I hate to write two Fukushima posts in a row, but shit…
The radiation dose received by one-year-old infants outside of a 30-kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant since Saturday’s explosion at the plant may have exceeded 100 millisieverts, a computer simulation conducted by the government showed Wednesday.
[…] Haruki Madarame, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, told reporters, ”The figure represents the level that one-year-old infants would have received and accumulated in their thyroids by midnight Wednesday since the explosion.”
[…] People exposed to a radiation dose of 100 millisieverts are required to take potassium iodide, Madarame said. An annual radiation dose of 100 millisieverts is believed to be associated with an increased risk of cancer.
Go ahead, dismiss me as alarmist. That’s only the dosage infants may have received, and it’s just a computer simulation. And that’s only if the babies had spent time outdoors each day, instead of being locked up inside their house with the doors and windows sealed shut.
But if I were a Japanese parent within a couple hundred kilometers of Fukushima I’d be pretty damned angry at this news, and heartbroken at the fact that by trusting the government’s previous assurances, I’d potentially exposed my child to dangerous doses of radiation.
I for one welcome our new Mutant Super Teens and their inevitable manga and anime spinoffs.
In a related story, the mutated sea bass are coming along nicely.
Goldy,
Your not writing about gossip, sex or drugs. So I think your being an alarmist.
These are interesting and informative posts. A lot of us empathize with, or have friends and family in, Japan. It’s a big story with global implications—post away, and throw in an update or two even long after the news cycle has moved past it.
BUT…what we don’t need is more people on the West Coast going “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God I think I feel radioactive already!” and encouraging their neighbors to clean the co-op out of organic seaweed penis and Tums.
Reporting information isn’t my job, so I won’t assume to know what stories are important to most people, but I can tell you after reading a dozen or so “what you need to know to protect yourself” headlines, it all starts to read like some idiot screaming “OMG that bleeding guy almost got his blood ON ME!” instead of getting the bleeding guy to the damn hospital*.
*Not a very good allegory, I was gonna go with “instead of holding hair back, make sure friend isn’t vomiting on you”, but that seemed even more lame.
I’m sure that the parents of that hypothetical one year old infant, if they’re still alive, have much much more to worry about. Like finding shelter, food, warmth, clothing and burying their dead.
What’s really annoying is the amnesia from the nuclear industry cheerleaders. They’ll read this news, recalibrate their bullshit, and pretend all their false assurances of yesterday never happened. And last week might as well have been a million years ago.
And anybody who stands up to them will still be called “crazy”, “luddite”, “hippie”… as they pat themselves on the back for being so “rational”.
They’re lucky its legal to lie, no matter who gets hurt.
@5: Clearly the solution is to not build plants where you might get a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami.
I mean, if that’s the kind of extreme conditions it takes to break one, they’re pretty well built, right? And unlike Japan we have the option of building them in areas that aren’t prone to earthquakes.
@3 I’m waiting for the inevitable anyone who gets cancer in the next 20 years blaming it on this.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-…
TLDR
Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)
Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro – world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)
I recognize the dangers of nuclear power, but to anyone that hold’s this disaster as a shining example why why it should never be an option: What are Japan’s energy alternatives?
You’re not being alarmist here, Goldy. For those of you who might be interested in the issue of thyroid cancer from nuclear test site fallout here in the US, check out the National Cancer Institute’s risk calculator: https://ntsi131.nci.nih.gov/
Your risks are highest if you were born in the late ’50s or early ’60s near a high-fallout area and drank a lot of milk from the local cows.
Note that NCI scientists are not alarmist, luddite hippies by any stretch of the imagination.
@6
They put their diesel generators in the basement, to help ensure that *any* flooding would knock out the electric backup. Which was *vital* to preventing meltdown. And their portable backup power used connectors that didn’t fit. Which means any kind of flooding would have had the same effect, not just a 9.0 earthquake.
And this level of incompetence is par for the course, even in Japan, one of the most technologically advanced nations, probably the most advanced.
I actually suspect nuclear power could be made safe, but there no way it could be safe if you listen to arrogant, incompetent fucknuts like prompt @7 and @8. That’s precisely the kind of hubris that makes nuclear power so deadly and unreliable.
If we took a step back and redefined “good engineering”, we might get somewhere. Also, jail time for the engineers who did this to us. Jail time.
@11 Of course this went as bad as it could have possibly gone. That doesn’t mean that nuclear power is unsafe, which is what is being spread by a lot of people lately. I’m not necessarily talking about you or Goldy here.
@12, prompt, that’s hilarious to see you using the past tense here: “went as bad as it could have possibly gone.” As if you still think we’ve seen the worst. As if you think it’s over. It ain’t over, buddy. What are you going to say tomorrow if (when?) it does get worse? Oops? I’m sorry? Will you ever admit how wrong you’ve been?
Here’s you 8 days ago doubling down on your belief that “there will be no lifethreatening release of radiation to the public.” Insisting that it couldn’t possibly go critical again. Remember just a couple days later they warned that it could go critical again? Oopsie, again…
Do you even care how wrong you’ve been? You ought to review what you said each day with what was really doing on. Clearly some powerful prejudice is clouding your ability to think.
@8 actually, unbeknownst to many people, coal frequently is mildly radioactive.
Depending on the source location.
Nuclear Power and safety rarely go together. And they were even caught covering up fire-risk “problems” at the reactors north of Tokyo before, had to fire a government minister because of it.
Nothing goes away as fast as transparency when the profits and PR expenses of The Industry are threatened.
Leadership knows what they’ve known ever since the Atomic Veterans: they’re exposed together, but they die, one by one, alone.