How are after shocks not earthquakes?
The Japanese say there is radiation that "drastically exceeds the legal levels in 11 vegetables grown in the area. "for human consumption. Yep more sensationalism .
These boys are the same age as my son.
They wear pretty much the same uniform, the same tabards are in his school for sports events etc, they talk the same (given a bit of dialect difference). This could have been us. My husband has seen these boys and says they are doing an adult’s work each. They have all lost someone themselves - the town where they live was devastated despite it having 10m high sea walls.
My husband said he was there yesterday and saw ships in the main street, and a whole house that had come to rest upon another house.
Aftershocks, are not really news worthy, especially when there are so many other things going on at the same time.
check out the number of aftershocks here:
I don’t think it is practical to report them at this point.
Yesterday since it rained the radioactivity is supposed to have increased a bit when they measured the water levels. But it is not at a level that would affect adults, yet.
I have to get back home from my office soon, and it started raining again now.
That is really touching. Usually my opinion of the Japanese youth is not very high, but seeing these kind of things raises my hopes. Best wishes to your family, hope you can get through this soon.
I went to Google News and searched for articles about “Japan food contamination” (without quotes), and the articles I found were mostly about fears about contamination, and the articles that listed the actual contamination levels and the safe/legal levels made it clear that while it wouldn’t be a good idea to eat the contaminated food long-term and it’s certainly prudent to avoid them for now, it’s not likely to have huge human health consequences. Current levels are higher than the legal limit, but the legal levels are not the same as the maximum safe dose. Legal limits are set to be much lower than even a safe dose, so there’s some buffer between legal and immediate danger.
Clean up and continued monitoring is certainly needed, and it seems like they’re halting food shipments mostly to prevent people from mistrusting the food supply, rather than any immediate risk.
Here is a good news article that I found (my emphasis added):
Here’s another article that I found (my emphasis added):
I wonder if anyone will publish the amount of Cesium that is 100% guaranteed to harm your child? Or say that “plutonium levels are only three times the normal amount”.
I’m sure the information on cesium is out there.
Of course, it doesn’t take much pure cesium, radioactive or not, to cause harm as the stuff has a habit of spontaneously combusting in the normal atmosphere. In other words, it has the potential to kill you chemically before any possible radiation could harm you. Well, there’s another reason not to fool with it. Let’s try a quick Google…
A number of its compounds are strongly alkali, so there again there’s the possibility of plenty of chemical damage.
A quick look on Wikipedia says the chemical LD50 of cesium chloride is copmarable to that of potassium chloride and common table salt, so at least that compound isn’t so very hazardous… unless it’s composed entirely of radioactive cesium + chlorine, that could be a problem…
The only information I could find on the letahlity of the 137 isotope was the result of experiments in dogs. Apparently 4.1 micrograms of cesium-137 per kilogram of bodyweight is lethal within three weeks, so assuming that holds true for people as well, feeding your kid 4.1 micrograms of Cs-137 per kg of weight would definitely be harmful. Lesser amounts probably aren’t good for you either.
Next question?
Plus, it needs to be on a thrust fault (one side with a large enough vertical vector upwards while the other side downwards) in deep ocean to generate the water displacement needed to produce a tsunami. So, strike-slip faults and shallow waters are very unlikely to generate tsunamis except for possibly some very localized areas due to geography/topography of the local area.
I forgot to inform the Canadian Consulate that I was not actually taking the trip to Tokyo this week that I was registered for - I just received an email stating ‘Nuclear Emergency in Japan’. Yeah, shit’s hit the fan when the government starts sending you emails like that.
It seems the earthquake and tsunami crippled the security system at a Shinkin Bank in Kesennuma, and the vault popped open. And then someone walked off with 40 million yen, which is about half a million bucks American. The bank notified police on Tuesday, 11 days after it happened. Story here.
BBC TV just reported a 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Burma, WAY up in the Golden Triangle area near the borders with Thailand and Laos. Too far inland to cause a tsunami, but they said it could be felt here in Bangkok several hundred miles away. The local BBC reporter was on the line saying she was speaking from the 8th floor of a Bangkok building that she claimed had shaken quite a bit. Said she’d been receiving calls from lots of others who felt it. My wife and I here on our sixth floor just looked at each other and wondered what the hell she was talking about, because we felt nothing.
Didn’t feel a thing here (5th floor), but soon after the quake a friend of my girlfriend called telling they had to evacuate their building as it swayed a fair bit.
Now my GF is having second thoughts about traveling to Indonesia in a couple weeks, she’s scared of more quakes and possible tsunamis as in 2004.
I hear there’s some good diving in Lake Geneva.
He also says plants can be built safely even in Japan so long as they’re built out of tsunami range, i.e., further uphill.
Well, you should remind your friend we don’t care that Chernobyl used graphite because our problem isn’t just five armed reactors, it’s also six fuel pools with decades and thousands of tons of highly radioactive and dangerous fuel rods contained by nothing more than some water on top of them which has now become quite a globally attention getting concern.
on radio
water at reactor is 10000 times normal. no more detail given.
from AP
reactor core in reactor 3 may have been breached. high radiation levels are detected.
Some MPSIMS in this MPSIMS thread: I still haven’t decided to cancel my trip to Tokyo and western Japan next month. The only thing that holds me back is the degree of control they have over the situation in Fukushima. As soon as the cooling systems are working well enough (and I’m guessing that’ll happen within a week), I’m going to reconfirm my hotel reservation.
With all due respects to your brother, and I’m sure he is a great software engineer, anyone who is not intimately involved with the particulars of this particular facility has no business making sweeping generalization like this.
Making unsupported, simplistic statements for the pro nuclear side, everything is completely safe and anyone questions this is hysterical, so don’t worry your pretty little heads (and while he isn’t necessarily saying it, the condescension from other wanna-be experts in unmistakable) is no more sophisticated than the sky is falling, and because there was an accident, the world is ending of the Chicken Little camp.
I challenge your brother, and all other self proclaimed “experts” who took a class or two in nuc engineering to refute the concerns by read experts. We can leave the kooks out, so don’t worry about them. Here’s a paper, written in 2000, well before this accident which outlined some experts’ concerns about the spent fuel.
How specifically did he address concerns about spent fuel, which is not stored within the containment vessels? If he or any of the other self-proclaimed messengers of rational discussion have the arrogance to dismiss the real experts, show me the calculations.
Oh, maybe he doesn’t know how much fuel is stored in the pools. Maybe he really doesn’t know what he is talking about.
I’m not saying that the world is coming apart, and I’m not saying this will be a problem, I’m just saying I would like to know what is the real level of concern.
It would be really nice if more people could discuss this topic like broomstick does, a voice of reasonable discussion on this board, as he/she counters true hysteria without mislabeling any dissent as such, and without getting pissy in the face of reluctance, or attacking rather than explaining, all while acknowledging that there is potential for danger.
The drinking water in Tokyo has exceeded the levels of radioactive iodine considered safe for babies. (And in now supposed to be better.) This is a concern because some experts believed that because the fission necessary to produce radioactive iodine with its short half-life of just eight days stopped within minutes of the earthquake on March 11. So the fear is that more radiation is being released than what was thought.
And there are other issues as well.
Hubris is what got us into this mess. I have little patience for it now. Honest discussion, love to. Arrogance, no.
So BrainGluttenyour bother may be right that we will not have exactly the same disaster as occurred in Cheryonebe, it does not mean that we cannot have a really bad disaster or that there are no chance of sever consequences. To proclaim otherwise is not only naïve, but poor engineering.
More details from TEPCO
Humm. I wonder if this is a good thing. If only an expert could come along tell us that there is NO WAY this is a bad thing. . .