Clearly Japan wouldn’t want to call it a 7 without good evidence. Now that they have it (and probably with a good deal or arm twisting from the US and France) they upgraded it.
While the amounts of radioactive materials are staggering, much higher than even the alarmists thought, the real reason for a 7 category is loss of containment. Which seemed obvious once we saw pictures of the reactor buildings, but they kept saying “we don’t know”, which is actually accurate, and they won’t know by observations for decades, if ever.
But the amount of radioactive material that has left the reactors and ended up in the air, land and ocean, they can’t keep that covered up. And while a nuclear denier really wants to believe, physics tells us that radioactive material from the core of a reactor flooding into the ocean means the containment is breached.
As I peruse the smorgasbord of denial that one can find online, the impression that one gets, is of a serious eyed spokesman from a large corporation assuring us that 220,000 people losing their homes, cars, businesses, farms, everything, due to radiation leaking from exploded and burned power reactors, just isn’t that bad.
He points to hard hit areas, and reminds you that it was worse elsewhere. And then he gets a little disturbed when nobody buys his act.
reports are 2 plant workers have been killed. though i suppose because they were killed due to explosion some would claim they were not nuclear deaths.
Bullshit. The workers are getting fried and they know it. The radiation spraying around the heavily populated environment will result in lots of deaths in the future. radiation does not make you keel over in the streets. It disrupts your DNA allowing cancers to start. The death toll will not be completely known for decades.
Why do you think they are evacuating a huge area? Kids and pregnant women are especially vulnerable. But they will not keel over within your attention span.
I mean, fuck, is it really too much to ask for you to read a cite? Same link as above:
"Thus far the worst exposure was suffered by three workers who stood in ankle-deep radioactive water for several hours and sustained doses above 100 millisievert from doing so, indicating local levels of 20-odd millisievert/hour. They have suffered zero health consequences as a result. As of the latest reports, as many as four other workers (of all the many hundreds present at the site) have gone above 100 millisievert: the maximum level allowed is 250 before being withdrawn from the operation altogether, but as is common in the nuclear industry intense caution is being exercised.
Danger beyond the plant fence has remained effectively nil. As of yesterday, according to nuclear experts at MIT in the States (reviewing data from Japanese and international monitoring teams on the ground) the highest dose rates seen within 30km of the plant have been 0.0016 millisievert/hour.
For context, you could live permanently under radiation levels of 0.0016 mS/hr and you would never achieve even half the annual dose levels permitted by airline crew.
The only actual health menace of any kind beyond the plant fence from Fukushima (and indeed following Chernobyl) has been presented by ingestion of radioisotopes in food: specifically of radioisotopic iodine. For adults this appears to have almost no effect, but in the case of children radio-iodine is taken up and concentrated in the thyroid gland very efficiently. Even though it decays away completely in a matter of weeks (iodine-131 has a half-life of just eight days), if a child ingests even quite small amounts of radio-iodine he or she will have a tiny extra risk of thyroid cancer in future – about 0.02 per cent, based on Chernobyl.
Fortunately, thyroid cancer – unusually among cancers – is almost always curable without ill effects (this is done, counterintuitively, using much larger amounts of iodine-131) and so the chance of such a child actually dying as a result of such exposure is unfeasibly tiny: less than one chance in a million."
Christ, at this rate I’m going to fall foul of the fair use policy for quotes just because clicking on a link is too much fucking effort for you.
Of course not. These explosions weren’t caused by nuclear reactions directly, they were only related to nuclear reactions through a long chain of causation. And they were in Japan, in Fukushima, not here. The laws of physics are such that no explosions occur in the USofA because we are exceptional. Unlike the Japanese, our nuclear plants are designed by American companies like GE and Westinghouse. And our nuclear plants are of later generations of design.
What’s that you say? Fukushima designs are from the same design era as all existing US plants? Bullshit I say! You say GE designed the Fukushima plants? Bullshit I say. Those are lies! Like the lies about it being a 7! There is no proof that it is still a 7! Just like there was not proof that it was ever admitted it was a 7 while it was still a 7! Just like there are no dead bodies of workers killed in the blasts that didn’t happen. You guys are such liars. Irrational liars!
Many nuclear experts claim no radiation is ok. it disrupts your DNA. .We are all snowflakes, a little bit different that everyone else. For some residents near the plant cancer is in their future. Others will not get it. But many will. They will die from this nuclear plant’s radioactive excrement.
If you claim nobody will die you are making a stupid claim. They will ,but nuke fans can wave it away in a decade or so and claim it is unrelated. That is what they do. And people who are pro nuke will eat it up.