This is so confused, I don't know where to start

[mooncliff]

I really do enjoy this site and read every post every day, but this kind of confusion makes me ask "Are they on coke?"

The story keeps changing from one day to the next, and one day molten radioactive fuel is leaking from the reactor AN EVERYBODY GONNA DIE, and the next there is a problem with the pit under the reactor AN EVERYBODY GONNA DIE. If they really knew what was going on, they would produce a detailed diagram showing what they think is happening. In detail.

So confused I cannot follow what they think they are saying. This is a really serious situation, and I wish they would spend time trying to understand what is actually happening instead of fabricating infotainment to get more traffic. They certainly have the mental gifts to do better than this.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/att...nmanned-drone-

[metalman]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

So confused I cannot follow what they think they are saying. This is a really serious situation, and I wish they would spend time trying to understand what is actually happening instead of fabricating infotainment to get more traffic.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/att...nmanned-drone-

but... that's what zerocred does. that's the modus operandi. hey, it works, doesn't it? you go there every day.

i wish ej would tell us more about what he's hearing first hand from experts who are assisting with the emergency response. so far all he's told us is that there was a partial meltdown in one reactor and this has not been confirmed to the public yet even though it was known 2 wks ago & that the sorry condition of the workers there has been suppressed & that the crisis is far from over.

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

Like metalman said: that is their MO. I think on the whole the level of hyperventilation has gone down over the years ( has it been years?). The level of reporting is low, but it is a measure of the fact vacuum that we swim in that I feel like i am getting better informed by Eric Janzen and "Tyler Durden" than CNN.

[don]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

I share your confusion, Mooncliff. I don't doubt for a moment the sincerity of our 'tulipers that consistently minimize the dangers of Fukushima. On the other hand, the engineering mindset tends to discount most cautions raised in furthering advanced technologies, especially nuclear. After reading the following (rant?) I don't know what to think. (Is he a charlatan or is he even more agenda driven than engineering?)



Chris Busby is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. He is visiting Professor at the University of Ulster and also Guest Researcher at the Julius Kuehn Institute of the German Federal Agricultural Institute in Braunschweig, Germany. He was a member of the UK Committee Examining Radiation Risk on Internal Emitters CERRIE and the UK MoD Depleted Uranium Oversight Board. He was Science and Policy Interface leader of the Policy Information network on Child Health and Environment based in the Netherlands. He was Science and Technology Speaker for the Green Party of England and Wales. He has conducted fundamental research on the health effects of internal radiation both at the theoretical and epidemiological level, including recently on the genotoxic effects of the element uranium.


Deconstructing Nuclear Experts

By CHRIS BUSBY

Since the Fukushima accident we have seen a stream of experts on radiation telling us not to worry, that the doses are too low, that the accident is nothing like Chernobyl and so forth. They appear on television and we read their articles in the newspapers and online. Fortunately the majority of the public don’t believe them. I myself have appeared on television and radio with these people; one example was Ian Fells of the University of Newcastle who, after telling us all on BBC News that the accident was nothing like Chernobyl (wrong), and the radiation levels of no consequence (wrong), that the main problem was that there was no electricity and that the lifts didn’t work. “ If you have been in a situation when the lifts don’t work, as I have” he burbled on, “you will know what I mean.” You can see this interview on youtube and decide for yourself.

What these people have in common is ignorance. You may think a professor at a university must actually know something about their subject. But this is not so. Nearly all of these experts who appear and pontificate have not actually done any research on the issue of radiation and health. Or if they have, they seem to have missed all the key studies and references. I leave out the real baddies, who are closely attached to the nuclear industry, like Richard Wakeford, or Richard D as he calls himself on the anonymous website he has set up to attack me, “chrisbusbyexposed”.

I saw him a few times talking down the accident on the television, labelled in the stripe as Professor Richard Wakeford, University of Manchester. Incidentally, Wakeford is a physicist, his PhD was in particle physics at Liverpool. But he was not presented as ex- Principle Scientist, British Nuclear Fuels, Sellafield. That might have given the viewers the wrong idea. Early on we saw another baddy, Malcolm Grimston, talking about radiation and health, described as Professor, Imperial College. Grimston is a psychologist, not a scientist, and his expertise was in examining why the public was frightened of radiation, and how their (emotional) views could be changed. But his lack of scientific training didn’t stop him explaining on TV and radio how the Fukushima accident was nothing to worry about. The doses were too low, nothing like Chernobyl, not as bad as 3-Mile Island, only 4 on the scale, all the usual blather. Most recently we have seen George Monbiot, who I know, and who also knows nothing about radiation and health, writing in The Guardian how this accident has actually changed his mind about nuclear power (can this be his Kierkegaard moment? Has he cracked? ) since he now understands (and reproduces a criminally misleading graphic to back up his new understanding) that radiation is actually OK and we shoudn’t worry about it. George does at least know better, or has been told better, since he asked me a few years ago to explain why internal and external radiation exposure cannot be considered to have the same health outcomes. He ignored what I said and wrote for him (with references) and promptly came out in favour of nuclear energy in his next article.

So what about Wade Allison? Wade is a medical physics person and a professor at Oxford. I have chosen to pitch into him since he epitomises and crystallises for us the arguments of the stupid physicist. In this he has done us a favour, since he is really easy to shoot down. All the arguments are in one place. Stupid physicists? Make no mistake, physicists are stupid. They make themselves stupid by a kind of religious belief in mathematical modelling. The old Bertie Russell logical positivist trap. And whilst this may be appropriate for examining the stresses in metals, or looking at the Universe (note that they seem to have lost 90% of the matter in the Universe, so-called “dark matter”) it is not appropriate for, and is even scarily incorrect when, examining stresses in humans or other lifeforms. Mary Midgley, the philosopher has written about Science as Religion. Health physicists are the priests. I have been reading Wade Allison’s article for the BBC but also looked at his book some months ago. He starts in the same way as all the others by comparing the accidents. He writes:

More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to.

Then we move to 3-Mile Island: There were no known deaths there.
And Chernobyl:

The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer - which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan).

This is breathtaking ignorance of the scientific literature. Prof. Steve Wing in the USA has carried out epidemiological studies of the effects of 3-Mile Island, with results published in the peer-review literature. Court cases are regularly settled on the basis of cancers produced by the 3-Mile Island contamination. But let us move to Chernobyl. The health effects of the Chernobyl accident are massive and demonstrable. They have been studied by many research groups in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, in the USA, Greece, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan. The scientific peer reviewed literature is enormous. Hundreds of papers report the effects, increases in cancer and a range of other diseases. My colleague Alexey Yablokov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published a review of these studies in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2009). Earlier in 2006 he and I collected together reviews of the Russian literature by a group of eminent radiation scientists and published these in the book Chernobyl, 20 Years After. The result: more than a million people have died between 1986 and 2004 as a direct result of Chernobyl.

I will briefly refer to two Chernobyl studies in the west which falsify Wade Allison’s assertions. The first is a study of cancer in Northern Sweden by Martin Tondel and his colleagues at Lynkoping University. Tondel examined cancer rates by radiation contamination level and showed that in the 10 years after the Chernobyl contamination of Sweden, there was an 11% increase in cancer for every 100kBq/sq metre of contamination. Since the official International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) figures for the Fukushima contamination are from 200 to 900kBq.sq metre out to 78km from the site, we can expect between 22% and 90% increases in cancer in people living in these places in the next 10 years. The other study I want to refer to is one I carried out myself. After Chernobyl, infant leukaemia was reported in 6 countries by 6 different groups, from Scotland, Greece, Wales, Germany, Belarus and the USA. The increases were only in children who had been in the womb at the time of the contamination: this specificity is rare in epidemiology. There is no other explanation than Chernobyl. The leukemias could not be blamed on some as-yet undiscovered virus and population mixing, which is the favourite explanation for the nuclear site child leukemia clusters. There is no population mixing in the womb. Yet the “doses” were very small, much lower than “natural background”. I published this unequivocal proof that the current risk model is wrong for internal exposures in two separate peer-reviewed journals in 2000 and 2009. This finding actually resulted in the formation in 2001 by UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher of a new Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters CERRIE. Richard Wakeford was on this committee representing BNFL and he introduced himself to me as “BNFL’s Rottweiler”. No difference there.

Wade then turns to a comparison of contamination:

So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let's look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).

A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m - areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl

But the IAEA themselves, not known for their independence from the nuclear industry, report that contamination levels out to 78km were between 200 and 900kBq/sq metre. And Wade has been rather selective with his data, to put it kindly. The UN definition of radioactively contaminated land is 37kBq/sq metre just as he writes, but actually, in all the maps published, the inner 30km Chernobyl contamination exclusion zone is defined as 555kBq/sq metre and above. This is just a fact. Why has he misled us? In passing, this means that there are 555,000 radioactive disintegrations per second on one square metre of surface. Can you believe this is not harmful? No. And you would be correct. And another calculation can be made. Since the IAEA data show that these levels of contamination, from 200,000 to 900,000 disintegrations per second per square metre, exist up to 78km from Fukushima, we can already calculate that the contamination is actually worse than Chernobyl, not 1% of Chernobyl as Wade states. For the area defined by a 78km radius is 19113 sq km compared to the Chernobyl exclusion zone of 2827 sq km. About seven times greater.

Now I turn to the health effects. Wade trots out most of the usual stupid physicist arguments. We are all exposed to natural background, the dose is 2mSv a year and the doses from the accident are not significantly above this. For example, the Japanese government are apparently making a mistake in telling people not to give tap water containing 200Bq/litre radioactive Iodine-131 to their children as there is naturally 50Bq/l of radiation in the human body and 200 will not do much harm. The mistake is made because of fears of the public which apparently forced the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP, to set the annual dose limits at 1mSv. Wade knows better: he would set the limits at 100mSv. He is a tough guy. He shoots from the hip:

Patients receiving a course of radiotherapy usually get a dose of more than 20,000 mSv to vital healthy tissue close to the treated tumour. This tissue survives only because the treatment is spread over many days giving healthy cells time for repair or replacement. A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information.

But Wade, dear, these people are usually old, and usually die anyway before they can develop a second tumour. They often develop other cancers even so because of the radiation. There are hundreds of studies showing this. And in any case, this external irradiation is not the problem. The problem is internal irradiation. The Iodine-131 is not in the whole body, it is in the thyroid gland and attached to the blood cells: hence the thyroid cancer and the leukaemia. And there is a whole list of internal radioactive elements that bind chemically to DNA, from Strontium-90 to Uranium. These give massive local doses to the DNA and to the tissues where they end up. The human body is not a piece of wire that you can apply physics to. The concept of dose which Wade uses cannot be used for internal exposures. This has been conceded by the ICRP itself in its publications. And in an interview with me in Stockholm in 2009, Dr Jack Valentin, the ex-Scientific Secretary of the ICRP conceded this, and also made the statement that the ICRP risk model, the one used by all governments to assess the outcome of accidents like Fukushima, was unsafe and could not be used. You can see this interview on the internet, on www.vimeo.com.

Why is the ICRP model unsafe? Because it is based on “absorbed dose”. This is average radiation energy in Joules divided by the mass of living tissue into which it is diluted. A milliSievert is one milliJoule of energy diluted into one kilogram of tissue. As such it would not distinguish between warming yourself in front of a fire and eating a red hot coal. It is the local distribution of energy that is the problem. The dose from a singly internal alpha particle track to a single cell is 500mSv! The dose to the whole body from the same alpha track is 5 x 10-11 mSv. That is 0.000000000005mSv. But it is the dose to the cell that causes the genetic damage and the ultimate cancer. The cancer yield per unit dose employed by ICRP is based entirely on external acute high dose radiation at Hiroshima, where the average dose to a cell was the same for all cells.

And what of the UN and their bonkers statement about the effects of the Chernobyl accident referred to by Wade Allison? What you have to know, is that the UN organisations on radiation and health are compromised in favour of the nuclear military complex, which was busy testing hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere at the time of the agreement and releasing all the Strontium, Caesium, Uranium and plutonium and other stuff that was to become the cause of the current and increasing cancer epidemic. The last thing they wanted was the doctors and epidemiologists stopping their fun. The IAEA and the World Health Organisation (WHO) signed an agreement in 1959 to remove all research into the issue from the doctors of the WHO, to the atom scientists, the physicists of the IAEA: this agreement is still in force. The UN organisations do not refer to, or cite any scientific study, which shows their statements on Chernobyl to be false. There is a huge gap between the picture painted by the UN, the IAEA, the ICRP and the real world. And the real world is increasingly being studied and reports are being published in the scientific literature: but none of the authorities responsible for looking after the public take any notice of this evidence.

As they say on the Underground trains in London: Mind the Gap. Wade Allison and the other experts I refer to need to do just this for their own sake. The one place that this gap is being closed rapidly and savagely is in the courts. I have acted as an expert witness in over 40 cases involving radiation and health. These include cases where Nuclear Test veterans are suing the UK government for exposures at the test sites that have caused cancer, they include cases involving nuclear pollution, work exposures and exposures to depleted uranium weapons fallout. And these cases are all being won. All of them. Because in court with a judge and a jury, people like Wade Allison and George Monbiot would not last 2 minutes. Because in court you rely on evidence. Not bullshitting.

Joseph Conrad wrote: "after all the shouting is over, the grim silence of facts remain". I believe that these phoney experts like Wade Allison and George Monbiot are criminally irresponsible, since their advice will lead to millions of deaths. I would hope that some time in the future, I can be involved as an expert in another legal case, one where Wade Allison, or George or my favourite baddy, Richard Wakeford (who actually knows better) are accused in a court of law of scientific dishonesty leading to the cancer in some poor victim who followed their advice. When they are found guilty, I hope they are sent to jail where they can have plenty of time to read the scientific proofs that their advice was based on the mathematical analysis of thin air.

In the meantime, I challenge each of them to debate this issue with me in public on television face to face, so that the people can figure out who is right. For the late Professor John Gofman, a senior figure in the US Atomic Energy Commission until he saw what was happening and resigned, famously said: "the nuclear industry is waging a war against humanity." This war has now entered an endgame which will decide the survival of the human race. Not from sudden nuclear war. But from the on-going and incremental nuclear war which began with the releases to the biosphere in the 60s of all the atmospheric test fallout, and which has continued inexorably since then through Windscale, Kyshtym, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Hanford, Sellafield, La Hague, Iraq and now Fukushima, accompanied by parallel increases in cancer rates and fertility loss to the human race.

There is a gap between them and us. Between the phoney scientists and the public who don’t believe what they say. Between those who are employed and paid to protect us from radioactive pollution and those who die from its consequences. Between those who talk down what is arguably the greatest public health scandal in human history, and the facts that they ignore.

Mind the Gap indeed.

http://www.counterpunch.org/busby03282011.html

[Adeptus]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

I agree, between itulip, zerocred (lol), and a few other sites, you come to a pretty quick realization that what you are getting on CNN, CBC.CA, BBC, etc is pretty watered down and often very late to the table. As for ZeroHedge, given that on some peak days they can churn out 40-50 "articles", a few of which are pages long, unquestionably I estimate there's a minimum of 5 to 15 people representing this "Tyler Durden" character. I know they would likely need to go outside of the movie theme (fight club) to pick additional aliases, but I really wish they would identify each writer separately, because I do believe there's a few quality articles on there almost daily, amongst the other nonsense we also see on there. Many writers all using the same alias also explains why they can post contradicting articles, or also the equivalent of double posts (different words, same story).

[Alvaro Spain]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

I know they would likely need to go outside of the movie theme (fight club) to pick additional aliases, but I really wish they would identify each writer separately, because I do believe there's a few quality articles on there almost daily, amongst the other nonsense we also see on there. Many writers all using the same alias also explains why they can post contradicting articles, or also the equivalent of double posts (different words, same story).

I suppose that for the owner of zerohedge.com is better to have his writers under a common name so that he can better control his site. For example: he can fire them easily. Also, it is difficult for the quality writers at zerohedge.com to leave the site and start another one, taking customers from zerohedge.

As for the sensationalism there, I will add a quote from EJ:

"...But the alternative media can operate outside the viewpoint range of the mainstream. They’ve been pushed to even further extremes to avoid direct competition with major sites like Yahoo, or they are absorbed into the machine. For the alternative media, debating extreme cases is all about surviving the onslaught of mainstream imitations of independent finance and economics producers and blogs. Even the data-driven sites have succumbed to the temptation to double-down on doom to keep an audience."

I check daily zerohedge.com, because they publish information not available elsewhere, but only read an article now and then, knowing that they are very biaised and sensationalist.

[don]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

maybe this will help:

From Far Labs, a Vivid Picture Emerges of Japan Crisis

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

For the clearest picture of what is happening at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, talk to scientists thousands of miles away.

Thanks to the unfamiliar but sophisticated art of atomic forensics, experts around the world have been able to document the situation vividly. Over decades, they have become very good at illuminating the hidden workings of nuclear power plants from afar, turning scraps of information into detailed analyses.

For example, an analysis by a French energy company revealed far more about the condition of the plant’s reactors than the Japanese have ever described: water levels at the reactor cores dropping by as much as three-quarters, and temperatures in those cores soaring to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn and melt the zirconium casings that protect the fuel rods.

Scientists in Europe and America also know from observing the explosions of hydrogen gas at the plant that the nuclear fuel rods had heated to very dangerous levels, and from radioactive plumes how far the rods had disintegrated.

At the same time, the evaluations also show that the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi escaped the deadliest outcomes — a complete meltdown of the plant.

Most of these computer-based forensics systems were developed after the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, when regulators found they were essentially blind to what was happening in the reactor. Since then, to satisfy regulators, companies that run nuclear power plants use snippets of information coming out of a plant to develop simulations of what is happening inside and to perform a variety of risk evaluations.

Indeed, the detailed assessments of the Japanese reactors that Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave on Friday — when he told reporters that about 70 percent of the core of one reactor had been damaged, and that another reactor had undergone a 33 percent meltdown — came from forensic modeling.

The bits of information that drive these analyses range from the simple to the complex. They can include everything from the length of time a reactor core lacked cooling water to the subtleties of the gases and radioactive particles being emitted from the plant. Engineers feed the data points into computer simulations that churn out detailed portraits of the imperceptible, including many specifics on the melting of the hot fuel cores.

Governments and companies now possess dozens of these independently developed computer programs, known in industry jargon as “safety codes.” Many of these institutions — including ones in Japan — are relying on forensic modeling to analyze the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi to plan for a range of activities, from evacuations to forecasting the likely outcome.

“The codes got better and better” after the accident at Three Mile Island revealed the poor state of reactor assessment, said Michael W. Golay, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

These portraits of the Japanese disaster tend to be proprietary and confidential, and in some cases secret. One reason the assessments are enormously sensitive for industry and government is the relative lack of precedent: The atomic age has seen the construction of nearly 600 civilian power plants, but according to the World Nuclear Association, only three have undergone serious accidents in which their fuel cores melted down.

Now, as a result of the crisis in Japan, the atomic simulations suggest that the number of serious accidents has suddenly doubled, with three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in some stage of meltdown. Even so, the public authorities have sought to avoid grim technical details that might trigger alarm or even panic.

“They don’t want to go there,” said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert who, from 1993 to 1999, was a policy adviser to the secretary of energy. “The spin is all about reassurance.”

If events in Japan unfold as they did at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the forensic modeling could go on for some time. It took more than three years before engineers lowered a camera to visually inspect the damaged core of the Pennsylvania reactor, and another year to map the extent of the destruction. The core turned out to be about half melted.

By definition, a meltdown is the severe overheating of the core of a nuclear reactor that results in either the partial or full liquefaction of its uranium fuel and supporting metal lattice, at times with the atmospheric release of deadly radiation. Partial meltdowns usually strike a core’s middle regions instead of the edge, where temperatures are typically lower.

The main meltdowns of the past at civilian plants were Three Mile Island in 1979, the St.-Laurent reactor in France in 1980, and Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986.

One of the first safety codes to emerge after Three Mile Island was the Modular Accident Analysis Program. Running on a modest computer, it simulates reactor crises based on such information as the duration of a power blackout and the presence of invisible wisps of radioactive materials.

Robert E. Henry, a developer of the code at Fauske & Associates, an engineering company near Chicago, said that a first sign of major trouble at any reactor was the release of hydrogen — a highly flammable gas that has fueled several large explosions at Fukushima Daiichi. The gas, he said in an interview, indicated that cooling water had fallen low, exposing the hot fuel rods.

The next alarms, Dr. Henry said, centered on various types of radioactivity that signal increasingly high core temperatures and melting.

First, he said, “as the core gets hotter and hotter,” easily evaporated products of atomic fission — like iodine 131 and cesium 137 — fly out. If temperatures rise higher, threatening to melt the core entirely, he added, less volatile products such as strontium 90 and plutonium 239 join the rising plume.

The lofting of the latter particles in large quantities points to “substantial fuel melting,” Dr. Henry said.

He added that he and his colleagues modeled the Japanese accident in its first days and discerned partial — not full — core melting.

Micro-Simulation Technology, a software company in Montville, N.J., used its own computer code to model the Japanese accident. It found core temperatures in the reactors soaring as high as 2,250 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to liquefy many reactor metals.

“Some portion of the core melted,” said Li-chi Cliff Po, the company’s president. He called his methods simpler than most industry simulations, adding that the Japanese disaster was relatively easy to model because the observable facts of the first hours and days were so unremittingly bleak — “no water in, no injection” to cool the hot cores.

“I don’t think there’s any mystery or foul play,” Dr. Po said of the disaster’s scale. “It’s just so bad.”

The big players in reactor modeling are federal laboratories and large nuclear companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva, a French group that supplied reactor fuel to the Japanese complex.

The Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque wrote one of the most respected codes. It models whole plants and serves as a main tool of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Washington agency that oversees the nation’s reactors.

Areva and French agencies use a reactor code-named Cathare, a complicated acronym that also refers to a kind of goat’s milk cheese.

On March 21, Stanford University presented an invitation-only panel discussion on the Japanese crisis that featured Alan Hansen, an executive vice president of Areva NC, a unit of the company focused on the nuclear fuel cycle.

“Clearly,” he told the audience, “we’re witnessing one of the greatest disasters in modern time.”

Dr. Hansen, a nuclear engineer, presented a slide show that he said the company’s German unit had prepared. That division, he added, “has been analyzing this accident in great detail.”

The presentation gave a blow-by-blow of the accident’s early hours and days. It said drops in cooling water exposed up to three-quarters of the reactor cores, and that peak temperatures hit 2,700 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to melt steel and zirconium — the main ingredient in the metallic outer shell of a fuel rod, known as the cladding.

“Zirconium in the cladding starts to burn,” said the slide presentation. At the peak temperature, it continued, the core experienced “melting of uranium-zirconium eutectics,” a reactor alloy.

A slide with a cutaway illustration of a reactor featured a glowing hot mass of melted fuel rods in the middle of the core and noted “release of fission products” during meltdown. The products are radioactive fragments of split atoms that can result in cancer and other serious illnesses.

Stanford, where Dr. Hansen is a visiting scholar, posted the slides online after the March presentation. At that time, each of the roughly 30 slides was marked with the Areva symbol or name, and each also gave the name of their author, Matthias Braun.

The posted document was later changed to remove all references to Areva, and Dr. Braun and Areva did not reply to questions about what simulation code or codes the company may have used to arrive at its analysis of the Fukushima disaster.

“We cannot comment on that,” Jarret Adams, a spokesman for Areva, said of the slide presentation. The reason, he added, was “because it was not an officially released document.”

A European atomic official monitoring the Fukushima crisis expressed sympathy for Japan’s need to rely on forensics to grasp the full dimensions of the unfolding disaster.

“Clearly, there’s no access to the core,” the official said. “The Japanese are honestly blind.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/sc...ef=global-home

[c1ue]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

The counterpunch article by Busby is interesting - especially in the focus on peak levels.

For example: IAEA logs for March 29, 2011:

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/...ima290311.html

On 28 March, deposition of iodine-131 was detected in 12 prefectures, and deposition of cesium-137 in 9 prefectures. The highest values were observed in the prefecture of Fukushima with 23 000 becquerel per square metre for iodine-131 and 790 becquerel per square metre for caesium-137. In the other prefectures where deposition of iodine-131 was reported, the range was from 1.8 to 280 becquerel per square metre. For caesium-137, the range was from 5.5 to 52 becquerel per square metre. In the Shinjyuku district of Tokyo, the daily deposition of both iodine-131 and cesium-137 was below 50 becquerel per square metre. No significant changes were reported in the 45 prefectures in gamma dose rates compared to yesterday.

So while Busby's comment on 200K to 800K Bcq/msquared is partially correct (it was for the 16km to 58 km radius around Fukushima #1, not 78 km), it is quite different in context than the detailed information above: that the overall radiation levels are considerably lower even 1 week later and that the long term radiation contamination (i.e. cesium 137) is much, much lower in proportion.

Secondly, looking at the 2 reports cited (one of which is his own) - I cannot find any mention of the Tondel study anywhere. It isn't cited, it isn't available to be read, etc etc.

Thirdly, Mr. Busby has a long history as someone agitating against even low level radiation exposure:

http://aotearoa.indymedia.org/articl...by-depleted-ur

Dr Chris Busby, chemical physicist, spoke on April 15th {2005} in Otautahi/ Chch. Here are the most important points from his talk on the health affects of depleted uranium.
Last night I went to an extremely informative meeting with British DU expert, Chris Busby, a chemical physicist from liverpool. I had thought I knew plenty about DU, you know compared to all those people who haven't even heard of depleted uranium. But last night I finally gained an understanding of the health effects, why it is considered 'legal' and the international community is allowing it to be used.
Things I learnt:
The model scientists use for figuring out the risk of health effects from radiation is based on the 'cancer yield' of Hibakusha from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is an example of external radiation, like a big flash lightbulb went off that emits gamma rays and eradiates each cell in your body the same amount. So the risk of the radiation causing cancer is measured in joules/kg - that is the amount of radiation received (as power - joules) compared with the mass of the person recieving the radiation (in kgs).
Busby argues that this is inappropriate for measuring risk of DU for Internal Radiation. When DU weapons explode, or corrode over time, the radiative particles are released as dust, and people will breath dust, eat it in their food and drink it in their water. While one small particle may not emit enough radiation to affect your whole body to the level that increases the risk of cancer (joules/kg you understand), lodged in your lung emitting a steady flow of alpha and beta rays (more active than gamma rays) will locally cause alot more damage to cells and therefore increase your risk of cancers and radiation related diseases.
Busby compares external radiation to internal radiation to the difference between sitting in front of a fire, heating your whole body equally and eating a piece of hot coal.
These are the figures and risk factors that people use to argue that the health affects of DU is insignificant.
So it's fairly obvious that this is a false assumption, and you's think brillant people like physicist and doctors would figure this out, so why isn't this model debunked and replaced to give us a clear idea of the risks of dropping DU on communities.
Well, way back in '59, the UN World Health Organisation agreed to leave all low level radiation research to the International Atomic Enegry Agency. Unfortunately, the IAEA feel the model works just fine (and particularly useful to an agency whose goal is the promotion of the peaceful atom), and little or no research is done into the actual
effects of DU and low level radiation from nuclear plants, mines and waste sites. Why do research when our model shows us the risk of cancers is negliable?
Busby has done some of the research, and the results show very clearly the predictions of increase in cancer are far too low. He described childhood leukemia clusters in areas where DU has been used, nuclear plants are operating and accident sites. Showed cancer rates in Iraq over the last 10 years, and a report into the health of Italian peacekeepers who served in Kosovo. All the evidence was damning, demonstrating without doubt that a rethink of the scientific approach to internal radiation is crucial and use of DU weapons and other sources of radiation stopped NOW.

I don't know enough to comment on DU, but certainly it appears that Mr. Busby is as much an advocate on his side as the supposed industry shills he attacks on the 'other' side.

Certainly also the repetition of childhood leukemia is extremely interesting - before it was due to DU, now suddenly it is due to Chernobyl. Given that Chernobyl was 1986 - strange how the childhood leukemia can be attributed to whatever cause d'etre Mr. Busby is pushing on.

[GRG55]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

I share your confusion, Mooncliff. I don't doubt for a moment the sincerity of our 'tulipers that consistently minimize the dangers of Fukushima. On the other hand, the engineering mindset tends to discount most cautions raised in furthering advanced technologies, especially nuclear...



...

I am crushed. Crushed, I tell you!

We engineers are the most conservative creatures on earth. The only thing we know how to discount is our consulting fees; plumbers still make more.

Just look at the way we dress. Requisite prep school uniform of grey flannels and a navy blazer. A blue suit with a striped tie on those rare days that we are feeling frisky.

Look who we marry. Solid citizens, mostly nurses and teachers. No adventurous artists or flakey fashion models for us. Hell, I went radical and married an, um, economist [my mother never forgave me]. That's about as far as it goes. Even worse, we get along with our mother-in-laws. Now what does that tell you...

Look at our work environment. Cubeville. No floor to ceiling glass, killer view, marble desks and nice artwork. Just laminate veneer over particle board, and a matching credenza when you finally make Dept. Manager. A picture of the kids for computer wallpaper. Maybe a Dilbert cartoon photocopied and pinned to the fabric of the divider.

Look what we drive. We are Government Motors best customers. Plain vanilla, four door sedan. If they still made the Chevy Biscayne, we'd be buying it. Instead we are the target market for the Malibu. In blue. Dark blue. With the child seat anchors please. Yes, we still have that picture of the cherry red Corvette from when we were 13, but it's hidden away in a bottom file drawer. Jeremy Clarkson is an aberration, probably has a hormone problem...

I could go on, but you get the picture don. "Discount most cautions"...really, how could you. All I can say in closing is that if we engineers were capable of discounting most cautions we'd have had the courage to go after the babes in college. I rest my case...

[c1ue]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

Now looking at the New York Times data:

1) It is all models. And all the models are based on exactly 3 real world situations: presumably Three Mile Island and Chernobyl being 2 of them. Arguably neither of these 2 applies in any way to Fukushima, even discounting major differences like reactor design.

2) The NY Times shows a graph of cesium 137 levels spiking up to 500x legal limits.

Yet they don't say what the legal limits are.

This isn't that easy to find, but it is probably nothing like the legal limits for food:

http://www.croptocuisine.org/2011/03...s-food-supply/

The allowable government limit is 2,000 becquerels per kilogram for iodine-131 and 500 Bq/kg for cesium-137. Most, but not all of, the readings showed the foods were still below the legal limit.

500x 500 Bq/kg = 250000 Bq/kg - this seems an improbably high number.

Instead here are some actual numbers:

http://truebluenz.wordpress.com/2011...dent-29-march/

No new results from the marine monitoring stations 30 km off-shore were reported for 27 or 28 March. However, new analyses in seawater 330 m east to the discharges point of NPP Units 1 – 4 were made available for 27 March. These concentrations show a significant decrease from 74 000 Becquerel per litre of iodine-131, 12 000 Becquerel per litre of cesium-137, and 12 000 Becquerel per litre of cesium-134 on 26 March to 11 000 Becquerel per litre of iodine-131 and 1 900 Becquerel per litre of cesium-137 on 27 March.

Sea water samples were also collected daily at a location 30 m from the common discharge point for Units 5 – 6. These results also show an increase in the radionuclide concentrations on 26 March. The sea water samples collected on March 27 show as well a decrease of the radionuclide concentration.

It can be expected that the data will be quite variable in the near future depending on the discharge levels. In general, dilutions by ocean currents and into deeper waters as well decay of short lived radionuclides e.g. I-131 or I-132 will soon lead to lower values.

Marine Organisms- First analyses were reported in fish carried out by the National Research Institute of Fishery Research. 5 samples of fish were collected from the port of Choshi (Chiba prefecture) and 4 of 5 samples showed Cs-137 concentrations below limit of detection. In one sample Cs-137 was found with 3 Bq/kg (fresh weight) and it was reported that it was slightly above the limit of detection. This concentration is far below any concern for fish consumption.

As has been noted elsewhere - the problem with 'legal limits' is that these numbers are generally so tiny as to be meaningless.

The 12000 Bq/liter of Cesium 137 at peak represents 0.00000000373 grams of cesium 137 per liter.

It isn't good, but this is a far cry from actual nuclear disasters like Chernobyl.

[oddlots]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

Not quite engineers per se but I think you'd recognise a kindred spirit:

[ocelotl]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

I am crushed. Crushed, I tell you!

We engineers are the most conservative creatures on earth. The only thing we know how to discount is our consulting fees; plumbers still make more.

Just look at the way we dress. Requisite prep school uniform of grey flannels and a navy blazer. A blue suit with a striped tie on those rare days that we are feeling frisky.

Look who we marry. Solid citizens, mostly nurses and teachers. No adventurous artists or flakey fashion models for us. Hell, I went radical and married an, um, economist [my mother never forgave me]. That's about as far as it goes. Even worse, we get along with our mother-in-laws. Now what does that tell you...

Look at our work environment. Cubeville. No floor to ceiling glass, killer view, marble desks and nice artwork. Just laminate veneer over particle board, and a matching credenza when you finally make Dept. Manager. A picture of the kids for computer wallpaper. Maybe a Dilbert cartoon photocopied and pinned to the fabric of the divider.

Look what we drive. We are Government Motors best customers. Plain vanilla, four door sedan. If they still made the Chevy Biscayne, we'd be buying it. Instead we are the target market for the Malibu. In blue. Dark blue. With the child seat anchors please. Yes, we still have that picture of the cherry red Corvette from when we were 13, but it's hidden away in a bottom file drawer. Jeremy Clarkson is an aberration, probably has a hormone problem...

I could go on, but you get the picture don. "Discount most cautions"...really, how could you. All I can say in closing is that if we engineers were capable of discounting most cautions we'd have had the courage to go after the babes in college. I rest my case...

There goes my part:
¿Blazer? I have a bunch of old sweaters and a few jackets bought on discount, some cheap khakhis and several shirts... If I dress a suit is once or twice a year...
¿Marry? Not yet, too shy, which reinforces GRG thesis...
¿Cubeville? I'm a field service engineer, and that means I carry all my job stuff in a 35 lb. backpack and have to content with whatever space the client has for us...
¿Drive? Numbers don't add up... Mostly is the orange limo that runs beneath this city, otherwise the green wheeled boxes or a multicolored old bus... A cab ride is not on the plans unless it is a "do it or perish" situation. Given the possibility, I would ponder an Opel Corsa, a VW Gol a Hyundai Accent, a Nissan Tiida, or even a Toyota Yaris, but nothing bigger.

[Shakespear]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

I am glad "don" has found the CHRIS BUSBY article. Now at least we have a point of view that can withstand the court of law. Lets see what the "experts" from the other Fukushima threads will say about this one. Especially the one where it was suggested to take a tourist trips to the Chernobyl Nature Reserve.

I took the dip in trying to point out some of my own on the ground observations from this part of the world and was curious from where were people coming up with information that Chernobyl was overblown in terms of its effect on population and local environment. Well by chance I got part of my answer last night. I happened to channel surf to a Science channel and found a program about Chernobyl. What timing !!!
This program trotted out interviews with Polish Nuclear experts who gave resounding opinions that the largest effect of Chernobyl was psychosomatic. Watching the film one could wonder what was all the fuss about.

As always the facts are buried deep and require a level of knowledge that the average person simply does not posses. Without it one is not able to handle the conflicting views being presented to them. That appears to be the mechanism being practiced today with ever greater intensity and now regarding this disaster.

Not long ago there was a program on Discovery about the Financial Meldown and how Paulson was handling it. With actors in place of the real people. That one I managed to watch for 5 minutes before changing the channel to a football game. The level of "smoothing" was just too much to handle.

[Spartacus]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

You could start at the beginning and proceed until the end, but that's old-school linear storytelling.

I really do enjoy this site and read every post every day, but this kind of confusion makes me ask "Are they on coke?"

Begin the tease by starting at the end and go right to the edge of the surprise ending (but not to the end) - this starts the suspense building- to build more, show some confusing parts of the middle to build some more tension, then jump around confusingly until the end so the audience thinks you're a nonlinear, avant-garde storyteller

(based on Steve Coogan's lines from "The Other Guys")

[don]

Re: This is so confused, I don't know where to start

I am crushed. Crushed, I tell you!

We engineers are the most conservative creatures on earth. The only thing we know how to discount is our consulting fees; plumbers still make more.

Just look at the way we dress. Requisite prep school uniform of grey flannels and a navy blazer. A blue suit with a striped tie on those rare days that we are feeling frisky.

Look who we marry. Solid citizens, mostly nurses and teachers. No adventurous artists or flakey fashion models for us. Hell, I went radical and married an, um, economist [my mother never forgave me]. That's about as far as it goes. Even worse, we get along with our mother-in-laws. Now what does that tell you...

Look at our work environment. Cubeville. No floor to ceiling glass, killer view, marble desks and nice artwork. Just laminate veneer over particle board, and a matching credenza when you finally make Dept. Manager. A picture of the kids for computer wallpaper. Maybe a Dilbert cartoon photocopied and pinned to the fabric of the divider.

Look what we drive. We are Government Motors best customers. Plain vanilla, four door sedan. If they still made the Chevy Biscayne, we'd be buying it. Instead we are the target market for the Malibu. In blue. Dark blue. With the child seat anchors please. Yes, we still have that picture of the cherry red Corvette from when we were 13, but it's hidden away in a bottom file drawer. Jeremy Clarkson is an aberration, probably has a hormone problem...

I could go on, but you get the picture don. "Discount most cautions"...really, how could you. All I can say in closing is that if we engineers were capable of discounting most cautions we'd have had the courage to go after the babes in college. I rest my case...

I'm still laughing. Thanks GRG55. I had no idea there was engineering standup Well done