Credit: http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.5954
Fukushima_San_Francisco.gif
  • http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.5954

As a partner to an earlier paper by University of Washington scientists (detecting radioactive Iodine from Fukushima in the Seattle air), now comes a paper by Berkley physicists finding radioactive isotopes from Fukushima in San Francisco rainwater.

(For an update on the levels of radioactivity being detected here in Seattle, you can visit a UW APL website.)

A few thoughts.

1. The peak levels of I-131 detected in Seattle air (about 4.5 mBq per m^3 or 4.5 kBq per liter of air) were much higher than the levels (per liter) in the SF rainwater.

2. It’s interesting how persistent the levels were in the San Francisco rainwater—lacking the clear peak and drop-off of the Seattle data.

3. I’m not sure what to make of the potential health effects of these amounts of I-131. The body’s response to I-131 is complex. The risk posed by I-131 depends on a multitude of factors; age at the time of exposure, nutritional status, the kind of exposure (by air, water, food and even specific kinds of foods). Finally the effects are variable, from increased thyroid and blood cancer risks, stunning of the Thyroid (causing a poor response to the treatment for Thyroid cancer), to destruction of the Thyroid.

Most of the epidemiological data is based upon exposures from Chernobyl and above-ground nuclear bomb testing. The amounts of I-131 detected in SF and Seattle are below those shown to cause increased risk of cancer later in life—by about about a hundred fold. But, those studies were small, and only powered to detect large increases in relative risk.

In plain English, there is no proven risk from these doses of I-131. That’s not to say there is no risk, just that the risk is too small to be detected in these prior studies. Given the sheer numbers of people being exposed right now—Tokyo is a city of 36 million people; the Central Valley of California feeds an astonishing number of people—I think it’s reasonable to assume that even small risks will cause some real increased cancers in the world.

4. I wish there was a more systematic, more open and public, monitoring of the I-131 levels around the world—particularly in Iodine rich foods: Seaweed, eggs, milk and other dairy products. The USDA—defining the term ‘captive regulatory agency’—is in charge of protecting the safety of our food supply.

What distressing about this pair of studies is not the levels of I-131 detected. What’s distressing is the ad-hoc nature of the data—the lack of systematic monitoring. The problem with Fukushima is—in my mind—the same as the problem of Salmonella: We tend to ignore problems, particularly problems caused by huge, powerful industries. Just because we aren’t collecting—or possibly divulging—distressing data, doesn’t make the underlying problem go away.

Jonathan Golob is an actual doctor.

25 replies on “Fukushima in the San Francisco Rain”

  1. I think this is a load of alarmist bullshit. I expected the Stranger to be one of the voices of reason among all lot of the media screaming, “Our skin’s gonna melt oooooff!”

    You said it yourself, these levels are FAR lower than anything known to cause real risk. You also fail to mention that the I-131 levels peaked over 2 weeks ago and have fallen consistently since then. Stop fucking scaring everybody and get your head on right.

  2. @1 You’d have to be pretty silly to be scared by Jonathan’s post. His point is that we can’t make a really empirical calculation of risk because there isn’t a deep statistical database and the industry isn’t interested in letting governments accumulate one.

    OTOH, lack of understanding is partly why we have so much fear of radiation but will blithely accept tens of thousands of deaths every year from other industries.

    Pick one: be a Japanese living next to Fukushima or an Indian living next to the Union Carbide plant in Bophal.

  3. @1

    Who, exactly, is fucking scared? Anybody you know?

    An adult discussion of the lack of systematic monitoring isn’t going to start a human stampede. Really. Calm the fuck down and let the grown ups talk.

  6. I think we have finally reached the point of absurdity with the ‘radioactivity is our friend’ bullshit.

    Seriously, we only know what we have been led to believe. Modern science (aka science that has ‘sponsors’) is full of ethics problems and frankly it is really difficult to figure out what facts are facts and what facts are lies.

    But to compare radioactivity to the food industry’s Salmonella problems is really pushing things. Most of us know what we’re dealing with when we get Salmonella.

    But as Jonathan admits, he’s not sure about the health implications of the amounts I-131. But I’m quite confident that unlike some Salmonella contamination, there isn’t going to be a voluntary recall of these isotopes.

    Nope, we’re all involuntary lab rats right know. I hope that Jonathan finds this interesting.

    I bet he defends the Tuskegee Syphilis study, too. Terribly interesting results, no?

  7. @Jonathon: Given the somewhat limited information – and our limited understanding of it – what practical steps (if any) would you advise? I live in the Bay Area. My two year old drinks a lot of milk and eats a lot of dairy products from the Central Valley; she also snacks regularly on seaweed imported from Japan. If you were a parent in my position, would you alter this behavior in any way? Thanks.

  11. @6 Need to work on the old reading comprehension there my friend…

    Jonathan wasn’t comparing the danger Salmonella outbreaks with that of prolonged, yet low-level, exposure to radioactive isotopes. He was making a comparison to illustrate the problem of ‘regulatory capture” – when a regulatory body becomes reliant on/subservient to the field it is ostensibly supposed to monitor.

    More astonishingly, you’ve apparently come to the conclusion that Jonathan condoned widespread radioactive contamination in the name of science. I’m not even sure where to begin on that one, but I might suggest an adult learning center.

  12. Whose afraid? Certainly not the EPA who is hastily rewriting the definition of “radioactive contamination” in order to make sure that whatever fallout reaches the United States falls under the new limits of “safe” radiation.

    The EPA maintains a set of so-called “Protective Action Guides”. These are being quickly revised to radically increase the allowable levels of iodine-131 to anywhere from 3,000 to 100,000 times the currently allowable levels.

  13. This blogger is at the far end of speculating on what disasters might be fall us, but its a welcome antidote to all the words of reassurance:

    Fukushima Is Horrifically Worse Than You Have Been Told

    Fukushima is a kind of global “kill shot,” make no mistake about that. The situation is dire in the extreme. The global nuclear industry is trying to kill you, and Fukushima is their latest broadside, aimed at the whole planet. The entire nuclear complex, from uranium mining, to nuclear weapons (including depleted uranium munitions), to nuclear electrical generating plants, to research reactors, to so-called “nuclear medicine,” has to go.

    […]

    Believe me, the situation is worse than bad, it’s worse than dire, it is history-altering horrific. A lot of people are going to die from what is happening in Fukushima, into the millions for sure, that is not in question. The only question is how many millions. If we are “lucky,” only one or two million persons will die. And if we are unlucky, well, things could get really grim, unimaginably hellish, on this planet we call home.

    http://eventhorizonchronicle.blogspot.co…

    Then there’s this referenced link of a video debate from “Democracy Now!”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAfhmX02y…

    See what Helen Caldicott has to say about getting a single nuclear particle lodged inside your body.

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

  14. Hanging by your Fingernails – The Fukushima Meltdown
    Michio Kaku

    The situation at Fukushima is relatively stable now… in the same way that you are stable if you hang by your fingernails off a cliff, and your fingernails begin to break one by one.

    http://bigthink.com/ideas/37705

    Michio Kaku (加來 道雄 Kaku Michio?, born January 24, 1947) is a Japanese American physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a “communicator” and “popularizer” of science.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku

  15. Thanks for the update, Dr. Golob. I don’t really have anything to add, I just wanted to shift the reply median away from “batshit crazy histrionics.”

  16. Fukushima Radiation Literally Off The Charts

    According to NHK, “a radiation monitor at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says workers there are exposed to immeasurable levels of radiation.” Unfortunately for the workers present, the monitor is not being metaphoric: “The monitor told NHK that no one can enter the plant’s No. 1 through 3 reactor buildings because radiation levels are so high that monitoring devices have been rendered useless. He said even levels outside the buildings exceed 100 millisieverts in some places.” Perhaps it is time for the discredited Japanese government to form a committee to investigate whether TEPCO, with or without the complicity of the NHK, was counterfeiting radiation reading over the past month…

    http://www.zerohedge.com/article/fukushi…

  19. Sheesh. If you’re worried about I-131 at these levels, you don’t have enough to worry about.

    Firstly, if you’re a grown adult, thyroid cancer, should you get it, will likely have been caused by something that happened to you 20 years ago. You’re already slowly dying of 30 other things. Get a grip. Iodine tablets will kill more adults than they will help, through sensitivity reactions, etc. Thyroid cancer is easily treated, with a low mortality. Go to the doctor once in awhile. (… and don’t freak out if they find a nodule. Your chance of having one, in percentages, is the same as your age, and they’re largely benign, although you’ll be paying for a biopsy to make sure.)

    If you have kids, again at these low levels there’s more to worry about from iodine tablets than the contamination. Buy bottled water for them if it will make you feel better, but make sure it’s been tested for excessive levels of lead, arsenic, etc. Those are more of a worry. Also remember, I-131 has a short half-life. Anything 8 days old has half the level it started with, 24 days old brings an 87% reduction and 80 days (10 half-lives) removes 99.9%. (Not to mention, anything produced a month ago didn’t have anything in it from Fukushima, because it hadn’t happened yet.)

    So, if contamination gets bad, you can use deep-well water, buy bottled water, bottle your own water and age it before use, buy canned milk, which has been in the supply chain a while already, or age and rotate your own stock if it hasn’t or you can’t figure out the production dates from the stamp on the can.

    But things aren’t bad. They’re barely noticeable here. The alarming thing is that they are noticeable, meaning the Fukushima disaster is a disaster. But not for us, at least not now and maybe never.

    Having been a little kid during open-air nuke bomb testing, I remember we had fall-out problems on Long Island which affected our milk. (There used to be dairy farms there before suburbia ate up all the farmland.) These were very serious levels. I’m not going to say that the results were trivial, because we really don’t know, and cancer seems to kill more of my generation than anything except heart disease, but we’re talking tens or hundreds of thousands of times more radioisotopes. So, get a grip. You’re way more likely to die from second-hand smoke, or getting hit by a drunk driver, or walking into traffic while texting.

  20. Dr. Golob,
    I have a kid who had Burkitt’s Lymphoma when he was 35 months old. So statistically rare here in these United States as to boggle the mind. No one knows “why.” Six weeks before he was diagnosed, we were swimming in the Columbia, downstream of Hanford. He had also been on a course of prophylactic antibiotics until he was 30 months old for a urinary tract condition that resolved, which could have intereferred with his immune system. Yes, I’ve given much thought to “why,’ as every childhood cancer parent does.

    So when you talk about the unknowns of exposure to I-131 and “no proven risk” I know that means “we haven’t asked that very specific question/don’t have a statistically valid way to ask the specific question” and so there’s no data. That is not the same thing as saying there’s no risk. Some will become ill because of this, and they will be told, “we just don’t know.”

    My son will live his entire life fighting the consequences of what happened to him, as will thousands more in Japan and many others all over the world. Very, very sad.

  21. It’s not as if this is the first time radiation has been dumped in to the atmosphere or the ocean. Literally hundreds of nuclear weapons were tested above ground and under water since 1945, and we’re still here. Not to say it was harmless by any means, but the point is Fukushima is not the end of the world. People claiming it is (Supremo) are just having a disaster porngasm.

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

    “A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/ National Cancer Institute study claims that nuclear fallout might have led to approximately 11,000 excess deaths, most caused by thyroid cancer linked to exposure to iodine-131.”

    For the sake of perspective, in 2010 traffic fatalities in the USA hit a record low: 32,788.

    And also, FWIW, “As of March 2009, the U.S. is the only nation that compensates nuclear test victims.”

  22. Golob – the UW scientists aren’t affiliated with APL (the Applied Physics Laboratory). You’ll find that they are at NPL, and most of their research is far from applied (these are neutrino physicists).

  24. Brooklyn reader you must live next too nuclear power plants too have that information! The people on the west coast away from nuclear power plants dont have those issues your talking about, so i would recommend moving away from nuclear power plants, and live a healthier life, or not your choice

  25. What’s distressing is that any attention is paid to I-131, which is pretty much gone after a couple months, and not to levels of Cs-137, which is pretty much gone after 300 years. Breathe in some I-131 and it’s soon over. Breathe in some Cs-137 … just the teensiest little speck of dust you can’t see without sunlight … and it’s with you for life, clocking out 1-meg photons, and for the lives of 10 generations praying over your grave.

    Assuming that the “low risks” don’t accumulate until there are no generations. There are enough “low risks” (including natural background, an ocean of man-made carcinogens business -needs-, etc.) to give 1 in 7 persons a cancer -now-. So, c’mon, let’s keep rolling the dice. And ignoring that there is no safe dose of radiation. Because all is sweetness and light and there’s nothing we can do about it anyway because we’re born in a world bathed in radiation. In fact the IAEA will soon announce that we should actually celebrate the risk. We should all stop thinking about it and getting back to production and consumption.

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