Last updated on March 1, 2013
Update 23:20(CET)/21:20(UTC)/06:20(JST)
NISA has not released any new update today, JAIF has released one more update since this morning. I won’t paste updated tables this time, but they can be seen in the link provided. There is no major changes to any reactor. Both number 2 and number 3 reactors are now getting their freshwater pumped with temporary electric pumps that have replaced the fire pumps used up untill now. In their latest written report they say that they have found highly contaminated water in a tunnel with pipes and cables connected to the turbine hall, the activity level is similar to the water found in the turbine hall basement and they are investigating the source of the water. They continue to se high levels of, among other things, I-131 in the seawater and suspect it is due to the contamination in the tunnel.
Kyodo reports that plutonium has been found in the soil outside the reactors. The source of the plutonium is unknown and the level is comparable to what was found in japan after the nuclear tests done by Russia and the US during the cold war. TEPCO has provided a report that gives the concentration as about 1 Bq/kg of soil of Pu-239 and less than 0.5 Bq/kg of soil of Pu-238. The levels are very low and one could practically eat tons of soil before ingesting getting a dangerous amount. There is 0.44 billionths of a gram of Pu-239 per kg of soil*, a lethal dose of plutonium-239 is half a gram. So one would have to eat more than one million metric tons of soil to get a lethal dose of the plutonium contained within the soil. That is how low the amount is (that also gives a good example how exceptionally low concentrations of radioactive materials can be detected).
NHK reports that the 3 exposed workers have been sent home and that they don’t show any symptoms of radiation sickness.
It seems like the number 2 reactor is leaking quite significant amounts of radioactive water. It’s not clear if it is coming through a breach in the containment or if it is through some of the pipes. If for instance the valves, closing the reactor from the pipes that are coming in through the containment, is leaking. The highly radioactive water is a big problem since it prevents access to the turbine halls and delays work to restore the reactors internal coolant pumps. They have found similar build ups of radioactive water in the number 1 and 3 reactors turbine halls, but not as strongly radioactive. Since it is a problem in all three reactors to some extent my bet would be that it is the valves that are leaking.
Update 09:30(CET)/07:30(UTC)/06:30(JST)
JAIF has released their update but not NISA. I will wait to write down the status of the reactors until the NISA update arrives and for now I just paste JAIF’s tabels.
Kyodo reports that TEPCO measured the radionuclide content of the water in the turbine halls wrongly, they overestimated it by a factor of a hundred. Confirming our suspicion that they are measuring wrong. Kyodo also reports that the Nuclear Safety Comission states that there has been a partial meltdown in the number 2 reactor. I am a bit surprised by this statement because it has been quite clear since the first few days that there has been a partial meltdown.
The workers that where exposed to radiation while working in the turbine hall basement have left the hospital and are reportedly in perfect health.
According to TEPCO’s latest update they have switched the cooling of the number 2 reactor from the fire pumps to temporary electric pumps.
Reuters report that the levels of radioactive material in the sea outside the plant is dropping.
Links(english)
Kyodo FOCUS: Little sense of crisis over tsunami in Japan’s nuclear power industry
Reuters Japan raps nuclear operator over radiation mistake
Links(swedish)
DN larm om hög strålning var fel
DN samtidigt ökar oron för Fukushima
Aftonbladet strålningslarmet var ett misstag
Expressen Härdsmälta i kraftverket
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Your correct assesment yesterday that the numbers were of by a factor 100 has made me admire your work even more. I find it funny that you get better and more accurate information about this subject from a website called ‘nuclearpoweryesplease’ (I mean the name is a bit biased, right?) than from traditional news sources. Really makes me wonder how much of the stuff we regularily read in the papers and believe in really is true. Thank you.
Thanks!
Well… yes, we are… we’re biased. And we’re fair. We’re biased and fair.
It comes from the fact that (nearly) all of us come from tech/science backgrounds. Science is all about being fair and biased, because when you find that your examined facts hold up to review and scrutiny, then you dare to say “This is the way it is”… i.e. you become biased towards a certain stance.
For example: when you jump out of a plane, you’ll find it’s impossible to remained unbiased about the theory of gravity… it’s there and it works!
Nuclear power is a very science-heavy subject. Once you get into the science behind it… it’s very hard to remain unbiased.
About newspapers… one has to remeber that they need to know a little about everything… thus they know everything about very little. Whenever you have a specialist subject, no matter what it is, you can expect that the facts are muddled at best.
Obviously Keke’s comment above is written by someone associated with this site.
Oh?
This should be amusing to hear: why is that so obvious (to anyone apart from you) that keke’s comment above must be from someone associated with this site? 🙂
/Michael
Because it is formulated in such a way that I have no doubt that one of you guys behind the site wrote it.
*chuckle* 🙂
You are a true believer Per… a devoted defender of the faith. 🙂
Per, why don’t you attack the facts that are presented here instead of making a fool of yourself?
OK now I know which one of you who writes fake comments under the name keke.
Please be so kind to enlighten us. We have a nice collection of accusations from people in other blog discussions of being somebody else, so it would be very nice to add your conclusions to that list. 🙂
Please tell me who am I in your parallell universe? (If I can choose I’d be Michael. Please let me be him!)
A fair and unbiased answer would probably have mentioned that yesterdays blog post suggested the numbers were off by a factor of 1000, not 100. 😉
“It was stated they where knee deep in this water! Now if we instead consider that perhaps they mean activity per liter, misstakenly reported as cubic centimeters, then everything goes down by a factor of 1000(there are one thousand cubic centimeters in a liter).“
See the comment I made at 17:03:55….. 🙂
I would never visit the same page twice! 😀
Thanks for your complement! The error we pointed out yesterday is however not the same as the one they announced now. They seem to have withdrawn the insane claim that there was 10^9 Bq of I-134 in the water, something that was obviously wrong(with that activity anyone trying to get a sample of the water would be dead before reaching the water)
But they still publish numbers of tens of mega Becquerel of activity. It’s very strange indeed.
Kinda obvious that “Keke’s” reply is probably written by someone from this site…
A tip to you Per: stick to the same name and email address as before and the spam filter will let you through automaticly.
Also… same question as above: why is that so obvious (to anyone but you that is :))?
/Michael
You are free to be silly but what’s the point?
Ah, Per is back, great! We were a bit worried that you might have a life outside of the web and had given up on us. 🙂
Radiations numbers are flying through the air from several sources and it makes it, at least for me uncertain what is going on. It is a complicated matter for us amateurs to separate the information. People with, what seems to be, a high level of imagination are talking about a Japan that is destroyed (or is going to be) for ages because of radiation. That sounds like a exaggeration.
Can good and understandable radiation information be found?
The levels of radiation in the prefectures around Fukushima seems to be going down. In Tokyo the iodine levels are below limits again etc. That is what is important.
What they are finding now are quite large levels of radiation leaking from primarily the number 2 reactor. But its not being vented through steam etc so its not spreading very far. As long as nothing dramatic happens it should remain a primarily local problem. The main impact it has is that it makes the work to restore the coolant pumps so much harder.
But the recent reports of a trench filled with water giving of a dose rate of 1 gray per hour is troubling. there must be a large leak in the number 2 containment.
Bad News! Now Plutonium has been found outside of the reactors. http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/81589.html
Why is this particulary more bad news than we already have?
Because of the highly poisonous nature of Plutonium. But you already knew that didn’t you?
Well, actually no, because plutonium isn’t highly poisonous. I know media has been flinging that particular piece of unscientific horse manure around, but they are wrong. The chemical toxicity for plutonium is about that of cadmium, that is to day clearly unsuitable to fling around the environment, but not some super-duper-extra-special-death-poison. Uranium is just as bad as plutonium.
Its specific activity with 24 100 years half-life is next to nothing compared to Iodine-131 (8.1 days) and Cs-137 (30 years)… that is to say those materials are atom-for-atom 1 million and 800 times as radioactive as plutonium.
Also, since we’re most likely talking plutonium oxides, it ges even more non-alarming because PuOx are about as immobile as they get. They have next to no soluability in water and stick to rock and dirt like glue.
OK so Plutonium isn’t highly poisonous? OK!
It’s a health hazard in sufficiently large quantities but not the super-poison the media makes it out to be, no.
So it is highly poisonous afterall then? OK
Ok, now you are just seeking a quarrel. Sorry, won’t take that bait.
Pu at a level of 1 Bq per kg soil is peanuts compared to the current Cs and I-levels.
Compared to other radionuclides already released plutonium isn’t a major health concern. The bigger concern is how and why it has been released, not that it is out there.
Read this for instance(check table 2) http://www.skb.se/upload/publications/pdf/R-99-58webb.pdf
“Plutonium är ett i några avseenden mycket farligt ämne. Det är mycket farligt att få in i kroppen särskilt via inandning. Om plutonium kommer in via mag-tarmkanalen går största delen rakt igenom och tas inte upp av kroppen. All hantering av plutonium måste på grund av inandningsrisken ske i s k handskboxar dvs täta skåp med styrd och filtrerad ventilation. De vanliga plutoniumisotoperna som finns i kärnbränsle eller batterier avger inte stark genomträngande strålning som kräver skärmning.”
Du hade kunnat läsa en mening till, Per. Bara en enda mening till…
OK en mening till : “Vid kraftig överexponering med plutonium ökar risken för lungcancer påtagligt”
Om du förångar och inhalerar det tvättmedel du använder så ökar risken för lungcancer påtagligt(om du överlever det). Faktiskt räcker det med att inhalera tillräckligt med vatten så dör du… Så vad är din poäng?
Starkare än din.
Med andra ord, du har inte blekaste aningen om vad du pratar om.
Även om det innebär en stor hälsorisk att få i sig plutonium så finns det andra ämnen,
som många människor använder dagligen, som är lika farliga. Det finns även ämnen som
är mycket giftigare än plutonium t ex botulin ett kemiskt ämne som kan bildas i gammalt
kött.
Look at table 2 on page 11. Inhaling nikotin is worse than inhaling plutonium. Considering the levels of plutonium found in Fukushima you would have to inhale one ton of soil to reach the LD50 of plutonium…
Johan I’m sorry but you are wrong, check the table again and see why.
Ahh it was injection of nikotin not inhalation, and that changes the general conclusions on Pu toxicity how exactly?
Fact is that Plutonium is very toxic and comparing it with pure nicotin (which of course is much more toxic than the small amounts of nicotine found in cigarettes) is totally in line with your agenda to make anything connected with nuclear technology seem to be less potentially harmful than it really is.
I would rather state is such that it is your agenda to portray nuclear energy and radiation as exceptionally dangerous and it really annoys you when we described the real risks involved.
It must really suck to have science against you?
When will you crusade against hydro power btw?
Johan Nuclear Power is without a doubt the most potentially dangerous form of energy that man has tried to tame, unfortunately for you science supports me in this statement. Fukushima has enough nuclearfuel to kill millions within a short period of time, even if that hopefully will not happen, but Fukushima surely won’t be the last largescale nuclearaccident we will see in our lifetime just as earthquakes and tsunamis will continue, you probably know that Japan is expecting an even more devasting earthquake than the one which recently hit them.It wasn’r very scientific to build nuclear plants in that environment.
Per: “Nuclear Power is without a doubt the most potentially dangerous form of energy that man has tried to tame … Fukushima has enough nuclear fuel to kill millions within a short period of time, …”
Could you be more foolish?!
A single moderately sized tank at a petrol terminal has enough fuel to kill tens of millions of people within a short period of time, should they ingest the contents of the tank. And that morbid statistic results from only the acute toxicity of the fuel; it doesn’t even consider that the fuel is also highly inflammable. A single terminal might house scores of these fuel tanks. If you’re so concerned about potential dangers, go protest your local petrol station.
“Science” supports that you have no concept of scale and no understanding of toxicity. Your silly factoid merely demonstrates how intellectually bankrupt your arguments are. You might think that you can make up for this deficiency with shameless hyperbole, but your over the top nonsense gives you away.
Per… kicking and screaming and presenting hyperbole nonsense isn’t helping your cause, whatever it may be.
Simple facts:
– the world’s worst nuclear accident killed less than 64 people in 20 years.
– the world’s worst dam accident killed 160 000 people.
– fossil fuels kill 2 million people every year in India alone.
In the time since the tsunami hit Japan, 3 times as many as were killed by the tsunami have died prematurely from fossil fuels.
I have no idea why you are so desperate in trying to make people scared of nuclear power… you apparently have some kind of personal investment in it… but you can’t hide the fact that 2½ weeks into an earthquake (with over 500 aftershocks), tsunami, three meltdowns, four explosions and what was probably a fire in an open fuel pool, Fukushima is still holding the casualty count at zero… and this is with up to 40 year old reactors, most of them missing vital security features, such as blowout filters and spark generators to burn off hydrogen.
Suck it up Per… you’re not going to get the nuclear disaster with piles of dead people you were hoping for. You built your world around a percieved imaged of nuclear power as hideously dangerous… and now you’re sorely disappointed that it wasn’t right. That’s probably why you are so annoyed at us right now.
Michael, why do you state false facts?
Tjernobyl: “Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously; the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000 while a Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more. ”
As for india please give a valid source for your claim that 2 million people die each year because of fossil fuels.
Are you really so desperate? I have no idea why you are so desperate in trying to make people think nuclear power is harmless and safe… you apparently have some kind of personal investment in it.
Nothing false about these figures. Read them yourself:
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf
How convinient of you to “forget” to comment the Banqiao disaster…
The source for the Indian health problem relating to fossil fuels is:
Ahmad, K. (2002) “Pollution cloud over south Asia is increasing ill health” Lancet (17 August 2002), 360(9332): p. 549, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(02)09762-3
I have never said that nuclear power is harmless and immune to accidents. That’s nonsense from you. But there is a very large gap between “harmless and immune to accidents” and your doomsday scenarios where you are claiming that nuclear power is “without a doubt the most potentially dangerous form of energy”.
You keep trying to use this trick all the time Per… where you try to paint those that do not agree with your extreme negative views as ruthless apologists and denialists. It’s not working and only making you look stupid and unreasonable so give it up.
A nuclear power facility is a large industrial site. Of course it can have accidents with wide consequences! Noone has denied that. Trying to claim that this has been denied is one of the worst lies that anti-nukes fling around.
But it is also not the end of the world as we know it, nor any of your silly doomsday scenarios with millions of dead people. That’s just bullshit. You’re trying to make nuclear power as worse than it is. Why? What’s your investment in that, hm?
Michael the IAEA report about Chernobyl is seriously biased and flawed and you know it but still use it to suppoirt your “facts” which is sad on your part. The source for your claim about 2 millions of death by fossil fuel in India every year is very shady to say the least.And you know that but still use it.
I never claimed that Nuclear Power is the end of he world, but it could be especially as you people who have fallen in love with the technology are so uncritical to the industry who puts making money far ahead of safety. Tepco & Fukushima is a “good” but tragic example of this.But you won¨t even admit to that as you can’t admit to being wrong even though you obviously regarding Fukushima have loads of eggs all over your face.
Per I suggest you contact IAEA and with your extensive expertise in radiation protection and environmental radiology explain to them how they are wrong, I am sure they will appreciate input from someone with such vast knowledge as yourself! I continue to be impressed by the depth of your experience in these fields that you highlight with your well thought out comments.
Johan everyone knows that IAEA’s agenda is first and foremost to promote nuclear power. In the report one sees numerous attempts at playing down the risks of radiation. Just like you do on this site time after time after time..
And fact is that Michael was deadwrong when he stated that only 64 people died because of Chernobyl in 20 years.
“The International Agency for Research on Cancer, another UN agency, predicts 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; an assessment by the Russian academy of sciences says there have been 60,000 deaths so far in Russia and an estimated 140,000 in Ukraine and Belarus.
Meanwhile, the Belarus national academy of sciences estimates 93,000 deaths so far and 270,000 cancers, and the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far.
The mismatches in figures arise because there have been no comprehensive, co-ordinated studies of the health consequences of the accident. This is in contrast to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where official research showed that the main rise in most types of cancer and non-cancer diseases only became apparent years after the atomic bombs fell.
With Chernobyl there have been difficulties in gathering reliable data from areas left in administrative chaos after the accident. Hundreds of thousands of people were moved away from the affected areas, and the break-up of the Soviet Union led to records being lost.
Controversy rages over the agendas of the IAEA, which has promoted civil nuclear power over the past 30 years, and the WHO. The UN accepts only peer-reviewed scientific studies written in certain journals in English, a rule said to exclude dozens of other studies”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/10/chernobyl-nuclear-deaths-cancers-dispute
Yes of course, anyone that goes against your alarmist viewpoint must be definition be a payed shill right?
IAEA and WHO IS conducting a long term study of Chernobyl(check Chernobyl forum) and they release reports about it. These results are accepted as accurate pretty much unanimously by the worlds health physics societies. If you don’t trust that, then pick up the phone and call some random radiation protection experts around the world.
Talking about Hiroshima, here is an interview about Fukushima with one of the lead researchers conducting studies on the cancer rates due to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Ohh my my, I bet he is payed by the nuclear industry!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/03/24/134833008/why-we-may-not-learn-much-new-about-radiation-risks-from-fukushima?ft=1&f=1001
“Given what you said about the impossibility of doing the kind of long-term study you mounted of the atom-bomb survivors, can we learn anything from the current episode?
On the basis of our current estimates, there shouldn’t be measurable numbers of cancers. So you won’t be able to count them, ever. But once the dose estimates are put together and extrapolated, you should be able to make a crude estimate of the health effects, based on the RERF data. And I think that estimate will surprise a lot of people.
And they’ll be surprised because?
They’re so low.”
OK so now you want to compare Fukushima to Hiroshima? Which you probably know is not so relevant.as radiation from the explosion of an atom bomb in a short space of time differs from longterm radioactive particles spread from failed nuclear plants.
I never said that it is impossible to do long term studies but it is hard. And as I said Michael stated that only 64 people died because of Chernobyl in 20 years. Do you also believe that? Because it is false by all accounts.
I didn’t do the comparison, the researcher doing research on the Hiroshima victims made the comparison. You make a nice point btw, a long spread out exposure to radiation is different from a short blast of it. The former is much less dangerous since the body is capable of handling small dose rates.
I don’t have the exact confirmed death count in my head and I won’t bother looking it up. Michaels number sounds like the number stated by the IAEA in their report.
IAEA also state that one might see a couple of thousand cases of lethal cancers, in the future tense. i.e those people have not gotten it yet and one has yet to see any increase of cancer beyond thyroid cancer. It is a hypothesis based on a model of cancer risk vs radiation exposure called LNT, linear no threshold model.
There is also a bunch of thyroid cancer cases where some of them turned out lethal. But all in all the number of known deaths are utterly insignificant compared to the deaths due to hydro power and less than the deaths due to the Bhopal incident. Chernobyl didn’t kill nearly as much people as the environmental movement hoped for.
Talking about Bhopal, a couple of japanese refineries where burning openly for 10 days, why don’t you worry about the carcinogens from that fire? Is it because its not radioactive and thus not evil? Why not demand the dismantling of all refineries. A refinery fire can happen in Göteborg and the distance from the refinery to the city center is not far.
“I don’t have the exact confirmed death count in my head and I won’t bother looking it up.”
Figures. So only 64 deaths in 20 years because of Chernobyl then- You do understand that this takes your credibility even lower.
As for Bhopal of course what you say is bad, but this site is called Nuclearpoweryespeas so lets focus on nuclear power for now. And yes I spelled it wrong by choice.
Like I said, if you don’t like it talk to the IAEA. I am sure they will appreciate your expertise in the relevant fields as much as we do!
Honestly, I don’t care about our credibility in your eyes. I care about hard facts, unfortunately for you they point in a completely different direction than what you hope. If we are biased towards nuclear, then its because the facts show that nuclear is the one energy source with the smallest environmental impact, the least number of deaths per produced kwh, the smallest ecological footprint and also the one energy source with the largest potential for development.
If you don’t like that, then its between you and the laws of physics because those properties are inherent to the vast energy released by tiny amounts of material when fissioned.
Per: “Johan everyone knows that IAEA’s agenda is first and foremost to promote nuclear power. In the report one sees numerous attempts at playing down the risks of radiation.”
Ah … so Per is a conspiracy theorist as well.
“The International Agency for Research on Cancer, another UN agency, predicts 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; …”
No, they don’t. That number was based on a off comment by one researcher who is no longer with IARC. In fact, IARC is part of the WHO, which was partially responsible for the Chernobyl Forum reports. Are you telling me that they don’t endorse their own work?
Typical inaccurate reporting from The Guardian. Who is surprised?
Brian?
Almost everybody who isn’t in the nuclearbusiness agrees that it is not good for IAEA to sit on so many chairs as they do. That they have an agenda is wellknown and by reading their reports there is no doubt that they constantly playdown the risks of nuclear power and radiation.
IAEA should be split into three separate parts completely independent of each other and they should be 100% financed by UN not by the nuclear industry.
Per?
Wow, I didn’t expect you to demonstrate so quickly how ill-informed you are! Criticizing you is like shooting fish in a barrel. 😉
“IAEA … should be 100% financed by UN not by the nuclear industry.”
The IAEA is not financed by the nuclear industry, you idiot. It is funded by its 151 Member states. Not surprisingly, most of the money comes from the more wealthy Western countries.
I seriously doubt that you have ever read an IAEA report.
“almost everybody who isn’t in the nuclearbusiness agrees”…..
You just excluded 99% of the people who actually knows what they are talking about!
My guess is you don’t know a single person involved with radiation protection, nuclear medicine, nuclear engineering or any other field related to nuclear. So your “almost everybody” efficiently excludes anyone with any knowledge.
Will you next say something like:
“almost everybody who isn’t a doctor agrees that medicine is a bad thing”
So you really think that its good that IAEA sits on too many different chairs? Then you prove me right. Unfortunately for you even some people inside the nuclear industry questions this and the lack of objectivity which comes frpm sitting on too many chairs.
Example
“The disclosure that IAEA damage-assessment documents are based on those issued by a Japanese industry group is likely to raise pressure on the embattled organization. The agency has released inaccurate information and been criticized by member states, especially in Europe, for doing too little since a 7- foot (2.1-meter) tsunami damaged the reactors on March 11.
“The IAEA’s role in dispensing advice should go beyond simply relaying information provided by the affected state,” the agency’s former top inspector, Ollie Heinonen, wrote in an analysis posted yesterday on Harvard University’s website. “It is of fundamental importance that the IAEA assess such information independently, relying on other sources of information and from its own findings on the ground.”
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:J2M85_wUkGQJ:www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-23/un-watchdog-mimics-japanese-nuclear-lobbyists-to-communicate-information.html
The critique you presented wants the IAEA to sit on even more chairs, making it into an authority on top of its current role. So that kind of negates your point.
I would not in anyway mind a IAEA with more authority, for instance authority to shut down reactors that doesn’t pass rigid safety requirements.
Your claim that the IAEA is just shills for the nuclear industry and that their reports regarding Chernobyl is flawed is not supported by any credible people.
Reuters- Greed in the nuclear industry and corporate influence over the U.N. watchdog for atomic energy may doom Japan to a spreading nuclear disaster, one of the men brought in to clean up Chernobyl said on Tuesday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/us-chernobyl-clean-up-expert-slams-japan-idUSTRE72E7AL20110315
The radioactive water is not leaking from valves. According to TEPCO it probably comes from holes in the reactor pressure vessels. The holes were caused by fuel melting down and burning through the vessels. See link to article below.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/china-detects-radiation-over-southeast-coastal-areas-asahi-reports-holes-reactor-pressure-ve
Thanks for the link!
That still doesn’t explain the leakage though. If the pressure vessels has a holes, then all the crap will leak out into the containment. But only reactor number 2 has a breached containment(the wet-well) while number 1 and 3 has undamaged containments. The leakage is happening to some extent in all three reactors even though it is worst in reactor number 2.
The hole in the pressure vessel can not be very large, at least not in reactor number 3, because they maintain a pressure differential between the reactor vessels and the containments.
Ahh I see that they write the same thing about pressure as I said above.
I think the low temperature readings in the lower head during the last few days also hints that a melt through the vessel cant be very large.
I must say that reading Per’s comments makes my days so much better. It’s like reading a comic book, really amusing 🙂
Victor laugh now cry later
That’s what you anti-nukes said before Fukushima as well.
And here we are… three meltdowns… explosions… leaking containments… and we’re not crying yet… except for the 28 000 dead/missing from the real disaster.
Don’t you find it rather horrible to be hoping for people to get hurt just so you won’t have to say “Ok, I was wrong… nuclear power isn’t all that bad as I made it out to be”?
Michael most people probably find it much more horrible that you constantly use the dead from the Tsunami as an alibi to downplay the seriousness of the Fukushima accident. Sorry but your tactics have backfired, again.
Per: “Michael most people probably find it much more horrible that you constantly use the dead from the Tsunami as an alibi …”
Yes, because we all know that Per would never use reports of 16,000 deaths, 60,000 deaths, 140,000 deaths, 93,000 deaths, or 500,000 deaths to make his point.
Taking the high road, are we, Per?
Brian?
It was Michael who once again started it by stating that only 64 people after 20 years had died because of the Chernobyl accident which is an outright lie. I wanted to show that not everyone agrees with IAEA who have an agenda just like this site in showing that radiation is nothing to worry about. How many died is an open question which probably never will be answered but definitively more than 64 people have died in the 20 years since Chernobyl because of that accident.
Per: “It was Michael who once again started it by stating that only 64 people after 20 years had died because of the Chernobyl accident which is an outright lie.”
I agree. Those 64 statistics include deaths that resulted from such “Chernobyl-accident” causes as coronary heart disease and liver cirrhosis. It is an outright lie to claim that they were killed by the Chernobyl accident.
Unacknowledged by the “green” propaganda houses that fuel Per’s insanity, however, is the fact that fear of radiation has caused far more deaths than the radiation itself.
Per – I suggest you actually read the IAEA/WHO reports.
Brian?
I have read the IAEA report. It’s bogus.
Good, case closed! Now you can go and write a letter to your local newspaper about your findings, and we will focus on our things. Thank you for stopping by.
When it comes to who we chose to put our trust in, the Chernobyl Forum (seven UN agencies and three countries) vs. anonymous nuclear-hating blog troll whose main and only argument is “it’s bogus”…
…well…
…hmmm…. it’s a really tough choice…
…naw, just kidding: the blog troll loses big-time. 🙂
So you still claim that only 64 people died because of Chernobyl within 20 years? I don¨t think anybody else claims that not even people of the Chernobyl Forum. You can try to ridicule me but it only falls back on yourself and spotlights your naivety.
Eventually, there will be 134 “victims” of Chernobyl, because all of the 103 patients who suffered from acute radiation disease after the accident and survived (31 did not) will eventually die.
I predict that they all will be counted as having been killed by Chernobyl — even if they were hit by a bus or died of extreme old age — just as 19 of this group, who had died before 2004, were counted as killed by Chernobyl in the 2005 report. These Chernobyl casualties included deaths from coronary heart disease, tuberculosis, liver cirrhosis, etc., all “caused” by the reactor accident.
This is all buried in the report, but somehow it doesn’t appear when the statistic is quoted that 64 people were killed by Chernobyl. It isn’t even that many.
The 4000, 9000, 16,000, or even 100,000 eventual deaths that are often tossed about are simply an abuse of statistics. They result from an extrapolation of a flawed risk model that we know does not reflect the real world. I could abuse the same technique to claim that the high elevation and soil composition of Denver results in thousands of eventual cancer deaths, even though the statistics of actual, real cancer deaths show no such trend.
Brian?
We are talking about Chernobyl now and Michaels claim that only 64 people died because of that accident within 20 years. A claim which is ludicrous if one checks the facts about Chernobyl.
And once again Per. That is the IAEA numbers, they have looked at the facts. So has many other expert organs. They come to the same conclusions. No increase in cancer, except for thyroid cancer which have caused an estimated 15 extra deaths, have been seen after Chernobyl. All other deaths are the immediet deaths during the initial days of the accident and as Brian states, some radiation unrelated deaths in the first responders on the site. It is clearly stated in the report that many of those deaths are unrelated.
If you want to find higher numbers you have to dive into the big latrine pool of the environmental movement and out of that filth drag out “reports” by the likes of greenpeace. Things that have no connection to scientific methodology what so ever.
“HOW MANY DIED?
Acute Radiation Sickness (ARS) deaths in 1986: 28
ARS patients who died later: 19 (some from other causes)
Others who died during explosion: 2
Child thyroid cancer deaths (1992-2002): 15 (UN figure)
Predicted extra cancer deaths: from 4,000 (UN) to 93,000 (Greenpeace)
Estimated deaths from non-cancer causes 1990-2004: 107,000 (Greenpeace)
Dozens killed in accidents building sarcophagus (according to an engineer)”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4917526.stm
Per,
the number from greenpeace doesnt even deserve a comment.
The IAEA 4000 estimated future deaths of cancer are FUTURE! Future like in opposed to past. It means they have not happened yet, due to the long time between radiation exposure and the appearance of solid cancers. So far NO increase in solid cancer has been seen. The only form of cancer to have increased is thyroid cancer.
IAEA estimates that up to 4000 people might develop fatal cancer in the future. It is an estimate, not a death count. Understand the difference?
Well even the WHO makes Michaels claim seem preposterous. And makes it obvious that IAEA whitewashed the effects of ‘Chernobyl.
“”The Greenpeace report is looking at all of Europe, whereas our report looks at only the most affected areas of the three most affected countries,” said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl.
“The WHO felt it had recourse to the best national and international scientific evidence and studies when it came up with its estimates of [up to] 9,000 excess deaths for the most affected areas. We feel they’re very sound.””
If the estimate is 4000 or 10000 it doesn’t really matter. You can find plenty of studies that all fall in that range somewhere. The numbers will constantly be revised up or down based on new and better information(that is what science is about after all).
What matter is that it is not a million that the environmental movement claims in their most ridiculous reports.
What matters is that the general order of magnitude between the studies match.
What matter is that the worst nuclear accident the world has ever seen, in a type of reactor that no sane country would build, will cause such few deaths that it will be pretty much impossible to see it in the cancer statistics(picking out 4000 or 10000 among hundreds of thousands of natural cancer cases is not possible). Other industrial accidents have been equal to or worse than Chernobyl(Bhopal and Banqiao) and no body is demanding the immediate shut down of the chemical industry or all hydro power.
Don’t you think that it is a weaknesss of the IAEA/WHO report that it only covers parts of three countries? Radiation knows no borders.
Not really since no other country got exposed to significant fallout. There is no point in including countries where the dosages due to Chernobyl was significantly smaller than the natural yearly dosage from background radiation. Any theoretical increase in cancer will be statistically impossible to track and such studies become examples of mental masturbation instead of adding anything to science.
So better to blink for what one doesn`t want to see then? I don’t know how old you are but if you are old enough you might remember that Sweden got quite a lot of cesium from Chernobyl and we were told not to eat some meat and certain berrys and mushrooms because of elevated levels of radiation. Some claim that the areas worst hit by Chernobyl in Sweden has suffered from more cancer deaths.
You really make an effort to twist anything we write to fit your preconceived notions don’t you?
So let me ask this, do you find it worthwhile to do a study on radiation dosages that are smaller than the difference in background radiation between different cities in Sweden?
The average natural gamma dose rate in Trelleborg for instance is half that of the average in Sweden. That difference is larger than the dose you get from Chernobyl.
We see zero effect on cancer statistics attributable to differences in background radiation in different regions in Sweden. You want to look for the effect of even smaller dose rate differences due to Chernobyl. Good luck! How do you suggest a study is designed to see what effect Chernobyl has had, when it is smaller than the natural variation? Now you have your chance to shine with your extensive experience in radiation protection!
It’s not about closing ones eyes for things one doesn’t want to see. It is about rationally seeing that there is no point. Doses due to Chernobyl much smaller than the natural ones are completely pointless to study.
Some claim a lot of things, I now claim the dark side of the moon got a high population of faeries sustaining themself by eating large amounts of radioactive cheese. Do you want the IAEA to study that claim as well?
Johan background radiation and radiation from failed nuclear reactors differs somewhat as you probably know. I’d say that most people find that IAEA have whitewashed their report by narrowing the area that the report cover, of course you don’t think so, but then again you are as biased as IAEA who after all makes a living of promoting nuclear power.
Really, is it? Im very interested in how you think a cell can tell the difference between being ionized by natural radionuclides and artificial radionuclides. Does the alpha, beta and gamma particles come with a label “made in a reactor” so the cell can respond to the free radicals in a different way?
Please tell me what mechanism makes the ionization different so that a cell knows if it got a milligray from a natural gamma emitter or a artificial one. I am preparing to be enlightened once again by the vast radiobiology knowledge you consistently display.
Per: “… background radiation and radiation from failed nuclear reactors differs somewhat as you probably know.”
Oh, they differ greatly … to the ignorant and superstitious. To those with a scientific background, however, they’re all the same particles, with the same effects.
You’re amazing, Per. I rarely come across someone as scientifically illiterate as you.
Hm, in contrast, even the most absurd comic books (personally I am a sucker for Boucq) tend to have a storyline…
Lantzelot, figures that you are an avid comic book reader, pretty soon there will be a comic book about Fukushima, maybe then you and your friends will understand how serious it is. Or maybe not..
Sorry Per, I didn’t learn much from the Helen and Tom and the Nuclear Reactor story either, but I do enjoy the Herge/Bob de Moor ripoff.
By the way, the manga scene is way ahead of us on the subject.
You mean ahead of you guys?
My apologies Per, I tend to forget about your superior intelligence.
Certainly you have also seen this one a long time ago.
The best way to kill a troll is to stop feeding it.
Please use your time doing what you do best instead of feeding an internet troll.
More updates to the articles instead of posting the new info in the troll stew.
I am still waiting for Per to explain how “natural” radiation differs from radiation from fission products, I am soooo curious and would want to learn from his infinite wisdom here…