That they keep calling it “building 3” is pretty ironic. The tremendous explosion that reduced it to a smoking pile of rubble and radioactive waste might be a clue.
When they say “cracked”, do you think they mean the metal reactor is broken? Or the containment structure is breached? I noticed they refuse to ever use the word “breached” when talking about reactor 3
Can’t blame them really. You report that for the first time in history a plutonium fueled reactor has partially melted down, breached containment, and is leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere, the plant, and the ocean, people might get upset.
The Center for Disease Control does have information on cutaneous radiation injury, but the units given are grays, not sieverts, and I’m not sure of the conversion. Two of the men were reported as symptomatic, which is worrisome so early after exposure, but the reports don’t have much details as to what exactly is going on. Some news sources simply say they’ve been taken to a hospital, some are saying “lesions” which could be almost anything. For laypeople it conjures up actual wounds but medically it could be applied to patches of reddened skin - with is a possible manifestation of radiation injury to the skin and if that’s all it is people getting radiation therapy for cancer have been known to come down with worse as a side effect of treatment (though with that there is usually a delay before symptoms manifest). The two most injured were afflicted with leaky boots, which is not good, of course. Whether that’s from improper use of safety equipment or due to damage to the boots from debris in the plants who knows?
Acute injury to the skin of this sort is consistent with the high levels of radiation being reported in the plant water. It was indeed plant #3. Apparently, it is not certain where all the radioactivity came from but the reactor core is a prime suspect. However, it is not the only possibility from what I’ve seen from the true experts and all possibilities will be investigated.
With such specific dosages given for these workers (the reports giving numbers give them to the microsievert) it seems evident they are wearing some sort of dosimeter. If these are the highest exposures so far since this mess started then no, no one is dying of radiation sickness. Going forward these people should be monitored for cancer and if any is found swift action should be taken.
I wish I could find easy-for-layperson-to-understand information on all these different radiation units and conversions between them.
This is, of course, very serious. However, if the radioactive substances can be kept inside the plant that’s for the best and that clearly will be a goal as much as clean up. Yes, some radioactivity has escaped but at this point it’s still believed to be from steam and explosions, not leaking contaminated water. This doesn’t mean the surrounding area will be devoid of life. This is new territory, as it is very different in mechanism than how the Chernobyl contamination occurred, so how to deal with this will need to be worked out - by people who know what the heck they’re doing, not a bunch of armchair analysts on the internet.
The Japanese government is requesting people out to 30 km evacuate the area, but that’s largely precautionary and the extended evacuation at this point is voluntary, not mandatory. If I was withing that zone I’d leave, but I wouldn’t do so in a panic. It’s my (admittedly amateur) opinion there isn’t an immediate danger in that zone so much that if something gets much worse it would best to be out of the way of it.
AP is now reporting that both for reactor 1 and reactor 3 there is water in the buildings that is 10000 times more radioactive than in a working reactor.
Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s article. Basically, it looks like there are three types of units:
Actual radioactivity
The number of atomic disintegrations per second:
SI units: 1 becquerel (Bq) = 1 disintegration per second.
Other unit (US? Old non-SI metric?): 1 curie (Ci) = 37 gigabecquerels (GBq).
Radiation absorbed dose
SI units: 1 gray (Gy) = 1 joule of energy from the radiation absorbed per kilogram of material.
Other unit: 1 rad = 100 ergs of energy absorbed per gram of material.
1 Gy = 100 rad.
Dose equivalent
Dose equivalent is the radiation absorbed dose multiplied by a quality factor that take into account the type of radiation and what or who is absorbing it.
SI units: 1 sievert (Sv) = 1 Gy * Q
Other units: 1 rem = 1 rad * Q.
So it looks like they’re talking grays, they’re talking the raw absorption rate.
(ISTR reading in various apocalyptic stories (when I was growing up in the eighties) that “rem” stood for “radiation equivalent man”. “Rad” would be directly from “radiation absorbed dose”. Time to dig out that old Dean Ing book The Chernobyl Syndrome. It has a lot of practical info on dealing with radiation unsing household materials at the last moment–it was written in the context that there might be a sudden nuclear war at any moment.
I just want to point out as a unit of radiation measure, you couldnt come up with a better unit to scare people with.
Given that just a gram of material will have something like 10^23 atoms, it could have a half life of trillions of years, meaning that for all practical purposes its not radioactive, yet it would still “give off” a very high and scary sounding number of Bqs
Does anyone know? The three workers that were hospitalized after exposure to the radioactive water in #3. Were they at least wearing rubber firefighting boots? Also why was the water not tested with a Geiger counter?
It seems like the plant just keeps making mistake after mistake. It is the dozen little things that would make me pretty worried about these plants in terrible condition. I have no trust in the management team at this point, does anyone?
While this would be good news, it doesn’t really inspire confidence.
ETA: I would imagine a Geiger counter would be giving a massive reading at the plant anyway, and therefore wouldn’t be very useful - but I stand to be corrected.
Yes, they were. They were standing in it trying to get their job done, and some water soaked/leaked into their boots, soaking their feet. At least two of them. The water may not have leaked into the third man’s boots.
I have faith that the men who are risking their lives there on the ground, are honestly doing the best they can, and as far as I can tell, the 500 “workers” they’re using are mostly engineers, so they’re not stupid. Stupidly brave, true. I think that’s because they realize just how dangerous this situation is.
You seem to be confusing those on the ground with management. This entire disaster seems to keep being made worse by poor human judgement at higher levels. See below as a counter point. Also if the firefighting boots were used and pre-inspected, there should have been no soaking or leaking.
Given that the normal amount of radioactive iodine in seawater is probably pretty damn close to zero, that statement does more to create fear than it does to educate.
What you really want to know is how much higher is it than what is considered safe/acceptable, and thats going to be a different number.
Yes. The same goes for giving a radiation reading from reactor water in sieverts.
A Sievert is a measure of radiation dose, taking into consideration the type of emission and how much damage it does to tissue.
IT IS NOT A RADIATION READING.
The level of bad info, no info and false info is criminal at this point. These liars are probably going to end up poisoning the world again, and somebody in another country or out at sea will be the first indication it is happening.
Just like Russia. The people on site will never tell the truth, in a timely manner.
It was taken outside a supermarket in suburban Sendai. Nothing particularly bad happens, but you can see that it just goes on and on and on. For comparison, the Kobe quake that killed nearly 7000 people lasted in the region of 15 seconds. This one went on for three and a half minutes.
