2015年1月5日月曜日

Japan’s Black Dust // Fukushima hot particle // Arnie Gundersen // 槌田敦「鼻血はベータ線被曝の結果

Give me Hot Drinks.

They learned nothing from Fukushima nuclear plant accident.

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20140529 UPLAN 槌田敦「鼻血はベータ線被曝の結果（原発事故基礎講座特別編）」

2014/05/27 に公開

※予定されていた「安全確保のためのDBA（設計基準事故）思想の破綻」は、次回（６月）に繰延べになりました。

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http://kaleido11.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-610.html

ガンダーセン氏はホットパーティクルを警告している

Fri.2011.06.10

福島第一原発事故が、実は想像以上に深刻だ、と世界中に訴えている原子力専門家・アーニー・ガンダーセン氏ですが、6月7日、ＣＮＮキャスター、ジョン・キングのインタビューでは、米国内に住む人々に「ホットパーティクル」について警告を出しています。

動画右下のボタンをクリックして全画面でご覧ください。

2011/12/20 にアップロード

福島原発ﾌﾟﾙﾄﾆｳﾑ粒子飛散! 米ニュースでガンダーセン氏警告 6/7(日本語字幕修正版: Jo2Rayden )　2011年6月の時点でのこの警告を、今疑う人はいなくなってきたでしょう。しかし、大手メデイアは、いまだにこの重要事項を無視しています。再訳しましたので、ご覧ください。

＊日本語訳全文： http://junebloke.blog.fc2.com/blog-en...

ジョン・キングのCNN,Week Nights 7PM in East Timeよりガンダーセン博士へのインタヴュー June 7, 2011 - Japan's radiation twice as bad - Posted: 09:14 PM East Time,USA.　

＜日本語訳:Jo2Rayden ＞Q. ガンダーセン博士は以前から、報道されている以上に状況は深刻だとおっしゃってましたが、どの様に深刻なのでしょうか？

A. "私は特に東電と日本政府の放射能放出量の計算が修正され"2倍になった"ことを驚いてはいません。日本政府と官僚の混乱と体質文化だと思いますね。保安院と原子力推進団体の組み合わせが大問題なのです。東電の上級職が経産省の為に働き、経産省・保安院の上級職が東電の為に働いて、その地位を天下りなどして回しているのです。この体制が原子力事故がいかに深刻かの判断を間違わせているのです。"

Q. ホット・パーティクル（プルトニウムﾑ微粒子）が、たとえば、米国シアトルでも検測されましたが、どの程度影響があるのでしょうか？

A. "放射能はガス状の雲になり発生し、これはガイガーカウンターで計測出来ます。ホット・パーティクル（プルトニウム微粒子）は、原子力関係者は微細燃料片と呼びますが、髪の切断面の幅よりとても小さいです。4月に東京で10個／日が観測された。1日に人々が呼吸すると吸入しています。

興味深いのは、シアトルで一人当たり5個／日の微細粒子が観測されています。なぜなら、この時期は主に太平洋へ、米西海岸に向かって風が吹いていたからです。米国で、レタスなどは食べる前に良く洗うよう注意喚起されてたのは、これが理由です。

ホット・パーティクル（プルトニウム微粒子）は、人間の肺に留まり、消化器官と骨に溜まり、長期間掛けて、ガンの原因になります。

ただ、検出が難しいほど微細放射性粒子です。

＊注意：放射性プルームは常に一定方向に流れたわけでなく、北東から南西にも時に変化していった。

Q. 米国西海岸の人達は、これは憂慮すべきことですか、それともそれほどでもないのでしょうか？

A. "平均的に人間は、日に10立法m呼吸しますが、シアトルで一人当たり5個／日のプルトニウム粒子を吸っています。

現在、ホット・パーティクルつまりプルトニウム微細燃料片は、細胞組織に影響します。ですから、私はいまだに友人には総ての野菜を良く洗いなさいとアドヴァイスしています。ただ、いまだに我々の周辺の空気中に放射性粒子は存在し、それからは逃れられません。

Q. 衛星写真の画像では、3/12と5/24を比べると放射能蒸気は変化しており、現在は原子炉は制御下にあるようにみえますが？

A. 原発の放射性ガスは、3月は寒くてＴＶ画面上は目視しやすかったが、5月には温かくなったので目視出来なくなった。いまだに、大量の放射性ガスと放射能汚染水を作り、放出し続けています。

ですから、放射能放出を抑えるには時間が必要です。来年になっても、放射能は漏れ続け、放射性蒸気が止まり冷温停止になるまで、放射性蒸気と放射能汚染水を作り続けるでしょう。

-END-

UPDATE: June 7th, 2011

CNN's John King interviews Arnie Gundersen about the Hot Particles discovered in Japan and the US. CNN's John King and Arnie Gundersen discuss "hot particles" detected in Seattle and Japan, the cozy relationship between Japanese regulator NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) and plant owner TEPCO, and changes at the Fukushima accident site since March. John King and Arnie Gundersen also discuss how TEPCO's acknowledgement today of another error in calculating radiation dose more than doubles the amount of radioactivity to which people in the Northern Hemisphere have been exposed.

* PLS donate to "fariewinds" which is non profit organization.

http://fairewinds.com/content/cnns-jo...

http://johnkingusa.blogs.cnn.com/2011...

シアトルは、アメリカ西海岸最北部・ワシントン州にある風光明媚な都市ですが、ここでも福島第一原発から放射性粒子が飛んできているようです。

このことは、前から言われていたことですが、4月には計測できるくらいの量だったようです。

特に問題なのは、プルトニウム粒子（＝ホットパーティクル　hot particle）です。

放射性核種の中でも質量が大きいプルトニウムは、遠くに飛ばないといわれていますが、実は、プルトニウムは「ホットパーティクル」と呼ばれる大腸菌と同じくらいの大きさの微粉末となって空中を拡散する性質を持っているそうです。

「ホットパーティクル」の毒性はとりわけ強く、微粉末1、2個が肺の中に入るだけで肺ガンを起こす

（京大原子炉実験所助教　小出裕章　　http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/kouen/Pu-risk.pdf の4ページ目））

放射性物質の中でも、特に毒性の強いプルトニウムの粒子を「ホットパーティクル」と名付けたようです。

この動画にはありませんが、ガンダーセン氏は、4月に西海岸とシアトルで大気のモニタリングをやっている何人かの科学者と、ひんぱんに連絡を取り合い、大気中のプルトニウムの放射性粒子（ホットパーティクル）の状態を観察していました。

4月の段階で、シアトルの人たちは、一日当たり5個ものプルトニウム放射性粒子（ホットパーティクル　hot particle）を肺に吸い込んでいました。

この頃、東京の人は1日当たり10個のホットパーティクルを吸い込んでいました。

人間の成人は一日に10立方メートルの空気を吸い込んで呼吸しているので、10立方メートル当たり10個のホットパーティクルが計測されたということです。

下の写真は肺の中に取り込まれたプルトニウム粒子（ホットパーティクル）をとらえたもので、周囲の細胞に集中的に放射線を浴びせ続け、しまいには肺がんなどを引き起こすもの。フィルムに感光させて発見するものです。

ソース元

日本の原子力関連のサイトでは、

酸化プルトニウムの粒子径が正確に評価されているのが特徴である。

このとき、米国のタンプリンという人物がプルトニウム「ホットパーティクル仮説」を提唱した。

これは、粒子状に固まって体内に摂取されたプルトニウムは、均等に分布して体内に摂取された場合の11万倍以上も危険であるという仮説で、いずれ全例が肺がんになると予測し世間の注目を集めた。

この説をよりどころとしてプルトニウムの利用に反対する人たちもいた。

しかし実際には影響が現れなかったので、逆にタンプリンの「ホットパーティクル仮説」の誤りが実証された例となっている。

原発推進派のサイトは、一様に、このホットパーティクル説を否定することに躍起となっていますが、ガンダーセン氏や、チェルノブイリ原発事故の調査に当たっている専門家の間では、ホットパーティクル説は肯定されています。

これも内部被曝なのですが、放射線核種によってどのように体内の臓器に蓄積されて、DNAを切り刻んでいくかは多少、違うようです。

ヒラリー・クリントン国務長官が、アメリカ人が日本の食べ物と野菜を買うことを奨励する協約を日本と結んだとのことですが、当の米国人は、日本に同情しながらも「とんでもない」と思っているようです。

ともかく最大の問題は、プルトニウムの粒子であるホットパーティクルが、太平洋を渡ってアメリカ西海岸まで飛んでいった、という事実です。

3月12日に1号機が水素爆発し、14日に3号機が水素爆発した頃から、アメリカ、特にヨーロッパ各国ではプルト二ウムの人体汚染に関するスレッドがフォーラムに立ち始めていました。

「われわれ市民のほうで費用を負担するから、大学や研究機関にプルトニウムが日本から飛散しているのか調べさせろ」というものでした。

欧米の人にとっては、プルトニウムが何より恐ろしいものであるようです。

アメリカ、シアトルの人たちにとっては、さぞかし「東電憎し」でしょうね。それに虚言癖ウィルスが細胞の一個一個に取り付いている枝野、菅直人に対してはなおさらでしょう。

4月の時点で、シアトルの住民は10個／1日のホットパーティクルを吸い込んでいたのですから、日本の東北・関東の人たちは、いったいどれくらい吸い込んでしまったのでしょう。

そして、アメリカの学者の間では当たり前のことになっていることが、事故後3ヶ月も経っているのに、なぜ日本ではまったく知らされないのでしょう。

海の向こうのガンダーセン氏は日本の人たちがプルト二ウムを吸い込んでいたことを知っていたのですから。

こうなると「過失」などという生易しいものではありません。

東電、保安院、斑目の原子力安全委員会、官邸は知っていたのですから、もう「未必の故意」で刑事告発するほかありませんね。

彼らを本当に刑務所に入れなければダメです。

今、ガンダーセン氏は、他の科学者たちとともに、ホットパーティクルについての調査結果をレポートにまとめる作業に取り掛かっているそうです。

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http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/kouen/Pu-risk.pdf

プルトニウムという放射能とその被曝の特徴

２００６年7 月15 日（土）

京都大学原子炉実験所小出裕章

Ⅰ．プルトニウムの危険性の根源

プルトニウムは天然には存在せず、人類が初めて作り出した放射性核種であり、かつて人類が遭遇した物質のうちでも最高の毒性を持つと言われる。その根拠は、プルトニウムがアルファ（α）線を放出すること、比放射能が高いこと、そして体内での代謝挙動にある。

Ⅱ．α線による被曝

この世に存在するあらゆるものは、生命体を含め、原子・分子から成り立っている。分子は原子が結合したものだが、その結合のエネルギーは数電子ボルト（１個の電子を１ボルトの電圧に逆らって移動させるために必要なエネルギーが１電子ボルト）である。一方、放射線のエネルギーはキロ電子ボルトあるいはミリオン電子ボルトであらわされるように、分子が結合して生命体を形作っているエネルギーの千倍、百万倍というような桁違いのエネルギーである。生命体に放射線が飛び込んでくれば、分子はいともたやすくその結合を破壊される。

ただし、一口に放射線といっても、レントゲンが発見したX 線のほか、α線、ベータ（β）線、ガンマ（γ）線、中性子線、重粒子線と言うように多種多様な放射線がある。そして、それぞれ透過度が違う。

X 線やγ線の正体は光子であり、透過度が大きい。そのため、X 線やγ線を放出する放射性核種が
体外にあっても、人体は被曝する。また、γ線を放出する放射能を仮に体内に取り込んだ場合には、一部のγ線は人体の外に飛び出して行ってしまうし、人体に被曝を与える場合も希薄で広範囲に与える。

一方、α線の正体はヘリウムの原子核で透過力が著しく弱く、紙1 枚あれば遮蔽できる。したがって、外部被曝に関してはγ線が恐ろしいが、α線は問題にならない。逆に、α線を放出する放射能を体内に取り込んでしまえば、その放射能が存在しているごくごく近傍の細胞だけに濃密な被曝を与える。たとえば、プルトニウム（Pu239）のα線のエネルギーは5.1 ミリオン電子ボルト（MeV）であり、組織中の飛程はわずか45μm しかない。

物理・化学的に被曝を計る場合の単位は「グレイ」であり、物体1kg が放射線から1 ジュールのエネルギーを得た場合に相当する。しかし、生物的には放射線の透過度が違うため、エネルギーを受ける密度が異なり、影響の発現にも差が出てくる。そこで、生物的な被曝を計る単位としては「シーベルト」を使うことにし、「グレイ」単位の被曝量に線質係数なる係数をかけて求めることになった。γ線とβ線に対する線質係数は１であり、α線に対しては20 とするように定められている。すなわち、γ線やβ線の場合には、「１グレイ」は「１シーベルト」であるが、α線の場合には「1 グレイ」は「20 シーベルト」となる。つまり、同じだけのエネルギーを放射線から受ける場合でも、α線から受ける場合にはγ線やβ線から受けるよりも20 倍危険なのである。

Ⅲ．比放射能
1895 年11 月、ドイツの物理学者レントゲンは陰極管（TV のブラウン管もその一種）の実験中に偶然、正体不明の放射線を発見した。人類が放射線を発見した最初であった。翌96 年にはフランスの物理学者ベクレルがウランも謎の放射線を発することを見つけた。つまり放射性物質の発見
である。98 年にはキュリー夫妻がポロニウム（キュリー夫人の祖国ポーランドにちなんで命名）とラジウムを発見した。

「ベクレル」や「キュリー」は放射能の強さを表す単位となっている。

放射能の強さは決められた時間にいくつの原子核が崩壊するかで測り、それを決めるのは原子核の質量数と崩壊定数（半減期とは逆数関係にある）である。1975 年に放射能の国際単位は「ベクレル」とされたが、「ベクレル」は１秒間に１個の原子核が崩壊する時の放射能の強さを表す。「比放射能」とは重さ当たりの放射能の強さのことであり、質量数をM、半減期をT1/2 で表した場合、ベクレルを単位とした比放射能は下の式で計算できる。

［ベクレル

］

＝

1.32 × 10⁺¹⁶　/　T1/2　[年]　×　M

半減期がこの式の分母にあるように、半減期が短ければ比放射能が大きくなるし、半減期が長ければ比放射能が小さくなる。代表的な放射性核種について半減期と比放射能の関係を次頁の表に示す。キュリー夫妻が発見したラジウムは質量数が226 で、その半減期は1600 年、１グラムのラジウムがあれば、その放射能の強さは370 億ベクレルである。つい最近までRa-226、１グラムが持つ放射能の強さを１キュリーと決めてきたのであった。半減期が極端に短くなれば、放射能は極端に強くはなるが、その代わりすぐに消えてなくなってしまう。逆に半減期が極端に長ければ、いつまでたってもなくならない代わりに、放射能は著しく弱くなる。放射性核種には右の表にも示すように多様なものがある。人間や人類にとって危険な放射性核種は、個体としての人間、あるいは類としての人類と同じ程度の寿命を持った放射性核種である。原子力発電所とは、放射能を製造する現場であり、被曝で問題になるのは比較的寿命の短い放射能であるが、再処理工場では、原子力発電所から運び込まれる前に寿命の短い放射能はなくなってしまっているので、寿命の長い核種が問題となる。それぞれの放射能を体内に取り込んだ場合の被曝量などを次頁の下の表に示す。天然に存在する放射性核種のうちα線を放出する核種の核種半減期 I-134 52.7 分 Te-129 1.2 時 Kr-87 1.3 時 I-132 2.3 時 Kr-88 2.8 時 Kr-85m 4.4 時 Tc-99m 6.0 時 I-135 6.7 時 Xe-135 9.2 時 Sr-91 9.7 時 Zr-97 17.0 時 I-133 21.0 時 Te-131m 1.3 日 Ce-143 1.4 日 La-140 1.7 日 Np-239 2.3 日 Y-90 2.7 日 Te-132 3.3 日 Xe-133 5.3 日 I-131 8.1 日 Ba-140 12.8 日 Cs-136 13.0 日 Ce-141 32.3 日 Te-129m 34.0 日 Ru-103 39.5 日 Sr-89 52.1 日 Y-91 59.0 日 Zr-95 65.2 日 Cm-242 162.9 日 Ag-110m 252.0 日 Ce-144 284.0 日 Ru-106 1.0 年 Th-228 1.9 年 Cs-134 2.1 年 Sb-125 2.7 年 Rh-102 2.9 年 Eu-155 4.9 年 Eu-154 8.5 年 Kr-85 10.7 年 H-3 12.3 年 Eu-152 13.0 年 Cd-113m 14.0 年 Pu-241 14.3 年 Cm-244 18.1 年 Cm-243 28.5 年 Sr-90 28.8 年 Cs-137 30.2 年 Pu-238 87.7 年 Sm-151 90.0 年 Am-242m 152.0 年 Am-241 433.0 年 Cm-246 4700.0 年 Pu-240 6570.0 年 Am-243 7370.0 年 Cm-245 8500.0 年 Pu-239 24100.0 年 Pa-231 32800.0 年 Th-230 80000.0 年 Tc-99 214000.0 年 U-234 245000.0 年 Pu-242 373300.0 年 Zr-93 1500000.0 年 Np-237 2140000.0 年 I-129 16000000.0 年 U-236 23420000.0 年 U-235 703800000.0 年 U-238 4468000000.0 年代表はウランやトリウムであるが、同じ放射能当りで比べれば、α線を放出するU-235, U-238 とPu-239 では、ほぼその毒性も等しい。しかし、Pu-239 の半減期24100年は、U-235（7 億年）やU-238（45 億年）に比べて４桁も５桁も小さいため、重さ当りの毒性で比べるとプルトニウムが圧倒的に高くなり、人類が遭遇した最高の毒物とも言われるようになったのである。単独のU-235 の場合、年摂取限度の値は2mg（2000μg）だし、U-238の場合は14mg（1 万4100μg）であることが表２から分かる。Pu-239 の場合には、その値が0.000052mg（0.052μg）であり、たしかに強烈な毒物であることが分かる。

核種名	質量数	半減期［年］	重量当りの放射能量
	M	T1/2	Ａ［ベクレル／g］
コバルト60	60	5	42,000,000,000,000
クリプトン85	85	11	15,000,000,000,000
トリチウム	3	12	360,000,000,000,000
ストロンチウム90	90	29	5,100,000,000,000
セシウム137	137	30	3,200,000,000,000
ラジウム226	226	1,600	37,000,000,000
プルトニウム239	239	24,100	2,300,000,000
ウラン235	235	703,800,000	80,000
ウラン238	238	4,468,000,000	12,000
トリウム232	232	14,100,000,000	4,000

	実効線量係数[mSv/Bq]		実効線量係数[mSv/g]		年摂取限度(μg)
	吸入	経口	吸入	経口	吸入	経口
H-3	0.000000018	0.000000018	6,400,000	6,400,000.00	0.16	0.16
Co-60	0.000017	0.0000025	710,000,000	100,000,000.00	0.0014	0.0096
Sr-90	0.00003	0.000028	150,000,000	140,000,000.00	0.0065	0.007
Cs-137	0.0000067	0.000013	21,000,000	42,000,000.00	0.047	0.024
Ra-226	0.0022	0.00028	81,000,000	10,000,000.00	0.012	0.098
Th-232	0.012	0.000092	49	0.37	21000	2700000
U-235	0.0061	0.0000083	490	0.66	2000	1500000
U-238	0.0057	0.0000076	71	0.09	14000	110000000
Pu-239	0.0083	0.000009	19,000,000	21,000.00	0.052	48

Ⅳ．不均等被曝の問題
その上、プルトニウムを含めα線を放出する放射性核種を吸入する場合には、肺中での不均等被曝の問題が生じる。
ICRP はPublication26 の第18 項で、線量当量H を以下の様に定義している。

H = DQN

この式でD は吸収線量、Q は線質係数、N は「その他すべての修正係数の積」である。
α線についてのQ が20 であることはすでに記した。問題は「その他すべての修正係数の積」とされ
たN である。この係数に対してICRP は「現在のところ、委員会はN に１という値をあてている」と述
べ、不均等被曝についても何の考慮も払わないとの態度を示している。

しかし、そんなことで本当にいいのだろうか？

粒径1μm、比重10 のPuO2 粒子を考えると、その放射能量は0.0106Bq となる。その粒子１個を吸い込み、それが肺中のどこかに沈着した場合の被曝量を考える。Pu239 のα線のエネルギーは5.1MeV、組織中の飛程は45μm 程度である。言い換えれば、この粒子から被曝する肺の組織は粒子から半径45μm以内のものだけであり、その重量はわずか0.4μg でしかない。そして、その他の肺の細胞はまったく被曝しない。一方、ICRP の評価方法では、1000g の重量を持つ肺全体で平均化した線量を計算する。両者の被曝量の計算結果を表に示すが、結果は９桁以上の違いとなる。もっとも、粒子が厳密に１箇所だけに固定されてまったく動かないということもありそうもなく、
ギーサマンの評価によれば、およそ65μg 程度の細胞が被曝するという。その場合の評価も表に書き込んでおいたが、その場合でもICRP の評価値とは７桁以上の違いがある。

1974 年に、タンプリンとコクランはこの肺中の不均等被曝問題を取り上げて、「Radiation Standard
for Hot Particle」と題する論文を発表した。彼らは、その粒子が沈着した周辺の細胞に10Sv 以上の被曝を与えるような粒子を「ホットパーティクル」と定義し、そのような被曝を受けた細胞ががん化する確率を動物実験の結果から1/2000 とした。当時職業人の年間許容被曝線量は5rem／年であり、この値は、がんになる危険度が1/1000 という仮定から導かれたものであった。それに対応してICRP が示していた、肺中のプルトニウムの最大許容沈着量は16000pCi であった。それに対し、タンプリンとコクランが考えた「ホットパーティクル」による不均等被曝の場合には、１個0.07pCi の放射能を持つホットパーティクル２個、つまり0.14pCi で、がんになる危険度が1/1000 になってしまう。

それゆえ、タンプリンとコクランはホットパーティクルの吸入を問題にする場合の許容量を115000
分の１（0.14/16000）に引き下げるよう求めたのであった。

Ⅴ．原子炉プルトニウムの問題
プルトニウムの同位体のうち何と言っても重要なのは、Pu-239 である。何故なら、それこそが長崎原爆の材料になり、今日の厖大な核兵器を支え、そして高速増殖炉の燃料になるといわれている核種だからである。しかし、被曝を問題にするならば、それだけ考えていては足りない。何故なら、今日の軽水炉で生み出されるプルトニウムのうちPu-239 が占める割合は重量で量って約６割、残りの４割はその他の同位体が占める。その中にはPu-239 に比べて半減期が短い核種がある、つまり比放射能の高い核種があるからである。

次頁の表に今日の軽水型原子力発電所で生じる代表的な組成の原子炉プルトニウムの危険度を示す。

たとえば、Pu-238 は原子炉プルトニウム中でわずか２％しか占めず、Pu-239 の約３０分の１である。

しかし、その半減期がPu-239 の半減期の３００分の１であるため、比放射能は逆に３００倍強く、結

原子炉Pu の危険度
質量内部被曝外部被曝
数
半減期比放射
能の比
使用済燃
料中組成
１ m ｇ中
の放射能α
（平均）
β 線質
係数
相対
危険度
γ
（平均）
相対
危険度
年 % Bq keV keV keV
238 88 276 2 1.3×107 5474 - 20 5.9 0.017 11.7
239 24130 1 58 1.3×106 5142 - 20 0.58 0.008 0.6
240 6570 3.7 24 2.0×106 5142 - 20 0.88 0.028 3.0
241 14 1667 12 4.6×108 - 20.8 1 0.040 0.000 7.0
242 396300 0.06 4 5.5×103 4890 - 20 0.0023 0.019 0.0
α 合計
1.6×107
7.4 22.3

果的に原子炉プルトニウムではPu-238 のα線強度はPu-239 のものの１０倍になってしまう。
Ⅵ．六ヶ所再処理工場での最近の被曝六ヶ所再処理工場では、アクティブ試験に入って以降、被曝事故が相次いでいる。特にプルトニウムの内部被曝は問題である。

プルトニウムを呼吸で取り込んだ場合、肺中でどのように挙動するかについては、モデルを決めて予測する以外にないが、国際放射線防護委員会が採用してきた呼吸器系モデルは右の図のようなものである。「鼻道（N-T）」、「気管及び気管支（T-B）」、「肺実質（P）」に到達する割合をまず仮定し、それぞれの領域に到達したもののうちある割合はある半減期を持って胃腸管や体液に移行していくと考えるのである。胃腸管に出たものは便として体外に出て行くし、体液に出たものは、ある仮定した速度で、尿に出て行くことになる。

体内に入ってしまったα線核種を体外から測定することはできないので、尿や便の中に出てきた核種を調べるしかないが、それが正しい情報を与えるか否かは、厖大な仮定のもとに作られたモデルの妥当性による。しかし、放射性核種もその化学形、取り込む時の粒径が違えば、それぞれの部位に到達する割合、排泄される割合が違ってしまうし、さらに言うならば、生物体としての個性
も大きく影響する。尿や便の分析から得られる情報など、大きな誤差を持ったものでしかない。

今回の事故では信じがたい出来事が次々と思っている。たとえば、

① 分析する試料中に３価の状態のプルトニウムがどれほどあるかを調べることが目的であり、そのためには大部分を占めるはずの４価のプルトニウムをまず除去する作業が必要であった。ところが、その作業がまったく行われずに、大量の４価のプルトニウムを含んだままの試料が測定試料作成係に送られてしまった。

② それを受け取った測定試料作成係は、４価のプルトニウムを除去した試料であるかどうかまったくチェック機構を持っていなかった。

③ 本来は放射能測定のプロであるはずの測定試料作成係は、放射能強度が強すぎると測定器が応答しなくなる性質を持っていることを知らずに、厖大なプルトニウムを含んだままの試料を無造作に次の測定係に引き渡した。

④ それを受け取った測定係もずさんな取り扱いでプルトニウムを飛散させて、自分自身を含めて汚染を生じさせた。何と１９歳の「協力会社」の社員であった。

分析すべきもとの廃液試料中にはプルトニウムが4mg/ml 含まれていたと言う。4mg の原子炉プルトニウムの中にはPu-239 が約５００万ベクレル、Pu-238 がその１０倍の５０００万ベクレル、Pu-240 も約８００万ベクレル、合計で６０００万ベクレルを超えるα線放出核種が含まれていた。それを100 倍に希釈した測定では900,000cpm のα線を計測したとのことで、計測効率を３０％とすれば、作成した試料には3,000,000dpm のα線放出核種が含まれていた、すなわち、５万ベクレルである。そうなれば、１００倍に希釈した試料の約0.1ml を焼き付けたことになる。実際の廃液の性状や分析の現場を私は知らないが、操作としてはほぼ納得できる（古川路明さんからのご教示を受け原燃の報告書を読み返したところ、焼付けに使った試料の量は0.2ml となっていた）。原液のまま焼き付ければ、その100 倍の放射能を含むし、計数もそれにつれて多くなるはずであるが、何と原液から作った試料での計数は4800cpmでしかなかったという。つまり、これは放射能が強すぎ、測定器の不感時間が長くなり過ぎたため、測定器が死んでしまっていたのである。放射線測定に携わる者としてまず第一に知っていなければならない知識である。

４価のプルトニウムを除去すべき作業を行わなかったのは「協力会社」の社員であった。測定試料作成係には日本原燃の社員も含まれていたようだが、多数は協力会社社員であった。さらに、不幸にして被曝した人は、上にも書いたように弱冠19 歳の「協力会社」社員であり、放射線測定の経験はどんなに長くても1 年しかないし、おそらくはほとんど知識がなかったのだろう。再処理工場において放射能の分析作業は必須であり、もともと日本原燃が自分の仕事として行うべきものである。それを下請け化することがそもそも間違っている。

ＩＣＲＰ-26 による呼吸器系モデル
酸化プルトニウムのような不溶性でクラスＹ
に分類される放射能に対する場合について、そ
れぞれのコンパートメントにおける分布割合
（上段の括弧の中）と、半減期（下段）を示し
た。

=================================================

http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-fud/arnie-gundersen-s-fukushima-hot-particle-myth.html

Arnie Gundersen’s Fukushima hot particle myth

Hot particles are produced by nuclear weapon detonations, and do not come from nuclear power plant accident releases. However, prolific antinuclear pundit Arnie Gundersen is making a concerted effort to have the world think that hot particles also come from nuke plants, especially Fukushima Daiichi. His latest “evidence” comes from a professional civil engineer in Massachusetts who has been trying for three years to use this contrived hot particle notion as a basis for getting a PhD…without success. Further, Gundersen makes one of the most convoluted conspiracy theory claims to yet come out of the Fukushima realm of distorted journalism.
A hot particle is a tiny, discrete radioactive fragment measuring less than 1 millimeter in size and can cause extremely high exposures to localized areas in a short amount of time. It is produced by the shattering of materials that are either naturally radioactive or have become radioactive by exposure to neutron radiation. Hot particles are almost always associated with nuclear weapon detonations, but can be caused by machining, cutting or grinding radioactive metals.⁽¹⁾ With bomb blasts, the earth and any structures beneath the explosion are literally pulverized. With bombs, the cloud of pulverized material is blasted upwards and engulfed by the intense field of neutrons in the expanding fireball. Neutron is the only type of radiation that can make non-radioactive substances radioactive. This is called “neutron activation”. This is how the pulverized particles thrown up by the blast become highly radioactive. Included in the cloud are tiny fragments of the Uranium or Plutonium core of the bomb itself, and become a part of the hot particle matrix. Most of the hot particles are too large and too heavy to be carried very far by the wind. Nearly all of them fall out of the dissipating cloud within 50 kilometers of the blast’s center. The smaller hot particles, no more than 1 mm in size, can be carried up to 100 kilometers. ⁽²⁾ Also, by definition, hot particles are not soluble; they cannot dissolve in water.

Hot particles emit Alpha (α) radiation. Alpha particles (they are not “rays” like gamma and x-ray radiation) are actually the nuclei of helium atoms with two neutrons and two protons, but no electrons spinning about the nucleus. This is a form of radiation that cannot penetrate much at all and even the most powerful α cannot make it through a single sheet of toilet tissue. Hot particle α radiation cannot go through skin and irradiate living tissue. Thus, hot particle exposure is primarily specific to the skin due to the rain-out of the material from the high-altitude cloud of material. For the most part, hot particle research has focused on Uranium and/or Plutonium metal fragments found downwind of bomb blasts. It is unusual to find fission products in hot particles, and only in tiny concentrations relative to the matrix of activation products and/or bomb core fragments. The only nuclear accident that has previously been connected to hot particles is Chernobyl, which was caused by a massive steam explosion immediately followed by at least one significant hydrogen detonation sufficient to dislodge the 1,000 ton upper biological shield which fell into the reactor compartment itself and crushed the core. But, the Chernobyl hot particles were found within the 30 kilometer evacuation radius, almost entirely tiny Uranium and Plutonium fuel fragments, and in miniscule concentrations. For all intents and purposes, hot particles are quite specific to bomb blasts and facilities that process nuclear materials for bombs.

Ever since the Fukushima accident resulted in traces of Plutonium isotopes found outside the site’s property boundary at F. Daiichi, Arnie Gundersen has been spouting that hot particles were expunged and could be found far, far away. In October of 2011, a civil engineer from Massachusetts, Marco Kaltofen, posted the claim that he had found Fukushima hot particles in American soils and in various dust filters from Japan. ⁽³⁾ Kaltofen has been trying to use his findings to get a PhD, but has not been successful. Regardless, Gundersen has recently posted a new Fairewinds video featuring Kaltofen called “The Hottest Particle”, ⁽⁴⁾ and makes two preposterous claims. First during the introduction, Gundersen says if it was produced in Japan “the State Secrets Law would likely prevent us from issuing this video.” Second at the end of the video, Gundersen says “Fairewinds has long said that there will be significant increases in cancer in Japan as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, and this video describing just one hot particle confirms our worst fears.”

In the first case, Japan’s new secrecy law would not prevent the video from being disseminated. There are a myriad of antinuclear websites in Japan (not to mention the majority of the popular Press) that have gone further over the edge that this convoluted video. Perhaps the most bizarre claim was made by a Tokyo professor who claimed the aftershocks at F. Daiichi in 2011 were not aftershocks at all. He claimed they were really hydro-volcanic explosions deep in the earth caused by molten Fukushima cores burning their way into underground aquifers, and Tokyo was covering it up. There have been a number of other such preposterous claims released to the Japanese internet since then, all of which are at least as provocative as Gundersen’s hot particle fantasy, and none of them were stopped by Tokyo! Besides, the only aspect of nuclear power plants which seems applicable to the secrecy law would be plant security measures to stop terrorists and such. Gundersen is actually making a veiled appeal to common conspiracy theory, and does no more than cement this observer’s view that he is nothing less than a street corner prophet.

The second claim of verification of a future cancer epidemic in Japan deserves a deeper look. To begin, Gundersen’s “expert”, Marco Kaltofen, changes the definition of hot particle to fit his agenda. He defines them as highly radioactive dust particles from a nuclear accident. He adds that if they are carried by the air, they must be included in internal exposure estimates, even if they are not ingested. The “hottest particle” he focusses on is not a fragment caused by an explosion of any kind. He found a clump of dust inside a vacuum cleaner bag sent to him from a home about 460 kilometers southwest of F. Daiichi. Kaltofen says this one glob is so radioactive that the full bag registered 300 Becquerels of activity. By using a crude partitioning methodology and an Exacto-knife, he found the dust clump which he says measured so highly that if there were a kilogram of it, the activity would be 40 million-trillion Becquerels. He says the dust clump by itself has a 70% chance of killing a person ingesting it.
The “hottest particle” was said to contain mostly three isotopes Cs-134, Cs-137, and Radium-226. Of course Cesium isotopes do not qualify as actual hot particle constituents because they are fission products, and not due to neutron activation. Further, they do not emit Alpha radiation. They give off weak Betas and Gammas. On the other hand, Ra-226 doesn’t qualify either because it is (1) naturally-occurring and found everywhere around the world, (2) is a highly unlikely isotope to be released from a nuclear reactor meltdown, and (3) is too heavy an isotope to be carried more than a few kilometers regardless of weather conditions. Kaltofen also mentions there was some Cobalt-60, which is also naturally-occurring and not produced by nuclear reactor fuel fissioning. Plus, he says there is “a whole zoo of isotopes that you’ll probably never hear about on CNN but you’d have to be a physicist to understand.” Regardless, the “hot dust clump” he picked from the vacuum cleaner bag in no way qualifies to be a hot particle by anyone’s definition other than the Kaltofen and antinuclear fear-salesmen like Gundersen.

Let’s face it, the dust clump was probably squeezed together by numerous vacuuming operations over a period of weeks and concentrated by the process itself. For all we know, the clump was compacted by Kaltofen’s makeshift Exacto-knife procedure. In addition, the huge activity number cited by Kaltofen (4X10¹⁹ Becquerels) is an enormous extrapolation. There would have to be an entire kilogram of the stuff to reach that huge activity level, however it is but one tiny glob. What the dust clump itself has for specific activity is not stated. Clearly, Kaltofen uses the all-too-routine posting of a huge, (in this case) concocted number to make it seem extremely significant. No wonder he has not been granted a PhD in the last three years! This is a clear case of pseudo-science.

Now, here’s the part that really sets me off. Gundersen ends the video by saying, “It is solid scientific material like this that you will not see or hear via traditional news stories, TEPCO, or the IAEA. Fairewinds has long said that there will be significant increases in cancer in Japan as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, and this video describing just one hot particle confirms our worst fears.” (Emphasis added) First, the video as evidence is about as solid as overly-cooked noodles…if that. Second, the reason you don’t find this anywhere else is because it is absolute balderdash. The Press around the world might have a strong antinuclear agenda, but they draw the line at pure nonsense. And, finally, Kaltofen’s folly in no way confirms Gundersen’s worse fears for a major cancer increase in Japan’s future. But, it does confirm that Gundersen will grasp even the most flimsy straw to try and keep his fantastic Fukushima forecasts alive.

References –
1 - http://health.phys.iit.edu/archives/2010-May/028745.html
2 - http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull404/40405084346.pdf
3 - https://apha.confex.com/apha/139am/webprogram/Paper254015.html

4 – http://fairewinds.org/hottest-particle/

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http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-radioactive-cancer-causing-hot-particles-spread-all-over-japan-and-north-americas-west-coast/5376695

Fukushima: Radioactive Cancer Causing “Hot Particles” Spread all Over Japan and North America’s West Coast

By Arnie Gundersen

Global Research, April 05, 2014

Fairewinds.org

Three years ago, Fairewinds was one of the first organizations to talk about “hot particles” that are scattered all over Japan and North America’s west coast. Hot particles are dangerous and difficult to detect. In this video Mr. Kaltofen discusses the hottest hot particle he has ever found, and it was discovered more than 300 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi site. If Fairewinds Energy Education was a Japanese website, the State Secrets Law would likely prevent us from issuing this video. Arnie Gundersen provides a brief introduction and summary to the video.

Transcript

[emphasis added by GR]

Hi, I am Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds,

I am here today to introduce professional engineer Marco Kaltofen in one of the most important videos Fairewinds Energy Education has ever produced. Three years ago, Fairewinds was one of the first organizations to talk about the “hot particles” that are scattered all over Japan and North America’s west coast. Hot particles are dangerous and difficult to detect. In this video Mr. Kaltofen discusses the hottest hot particle he has ever found, and it was discovered more than 300 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi site. If Fairewinds Energy Education was a Japanese website, the State Secrets Law would likely prevent us from issuing this video. I will provide a brief summary at the end of the video.

I’m Marco Kalton. I am a civil engineer and I’m a Ph.D candidate at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Most of my research looks at radioactive and chemical contaminants and how they wind up in house dust. And the reason for doing that is this is a very important way that the general public is exposed to things like radioactive contaminants.

In looking at indoor environments, they tend to be much more contaminated than the surroundings outside. Houses act like a trap and they tend to collect outdoor contaminants. And they expose people as much as 24 hours a day versus consider how short a time most people spend outdoors. Your exposure is actually much less. One of the nice things about social media is that we can talk to a lot of people and hook up with volunteers and volunteer and scientific organizations. And they were able to send us indoor dust samples, whether it was a vacuum cleaner bag or a sample from a home air filter or something like an appliance filter – think of an air conditioner filter or a heating and ventilation filter that people might have installed in their home. And we actually have developed a very straight-forward method for prepping all of these samples. And that way, we can compare people’s exposure from one house to another.

We looked at samples in Northern Japan; we looked at samples in Tokyo; we looked at samples in the United States and Canada. We tried to get a feel for what people’s actual exposure was. And that’s why we went looking for hot particles. The thing about radiation exposure is, if you look at it from a legal perspective, what you’re trying to do is find the average exposure that people get and then try and find some kind of safe level you can measure that against. And if you exceed that average level that you think is safe, then you have to start doing something about it; either institute some type of policy or some kind of cleanup.

The difference with our work is, while we understand there’s an average concentration people get, some people get a much higher or a much lower concentration. And that depends on how many hot particles, how many radioactive dust particles from the original accident can make their way through the air into somebody’s home. And if they’re small enough to be ingested or inhaled, then you have to count that over and above what their average exposure could be. When you look at the two different components of people’s exposure – (1) your average exposure; and (2) your exposure from hot particles, your hot particle exposure is going to be more rare, because there is a comparatively small number of hot particles that are disbursed from a site. So most people won’t be exposed to any. But a few people will be exposed to one or more than one. And that exposure from the hot particle can actually be bigger than the average exposure that everyone is getting. So you have to measure both components if you really want to understand what’s happening to people. So when we get a sample, we actually have a whole series of analyses that we’re doing.We do some very basic analyses that give us the average exposure. We use something called gamma spectrometry. Gamma spectrometry has been around for nearly 100 years and we use that to see which isotopes, which radioactive materials are present in the sample.

Now with Fukushima, we generally see three isotopes over and over again. And two of them are Cesium 134 and Cesium 137. When we see both of them in a certain ratio we can be fairly certain we’re looking at a material that’s contaminated with material from the Fukushima accident. Now that’s a fission product and that only comes after there’s been some kind of nuclear reaction. The other thing we’re looking at is Radium 226. And that’s actually related to the original uranium fuel that starts the nuclear process in the first place. So those three things are what we’re looking for when we’re doing our test for dust sample. And if we find them, then we go on to part 2 and try and identify if hot particles are present. The way that happens is, once we’ve ID’d a sample that we want to take to the next level where we want to do the hot particle analysis, we actually sieve out some of the finer particles, and we spread them on a copper plate and we exposure them to X-ray film. We expose them for a week. Now this is another old technique. It’s probably more than a century old. But what happens is, it identifies the places in the dust sample where there might be a small, radioactively hot particle. We can actually develop that X-ray plate and if there’s a positive result from location, we just take an Exacto knife, we remove it, we put it onto an aluminum microscope slide, and it’s analyzed by a scanning electron microscope. Not just any old microscope, but one that can give us an actual elemental analysis as we’re going along. So imagine you’re looking through the microscope. It’s all done on video these days. And you can actually see all the individual particles magnified maybe as much as 5,000, 10,000, 15,000X. And as you’re scanning, you’ve got a joystick and a set of crosshairs. Think of a videogame. And you can zap each particle one at a time with an X-ray beam and you can actually weed out which elements are present. And when you’re starting to see the radioactive elements – plutonium, Americium, uranium, radium, then you know you’re getting somewhere. So we can actually, through this process, take a sample that might weigh a pound or two pounds – a half a kilo, a full kilo, and isolate as few as one or two hot particles from that entire sample. And then do a full analysis and a breakdown. And that’s extremely valuable to us. It tells us a lot about what might happen if someone inhaled or ingested that particle.

All hot particles are not alike. Some are modestly elevated. They’re a little bit more radioactive than their surroundings. These are awfully hard to detect. But others tend to be orders of magnitude, factors of 10 more contaminated than their surroundings. Think the Richter scale where an earthquake magnitude 5 is 100 times more powerful than an earthquake magnitude 3. That’s what we’re looking for with hot particles, not things that are just a little bit more radioactive, but much more.

We get those – those highly radioactive particles – even though they’re small, they can give us a lot of information about where they came from because we can actually see it in the microscope. We can see how big it is, we can see what shape it is. It really gives a history of what happened to the particle. And it gives a fingerprint of where that particle came from. And the last step, if we know how big it is and we know its elemental composition and how radioactive it is, we can actually tell exactly how dangerous that particle will be if you happen to inhale it or if you happen to ingest it. You can say, well, we don’t know what might happen to a particular person, we just know what the average is. Well, that’s true of non-hot particle testing. But with this, we can take a hot particle and say, all right, the person in this household, if that person had inhaled this particular particle, their odds would be 7 percent or 70 percent of contracting a lung cancer or an epithelial tissue cancer or a nasal pharyngeal cancer. You can actually see which one of these is more likely once you have the photograph of the particle. So it’s a time consuming analysis but it tells us a lot about what the potential hazards are. And it’s a good way to diagnose which areas are going to have which times of potential health damages.

The sample that we got came from the Goya in Japan. It’s 460 kilometers from the accident site. That’s about 300 miles away. The hot particle was 10 microns across. That means it is 10 one-millionth of a meter across; obviously, something you’re only going to see with a powerful microscope. The particle was actually in the size range of dusts that can be inhaled and then retained in the lungs. And this is important because if you’re a health physicist and you’re calculating the dose that you would get from this particle, you’d have to consider that this particle might actually be trapped and result in a lifetime exposure. Thing of asbestos workers who inhaled an asbestos particle and when they eventually died, from whatever reason, that asbestos particle is still in their lungs. Well, this kind of hot particle would probably do something very, very similar. The particle that we examined was a mixture of fission products from a nuclear reactor and nuclear fuels. We looked at materials like Telurium, Radium 226. We saw Cesium 134 and 137, Cobalt 60 and a whole zoo of isotopes that probably you’ll never hear about on CNN but you’d have to be a physicist to understand. Let’s put it this way. Eighty percent by weight of this particle was made up of pure reactor core materials. So that tells me that something that came directly from the accident, directly from the core, could escape containment and travel a very, very significant distance. So it’s a long distance to travel, and what happens is the particle is so very small that it will essentially travel with whatever gas it’s entrained in. The winds will blow it long distances.

What’s going to happen is the further you get away from the reactor, the less likely you are to find a hot particle of this magnitude. But of course we’ve looked at so many samples from Japan, this just happens to be the longest distance and the hottest particle that we’ve found. I have to put some numbers on it.

In Japan, we measure radiation in Becquerels. A Becquerel is obviously named after someone. It’s named after Henri Becquerel. And a Becquerel means one radioactive disintegration per second. Now in Japan, if your food has more than 100 Becquerels in a kilogram, about 45 Becquerels in a pound, then it’s not considered safe to eat. The number is a bit higher in the United States, but if we use 100 Becquerels per kilogram as a guide – it’s something too radioactive to eat – this material was in the petabecquerel per kilogram range. Now you probably don’t hear that prefix very often. The number we’re looking at is 4 followed by 19 zeroes – that many becquerels per kilogram. That’s a very, very high number and essentially, that’s the kind of number you get when you look at core material. It is a tiny particle – in fact, the total number of becquerels from the particle was only about 310 becquerels for the particle. And so when we got our vacuum cleaner bag, the entire vacuum cleaner bag clicked away on our counter at 310 becquerels, which is a little higher than average for our Fukushima Prefecture vacuum cleaner bags. So we didn’t think too much of it.

Although everything is done in a glovebox or in a hood, when we separated the sample in half – this is the first step in identifying if a hot particle was present – when we separated the sample in half and analyzed half the sample, you’d expect to get 155 becquerels – right? Half of 310. In fact, compared to background, we got none. So we said, all right, we’ll measure the other half. The other half – none. So where’d it go? We took the entire sample and put it in. We’re back to 310 becquerels. A bit of a mystery. Until we realized that the very center of the two samples – the razor knife that we’d used to collect this, had actually hit the hot particle and stuck to the razor. And so when we were able to put the razor under the microscope and carefully collect that hot particle and see just how much that was clicking away with the radiation detectors. So we short circuited the process a little bit, but that’s exactly the method that you would use to try and find a hot particle. You just keep dividing your sample until you can find the part that has that high radiation emit. If you look at the black dust – and we’ve received samples of that (13:11) from Namie and Litate and a couple of other communities in northern Japan, this is very similar to the black sand that people see. The black sand – and this particle, too – it’s an aggregate, it’s a mixture. If you think of a hunk of concrete, it’s actually a mix of sand and cement and small stones, that’s what it looks like under the microscope.

So essentially what we’re talking about is a worst case for black sand. That’s what this hot particle is. So this material was vaporized during the accident. It condenses into these small particles and then they aggregate. They congeal, they collect, and they make particles big enough to be detected. They fly around in the winds. And sooner or later they hit something and they stick to it.

In the case of the Goya, the sample blew in with the outside air and appears to have just lodged somewhere into a carpet or floor material – something in the house that had been vacuum cleaned, and then collected in the vacuum cleaner bag. The good news is repeated sampling at the same location getting additional material from there, we’ve never found another particle like that. So it’s not like there’s anything about this particular house or that there’s according to our data more than one of these particles in the home. It doesn’t appear that there is. But it does tell me that it’s worth looking at for a particular area, what’s the probability of there being a hot particle present.

This has such a big impact on people’s exposure, the potential health damages. So far, from our Japanese samples from Fukushima Prefecture and from Tokyo, about 25 percent of those samples contained at least a few measurable hot particles. Only one that was this hot. And this was the worst case. It doesn’t represent any kind of average, but it does tell you what’s possible. The bottom line is, now that I’ve had time to digest the entire set of samples and put the number of hot particles per sample in perspective, take this data and put it before a peer review panel at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and prepare all this data for publication, it’s good to see that it’s going to be possible to find a real exposure number, where we can take the average exposures that we’re used to dealing with and also add in a probability for being exposed to a hot particle, so that we can find out what the true level of potential health damage is from an accident.
It is solid scientific material like this that you will not see or hear via traditional news stories, TEPCO, or the IAEA. Fairewinds has long said that there will be significant increases in cancer in Japan as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, and this video describing just one hot particle confirms our worst fears.

Thank you for viewing Fairewinds Energy Education. This is Arnie Gundersen, and I’ll keep you informed.

Articles by:Arnie Gundersen

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. The Center of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: publications@globalresearch.ca

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http://www.examiner.com/article/japan-passes-law-to-cleanse-internet-of-bad-fukushima-radiation-news

Japan Passes Law To Cleanse Internet Of "Bad" Fukushima Radiation News

July 24, 2011 8:14 PM MST

Japanese Farmer Refuses To Kill Radioactive Cows Uncanny Terrain - YouTube Japan has passed a law that will enable the police and contractors to monitor internet activity without restriction to "cleanse" the Internet of any "bad" Fukushima radiation news. As I previous reported, Japan has officially ordered the censorship of any reporting of the truth about the Fukushima nuclear radiation fallout by ordering telecommunications companies and web masters to scrub any stories negative stories from the about the disaster.

______________________________________________________________

Japan Officially Orders Censorship Of Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster

The government of Japan has issued an official order to telecommunications companies and web masters to censor reports which contradict the state media reports that the Fukushima nuclear radiation disaster is over.

Japan Government Officially Censors Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster.

The supposedly free democratic nation of Japan, which supposedly values and promotes freedom of speech, has officially issued orders to telecommunication companies and webmasters to remove content from websites that counter the official government position that the disaster is over and there is no more threat from the radiation.

______________________________________________________________

The government charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send “letters of request” to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they “take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information. ”The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem harmful to public order and morality. Source: Asia Pacific Journal

Note: I saw the executive order issued by Japan a week or two ago but could not find it in an English version anywhere but didn't report on it because the Japanese to English translated versions of the order did not provide clear enough meaning. What I gathered from the order was that Japan ordered telecommunication companies to provide notices to websites and webmasters to remove messages from internet bulletin boards and websites that conflicted with the Government reported version of events. If the websites and webmasters did not comply the telecommunication companies are to shut down offending websites as this is considered a national security issue which is affecting public safety and contributing to public unrest. It was also ordered that email communications be monitored to prevent the spread of false rumors. If you can find the original executive order, please send me a tip with the link.

[...]

When Tanaka requested the names of the media executives hosted by TEPCO in China, Katsumata retorted, “I cannot reveal their names since this is private information.” But it is precisely such collusive relations between mainstream media, the government and TEPCO, that results in the censorship of information concerning nuclear problems.

Now the Japanese government has moved to crack down on independent reportage and criticism of the government’s policies in the wake of the disaster by deciding what citizens may or may not talk about in public. A new project team has been created by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the National Police Agency, and METI to combat “rumors” deemed harmful to Japanese security in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

The government charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send “letters of request” to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they “take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information. ”The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem harmful to public order and morality.

[...]

Read The Rest...

Apparently the previous order was not enough to stem the flow of negative news as Japan has passed allow that will allow police unrestricted access to monitor all Internet communications to crack down on the so-called rumors. Making matters worse, Japan has issued open bids for companies to monitor blogs and social media such as tweets to crack down on the information making its way around the internet.

According to are report on the U.K progressive, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, opened a call for bids (tender) regarding the “Nuclear Power Safety Regulation Publicity Project”, for contractors to monitor blogs and tweets posted about nuclear power and radiation.

“Nuclear Power Safety Regulation Publicity Project” stipulates that, “The Contractor is required to monitor blogs on nuclear power and radiation issues as well as Twitter accounts (monitoring tweets is essential) around the clock, and conduct research and analysis on incorrect and inappropriate information that would lead to false rumors, and to report such internet accounts to the Agency. The “Contractor” is required to keep the Agency well informed on the internet accounts and keywords used in the blogs and Twitter accounts that are posting incorrect and inappropriate information. The Contractor is required to maintain sufficient number of personnel for around-the-clock monitoring. The Contractor is required to submit reports on internet accounts via CDR.” The document, however, does not state that blogs or Twitter accounts, which run afoul of METI’s guidelines, are to be banned or frozen.”

Nuclear News adds in their report 'Japan about to censor Internet news on nuclear radiation?'

Since March 11, 2011 it has been reported that YouTube videos containing footage or comments unfavorable to Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) or the Japanese government have been removed within several hours of their posting. Examples of offending YouTube videos include excerpts of TV shows with controversial comments like footage showing smoke emitted from the nuclear reactors, and an ex-TEPCO employee speaking on his Fukushima experiences. Likewise, Twitter accounts with too much content regarding nuclear power and radiation issues have been disrupted.

Prof. Ibusuki of Seijo Univ. Law Dept. comments:

“The Computer Network Monitoring Law will enable the police to monitor anyone’s internet activity without restriction.” Although this appears, on the surface, to be beneficial when targeting cyber-attacks, some Japanese commentators are suggesting that the law is un-Constitutional……

“Nuclear Power Safety Regulation Publicity Project” stipulates that, “The Contractor is required to monitor blogs on nuclear power and radiation issues as well as Twitter accounts (monitoring tweets is essential) around the clock, and conduct research and analysis on incorrect and inappropriate information that would lead to false rumors, and to report such internet accounts to the Agency. The “Contractor” is required to keep the Agency well informed on the internet accounts and keywords used in the blogs and Twitter accounts that are posting incorrect and inappropriate information. The Contractor is required to maintain sufficient number of personnel for around-the-clock monitoring. The Contractor is required to submit reports on internet accounts via CDR.” The document, however, does not state that blogs or Twitter accounts, which run afoul of METI’s guidelines, are to be banned or frozen.”

The U.K Progressive further elaborates:

Saturday, July 23, The Japan Times reported, about 1,500 cows that were fed hay containing radioactive cesium, in excess of the government limit, were found to have been shipped from Fukushima and other prefectures to all of Japan except Okinawa, as of Thursday, July 21. Evidence of rising contamination in and around the plant has tempered optimism, and new reports has consumers raising questions about whether it remains safe to eat beef, chicken and pork.

Since March 11, 2011 it has been reported that YouTube videos containing footage or comments unfavorable to Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) or the Japanese government have been removed within several hours of their posting. Examples of offending YouTube videos include excerpts of TV shows with controversial comments like footage showing smoke emitted from the nuclear reactors, and an ex-TEPCO employee speaking on his Fukushima experiences. Likewise, Twitter accounts with too much content regarding nuclear power and radiation issues have been disrupted. While many radioactive cattle have been discovered long distances from Fukushima, what is more important is where their feed is coming from.

Uncanny Terrain: Yoshizawa’s ranch is 14km downwind from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The government ordered him to kill his 300 cows. Most of his neighbors’ animals are gone, but some have been released and joined his herd. Yoshizawa refuses to kill his cows. He wants them to be studied for the effects of radiation.

Straw found 45 miles from Fukushima is highly contaminated with radioactive cesium, which is an indication that radiation has contaminated large portions of Northern Japan. More than half a million disintegration per second in a kilogram of straw are comparable to Chernobyl levels.

The American Nuclear Regulatory Commission was correct when it told Americans to evacuate beyond 50 miles from Fukushima – the Japanese should have done the same. Ex-Secretariat, Gundersen, of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission blames this contamination on “Black Rain”. “Rather than minimize the information the Japanese people receive,” Gundersen suggests, “minimizing their radiation exposure..”

This video included in the progressive report page shows the type of the negative information Japan is trying to keep a lid. Even in light of the recent beef scandal were Japan allowed highly radioactive beef to be shipped all over the country and be eaten when it was widely reported that the beef was highly radioactive this man whose cows are only 14 miles from the Fukushima plant refuses to kill his cows.

Meanwhile, in this video, Nuclear Engineer Arnie Gundersen says it is time to stop trying to minimize the flow of information and start minimizing the radiation exposure people are receiving.

Famed Nuclear Physicist Chris Bubsy goes even further says the Fukushima disaster health risk is being grossly underestimated and is far worse than Chernobyl on a global level.

Instead of factual reporting, the new law will mean a news sites and blogs will become proliferated with news articles like this report from Daily Yomuri with the feel good healdine of "Fun in the sun for Fukushima families".

Fun in the sun for Fukushima families

[...]

To make summer more enjoyable for children, a newly organized group called "Fukushima no kodomo o mamoru kai" (group to protect Fukushima children) is planning a 29-day trip around Hokkaido for children and their parents from Fukushima Prefecture.

The group was founded by a woman who evacuated from Fukushima to Sapporo and other volunteers. During the one-month program, which begins Monday, participants can enjoy swimming, hiking and bug collecting.

It costs only 5,000 yen for children and 20,000 yen for parents with additional funds coming from donations by Hokkaido residents and others. A total of 20 families or 44 people are slated to participate in the program.

Yuka Saito, 38, who will join the trip with her three children, said: "My kids and I are tired of worrying about radiation. In Hokkaido, we don't have to worry about food contamination and I want my kids to run around outside and enjoy themselves." The Fukushima University disaster volunteer center, mainly made up of university students, will invite about 40 primary school students for a free, five-day summer camp on the Shima Peninsula, Mie Prefecture.

In Minami-Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, parents and schools will give about 840 children and parents the opportunity to travel abroad to Asian countries or to many destinations in Japan, including Okinawa. Participants do not have to pay for transportation, accommodation or most other expenses, which will be covered by local governments and nonprofit organizations.

[...]

Source: The Daily Yomuri

Nuclear Engineer Arnie Gundersen says it is time to stop trying to minimize the flow of information and start minimizing the radiation exposure people are receiving.

Physicist: Fukushima Risk Grossly Underestimated And Far Worse Than Chernobyl

July 22, 2011 8:35 PM MST

2011/04/13 にアップロード

Engineers at Japan's Fukushima plant continue work on emptying highly radioactive water from one of the nuclear reactors. The latest tests show that radiation levels in the sea near the damaged facility have spiked. On Tuesday, Japan raised the level of nuclear alert at the plant to the maximum of seven, putting it on a par with the Chernobyl disaster. Recovery efforts came under threat as series of powerful aftershocks hit the area near the power station. It came a month after the massive earthquake and tsunami devastated the country, leaving over 13 thousand people dead. Monitoring stations around the world have been picking up small amounts of radioactive particles spreading from Fukushima. RT on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RTnews RT on Twitter: http://twitter.com/RT_com

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http://www.bfs.de/de/ion/imis/spurenmessungen.html/#2

Trace analysis in Germany

Trace measurements on airborne dust are a part of the integrated measuring and information system IMIS . For this run, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS), the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and the German Weather Service (DWD) air dust collector in a total of 43 sampling locations. Four of these collectors have a particularly high air flow, so that reaches a large sample volume and thus a sensitive detection of artificial radionuclides is possible. The stations are to be

Schauinsland near Freiburg (BfS)
Braunschweig (PTB),
Potsdam (DWD)
Offenbach (DWD).

The DWD still has another 39 gauge measuring points . BfS, PTB and DWD agree, especially prior to striking events in the sampling rhythm from. BfS has the function of the control center, which also reviews the resulting data, among other things, summarizing the field of trace analysis, evaluates and reports to the Federal Ministry of Environment.

Current Observation
Activity concentrations of artificial iodine-131 and cesium-137 at Schauinsland monitoring station
To compare the activity concentrations of artificial and natural radioactivity measured activity concentrations of artificial iodine-131 and cesium-137, the activity concentrations of naturally occurring radon and also naturally occurring beryllium-7 are compared in Figure 1. At present there is the activity concentrations of iodine-131 usually below the detection limit, which also correspond to cesium-137 from the ground again level was measured before the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. cesium-137 is also currently detected in each sample, this is due to the still existing nuclear fallout and nuclear disaster Chernobyl due.

Trace analysis results to the event in Fukushima
The events at the Japanese nuclear power plant in Fukushima had a release of radioactive material into the atmosphere result. These were transported in the atmosphere and could, despite their dilution during transport, by appropriately sensitive measuring devices in several thousand kilometers away are detected.

Activity concentrations of artificial iodine-131 and cesium-137 at Schauinsland monitoring station
In Figure 2, the period in 21.3. to 12.5.2011 measured at Schauinsland monitoring station activity concentrations of artificial iodine-131 and cesium-137 activity concentration of natural radioactivity (radon and beryllium-7) placed opposite. In this time of sampling cycle was reduced from weekly to daily sampling. In the sample from 24.3.2011 (measurement from 25.3.2011) of iodine-131 were first detected with an activity concentration of 58 Mikrobecquerel per cubic meter of air and cesium-137. As a result, to the middle of May, the artificial nuclides iodine-131, cesium-137, and also cesium-134 were detected in the air filter sample. After this time the activity levels for iodine-131, cesium-134 were below the detection limits, the cesium-137 still took off and is now on the ground level of before the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. However, cesium-137 is currently still in individual samples detected, which is due to the nuclear fallout and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Trace analysis of four German track measuring points: measurement of liberated iodine-131 and cesium-137
Figures 3 and 4 show the activity concentrations of iodine-131 and cesium-137 in the period 21.3. to 20.5.2011 or 11.7.2011 German at the four trace measuring points. The values show strong fluctuations, which has the multiple drafts of different air masses over Germany. The observed at the individual track tag values depend on the particular weather conditions, as for example rain or the activity concentration can be reduced by washing in the air. In addition, it is observed that the measured values for iodine-131 decrease faster than that for cesium-137, iodine-131 as a much shorter half-life (8 days) than the cesium-137 has (30 years).

Rating
The measured values posed no health risk to people and the environment in Germany and Europe and were many times below the natural radiation exposure measured. The measurement results that have been achieved independently in the different measuring methods were, for the artificial radiation by radioactive particles in the range of a few thousandths of Becquerel per cubic meter of air.

For comparison,
Due to the naturally occurring radon natural radiation in Germany outdoor continuously is several becquerels per cubic meter of air. Depending on location vary these values because the radon concentration is affected by the geological bedrock and the weather conditions. The 24-hour stay in an area with an iodine-131 activity concentration for example, 0,005 becquerels per cubic meter of air (in this order were the results of the monitoring stations Brunswick and Potsdam on 29.3.2011) results for an adult to additional radiation exposure of about one billionth of a sievert. This roughly corresponds to the natural background radiation in a minute spent outdoors.

Figure 1: Graphs of the activity concentrations of natural radioactivity (radon and beryllium-7) and the artificial radionuclides iodine-131 and cesium-137 at the Schauinsland station. The graph is updated weekly. (click for a larger view graphics)

Figure 2: Time course of the activity concentrations of natural radioactivity (radon and beryllium-7) and the artificial radionuclides iodine-131 and cesium-137 at the Schauinsland station during the period 21.3. to 12.5.2011.

Figure 3: Time course of the activity concentration of iodine-131 at four German track measuring points in the period 21.3. to 20.5.2011.

Figure 4: Time course of the activity concentration of cesium-137 at four German track measuring points in the period 21.3. to 11.7.2011.

Additional Information

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Fukushima, la poussière noire - A. Gundersen M.Kaltofen 10.07.2013

2013/07/25 に公開

Voici une version traduite et sous-titrée en Français du podcast du 10 Juillet 2013 de Fairewinds Energy Education.

Pour la semaine du 8 au 14 Juillet, Fairewinds a interrogé Marco Kaltofen, un éminent scientifique qui étudie les radiations ainsi que des isotopes radioactifs spécifiques.

Marco et Arnie Gundersen discutent d'un échantillon récent qui contenait une matière radioactive hautement concentrée provenant de l'accident à la centrale nucléaire de Fukushima Daiichi au Japon.

Comme la qualité sonore de cet enregistrement est variable et médiocre, le podcast affiche une transcription pour pouvoir lire en même temps.

Rapport d'analyse de M. Kaltofen (en Anglais) : http://www.scribd.com/doc/152720091/R...

Podcast original, vidéo et transcription en Anglais et Allemand sur le site de Fairewinds :

http://fairewinds.org/podcast/japans-...

Site Fairewinds : http://fairewinds.org/

Video originale sur la chaîne de Fairewinds : http://youtu.be/BPGvsZcHh6A

Traduction & sous-titrage par mes soins.

Mon blog : http://kna-blog.blogspot.fr/

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http://www.fairewinds.org/japans-black-dust-with-marco-kaltofen/#sthash.kqksPdLH.q316jRUU.dpbs

Japan’s Black Dust, with Marco Kaltofen

July 10th, 2013

About This Podcast

This week Fairewinds Energy Education interviewed Marco Kaltofen, a leading scientist who studies radiation as well as specific radioactive isotopes. Marco and Arnie discuss a recent sample that contained highly concentrated radioactive material from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident. As the sound quality of this recording varies, we have transcribed the podcast so you can read along.

Read Marco’s Report: Radiological Analysis of Namie Street Dust

Podcast Transcript

[tabgroup]

NWJ: Welcome to Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast for Wednesday, July 10. Joining me today is Marco Kaltofen, the President of Boston Chemical Data Corp and doctoral student researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, as well as Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer for Fairewinds.
MK:    Thanks for having me.
AG:     Yeah, I’m glad I’m here.
NWJ:   Marco, I had a chance to look over the report that you did on that sample from outside the exclusion zone around Fukushima. Can you fill me on exactly what you found from that soil sample.
MK:    I think one of the things that’s unique about this particular accident is that there’s a lot of crowd source data. We have a lot of people who have the resources to go out, collect samples, do testing, explore their environment and get some data about what they’re seeing. And we kept hearing reports about something unusual, a black dust that was on the surface of soils or streets that was much more radioactive than any surrounding soils. So it was almost as if some concentrated radioactive contaminant from the accident was pretty much refusing to disburse, collecting in a certain gully or gutter and folks were getting it. So we finally got a very small sample of that, a tiny amount, mainly for safety reasons, and put it through a whole battery of tests.
AG:     Talk about this dark sample that has been showing up in Japan, and I realize that what you’ve got may not be representative, but it certainly is unique. And maybe – what does it tell us? We know it came from Daiichi because there’s Cesium 134 and 137 in it? Is that –
MK:    I’ll just back up a little bit. What we looked at at Worcester Polytech is a couple of hundred different soil and dust samples. And what we’re doing with those samples is we are not just looking for the radioactive isotopes that you would expect from Fukushima Daiichi, but we want to know how big the dust particles are that are carrying that radiation because that tells us how far they’re going to travel and what process within the reactor created them and where they’re probably going to end up. So we actually isolate those radioactive particles from our samples and then we photograph them with a scanning electron microscope. So we learned a lot more about them than just using a Geiger counter or a gamma spectral detector. And I was going to say, what’s different about this material is unlike a lot of the soil and dust samples we’ve gotten, there’s a real uniformity to this stuff. It’s a single substance. It’s not a mix of mineral particles and pieces of dead bugs and plant matter and dust particles. It’s actually very homogenous and uniform when you look at it under the microscope. And it doesn’t look like the surrounding soils. And it is much more intensely radioactive than any other soil or dust sample we’ve gotten from around Fukushima Daiichi. So this material is different. It’s not a natural soil. There’s something unusual happening with this stuff.
AG:     So I’ve been reading this stuff for years and there keeps coming up these persistent stories of this black dust that winds up, usually in places where there’s a hollow, and apparently something’s washing out off of other surfaces and collecting. And it seems to be detected, as you said, because it’s extraordinarily more radioactive than anything other people have been bumping into. Does it – because it’s black, does that mean anything? Or is that just a coincidence?
MK:    Well, actually it does mean something. We were able to put this material under a microscope and these aren’t simple particles. They’re kind of – they’re aggregates. Have you ever seen a cheeseball? Well, under a microscope, the aggregates look like one of those cheeseballs rolled in nuts. It’s a big thing made up of a lot of small things smushed together. That’s what these particles look like. Kind of a snow cone of radioactive particles. And they’re all glued together somehow and they stay cohesive and they don’t fall apart when we handle them in the laboratory. And if you look at them under a microscope, it’s as if you took hundreds of very small radioactive particles and glued them all together into different shapes and sizes. And that’s what gives this stuff the black appearance. And that might be why it tends to stick together so well in the environment.
AG:     So it sounds like this stuff was created at Daiichi. I mean it didn’t go out as little particles and coalesce after it left Daiichi.
MK:    Well, while that’s possible, one piece of evidence that tells us that’s probably not the case is that it is uniformly radioactive. That means that the entire sample is radioactive. It’s not a mix of normal soil that’s not radioactive plus a little bit of contaminant. When we take some of this black dust and we spread it out over a X-ray plate, it actually exposes that x-ray plate to the dust’s radiation without any additional light or photons or X-rays. And every single dust particle in the sample darkens the X-ray film. So there’s nothing uncontaminated that we’ve sampled.
AG:     That’s fascinating. We probably should give the listeners an idea of how radioactive the sample was. The person in Japan who sent the sample to your lab was walking along with a Geiger counter and found an area that was highly radioactive. He then in touch with you and I and because it was so radioactive, we asked for an extraordinarily small sample to be sent. And it was about a tenth of a gram. To give the listeners an idea of what a gram is, a gram is about the weight of a dollar. So a tenth of the weight of a dollar is the weight of the whole sample that we sent through the mail. And I’m going to ask you to pick it up from here, Marco, and tell what that tenth of a gram sample contained.
MK:    The entire sample is probably about the size of an aspirin tablet. And it was mostly beta radiation of Cesium 134 and 137 that we had. And the total amount of that radioactive Cesium was about 1.5 mega becquerels per kilogram. That means for every kilogram of this material, it would have 1.5 million radioactive disintegration per second. Or for this very, very small sample, you could use a different unit. You could say 1,500 radioactive disintegrations per gram, and so on. But those are big, big numbers. They are much higher than anything out there we’ve seen.
AG:     And a kilogram is about 2.2 pounds. So about 2.2 pounds of this material would disintegrate off at about a million and a half disintegrations every second, and then the next second and then the next second. So, we’re not suggesting that there were many pounds of this material, thank God. There was a small piece of land that was contaminated. And on that small piece of land, we got even a smaller sample.
MK:    Well here’s something important. This material is not representative of the area as a whole. The sample was taken just over 10 kilometers away from the accident site. So it was just outside the exclusion zone within the restricted zone. People can visit these areas for the short term but they cannot stay. What happened here is somehow this material, which is much more radioactive than the surrounding, stays together and isn’t dispersing into the environment; that there’s some natural phenomenon that causes this material that collects and creates this hot spot. And that shows the need for vigilance. Because if there are natural processes that are going to allow hot spots to continue in this kind of concentration two years after the accident, then these hot spots need to be mapped and people need to be aware of that potential for higher-than-average radiation exposure.
NWJ:   Well, why do you think that we’re getting these hot spots?
MK:    Well, it’s really all about the form that this radiation has. The radioactive material that came from inside the reactor is attaching to particles that tend to clump together and aren’t being dispersed, they’re not dissolving in rain water. They’re not being taken up by plant life. They’re staying cohesive and they’re resisting degradation. They’re not degrading into smaller particles or simpler things. And the thing that’s also interesting about this is that there’s not just the Cesium that’s in here. We also saw a good deal of radium. The sample had fairly high levels of radium 226. Now that’s not a radioisotope that we hear as much about. The radium 226 has almost as much activity as the radioactive Cesium in the sample. Radium 226 is a degradation product of uranium and we can’t really detect the uranium directly. Uranium has such a long half-life, it doesn’t really show up on the gamma detector. That’s why the uranium that was created when the earth was created billions of years ago is still around. But one of these daughter products, – one of the things it degraded into is radium 226, which is much more intensely radioactive than the original uranium. And this tells me that this particle contains not only fission waste products from the reactor but very likely contains a concentrated unburned nuclear fuel. And that’s unusual. This sample had by far the highest level of uranium daughters that we’ve seen in a dust or soil sample. We’re actually seeing material that might well have come from inside a failed fuel assembly.
AG:     Okay. When I hear that, that’s clear evidence that the containment was breached. The interesting thing to me is that when I hear black, I think of like algae or fungi or something like that. But you’re saying this is not an organic substance. Is that right?
MK:    No. It’s not an organic substance. It’s a mixture of very small particles and just the way they aggregate gives it the appearance of being black, but it’s – it probably – I won’t say optical illusion, but it’s an optical effect of the size of the particles and the way they’re joined together.
NWJ:   So can you talk a little bit about the issues that are going to be – why people are still being allowed into the areas where we’re seeing these radiation hot spots? Or can you talk a little bit about what effect that might have on people who are exposed to these?
MK:    There’s nothing about the imaginary line between the restricted zone and the exclusion zone that can stop this material from being transported outward to where the population still lives. So I can’t speak to any kind of government policy, but I can say that this material obviously doesn’t respect a political boundary or a regulatory boundary. It’s going to move wherever surface water or wind is going to take it. The particles are a little big to move easily by wind, so it would actually take a fairly strong wind.
AG:     So these particles are heavy enough that they’re not going to travel across the Pacific on their own, but they were light enough to be thrown 10 to 20 kilometers away from the accident.
MK:    This sample came from about 10 kilometers away. If it could get 10, maybe we could look further afield and find this again. I know we’ve heard reports of the black material much further away than just 10 kilometers. What probably happened is that originally they were very small particles that traveled very easily and could travel long distances. And then they somehow aggregated. This is actually a common effect of radioactive particles because they give off alpha and beta radiations which are electrically charged and it makes the dust particles that contain those pick up an electrical charge so that they tend to seek each other out and aggregate. Very normal. This is just an extreme case where we’ve got a very large, very radioactive aggregates that formed into small particles. And given that the testing shows that we saw uranium daughters, Cesium 134 and 137 with the signature of Fukushima and a lot of materials that are suspected fission products, obviously it’s very likely these aggregates contain – at least some particles came from inside the reactor.
AG:     Are these particles light enough for people to ingest them or breathe them in?
MK:    Well, certainly they could be ingested. They could be – I mean the amount of hand-to-mouth activity people, even adults, engage in is pretty surprising for most folks and certainly for children or anyone working with soil – agricultural workers, construction workers, ingestion could be a very serious way of taking this material into the body. Inhalation, breathing in these particles – right now these particles are too big to be breathed in, but if they aggregated, they might de-aggregate and in that case, they could be a breathing hazard. But right now I would say they’re much more an ingestion hazard. And that usually tends to target children and agricultural workers.
AG:     I remember last – two Octobers ago – you did a paper for the American Public Health Association. And you had photographs of kids’ sneakers. So I think what you’re saying is that this could be – this is the kind of stuff that kind wind up in a kid’s shoelace and then on his hands and then in his mouth, but not likely to be inhaled.
MK:    Less likely to be inhaled because of its size. The thing to keep in mind is we had a 100mg sample and it was hot enough to get the physicists at WPI very interested with the sample. A child on average consumes between 100 and 200 milligrams of soil a day because of hand-to-mouth activity. So that’s something to really think about.
AG:     Wow, that’s breathtaking. So it certainly behooves authorities over there to continue to look in areas that may have been cleaned up already because this stuff, as you said, will migrate and knows no political boundary.
MK:    There are a lot of ways that we can model and predict where the material is going to travel. That’s why we were excited to have a sample of this because now that we know the particle size and a little bit about the density, we can make some better guesses about where this material is going to end up and let people at least have the option of cleaning up a little smarter, and maybe targeting places where this is going to become more concentrated and obviously be a bigger hazard.
NWJ:   Well, so I think this is a great opportunity for us to kind of talk about solutions and how they can start to clean this up. What can we do to get rid of these particles in these hot spots?
MK:    I’ve been a civil engineer my entire working life and there are so many technologies for cleanup and remediation. And this has been done in many places often quite well and it’s become routine in construction, development, real estate, for us to take care of these kind of issues. But what always has to happen first is there has to be a top-down approach where they actually mandate that these issues be addressed. So we’re getting into the area of policy. The technology and engineering is absolutely there to have an effective cleanup. All that has to happen is that people need to demand it and governments need to back up those demands.
AG:     I have been saying since last year that the Japanese government really – to fight a big problem, you need to admit you have a big problem. And I’ve never seen the commitment to admitting that it is a big problem. And they seem to be nipping around the edges, but not really going after… just realizing how tough this problem is to begin with.
MK:    I can’t speak to Japanese government policy. I’d be a fish out of water there. But I can say that this is not a problem that you nip around the edges. This is a problem that requires a comprehensive solution and we have done this before with good success. We’ve dealt with lead, for instance, in the environment. Lead used to be a scourge for our children. It was probably one of the largest public health hazards we experienced. And we have as a country and internationally dealt with that problem and dramatically reduced the exposures. It was top down, backed up by good research. There’s no reason we can’t do the same thing with the Fukushima contamination.
AG:     You know, Marco, this is the second time in two weeks where we’ve heard that exact same problem about how this is a solvable problem but you have to really be committed to thoroughly implementing the solution. There’s a report on the Fairewinds website, on the Demystifying Nuclear Power blog on the site, and it’s written by a professional journalist named Art Keller. And the title of it is Cleanup for Fukushima Daiichi: Technological Disaster or Crisis in Governance. So if people who are listening to this want to read a little bit more on this topic, they can switch over to the blog and read Mr. Keller’s eyewitness accounts of the difficulties American firms are having in attempting to clean up the site.
NWJ:   Is this an isolated sample or is it more likely that there are going to be more hot spots like this?
MK:    This is an isolated sample. You can do some statistics on how often we’re likely to see samples like this. If you do it based on the samples that we have, which are obviously selected since they come from volunteers – I mean we’re talking about – this sample is in the top 1 percent. So it is strikingly concentrated and intense, and fortunately somewhat rare. It will obviously take much more comprehensive testing to find out exactly how many of these small hot spots could exist. One way to do that is for everyone to share their data so that you can compare and get a little more statistical power because you’re combining everyone’s samples and giving your review.
AG:     You know, it’s rare but it’s not unique. There have been reports of a black powder that’s highly radioactive for more than a year near – in the relative nearness of the plant, less than 20 kilometers or 12 miles. But this is really the first one that we’ve been able to analyze in detail. And I think what makes this unique is that we’ve got a small piece in the lab and are really amazed at the isotopes that are in it and the concentration of the isotopes that are in it.
MK:    We were lucky to get the sample. We’ve been hearing about this type of material for a long time now and are really pleased to have had the chance to analyze it. There really can’t be any doubt about where this material came from. And I’ll be honest. I’m disappointed to hear that it’s not unique. But that makes sense that this kind of material would have escaped, given the severity of the accident.
NWJ:   Thank you both for taking the time to join us today.
AG:     Yeah, thank you for having me, Nat. The one last thing I’d like to add is the fact that we were contacted by someone in Japan who we then put in touch with Marco Kaltofen. And we knew this sample was coming. It’s important if you have something that you think is scientifically interesting to send us an email before you send the sample. We have a sampling protocol that we would send out and it just makes sure that when the lab gets the sample, we’re aware ahead of time that we can handle it safely and appropriately. So to the people in Japan, especially Fukushima Prefecture, there are many samples we would be interested in analyzing, but please contact us first and let’s make sure that we abide by the protocols we have in place to make sure the shipment is safely shipped and that you are safely protected when you take the sample in the first place. Thanks again for listening to Fairewinds.
MK:    Bye bye everybody.
NWJ:   This has been a Fairewinds Education Podcast.
- See more at: http://www.fairewinds.org/japans-black-dust-with-marco-kaltofen/#sthash.kqksPdLH.xD8Jf9hr.dpuf

Japans schwarzer Staub Gast: Marco Kaltofen

Mit: Arnie Gundersen sowie Nathaniel White Joyal

Nathaniel White Joyal: Willkommen beim Energy Education Podcast vom Mittwoch, dem 10. Juli 2013. Unser heutiger Podcast ist mit einer Video-Transkription unterlegt, da die Aufnahmequalität variiert. Mein Name ist Nathaniel White Joyal. Meine Gäste sind heute Marco Kaltofen, Direktor von Boston Chemical Data Corporation und Forscher und Doktorand im Worcester Polytechnic Institute, sowie Arnie Gundersen, der Chefingenieur von Fairewinds.

Marco Kaltofen: Danke für die Einladung!

Arnie Gundersen: Danke für die Einladung, Nat!

Nathaniel White Joyal: Marco, ich hatte die Gelegenheit, den Bericht durchzublättern, den du über die Probe angefertigt hast, die von einer Stelle gerade außerhalb der Sperrzone rund um Fukushima stammt. Kannst du mich darüber aufklären, was genau du in dieser Bodenprobe gefunden hast?

Marco Kaltofen: Meines Erachtens ist einer der Aspekte, die diesen speziellen Unfall so einzigartig machen, dass so viele Daten von der Bevölkerung erhoben wurden. Es gibt eine Menge Leute, welchen die Mittel und das nötige Wissen zur Verfügung stehen, um hinauszugehen, Proben zu nehmen, Analysen durchzuführen, die Umgebung zu erforschen und so einiges an Daten über das, was sie finden, anzusammeln. Wir haben immer wieder von ganz unüblichen Beobachtungen gehört, einer Art schwarzem Staub auf dem Erdboden oder auch auf Straßen, der aber wesentlich stärker strahlt als die Oberflächen bzw Böden ringsum. Es schien fast so, als ob irgendein von dem Unfall stammender radioaktiver Schadstoff sich weigerte, sich zu zerstreuen, sich dagegen in manchen Abflüssen und Rinnsteinen konzentrierte, woher die Leute ihn dann bezogen. Wir haben also schließlich eine kleine Probe davon bekommen, eine winzige Menge, hauptsächlich aus Sicherheitsgründen, und haben damit eine ganze Batterie von Tests durchgeführt.

Arnie Gundersen: Wenn wir von diesen dunkelfarbigen Proben sprechen, die da in Japan aufgetaucht sind – was du da bekommen hast, mag vielleicht nicht charakteristisch sein, aber es ist auf jeden Fall einzigartig. Und vielleicht … Was sagt sie uns? Wir wissen, dass sie aus Daiichi stammt, weil sie ¹³⁴Cäsium und ¹³⁷Cäsium enthält? Ist das …

Marco Kaltofen: Ich werde ein bisschen weiter ausholen. Was wir in Worcester Polytech untersucht haben, waren ein paar hundert verschiedene Erd- und Staubproben. Wir suchen dabei nicht nur nach radioaktiven Isotopen, wie man sie als Konsequenz aus den Ereignissen in Fukushima Daiichi erwarten muss, sondern wir möchten feststellen, wie groß diese Staubpartikel sind, die eine derartige Strahlung transportieren, denn daraus können wir erschließen, wie weit sie sich verbreiten, welche Vorgänge in den Reaktoren sie erzeugt haben und wohin sie schließlich aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach gelangen werden. Wir lösen diese radioaktiven Partikel also aus den Proben heraus, und danach fotografieren wir sie mit einem Rasterelektronenmikroskop. Wir haben dadurch wesentlich mehr über sie erfahren, als wenn wir lediglich einen Geigerzähler oder ein Gammaspektrometer eingesetzt hätten. Was ich aber sagen wollte: Im Gegensatz zu einer Vielzahl von Erd- und Staubproben, die wir erhalten haben, besitzt dieses Material eine große Einheitlichkeit. Es handelt sich um eine einzige Substanz. Es ist keine Mischung aus mineralischen Partikeln, Überresten toter Insekten, Pflanzenrückständen und Staubkörnern. Diese Substanz ist überaus homogen und gleichförmig, wenn man sie unter dem Mikroskop betrachtet. Sie sieht auch anders aus als die umliegende Erde. Schlussendlich ist sie auch in höherem Ausmaß radioaktiv als jede andere Erd- oder Staubprobe, die wir aus der Region rund um Fukushima Daiichi erhalten haben. Dieses Material ist also anders. Es ist kein natürlicher Bodenbestandteil. Etwas Ungewöhnliches geht in diesem Zeug vor sich.

Arnie Gundersen: Ich lese nun schon seit Jahren von diesem Zeug und hartnäckig tauchen immer wieder Geschichten über diesen schwarzen Staub auf, der sich normalerweise in irgendwelchen Senken oder Höhlungen befindet, anscheinend wird er aus anderen Oberflächen ausgeschwemmt und sammelt sich dann dort an. Entdeckt wird er, wie du erwähnt hast, wegen dieser außerordentlich hohen Radioaktivität, die um so Vieles höher ist als alles andere, worauf die Leute sonst so stoßen. Hat der Umstand irgendeine Bedeutung, dass dieser Stoff schwarz gefärbt ist? Oder ist das ein bloßer Zufall?

Marco Kaltofen: Nun, dieser Umstand ist tatsächlich von Bedeutung. Wir konnten dieses Material in einem Mikroskop betrachten und es sind nicht einfach simple Bruchstücke. Eher schon sind es Gemenge. Hast du schon einmal Weichkäsebällchen gesehen? Tja, unter dem Mikroskop schauen sie so aus wie in Nüssen gewälzte Käsebällchen: Ein größeres Ding, das aus vielen, ineinander verschachtelten kleineren Dingern besteht. Genau so schauen sie aus. Wie zerstoßenes Eis – aus radioaktiven Partikeln. Diese Teilchen sind irgendwie zusammengeklebt – und sie bleiben das auch, sie zerfallen nicht, wenn wir mit ihnen in unserem Labor hantieren. Wenn man sie also im Mikroskop ansieht, dann ist es, als ob man hunderte kleinster radioaktiver Partikel genommen und diese zu verschiedene Formen und in verschiedenen Größen zusammengeleimt hätte. Das ist es, was dem Zeug die schwarze Erscheinung verleiht. Es könnte auch der Grund sein, warum es in der Umwelt so gut zusammenhaftet.

Arnie Gundersen: Das hört sich so an, als wäre dieses Zeug in Daiichi entstanden. Ich meine damit, dass es wohl nicht in Form dieser winzigen Partikel Daiichi verlassen hat und sich erst danach in diese Knäuel verwandelt hat.

Marco Kaltofen: Auch das wäre möglich, aber ein Hinweis darauf, dass dies wohl nicht der Fall ist, besteht darin, dass es so gleichförmig radioaktiv ist. Mit anderen Worten: die gesamte Probe ist radioaktiv; es handelt sich nicht um eine Mischung aus normaler, nicht radioaktiver Erde plus einem geringen Anteil von Verunreinigungen. Wenn wir etwas von diesem schwarzen Staub nehmen und auf einer Röntgenplatte verteilen, dann wird die Röntgenplatte durch die Radioaktivität, wie sie von diesen Staubpartikeln ausgeht, belichtet, und zwar ohne dass irgendein zusätzliches Licht oder Photonen oder andere Röntgenstrahlen im Spiel wären. Jedes einzelne Staubkorn aus der Probe belichtet dabei die Platte, es gibt also nichts Unverstrahltes in diesen Proben.

Arnie Gundersen: Das ist äußerst interessant. Wir sollten unseren Zuhörern wahrscheinlich eine Vorstellung davon geben, wie radioaktiv diese Probe war. Die Person aus Japan, die diese Proben an dein Labor geschickt hat, ist mit ihrem Geigerzähler unterwegs gewesen und hat einen hoch radioaktiven Bereich entdeckt. Sie ist dann mit uns in Verbindung getreten, und weil die Probe derart massiv strahlt, haben wir sie gebeten, nur eine winzig kleine Probe zu übermitteln. Das war dann ein Zehntel von einem Gramm. Um den Zuhörern auch eine Vorstellung von einem Gramm zu geben: ein Dollar wiegt ungefähr ein Gramm. Ein Zehntel des Gewichts einer Dollarnote entspricht also dem Gewicht der Probe, die wir per Post zugesandt bekommen haben. Ich würde dich bitten, Marco, nun weiterzuerzählen und uns darüber zu unterrichten, was dieses zehntel Gramm nun enthielt.

Marco Kaltofen: Die gesamte Probe ist vielleicht so groß wie eine Aspirintablette. Wir ermittelten hauptsächlich Beta-Strahlung, die von ¹³⁴Cäsium und ¹³⁷Casium herrührt. Die Gesamtintensität entsprach 1,5 Megabecquerel pro Kilogramm. Das heißt also, dass jedes Kilogramm von diesem Stoff 1,5 Millionen Zerfälle pro Sekunde erzeugt. Für diese sehr, sehr kleine Probe könnt man eine andere Einheit verwenden: Man könnte von 1.500 Zerfällen pro Gramm sprechen, und so weiter. Aber das sind riesige Zahlen! Sie sind viel höher als alles, was wir bis jetzt gesehen haben.

Arnie Gundersen: Ein Kilogramm sind ca 2,2 Pfund. 2,2 Pfund von diesem Material würden also ungefähr eineinhalb Millionen Zerfälle pro Sekunde generieren, in dieser Sekunde, in der nächsten und in der nächsten ebenso. Wir wollen nicht unterstellen, dass dort mehrere Pfund von diesem Material herumlagen, Gott sei Dank! Ein kleiner Bodenbereich war verseucht, und von diesem stammt unsere noch viel kleinere Probe.

Marco Kaltofen: Noch eine wichtige Zusatzinformation: dieser Stoff ist nicht repräsentativ für das ganze Gebiet. Die Probe wurde nur 10 Kilometern von der Unfallstelle entfernt gezogen, also gerade außerhalb der Sperrzone und innerhalb einer nur unter Auflagen zugänglichen Zone. Die Menschen können für kurze Besuche dorthin, aber sie können nicht bleiben. Was aber hier passiert, ist, dass dieses Material, das um Vieles radioaktiver ist als seine Umgebung, sich nicht in der Umwelt verteilt, sondern Anhäufungen bildet, dass es irgendeinen natürlichen Prozess gibt, der bewirkt, dass sich dieses Material anhäuft und Hotspots produziert. Das wiederum beweist aber, dass weiterhin Wachsamkeit erforderlich ist. Denn wenn es natürliche Vorgänge gibt, die es erlauben, dass Hotspots dieser Art zwei Jahre nach dem Unfall weiterhin bestehen, dann müssen diese Hotspots kartographisch erfasst werden und die Menschen müssen sich dieses Risikos einer überdurchschnittlichen Strahlenbelastung bewusst sein.

Nathaniel White Joyal: Was ist deine Annahme, wie es zu diesen Hotspots kommt?

Marco Kaltofen: Der Dreh- und Angelpunkt scheint mir in der Struktur zu liegen. Das radioaktive Material aus den Reaktoren ist an Partikel angeheftet, die zur Verklumpung neigen und sich nicht zerstreuen – in Regenwasser werden sie nicht aufgelöst. Sie werden auch durch Pflanzen nicht aufgenommen. Sie bleiben klebrig und widersetzen sich dem Zerfall, sie zerfallen nicht in kleinere oder simplere Einheiten. Es ist in diesem Zusammenhang auch interessant, dass sie nicht nur Cäsium enthalten. Wir haben auch eine ansehnliche Menge an Radium festgestellt. Diese Probe hatte einen hohen Gehalt an ²²⁶Radium. Nun, das ist kein Isotop, von dem wir sehr häufig hören. Das ²²⁶Radium ist in dieser Probe fast gleich aktiv wie das Cäsium. ²²⁶Radium ist ein Zerfallsprodukt von Uran, das Uran selbst können wir aber nicht direkt aufspüren. Uran hat so eine lange Halbwertszeit, dass es von einem Gammadetektor nicht wirklich registriert wird. Das ist auch der Grund, warum das Uran, das vor Milliarden Jahren, während der Erdentstehung, gebildet wurde, immer noch da ist. Aber eines der Zerfallsprodukte, einer der Stoffe, zu denen es zerfällt, ist ²²⁶Radium, das wesentlich radioaktiver ist als das ursprünglich vorhandene Uran. Das sagt mir, dass diese Partikel nicht nur Rückstände aus den Spaltvorgängen im Reaktor enthalten, sondern höchstwahrscheinlich auch ein konzentriertes Stückchen unverbrauchten, nicht abgebrannten Kernbrennstoffs. Das ist sehr ungewöhnlich. Diese Probe enthielt mit Abstand die meisten Uran-Zerfallsprodukte, die wir je in einer Staub- oder Erdprobe gemessen haben. Es könnte sehr gut sein, dass wir Material aus einem zerstörten Brennelement vor uns haben.

Arnie Gundersen: OK. Wenn ich das höre, dann ist mir klar, dass der Sicherheitsbehälter undicht geworden ist. Was ich aber interessant finde, ist, dass ich bei der Farbe Schwarz an Algen, Pilze oder etwas Anderes in dieser Richtung denke. Aber du sagst, dass es sich hier nicht um eine organische Substanz handelt, richtig?

Marco Kaltofen: Nein, es ist sicher keine organische Substanz. Es ist eine Mixtur aus sehr kleinen Elementen, und nur die Art, in der sie zusammengesetzt sind, ergibt den Eindruck von schwarz, es ist also wahrscheinlich – ich sage nicht, eine optische Täuschung, aber doch ein optischer Effekt, der aus der Größe der Partikel resultiert und aus der Art, wie sie miteinander verschmolzen sind.

Nathaniel White Joyal: Kannst du vielleicht noch etwas dazu sagen, warum die Menschen in Gegenden vorgelassen werden, in denen diese Hotspots zu finden sind? Oder kannst du uns etwas dazu sagen, welche Auswirkungen die Leute zu gewärtigen haben, die ihnen ausgesetzt sind?

Marco Kaltofen: Es gibt nichts an dieser fiktiven Linie, welche die Sperrzone und die beschränkt zugänglichen Gebiete umschließt, wodurch dieses Material daran gehindert würde, nach außen weitertransportiert zu werden, dorthin, wo weiterhin Menschen leben. Ich werde also zu den Strategien der Regierung nichts weiter sagen, aber ich kann festhalten, dass dieses Material offensichtlich weder politische Grenzziehungen noch irgendwelche in Regelwerken festgesetzten Grenzlinien beachtet. Es gelangt schlicht dorthin, wohin es durch Wind und Wasser verfrachtet wird. Diese Partikel sind allerdings ein bisschen zu groß, um mit Leichtigkeit durch den Wind weitergetrieben zu werden, dafür müsste der Wind schon ziemlich heftig blasen, aber offensichtlich kann es auch dazu kommen.

Arnie Gundersen: Diese Teilchen sind also zu schwer, um von sich aus den Pazifik zu überqueren; sie sind aber leicht genug, als dass sie vom Unfallort aus 10 bis 20 km weit geschleudert werden konnten.

Marco Kaltofen: Diese Probe stammt aus einer Entfernung von rund 10 Kilometern. Wenn es bis zu 10 km weit kommen konnte, dann sollten wir vielleicht auch in größerer Entfernung danach Ausschau halten und würden es auch dort vorfinden. Ich weiß, dass wir Berichte von diesem schwarzen Material erhalten haben, die von einer weitaus größeren Entfernung als 10 km sprechen. Wahrscheinlich bestand dieses Material ursprünglich aus winzigen Partikeln, die demgemäß mit Leichtigkeit größere Entfernungen überwinden können, und dann haben sie sich irgendwie miteinander verbunden. Dies ist an und für sich ein bei radioaktiven Partikeln ganz normaler Effekt, denn sie erzeugen Alpha- und Betastrahlen, deren elektrische Ladung in den Staubteilchen, in die sie eingelagert sind, ebenfalls eine elektrische Ladung induziert; das ist der Grund, warum sie sich gegenseitig anziehen. Alles ganz wie zu erwarten. Hier handelt es sich lediglich um einen Extremfall, bei dem wir sehr große, äußerst radioaktive Konglomerate vorfinden, die sich in kleinen Partikeln zusammengeschlossen haben. Da wir ja bei unseren Untersuchungen Zerfallsprodukte von Uran festgestellt haben, das ¹³⁴Caesium und ¹³⁷Cäsium in der für Fukushima charakteristischen Verteilung, und weiterhin eine Menge an Stoffen, von denen wir annehmen, dass es sich dabei um Spaltprodukte handelt, so ist es offensichtlich höchstwahrscheinlich, dass wenigstens einige dieser Partikel aus dem Reaktorinneren stammen.

Arnie Gundersen: Sind diese Partikel fein genug, dass die Leute sie mit der Nahrung zu sich nehmen oder auch einatmen können?

Marco Kaltofen: Sie können mit Sicherheit zusammen mit Nahrung aufgenommen werden. Es könnte so sein, dass … Ich meine, die Häufigkeit von Aktionen, in denen eine Hand zum Mund geführt wird, selbst wenn wir ausschließlich Erwachsene betrachten, ist für die meisten Leute ziemlich verblüffend. Aber für Kinder und auch alle Menschen, die mit Erdreich zu tun haben – Arbeitskräfte in der Landwirtschaft oder Bauarbeiter etwa – könnte dieser Aufnahmemechanismus ein nicht zu unterschätzender Pfad sein, wie dieses Material in den Körper gelangt. Was das Einatmen betrifft: zurzeit sind diese Partikel zu groß, um eingeatmet werden zu können. Aber so, wie sie sich verbunden haben, können sie auch wieder zerfallen, und in dem Fall könnten sie tatsächlich zu einer Gefahr in der Atemluft werden. Zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt würde ich aber vermuten, dass die Hauptgefahr in der oralen Aufnahme besteht, davon wären dann Kinder und Bauarbeiter am stärksten betroffen.

Arnie Gundersen: Ich kann mich daran erinnern, dass du letzten Oktober [2012; AdÜ] eine wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung für die American Public Health Association [ein Zusammenschluss von Mitgliedern verschiedener medizinischer Disziplinen, deren Zweck die Förderung der öffentlichen Gesundheit darstellt; AdÜ] verfasst hast. In diesem Bericht ist ein Foto von Kinderturnschuhen. Wenn ich es richtig verstanden habe, dann sagst du, dass dieses Zeug etwa an den Schnürsenkeln von Kindern auftaucht und dann über die Hände schließlich bis zum Mund hin transportiert werden könnte, dass es andererseits aber sehr unwahrscheinlich ist, es einzuatmen.

Marco Kaltofen: Die Aufnahme über die Atmung ist sehr unwahrscheinlich wegen der Größe dieser Partikel. Man muss jedoch stets im Auge behalten, dass uns eine Probe von lediglich 100 Milligramm zur Verfügung stand, dass diese aber so radioaktiv war, dass die Physiker am Worcester Polytechnic Institute sehr, sehr neugierig darauf wurden. Ein Kind nimmt an einem Tag durch Hand-zum-Mund Bewegungen durchschnittlich 100 bis 200 Milligramm Erde zu sich. Das muss man entsprechend in Betracht ziehen.

Arnie Gundersen: Mein Gott, das ist ziemlich atemberaubend. Es stünde den Behörden dort drüben sehr gut an, wenn sie weiterhin auch Gebiete überprüfen, die schon einmal gesäubert worden sind, weil dieses Zeug, wie du schon gesagt hast, weiterwandern kann – es hält sich an keine politischen Grenzen.

Marco Kaltofen: Wir können auf mehrere Arten vorhersagen und im Modell darstellen, wohin sich dieses Material bewegt. Das ist auch der Grund, warum wir so begeistert über die Probe waren, denn da wir nun die Partikelgröße kennen und ein wenig über die Dichte dieser Teilchen wissen, können wir bessere Hypothesen darüber aufstellen, wo dieses Material schlussendlich hingelangen wird. Dadurch können wir den Menschen die Möglichkeit geben, die Dekontaminationsanstrengungen ein bisschen schlauer anzugehen, vielleicht auch die Orte gezielt auszuwählen, in denen diese Partikel in größerer Konzentration auftauchen, was selbstverständlich auch eine größere Gefahr bedeutet.

Nathaniel White Joyal: Daraus ergibt sich für uns die Gelegenheit, über Lösungsstrategien zu sprechen und darüber, wie man die Dekontamination organisieren sollte. Was kann getan werden, um diese Partikel in den Hotspots wieder loszuwerden?

Marco Kaltofen: Ich war mein ganzes Arbeitsleben lang Ziviltechniker, es gibt so viele Technologien für Dekontamination und Sanierung. An vielen Orten wurde das bereits gemacht, oft auch gar nicht so schlecht. Es ist im Bauwesen, in der Erschließung, auf Grundstücken jeglicher Art zur Routine geworden, sich mit diesen Belangen zu befassen. Ein erster Anstoß in diesen Dingen muss aber stets von oben kommen, es muss angeordnet werden, dass diese Probleme zu berücksichtigen sind. Wir kommen nun also in den Bereich der politischen Absichten. Die Technologie und die Methoden für eine wirksame Sanierung existieren. Es ist aber unumgänglich, dass die Menschen dies auch verlangen, und die Regierungen müssen dieser Aufforderung auch Folge leisten.

Arnie Gundersen: Seit dem letzten Jahr habe ich wiederholt gesagt, dass die japanische Regierung wirklich … Um ein Riesenproblem bekämpfen zu können, muss man sich erst einmal eingestehen, dass man ein Riesenproblem hat. Ich habe diesen Willen einzuräumen, dass es sich hier um ein großes Problem handelt, aber zu keinem Zeitpunkt wahrgenommen. Man tanzt um den heißen Brei herum, aber geht nicht zielstrebig an die Sache heran, auch wenn es nur darum geht, sich einzugestehen, wie ernst die Lage ist.

Marco Kaltofen: Ich kann mich zu den Vorgehensweisen der japanischen Regierung nicht weiter äußern, dazu fehlt mir jegliches Wissen. Ich kann aber feststellen, dass es sich hier um ein Problem handelt, bei dem man nicht um den heißen Brei herumtanzen kann. Hier handelt es sich um ein Problem, das einer umfassenden, flächendeckenden Lösung bedarf – wir haben so etwas bereits mit Erfolg durchgeführt. Wir haben zB mit Blei in der Umwelt aufgeräumt. Blei war eine Geißel für unsere Kinder und wahrscheinlich eine der größten Bedrohungen für die öffentliche Gesundheit, die wir erleben mussten. Wir sind als Nation und auch weltweit gegen dieses Problem vorgegangen und haben die Belastung drastisch reduziert. Das wurde von oben nach unten durchgesetzt, von ordentlicher Forschungsarbeit gestützt. Es gibt keinen Grund anzunehmen, dass wir bei der Verseuchung von Fukushima nicht das Gleiche erreichen können.

Arnie Gundersen: Weißt du, Marco, dies ist jetzt bereits das zweite Mal in 14 Tagen, dass wir genau vom gleichen Problem hören: dieses Problem wäre lösbar, aber man müsste mit ganzer Kraft, ohne jede Halbherzigkeit, darangehen, die notwendigen Maßnahmen gründlich durchzuführen. Wir haben einen Bericht auf unserer Fairewinds-Website, in unserem Blog mit dem Titel: Die Kernkraft entzaubern, von einem Berufsjournalisten namens Art Keller. Der Titel ist: Dekontamination für Fukushima Daiichi: Technikkatastrophe oder Krise der Staatsführung? Falls einige Leute, die uns zuhören, also ein bisschen mehr zu diesem Thema wissen wollen, dann können sie zu unserem Blog wechseln und den Augenzeugenbericht von Herrn Keller lesen, welchen Hindernissen sich amerikanische Firmen bei dem Versuch gegenübersehen, die Anlage zu dekontaminieren.

Nathaniel White Joyal: Ist das ein isolierter Einzelfall, oder ist es eher wahrscheinlich, dass es noch weitere solcher Hotspots gibt?

Marco Kaltofen: Es ist ein Einzelfall. Man kann eine Statistik aufstellen, wie oft uns Proben wie diese hier unterkommen werden. Wenn man dies auf Basis der Proben, die wir erhalten haben, durchführt, welche natürlich einer gewissen Auswahl entsprechen, da sie von freiwilligen Helfern stammen, so sprechen wir bei dieser Probe vom obersten Prozent. Es ist also ganz unglaublich konzentriert und außerordentlich dicht, aber glücklicherweise auch einigermaßen selten. Es wird ganz offensichtlich viel umfassender Untersuchungen bedürfen um herauszufinden, wie viele dieser lokalen Hotspots tatsächlich existieren. Eine Möglichkeit, dies zu leisten, bestünde darin, dass alle ihre Daten zur Verfügung stellen, damit man Vergleiche anstellen kann, die ein bisschen mehr statistisches Gewicht erlangen, weil man alle Proben vergleicht und daraus seine Schlüsse zieht.

Arnie Gundersen: Meines Erachtens ist dieses Material zwar selten, aber nicht einzigartig. Berichte über hochradioaktives Pulver gab es jetzt schon länger als ein Jahr – relativ nahe beim Kraftwerk, in einem Umkreis von weniger als 20 km. Es ist allerdings das erste Mal, dass wir diesen Stoff etwas ausführlicher untersuchen konnten. Ich denke, was diese Probe einzigartig macht, ist der Umstand, dass wir das kleine Stückchen hier im Labor haben und ganz verblüfft über die Verschiedenartigkeit und Konzentration von Isotopen sind, die es aufweist.

Marco Kaltofen: Wir haben großes Glück, dass wir diese Probe erhalten haben. Wir haben von diesem Material nun schon seit langer Zeit gehört und sind sehr froh darüber, dass dadurch eine Gelegenheit zur Analyse zustande gekommen ist. Es kann überhaupt keinen Zweifel daran geben, woher dieses Material stammt. Ich werde ehrlich sein: ich bin enttäuscht darüber zu erfahren, dass es wohl nicht einzigartig ist. Aber wenn man die Schwere des Unfalls in Betracht zieht, dann ist es gut nachvollziehbar, dass diese Art von Material freigesetzt wurde.

Nathaniel White Joyal: Mein Dank an euch beide, dass ihr euch heute die Zeit genommen habt, dabei zu sein!

Arnie Gundersen: Aber gerne, danke für die Einladung, Nat! Zuletzt möchte ich noch diese eine Sache hinzufügen: wir wurden von jemandem in Japan kontaktiert, den wir dann an Marco Kaltofen weiterverwiesen haben. Wir haben davon gewusst, dass diese Probe auf dem Weg zu uns war. Wenn Sie also glauben, dass Sie etwas haben, was von wissenschaftlichem Wert sein könnte, dann ist es sehr wichtig, dass Sie uns eine E-Mail zukommen lassen, bevor Sie die Probe an uns weiterleiten. Wir haben ein Formular, das wir im Voraus verschicken und das sicherstellt, dass wir mit der Probe sicher und angemessen umgehen, wenn sie im Labor eintrifft. Dieser Appell ist also an die Menschen in Japan gerichtet, speziell die aus der Präfektur von Fukushima: es gibt eine Vielzahl von Proben, die wir sehr gerne analysieren würden, aber bitte kontaktieren Sie uns im Voraus, damit wir sichergehen können, dass all die Verfahren eingehalten werden, die wir eingerichtet haben, um zu gewährleisten, dass die Sendung sicher verschickt wird, dass aber vor allem auch Sie selbst geschützt sind, wenn Sie eine Probe nehmen. Noch einmal danke, dass Sie die Sendungen von Fairewinds verfolgen!

Marco Kaltofen: Auf Wiedersehen allerseits!

Nathaniel White Joyal: Dieser Podcast ist eine Produktion von Fairewinds Energy Education.

- See more at: http://www.fairewinds.org/japans-black-dust-with-marco-kaltofen/#sthash.kqksPdLH.xD8Jf9hr.dpuf

Übersetzung und Lektorierung: www.afaz.at (ak)
Dieses Schriftstück steht unter GFDL, siehe www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html . Vervielfältigung und Verbreitung – auch in geänderter Form – sind jederzeit gestattet, Änderungen müssen mitgeteilt werden (email: afaz@gmx.at). www.afaz.at Juli 2013 / v1

Cliquez ici pour voir cette vidéo avec sous-titres en français

[/tabgroup] - See more at: http://www.fairewinds.org/japans-black-dust-with-marco-kaltofen/#sthash.kqksPdLH.xD8Jf9hr.dpuf

Scientist Marco Kaltofen Presents Data Confirming Hot Particles
New TEPCO Report Shows Damage to Unit Fuel Pool MUCH Worse Than That at Unit 4
CSI: Fukushima
Forgotten Fukushima – Japan Two Years After the Daiichi Accident

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http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Hot-Particle-Lung-Tissue1997.htm

“Hot” or radioactive particle in lung tissue”

photo by Del Tredici, Burdens of Proof by Tim Connor, Energy Research Foundation (1997)

This is a photo of a “hot particle”, in this case a 1 micron particle of plutonium, and shows the alpha tracks emitted from that particle in one year.

Plutonium in Lung Tissue: The dark, star-like image in this photograph (magnified 500 times) shows tracks from alpha particles radiating front a speck of plutonium lodged in the lung tissue of an ape. Alpha radiation from plutonium and other alpha-emitting radionuclides can be blocked by skin or even a piece of paper but it is the most biologically destructive form of ionizing radiation when the alpha-emitting substance is deposited in the soft tissue of internal organs like the lung. The alpha tracks shown above were captured over a two-day period. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley California, September 1982.

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http://www.llrc.org/du/subtopic/durs.htm

Science on Trial:

On the Biological Effects and Health Risks

following Exposure to Aerosols produced by the use of Depleted Uranium Weapons

Chris Busby PhD

Invited Presentation to the Royal Society

London, July 19th 2000

Also given in part to the International Conference against Depleted Uranium

Manchester, 4th –5th November 2000

Occasional Paper 2000/11

Aberystwyth: Green Audit

October 2000

[And additional evidence given 12th March 2001]

1. Science on Trial: the Health Effects of Low Level Radiation

The Royal Society Committee on Depleted Uranium has been set up, as I understand it, to evaluate the health risks associated with the battlefield use by the military of the armour-piercing penetrators manufactured from this material. The question of the possible risks to the health of those who were exposed to it has now arrived at the door of this august body, the Royal Society. This is because it has sequentially passed through the stages of being addressed by several other less grand committees of experts whose job it is to know about these things, but who have all answered the question in a way that is not believable, given the real world data, what we might hesitantly label 'the facts'. The facts are that veterans of the recent Iraqi war have been suffering from a mysterious ailment called 'Gulf War Syndrome' which has all the indications of a consequence of chemical or radiation poisoning. The cancer rate in particular has sharply increased in this group of people suggesting exposure of the soldiers to a mutagen, or carcinogen. In addition, the population of Iraq in the areas where DU weapons were used seems to be suffering a similar fate, but in these territories also there have been reported increases in childhood cancer and malformation rates, again indication of a mutagen source. It is now generally conceded that about 350 tonnes of Depleted Uranium was used in the war and that sub-micron diameter oxide particles became dispersed in the areas that were bombed or strafed. Uranium is known to be a radiation hazard, and radiation exposure is a known cause of all the effects observed in the veterans and the children of Iraq. These facts taken together suggest that the exposure to DU may be the main cause or one of the causes of the observed effects. I will not argue further for the existence of Gulf War Syndrome, or the Iraqi cancer effects in this presentation. The argument marshalled against this suggestion is that Depleted Uranium is not considered to be a serious radiation hazard since it is so weakly radioactive owing to its long half-life and the fact that its alpha emissions have a very short range. It is argued that on the basis of the 'known relationship between radiation dose and subsequent cancer' the exposure to DU suffered by the Gulf War veterans, or the Iraqi children, cannot have been sufficiently high to be a cause of cancer or mutagenic illness. This is familiar territory to any scientist who has looked into the area of the health risks of exposure to man-made radioactivity: similar arguments are routinely advanced to exonerate radiation as a cause of childhood cancer and leukemia clusters near nuclear reprocessing sites like Sellafield, Dounreay and La Hague, increases in infant mortality and cancer in populations exposed to weapons fallout and fallout from nuclear accidents, cancer increases in nuclear workers and their children, and whole ranges of observations and experience which to most people seem clear evidence of causation. For us, therefore, the questions about Depleted Uranium, are the latest in a long series of questions about the health effects of low level radiation [Busby, 1995]. In the time I have available I want to address four main areas which inform this debate. I will begin by firing my largest cannon. I will show that recent incontrovertible evidence defines the existence of a very large error in the presently accepted model for the health consequences of exposure to low-level man-made radioactivity, and that therefore this same model which underpins the presently accepted assessment of harm from Depleted Uranium, is likely to be similarly flawed. I am tempted to leave it at that. However, it is of some interest to the public, I feel, and should be to the Royal Society, to ask how such a state of affairs could have come about. So I will look and ask if the Scientific Method has been properly used in the assessment of risk from exposure to low-level radiation. We will discover that it has not. Third, I will outline one mechanism which explains how this may have occurred. Finally I will briefly review some of the evidence from the studies of my group which support this new model and show how it applies to the Depleted Uranium controversy.

2. The Chernobyl Infants

I was trained as a chemist. As a chemist, I could stand before you and mix a clear solution of the indicator, phenolphthalein and a clear solution of the base, sodium hydroxide to produce a startling red colour. I cannot hold up a child and mix it with low level radiation to produce leukemia. A very close experiment to this has, however, been recently described and you should be aware of this. It shows, without any doubt, that the concerns of those who argued, either emotionally, or illogically, or with good scientific arguments, that low-level radiation was killing people near nuclear sites, were correct. Following the Chernobyl accident in 1986, in five different countries, the cohort of children who were exposed in their mother's womb to radioisotopes from the releases suffered an excess risk of developing leukemia in their first year of life. This 'infant leukemia' cohort effect was first reported in Scotland [Gibson et al, 1988], and then in Greece [Petridou et al, 1996], in the United States [Mangano, 1997] and in Germany [Michaelis, et al. 1997]. We first reported increases in childhood leukemia in Wales and Scotland following the Chernobyl accident in 1996 [Bramhall, 1996] but more recently examined the specific infant leukemia cohort in Wales and Scotland [Busby and Scott Cato 2000]. Unlike the earlier researchers, who merely showed the existence of a significant rise in infant leukemia, we decided to examine the relationship between the observed numbers of cases and those predicted by the present radiation risk model. This was an invaluable opportunity since the specificity of the cohort enabled us to argue that the effect could only be a consequence of the exposure to the Chernobyl fallout. There could be no alternative explanation, like the 'population mixing hypothesis' advanced to explain away the Sellafield childhood leukemia cluster. However implausible such theories may be, they have acquired popularity, and their proponents status, as a consequence of their utility to the nuclear lobby. However, 'though population mixing may occur at Sellafield, it cannot occur in the womb. Because the National Radiological Protection Board had measured and assessed the doses to the populations of Wales and Scotland and because they themselves had also published risk factors for radiogenic leukemia based on ICRP models it was a simple matter to compare their predictions with the observations and test the contemporary risk model. The method simply assumed that infants born in the periods 1980-85 and 1990-92 were unexposed, and defined the Poisson expectation of numbers of infant leukemia cases in the children who were in utero over the 18 month period following the Chernobyl fallout. This 18 month period was chosen because it was shown that the in utero dose was due to radioactive isotopes which were ingested or inhaled by the mothers and that whole-body monitoring had shown that this material remained in the bodies of the mothers until Spring 1987 because silage cut in the Summer of 1986 had been stored and fed to the cattle in the following winter. The result was startling. First, there was a statistically significant 3.8-fold excess of infant leukemia in the combined Wales and Scotland cohort (p = 0.0002). Second, the leukemia yield in the exposed 'in utero' cohort was about 100 times the yield predicted by the model. Table 1 compares the effect in the three main studies. In passing it should be noted that this number, 100, is very close to the error required to explain the Sellafield childhood leukemia cluster.

	Wales and Scotland	Germany	Greece
Exposed cohort B
Size	156,600	928,649	163,337
Cases	12	12	35
Rate	7.7	3.8	7.3
unexposed cohort A+C
Size	835,200	5,630,789	1,112,566
Cases	18	143	31
Rate	2.15	2.54	2.8
Risk ratio B/A+C	3.6	1.5	2.6
p-value (poisson)	0.0002	0.015	0.0025
Estimated dose microSv	88	150	650

At this stage we must close another denial exit. It should be noted that the possibility of the effect being due to chance may be obtained by multiplying the p-values for the null hypothesis that the effect was due to chance in each of the separate countries and studies to give an overall p-value less than 0.0000000001. Thus it was not a chance occurrence: it was a consequence of the exposure to low-level radiation from Chernobyl. I am sorry to have to keep banging the gong but I want you to be quite clear about this point.

And since the World Health Organization has given approximate exposure levels in Greece, Germany and the United States, it was also possible to examine the leukemia yield in the infant 'exposed cohort' reported by the several other studies and establish a dose response relationship. This is shown in Fig 1. It is a curious shape and goes up, down and up again, and this shape should be noted.

Fig. 1. dose-response relationship between exposure to the infants who were in utero at the time of the Chernobyl fallout, and the subsequent risk of leukaemia.

Horizontal axis = dose (mSv): vertical axis = leukaemia risk
Data points from left:- United States, England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, Greece

I will return to the shape of this curve below, but first I must ask how it is that some fifty years after the atom bomb, and following a huge amount of research into the subject, we can have discovered such a huge error in the science of radiation risk. To understand the answer, we must look at the scientific method a little more closely.

3. Radiation Risk and Scientific Method

The classical exposition of the scientific, or inductive method (originally due to William of Occam) is what is now called Mill's Canons, the two most important of which are:

The Canon of Agreement which states that whatever there is in common between the antecedent conditions of a phenomenon can be supposed to be the cause, or related to the cause, of the phenomenon.

The Canon of Difference which states that the differences in the conditions under which an effect occurs and those under which it does not must be the cause or related to the cause of that effect.
In addition, the method relies upon the Principle of Accumulation which states that scientific knowledge grows additively by the discovery of independent laws, and the Principle of Instance Confirmation, that the degree of belief in the truth of a law is proportional to the number of favourable instances of the law. Finally to the methods of inductive reasoning we should add considerations of plausibility of mechanism. These are the basic methods of science [Mill, 1879; Harre, 1985; Papineau, 1996] Let us first define our question. It is this. What are the health consequences of exposure to novel internal radioisotopes at whole organ dose levels below 2mSv? Because we are looking at battlefield DU, we should add that in this case, although the element is 'natural', the exposure is novel, and due to internal sub-micron Uranium Oxide particles embedded in tissue. Although risks from exposure to high levels of ionizing radiation are generally accepted, since they are fairly immediate and graphic, the situation with regard to low-level exposure is curious. There are now two mutually exclusive models describing the health consequences of exposure to low-level radiation. There is a nuclear establishment one, which is that which is presently used to set legislation on exposures and argue that DU is safe, and a radical one, which is espoused by the anti-nuclear movement and its associated scientists. I show these two models schematically in Fig 2.

study group	Type of exposure	Analytical approach	Resulting model
A-bomb survivors	High dose External Acute	Physics Averaging Theoretical Mathematical Reductionist Simplistic Deductive	Linear No Threshold (Low risk)
Nuclear site leukaemia clusters (e.g. Sellafield) Irish Sea coast effect Chernobyl infants Minisatellite mutations Weapons fallout cancers DU Gulf veterans Iraqi children	Internal Chronic Isotopic	Biology Epidemiology Empirical Inductive	Biphasic cell response (High risk)

Fig. 2. Mutually Exclusive Radiation Risk Models

The two models arise from two different scientific methods. The conventional model is a physics-based one because it was developed by physicists prior to the discovery of DNA. Like all such models it is mathematical, reductionist and simplistic, but because of this is of great descriptive utility. Its quantities, dose, are average energy per unit volume or dE/dV and in its application, the volumes used are greater than 1kg. Thus it would not distinguish between the average energy transferred to a person warming themselves in front of a fire and a person eating a red hot coal. In its application to the problem at hand, the internal, low-level, isotopic or particulate exposure, it has been used entirely deductively. The basis of this application is that the cancer and leukemia yield has been determined following the external acute high-dose irradiation by gamma rays of a large number of Japanese inhabitants of the town of Hiroshima. Following this, arguments based on averaging have been used (quite spuriously) to maintain that there is a simple linear relationship (in the low-dose region) between dose and cancer yield. This Linear No Threshold (LNT) assumption enables easy calculations to be made of the cancer yield of any given external irradiation.

By comparison, the radical model shown in Fig.2 arises from an inductive process. There have been many observations of anomalously high levels of cancer and leukemia in populations living near nuclear sites, especially those where the measurements show that there is contamination from man-made radioisotopes, e.g. reprocessing plants. In addition, populations who have been exposed to man-made radioisotopes from global weapons tests, downwinders living near nuclear weapon test sites and those exposed to these materials because of accidents (like the Chernobyl infant leukemia cohort) or because of work in the nuclear industry or military. A review of these findings is available [Busby, 1995] and a more recent literature review of studies showing these effects is published by the Low Level Radiation Campaign [LLRC, 2000]. In addition, the radical model is based on biological considerations and considers each type of exposure according to its cellular radiation track structure in space and in time. It is not, therefore, possible to employ this model to predict risks from 'radiation dose' to 'populations' but only from microscopically described doses from specific isotopes or particles whose decay fractionations are considered to interact with cells which themselves respond biologically to the insults and may be in various stages of their biological development. The dose-response relationship following from this kind of analysis might be expected to be quite complex.

These models are at war: which one is correct? What considerations can we use to choose? The answer is that the conventional LNT model must be rejected because it is not scientific. Its conclusions are based on deductive reasoning. It falsely uses data from one set of conditions, high-level, acute, external exposure to model low-level, chronic, internal exposure. It is scientifically bankrupt, and were it not for political considerations, would have been rejected long ago. On the other hand, it should be clear that the radical model conforms to all the requirements of the scientific method listed above. Man-made radioisotopes, often in the form of 'hot particles' are common contaminants to the areas near nuclear sites where there are cancer and leukemia clusters, and to the downwinders, and to the fallout-exposed populations. This satisfies the Canon of Agreement. The contingency analysis tables with control populations for such studies show that the Canon of Difference is also satisfied: people living in more remote regions than the downwinders show lower levels of illness. We must by now also have some faith in a Principle of Instance Confirmation, since so many studies have shown that increases in cancer and leukemia follow these exposure regimes at low dose. Indeed, the Gulf War Syndrome, might be considered as such an instance confirmation. We are left only with 'Plausibility of Mechanism', which I will address below. Before I turn to the mechanistic arguments I will try to throw some light on how such a state of affairs continues to go unchallenged by quoting from an eminent and past member of the Royal Society, the Nobel-prize winner, Chemist and Economist Michael Polanyi. Polanyi, was interested in the scientific method, and in scientists: his writings pre-dated the Science War philosophers like Kuhn and more recently Latour. He was aware that at any time, the scientific world view might be completely wrong. For as Montaigne wrote:

Since a wise man may be wrong, or a hundred men, or several Nations, and since even human nature, as we know it, goes wrong for several centuries on this matter or on that, how can we be certain that it occasionally stops going wrong and that in this century it is not mistaken?

(Montaigne 1533-92, The Essays)

In asking how we know anything at all and how we build up a picture of the 'real world' Polanyi saw many similarities between scientists and primitive witch-doctors like the Azande who had been studied by the anthropologist Evans Pritchard who wrote:

They reason excellently in the idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason outside, or against their beliefs, because they have no other idiom in which to express their thoughts. The contradiction between experience and one mystical notion is explained by reference to other mystical notions.

E. Evans Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, 1937

For the scientific world view, Polanyi concluded:

[For] the stability of the naturalistic system we currently accept, instead, rests on the same logical structure as Azande witchcraft beliefs. Any contradiction between a particular scientific notion and the facts of experience will be explained by other scientific notions. There is a ready reserve of possible scientific hypotheses available to explain any conceivable event. Secured by its circularity and defended by its epicyclical reserves science may deny or at least cast aside as of no scientific interest, whole ranges of experience which to the unscientific mind appear both massive and vital. M. Polanyi FRS, Personal Knowledge, 1958

The Royal Society committee is invited to apply these considerations to the responses which followed the discovery by Yorkshire TV of the childhood leukemia cluster near Sellafield, and bear them in mind whilst deliberating the effects of DU.

4. Mechanistic Considerations Averaging Dose

I want to look more closely at the averaging model and its predictions at low dose. It is essentially what used to be called a colligative model: the dE/dM formulation of dose requires that energy transferred from absorption of the consequence of a radioactive disintegration is averaged over the target site, usually the whole body or organ. Whatever lip service is made to considerations of what is now called 'microdosimetry', close examination of calculations done to establish risk near nuclear sites shows this to be the case. The document NRPB R-276, Risk of Leukemia and other Cancers in Seascale from All Sources of Radiation published in 1995 is a good example. In this document, doses to the lymphatic system were calculated by modelling it as 'liver, lung, kidney, spleen, pancreas, uterus and intestines'. A physiologist would not recognise this list as the 'lymphatic system', so why was it used? The answer is that breathing introduces the particles of plutonium that exist in the air near Sellafield into the lungs of the children who live there. From the lungs, these particles are scavenged to the two small tracheobronchial lymph nodes which have a combined mass of perhaps one gram. If NRPB had divided dE by 1 gram, the resultant dose to this part of the lymphatic system would have been extremely high. Given that this organ has been identified as a source of lymphoma and leukemia in animals, this sounds very like the cause of the Sellafield leukemia cluster. But dilution of the plutonium decay energies into the whole mass of guts used for dM reduces the 'dose' to an acceptable small level. This process, incidentally, is very relevant to the DU exposures. Figure 3 (pending)shows a phantom used by ICRP to calculate doses from external radiation fields. This is the model that is presently used to calculate internal doses. Of course, in the low dose region, cells are either hit or not hit, so the cell dose is very different from the tissue dose. Nevertheless, the model is valid as a means of establishing a quantity, 'dose' which can be correlated with some health consequence like cancer, so long as each cell in the body, or target region, has an equivalent probability of being hit (or more properly intercepted by a track). Dudley Goodhead, a member of the Royal Society depleted Uranium panel, has written of the low-dose region [Goodhead, 1988]:

Most situations of practical interest are characterised by cells receiving occasional single tracks well separated in time from any other tracks which may impinge on the same cell. From Natural Background, there is, on average, about one track per year through each cell nucleus. Therefore it is highly unlikely that there will be multiple tracks in short times (< 1 day) over which repair of radiation induced damage within cells is usually observed to take place.

It is these (essentially external irradiation) considerations that enable the model to assume the linear dose response relationship that is the basis for radiation risk. But there are two situations of practical interest that Goodhead's arguments do not address. The first is that a cell's response to radiation damage is not constant over its lifespan: cells are very sensitive to radiation when they are in their repair and replication cycle. The second is that for internal radionuclide decays, either from sequential emitters or from 'hot particles' the microscopic local radiation flux, or energy density, may be very high, even though the average dose may be low. For internal exposure, these are common situations. Here the concept of 'dose' no longer applies and the conventional model breaks down. I will address these in turn.

Cellular responses to radiation: the Burlakova dose response

It has been known from almost the beginning of the radiation age that rapidly replicating cells are more sensitive to radiation damage [Bergonie and Tribondeau, 1906]. Indeed, this is the basis of radiotherapy for cancer where it is the rapidly proliferating cancer cells that are preferentially destroyed. Most cells in a living organism are in a non-replication mode, sometimes labelled G0. These cells are contributing to the organism as part of the normal living process and do not need to replicate unless there is some signal requiring this, perhaps because of tissue growth, damage or senescence. Throughout the growth and lifespan of individual organisms, there is a constant need for cellular replication, and therefore there are always some small proportion of cells which will be replicating: the magnitude will naturally depend upon the type of cell. When cells receive the signal to move out of stasis or G0, they undertake a fixed sequence of DNA repair and replication, labelled G0-G1-S-G2-M, with various identifiable check points through the sequence which ends in replication M or Mitosis. The period of the repair replication sequence is about 10 to 15 hours and the sensitivity of replicating cells to damage including fixed mutation is extremely high at some points during this sequence. This has been known for some time: Fig 4 shows the results of early experiments on Chinese hamster cells indicating up to 600-fold variation in the cell radiation sensitivity over the whole cycle. [Morton and Sinclair, 1966]

Fig. 4. Variation in sensitivity to radiation of Chinese hamster ovary cells over the cell cycle in vitro

(Sinclair and Morton 1966)

Horizontal axis: time in hours; Vertical axis: Vertical axis is fraction of cells surviving the radiation. --

Upper line: 660 rads; lower line: 1000 rads

If we display this response variation on a scale that shows the normal cell lifespan in the organism, rather than just over the cell cycle in vitro, the window of opportunity for cell mutation at high sensitivity becomes apparent Fig 5.

Fig. 5. Displaying the 10 hour repair replication high-sensitivity window in terms of normal cell lifespan in the living organism

So the picture of isotropic dose to equivalent cells, the 'bag of water' phantom model outlined by Goodhead has to be reviewed. Perhaps 1 percent of these cells are actively dividing and are in repair replication sequences that we will assume, for argument, are 600 times more sensitive to being 'hit' by a track. What would we expect the dose-response to look like? Well as the dose was increased from zero, the sensitive cells would begin to be damaged and a proportion of these hits would result in fixing a mutation and increasing the possibility of cancer. As the dose increased further, eventually this rise in response would peak as these sensitive cells were killed. The mutation yield would then begin to fall. However, at some point, the insensitive G0 cells would begin to be damaged and the whole process would begin again, with a rise in cancer. Ultimately there would be a second fall, but this level of exposure would probably result in the death of the organism (although such considerations have been used to explain an observed fall-off in effect from alpha emitters at high dose). So the dose response would look like that in Fig 6.

Fig. 6. Predicted dose-response relationship for mutation in an organism made up of two sub-classes of cell sensitivities: high sensitivity replicating cells and low sensitivity quiescent cells. Sensitive sub-class cells are first mutated (to the left of the dotted line)and then killed as dose is increased (right of the dotted line).

1% of cells are actively dividing and 200 - 600 times more radiosensitive than non-dividing cells.

Horizontal axis = dose: vertical axis = effect

This type of response was shown to occur in several experiments by Burlakova, although she gave a different explanation for it, involving a combination of increasing damage and induced repair curves. She showed that such an effect can be seen by plotting the results of a large number of separate radiation and leukemia studies, a graph reproduced in Fig 7.

Fig. 7. Leukaemia deaths per 10⁵ person years depending on the dose of radiation. Many different studies plotted (Copied from Burlakova et al. 1996)

The results of animal studies on beagle dogs and mice also show these biphasic effects in the low-dose region [Busby, 1995] . Referring back to the Azande scientists for a moment, it is quite easy to see how such a result might be interpreted as 'hormesis', the radiation-is-good-for-you concept advanced by the nuclear lobby and its scientists. All that is necessary is to plot the biphasic response but leave out the first zero point. The deductive conclusions from high-dose experiments could not be squared with the possibility of such variation in this low dose region so either the points were interpreted as scatter or they were forced into a hormesis dip by leaving out the lowest dose responses as outliers. Note that this type of biphasic curve is seen in the Chernobyl infant studies collected together in Fig 1.

The Second Event Theory

There is large variation in sensitivity over the cell lifespan. Although naturally dividing cells may accidentally receive a 'hit', this process can be modelled by averaging over large masses of tissue, even if the dose response curve is not linear, as thought. However, unplanned cell division, preceded by DNA repair can be forced by a sub-lethal damaging radiation track: this is one of the signals which push the cell out of G0 into the repair replication sequence. It follows that two hits, separated by about eight hours, can generate a high sensitivity cell and then hit this same cell a second time in its sensitive phase. This idea, the 'Second Event Theory' is described and supporting evidence advanced in Busby 1995 and its mathematical description has been approached slightly differently in Busby 2000. It has been the subject of some dispute by NRPB [Cox and Edwards, 2000, Busby, 2000a] Very recently, developments in micro techniques have enabled some new evidence that supports the two hit idea to emerge. Miller et al., [1999] in a consideration of Radon exposure risks, have been able to show that the measured oncogenicity from exactly one alpha particle hit per cell is significantly lower than for a Poisson distributed mean of one alpha particle hit per cell. The authors argue that this implies that cells traversed by two alpha particles or more contribute most of the risk of mutation, i.e. single hits are not the cause of cancer. There are two types of internal exposure for which there would be expected to be an enhancement of risk from this Second Event source. The first, due to sequentially decaying radioisotopes like Strontium-90 has been discussed in Busby 1995, Cox and Edwards, 2000 and Busby, 2000. Following an initial decay from an Sr-90 atom bound to a chromosome, the second decay from the daughter, Yttrium-90, whose half-life is 64hrs can hit the same cell in the induced replication sequence with a probability that is simple to calculate. The same dose from external radiation has a vanishingly small chance of effecting the same process. The second type of Second Event exposure, referred to in Busby 2000a, is from micron or sub-micron sized 'hot particles'. If lodged in tissue, these will decay again and again increasing the probability of multiple hits to the same cell inside the 10 hour repair replication period. It is this process that is relevant to the Depleted Uranium problem.

Second Events from DU particles.

The US Defence Department commissioned research into the levels of Uranium Oxide particulates produced by the impact of Abrams M1A1 Tank ammunition at the Nevada test site in 1986 [USBRL 1986]. The impact on armour of Depleted uranium penetrators results in about 80% conversion to Uranium Oxides UO2 and U3O8 in the form of ceramic particles of diameters in the micron region. These aerosol particles are very mobile and can clearly be inhaled. In this regard the hazard is of a similar nature to that from the Plutonium oxide particles resuspended from Sellafield discharges to the Irish Sea which were considered as a possible cause of the Sellafield leukemia cluster by COMARE and NRPB and referred to earlier where it was recorded that the ICRP66 models used to estimate doses did so by diluting the particles energy into large masses of tissue. For particles below 1 micron diameter, self absorption of the alpha particle decays may be considered second order and the dose to tissue in the range of these alpha decays calculated. Table 2 shows the calculated doses in spheres of tissue within the 30micron range of the alpha decays.

Table of doses to sphere of tissue 30 micron radius

by one particle of U3O8 of various diameters 7

Particle diameter microns	Particle volume cm³	Mass U₃0₈(g)	Mass U238(g)	Activity of particle (Bq)	Hits /day(dose mSv)	Hits/year(annual dose mSv)
0.2	4.2 x 10^-15	3.6 x 10^-14	3.06 x 10^-14	3.8 x 10^-10	3.3 x 10^-5 (3.96 x 10^-3mSv)	0.012 (1.44mSv)
0.5	6.5 x 10^-14	5.6 x 10^-13	4.8 x 10^-13	5.9 x 10^-9	5.1 x 10^-4 (0.06mSv)	0.186 (21.9mSv)
1	5.2 x 10^-13	4.3 x 10^-12	3.7 x 10^-12	8.8 x 10^-8	7.6 x 10^-3 (0.91mSv)	2.77 (332mSv)
2	4 x 10^-12	3.5 x 10^-11	2.9 x 10^-11	3.6 x 10^-7	0.031 (3.72mSv)	11.32 (1358mSv)
5	6.5 x 10^-11	5.6 x 10^-10	4.75 x 10^-10	5.9 x 10^-6	0.51 (60mSv)	186 (21900mSv)

Assumptions: Uranium Oxide (²³⁸U] is in the form U₃0₈

(density = 8.6);
specific activity of ²³⁸U = 12.43 MBq/Kg;
Alpha decay energy = 4.45MeV;
Alpha range = 30 microns.
Relative Biological Effectiveness factor for Alphas = 20 (from ICRP) has been used to convert dose in Grays to effective dose in Sieverts.
Also tabulated is the number of hits per day to this sphere of tissue. The table shows that for particles as small as 0.2 microns diameter, average annual alpha dose to the (lymphatic) tissue surrounding the particles is about the same as the total annual average background dose of 2mSv. For larger particles the dose rapidly increases. Between 0.5 and 5 microns, Second Event processes are stochastically likely. This is shown by Fig 8 where the number of hits per day is plotted against the particle diameter.

Fig. 8. Uranium particle doses to local cell volume: number of hits per day to cell volume from particles of U₃₀₈ of different diameters.

Horizontal axis = U₃₀₈ particle diameter in microns: vertical axis = hits per day
light line is number of hits after allowing for the self absorption of energy within the particle itself
These 'hot particle' processes have been known about for a long time: Fig 9 shows a radiographic photomicrograph of a plutonium oxide 'hot particle' in lung tissue. Overlapping tracks can be seen.

Fig. 9. Photomicrograph of Plutonium Oxide particle of about 2 microns by 6 microns trapped in lung tissue. Note the alpha star. (Original photo: Robert de Tredici)

Energy density and risk

The consequence of aggregating decays into a small sphere around a 'hot particle' is, of course, that the number of different cells capable of being hit elsewhere is necessarily reduced: we have converted a number of tracks well separated to the same number of tracks close together. If all tracks carry the same risk of mutation in cells in the track, i.e. all hits are equivalent, then there should be no hazard enhancement. The hazard enhancement proposed arises not from some 'hot coal' type of energy concentration process but from the fact that cells may be triggered into a sensitive repair replication sequence which carries a very high sensitivity weighting. It may, of course be true that there would be other reasons why concentrated irradiation of a small cluster of cells could produce unstable cell replication or cell communication fields such as those recently proposed by Sonnenschein and Sato [1999] and this itself may lead to a tumour promotion advantage but this is another matter.

Beta emissions from DU

Before collecting together these considerations there is one further matter which may have been overlooked in the case of DU. Uranium-238 is an alpha emitter but depleted Uranium is also a beta emitter: indeed in the solid form the two beta-emitting daughter isotopes, Thorium-234 (beta; 0.26MeV, 24 days) and Protoactinium-234 (beta 0.23MeV, 6,75 hrs) are in equilibrium with the parent after 20 weeks. These beta emissions are the main radiological hazard in handling the bulk material. In Iraq, I recently measured 24,000 counts per second at the surface of a stray A-10 30mm penetrator which was just lying on the ground. This represented a dose of about 1mSv/hour to the hands of anyone holding the penetrator. However, most of the beta (and alpha) decays were absorbed inside the bulk material, and only surface disintegrations were emerging to be absorbed in the scintillation counter head. The equilibrium beta activity of DU is about 24MBq/kg. But most of this energy is absorbed in the bulk material: oxidation of the material on impact to produce some 10¹⁴ 1 micron diameter Uranium Oxide spheres per kilogram would enable all of the decay energy to be potentially available for human exposure. The enhancement of efficiency in release of beta radiation is thus about 1000-fold.

Environmental Mobility of the DU particles

In order to define the population at risk, it is necessary to know the fate of the Uranium particles subsequent to impact. At the Nevada test site, the atmospheric concentration at 100m from impact exceeded the UK NRPB Generalized Derived Limit for Uranium in Air by a factor of about 5 [Busby 1999]. Dietz has reviewed data which establishes that DU particles are able to travel at least 100km from their impact source [Dietz, 1997]. I recently made measurements of alpha radiation levels in Iraq in three areas, the southern battleground near tanks destroyed by DU fire, the same area remote from the tanks, the town of Al Basrah and the city of Baghdad. Results showed that the alpha activity in the battleground area was more than five times higher than in Basrah and ten times higher that in Baghdad. In addition, and remarkably, levels on the surface of the ground near the damaged tanks did not generally show high levels of alpha or beta signal from Uranium and its daughters except in the case of one tank where a yellow contaminant, probably UO3, showed high levels of beta activity. In addition, the insides of tank turrets which had radioactive holes in them from A10 hits, did not show high levels of beta or alpha activity. The generally higher alpha levels in the whole area, coupled with these observations suggest that the Uranium particles has been efficiently dispersed by some mechanism. I believe that this mechanism is the repulsion of charged particles by themselves and by the earths permanent electric field of 150V/m. I have argued elsewhere that this effect operates in the Kennet Valley near the Atomic Weapons plant at Aldermaston and results in the preferential concentration of charged radioative particles near electrostatic discontinuities between strata with different conductivity [Busby, 1997] . A similar effect near high voltage power lines was recently found by Henshaw et al. [1999].

Conclusions on Mechanism

Thus we can conclude that the external bag-of-water model is not an accurate representation of the kind of processes that occur at the cellular level and that the physics based descriptions do not apply to internal irradiation. The Uranium Oxide particles are capable of travelling very large distances [Deitz, 1997]. They may then be inhaled and will become trapped in the lymphatic sytem where they may be transported to any part of the body. Here they may cause sequential moderate dose irradiation of local tissue volumes where the risk of mutation is far higher than is suggested by the LNT and average dose models. The enhancement of mutation efficiency that follows from exposure to inhaled Uranium oxide hot particles is capable of explaining what might be thought of by Michael Polanyi's Azande scientists as 'anomalous responses to low dose exposure'. We are not, however, reduced to looking only at the Gulf War Syndrome and the Iraqi children for supporting evidence. There are other indicators, and our springboard for these is the 1983 observation of a childhood leukaemia cluster at Sellafield. In the last four years Green Audit been funded by the government of the Republic of Ireland to study cancer incidence close to the Irish sea. The study has used both Wales Cancer Registry and Irish Cancer Registry data to examine and explain variations in cancer risk with distance from the sea. The results of this work will be published elsewhere but since they cast considerable light on the DU problem, some of the findings will be briefly reviewed here.

5. Sea coast cancer risks and resuspended hot particles.

In three separate investigations between 1997 and 2000, Green Audit discovered profound and statistically significant evidence of excess risk of cancer incidence and mortality in coastal populations in Wales, Ireland and Somerset. The excess risk has been found for most of the cancer types and sites and in the following data:

Incidence data for small areas in Wales from Wales Cancer Registry from 1974-89

Incidence data for small areas of Ireland from the Irish National Cancer Registry for 1994-1996.
Mortality data for census wards in Somerset from the Office for National Statistics for 1995-1998
In each area the trend with distance from the sea shows a sharp rise in the group of people living within 800m of the sea coast. It is driven by proximity to areas of intertidal sediment known to be contaminated with radioisotopes from Sellafield discharges. In the case of the Somerset study, which was investigated as a hypothesis test the drying, offshore, mud bank, known as the Steart Flats, was contaminated by historic releases from the adjacent Nuclear Power site at Hinkley Point. As one example of the type of result found, the all malignancy relative risk for populations of all ages in Wales from 1974-89 is shown plotted against distance from the Irish Sea in Fig 10.

Fig. 10. All malignancy incidence relative risk (base population England plus Wales 1979) for populations of Mid and North Wales 1974 - 1989 all ages by distance from the Irish Sea in km. (LOESS fit)Horizontal axis = distance from sea in Km.: vertical axis = Relative Risk

Note the sharp rise in risk near the coast. Sufficient evidence has now accumulated from these studies to support the hypothesis that this cancer risk is a consequence of an exposure route involving inhalation of resuspended radioisotopes, particularly Plutonium Oxide particles. The trend in concentration of Plutonium with distance from the sea in Cumbria has been established and is shown in Fig 11.

Fig. 11. Inland penetration of Plutonium in air and seaspray (Eakins and Lally)

Horizontal axis = Distance downwind from sea (Km):

vertical axis (upper figure) = Relative concentration of ^239,240Pu in air (pCi m³): lower figure Concentration of ^239,240Pu (pCi g^-1Na)

The radioactivity is brought inland by seaspray scavenging mechanisms which are quite well understood: indeed, the ocean is the source of about 30% of all PM10 particles in the UK. It is therefore not surprising that NRPB workers found Plutonium in the tracheobronchial lymph nodes of autopsy specimens from all over the UK in proportion to their distance from the west coast, particularly Cumbria [Popplewell, 1986]. Table 3 shows some results of these studies, which were, incidentally, omitted from the considerations in the COMARE report on the Sellafield leukemia cluster. Nor is it surprising that Plutonium is found in children's teeth in the UK at levels which reflect a similar trend with distance from the Irish Sea [Priest et al, 1996]

Tissue (post mortem)	Cumbrian workers (Figures given for each of three cadavers in mBq/Kg Pu)	Cumbrian public(mBq/Kg Pu. Figure in brackets is number of cadavers)	Public elsewhere (mBq/Kg Pu. Figure in brackets is number of cadavers)
Rib	130 360 94	9 (10)	6 (43)
Femur	132 250 100	5.4 (11)	3.6 (35)
Lung	940 1140 120	6.8 (11)	1.9 (47)
Tracheo-bronchial lymph nodes	450 73,300 1600	35 (12)	10 (37)

Table 3. Plutonium in autopsy specimens from UK (Popplewell NRPB) Pu in various organs at post mortem from members of the public and from occupationally exposed workers living in Cumbria (mBq/Kg)

6. Overall Conclusions

The Gulf War Syndrome and the increases in cancer and congenital effects in Iraqi populations are merely more and recent evidence of the serious error in the way in which the health consequences of ionizing radiation exposures are presently modelled. They do not stand alone as some sort of curiosity which needs special examination and complex explanations. Polanyi's Azande scientists might have to find some special explanation here: perhaps their Oracle would tell them that the problem must be that the Gulf War veterans had been given many injections to protect against gas attacks by the evil dictator. But then they would have to have another explanation for the Iraqi children who did not receive such injections. So their problems have to be something else, perhaps the oil well fires. But then, what about the children in the north, who were also bombed but there was no oil? Perhaps, in that case, it was a demon: population mixing. Or maybe there is no increase in illness and the evil Iraqis have made it all up. Quick! Despatch a team from IARC in Lyon to discover that the Iraq Cancer Registry only has a 286 computer (this happened). Ah! That must be it. A computer problem. And so forth. In this affair, it is not DU that is on trial. Science itself is On Trial, and the Royal Society is On Trial. If this committee follows the Azande method of deliberation, the credibility of the Royal Society will be finished. Because, following the Azande Scientific Oracle advice on BSE, Global Warming, Sellafield, Mobile Phones and GM crops, it would take very little for people to revert entirely to believing the evidence of their own senses and the advice of their own instincts in areas that to their unscientific minds appear both massive and vital.

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Additional evidence given to Royal Society Working Group 12th March 2001

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http://www.indymedia.ie/article/104629

The Three Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Core Meltdowns and Widespread Contamination

Wednesday March 19, 2014 21:53

by T

It was three years on March 11th since the triple nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima plant in Japan in 2011. This article attempts to try and give an picture of the situation today and to show that the accident is still an active event that will take many decades to cleanup and it is anything but over.

Remembering What Happened

It is three years since the accident on March 11th 2011 at the Fukushima power station complex. There has been surprisingly little coverage of it in the mainstream media compared to the Chernobyl accident in 1986 at the time. As most people know, the accident was a result of an earthquake which caused the tsunami which flooded the Fukushima site and knocked out the backup diesel generators used for cooling the plants and that is how the story goes. The first report many people heard was that they were using sea-water to cool the reactors. This in itself was frightening because sea-water and cooling of nuclear reactors should not be in the same sentence, ever and it can only mean one thing -the situation is desperate, everything has failed and since sea-water would destroy the reactor vessel and fuel rods it means its the very last resort at trying to stop a meltdown.

The Fukushima Daiichi Complex At the now devastated Fukushima Daiichi site, there are four nuclear reactors on the main site and another two a bit further away. When the earthquake struck, reactors #4, #5 and #6 were offline for maintenance while three reactors #1, #2, and #3, were running and these automatically shutdown. However in the case of a nuclear power plant, the nuclear fuel rods still produce tremendous amounts of heat which cannot be turned off. This heat arising from radioactive decay, amounts in the immediate aftermath of shutdown to about 5% of the full power. The rated power output for reactors #1 and #2 was 439 Megawatts (MW) and 784 MW for #3. That means 5% of 439 MW is 21 MW whilst of 739 MW it is 36 MW. That's a lot of heat to get rid of and if you don't then the water which the fuel rods are immersed in, will quickly boil off and after that the fuel rods will start to buckle and melt and react with steam to give off hydrogen gas and at that point, you then have the certainty of a hydrogen explosion followed by a core meltdown as the rods fall to the floor. The huge heat being emitted by the tons of highly radioactive fuel rods would cause the bottom of reactor steel vessel to melt allowing the molten pile of nuclear debris to drop down onto the concentre floor under the vessel and then slowly melt through the concrete down into the ground taking days and weeks. The radiation would be intense and deadly and fission reactions would continue for quite awhile, adding to the deadly cocktail of radionuclides given off into the surrounding environment.

In addition to the reactors themselves each of the plants have their own spent fuel pools for storing the nuclear waste. These are huge concrete pools filled with tonnes of water to a depth of 30 metres or more and when the nuclear fuel rods are removed from the reactor, they have to be stored in them for years. At Fukushima, Units 1 to 4 had about 1,000 fuel assemblies in their spent fuel pools each while units 5 & 6 had closer to 1,500 each. And each fuel assemble contains multiple fuel rods. And as if all this wasn't bad enough, reactor #3 was burning a mixture of Uranium and Plutonium, (MOX).

The Breaking News in March 2011

It is from this point on where things get hazy because TEPCO the company that operates the nuclear plants gave conflicting statements that they were trying to cool the reactors with sea-water, water jets, and long spray hoses, that fuel rods had been exposed and reports of various radiation leaks and so forth. In other words they seemed to be telling us quite a lot but it was confusing too. News reports at the time indicated once the backup diesel pumps had been flooded, they were down to relying on battery power and these were designed to only work for 8 hours. There was also reports that external power to the site had been lost and because of earthquake damage in the area, there was little chance of getting it reconnected soon or at least not until well after the batteries were exhausted. But in all this TEPCO would not admit in the days and few weeks that followed that they had three core meltdowns within approximately 4 days of the batteries going dead. A government spokesman Yukio Edano insisted: "There has been no meltdown... It was an unforeseeable disaster.." It turns out reactor #1 had a core meltdown within 16 hours, reactor #3 within 44 hours and reactor #2 after approximately 100 hours or 4 days. The reason for the delay in reactor #2 melting down is because they managed to keep enough coolant to it until the evening of the 3rd day (Mar 14th 18:00) and similar for reactor #2 because it only takes 5 to 8 hours for the tonnes of water to boil off. Earlier in the day at approximately 13:15 reactor core isolation cooling system for reactor 2 stopped and this could have been due to damage sustained in the explosion 2 hours previously at Unit 3.

Box 1: The Role of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Relationship to World Health Organisation (WHO)

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) UN agency were setup in 1957 to promote nuclear power and partially counteract the negative image of all things nuclear as a result of the use of the atomic bomb. They have considerable power since they were born out of the highest levels within governments and powerful sections of the military and indeed of the nuclear industry itself. It is safe to say it is a highly politicized institution. Organizations like this tend to be stocked with people suffering from blind faith in all things nuclear and who go into complete denial about any problems caused by it, for this challenges the very core of their beliefs and life long work. Before we go any further the relationship between the IAEA and WHO needs to be clarified as this will explain certain things such as why the WHO claimed only 43 deaths were attributable to Chernobyl whereas a recent New York Academy of Sciences book on it, puts the figure at 980,000 and at least 125,000 of these were the 'liquidators' drafted in by the USSR to clean up the reactor and seal it. The book's findings are reported here and here. The book's title is: Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment and copyright has been released and it is available in PDF here.

"In the early days of nuclear power, WHO issued forthright statements on radiation risks such as its 1956 warning: Genetic heritage is the most precious property for human beings. It determines the lives of our progeny, health and harmonious development of future generations. As experts, we affirm that the health of future generations is threatened by increasing development of the atomic industry and sources of radiation … We also believe that new mutations that occur in humans are harmful to them and their offspring. After 1959, WHO made no more statements on health and radioactivity. What happened? On 28 May 1959, at the 12th World Health Assembly, WHO drew up an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); clause 12.40 of this agreement says: Whenever either organisation [the WHO or the IAEA] proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organisation has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement." In other words, the WHO grants the right of prior approval over any research it might undertake or report on to the IAEA – a group that many people, including journalists, think is a neutral watchdog, but which is, in fact, an advocate for the nuclear power industry. The IAEA's founding papers state: "The agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity through the world." [from source]

But there still are genuine people working/researching for WHO who try to be honest and do things with an open mind. It is just when research funding or authorization happens or reports released, they have to pass through people who are in charge and this is where the interagency gatekeeping, filtering, censoring and control is applied. And in 1995 the then WHO Director Hiroshi Nakajima held a conference of 700 experts and physicians who would go on to produce the most comprehensive report of the human consequences of the Chernobyl meltdown to date. This report was never published, never released to the public, and erased from history by orders of the IAEA. This came to the public's attention later when a small Swiss news documentary entitled 'Nuclear Controversies' was aired.

It is evident now that in the immediate hours after the earthquake and tsunami that the first reaction of TEPCO, Japanese government and other authorities and agencies supportive of nuclear power like the IAEA (see box 1 for more about IAEA), was to try and play down what was happening and to allow enough information out so as to appear to give the full information, but to actually hold back the full extent of what was happening so that the full implications were not known because it really was the worst case scenario. There were many reasons for this strategy besides the basic one of looking after the industry's interests and that was because Chernobyl had already dealt a blow to the nuclear industry and it had taken years of PR spin to recreate a positive image. But it takes a few hours when a crisis hits, for the multitude of government and intergovernmental agencies to sync up and co-ordinate the flow of information and thence to speak with just one consistent voice. This is essential otherwise you could end up having officials releasing information that contradicts the message they want to put out and the 'wrong' information could get out. A good example of this was the US State Dept, initially announced that it's citizens should evacuate but then pulled back from that statement. After that we heard little more from them even though most people were expecting some kind of news about radioactive plumes since this was the main story during Chernobyl and people in general acknowledge the expertise of the US on all things nuclear and so were expecting a more independent view that they might expect from the Japanese. But there was almost nothing and no mention at all of plumes being detected anywhere further afield, except 'safely' out to sea. This was despite the fact that all their (US) naval ships and military bases (in Japan & Guam) have extensive radiation detection and monitoring equipment as part of their nuclear weapons capability and infrastructure. In addition the military have an extensive land based network in the USA itself and every nuclear power plant has radiation detectors on site and the EPA have RADNET which covers US territory. Likewise every European country has radiation detectors and certainly those with nuclear power would also have numerous detection sites. Again we heard almost nothing about any fallout detected anything other than bland reassurances that anything measured was too low to worry about although in France apparently there was brief warnings for a few days to wash fresh fruit. More on this later.

Meanwhile our neighbours, Britain quickly dispatched teams to help out but it seems the only helping was to help control the flow of information and to carefully manage the information such that no panic ensured whilst the meltdowns were in progress. The US too had a team from the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRC) in Japan to help monitor and assess the situation for their own government and to give advice and any help to the Japanese. Luckily they were there because it was later through Freedom of Information requests to the NRC that certain information came out. As is almost standard procedure in environmental disasters, TEPCO stood up to the plate and claimed the accident was an unforeseen disaster. This of course was was a complete lie because a subsequent investigation by the Japanese government showed that a decade before they were warned that the sea-wall was not high enough to block a tsunami like the one that hit and instead TEPCO successfully spent millions lobbying the government to NOT build the wall higher. In the official investigation which interviewed over hundreds of workers and officials, a clear picture emerges of significant damage to the Fukushima site including buildings and crucially to the cooling pipes to the reactors by the earthquake. So even without the tsunami multiple meltdowns were inevitable. A report in Aug 2011 in the UK independent details and explains the significance of this. They quote two workers who were on the site at the time of the earthquake.

Worker A said: "I personally saw pipes that had come apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. There's no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant... I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for reactor one had come away. That crack might have affected the reactor." and worker B added: "It felt like the earthquake hit in two waves, the first impact was so intense you could see the building shaking, the pipes buckling, and within minutes I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall... I could see that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believe were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that coolant couldn't get to the reactor core. If you can't sufficiently get the coolant to the core, it melts down. You don't have to have to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out." Mitsuhiko Tanaka, a former nuclear plant designer, describes what occurred on 11th March 2011 as a loss-of-coolant accident. "The data that Tepco has made public shows a huge loss of coolant within the first few hours of the earthquake. It can't be accounted for by the loss of electrical power. There was already so much damage to the cooling system that a meltdown was inevitable long before the tsunami came." He says the released data shows that at 2.52pm, just after the quake, the emergency circulation equipment of both the A and B systems automatically started up. "This only happens when there is a loss of coolant." Between 3.04 and 3.11pm, the water sprayer inside the containment vessel was turned on. Mr Tanaka says that it is an emergency measure only done when other cooling systems have failed. By the time the tsunami arrived and knocked out all the electrical systems, at about 3.37pm, the plant was already on its way to melting down.

The reason TEPCO wanted to cover up this explanation and blame the problems on the tsunami was to take the focus off the fact that they had been warned numerous times about the lack of maintenance and repair of their equipment and lack of preparation for surviving a quake and this is the case for all of the nuclear reactors in Japan, not just Fukushima, which means in this highly earthquake prone zone, disaster could hit at any time at the other sites too. This would appear to be behind the reason Japan shutdown all 54 nuclear reactors for months in May 2012 in order to carryout essential safety work. For this unprecedented step to occur there must have been some very serious deficiencies of such a nature that it would have been a certainty of another accident. Governments don't act like this unless they absolutely have to and there are no other choices.

The Evacuation Around Fukushima

On the day of the accident a 3 km exclusion zone was declared and people were told to evacuate. After the explosion at Unit #1 this was extended to 20 km and only on March 15th were residents in the zone told to leave and those in a wider zone of 20 km - 30km were told to stay indoors. On March 25th this latter group were eventually advised to leave. Many would have fled voluntary anyhow. In all at least 200,000 had to eventually leave their homes. The harm though would have already been done. People were largely unaware that the rain which fell on the March 15th was loaded with radioactive particles. Whilst the plumes was initially blowing out to sea, over the next week this switched around several times, and no real attempt was made to match the exclusion zone to actual contamination. Every exclusion zone map in the world has a circular zone, but it doesn't reflect the reality where a narrow plume can stretch for a 100 miles or more and this is exactly how it was experienced after Chernobyl where areas quite far away were heavily contaminated with nearer areas less so. As can be seen from the cesium contamination map below, there was and still is significant contamination out to 60 km and even 100 km. The next image shows the contamination on a larger scale and is from the science journal Nature.

Map created by the Japan science ministry and U.S. Dept of Energy

shows over 800 sq km contaminated with accumulated cesium-137 of

600,000 Becquerels or higher per square meter A level of

555,000 Becquerels or higher of cesium-137) that was used to

issue compulsory evacuation orders in the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.

It ought to be noted that there was a US naval ship stationed 2 miles offshore early in the accident and other ships further offshore and this ship was enveloped in a radioactive cloud. The sailors have since suffered devastating health effects and there is a huge lawsuit in progress and some have had children with birth defects. So if they were affected then it is only logical anyone under the plume a few days later when the winds changed direction suffered similarly.

The government put in place regulations on maximum contamination levels in food and drink which were not to exceed a committed effective dose of 5 mSv/year. Farm produce from the Fukushima prefecture was rejected by the rest of the population and this led to problems of relabeling. Within weeks contamination was showing up all over the place and local food manufacturers were performing their own tests. Some of these were detecting plutonium in rice fields up to 50 km away. See here. Given most of the radioactivity from the plant was being carried into the Pacific from water running off the site, this put the entire fisheries at risk. There have been numerous reports of high levels of radioactivity detected in fish. A good example is this one Jan 2013: Fish with radiation over 2,500 times safe levels found near Fukushima plant and another in Oct 2013 about the extremely high levels of nuclear radiation in fish caught in the Pacific: Report raises fresh concerns about radiation levels in Japanese fish And if that is not enough to concern people as reported here in Jan 2012, the Montreal Gazette analyzed the Japanese fisheries data for 22 seafood species that Japan has exported to Canada in recent years. Some cesium was found in 16 of these 22 species in November, the last full month for which data were available. Cesium was especially prevalent in certain of the species: 73 per cent of mackerel tested, 91 per cent of the halibut, 92 per cent of the sardines, 93 per cent of the tuna and eel, 94 per cent of the cod and anchovies and 100 per cent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish.

As the months progressed the government were keen to get the 200,000 or so people back in their homes. They did carryout work to identify areas which were contaminated and then to clean them up and billions of yen were spent in the effort. This consisted of scraping radioactive soil away and dumping it elsewhere which meant they were simply moving around the radioactivity. The clean-up efforts appear to have been a sham and have been criticized for not completing clean-ups, that it was inadequately done and of not disposing of the waste properly. As explained in Box 8, they did the totally ludicrous thing of incinerating some of the radioactive waste which simply had the effect of spreading it much wider. And they still are incinerating it. It would seem the main goal was to be seen to go in and clean-up areas and then declare them safe regardless of whether they were or not.

Unfortunately for the Japanese people far too many of them believe their governments and this will come at great cost to them because thousands returned to their homes even though they shouldn't have. Even worse is that people were consuming food grown in the area and there is almost zero possibility that this is safe. Numerous individuals started taking the own readings using Geiger counters. Immediately after the accident every Geiger counter was bought up and they were soon sold out worldwide. See here. The latest is that the government is trying to encourage people to eat food grown in Fukushima prefecture and they are trying to kick-start this with the food provided in schools. It doesn't get much more cynical and head in the sand than that.

The NRC FOI Documentation

At this point it is necessary to explain about the US NRC documentation. It was mentioned out earlier they had a team on the ground in Japan and they were having daily briefings on the situation and handling the public information side of things in the US. In 2011 Friends of the Earth (FOE), the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) as well as Reuters filed Freedom of Information requests to the NRC to try out find out what they knew. See here for coverage of it. The information was eventually provided and as part of the standard technique they released thousands of documents in the hope that the sheer quantity of information would make it hard to find anything useful. See here. It consists mainly of emails and transcripts of telephone conference calls where they are discussing the situation as it unfolded. The participants are clearly aware that what they write and say could eventually come under FOIA requests and at key points they lower their voice so much that the person doing the transcript was unable to determine what they had said. There are also extensive sections of conversations redacted. Few people have the time or resources to wade through them but one person under the pseudo-name Hatrick Penry did and what he concludes is that there was a massive cover-up and he has given it a name, Plume-Gate.

But before continuing on, here are just a two small samples from the NRC FOIA documents and giving an insight into how well the PR machine is totally knit together, linking directly with the ambassador in Japan although he is just considered an mouthpiece more than anything. See here for the archive. It is well worth a read. [continues below]

Note: DOE is US Dept of Energy

From: Franovich, Mike

Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:06 AM

To: Nieh, Ho

Cc: Warnick, Greg; Warnick, Greg; Kock, Andrea; Zorn, Jason

Subject: Fukushima Daiichi Units Degrading

Hi,

* I called WCO to give him a heads-up and details. The Chairman is in the Ops center on the line with the US Ambassador in Tokyo.

* Unit 2 appears to have gone into a possible reactor vessel breach situation. The fuel was not cooled for hours. The primary containment is likely breached after an explosion near the torus. We may have had an ex-vessel core reaction.

* Unit 4 has a dry spent fuel pool. This unit was in a refueling outage with a hot core offloaded to the pool. It appears a zirconium fire may be in progress.

* DOE has dispatch its rad assessment (RAP) team and will in Japan in seven hours.

* Suggested WCO get with the Chairman to discuss where he may help the Chairman in a divide and conquer approach. The Chairman has no relief where our other operations are being handled by shift/rotation for the ET.

Mike

Sunday, March 13, 2011 -Transcript. Note: The USS Ronald Reagan is an aircraft carrier.

ADMIRAL DONALD: Earlier this evening, as the USS Ronald Reagan was operating off the coast of Japan, we — the ship just arrived. We had given the ship some guidance as far as positioning was concerned to stay clear of the area of the potential plume, basically told her to stay 50 miles outside of the radius of the — 100 miles — excuse me — 50 miles radius outside of the plant — damaged plant — potentially damaged plant, and then 100 miles along the plume with a vector of 45 degrees.

The ship was adhering to that requirement and detected some activity about two and a half times above normal airborne activity using on-board sensors on the aircraft carriers.

So that indicated that they had found the plume and it was probably more significant than what we had originally thought.

The second thing — the second thing that has happened is we have had some helicopters conducting operations from the aircraft carrier and one of the helicopters came back from having stopped on board the Japanese command ship in the area, and people who had been on — were on the helicopter who had walked on the deck of the ship, were monitored and had elevated counts on their feet, 2500 counts per minute.

MR. PONEMAN: Yes, 5,000 d m.

[REDACTED]

But I wanted to get you guys on the line and my expert on the line so we can get the data and then the proper people notified.

MR. PONEMAN: Okay, I have a couple of questions. Number one, in terms of the level of radiation that you are picking up, what’s the delta between that and any information we have from the Japanese or other sources of what the level of radiation would be, given the venting and so forth that we know has occurred?

MR. MUELLER: So — this is Mueller — the sample that was taken and then what we detected, we were 100 nautical miles away and it’s — in our terms it’s — compared to just normal background it’s about 30 times what you would detect just on a normal air sample out at sea.

And so we thought — we thought based on what we had heard on the reactors that we wouldn’t detect that level even at 25 miles. So it’s much greater than what we had thought. We didn’t think we would detect anything at 100 miles.

MR.. PONEMAN: You didn’t think you’d detect anything at 100 miles. Okay, and then in terms of the regulations and so forth of people operating in these kinds of areas, I forget there’s some you know, acronym for it, PAG or something, how do the levels detected compare with what is permissible?

MR. MUELLER: If it were a member of the general public, it would take — well, it would take about 10 hours to reach a limit, a PAG limit.

MR. PONEMAN: Right.

MR. MUELLER: For a member of the general public.

MR. PONEMAN: Right. You mean, at the level you detected?

MR. MUELLER: Yes sir.

MR. PONEMAN: But 10 hours, okay.

MR. MUELLER: Yes sir, and it would be a thyroid dose issue.

MR. PONEMAN: It’s a thyroid dose issue.

Okay, but the net of all this is that the amount of release that is detected by these two episodes or whatever you would call them, is significantly higher than anything you would have expected from what you have been reading from all sources?

MR. MUELLER: Yes sir. The number — the specific number we detected was 2.5 times 10 to the minus nine microcuries per milliliter, airborne, and that’s particulate airborne. It is — we did not take radioiodine samples so I don’t know that value, but this is particulate airborne.

Tell me again exactly how you picked up these two forms of samples.

MR. MUELLER: We have automatic detectors in the plant that picked up — picked up the airborne, and all of our continuous monitors alarmed at the same level, at this value. And then we took portable air samples on the flight desk and got the same value.

ADMIRAL DONALD: These are normally running continuous detectors, continuous monitors that run in the engine room all the time, monitoring our equipment.

MR. PONEMAN: These are detectors on the Reagan?

ADMIRAL DONALD: On the Ronald Reagan, that’s correct.

MR. MUELLER: Yes sir.

MR. PONEMAN: On the Ronald Reagan. They are there because you have got equipment there that,.byou know, it could emit stuff and while you were there, you picked up stuff that was ambient which indicated that you actually were in the plume?

MR. MUELLER: That’s correct.

MR. PONEMAN: And this was — this was 30 times higher than what you would have expected?

MR. MUELLER: Yes sir.

MR. PONEMAN: Okay and the one with the shoes and — tell me about that again.

MR. MUELLER: The shoes were from helicopter crews that flew to a Japanese flag ship that is 50 miles closer to the power plant at sea, so it’s about — it’s about half way so it’s 50 miles from land as well, and it was near the center line of the plume.

And when they flew back to Ronald Reagan, the contamination was found on the shoes of the people that had gotten off and back onto the helo from the Japanese ship.

MR. PONEMAN: And that was also of a level 30 times what you expected or was there a different ratio?

MR. MUELLER: Oh, this is — we use — we have — we would expect nothing and got — it’s about five times our minimum detectable for frisking.

MR. PONEMAN: And what is that measured in?

MR. MUELLER: That’s in — it’s — so it’s about — it’s 10,000 micro-microcuries per 100 square centimeters, or per frisk.

MR. PONEMAN: Does that measure out in something in terms of rems or millirems?

MR. MUELLER: No, that’s — because this is contamination level.

MR. PONEMAN: And 10,000 microcuries per

MR. MUELLER: square centimeters.

MR. PONEMAN: what gets picked up from Ronald Reagan?

MR. PONEMAN: know, the thing that was

MR. MUELLER: Micro-microcuries per 100 And how do you measure the detectors on board the Repeat that again please.

What was the unit — you

– (audio distortion)

It was microcuries per milliliter.

MR. PONEMAN: Right, so it was the same thing you are talking about in terms of the — what you picked up on the Reagan was also measured in microcuries per milliliters.

MR. MUELLER: Yes, one’s a concentration in the air –

MR. PONEMAN: Yes. Yes.

MR. MUELLER: of microcuries per milliliter, and then the other value is on the surface, the surface (inaudible).

MR. PONEMAN: So does Admiral — sorry Minister D’Agostino or others in the DOE chain know about this?

MR. MUELLER: No sir.

MR. PONEMAN: Okay. Well, we better get them apprised. My alarm’s gone off. I got to jump on another call but you are correct. We do need to handle this appropriately. There’s other communications that have been going on and I have got to make sure that this is factored into that.

So I am going to jump off this now but first thing to do would be to brief Administrator D’Agostino because we are going to have to bring him into this as well.

ADMIRAL DONALD: Okay. Yes sir. We can do that.

MR. MUELLER: Right, but this is 100 nautical miles away at 2500 counts per minute. So they don’t even correlate, the two numbers that you just said. It’s a different — it’s much worse if we are detecting 2500 counts per minute on people’s shoes 50 miles away.

MR. WEBER: Yes, but I don’t know where that other vessel was before it was 50 miles off the coast.

MR. MUELLER: That’s true, but with the airborne at — the airborne that we detected at 100 nautical miles, that’s far and above what we would expect.

Overall the documents show that both the NRC and officials in TEPCO and the Japanese government were fully aware of the situation and that meltdowns were in progress. There was unambiguous recognition that coolant was lost and the water was boiling off followed shortly by exposure of the fuel rods. They were also aware of the implications and the type of radionuclides being released. They were running various (computer) models for where the radioactive plumes were going and how they were dispersing and trying to predict the radiation dosage. The story of the spent fuel pools got even less attention than the reactors and yet they contained hundreds of tonnes of deadly radioactive material. Between the earthquake and the explosions which caused massive damage to the reactor buildings one would expect that these storage pools would have been at best damaged if not ruptured and the NRC spend quite a lot of time discussing this for they rightly knew the dangers posed.

Re-consideration of the Damage and Implications
In light of what we know and just by examining photographs of the damage it is worth reconsidering what would be expected from such an outcome. In the first photograph above and the two below (and many others can be found on the web), the extent of the damage is plain to see with three of the reactor buildings shattered, broken pipes strewn around and generally debris all over the site. Given that each of these units contain nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools and three of the units suffered explosions (Unit 1 on March 12th, Unit 2 on March 14th and Unit 3 on March 15th), then it is next to impossible to not recognise that there must have been huge releases of radioactivity.

Extensive damage by separate explosions to Unit #3 and Unit #4.

During the accident news reports had said all power had been lost to the site and these lasted for days and this meant that during the accident the continuous cooling required for the spent fuel pools would have been interrupted. There is also a strong likelihood the pools were damaged or cracked and the water drained out, if they had not been already structurally damaged by the massive earthquake earlier on March 11th. Between the three separate units it would have been extraordinary luck if they didn't have a 'zirc fire', which happens when the spent fuel rods are exposed. See box 2 for a description of a zirc fire. The radioactive leak from this would have far exceeded what Chernobyl released. At one point at the height of the emergency it was reported that workers had to abandon the site because of the spike in radiation and elite units of Tokyo Fire Department and Japanese Self-Defense Force used unmanned remote-controlled fire trucks to spray to get in at the plant. There would have been a frantic effort to keep those spent fuel pools cooled and the photograph below shows a long hydraulic pipe of the type used typically for pouring concrete, being used to deliver water into it. And we know from reports they tried for a time to use helicopters to dump water but this was abandoned because the radiation was too intense and they weren't hitting the target. After the first explosion they were still trying to prevent a core meltdown in two of the other reactors. The situation could be best summed up as completely out of control.

Box 2: What is Spent Nuclear Fuel and a Zirc Fire?

The fuel for a nuclear reactor comes in the form of nuclear fuel rods containing Uranium pellets which are inserted inside Zirconium rods. Sets of these rods are bundled into fuel assembles, usually between 64 and 100 per assembly. A typical Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) reactor will be loaded with approximately 800 assemblies. When the nuclear fuel (i.e. Uranium) is used up, these assemblies (of rods) are taken out. At this point they are extremely radioactive and physically hot and they are then placed in 'spent fuel pools' which are big concentrate tanks full of water which is used to keep the rods cool. There they stay for several years, decades in practically all cases, until some long term solution is found. The bulk of the heat is lost in the first weeks, months and years and it comes from the heat of radioactive decay. The sheer quantity of radioactivity contained in the assemblies is mind boggling. One estimate puts it at 327 million curies which equates to 12.1 Exa Bq (or 12.1 billion billion Becquerels). Chernobyl is estimated to have released about 11 million curies. Estimates for what has been released already from Fukushima range from twice to 10 times the amount from Chernobyl.

Spent fuel pool in Unit 4 at Fukushima before and after the accident.

A spent fuel pool must be cooled at all times. If the cooling pumps fail then the water temperature will rise and start to boil. The timing for this depends on how old the rods are. For relatively new rods the pool can boil down in a matter of hours. There is supposed to be several meters of water covering the rods but once the water level drops and starts to expose the top of the rods, the Zirconium cladding will not be able to cool quick enough and it will begin to buckle and in the process the rods split open and release a vast array of radioactive particles and gases. The temperature rises so much that the Zircon will oxidise with water and produce free hydrogen. This is known as a Zircon or 'Zirc' fire. Basically it grabs the oxygen off the water molecule and because ZrO₂ is in a much lower energy state, it releases a lot of heat. The result is that all the radioactive material in the fuel rods begins to ablate and thereby releasing huge quantity of radioactive dust and gases. This is an extremely dangerous situation and one of the last things you would ever want to deal with. The radiation surrounding such a fire would be intense and deadly.

Spent Nuclear Fuel Inventory at Fukushima
Unit	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5	#6
Reactor Fuel Assemblies	400	548	548	0	548	764
Spent Fuel Assemblies	292	587	514	1331	946	876
Fuel	UO₂	UO₂	MOX	UO₂	UO₂	UO₂
New Fuel Assemblies* recently swapped out of reactor	100	28	52	204	48	64

Attempts to supply cooling water into spent fuel pool of Unit #4.

What is interesting though is the explosion that got wide video coverage mostly because it was so powerful. It was of unit #3 exploding at 11am on March 15th. This was the one that used MOX fuel containing plutonium. In the first picture below it shows a comparison with the unit #1 explosion which was most likely a hydrogen explosion. The second image is a sequence of 4 video frames of the unit #3 explosion. What is noticeable is the speed at which the explosion develops and the sharp vertical plume indicating a very rapid velocity of ascent. To all intents and purposes it looks like a mini-mushroom cloud. What this would indicate is that there was a 'criticality' event and this means that nuclear reactions have started up again but it is first necessary to describe how and why this occurs.

A Nuclear Criticality Event
In an nuclear fission reaction the emission of neutrons from Uranium and or plutonium will trigger further fissions if they happen to be absorbed by surrounding Uranium / plutonium atoms. Because the nuclei are tiny the chances of this happening are low. However if all the atoms are squeezed tightly together for a moment, then the chance of absorbing a neutron is vastly increased and a rapid chain reaction can occur. The speed of nuclear reactions are extremely rapid and will happen in under a femtosecond or one million billionth of a second. In an atomic bomb where the material is compressed by an initiating explosion, this speed is important because it means there is an exponential surge and release of energy. In the case of a nuclear reactor the rods are held sufficiently close together to keep the nuclear reaction going but are sufficiently far apart to prevent the runaway chain reaction. There is normally extra material present that can be inserted to absorb the neutrons. All of this explains why you cannot store nuclear fuel close together. It has to be separated by a certain minimum distance. In a criticality event what happens is that the fuel has come too close together and in an uncontrolled situation where a big mass of fuel or recently spent fuel rods fall in a heap then the conditions are met for nuclear reactions to restart and a rapid surge of energy being released resulting in a blast. The blast will likely disrupt whatever caused it to shut down the explosion quick enough to prevent it becoming an atomic bomb type of explosion because in such a device it is purposely designed to keep it together for as long as possible thereby allowing the explosion to develop and get even larger.

Unit 3 Explosion

There are two possibilities. 1) The fuel rods were exposed in the reactor because of loss of water and the rods had heated up, buckled and dropped to the floor and an criticality event occured there or 2) the spent fuel rods were exposed because the tank was emptied and there was a zirc fire and the fuel assemblies collapsed and fell on top of each other. In either scenario a blast like the one on the video would have vaporized a large amount of nuclear material and injected into the atmosphere. The surrounding area would have been rained down with pieces of fuel rods and other highly radioactive material and trillions upon trillions of tiny specks of radioactive particles including plutonium.

Arnie Gundersen, an American physicist with over 30 years nuclear industry experience discusses the explosion and he points out that it is a detonation supersonic shockwave and the fact there is no nuclear containment in the world can withstand a detonation shockwave. And he comes to the conclusion that the explosion was in the spent fuel pool and was what he calls a prompt moderated criticality occurred in unit 3. He also points out that the radiation is so lethal around it, that the unit #3 spent fuel pool cannot be accessed. The video can be found here. In another separate video from March 29th 2011, he also discusses the news of the discovery of plutonium and highly radioactive water on the site and the fact that this is draining into the ocean. It can be found here and it is worth watching.

Public Reaction and Government Response All of this would suggest that things are not going well and it is much worse than the bland reassurances we have all received from the mainstream media and our respective politicians and governments. It is the lack of coverage and apparent interest that helps create the notion that there is nothing much to worry about that is newsworthy and therefore it is alright. Given the obvious releases of radioactivity it then begs the question what embargos if any are in place about food from Japan or advice about travelling to Japan because every week there will be many people who travel there for business or as students or even as tourists and they will be taking their cues from the media and any announcements from Japan itself, to determine whether it is safe to go there. After-all Japan won the 2020 Olympics bid. See box 6 for more details. It would be foolish in the extreme to consume any Japanese food and especially fish. Most governments are simply not testing it. That way they find nothing, thereby in the Orwellian logic so prevalent these days, makes it safe. Most people would automatically assume it is being tested.

There has been little coverage in the media except to belittle and rubbish the claims by several scientists and critics of the nuclear industry as well as Arnie Gundersen who have said that the Fukushima accident is far worse than Chernobyl in 1986 was and it has released up to 10 times more radioactivity into the environment. Given the scale of damage on the site it would be surprising if this was not so. This information while useful is a little bit late because if people remember back to Chernobyl there was widespread coverage of the fallout and bans and restrictions were put in place as required. For instance in parts of the uplands of Scotland and Wales and even here in Ireland in Wicklow, there were restrictions on the sale of lamb meat which were in effect in some areas for over a decade because of contamination by radioactive cesium. Farmers were compensated to prevent illegal relabeling of the meat and thus prevent contaminated food entering the food chain. In Norway reindeer farmers couldn't sell their meet for years either. The reason it affected these types of areas is because the acidic soil of upland peat and the tundra retains cesium much longer.

The question then is why isn't there the same response today? Part of the answer may have to do with the neo-liberal and corporate takeover of society and consolidation of the media. In the past, people could complain and protest and they might get some response and sometimes a victory or two resulting in some kind of action and back in 1986 governments would have been afraid not to carry out the radioactive measurements and would have felt obliged to protect the public and food chain. Today however in the era of mass surveillance, spin-doctors and PR consultants, and public trust in most institutions has broken down, people are just ignored while billions are given to the rich and at the same time the very social fabric and safety nets of society are being torn asunder, the citizens are largely treated with contempt. It is no wonder then that there has been virtually no response by national governments to the Fukushima accident. What is quite suspect too is that uniformly each State, the majority of which have national radiological bodies for monitoring radiation all report trace amounts of radiation of negligible risk. It seems that they are being economical with the truth and probably carefully crafted their press releases since this is the norm now to distort reality and manage perceptions.

TEPCO's Handling of the Crisis TEPCO has rightly come into a lot of criticism for it's handling of the crisis and it is easy to see why. It lied about the accident saying it was unforeseen even though they had lobbied not to raise the height of the sea-wall. They were continuously in breach of numerous regulations and had been instructed to carry out repairs and fix things at many of it's sites. It deliberately misled the public and failed to warn them at key times. It was dis-organised and at the height of the crisis it was unable to coordinate and prioritise all the different requests and reports. The list goes on.
An example of the farcical levels things had reached on the human side is demonstrated in this transcript [reported here] from tapes released showing how TEPCO handled the accident and it concerned the situation where they couldn’t seem to get their hands on a battery, although we do have to remember the entire coastline region was devastated by the earthquake. 'In fact, it took about 24 hours and trip to the hardware store to buy it while on the brink of meltdown. With reactors 2 and 3 on the verge of having a meltdown, the on-site team had to open a valve to release coolant into the reactors. However, with the extensive damage to the plant, an ordinary car battery was needed to power the valve controls.'

Fukushima Daiichi Materials Team: 'We don’t have enough cash. Sorry to ask but if it’s possible could you lend it to me? We’d appreciate it.”
Head Office Akio Komori, Managing Director (at the time): "I wonder if someone’s using the helicopter today. Who’s using the helicopter? We can use a helicopter to carry the cash."
Narrator: "Units 2 and 3 are also in danger of meltdown. They had to connect a car battery to the valve to activate the reactor coolant. However, there wasn’t even enough cash to buy one...Finally after 10 hours..."
Head Office: Akio Komori, Managing Director (at the time): "We sent a person from the head office to [Fukushima’s] off-site center carrying a lot of cash. You can get it from the off-site center."
Fukushima Daiichi: Masao Yoshida, Fukushima Director (at the time): "Okay, I should write an IOU for this, right?"
Head Office: Akio Komori, Managing Director (at the time): 'No need. I’ll take your word for it."
Fukushima Daiichi: Masao Yoshida: "Got it. Thank you."
Narrator: However, instructions to evacuate beyond 20km of Fukushima have already gone out. There were no shops open nearby.
Fukushima Daiichi Materials Team: "We are working hard to procure [a battery] but our best chance is in Iwaki which is 6 hours away. We request your assistance, Head Office."
Off-Site Center: "Today we went to Iwaki to get a battery but couldn’t get one."
Fukushima Daiichi Materials Team: "Tomorrow we’re going to a home center to buy stuff. If there’s anything you want bring us a list or tell us... whatever... just come down."
Narrator: "It’s unbelievable that they would go shopping for supplies at a home center during the worst nuclear disaster in the world." The report concludes with: 'Soon after both units 2 and 3 were said to have reached meltdown. Yoshida retired late last year, reportedly diagnosed with cancer and having suffered a brain hemorrhage which experts say are not related to radiation exposure'.

Current Official State of Conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi Site The current offical state of the Fukushima site is that the clean-up is continuing and they are still pouring water into the reactors although it is really onto the melted cores somewhere under the reactors via the holes in the base of them. TEPCO had indicated that about 300 tonnes a day are being used for this. Additionally because the site is on the coast and at the bottom of a hill there is a certain amount of groundwater that naturally passes through the site on it's way to the sea and TEPCO have said this amounts to about 300 tonnes of groundwater passing through the site every day. They have been more circumspect about it being contaminated and the fact it is pouring into the Pacific Ocean every single day.

Cross section of site showing ground water flowing over the meltdown cores and flowing into the Pacific ocean.

To try and stop this waste leaking they have hastily built 1,060 tanks to hold the radioactive water. These have been placed on the uphill part of the site and for months they have been pumping 400 tonnes of water a day and storing it in the tanks. The tanks are made of steel plates bolted together and are now leaking their radioactive contents. They were built by hundreds of inexperienced workers dragged in from all over Japan, brought in illegally, recruited by the Japanese gangs (i.e. mafia) and the workers themselves admitted they assembled tanks in weather that did not permit proper sealing. The water is being pumped into the tanks via a mish mash of plastic hoses pipes and these have rubber seals at the tank connections. The lifetime of the tanks has been estimated to be about 5 years at which time the problem will need to be solved yet again and already many of the tanks are 2 or 3 years old. Collectively the tanks hold several quadrillion Bq of radioactivity.

The hastily built water tanks holding contaminated water at Fukushima

What TEPCO are trying to do with these tanks is to capture and store the water both flowing through the site and the water which they are using to cool the spent fuel pools and the molten fuel cores that are underground. This is an impossible task and it is being contaminated with highly radioactive particles. The idea is that by pumping the water into the tanks then can later filter the water to extract the radioactive particles. The equipment system known as ALPS to do this breaks down frequently for extended periods, can't remove all substances like Tritium and does not have the capacity to deal with the sheer volume. There is no way that TEPCO can prevent the water that flows through the soil from entering the sea and they have already admitted on many occasions in the past 3 years that indeed there has been discharges of highly radioactive water in the ocean. At one point they had an absurd plan to build an ice wall to try and prevent the water from entering the sea. It is an obviously difficult and impracticable idea. Towards the end of 2013, they finally admitted indirectly they could not manage this juggling act with the water when after consultation with their US counterparts and government officials that they would start releasing water from the tanks into the ocean. Amazingly they are claiming it will be perfectly safe and have no health effects and their reasoning is that they will filter the water first. But water is already entering the ocean untreated and we are left to simply rely on their assurances it will be safe when they have no credibility although what they do have is the new secrecy laws (see box 6) to keep such information out of the public arena. Here's another one of many classic reports covering just one of the many leaks.

Tokyo Electric has now admitted that on May 10 2011, at least 250 tons of radioactive liquid leaked into the sea from a pit near the intake at Unit 3, whose fuel was spiked with plutonium. According to the Japanese government, the leak contained about 100 times the annual allowable contamination. About 500 tons leaked from Unit 2 from April 1 to April 6. Other leaks have been steady and virtually impossible to trace.

Aerial view of the water tanks at the Fukushima

In light of all this one simple fact should be obvious and that is around 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water has been entering the Pacific Ocean for the last three years. Never before has anything remotely like this happened or for so long. This radioactive waste has to be dispersing throughout the entire Pacific Ocean. And the flipside of this is how long is this going to continue for? The inshore waters though will most affected and any fish, shellfish or other creatures in it or passing through it will be contaminated. The other remaining problem and there are lots of them, which got a fair amount of press attention in the last six months of 2013 was the fact that the spent fuel pool in the heavily damaged unit #4 building was filled to capacity before the accident, now contains damaged and broken fuel assemblies and these need to be urgently removed. The reason is the fear that the building could heave over because the ground is apparently sinking from all the water. Removing these fuel assemblies is normally done under computer control in a properly functioning plant. If the rods were to come in contact with each other we could end up with a criticality event. There are over 1,300 fuel assemblies in there. (See box 2). To make matters more interesting the radiation level around the pools is about 100 rem. In that environment you would receive a lethal dose in two or three hours. In this video here from Fairewinds Associates by Arnie Gundersen, he discusses the undertaking.

Widespread Contamination in Japan and Pacific Regions
It ought to be obvious by now that there has to be widespread contamination because of the sheer quantity of radioactivity release and because of the three year continual leakage of radioactive waste into the Pacific. There have been many reports that point to this except that nuclear industry shrills have managed to discredit them because they are able to say that no dangerous levels of radiation were detected outside of Japan. This statement in itself is false. The US NRC and EPA were very reluctant to release their figures and even turned off their radiation detection network at one stage. There is even a claim that they intentionally recalibrated the equipment so that it would give lower readings. The first hint that radioactivity was spread far and wide is a research paper published in Nuclear Industry and Health titled: 'An Unexpected Mortality Increase in the United States Follows Arrival of the Radioactive Plume from Fukushima: Is there a Correlation?'. The research paper analysis death figures for 122 US cities and they noticed a small increase in the weeks after Fukushima and come with an estimate of 14,000 additional deaths. The PDF is attached at the end of this article. Interestingly they have this to say about the EPA radiation measurement dataset.

This dataset was much weaker than that reported by the EPA in May-June 1986, in the aftermath of the Chernobyl meltdown. For example, the EPA reported 2,304 milk samples in the United States, with 2,000 (86.8%) reporting a positive number for the three isotopes barium-140, cesium-137, and iodine-131 (6). After Fukushima, there were 670 measurements of milk for 10 isotopes, with just 2.2 percent reporting a positive numerical value (16). Clearly, the 2011 EPA reports cannot be used with confidence for any comprehensive assessment of temporal trends and spatial patterns of U.S. environmental radiation levels originating in Japan.

Then in this report from RT on Feb 18th 2013 - Fukushima kids have skyrocketing number of thyroid abnormalities - report says more than 40% of 94,975 children sampled have thyroid abnormalities. They would have got this by exposure from radioactive Iodine. And in the typical fashion of a paid shrill a government-backed researcher claimed there was no health affects. In another article reporting on increased thyroid in newborns on the US West Coast found in research done in the US and published in the Journal of Pediatrics the research papers notes that 'Just days after the meltdowns, I-131 concentrations in US precipitation was measured up to 211 times above normal. Highest levels of I-131 and airborne gross beta were documented in the five US States on the Pacific Ocean.'

Contamination in Tokyo. Soil and Air Samples
In May 2012 Arnie Gundersen posted this report Tokyo Soil Samples Would Be Considered Nuclear Waste In The US on his site about a trip he took to Tokyo in March 2012. While he was there he took five random soils samples from around central downtown Tokyo. He brought these back to the USA and got them analysed by a lab. The results came back and showed they all contained radioactivity material and under safety regulations in the USA the samples themselves would have to be treated as nuclear waste. One sample was from the sidewalk, one from a playground, the side of the road, the roof of a building and from the street. This means that just walking on the streets and parks will transfer radioactivity onto your shoes and shoelaces and this has to be then getting brought indoors. This insidious spread of radioactivity is virtually impossible to stop.

In yet another video titled: Hot Particles and Measurement of Radioactivity -Arnie Gundersen Gundersen is discussing radiation measurements with a colleague of radioactive 'hot' particles scooped up by air filters from cars sent from Japan. In the video, Marco Kaltofen points out that it just happens that the amount of air processed by an air filter for the typical mileage done in Japan is approximately the same as processed by the lung of a hard working human and therefore the air filters serve as an excellent proxy to estimate how many hot particles people are inhaling. The image below is an autograph (detects radiation) of the samples and it shows the relative density of hot particles between Fukushima city, Tokyo and Seattle. The lung is really good at capturing particles of a certain size mainly from 0.5 to 5 um (micro-meters) exhaling smaller and larger particles. Thus the size and distribution in any radioactive plume matters. The problem with these hot particles is when they lodge inside your body, for example in your lung. They just sit there continuously emitting radiation, damaging the cells and tissue all around constantly. The image below shows an a lung tissue sample with a hot particle lodged in it and the damage can be seen. Particles in the 10um or smaller range can be easily carried continental distances. They also discuss radiation measurements from children shoes and for all the shoe samples received from Japan they were positive and whatever is on the shoes will get on the hands. Younger people are more sensitive to radiation and developing cancer because their bodies are still growing with lots of cells multiplying.

Hot particle in a lung tissue sample showing damage to surrounding cells

In this research paper from Biogeosciences the authors discuss Strontium (Sr) releases into the ocean. Strontium behaves chemically like calcium and is taken up in the bones. Radioactive Strontium causes leukaemia because the source of blood cells is in bone marrow where they would gain mutations from exposure to Strontium. In the paper they estimate the amount of radioactive Strontium released into the Pacific based on measurements they had of the waters from 30-600km offshore of Fukushima to be of the order 90 to 900 TBq where TBq is a trillion Becquerels. The exact wording is: Liquid discharges of ⁹⁰Sr to the ocean were estimated, resulting in an inventory of 53 ± 1 TBq of ⁹⁰Sr in the inshore study area in June 2011 and total releases of ⁹⁰Sr ranging from 90 to 900 TBq, depending upon the reported estimates of ¹³⁷Cs releases that are considered. This is a lot of radioactivity and it is going to be absorbed by algae, plankton, fish, crabs, shellfish and larger predators like tuna, dolphins, seals, sea-otters, sea-birds and including humans who eat any of these contaminated fish.

Results from sampling in 2011 on Alaskan islands of Amchitka & Adak

In line with these discharges and the effects expected, it is unclear how this US government research in Alaska, reported here, got through. In the biological monitoring report it shows a significant cesium isotope signature was detected by Scientists during 2011. A comparison with 1997 sampling show the values to be around 50 times higher on Amchitka and 660 times higher on Adak islands. The 2011 and 1997 tables are extracted from the report and in the image below. Click on to enlarge. In Jan 2014, it was reported scientists found two conjoined gray whale calves in a Baja California lagoon. It is not possible to attribute the cause but given whales travel widely and eat huge quantities of krill which are low down in the food chain and would be soaking up all that radioactivity, one has to wonder is it a result of exposure to radioactivity in the ocean released by Fukushima. There were also other reports back in Jan 2012 from Alaska where Seals and Walruses Found Dead in Alaska with Mysterious Sores and Hair Loss: Scientists Baffled. These are unusual symptoms especially when found across a number of animals and across species. Perhaps neither of these are caused by Fukushima and are instead due to their body fat being loaded up with toxic industrial chemicals like PCBs, much like in the 1980s, when massive seal deaths in Europeans waters caused by strange diseases was eventually found to be the result of a build up of toxic chemicals that weakened their immune systems leaving them wide open to opportune infections.

Box 3: What is Radioactivity?
There are three main types of radioactivity and each has its own characteristics and the way it can affect you is different. Radioactivity is ultimately caused by instabilities in the nucleus of certain types of atoms often referred to as elements and is the result of these nuclei disintegrating and taking on a new more stable energetic state. The atomic nuclei are composed of protons and neutrons. Because the strong nuclear force is what holds the nuclei of atoms together, any change can result in tremendous energy release when they are re-organised. Generally the heavier an atom the more neutrons you need to have because due to the electrical force the protons are trying to fly apart from each other because they have the same charge, but the strong nuclear force that binds the protons and neutrons together is much stronger and in most cases overcomes this opposing effect. But certain setups and combinations are unstable and this level of instability is related to how radioactive these nuclei are. For example Uranium with a total 235 neutrons and protons (U-235) is more unstable than U-238 even though U-238 is also radioactive but it is far more stable and it is the 3 extra neutrons that give it the stability. (Note: The number of protons essentially defines the type of atom. See the periodic table)

Radioactivity is measured in half-lives. So for example Cesium (Cs-137) where it has 55 protons and 82 neutrons, has a half live of 30 years. This means that after 30 years half of all the Cesium atoms in any given collection will have decayed. Then in the next 30 years a further half will have decayed and so on. This means you are dividing by 2 for each half-life period. So if for example you had a pile of radioactive Cesium and it was measuring 64 times higher than the background level, then to work out how many half lives it would take for it to be only 4 times the background level, this is then 64/2 = 32/2 = 16/2 = 8/2 = 4 which is 4 half-lives and in the case of Cesium that means it is 4x30 years or 120 years. So it should be clear you have to treat each particular radioactive material separately and to consider it's half life and do the calculation.

Alpha decay: Alpha decay is when an alpha particle which consists of two protons and neutrons and is thus charged, is emitted from a nucleus. It is basically a bare helium nucleus and within microseconds it will steal electrons from the surrounding environment and eventually become a helium atom. The nucleus left behind will be transformed into a new element. The alpha particle is released at high speed with a huge energy boost and this is measured in energy units known as MeV or millions of electron volts. For most molecular compounds the atoms are bound together with an energy of up to 1 or 2 eV at most and this would be the case for all the biological compounds in your body. When one of these alpha particles is emitted it blasts through any material near the speed of light and rapidly dumps the energy by smashing chemical bonds in it's path and thereby slows down and leaves a trail of very reactive molecules that will in all likelihood react uncontrollably with whatever is around to re-establish their own energy equilibrium. Typically alpha particles can only travel a few centimeters in the body but not before its ripped through the delicate molecular machinery of your cells. An example of alpha decay is when plutonium (Pu-239) alpha decays into Uranium (U-235).

Beta decay: This is when a positively charged electron known as a positron is emitted. It occurs when one of the protons in the nucleus basically dumps its charge (in the form of the positron) and turns into a neutron. As before in this event, the atom is transformed. For example Cesium Cs-134 beta decays to Barium Ba-134 which is a completely different chemical. Again beta rays are charged and travel close to the speed of light on emission but quickly will dump their energy. As it collides with other atoms knocking out (inner) electrons it will give rise to X-rays which in sufficient intensity can be harmful too. In air the beta radiation can travel several meters. Within the body they will do similar damage as alpha decay. For example Krypton (Kr-85) beta decays to Rubidium (Rb-85) with a half life of 10.7 years. Spent nuclear fuel rods contain Kr-85.

Gamma decay: This is a highly energetic photo and essentially lies beyond x-rays. Gamma radiation is highly penetrating and depending on the intensity can penetrate several feet of lead and even more of concrete and you certainly do not want to be in the presence of it.
At any given moment an atomic nucleus is vibrating and it has a certain energy but it can slip out of this mode into another more stable vibrating mode which has a lower energy and when it does this, that difference in energy is converted into the energy of a gamma ray. Gamma rays are of several to tens of MeV in energy. For example Iodine (I-131) gamma decays and this can cause ionization which basically means smashes chemical bonds.

Box 4: Radioactivity Measurements and Effects

There are many measuring units of radioactivity and each have their merits but each have to be qualified by what type of radioactivity it is that is being measured. For example you might want to know the number of (atomic) disintegrations per second (Becquerels) or the intensity of radiation or even the dosage which is a way of trying to quantity the amount of energy received. The units themselves vary enormously and that is because the level of radioactivity does too. Each measuring unit has its metric equivalent. Here is a list of the most commonly referred to measurement units:

Sieverts (Sv) -measures dosage. Units are J / Kg
Röntgen equivalent man (rem) -measures dosage. Units are 100 erg/ g
Rad (rad) -measures absorbed dose. Units are 100 erg/ g
Becquerel (Bq) -measures activity. Units are decays per second.
Curie (Ci) -measures activity. Units are 3.7 x 10¹⁰ decays per second.
One curie is roughly the activity of 1 gram of the radium isotope 226Ra. And since one Becquerel (Bq) is one decay per second then 1 Ci = 3.7 × 1010 Bq = 37 GBq -that is 37 billion decays per second

One sievert equals 100 rem. The rem is an older, non-SI unit of measurement.

There is no one measurement that explains all. For example if a radioactive plume was passing over you the level of radiation might give a certain reading that doesn't seem particularly high or deadly but the plume itself would very likely also contain an aerosol of radioactive particles. If you happen to absorb onto your skin and inhale these microscopic particles and they become lodged inside you, then it is a completely different matter and far more dangerous. This is because for alpha and beta decay you will be largely unprotected and be getting maximum damage for every radioactive atomic nucleus disintegration.

Another factor to consider is the type of radioactive particle. Is it Iodine or Strontium or something else? In the case of Iodine your body will automatically try to concentrate it in your thyroid gland whereas chemically Cesium behaves more like Calcium and will be absorbed into your bones, potentially setting you up for bone cancer. In the case of plutonium (Pu) the body thinks it is iron and will concentrate it in the liver, bone marrow and iron is used for production of sperm, hence you could get cancer of the liver, bone marrow or testicles. Cesium will be attracted to the muscles and organs.

Ingesting radioactive 'hot particles' is categorically different than being exposed to a single exposure of gamma radiation. Particles trapped within the body can behave differently depending upon where they end up. Some radioactive elements collect in the thyroid, as with Iodine-131. Others, such as cesium-137 and 134 collect in muscle tissue and other organs. Strontium-90 collects in bones, and there it stays irradiating the host for likely the remainder of his life. In such close proximity to other cells a radioactive hot particle engages in "cellular disruption (CDC, Cesium 2, Relevance to Public Health)." These radioactive isotopes bombard the nuclei of surrounding cells with energy, and this energy can cause mutations in DNA, thus sparking cancer.

Evidence of Plumes and Models and Plume Gate

It should be clear if the plume had spread over the Tokyo metropolitan with a population of 35 million people, there would be no evacuation because you simply cannot move even a fraction of that many people and there wouldn't be anywhere that they could go and be easily accommodated and besides the mad rush and disruption would cause panic and the image of that would not go down well. Quite simply the only alternative would be to deny it was happening. This would be just as true for any other city in the path of a radioactive plume. For example if a serious accident occurred in Sellafield and they had a zirc fire in one of their many spent fuel pools and we were unfortunate enough to have a North Easterly wind -which is unlikely -blowing over the Dublin, the same logic would be faced by the Irish government.

And now back to the NRC FOIA documents. Without going directly to them, one should realize in any situation like this, central to any crisis management in an accident on the scale of Fukushima, would be to have at hand the Meteorlogical Services and one or more teams already proficient at modelling plumes using the latest weather data and forecasting the track of any plume using the latest forecast and weather observations. What the NRC documents unsurprisingly show is that they were doing just that and they were discussing readings taken on board the numerous naval vessels that the USA has stationed off Japan. Normally what is done is you try to get a number of different groups using their own computer models to forecast where the plumes are and if they all agree then that increases the confidence you can have. The problem was that we didn't see these plume models on the nightly news. If we go back to the original news coverage, the general impression given is that the plumes went out to sea and dispersed and weren't the Japanese very fortunate and that was largely it and perhaps a few harmless trace amounts were detected elsewhere.

It was mentioned earlier in the section 'The NRC FOI Documentation' above that a 'Hatrick Penry' did a huge amount of work going through thousands of the NRC documents and uncovered quite a lot of interesting things. He also covered other external material related to the accident. As a result he came to the conclusion that there was a massive cover-up mainly of the extent of the radioactive plumes both in Japan and globally and he put all this work together in a 445 page PDF document which he called Plume Gate and it is available at the end of this article for download. The document contains parts of the transcripts and emails from the NRC exchanged in the days after the accident and most importantly he has dug out some of the charts for the plume model runs and forecasts and three of them are included below.

The first image covers forecasts for March 20th to 23rd 2011 for total deposition off Iodine-131 from the Japanese Meteorlogical Agency. While these are estimates, they would be using weather observations on wind and precipitation at the time to work out where plume would disperse and it is quite clear Tokyo and other cities and large parts of Japan are affected. The second image is from Obninisk Russian Meteorlogical Service who have expertise in modelling and the NRC were using the outputs from this. Their model run simulates the relative dispersion of a certain release of radioactivity for the same dates and it matches quite well with the first model. The text on the first image points out that while the release of Plutonium was not modelled and probably for fear the data would eventually get released, there would be little difference in the fallout pattern. This ties in nicely with the radioactivity detected by Arnie Gundersen in Tokyo and the sets of car air filters that were analyzed and showed up the presence of hot particles. There are probably many readings taken by concerned Japanese citizens (e.g www.SafeCast.org) and whilst there would be a lot of variability due to the limitations of Geiger counters and calibration issues, a random check of the Internet shows many reports of the presence of contamination.

The next image below is another model run from the Japanese Meteorological Agency and it covers the 16th to 21st March 2011 over a wider area over the Pacific basin. What is shows is that the radioactive cloud is dispersed over a broad area but it also more or less follows the direction of the Polar Jetstream which is exactly what would be expected. It should be borne in mind that the NRC only ran computer models of the plume for a limited number of days but emissions from Fukushima would have continued for weeks if not on and off for months into the atmosphere and continuously to the present day into the ocean. The relatively high readings detected on the Islands of Amchitka and Adak islands (described earlier) which are in the Aleutian island chain off Alaska are right on the path of the plume. The reports cited earlier about seals and walruses found dead in Alaska with mysterious sores and hair loss so far officially are not said to be caused by exposure to radiation, there are two things to consider. The first is that the Jet Stream has clearly carried alot of hot particles into that region and discharges into the Pacific would have also brought contamination which although much more diluted could be rapidly concentrated up the food chain to top predators like seals and walruses. And two if an attempt has been made to cover this up, then the NRC working with the Dept of Energy would have full authority over any release of government information when it concerns radioactivity and most certainly would not disclose this if they felt it was a 'national security' issue which must be one of the most misused and abused privileges used by governments everywhere. They would then be easily able to rubbish any claims suggesting otherwise since the data would not be available. Unfortunately because there is so little trust and government have a long and very broad record of abusing trust and lying, then it is not surprising that people do jump to conclusions and it becomes extremely difficult to work out what is the case. But the justification works on the principle summed up by George W. Bush

"You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on."

Box 5: Radiation and Health - Radiation doesn't just mean cancer

Radiation and cancer are synonymous to the point where we only think of nuclear radiation causing cancer but exposure to radioactivity causes a host of other health problems too. This should not be surprising because radiation blasts away at cells in the body including the DNA. In the case of DNA damage especially to sperm and eggs, it can have devastating effects on a developing embryo resulting in horrible birth defects. What is not commonly realized is that not all the DNA is expressed or activated because there can be multiple copies of genes or certain genes may be switched off and this can be significant. In genetic biology it is widely recognised that there can be as much variation within the genome of a single individual as amongst a population but we don't see it because most the variation is not expressed. This partially explains why populations can crash to quite low numbers and still recover. The flip-side in terms of exposure to radioactive contamination is that the sperm, eggs and or foetus may have been exposed and resulted in the birth of what appears like a healthy individual but within that person the DNA has been damaged but in genes not expressed currently. However when that person goes onto to have children the damage will be passed down and it can take up to 20 generations for the damage to manifest itself. This was discovered to be the case in many biological studies with creatures that have short lifespans. In the case of atomic bomb survivors, these effects are arising in their grandchildren.

Incidentally the widespread use of Depleted Uranium which uses U-238 for armour piercing weapons in the forms of missiles, anti-tank weapons and high calibre bullets during the Gulf War II in Iraq where over 4,000 tonnes of depleted Uranium was used has resulted in the release of a fine aerosol of microscope radioactive particles on impact as these weapons vaporise on explosive impact. As this fine dust has settled down, it has been inhaled by locals and animals alike, contaminated the soil and water tables. This has caused a huge surge in horrifying birth defects and widespread cancers which were previously extremely rare. The net effect is that the collective genetic genome of the peoples of the Middle East is being irreversibly destroyed for all future generations. These weapons were and are used in Afghanistan with the same horrific results and widespread contamination of aquifers. The use of such weapons of this nature even by the 1950s was recognised and they were classed as weapons of mass destruction back then.

The other types of damage to your health arise because the radiation damages the cells of each of the organs such that significant quantities of them fail or operate incorrectly or only partially. This applies to all your organs and your immune system too. Ever since the Chernobyl accident in 1986 the term Chernobyl heart has become known and it is caused by general deterioration of the heart cells as radionuclides accumulate and damage tissue killing and weakening cells. This impacts poorly on the heart. There is also another condition known as Chernobyl AIDS and this is where the immune system is so damaged it no longer works at full capacity and the person gets all types of chronic infections weakening them, giving rise to fatigue and lethargy and eventually death.

Yet another condition covering a broad range of effects is known as Chronic Radiation Syndrome (CRS) first secretly documented in 1950 by Soviet doctors. It affected the residents of in the village of Muslumovo and surrounds in the southern Russian Urals where back in 1949 high level radioactive waste at a plutonium plant was released in the Techa river contaminating a large area. CRS is caused by extended exposure to low doses of radioactive elements. Workers at the plant started out headaches, sharp pains in bones and joints, and constant weariness. In the declassified records one entry describes the terrible ache of CRS as a pain that made him 'want to crawl up the walls.' They lost weight. Their gait slowed. They suffered severe anemia, wheezed heavily, and started to show signs of heart disease. The doctors learned to predict the onset of this mysterious new illness by changes in the blood, often signalled in severe anemia.
By 1999, 95% of the children born in Muslumovo had genetic disorders and 90% of them suffered from anemia, fatigue, or immune disorders.

One will notice that these other health aspects are never discussed in the mainstream media on any sort of regular basis and this is clearly because by keeping the lid on it, it prevents people from understanding more about the dangers and the consequences. The original association with cancer would have been unavoidable to hide although since Fukushima there have been several spineless shrills who have even tried to claim radiation is safe. Thus rollback of hard won public knowledge is always something that the system tries to do.

Amongst the more known ones are birth defects. It causes a lot of other health problems too.

See Chernobyl Heart (2004) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ujAG_Ofj4M

There were other organisations doing computer models of the Fukushima plume. For example one was the Norwegian Air Institute and they carried out plume dispersion modelling during the weeks after the accident. The image below is one example of output from them and it is for May 9th to 12th 2011 and what is significant is that it is modelling a release of Iodine-131 (half-life 8 days) almost two months after the initial accident and strongly suggests that fission reactions were still occuring somewhere for example in the molten coriums or spent nuclear fuel rods were exposed and releasing their contents which would consist of a wide range of fission products, one of which includes Iodine. Another set of models were run by the Centre for Education and Research in the Environment and Atmosphere (CEREA) at joint laboratory École des Ponts ParisTech and EdF R&D. The two model runs shown are of cesium dispersion with a snapshot for 21st and 29th of March 2011. It should be evident by now that given explosions and the meltdowns there were multiple plumes and these spread out across the Pacific and entire North Hemisphere and when this is contrasted with the reaction of authorities after Chernobyl compared to now, it is a bit strange the lack of reported detections of radioactivity from Fukushima. But to complete this picture a bit, it is worth including the text of a report about a 18 day Chinese scientific cruise off the waters of Japan in June/July 2011 that took water samples. The air samples are normal because at that time the plumes would have dispersed.

NILO dispersion model run for I-131 for May 9th - 12th 2011

Beijing, Jul 31 (PTI) Waters of the western Pacific, close to Japan's tsunami-hit nuclear plant, are "clearly affected" by the radioactive materials leaked from the crippled Fukushima facility, tests by China's state agency have found.

China's State Oceanic Administration, which conducted the studies in the area, said today that waters in the western Pacific region, close to the east and southeast of the Fukushima nuclear power plant are found to have radioactive material in excess of normal quantities.
Initial tests of samples collected from these areas show that radioactive Cesium-137 and -134, as well as Strontium-90 can be found in all water samples, it said in a statement.
Under normal conditions, Cesium-134 cannot be detected in sea waters, but the maximum amounts of Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 detected in the samples are 300 times and 10 times, respectively, of the amounts of natural background radiation in China's territorial waters, it said.
The administration has sent professional personnel to these waters to monitor the impact of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, as well as to China”s territorial waters.
The 18-day voyage, which ended on July 4, monitored waters of 25.2 square kilometers stretch, and the monitoring team collected air, water and biological samples from the spot areas, the statement said. The administration will continue to publish results of further testing and evaluations of the samples, the statement said. Source here and here

And here is another example of how when the risk of someone going off base and analyzing this stuff the team swings into high gear and involves the highest levels of government to ensure there is only one message gets out.

This is a transcript of an audio file from March 12th 2011. National Labs would refer to the US nuclear weapons national labs who have huge expertise and resources in all things nuclear.

MR. SHARON: This is Brian Sharon. Quick question, well, not question, but I’ve gotten a couple of emails here today, from some of the National Labs, and they’re all - there are a couple of them chomping a the bit, you know, saying, "Ghee, can we help? Ghee, can we go calculate this," with the codes and all that stuff.
I keep telling them, "No, you don’t know the scenario," but you know, somebody might want to call DOE and tell them to tell their labs to cool it, because the last thing we want is the labs going off, talking to the press, talking about consequences and all sorts of other stuff, because you know, they’re chomping at the bit, to do something, and I’m not sure, Eliot, maybe you’ve got a point of contact up there at DOE?
MR. BRENNER: I’ll send a note to their Press Secretary, asking him, through his chain, to reach out, down to the labs and tell them to back off. If we’ve got other chains, we might as well -
MALE PARTICIPANT: If I could chime in on that? On the Deputy’s call yesterday, I was on with the Chairman, and Pete Lyons was one of the principals at DOE. Lyons may be a good source to contact at DOE.
MR. JOHNSON: This is Mike Johnson. My other thought was, it may be just to cut to the chase, just to pass the same, to call the lab directors and say, "Knock it off," or whatever messages we want to get to them.
There are a number of ways we can do this.
So, I agree, Brian, we’ve got to do it soon.
MR. McDERMOTT: Okay, we’ll take that action from headquarters.

Conclusion
In summary then it is likely we will never find out what the full extent of the contamination is and even though a certain amount was revealed by the NRC documents, there are significant and important parts which are redacted and there is simply no way that anything that shows the true extent will ever be permitted to be released by whatever means. We should also bear in mind in light of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden which amongst other things revealed the very extensive, sophisticated and active offense cyber attack capabilities, then anything that does appear on the Internet will be hacked in short order and removed.

At the accident site itself, the problems are so large and too large for a company like TEPCO according to Gundersen, and the complexity of the tasks is so great that the cleanup is going to be still going on 50 years if not 100 years from now. However there is one problem with this, as the global industrial civilisation slides down the back of Peak Oil now that we are already past the cheap energy era, it will be virtually impossible to maintain the infrastructure of our energy intensive and complex infrastructure and this will be just as true for Japan. It is hard to see how there will be enough wealth left in the system to train a new army of nuclear engineers and pay dead money on cleaning up a mess that has long since ceased contributing any benefits -in the form of electricity - to society.

What makes matters worse is that Japanese culture or society is not good at collectively admitting there are problems and all the evidence is that the entire body politic is in denial and would sooner brush it all under the carpet. This can only make matters worse and prolong the pain. For instance unlike Germany, Japan has never in any public way to its own people ever owned up to its role in the Second World War and the atrocities they carried out in China and before the War. And so it seems in their completely stupid and reckless at incinerating radioactive waste is just another example of this type of behaviour.

What we see with the Fukushima accident is the future. There are approximately 450 nuclear reactors around the world, many are 30 or even 40 years old. Just recently a spate of leaks from spent fuel ponds and storage tanks have been reported throughout the USA and this is a symptom of the age of these tanks and they are all beginning to develop faults and fail and since they were built in broadly the same decade, their meantime to failure will be at much the same time too. Over the next few decades we can expect to see more Fukushimas. If you are willing to spend the time and dig a little what you will find is a long catalogue of serious problems at nuclear facilities all over the world, each one capable of causing it's own disaster. It was the era of high growth and availability of plentiful cheap energy that allowed the initial surge and provided the wealth to enable all these plants to be built. This wealth has been replaced by a massive global debt bubble and governments simply don't have the money to look after them and carefully manage their controlled decommissioning. The predatory capitalist system has little interest in mere matters of safety for the bottom line is the only concern. They rightly know that they can run these nuclear plants at a profit because many of them are already operating beyond their original lifespan and the capital has been paid off, so what they are getting now is mainly profit. If a plant fails, they can walk away and hand the problem over to the government. In most countries with nuclear energy, it is written into national law, that the government picks up the tab after the first few hundred million for any consequences of a serious accident. See for instance the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. You can be sure that Japanese government will be on the hook for the cleanup TEPCO is carrying out. The question then is how many of these nuclear plants going to have accidents. The answer is probably quite a lot and the more it happens and the more experienced the nuclear industry and governments get at making it a non-issue, the more frequently it will occur. What we do know is this. The nuclear industry won't get cleaner or safer until real public pressure forces it and the cleanups will be more tokenistic PR efforts until people force it to be otherwise. The democratic deficit just like it had a major role to play in the financial crisis is thus an important factor in the unfolding disaster that is nuclear power.
So what are the options? The first one would be to skip the 2020 Olympics, do not consume any Japanese food including fish. Avoid any travel there unless you absolutely have to. The second step would be to find out more and educate yourself, perhaps even join a citizen network for radiation measurements and find out what your area is like. Third, find out what foods are good at removing certain chemicals, because if you live in a contaminated area or have been affected, certain foods are good at removing certain compounds from the body. And fourth, stop being ignorant because it could cost you your health.

Box 6: Some of the Cover-up Techniques by TEPCO and Japanese Government

The Chernobyl accident thought the authorities a lot in handling nuclear accidents but the lesson was not really in the actual reactor itself but more on the control of information. In Chernobyl the Soviet authorities immediately made a decree raising the safe limit of radiation exposure to a much higher level. There was another secret decree that all hospitals keep two sets of books. One were the real data and the other would be what was released to the public. So the official picture gave the impression of only a very mild effect.

When the Fukushima accident happened the Japanese authorities showed they had learned the lessons. First they denied the severity of the accident for months and in within a few weeks in April they announced the 'safe' level of exposure for children was to be raised from one to 20 millisieverts per year. This is a level that leads to 2,270 cancers annually per million people (or 160,000 lifetime cancers per million), according to data in a landmark 2006 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report on radiation cancer risk. The beauty of this move is that it meant huge areas of contamination previously deemed unsafe were now 'safe'. Other tricks and these were used continuously was to under report radiation levels. They declared contaminated areas and told residents they were safe to return when they weren't.

In Nov 2011 TEPCO announced they had reached cold-shutdown. This was another lie. It gave the pretence that they had somehow shutdown the reactors in a controlled manner. It was part of the PR for their international image. There was no shutdown because three of the reactors had core meltdowns and the molten nuclear slag was slowly working its way down through the soil. All it meant was that the temperature of the reactors had fallen below 100 C and they had stopped pouring cooling water into the now empty reactors. See further commentary from the science journal, Nature.
And in Sept 2013 they took this to the logical extreme by bidding for the 2020 Olympics and actually won the bid. The whole affair was an exercise in propaganda to put out the image that Japan was safe and will be safe. It has to rate as one of the most cynical and dishonest acts by the Abe' government. To quote the arrogant lies from Abe to the press at the time. 'Let me assure you the situation is under control...It has never done and will never do any damage to Tokyo...There are no health-related problems until now, and nor will there be in the future - I make the statement to you in the most emphatic and unequivocal way.' If anyone is reassured by this, they would want to get their head examined.

This was followed later in 2013 a new secrecy law Designated Secrets Bill, was rammed through parliament. The law allows the government to declare any information it likes as "state secrets" with very severe punishments. The law has no checks and balances and is wide open to abuse and will completely muzzle the press. Part of the hysteria created by the Japanese government was to remove bad 'rumours' about Fukushima. The supposedly free democratic nation of Japan, which supposedly values and promotes freedom of speech, has officially issued orders to telecommunication companies and webmasters to remove content from websites that counter the official government position that the disaster is over and there is no more threat from the radiation. They have also passed an order allows police unrestricted access to monitor all Internet communications to crack down on the 'rumors'. And in the spirit of the neo-liberal merger of corporate and state power, Japan has issued open bids for companies to monitor blogs and social media such as tweets to crack down on the information making its way around the internet.

See more here and here -Japan Passes Law To Cleanse Internet Of "Bad" Fukushima Radiation News [Tangentially, the PM Mori has declared that subjects of intense public debate, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) economic agreement (free trade agreement) currently being negotiated behind closed doors with the United States and other countries, could be designated as secrets. The TPP is an treaty for multinational corporations that will remove all the last vestiges of sovereignty and national regulation and rights. If signed for the Pacific region then it will be pushed for Atlantic region -i.e. US & EU.]

Finally see also: Former Japan Ambassador: US gov’t is main reason why crisis at Fukushima Unit 4 has been "toned down" (VIDEO)

Box 7: Citizens fight back by creating their own radiation measurement networks.

http://www.radiationnetwork.com/ and www.SafeCast.org

In theory governments represent the culmination of cooperation of people living in a society and it is supposed to represent the division of labour and expertise to look after, protect and help the people. As with all complex systems it is open to exploitation and the parasitic behaviour of the elite who happen to be the rich ultimately have co-opted the machinery of the state to serve their needs rather than the majority of the people. Complex systems evolve and so have governments but much of this has been under the direction of the parasites who have ensured it has changed structurally so that it is harder and harder for the host (i.e. the people) to fight back and redirect the functioning of the state back to its needs.
What all this means is that every Western country is under the direction of the capitalist class and the last thing they want is panic and people objecting and even worse opposing nuclear power or indeed any other project that they have. As a result governments have in some cases simply switched off their radiation detectors in some places and as policy do not let the public see the raw data measurements. They outright refuse to sample and test food for radioactive contamination and even when they do release measurements they always fall on the side of whatever the safe limit is or else whatever peak was measured was of very short duration and extremely safe. But people are noticing a pattern here and trust is breaking down considering governments have a long track record of dishonesty and outright lies over a vast spectrum of subject matter.
As a result people are having to go back to basics. They are forming their own ad-hoc networks and by cooperating together and pooling the talents, knowledge and resources, they are attempting to build their own independent networks. One such network for radiation measurements is RADNet. This is composed of individuals making measurements mostly with Geiger counters and pooling their results on a website. As time progress, this system is evolving and they are improving their techniques. Regrettably they don't have anything remotely like the resources they should have and which the state has but they are making a difference. These types of networks are very effective because they are good at harnessing the power of thousands of people and save on the infrastructure setup of a measuring network because with enough people then by virtue of the random places they report from, you get widespread (measurement) coverage. It's a bit like science done by thousands of people together simultaneously for the same study. What RADnet has shown is that radiation levels go up and down quite a lot, it is varied and the level of overall exposure is far higher than what official governments figure say.
Unfortunately this network and other ones like it will come under attack from the state as the intelligence state (aka NSA, GCHQ or whatever is in your country) will seek to undermine, infiltrate, damage, sabotage, disrupt and undermine the people and their websites and equipment in these networks. Indeed it is highly likely they will label this as terrorist activity and with tongue in cheek one could suppose it is because it terrorizes the elite that people can slip out from under their totalitarian control and report the actual truth for a short while before they close down their websites and remove all trace of the information from the Internet.

Box 8: Fukushima Accident Cleanup.

So far the cleanup of the accident can be summed up in one word -Denial. This has been the approach of TEPCO and the Japanese government from the start. They have denied the extent of the massive problem and tried to sweep the problem away. They even classified the accident as level 4 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) when it was level 7 from the start. The latest incarnation of this was when they brought in a dangerous new law making all information about Fukushima and the nuclear industry highly classified and thereby making it illegal to say anything about the accident and with hefty prisons sentences for those who are deemed to break it. This has had the desired effect with an almost complete shutdown on information coming from the press in Japan about the progress of the cleanup. Within months it seems the Japanese set out intentionally to ruin any chance of monitoring the health effects long term of the accident. One would imagine that in the decades ahead the most tragic effects will in general show up in populations nearer the plant. To sabotage this natural effect the Japanese government ordered that the waste (including soil) cleaned up in the thousands of identified radioactive hot-spots be incinerated. This had the effect of simply dispersing the nuclear contamination even further far and wide. The effect of this is to spread the contamination more evenly over the whole country. This will then allow the government and nuclear industry to claim that any health effects are NOT due to the nuclear accident because they will appear more evenly over the entire country and they will argue it must be for some other reason because they will say you would expect the worst effects to be located in the region around Fukushima. [Incineration is a chemical reaction and has absolutely no effect on the radioactivity of a substance. Any secondary school child learning basic science should know that.]