1661

A drive through the exclusion zone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp9iJ3pPuL8&hd=1

1662

Nope, probably not.

1663

Just like in Chernobyl it will take a while for the facts to be officially confirmed and to reach mainstream publications.

1664

So, you believe that the facts are being suppressed?

1665

random fact. It was reported that an australian journalist crew landed their helicopter 30 km away from the plant due to ice. They had to cleanup the rotors… After returning to their home base, radiation was meassured at the shoes. How comes that a random spot on the map 30 km outside of the facilities has enough radiation to be found on someones shoes… I don’t say it is high enough to be an immediate danger, but the 30 km area is certainly polluted as a whole… if not even more area is polluted or radiated. How is it possible to pollute such an area if everything is contained…? I don’t believe it.

1666

Radioactive elements escaped after the hydrogen explosions, contaminating the neighbouring area. Has this somehow escaped your notice? Keeping the reactors cooled and contained is an ongoing job and it’s not easy. They are still looking for temporary solutions before they can settle on something permanent.

But the pollution still doesn’t come close to the levels spread at Chernobyl, so your smug fear-mongering misses the target yet again.

1667

The Japanese government is not exactly known for being fourth coming, but I wouldn’t compare them with Soviet Russia.

1668

For fuck’s sake. They’re measuring elevated radiation levels directly linked to Fukishima as far away as Copenhagen. Nobody is saying that nothing made it out, just that the levels are so extremely low that it doesn’t make any difference and can only be measured by very fine equipment.

The above is exactly the kind of stupid fearmongering crap, we get too much off. How much radiation was measured on these people? Was it a health risk to anybody? Those are relevant questions, that somebody heard that something was measured somewhere and then screaming “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” doesn’t help. You sound like Glen Beck “I’m not saying it is… but it makes you wonder!”

1669

didn’t say the sky is falling, you funny guy. I know that in your view of the world everything is fine, as long as you get your paycheck you don’t have to switch on your brain…

1670

Then where do they fall in the order? Sloppy seconds?

H.

1671

Radioactive stuff is ridiculously easy to detect and identify even in the tiniest quantities. That’s why it gets used for lots of different tracing-type jobs. Saying you can detect the stuff without mentioning at what level is meaningless.

1672

And he’s called Tetsuo.

1673

Newbrof - you should probably look into the radioactivity level of bananas. I’m not saying they’re radioactive and you should stop eating them, but it makes you wonder.

1674

At 2km, encountered a bulldog.

1675

Yeah, I was hoping they’d take the dogs out. Or at least drop the bulldog off farther away where the other dogs were.

1676

So from that video the radiation exposure in the exclusion zone is around 1-2 μSv/hour. So spending a year inside the exclusion zone would be like getting a single chest x-ray. I had several of those a day when I was in hospital last.

1677

It would be a Chest X-ray every 26 hours at 1.8km from the plant. Double that at right outside the plant. The highest measurement was a full Sievert an hour, which would be if you were standing in the pool of leaked radioactive water inside the outer containment. (Inner containment was breached, outer wasn’t.)

1678

It depends. What’s the number you’re using for the chest x-ray? But if you’re spending a year in the exclusion zone, you’re not just talking about what you’re exposed to via air, but also what you eat and drink that’s also exposed. It’s additive within the food chain, no?

1.5km from the plant, it was nearly 10 μSv/hour. The other thing to keep in mind is unlike a chest x-ray, it isn’t localized to a specific area of your body. According to this, depending on what you’re counting as a chest x-ray it could be…

Edit: Actually, I was wrong. 1 μSv = 0.1 mrem. Choosing a 6 mrem (PA and Lateral) radiograph, that’d be 60 μSv, which means if you go just 1 μSv per hour, that’s a chest radiograph every 3 days or so. So in a year of just exposure, that’s over 100 chest x-rays per year. A chest CT Scan is 800 mrem, and it’s my understanding they do want to limit how often you get CT scans. Over 100 is a bit different than just 1, not even counting the additive effects of it getting into the food chain (if that’s correct).

Edit 2: Is my math wrong? Am I misreading that? A one hundred times difference between conclusions is a lot.

Edit 3: And heres’ the wiki articles on CXR (chest x-ray) and CT scans.

Edit 4: And busting out the calculator, it’s 140.8 chest x-rays (PA and lateral) per year, basing it on an exposure of 1 μSv per hour.

1679

It’s the equivalent of one CT chest x-ray a year. My bad.

But still it’s 5 or 10 times background radiation levels. In the days after Chernobyl places a thousand of kilometers away, like Finland, had levels that were hundreds of times greater than background levels. Finland didn’t suffer any major long-term issues. Helsinki is still a very nice place to live. You’d need to multiply those radiation levels by a factor of around 50-250,000 before radiation poisoning starts.

As a comparison, 5-15km from Chernobyl after the explosion, radiation levels were at 100-1000 mSv. That’s up to a million times the levels we can see in the video in the same area.

1680

Well the exclusion zone exists mainly as a precautionary measure and radiation is more damaging to children. I think long term, these elevated levels (especially considering that the surrounding area includes farm land) could still have a negative impact on health. And that’s not even counting what the leak (for however long) had been dumping into the ocean, where levels were much higher.

Consider, at least according the wikipedia… this was the dose of radiation during the Three Mile Island accident:

Average dose to people living within 16 km of Three Mile Island accident: 0.08 mSv during the accident

That’s only 80 μSv. I don’t see Fukushima ending anytime soon. So while comparisons of equivalence to Chernobyl aren’t warranted, that doesn’t necessarily mean the radiation release from Fukushima will end up being harmless.