A guide to radiation for the clueless...

Generali

1984ReturnsForReal wrote: »

I suggest you do some proper research on who "they" are before ascertaining their position on nuclear power.

Interesting that you take your perception on things & pass that judgment onto those who do not fit into your box.

You could just being so cryptic and make your point. It would be extremely helpful rather than trying to be like the forum cheshire cat.

ninky_2

vivatifosi wrote: »

As this remains the most active Japan thread, thought I'd mention tonight's Horizon (just finished) in case anyone fancies catching it on iPlayer. It covers the earthquake, tsunami and a bit about the nuclear emergency, though its focus is on the former two events. Very interesting.

did you watch it? i was a bit disgusted with the way they showed some of the youtube clips and were pointing out the people and cars desperately trying to get away. all very sick imho. we really didn't need a professor to point that stuff out and it didn't really increase the sum of human knowledge at all - was just for shock value entertainment at this stage afai could see.

ninky_2

chris_m wrote: »

They now say that reading was an error.

yes 'only' 100 000 times the safe / normal level now. is there a name for that sort of news release - covering terrible news by saying it's even worse so the real figures look slightly better by comparison? i'm not saying that's what they did (deliberately) but sticking a couple of extra noughts on the end does seem like quite a basic error.

michaels

^^^It appears I'm not the only one who sees it this way ^^^

I thought it was a nice little lesson in spin yesterday - announce impossibly high radiation readings then announce that it was wrong and the readings were only extremely dangerously high and get the media talking about the important issues which was obviously the failings re issuing wrong readings rather than the minor issue of the extremely dangerously high readings...

ninky_2

this hardly instills confidence in the nuclear industry....

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/market_news/article.jsp?content=D9M84O580

In the morning, Tokyo Electric Power Co. told reporters that radiation levels in contaminated water in one of the troubled reactors at the plant had surged to 10 million times the level than when the reactor is working normally.
Eight hours later, TEPCO Vice President Sakae Muto bowed in apology. They had gotten it wrong, misreading a machine that analyzes water samples and mistaking one radioactive isotope for another.
The real number turned out to be 100,000 times normal — still high, but well below their terror-inducing earlier figure that caused an immediate evacuation of workers from the reactor.
"This sort of mistake is not something that can be forgiven," Chief Cabinet spokesman Yukio Edano said Monday.
Earlier Monday, TEPCO was forced to apologize again for naming the wrong isotope in its correction. It had gotten their isotopes wrong not just once, but twice.
If such errors seem dizzyingly technical to most of the world, they are basics for the nuclear power industry, where mistaking two isotopes is a major error.

Mitsuhiko Tanaka, a Fukushima nuclear plant designer turned anti-nuclear activist, said utility officials aren't fully equipped to orchestrate the response to the crisis. He says they aren't familiar enough with reactor designs, any more than pilots or stewardesses know the design of a jet engine. He urges more involvement of designers and other experts.
"When a jet begins to crash, you don't ask the pilots for answers to what's gone wrong," he said in an interview.

ninky_2

a new rating puts fukushima at level 7 INES scale.

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/Fukushima--INES-scale-rating/

japan NRC have upgraded to 6.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/fukushima-raised-level-6-ines-scale-now-officially-more-serious-3-mile-island

ninky_2

i can see a new investment opportunity coming on. all very sad. create the problem, provide the (costly) cure.

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/US-Deveoping-Radiation-Sickness-Drug-118575759.html

Ramesh Kumar, the CEO of a U.S. drug research firm called Onconova, says his company has just such a wonder drug in the works.
The company has been collaborating on the drug, called Ex-Rad, with scientists at a U.S. Defense Department research laboratory. Kumar says early animal trials have been promising.

fimonkey

Deleted - I asked a quesiton then saw it was answered later in the thread.

ninky_2

whilst not sitting safely in foolproof pools, japan's used nuclear fuel is shipped to countries such as the UK for reprocessing. let's hope the shipment and reprocessing uses similar foolproof methodology, eh?

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20100204mr.html

The Pacific Sandpiper, a specially built cargo ship with safety features far in excess of those found on conventional vessels, left Britain's Barrow port bound for Japan the other day.



The security surrounding its departure on Jan. 21 indicates that something out of the ordinary is aboard. The Pacific Sandpiper and several sister ships make no port calls on their voyages between Europe and Japan because they carry potentially lethal nuclear material.

In the Pacific Sandpiper's hold on this journey to Japan via the Panama Canal is only one item of cargo — a giant cylinder weighing more than 100 tons. Inside are 28 containers, each made of stainless steel nearly one-third of a meter thick. They are packed with 14 tons of highly radioactive waste that has been turned into solid glass form to make it safer and easier to handle.

It is the first of a series of such shipments planned for next few years to Japan from Britain's Sellafield nuclear storage and reprocessing complex. Three years ago, a dozen similar shipments from France to Japan were successfully completed. Used fuel from nuclear power reactors that generate about one-third of Japan's electricity has been shipped to Europe for reprocessing since 1969, while vitrified waste has been sent back to Japan by sea since 1995.

1984ReturnsForReal_2

Generali wrote: »

You could just being so cryptic and make your point. It would be extremely helpful rather than trying to be like the forum cheshire cat.

My point is the news link placed on here by another poster was a PR exercise by a lifelong paid supporter of nuclear with a book to promote.

There was no constructive comments, only comments that favoured the party line whilst ignoring facts that did not suit.

Personally I prefer to look at the disability rate of the clean up workers of Chernobyl when deciding how dangerous it was.

I would look at the death rate but as you rightly pointed out the average life expectancy in that part of Russia is low & obviously this equates to over 60% dead already or was is 90%? Somewhere in between would be a good bet......

As for those against Nuclear War I am quite sure as many of them are pro Nuclear Power.

<<<<<<<< forgot the grin..

By the way. They have found plutonium outside the plant.