyl. [url]http://www.gdr.org/beepollenspirulina.ht…] Keep your body topped off with the [url="http://english.hsuginseng.com/product/ProductsDetailView.aspx?CatId=109127229&ProductsID=109164047"]right supplements[/url]. I have this and it's a blue-green algae known to kick in your stem cells to fight off anything! You will feel a difference in stamina!

Sea-weed is great, and there is Kelp extract in drug stores. Potassium Iodide is what you use in an emergency, and is what Japan is handing out. A $14.00 pack went for $610 on eBay yesterday! If you can find it, good, just use it when there's a bad rise of the radiation or your close to an accident.

Keeping your Iodine level up in your thyroid is the best thing you can do for now, and not let the cancer start in your thyroid. Now that I learned more about this, it's something we should do anyway because there's way too many cancer cases out there, ( [url]http://www.radiation.org/[/url] ) and it comes from the food, that falls on it from the air. Plus we have the micro-waves from phones that are not healthy.

RadiationNetwork.com, home of the National Radiation Map, depicting environmental radiation levels across the USA, updated in real time every minute. This is the first web site where the average citizen (or anyone in the world) can see what radiation levels are anywhere in the USA at any time, as more members add to the network.

The EPA has shut off any Real-Time Monitoring on line!

Be aware that Plutonian is not detectable with a Geiger counter, or the many other isotopes that cause cancer. They're only giving us the common radiation numbers. Its what comes with this ionizing radiation, in a gaseous form known as alpha particles. This will kill you the fastest from the inside-out. If a Geiger counter reads high radiation, get the hell out because of the other stuff that comes with it!

Geiger counters detect ionizing radiation, like beta particles and gamma rays, - the stuff that burns you on the surface like the sun, but there are certain models that can detect the alpha particles. The top Geiger detector sales sites that come up in a search right now are sold out with back orders that say up to 12 weeks

The plume is heading for Southern CA., and splits off to the Aleutian Islands that will see it first today. It will hit the West Coast by tomorrow. Without knowing what is going on because they shut down the EPA's real time monitoring web site, we can hope some people should have set up some monitoring sites on there own? We don't even know how bad this thing is?

The aircraft carrier took off from Japan, and someone that knows a Navy guy on a support ship to the carrier said the meters were pegged! ~ They had to wash the ships down, and hauled azz out of there..

You can only hope it burns into the ground and does not blow up the core, then we're all gonna get sick! The world has never seen anything like this before! Cancer is way up now, and study's that have been done that show the rates are the highest near the nuke plants here! A plant in Canada just dumped some radioactive water into a lake yesterday.

Make sure you eat foods high in iodine. Or take supplements. Just keeping your iodine level high in your thyroid, - will help if this gets really out of control. They used this stuff Spirulina after the disaster in Chernobyl. [url]http://www.gdr.org/beepollenspirulina.ht…] Keep your body topped off with the [url="http://english.hsuginseng.com/product/ProductsDetailView.aspx?CatId=109127229&ProductsID=109164047"]right supplements[/url]. I have this and it's a blue-green algae known to kick in your stem cells to fight off anything! You will feel a difference in stamina!

Sea-weed is great, and there is Kelp extract in drug stores. Potassium Iodide is what you use in an emergency, and is what Japan is handing out. A $14.00 pack went for $610 on eBay yesterday! If you can find it, good, just use it when there's a bad rise of the radiation or your close to an accident.

Keeping your Iodine level up in your thyroid is the best thing you can do for now, and not let the cancer start in your thyroid. Now that I learned more about this, it's something we should do anyway because there's way too many cancer cases out there, ( [url]http://www.radiation.org/[/url] ) and it comes from the food, that falls on it from the air. Plus we have the micro-waves from phones that are not healthy.

RadiationNetwork.com, home of the National Radiation Map, depicting environmental radiation levels across the USA, updated in real time every minute. This is the first web site where the average citizen (or anyone in the world) can see what radiation levels are anywhere in the USA at any time, as more members add to the network.

The EPA has shut off any Real-Time Monitoring on line!

http://www.radiationnetwork.com/

Watch a Live Radiation Monitoring feed from Los Angeles CA..
Looks like this Geiger Counter only detects ionizing radiation isotopes, and does not include the Alpha Particles?

Alert Level Is = 130 CPM

CA Live Feed;

http://tinyurl.com/6jalsk4

Tokyo live:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/geiger-cou…
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/geiger-cou…

Tables;

http://unit-converter.org/en/equivalent_…

Explaination's;

http://www.wikiradiography.com/page/Safe…

http://tinyurl.com/6fdunxl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equi…

sorry for all th repeate posts. I got it now and it won't happen again!! - Yea - Right!

@40: Thanks for the reference; I'll review it in a while.

With regard to comparison of nuke workers with general populace, isn't that addressed in Table 2 of the report?

I found BEIR VII that was in a browser-readable form (you can also buy the PDF version). The Chapter 13 (Summary) contains Fig 13-1 found here: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record… . I note that the LNT line passes through 9 of the 10 confidence interval (CI) bars, and the quadratic fit passes through all 10. Since these are 95% CIs, the probably of getting 10 out of 10 is around 60%, while 9/10 is 30% (binomial probability distribution). I offer another alternative: a piece-wise linear curve that is 0 from 0 to 0.1 Sv and parallels the LNT line above 0.1 Sv (linear plus a threshold, L+T, see here: http://i55.tinypic.com/2dh5geg.jpg). This also passes through 10/10 CIs. The summary report states that the difference in fit is not statistically significant, and so adopts LNT. Perhaps the details of the goodness-of-fit is determined in part of Chapter 6; I haven't had a chance to dig into that yet. I also found it interesting that there is a paragraph on Hormesis (page 315), but describes it as being 'the subject of considerable debate'. (Note that L+T alternative I proposed does not assume hormesis.)

Thanks, again.

I'm concerned that none of your technically sophisticated readers has noticed what seems to be a basic math error in Jonathan Golob's initial post. He wrote: "A dose of 1 milliseivert per year is considered a 'safe' annual dose of radiation." (Incidentally, the correct spelling is sievert, not seivert, and while spelling is less important than math here, misspelling does indicate a lack of familiarity with the subject).

Earlier in the same para, he states that 100 counts per minute, on the Geiger counters generating the graphs above, is approximately equivalent to 1 microsievert per hour. Really! Then let's do a simple comparison.

There appear to be many places in the US where 50 counts per minute is normal. So that would be 0.5 microsieverts per hour. There are 8760 hours in a year. So, people in those areas are getting 4380 microsieverts or (rounding) 4.4 MILLIsieverts, per YEAR. Even if we look at people in areas where background radiation is low--say, 25 cpm--they are still getting 2.2 millisieverts per year.

Therefore, according to this blog, pretty much everyone in the world is exposed to more than the "safe" annual dose of radiation.

What does this tell me? I know very little about radiation. Therefore I must simply conclude that this blog is not a reliable source of information.