Monday, July 14, 2014

Increased "Backround" Radiation

Our background radiation levels are increasing every day, as spreading contamination from Fukushima, Hanford, WIPP, and every other leaking nuclear site across the world diffuses in the atmosphere, fresh water, and ocean.

Here are a couple of screenshots from today's emissions over the Common Spent Fuel Pool area at Fukushima:




Later, at 9:50 AM, the view was obscured with fog. I missed the buildup, but I hope the fog is not actually emissions from the common spent fuel pool, which is seen spewing above:

DNA code breaking contamination is spewed daily into the atmosphere, freshwater, and sea.

The IAEA defines land contamination at 40 kiloBecquerels per meter squared, which is 40,000 Becquerels (Christoudias et al., 2012)

Soil sample data collected at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo on March 23, 2011 were used to extrapolate total fallout inventory from the days after the explosions at 225,000 Becquerels per square meter (Zhang, et al., 2013).

Atmospheric fallout was not restricted to Japan. A 2012 U.S. Geological Survey documents wet deposition of fission products in samples collected in 2011 in the western US (Wetherbee, Debey, Nilles, Lehmann, & Gay, 2012):
I-31 was quantified and adjusted for decay to the time of sample collection for five whole-water wet-deposition samples from California, Colorado, and Washington. The activities of the quantified I-131 ranged from 29.6 to 1,090 pCi/L, and calculated deposition values ranged from 211 to 5,100 Bq/m2. Several weeks transpired between sample collection and analysis of the I-131 in the water samples, which were prioritized for analysis from west (high priority) to east (low priority). Therefore, I-131 activities likely decayed in most of the samples before they could be measured. (page 26)
Note that the passage states that there measured I-131 levels were probably vastly undercounted since I-31 has a 8 day half-life. My son is figuring out the equation for me.

Contamination may be more widespread and sustained than projected in models based on March 2011 because uranium bucky-balls, or durable transportable structures created from the use of salt-water to cool melted fuel, may have increased transportability of radionuclides, potentially invalidating dispersion projections (Priyadarshi, et al., 2011).


Moreover, emissions from Fukushima have never stopped, as illustrated by my screenshots above.

The nucleocrats insist that low level radiation is "safe." However, these authorities either don't understand, or are deliberately denying, bio-accumulation, bio-magnification, and the radioactive decay/chemical toxicity of internal emitters.

In a 2003 video titled Nuclear Controversies by Vladimir Tchertkoff, Professor Yury Bandazhevsky (former director of the Medical Institute in Gomel), states that based on his research on children exposed to radiocesium from Chernobyl:
‘Over 50 Bq/kg of body weight lead to irreversible lesions in vital organs.’

In a short summary of his work published in English in 2003, Bandazhevsky described high levels of Cesium-137 bioaccumulation in Chernobyl children’s heart and endocrine glands, particularly the thyroid gland, the adrenals, and the pancreas. He also found high levels in the thymus and the spleen. He found higher levels of bio-accumulation in children than adults. This research demonstrates how radiocesium bioacccumulates within organs and establishes the vulnerability of young people to that process.

But the nucleocrats DENY by failing to acknowledge the roles of bio-accumulation and bio-magnification. Almost no one is talking about the broader implications for the human genome as it becomes mosaicized by genotoxins.

Despite the active decimation of our collective genome, we will probably outlast most of the sea mammals, ranging from otters to the great whales.

The OCEAN is particularly in jeopardy from Fukushima. It is commonly stated that approximately 80% of Fukushima atmospheric fallout went into the ocean.

Further, Fukushima's melted-out core(s) are "uncontained" in the vicinity of an underground river.   Highly contaminated water from the site is being carried out to sea every single day. The Pacific Ocean is becoming more contaminated everyday:
Steven Mihailovich (2014, July 8). Waves for Worry: . La Jolla Light, http://www.lajollalight.com/2014/07/08/waves-for-worry-scientists-weigh-in-on-status-of-radioactive-waters-from-fukushima/
[Excerpted] Experts project the radioactivity will be very low, about two-to-20 times greater than the residual radiation already in the Pacific from the nuclear weapons tests of the 1950s and ’60s. [end]
I don't understand how the article can claim that an up to twenty-fold increase in radiation in the ocean can be considered "low."

Prior to Fukushima, the Pacific Ocean measured ½ to 2 Becquerels per liter, according to Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole Aquarium (Buesseler, 2013). Buesseler doesn't tell us what level the ocean measured at prior to atmospheric testing. Keep in mind much of the increase in radiation in the ocean is from human created isotopes, such as Strontium-90 and Cesium-137.

In October of 2013, Buesseler predicted that the Pacific Ocean could measure up to 30 Becquerels per liter on average from Fukushima, although he was unclear about whether that figure applied exclusively to cesium. Other radionuclides are also of concern, including strontium, uranium, and plutonium, among others.

Tritium, for example, is known to bio-accumulate in phytoplankton, which is a keystone species. Bio-magnification of tritium in phytoplankton poses a persistent and toxic contaminant with intergenerational effects (Jaeschke et al., 2013). Bio-magnification will occur as  phytoplankton is at the bottom of a very long food change. Animals at the top of the chain will have levels of contamination hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times more magnified.

Orcas and other large whales have been known to be highly contaminated for at least a decade. Orcas are often so contaminated that they qualify as toxic waste.

Can you imagine the likely impact of Fukushima's increased "background" radiation for Orcas and other whales. I can.

While speaking at a New York Press Conference on Fukushima held May 4, 2012, Professor Hiroaki Koide, Nuclear Reactor Specialist and Assistant Professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute stated that humanity as a whole has never experienced this level of radiation contamination and he stated ‘I have no idea what will happen but we will be fighting this radiation on the order of tens, hundreds of years.’ 

‘Archive Footage of the NYC Press Conference May 4th 2012.’ Cinema Forum Fukushima, http://cinemaforumfukushima.org/2012/05/06/archive-footage-of-the-nyc-press-conference-may-4th-2012/, date accessed 18 May 2012





REFERENCES

Bandazhevsky, Y. I. (2003) ‘Chronic Cs-137 Incorporation in Children’s Organs’, Swiss Med Wkly,
133, 488-490, http://tchernobyl.verites.free.fr/sciences/smw-Bandazhevsky_chronicCs137.pdf


Buesseler, K. (2013, October 24). Japan’s continuing nuclear nightmare: Experts discuss Fukushima and its aftereffects. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. Available http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/mit-cis/videos/26614-japan-s-continuing-nuclear-nightmare


Christoudias, et al (2012). Modelling the global atmospheric transport and deposition of radionuclides from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Atmospheric Chemistry; Physics Discussions, 12, 24531-24555.


Jaeschke, B. C., et al. (2013). Bioaccumulation of tritiated water in phytoplankton and trophic transfer of organically bound tritium to the blue mussel, mytilus edulis. Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, 115, 28-33.


Priyadarshi, A., et al. (2011). Evidence of neutron leakage at the Fukushima nuclear plant from measurements of radioactive 35S in California. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(35), 14422-14425.


Tchertkoff, W. (2008) Nuclear Controversies, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qqhm_ZrfhE&feature=relmfu.

Wetherbee, G. A., Debey, T. M., Nilles, M. A., Lehmann, M. B., & Gay, D. A. (2012). Fission products in national atmospheric deposition program—wet deposition samples prior to and following the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant incident, march 8–April 5, 2011. U.S. Geological Survey, 1277, 6.


Zhang, W., Friese, J., & Ungar, K. (2013). The ambient gamma dose-rate and the inventory of fission products estimations with the soil samples collected at Canadian embassy in Tokyo during Fukushima nuclear accident. Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, 296(1), 69-73.


4 comments:

  1. Majia,
    I sincerely hope you are incorrect. I haven't seen the webcams for months, so I'm not exactly up to speed on what's happening, so thanks for posting pictures.

    The first two pictures depict Units 1 (with tent), 2 still (with original blue/white cow paint job) and 3 lower, to the right of tower, and 4 all the way to the right of the frame - just a small portion visible. The common spent fuel pool is roughly to the West of unit 4 (to the right in this view) so it is pretty far off-frame to the right.

    No way to tell if any of that smoke is coming from the CSFP - can't be confirmed or denied in this picture.

    What I do observe is a very large emission directly over #3. You can see vertical streaks coming up from the reactor floor area.

    There is also a cloud or smoke hanging somewhat above the emissions and horizontally across the frame and blocking out the very top of the vent tower.

    I'm surprised, but I do not see much smoke coming from the pit area between units 2 and 3.

    If the CSFP catches fire - that's catastrophic. There were something like 6300 assemblies in the CSFP - compared to 548 in the core of units 2-4, and around 1100 to 1500 in the reactor spent fuel pools. Add whatever they recovered from #4 SFP, which I think they put in the CSFP.

    I hope they know they need to save the CSFP at all costs. If it melts down catastrophically, there's enough spent fuel in it to cause a very large kill radius. If that radius somehow reaches Diani - then the dominos will fall, and that is the true danger of this meltdown.

    Hope you are doing well.

    James

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for being courageous enough to start the discussion on this, Majia.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "MF" aka "Moe Foe" aka "Niall" might not be back to bother 'newsers. Then again, he's not exactly known for being a "man" of "his" word.

    Spread the news. Not one MF'ing word he said has any credibility to it whatsoever. He has continued to "out" himself & abuse/bully "his" opponents. That this alleged "HPS" worker whom previously claimed to work for Amnesty Internation now claims to have fibromyalgia. What a slap in the face to genuine sufferers!

    I would quote him, though common sense prevents.
    So, instead i'll just point to (one place) where he does indeed out hisself.

    http://fukushima-diary.com/2014/07/reactor-5-temperature-jumped-13-%E2%84%83-losing-coolant-system-2-days/#comment-2250825

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If he ever does "grace" the pages of enenews again, please somebody tell him from me that

      "Fukushima Update phoned and demanded it's immature sociopathic shill back."

      Delete

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