cnetnews
TOKYO–As Japan’s government prepares regulations to punish those who violate the 20km (12.4 mile) exclusion zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, a Japanese journalist drove into the area and recorded scenes of desolation.
Armed with only filtration masks, a Geiger counter, and dosimeter, Tetsuo Jimbo of the Web site Videonews and a colleague drove into the voluntary evacuation zone at 30 km (18.6 miles) from the plant and began recording.
why not wear lead suits? dont understand why someone would risk getting cancer for their job 😛
How will this “event” be calculated into the “cost” of Nuke Power==or is it even?==or should it even be?
Or just ignore it: “We need all forms of energy as part of the mix, and remember: drill baby drill.”
JUST LOOK! Advocates will still say nukclear power is safe. Safest enegy source in the world. Accidents don’t count. Just look/listen. They’ll say it again as they have after every accident.
The valid question: how much of the earth’s surface, air, and water should be given up for 1000’s of years for this cheap safe energy? And when you answer that question, you know you are in good sound PUKE territory.
Wake Up Fools. The Republicans want to Kill America but they can’t do it without your vote.
In Japan, even the radioactive feral dogs are polite.
From Wikipedia (so it might be true):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Hourly_dose_examples
Those guys driving around were getting ranges from as low as 1.2 mSv/Hour to as high as 108 mSv/Hour.
Which means that they’ve probably exceeded the maximum that a worker at the Fukushima reactor is supposed to get within a year.
But if you read a little further in Wikipedia it shows that the amount of radiation required to actually get radiation sickness is 1000s of times higher.
I certainly wouldn’t volunteer to drive into the exclusion zone.
Chuck–those radiation levels are difficult to figure because people do react differently to the various levels. Radiation Sickness I take to mean you die within a few months but lower levels mean you get cancer at 90 years instead of a heart attack, or you live long and healthy but your kiddies are ill.
Hard to pin point.
Japan has got some serious problems right now.
I can’t even imagine what is going through the minds of those who need to evacuate and know beyond a shadow of a doubt they are never going back.
sad
#4 Chuck: The doses reported in the video were in micro-Sievert, not milli-Sievert. The highest dose mentioned in the report was about 0.12 milli-Sievert per hour. About 8 hours to get a year’s normal dose. Maybe 160 hours for a maximum acceptable dose for a rad worker.
#8 thanks for the correction.
I think a lot of people get confused by the different between the micro- and milli- Sievert amounts that are reported and the whole Sv units which are the serious hard-radiation.
Some one should drive by a coal-fired power plant and see what the “normal” mSv (or muSv) levels are.
I’ve seen news reporters trying to cause panic by reporting that radioactive seawater from the reactor has reached the US west-coast. Considering that maybe a few 100,000 gallons of water have traveled through literally billions (maybe trillions) of gallons of ocean, I can’t see how the amount of radiation could possible be detectable.
They tell by the signature, composition, of the isotopes in the water n’est–ce pas? Dvorak can confirm?
Since it hasn’t been posted here yet, the Japs have decided to raise the scale of this event from a 5 to a 7, the highest. While this may be “News” to the brain dead morons that only like to get spoon fed by the Government on TV, in actuality this has been widely known to be a level 7+ since day 1 to those that pay attention to reality.
Meanwhile, the US news continues the lie that this event is over and done with. All cleaned up and the radiation is 0, it just disappeared like the oil in the gulf of Mexico, according to ABC and CNN.
# 5 bobbo, “Radiation Sickness I take to mean you die within a few months”
Radiation illness is not an automatic death sentence. If they’ve absorbed something above 6 Gy, yeah. They’re likely gonners. Less, there are treatments. Potassium Iodide most everyone has heard of recently, helps to protect the thyroid from accumulating radioactive iodine isotopes. But there are chemcials that help you get rid of the other by products of fission. Cesium and thallium isotopes can be treated with Prussian blue. The dye combines with those elements and is excreted in your feces. (No. Your poop wouldn’t glow. Well, not very brightly, anyway.) DTPA helps to clea
# 5 bobbo, “Radiation Sickness I take to mean you die within a few months”
Radiation illness is not an automatic death sentence. If they’ve absorbed something above 6 Gy, yeah. They’re likely gonners. Less, there are treatments. Potassium Iodide most everyone has heard of recently, helps to protect the thyroid from accumulating radioactive iodine isotopes. But there are chemcials that help you get rid of the other by products of fission. Cesium and thallium isotopes can be treated with Prussian blue. The dye combines with those elements and is excreted in your feces. (No. Your poop wouldn’t glow. Well, not very brightly, anyway.) DTPA helps to clear plutonium and a couple others. These are passed in your urine.
As for getting cancer at 90 or having sick kids? Again, it depends on the dose and the kind of radiation. There are reports of many survivors of radiation poisoning following the two bombs in Japan. Some lived to ripe old ages and some had normal children who are now raising their own children.
Radiation is a fickle threat. It is impossible to predict what will happen after survivable doses (i.e. < 6 Gy).
Westinghouse owns a lot of TV in the USA and hold a huge stake in the nuclear energy industry. So to me it is not too suprising that the domino of nuclear disasters in Tokyo is under reported by the media. What makes this different to Chernobyl? The internet.
# 14 sargasso_c said, “Westinghouse owns a lot of TV in the USA”
Not sure here, but didn’t Westinghouse sell CBS to Viacom?
Wild nuke history history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
Fascinating!
Like a real version of those movies where there are just a few survivors.
I wonder if they get the fuel etc. out, does this area become inhabitable again?
#13–Animby==I’m happy there’s at least one expert around.
Can you confirm this: the harm that radiation does is it breaks chemical and nuclear bonds within the body. The consequences of radiation exposure are variable because it is variable what exact bonds/how many bonds are broken rendering atoms/molecules/proteins non-functional. When enough nonfuctional parts add up, you get the different effects from organ failure to reproductive failure to birth defects or just bad gas?
#19 Bob, Bad gas? Radioactive flatulence? Hmmm. Could be responsible for numerous UFO sightings.
Your explanation is essentially correct. Some of those bonds that are broken might be in some of your DNA. That “mutation” might very well be your burgeoning case of cancer. Additionally, a sufficient dose can, indeed, cause cellular death. And you know how that works: a cell here, a cell there and pretty soon the whole prison collapses.
Punishing the little people (common citizens) who don’t understand why they have to give up their homes and land. Meanwhile the jerk who owns the power plant was finally heard from. And he deeply apologizes. THAT’S IT?! Is that all that’s going to happen to him. He had to bow down and pretend to give a sh*t, for a few moments. Wow! Now he can go back to his safe mansion, wherever the heck it is.
As I was telling my elderly mother. They picked the least expensive piece of real estate in Japan, to build this monster power plant. Right on the eastern shore of Japan. Only several miles away from a fault zone. Because anywhere else, would have endangered people and property that COUNT! But these farmers and fishing villagers don’t count. So they got six nuclear reactors, very close by.
The news makes a big deal about the radiation contaminating the sea water. And I agree, it should be of concern. But I has to be a drop in the bucket, compared to what the US Navy did back in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. 235 tests in all, in both Nevada and the Pacific. The most infamous being the Bikini Atoll tests. Which have left the area unlivable. And yet they’re only grossing about what’s happening in Japan, and what happened in Russia. Very, very rarely, about what almost happened at Three Mile Island, PA. And the gov. may not have told us everything about that.
Why did they build above ground?
If I was their insurance company I would have insisted that the power station be built underground, below any possible earthquake and tsunami damage.
We know how to dig, plenty of engineering marvels underground, and we know how to build, plenty of earthquake-proof structure around.
That would have disposed of the nuclear waste problem too. Never bring it to the surface.
Ass-hats…
PeePod===$.
There are water tables underground, silly. contaminate that, and the entire country of japan could be irradiated from the water supply.
The only reason you would ever build a nuclear power plant underground is you are making nuclear bombs and want a facility that can stand being attacked.
Bobbo you are a fucking idiot, please kill yourself