RE: TEPCO admits Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 core completely melted down

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 10:56:25 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Saturday, March 21, 2015 9:56 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: TEPCO admits Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 core completely melted down

 

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015  'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List 
<[email protected]> wrote:
 

>> I disagree.  Assuming the above is true, and it probably is, that would be 
>> WONDERFUL news. In a water cooled reactor, the sort that is used everywhere 
>> ( except for Chernobyl and other reactors in the former USSR which used 
>> graphite) a core meltdown is as bad a disaster as it gets, and having the 
>> fourth largest earthquake ever recorded right under the plant caused 
>> billions of dollars of damage, but Fukushima killed NOBODY. So apparently 
>> the worst that can happen to a water cooled nuclear power reactor is bad but 
>> not all that bad. The death toll from the huge earthquake was 20,000, but 
>> the death toll from Fukushima was zero.  

 

> The incurred cancer deaths will happen quietly, years, decades, centuries and 
> millennia later and they will happen off camera, but that does not mean that 
> they will not happen.I doubt we will ever know the final death toll – many 
> tens of thousands of years from now when the released corium decays through 
> various decay series into relatively innocuous elemental products – along the 
> way slowly leeching into the biosphere over the centuries, millennia and tens 
> of millennia. However one thing I think is clear is that your figure of zero 
> deaths has a zero percent probability of being correct

 

Maybe, and maybe the blade on a giant wind turbine will crack off and slice 
into a school bus packed with children, but I doubt it. In 1979 the reactor 
core at Three Mile Island melted down just like at Fukushima but despite 6.02 
*10^23 doomsday stories about how it would kill us all it ended up killing 
NOBODY.  

 

That is an incorrect equivalency! There is a gulf of difference between what 
happened at 3-mile island and what happened at Fukushima; 3-mile Island was a 
partial melt down that was contained within the reactor. In the case of  
Fukushima instead we are presented with an incident with three complete 
meltdowns with total loss of containment and with the core material now in some 
unknown region beneath the disaster area. 

You do not know that nobody died as a result of the – vastly smaller scale (by 
many orders of magnitude) release -- of radionuclides into the environment 
associated with 3-mile island. There is no way to conclusively prove that 
someone’s leukemia, bone, lung or other cancer resulted from this factor or 
that factor. Cancer is a complex disease, which is often multi-factored. To 
claim unequivocally that (IN CAPS) NOBODY died, when in reality you have no way 
of knowing this is precisely the kind of rhetoric so many people on this list 
seem to be complaining about.

Cancer is very hard to attribute with certainty, and if one uses statistical 
based arguments there is always some degree of uncertainty.

 

 

BY Far the worst nuclear accident that ever happened was at the graphite cooled 
Chernobyl reactor in 1986, but no reactor in the western world is built like 
Chernobyl, they use water to slow neutrons not graphite and that is vastly 
safer because unlike graphite water does not burn (one reason I don't like 
Uranium breeder reactors is that they use molten sodium to cool the neutrons 
and molten sodium does burn in the air and even explodes in the presence of 
water). And as bad as it was even Chernobyl killed fewer than 60 people, 

 

That number is wrong by orders of magnitude; you cannot just count the 56 
people who died from acute radiation poisoning, but need to include the many 
more who died – off camera – of various horrible cancers that stole their lives 
away. 

The World Health Organization or WHO estimates that 4,000 people will die from 
cancers caused by Chernobyl; other reputable scientific bodies have provided 
much higher numbers than that. Another UN agency: The International Agency for 
Research on Cancer, has predicted 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; while a 
well-known and cited 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. 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.

 

 

 

a single oil rig disaster can kill that many, and a coal mine disaster in China 
can kill 10 times as many. For a water cooled reactor having the fourth largest 
earthquake ever recorded occur directly under 3 reactors is close to being as 
extreme as conditions can get, and having those 3 reactors melt down was a 
worst case scenario, but even then NOBODY died.  

 

Again your use of the word NOBODY (in ALL CAPS) is purely rhetorical. You don’t 
know how many people will die from cancers that have been caused by 
radionuclides they absorbed, through various bio-uptake channels and that were 
released into the environment – and continue to be released into our 
environment -- by the Fukushima disaster. 

 

As for very long term effects ending up killing people, you're assuming that 
the Linear No Threshold theory is correct, the idea that even very small 
amounts of radiation will end up killing lots of people if enough are exposed 
to that small increase. I've written about this before but apparently it needs 
repeating.

 

Everybody agrees that huge amounts of radiation are harmful or fatal, 
especially if received virtually instantaneously as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 
but do more moderate amounts received much more slowly really increase the 
likelihood of getting cancer and death years later? All our public policy 
regarding nuclear power is based on the assumption that the answer is yes, in 
particular it is assumed that the Linear No Threshold theory is correct. But is 
it? If death rates were always linear and it was known that there was a 50% 
chance that when people were hit in the head with a 3 pound iron ball moving at 
20 mph they would die then if a million people were hit in the head with an 
iron ball 6000 times less massive you'd expect about 83 people to die, but in 
actuality a .008 ounce BB moving at 20 mph wouldn't even break the skin and 
nobody would die. It doesn't work for iron balls but is the Linear No Threshold 
theory correct for radiation? For obvious ethical reasons there isn't a lot of 
data on this subject but there is some. 

 

The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received 2000 millisieverts of 
radiation were 7.9 times as likely to get Leukemia as the general population of 
Japanese, If they received half that amount of radiation (1000 millisieverts) 
and the 

Linear No Threshold theory was true you would expect them to be 3.95 times as 
likely to get that disease, but instead they were only 2.1 times as likely; and 
if they got 200 millisieverts they were 4% LESS likely and with 100 
millisieverts they were 17% LESS likely to get Leukemia. These NONLINEAR 
results are NOT consistent with the LINEAR No Threshold theory.

And the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received more than 100 
millisieverts were more likely to develop solid cancers than the general 
population of Japanese, but those who were under 100 millisieverts were not. 
Such a THRESHOLD is NOT consistent with the Linear NO THRESHOLD theory. 

The natural background radiation of the Rocky Mountain states in the USA is 3.2 
times higher than in the Gulf States, and yet the cancer death rate in the Gulf 
States is 1.26 times HIGHER than in the Rocky Mountain states.

Radiologists spend their lives exposed to X rays, but they have less cancer and 
a lower death rate  than other physicians. People who became radiologists 
between 1955 and 1970 had a 29% lower cancer rate and a 32% lower death rate 
than non-radiologist physicians.

In 1983 steel bars used in the construction of 180 apartment buildings in 
Taiwan were accidentally contaminated with Cobalt 60, it took about a decade 
for this error to be discovered and in the meantime 10,000 people were exposed 
and some residents received as much as 500 millisieverts per year, the average 
was 50; by comparison the natural background level is only 3.3 millisieverts. 
In a group of people that large you'd expect that 232 would die from cancer by 
now, and if the Linear No Threshold theory is true you'd expect 70 additional 
would die due to the excess radiation, so there should have been 302 deaths 
from cancer; but the ASTONISHING  thing is that only 7 people died of cancer. 
In addition the Linear No Threshold theory predicts there should have been 46 
birth defects, but the actual number was 3.

A study was done on 71,000 people who were shipyard workers between 1957 and 
1981, they were divided into 3 categories, a high dose group received more than 
0.5 rem, a low dose group that received less than that, and a control group of 
shipyard workers that didn't work on nuclear ships and so received no excess 
radiation at all. Actuarial studies show that the high radiation group had a 
25% LOWER death rate than the control no radiation group; the low radiation 
group had a bigger death rate than the high radiation group but it was still 
lower than the zero radiation control group of shipyard workers. 

These results are the exact opposite of what the Linear No Threshold theory 
predicts and incredibly it seems to indicate that modest amounts of radiation 
received over a long period of time can actually be beneficial. If this were 
about any other subject evidence this strong would be more than enough to kill 
a theory, but the Linear No Threshold theory is based on radiation fear, and 
fear is a powerful emotion that can not always be stopped by logic.

 

You are mixing apples and oranges. The danger from disasters such as Fukushima 
is in the released radionuclides. The incident radiation is very dilute and 
very low, as this stuff disperses in the environment. So the danger from the 
measurable increase in the background radiation that one would be receiving is 
very low and probably not that much of a concern.

However if you are unlucky enough to uptake a single strontium-90 into your hip 
bone (through the calcium uptake channels) that single radionuclide, now 
incorporated into your bone, has a good chance of causing bone cancer, because 
it will be *continuously* irradiating the proximate bone cells over a very long 
time axis. 

You cannot claim that admittedly low increment in the measured background 
radiation provides the entire picture. I am not arguing that it does, and am 
convinced by the evidence you provide showing that morbidity does not appear to 
be related in a linear fashion to increased incidental exposure to ionizing 
radiation.  

However this does not measure or track what happens when one of the many types 
of radionuclides that can become either mechanically lodged into deep lung or 
kidney or liver tissue or incorporated into living tissue through bio-uptake 
from the environment. You seem to utterly ignore this dimension; and how a 
single particle in the wrong place over time an through continuous sustained 
irradiation of some micro region within the body cause a resulting cancer.

Chris

> …. Over the long run.

 

"Over the long run we're all dead"  John Maynard Keynes

 

  John K Clark

 

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to