Nuclear Meltdown Watch

[23]

Been sitting here think about the fact that 'they' told us radiation hit the coast but none of the geiger counters on the sites showed a spike. Wonder if they tricked us.

You mean the same folks who assured the rescuers at Ground Zero that it was safe to work there?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqrr-xyqxfs

[anothershamus]

Just to get this on the last page, It was timely and appropriate and I got paged over in less than a minute.

Breathing, Kate Bush lyrics.....timely and appropriate.

Outside gets inside, Through her skin,
I`ve been out before
But this time it`s much safer in.
Last night, in the sky,
Such a bright light.
My radar send me danger
But my instincts tell me to
Keep Breathing

Chorus
Breathing
Breathing my mother in,
Breathing, my beloved in,
Breathing, Breathing her nicotine, breathing
Breathing the fall out-in, out-in, out-in, out-in, out-in.

We`ve lost our chance, we`re the first and last,
After the blast,
Chips of Plutonium are twinkling in every lung.
I love my beloved.
All and everywhere,
Only the fools blew it,
You and me knew life itself is breathing.

Chorus

What are we going to do without
Ooh, please, let me breathe,
Quick, breath in deep,
Leave us something to breathe,
Ooh, Life is-
Breathing.

[vanlose kid]

this was taken down after posting. exists only in cache.

GAMMA RADIATION LEVELS ON WEST COAST 2 T0 10 TIMES LEVELS ON EAST COAST


By Miriam Raftery

March 16, 2011 (San Diego) 12:30 a.m. -- A radiation map on the U.S. Environmental Protection Service shows radiation levels at measuring stations across the United States. There is a disturbing pattern showing gamma radiation levels along the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii at two to ten times levels on the East Coast, with midwest states in mid-ranges:



The EPA radiation site (http://www.epa.gov/radiation) has a database but does not appear to list what units this map is measured in, so it is difficult to assess whether these levels should be of concern. However it's clear from the map that levels are highest in all West Coast states, Hawaii, Alaska, Arizona and Nevada, all with measures in the 900s, tapering off as you move eastward, with measurements on the East Coast ranging from around 100 to 400.

The map displays gamma radiation. The site states that gamma radiation is only measured when beta radiation is found to exceed normal levels.

Gamma radiation is the type of radiation being spewed forth from at least four failed Japanese nuclear reactors, including two where authorities have indicated the core has been breached, plus a spent fuel rod pond where radiation was released directly into the atmosphere. In low levels, gamma rays can cause nausea and other effects. In high levels, it can cause more serious health effects both short and long term, including cancer and birth defects.

East County Magazine will be contacting the EPA when their office opens for an explanation on the measurements. Earlier today, the EPA issued a statement indicating it will deploy more electronic monitors that measure radiation levels in the air. The monitors, which detect gamma radiation and radioactive particles, will be set up in "parts of the Western U.S. and U.S. territories," the agency said in a statement.

EPA officials, however, refused to answer questions or make staff members available to explain the exact location and number of monitors, or the levels of radiation, if any, being recorded at existing monitors in California, the San Jose Mercury-News reports. Margot Perez-Sullivan at the EPA's regional headquarters in San Francisco, said the agency's written statement would stand on its own.

Critics said the public needs more information.

"It's disappointing," said Bill Magavern, director of Sierra Club California. "I have a strong suspicion that EPA is being silenced by those in the federal government who don't want anything to stand in the way of a nuclear power expansion in this country, heavily subsidized by taxpayer money."

The EPA has 124 air monitors, which provide hourly readings, already in place in its "Rad-Net" system to measure radiation, including 12 in California and two in Hawaii. California locations include San Jose, Sacramento, Fresno, Los Angeles and San Diego; however the San Diego monitor is listed as "inactive" on another EPA database. The EPA also has 40 mobile monitors, some of which are now being deployed. The agency clarified that some would go to Guam, Hawaii and Alaska, but did not respond to questions about California, the Mercury-News said.

"As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said, we do not expect to see radiation at harmful levels reaching the U.S. from damaged Japanese nuclear power plants," the EPA statement yesterday stated.

Government regulatory agencies and nuclear experts have repeatedly said that high levels of radiation are unlikely to hit California in significant quantities because Japan is 5,000 miles away. However, studies from the California Air Resources Board have found that coal dust and other pollution from China regularly reaches the state.

Most experts said that if the Japanese reactors experience a complete Chernobyl-type explosion, fire and release of nuclear material, some could reach California, but "probably in very low amounts," the Mercury- News reports.

The Japanese government now has a website with radiation readings there posted online, however Fukushima and certain other locations are listed as "under survey" and have not been releaesd. You can view the current data here: http://www.bousai.ne.jp/eng/

There is an analysis and screenshots of the Japanese data here that indicates gamma radiation levels were extremely high 100 miles or so from the explosions and fires at the Fukushima nuclear reactors. The website Zero Hedge analysis concludes that "the data is stunning: based on a N, NE and NNE wind direction (where it originates), meaning all coming from Fukushima, with a normal reading in the 80 nGy/h range, the city of Kounosu Naka is at 3,024, Kadobe Naka is at 2,416, Isobe Hitachioota is at 1,213 and many others are in the mid to upper triple digit range! Again, this is based on wind coming out of Fukushima and ultimately headed toward the capital. Indicatively, normal terrestrial plus cosmic gamma radiation is about 80 nGy/h." See
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/gamma- ... ove-normal

ECM cautions that we do not know whether these sites are using comparable measurements to the EPA site or not, nor even whether West Coast gamma measurements are customarily comparable to East Coast measurements or not, nor whether the higher levels on this map are due to the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan. However we believe in giving the public all information available. We will be seeking expert comments at the earliest opportunity.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ ... .google.de

found it here.

*

[justdrew]

aww shit.

they can eat my radiation. not gonna get me.
Nas Ne Dogonyat

[eyeno]

Man my spidey sense just won't leave me alone about some of this today. The more I think about how this played out and the fact that three other rad monitors I was watching didn't make a peep....I am not so sure i'm buying in on this whole scenario here. Something about this is itchin my spidey hairs. Epa monitors popped off like the japanese monitors did.

The timing of it also seems to be a shoe horn fit for this too.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011 ... f=science#


vanclose how did you dig that out of a cache? i want to go dumpster diving in a few places. i went to that zerohedge link and i'm not seeing that epa map.

edit: ok i went to the wrong link. found it in the google cache.

[Peachtree Pam]

Just to say that updates on Fukushima that were being posted on Floridaoilspillaw are now being posted on:

http://enenews.com/

@Nordic

Testing finds no health threat along West Coast

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.seattlepi.com/health/1500ap_ ... quake.html

SAN FRANCISCO -- Federal and state officials sought Friday to dispel fears of a wider danger from radioactivity spewing from Japan's crippled nuclear reactors, saying testing indicated there were no health threats along the West Coast of the U.S.

Driven by winds over the Pacific Ocean, a radioactive plume released from the Fukushima Dai-ichi reached Southern California on Friday, heightening concerns that Japan's nuclear disaster was assuming international proportions.

However, the results of testing reflected expectations by International Atomic Energy Agency officials that radiation had dissipated so much by the time it reached the U.S. coastline that it posed no health risk whatsoever to residents.

The U.S. Department of Energy said minuscule amounts of the radioactive isotopes iodine-131, iodine-132, tellurium-132 and cesium-137 had reached a Sacramento monitoring station tied to the U.N.'s Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, but the readings were far below levels that could pose any health risks.

A detector at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State earlier this week also detected trace amounts of xenon-133 - a gas produced during nuclear fission - the DOE said.

The doses that a person normally receives from rocks, bricks, the sun and other natural background sources are 100,000 times the dose rates detected at either location, the DOE and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in a joint statement.

The statement confirmed statements from diplomats and officials in Vienna earlier in the day.

Air pollution regulators in Southern California said they have not detected increased levels of radiation. The South Coast Air Quality Management District said radiation measured at its three sites was not higher than typical levels.

The agency's monitors are part of the EPA's network of more than 100 sensors across the nation that track radiation levels every hour.

In Alaska, Dr. Bernd Jilly, director of state public health laboratories, also said monitoring had shown no readings of above-normal levels of radiation.

The same was true in the state of Washington, health department spokesman Donn Moyer said. The levels would have to be hundreds of thousands of times higher than current readings before health officials would recommend any response, he said.

Graham Andrew, a senior official of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said that after consultation with the IAEA, the International Civil Aviation Organization found there was no reason to curtail normal international flights and maritime operations to and from Japan and "there is no medical basis for imposing additional measures to protect passengers."

The CTBTO presentation Friday showed radiation levels peaking in Tokyo and other cities in the first days of the disaster at levels officials said were well below risk points before tapering off.

"The rates in Tokyo and other cities ... remain far from levels which require action, in other words they are not dangerous to human health," Andrew said.

While set up to monitor atmospheric nuclear testing, the CTBTO's worldwide network of stations can detect earthquakes, tsunamis and fallout from nuclear accidents such as the disaster on Japan's northeastern coast that was set off by a massive earthquake and a devastating tsunami a week ago.

Since then, emergency crews have been trying to restore the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant's cooling system and prevent overheated fuel rods from releasing greater doses of radioactivity.

Japanese officials on Friday reclassified the rating of the accident at the plant from Level 4 to Level 5 on a seven-level international scale, putting it on a par with the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. The International Nuclear Event Scale defines a Level 4 incident as having local consequences and a Level 5 as having wider consequences.

Nuclear experts have been saying for days that Japan was underplaying the severity of the nuclear crisis.

Andrew refused to be drawn on that issue, saying severity assessments would be the task of a post-emergency investigation. Describing the situation as very serious, he nonetheless noted no significant worsening since his last briefing Thursday, when he used similar terminology.

Things are "moving to a stable, non-changing situation, which is positive," he said. "You don't want things that are rapidly changing."

Hope this is accurate news. No one knows what to believe anymore.

[American Dream]

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/a ... ?page=full

Japan’s nuclear disaster caps decades of accidents and fake reports

By Jason Clenfield
Bloomberg News / March 18, 2011


TOKYO — The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents, and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.

The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, disclosures the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.

With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, Japan has made nuclear power a national priority since the 1960s. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors — more than any other country except the United States and France — to power its industries, pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.

Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports, and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.

Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.’’

In an interview in 2007 after Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake, Ishibashi said fundamental improvements were needed in engineering standards for atomic power stations, without which Japan could see a catastrophic disaster.

“We didn’t learn anything,’’ Ishibashi said in a phone interview this week. “Nuclear power is national policy and there’s a real reluctance to scrutinize it.’’

The 40-year-old Fukushima plant, built in the 1970s when Japan’s first wave of nuclear construction began, stood up to the country’s worst earthquake on record March 11 only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 25-foot tsunami that followed.

Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors.

Radiation readings spiked around Fukushima as the disaster widened, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 people and causing radiation levels to rise on the outskirts of Tokyo, 135 miles to the south, with a population of 30 million.

Back-up diesel generators that might have averted the disaster were positioned in a basement, where they were overwhelmed by waves.

“This in the country that invented the word ‘tsunami,’’’ said Ken Brockman, a former director of nuclear installation safety at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and a former worker at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Japan is going to have a look again at its regulatory process and whether it’s intrusive enough.’’

The cascade of events at Fukushima had been foretold in a report published in the United States two decades ago. The 1990 report by the NRC identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes’’ of nuclear accidents from an external event.

While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, it seems adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric, said Jun Tateno, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and professor at Chuo University.

“It’s questionable whether Tokyo Electric really studied the risks,’’ Tateno said in an interview.

Hajime Motojuku, a utility spokesman, said he couldn’t immediately confirm whether the company was aware of the report.

All six boiling water reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were designed byGeneral Electric Co. and the company built the No. 1, 2 and 6 reactors, spokeswoman Emily Caruso said in an e-mail response to questions. The No. 1 reactor went into commercial operation in 1971.

Toshiba Corp. built 3 and 5. Hitachi Ltd., which folded its nuclear operations into a venture with GE known as Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd. in 2007, built No. 4.

Mitsuhiko Tanaka, 67, working as an engineer at Babcock Hitachi, helped design and supervise the manufacture of a $250 million steel pressure vessel for Tokyo Electric in 1975. Today, that vessel holds the fuel rods in the core of the No. 4 reactor at the Daiichi plant.

Tanaka says the vessel was damaged in the production process. He says he knows because he orchestrated the coverup. When he brought his accusations to the government more than a decade later, he was ignored, he says.

The accident occurred when Tanaka and his team were strengthening the steel in the pressure vessel, heating it in a furnace to more than 1,112 degrees, a temperature that melts metal. Braces that should have been inside the vessel during the blasting were either forgotten or fell over. After it cooled, Tanaka found that its walls had warped.

The law required the flawed vessel be scrapped, a loss that Tanaka said might have bankrupted the company. Rather than sacrifice years of work and risk the company’s survival, Tanaka used computer modeling to devise a way to reshape the vessel so that no one would know it had been damaged. He did that with Hitachi’s blessings, he said.

“I saved the company billions of yen,’’ Tanaka said in an interview March 12, the day after the earthquake. Tanaka says he got a 3 million yen bonus ($38,000) from Hitachi and a plaque acknowledging his “extraordinary’’ effort in 1974. “At the time, I felt like a hero.’’

That changed with Chernobyl. Two years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, Tanaka went to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to report the coverup he’d engineered more than a decade earlier. Hitachi denied his accusation and the government refused to investigate.

In 1988, Hitachi met with Tanaka to discuss the work he had done to fix the dent in the vessel. They concluded that there was no safety problem, said Hitachi spokesman Yuichi Izumisawa. “We have not revised our view since then,’’ Izumisawa said.

Tokyo Electric in 2002 admitted it had falsified repair reports at nuclear plants for more than two decades. Chairman Hiroshi Araki and president Nobuyama Minami resigned to take responsibility for hundreds of occasions on which the company had submitted false data to the regulator.

Then in 2007, the utility said it hadn’t come entirely clean five years earlier. It had concealed at least six emergency stoppages at its Daiichi station and a “critical’’ reaction at the plant’s No. 3 unit that lasted for seven hours.

Kansai Electric Power Co., the utility that provides Osaka with electricity, said it also faked nuclear safety records. Chubu Electric Power Co., Tohoku Electric Power Co., and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. said the same.

Only months after that second round of disclosures, an earthquake struck a cluster of seven reactors run by Tokyo Electric on Japan’s north coast. The Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest, was hit by a 6.8 magnitude temblor that buckled walls and caused a fire.

[DoYouEverWonder]

UPDATE 1-IAEA:Japan halts sale of Fukushima area food products

Mar 19, 2011

VIENNA, March 19 (Reuters) - Japan confirmed the presence of radioactive iodine contamination in food products from near a crippled nuclear plant and ordered a halt to the sale of such products from the area, the U.N. nuclear body said on Saturday.

In what it called another "critical" measure to counter the contamination of food products, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Japanese authorities on March 16 recommended that people leaving the area should ingest stable iodine.

Taken as pills or syrup, stable iodine can be used to help protect against thyroid cancer in the case of radioactive exposure in a nuclear accident.

"Though radioactive iodine has a short half-life of about 8 days and decays naturally within a matter of weeks, there is a short-term risk to human health if radioactive iodine in food is absorbed into the human body," the IAEA said in a statement.

Japan's top government spokesman earlier on Satursday said tests detected radiation above the national safety level in spinach and milk produced near the Fukushima nuclear plant.

It was the first known case of contamination since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that touched off the crisis.

Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said radiation levels in milk from a Fukushima farm about 30 km (18 miles) from the plant, and spinach grown in Ibaraki, a neighbouring prefecture, exceeded limits set by the government.

He said these higher radiation levels still posed no risk to human health.

But the IAEA said radioactive iodine if ingested "can accumulate in and cause damage to the thyroid. Children and young people are particularly at risk of thyroid damage due to the ingestion of radioactive iodine."

[url]http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/19/japan-nuclear-food-idUSLDE72I0A720110319[url]

[23]

The above article raises a related significant concern.

This storm...

http://www.weather.com/maps/maptype/sat ... mated.html

will carry with it the atmospheric radioactive particles that are heading eastwardly. It originated in the exact area where the particles atmospherically reside.

Our crops, and the animals that survive on them, will be soaked with it.

http://news.bioscholar.com/2011/03/publ ... lants.html
Public health risks from radiation leaking from Japanese nuclear plants

(excerpted)

Scientists have said that as of now the airborne radiation from a meltdown at Japanese nuclear plants, poses no immediate risk to the continental United States.

Drawing on research from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, University of Maryland public health and atmospheric scientists said that for most Japanese, the long-term risk may lie in ingestion of milk, water or food, as well as direct exposure to contaminated soil.

“Radiation from Chernobyl was barely measurable in the mainland United States,” University of Maryland atmospheric scientist Russell Dickerson said.

“I struggled to detect any in North Dakota, at the time. How much transport we can expect from ongoing events will depend on many factors, some of which are not knowable right now.

“But, distance is great and so far, releases have not been of the scale seen in Chernobyl. So, there is no present danger,” he stated.

The most significant release of radiation at Chernobyl involved two by-products of uranium fission – Iodine 131 and Cesium 137.

“After Chernobyl, small amounts of nuclear particles and gases were detected in other European countries,” Dickerson said.

“Only about one percent of the release from Chernobyl was deposited onto the United Kingdom. The stuff tends to stay close to where it was released,” he explained.

The half-life of Iodine 131 is eight days, and for Cesium 137, 30 years, though both are removed from the atmosphere fairly quickly. The real danger lies not while the particles are in the air, but once rain carries it to the soil and watershed.

[seemslikeadream]

Officials Are "Underestimating the Seriousness of the Problem" with Japan's Nuclear Reactors
Japan raised the nuclear alert level from a four to a five, on par with Three Mile Island. This decision has shocked many nuclear experts who thought it should be higher.
March 18, 2011 |


JUAN GONZALEZ: The Japanese nuclear crisis continues to worsen as authorities race to find a way to cool the overheating reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Earlier today, Japan raised the nuclear alert level at the crippled plant from a four to a five, which is on par with Three Mile Island. Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, described the situation as, quote, "still very grave."

Japan is continuing to dump water on the reactors, while attempting to fix a power cable that could help restart the water pumps needed to cool the overheating nuclear fuel rods. But Gregory Jaczko, the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Thursday that it could take weeks for the crisis to be brought under control.

Meanwhile, the number of dead and missing from last week’s devastating earthquake and tsunami has now topped 16,000. It is the deadliest natural disaster to hit Japan in nearly a century.

Twenty-two hundred emergency shelters are operating in the disaster zone, but many are running out of food, fuel, water and medicine. The organization Save the Children estimates 100,000 children have been left homeless.

To talk more about the crisis in Japan, we’re joined by Philip White of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, Japan. Also with us is Dr. Ira Helfand of Physicians for Social Responsibility and longtime nuclear critic Ralph Nader, author of the recent book Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

I want to begin with Philip White in Tokyo. Your sense of this latest announcement by the Japanese government that it’s raising the level of the emergency and what you’re seeing from Tokyo?

PHILIP WHITE: I think it’s a good indication of how they are underestimating the seriousness of the problem. Our experts think that it’s a level 6.5 already, and it’s on the way to a seven, which was Chernobyl. We were very shocked that they only called it a five.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what makes you think that the level is still being so grossly underestimated?

PHILIP WHITE: Well, so much radioactivity is already out there. You have spent fuel pools in at least two of the reactors that are burning and exploding and things like that. You’ve got a hole in another reactor—well, in the containment vessel. You’ve got six reactors lined up there, ready to go off any minute. And they think that’s a five. I’m not quite sure what they’re thinking about, really.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we’ve begun to get some of the actual levels of radiation that have been measured. The helicopters, for instance, that flew over some of the reactors yesterday, trying to dump water on them, measured, supposedly, according to the Japanese government, at levels of 300 meters above the reactors, about four millisieverts of radiation per hour, and then at 100 meters, which is where they descended to, 87 millisieverts per hour. Could you tell us what that means in layman’s terms, for those who don’t know the levels of radiation measurement?

PHILIP WHITE: Millisieverts, so that’s a thousand of those makes up one sievert. And one sievert is well and truly into the high dose of radiation, and you’re getting acute—you’re getting acute radiation symptoms well below that. When you’re counting millisieverts, you’ve got to remember, this is per hour, so people who are actually there for any length of time, you multiply that figure by the number of hours they’re there. So, people who are actually in the plant, although they’ll have protective clothing, they’re getting massive doses of radiation by now.

People off the site, we’ve seen figures around 170 microsieverts per hour at about 30 kilometers. Now, microsieverts, it’s a much smaller figure, but those people are potentially there for quite a long time. And if they were outside, which hopefully they’re not, they would be getting the average yearly dose in about a day or less, or maybe 10 hours or something like that. So, just think of that. In one day, you can get your average [yearly] dose of radiation if you go out 30 kilometers from this site.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re also joined by Ira Helfand of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Your assessment of the talk about the dangers of the radiation in the exclusion zone to the workers and the potential for other areas outside the exclusion zone.

IRA HELFAND: Yeah, I mean, there are basically two distinct dangers that we’re faced with a reactor accident of this sort. One is the levels of very high radiation, which are primarily confined to the area right around the plant, at least at this point. And these are doses which, if you get up to a full sievert, will cause, as Philip was just explaining, radiation sickness. This is primarily a concern for people working in the plant, the 180-some-odd workers who have stayed behind there to try to bring this situation under control. If there was a much larger release, this conceivably could be a problem further out, but hopefully would not go out beyond the evacuation zone.

I think the danger, though, that we need to focus on, because it’s the one that affects the largest numbers of people, is the danger posed by low-level radiation and the possibility of cancer and other chronic illnesses being caused down the road from this episode. The radioactive material coming out of the plant is made up of about 200 different radioactive isotopes, and particles of these radioactive materials can travel great distances with the wind if they are dispersed into the air. We’re picking up radiation as—you know, elevated levels of radiation in Tokyo and in other places at some remove. At this point, those levels are still quite low. And while it is important to emphasize that there is no safe level of radiation—any radiation exposure increases your risk of cancer—the levels that people are being exposed to at this point remain quite low, if you get away from the plant itself, and will have very low health effects.

If there’s a larger release from this plant—and the situation there is still completely out of control—that could change very dramatically, and we could end up with a situation, as occurred at Chernobyl, where significant amounts of these radioactive isotopes get deposited downwind, contaminating populations, exposing them to an increased risk of cancer. And the best estimate that I’ve seen is that there will be approximately 250,000 excess cancer deaths, ultimately, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. We could have the same kind of wide deposition of radioactive materials if there’s a much larger release than has occurred so far.

In addition, large areas of ground can become so contaminated that people can’t use these areas for extended periods of time. And again, the Chernobyl experience, there were areas up to 100 miles downwind from the plant that had to be evacuated and which remain unsafe for human use today.

So, these two distinct differences—these two distinct dangers: the high doses of radiation affecting primarily people right around the plant at this point and then the potential for a fairly broad distribution of low-level radiation, which could be quite, quite destructive from a public health point of view.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And your sense of the differences that have emerged between the U.S. government’s assessment of the problem and the Japanese government at this stage?

IRA HELFAND: Well, I think it’s very hard to figure out what’s going on for sure. And I think both the U.S. and the Japanese governments are working somewhat in the dark here. And so, it’s kind of hard to know whose assessment is right. But I think that what you’re seeing on the part of the Japanese is that—one might perhaps wish to evacuate up to 50 miles, as the U.S. government has suggested should be done. I’m not sure how you do that in a situation where the area has been devastated by an earthquake and a tsunami.

I think, from my point of view, the most important aspect of the U.S. government recommendation of a 50-mile evacuation zone applies not just to the situation here in Japan right now, but to potential future situations in the United States. The primary danger to American citizens at the moment is not from radiation emanating from the plant in Japan; it’s the potential future release of radiation if we have an accident like this in the United States. And, for example, the nuclear plant in the U.S. which has been said to be most vulnerable to earthquake activity is not, as I had expected, in California; it’s Indian Point, 27 miles north of New York City. If there were to be the kind of release at Indian Point that we are seeing now at Fukushima, a 50-mile evacuation zone involves the entire New York metropolitan area. And I’m not sure quite how we would evacuate the 20 million people who live in that metropolitan area or where we would put them.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Ralph Nader joins us from Washington, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate. His latest book is Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ralph.

RALPH NADER: Thank you, Juan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Your assessment not only what’s happening in Japan, but what the impact will be here in the United States, and especially with the Obama administration and Congress trying to move forward with a renaissance of development of nuclear plants here in the United States?

RALPH NADER: The Japanese disaster has ended whatever nuclear renaissance is being considered here in the United States. The problem is that people have got to get more involved, because the government and the industry will defend nuclear power in the United States to the last mutation. They are representing a closed, monetized mind that does not have options for revision, which true science should provide for. Secretary Chu, Energy Secretary, has refused for two years to meet with the leading critics of nuclear power, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, Friends of the Earth and other groups. He has met with nuclear business interests regularly, and he has written articles touting nuclear power.

What we’re seeing here is 110 or so operating nuclear plants in the United States, many of them aging, many of them infected with corrosion, faulty pipes, leaky pumps and combustible materials. These have been documented by data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assembled by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Indian Point, for example, is a plant that presents undue risks, in the opinion of the Union of Concerned Scientists, to millions of people in the New York City greater area. And it is unevacuable if there’s an accident. You’re never going to evacuate a population of millions of people, whether it’s around San Onofre or Diablo Canyon in Southern California or Indian Point or Davis-Besse near Toledo and Detroit or any of the other endangered nuclear plants.

Why are we playing Russian roulette with the American people for nuclear plants whose principal objective is simply to boil water and produce steam? This is technological insanity. It presents national security problems, for every nuclear plant is a prime target. It affects our civil liberties. It endangers our workers. It is an industry that cannot be financed by Wall Street because it’s too risky. Wall Street demands 100 percent taxpayer guarantees for any nuclear plant.

So I suggest that people listening and watching this program to pick up the phone and dial the White House comment number, which is (202) 456-1111, (202) 456-1111, and demand the following: that there be public hearings in every area where there’s a nuclear plant, so the people can see for themselves what the hazards are, what the risks are, how farcical the evacuation plans are, how costly nuclear power is, and how it can be replaced by energy efficiency, by solar energy, different kinds of solar energy, by cogeneration, as Amory Lovins and many others, Peter Bradford, have pointed out.

We must no longer license any new nuclear plants. We should shut down the ones like Indian Point. How many people know that Hillary Clinton, as senator, and Andrew Cuomo, as attorney general, demanded that Indian Point be shut down? That doesn’t matter to the monetized minds in Washington, D.C. We also should prepare a plan where, apart from the aging plants, which should be shut down, and apart from the earthquake-risk plants—should be shut down—for the phase-out of the entire industry. We’re going to be left with radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years, for which there is no permanent repository. This is institutional insanity, and I urge the people in this country to wake up before they experience what is now going on in northern Japan: uninhabitable territory, thousands dead, hundreds of thousands at risk of cancer, enormous economic loss. And for what?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Ira Helfand, this statement by President Obama, of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that they’re going to do a comprehensive review of the safety of U.S. nuclear plants, do you have much expectation for that review?

IRA HELFAND: I don’t, unfortunately. I’m most troubled in this regard, by President Obama’s rush to defend nuclear power last Sunday, even as this crisis was just beginning to unfold. I think the mindset is strongly in support of nuclear power within the administration. And obviously the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has functioned primarily as a cheerleader for the industry since its inception, which is really, you know, a tragic situation.

But I would agree exactly with what Ralph Nader just said. What we need to do instead is to have a real review of our energy policy here and to figure out how we can move as quickly as we possibly can away from nuclear, and away coal, for that matter, which also has huge health risks associated with it, and to seriously begin to build a green energy system based on energy efficiency, conservation and the development of renewable sources of power generation like wind and solar. This is an urgent national security task for the United States, and it’s something we have been ignoring and failing to address for decades at this point. The events in Japan have clearly shown that nuclear power is not reliable and contrary to the claims of the industry and the administration, and we need to move away from it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Philip White, your group, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, have been especially involved in efforts to prevent the development of a new plant in South Texas that the Japanese are directly involved in. Could you talk about that?

PHILIP WHITE: The Japanese government has been falling over backwards to support Toshiba, in particular, which made a very, very bad investment when it paid double what Westinghouse was worth to buy that company, and Toshiba is one of the investors in the proposed South Texas project, along with this very—would the Americans like this Tokyo Electric Power Company to come over and help them with their energy plants and advise them? This is the very Tokyo Electric Power Company which is now responsible for this reactor here.

Anyway, sort of irony aside, just recently, the Japan Bank [for] International Cooperation listed on its website that it was considering providing finance for this project. We believe that it would be in the order of four billion U.S. dollars, and that would be about one-third of the total capital worth of JBIC. So it would be—JBIC being Japan Bank for International Cooperation. So it would be an absolutely unprecedented loan for JBIC. And we have been lobbying, along with United States groups, as well as people from around the world, against the—on the grounds of the financial risk. I mean, we, of course, are very concerned about all these other risks, but somehow or other it always seems to fall on a deaf ear. We thought maybe the financial risk would resonate. And it has resonated with many people, even within the bureaucracy here. But there’s this incredibly powerful organization called the Ministry for Economy, Trade and Industry here, METI, which really has had a stranglehold on energy policy and nuclear policy for many years in Japan, and shifting them is a very, very difficult process. So, I think this has basically blown that away.

But actually, something really quite remarkable has begun to happen, something I never thought I would see. Yesterday, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, the more or less permanent government until a few years ago, 'til a couple of years ago, came out and said that it would be very difficult to maintain the nuclear policy as it currently exists. Fairly noncommittal words, you might say, but that in itself was an amazing statement. And then, the following day, the chief cabinet secretary in the current government, the Democratic Party of Japan, said that this was absolutely right. It was completely obvious that it would be difficult to maintain this policy now. That, in itself, to get that from both sides of the political spectrum, is extraordinary. But without public pressure, we won't make that to actually come through, I don’t think.

[23]

I suspect that this is what we will all be concerned about shortly, here in the United States. The ingestion of radioactive particles, not inhaling them. Especially after the storm that will be here in just a couple of days.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/19_21.html
Radiation detected in milk and spinach

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says the government was informed around 5:30 PM on Friday that higher levels of radiation than the legal standard were detected in fresh milk from cows at a dairy farm in Fukushima Prefecture.

He also said that at 11:00 AM on Saturday, the government received information that six samples of spinach tested at a research institute in Ibaraki Prefecture contained higher levels of radiation than the official standard.

Early on Saturday morning, the health ministry asked Ibaraki Prefecture to determine where the spinach samples came from and their distribution route.

The prefecture was also asked to take measures under the Food Sanitation Law if necessary, including a ban on sales.

Edano said the government will conduct further testing taking into consideration the possible links between the higher radiation levels and the accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

He said the test results will be thoroughly analyzed so the government can swiftly determine whether it should take measures, including restrictions on shipments and intakes of the products.

Edano said the level of radiation from the average yearly consumption of the milk in question would be the equivalent of a single CT scan, and around a fifth of this amount in the case of the spinach.

Saturday, March 19, 2011 17:39 +0900 (JST)

[anothershamus]

Check out this! A Japanese news program built a huge scale model diorama to show the reactors and damage. Really nice work, via izreloaded.blogspot.com

More pics here:
http://izreloaded.blogspot.com/2011/03/diorama-of-damaged-japanese-nuclear.html

[anothershamus]

Here is a really good site with charts on realtime all on the West Coast.

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/03/19/realtime-epa-japan-nuclear-fallout-radiation-graphs-west-coast-cities-9228/

and here is another with a digital monitor streaming live from LA.

http://www.enviroreporter.com/2011/03/enviroreporter-coms-radiation-station/

[tazmic]

zerohedge: "Gamma radiation is the type of radiation being spewed forth from at least four failed Japanese nuclear reactors, including two where authorities have indicated the core has been breached, plus a spent fuel rod pond where radiation was released directly into the atmosphere. In low levels, gamma rays can cause nausea and other effects. In high levels, it can cause more serious health effects both short and long term, including cancer and birth defects."

This is back to front. (If you are nauseous - from radiation, you are dosed. Or more to the point, for the west coast, you are not dosed, just nauseous and paranoid.)

(http://www.wwheaton.com/waw/mad/mad13.html)

[eyeno]

Here is a site that shows some readings around Fukushima exclusion zone.

http://www.mext.go.jp/english/radioacti ... 303962.htm