Fukushima continues

I just found an article that explains pretty much what DC says.

http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/05/16/spent-fuel-at-fukushima-not-dangerous/

I just checked both places. Interesting the ENE news has just one comment from a real scientist - and he says "dump it all in the ocean, it'll be so dilute it won't matter". And he's right, by the numbers. If it disperses evenly, that is. Actually what would happen is most would just sink into the ocean floor and be covered by dirt, back to nature in a fairly safe and decent way - while the water soluble stuff might not mix evenly and might actually give trouble elsewhere for awhile. I've not studied ocean current speeds and locations in the Pacific, I'd have to take a look into that one to see what the *true* issues are. I wouldn't depend on those guys to actually try to find truth - they are trying to find bad things whether they are there or not.

It's obviously an utterly anti-nuke site, reminds me of anti-gun people. Ditto the other guys, who strangely discredit themselves in one of their own articles, screaming about a leak of 5k picocuries/liter when the drinking water standard limit is 20k....so you could drink this leak(!). Yet for them, it's front page news. Hmmm.

Actually, they did get one thing wrong. Tritium is almost all produced as a gas - adding a neutron to deuterium (which a small part of the cooling water contains, as the H in it does absorb a neutron once in awhile - which along with the U-238 eating some neutrons "uselessly" is why you need enriched fuel in reactors if you don't use heavy water moderator) is quite rare, perhaps that's why their numbers for curies (pico is 10^-12) are so small, but normally it's a gas coming from rod leaks etc, and just flies off into space - earth's gravity won't hold it. Now, a curie is a pretty hot unit - 10^7 decays/second per gram, which is roughly what pure radium is (and hence the name). This would then be 10^-5 decays/sec/gram. Oh please, my own blood is hotter than that even if I don't have a banana for lunch! Yet the article, so you can see what their attitude (and ignorance that they get much more daily from the sky) is. This is not to say that they don't have valid info - but anyone who knows how to run the numbers sees this as good, not bad news.

What's funny is that they didn't know most T is produced as a gas, inside the fuel rods. Told ya, they're well made. Yeah, you can break them like you can most things, but you really have to work at it.

I can't fault them on numbers, just attitude, didn't see the articles that said the stuff you said, but obviously both sites are rabidly anti-nuke (not that I completely disagree - see above) - and about as trustworthy on the topic as the anti gun guys are on theirs, IMO.

These other claims - fresh fuel in the same pool as used - I didn't see (but I didn't look very long either), are the kind of thing you have to ask - if Tepco etc aren't saying squat about surely-real stuff, how'd they find that out, anyway? Tepco themselves can't find the cores under the debris since it's too hot there to move it out of the way - they'd need heavy lift helicopters with magic cranes/grippers or something to do that at this point. And a realllly looooonnng cable...

They evidently are really good at clusterfucking the paperwork on top. I have no doubts that bad things are yet to be disclosed about all this.
Nasty bad to be near there just now, and for quite awhile. Glad I'm here instead.

But just like the guy from New Scientist (note, they added their own words for the end para, and didn't mention they weren't his - I read New Scientist now and again myself) - really you could dump this entire mess in the ocean, and the result would be no edible fish near Japan for some years - most of this junk isn't water soluble and would simply sink into the silt and be out of the system as far as we and fish are concerned. - just like shipwrecks that survive hundreds of years with little effect. The deep ocean isn't very corrosive. The rest?

Fish from the oceans have always been a little hot - I'd like to see a real paper that shows the baseline and the increase over time from this particular incident. The trouble is, before it happened, only a few people on earth took those measurements (and they did publish refereed papers on it - read a couple but don't have them and don't remember the numbers, but they weren't too bad, just hotter than normal ocean water, which is pretty cool normally, or was before some other incidents).

I have a pal on the pacific coast - the guy with the really serious cyro cooled HPGE spectrometer that can pick up individual isotope signatures even way lower than the cosmic background levels. I'll ask him how hot the fish are next time I get a chance. I'd bet it's on the order of banana. But we'll see. He will be at a fusion scientist meeting near here in October, so I'll get the chance to request a measurement from someone with the right gear who knows how to use it - and who I trust. It would take something on the order of magic to get that much stuff that far across the ocean that fast and there's just not enough of it even if you assume their leaks are 100's of times worse than reported (which might be close to true for all we know now). It's a really big puddle (the pacific ocean), after all.

In short, I didn't see anything there to be scared of, actually, and a couple of good signs of incompetents/users being fired. Yeah, you'd like it if they weren't hired in the first place, but you know how business works - I read your rants - and have run my own - and people do change over time. Some good hires turn bad, and it's impossible to never hire a baddy if you do much hiring.

Those sources are like ZH - "first with the worst", and ZH has predicted ~5000 of the last one recession - talking their book I suppose. Or wait - did they even predict this one? Take it with a grain of salt - first with the worst is good for you if you're long and want instant info on why to get out, sometimes, but if you drink that kool ade - you got killed this year in the markets and missed 22% easy money w/o even using leverage in half a year. And last year, and the year before and...you have to spend a lot of mental sweat to interpret such sources and separate the wheat from the much more numerous chaff.

Maybe you and I should form a corp and go show them how engineering is really done right, save a few lives - and a metric crap-ton of wasted fear, and get stinking rich at it?

Or maybe I should send you a really accurate geiger counter and let you tell me what *you* measure where you are, and compare with what I measure here where I am, using the same tool. Unfortunately, it's USB powered and linux based (since I am and so are most scientists), so you'd have to have a linux box or laptop to drive it. But it takes nice logs and makes nice graphs. We could then send it to another friend on the pacific coast and try his fish too - and see if there's a difference we can even see out of the background noise. It'd be cheaper than flying me all over the country/world.

FWIW, you know yourself that by the ocean, the problem isn't ground water going into the ocean, it's salt water getting into the ground water, right?

Edit:
"I just found an article that explains pretty much what DC says."
Just trying to explain things as best I can to non experts who have a long enough attention span (rare, those, but perhaps this place is outstanding in that regard - most here seem darn smart). Most qualified dudes are going to tell you the same stuff, I believe.

This is excellent information but how can we be sure that the fish we are eating is just a little warm and not red hot? The problem as I see it, is that some fish get flown first class half way across the planet to fine restaurants, and some fish get frozen and end up at Long John Silvers. How would anybody know if they are eating a fish that spent summer vacation near Japan. Or perhaps a smaller vacationing fish got eaten by a bigger fish and that fish really enjoys long distance swimming and has a girlfriend in California. Maybe it would be safer to stay with farmed fish so at least you know you are eating chemicals instead of radiation? Or am I worrying too much?

The only way to be sure is not to guess. A geiger counter is a nice thing to have *before* you need it, so you know what's normal and won't freak out over nothing. In fact, that's my sig on a few services:

"Why guess when you can know? Measure it!"

While a geiger counter won't see everything, and cheap ones are unreliable and don't stay in calibration (make sure to get a test source, I can help there if needed), having one is a lot better than not. Some sorts of fairly damaging stuff - if it gets inside you - won't count very hot from the outside, as the body of say, the fish, shields some things. Thankfully CS-137 is so hot it comes right through fish-flesh - and that's the one we worry about the most, there's a lot of it, it's hot, it stays hot for decades (instead of thousands of years, which is why a little is so hot).

The "gamma scout" is a pretty good one (but about $400). I make a good one (and sell them sometimes, but right now I'm out of stock on a crucial part and can't sell them).

The cheesy stuff that every entrepreneur brought out just after Fuk to cash in - not so great.
And they bought out the market on quality Russian new-old stock tubes in the bargain, mated them with inferior other parts, and sold them to people who didn't know how to use them right - really screwed me up as I couldn't get the inexpensive but good Russian tubes any more. Then they put them inside a box that shields the detector from half what you want to measure!

Look at how long the company has been at it. I'd trust for example Harshaw over Sum Ting Wong.
But they made some really numb ones too - look for "survey meter" as those tend to be nicely sensitive. Except the yellow ones they made for Civil Defense - those are the most reliable but horribly insensitive things on this planet (even if made by Victoreen, normally a great outfit - they just had to meet the .gov spec). They might just barely read in a puddle of that leak from Fuk, if you got them into the water itself. Avoid ones painted yellow...those are the CD ones that stink. Even high grade uranium ore won't move the needle off zero on those.

The old cheap ones you can find on ebay aren't too shabby if they're the type with the tube separate on a cable so you can hold the tube up to what you want to measure. They tend to be at the good end of sensitivity, and are used for prospecting and so forth. Just kinda clunky, and eat batteries.
The separate tube in general means they're the sensitive type - and they didn't ruin it by putting the detector inside the box, where it would be somewhat shielded.

Maybe the thing to do would be to convince the restaurant owner to get one and advertise he checks the source of what he's serving. He might even make money at it.

The thing is, the thin-window tubes I have - they are fragile as hell, and in most hands, get punctured (there's near-vacuum on the other side of a .0005" thick mica window 2" in diameter).

Forget the old Civil Defence yellow ionization counters - they totally suck for all but one model - the ones that suck worst are the 715 "survey meter" which is a bad name for something so numb. By the time they read on the most sensitive scale, you're dead in a few hours. They are THAT bad.
(which is why they go for $35) They are large and ugly too. They are so numb it's crazy - as in, midscale reading, if you go out, in 1 hour you'll only get really sick - 4 hours you're sure to die. To give them credit, they're reliable and meant for that situation where someone has to volunteer to go out from a bomb shelter at risk to themselves to save the others - all they'll tell you is how long you might live, if you'll get back in time to help anybody before you die out there. This can be helpful to know in the case of nuclear war for example, the reason they exist. In a truly hot situation, you can get enough rads in a second to kill you - it might take a few nasty hours to actually die, but it's a done deal at that point.

Sad to say, that's about the answer - don't believe anybody, check it yourself.

Get used to what is normal first - quite a few things make a geiger go click, and no one worries about kitty litter, bathroom tiles and grout, coleman lantern mantles (the old ones are incredibly hot - 6000 cpm and up - I use them as test sources here), granite, dirt, etc - but you don't eat those or carry them in your pocket for weeks either.

Depending on where you live, out in open air, the norm for an average sized geiger tube might be between 50 and 150 counts/minute - for a sensitive scintillator, around 1000 cpm (TSA sold a bunch surplus awhile back, they were too sensitive for them - they just went nuts all the time, I toned them down a bit).

My normal geigers read 120 or so cpm here - they are 2 in sq sensitive area, kinda big, and very accurate. A smaller tube will give lower counts for the same radiation level, as being smaller, less hits it. Most tubes are less sensitive than the pancake ones I use as well. It's a trade off with being rugged enough to live awhile. I'm just careful with mine.

The fully solid state ones I've tried (PIN diodes for hose in the know) don't even count the thoriated lantern mantles at all. Obviously no good for this! If you can't see a count when there's nothing there, it's not good enough - because there's always something there from outer space if nothing else - in fact, it's a good test source, and if you can't see it, you're probably not going to see 10% more, which is about where I personally would start losing my appetite..

Some of the rocks where I live hit 400-500 cpm....if you see that in a fish, don't eat it.
In fact, some of the moss growing on those rocks acts just like fish - it concentrates heavy metals, and counts a couple thousand counts a minute. That's way too much to even remotely consider eating - or burning and breathing near, or really much of anything. These rocks are nothing special, just low grade granite/feldspar.

tl;dr version:

The hassle here is that a count rate perfectly acceptable to be in if it's external to you is not if it's in your gut. If a counter won't read the natural background, it's therefore too numb to be useful for food checking. Make sure it can do that, and you're good. If you see 10-20% above background - don't eat it. Personally, I'd stay on the lower end of that.

Thank-you. I don't know of any other place where this kind of information is available in a way where a non-scientist could understand it and I really appreciate the time you take to share your knowledge. The media certainly is running around like a bunch of idiots just confusing everybody about what is happening. It sounds like a good geiger counter would make a reasonable addition to any prepardness kit (and for anybody who enjoys seafood). I am just stunned at how much radioactive stuff is scattering around the world both intentionally and accidentally. But what really freaks me out is this stuff stays dangerous for so long. The human race is not equipped to handle this. The only plan I see is that everyone is hoping this stuff ends up in somebody else's backyard, and not in their own. That is not a plan that is going to work for long.

The idea is to help. I think a geiger (and knowledge of how to use it and what the readings mean!) is an important part of any survival kit unless/until there are no more nukes or weapons - which isn't going to happen, realistically. We need the power too badly, coal can and usually is even worse, uptake of alternatives is happening but not as fast as I'd like.

And we're too afraid of making conventional big wars possible again to ever give up our nuclear weapons...at least the big 3 + Israel will never part with them all.

Yes, this stuff is going to wind up in the pacific, I found a link on BBC that shows why - I was ignorant of the geometry of the situation, this clears up a lot. The water is coming from above, in the mountains, and channelling right through the plant - in other words, there is an endless supply of it, and it's under positive pressure when it gets there - worst case possible.

Doesn't matter how many tanks and walls they build, and it's quite likely they won't be able to keep up with filtering it if there's even one severe rain. So, this stuff's going into the ocean, like it or not, and sooner or later. You can't beat mother nature, at least not usually and never over a large area or for a long time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23807453

As I said above, this isn't all bad - the ocean is a rather huge number of cubic kilometers, and it will dilute just fine as it gets mixed in, and mostly wind up as bottom silt - probably after going through a few life forms along the way.

Something I evidently haven't made quite clear, so I'll fill in. The faster the decay rate of something - the more counts/second/gram of it - the faster it's gone too - a hotter fire runs out of fuel quicker.
The large concerns here are stuff that's in a nasty sweet spot in the middle - the fastest decay stuff is gone already. The slow stuff simply isn't very hot. If it was all divided up so that every human on the planet had to carry their share around in a baggie in a pocket - no damage at all. And it'd be a microscopic baggie, you could actually have a lot more that this works out to and be fine.

The slow decay stuff - the stuff the fear-mongers are most worried (or at least do the most shouting) about, decays so slow it isn't very hot either, and it's all around you anyway, which you will find out of you get a counter that can let you hear or see single clicks (the old school stuff makes this easy, the newer digital ones, you have to pay for more quality to get that level of info out of). Even though you get a lot from space (more here in the mountains than at sea level), quite a bit of your normal exposure is from the rocks and dirt, already - the entire planet is more or less a low grade uranium mine, the way it came to us.

Even high grade uranium ore is safe to carry in your pocket - if you paint it so you don't breathe the dust. Refined is safer yet, as it doesn't have the rest of the decay chain products in it. The unreacted fuel - which is nearly all of it - came out of the ground and it was safe there. It can go back into another part of the ground right where it is, and still be safe. It's chemically inert as can be, in fact, there are few compounds more inert than these oxides are.

And a few reactors worth more of that just isn't enough to make a real noticeable difference in something like an ocean. Scale does matter, obviously there's a limit to that, but we are not that close to problems with this one as a puny species on a large planet. We're in much more trouble over oil and coal right now. We're hosed there - if we keep using it, we ruin the planet and run out.
(and not wanting to argue about this one - we might bake ourselves off the place or move the weather around so that where it's good to grow crops isn't where the land for that is - much more likely, actually)

If we stop, no one will be able to live the lifestyle they demand; it'll take awhile for the alt energy things to catch up. And that's even assuming no more big oil spills. Even though I'm off the grid, and almost carbon-negative myself - how again does food get to me? Yup, trucks - even if it's short-haul from local farms for some of the year. It's how everything gets everywhere these days, and why things don't cost several times more than they do now - they can be made where it's cheapest (or in season), then shipped cheaply to the demand. That's going to end, one way or another.
---

Those bad leakers are Cs-137 and strontium 90, with half lives of around 30.17 years and 28.8 years.

In one half life, half of it is gone, in two, 3/4 is gone and so on. Just long enough to get one human lifetime, in other words, not thousands of years. Most of the rest is either not very hot, already decayed (very hot at first and already gone now), or inert stuff that doesn't make easy compounds with other things in ocean chemistry - it will probably stay put right there in the reactors till someone removes it and the rest of the junk.

The reason the two above are the baddies, is that their chemistry is such that your body can't easily tell cesium or strontium from calcium and if you get it in you, it becomes part of your bones and teeth and neurosystem where there is nothing between your important parts and the radiation it emits. They are quite chemically reactive with plain old water (almost like sodium metal), and that's our issue here - it looks like there will be an unlimited supply of water that really can't be stopped short of changing the geography, kind of a non-starter. The rest of the stuff - the very hot short half life stuff, is largely gone already, and the longer stuff just isn't hot enough per gram to be much of an issue in the first place - it's that bad spot in the middle that is the hazard. Luckily, it's only a few percent of even overused nuke fuel.

Luckily, there isn't an unlimited supply of de-encapsulated fuel, so there's a limit how much will go into the ocean. The rest can stay right where it is, or maybe have concrete poured over it. Water from ground water, in this case from a nearby mountain and under pressure, will still wash over it if not removed, but it just won't do anything much to fuel that's still in Zircalloy - it can be safely left there in other words, probably good news when all things are considered. The real question is now simply one of magnitude - how much fuel got loose from inside that encapsulation - no one appears to be saying who would know, or no one knows at all - the most likely case is the latter. From what I think I know, most of it did stay encapsulated.

No matter how much it was...remember me saying there are already a few full-tilt sub reactors on the ocean floors around the world from classified sub accidents - this will just be 1-2 more, not a big percentage addition to what's there already - and no one noticed that...it had less effect by far on things than the atmospheric weapons testing has had (and that is largely gone already - decayed or weathered into the dirt or oceans so deep it doesn't affect us any more).

But notice how many times I've used the word "luck" here. We can't count on that forever.

This is NOT to apologize for those wankers. Obviously, we need stricter control over where people build these plants, and how they are run if they are going to be allowed to exist at all. A few more like that, and then we really do start to have worldwide issues, and the stage is set, it's time to pay attention to other high risk installations and make sure we don't get more of this any time soon.

Till I saw this, I had no idea they could be that stupid - it adds another item to my list of 3 stupid things in a row they did, bringing it up to 4. Sickening. Hopefully, wise heads will look around and see if anything else exists with this unique set of bad conditions, and shut those down, dollars be damned. If some fat people sitting on the couches might have to go down to sub-5 foot tv's and run their AC a little less, so be it. If they have to have that stuff, make them buy solar panels, as I did.
Works for me. And after a hard day's logging, I'm about to shower in solar heated water.

In this case, their ground water is actually an underground river, not the usual case of an aquifer.
Gawd, how can you be that $tupid? I guess I answered that one...

Maybe next time the MBA idiots who promote this kind of crap will realize that they didn't wind up saving money....but hope isn't a viable strategy in most things, and we know from history that it only takes a generation or two to forget how horrible even a major war is, and we go right back to it.
Until we got weapons so scary we really could destroy the planet, it's been the pattern in all of recorded history. In fact, the MBA's who created this mess have probably already moved on to other jobs long since. That's a problem with how we work as humans. By the time TSHTF, the guys you'd wanna roast for that are long-gone.

You are right - this plan isn't going to last forever. It'll get us by this time, and perhaps the next 1-2, but after that? Time to leave. To where, you'd have to ask Elon Musk or someone like him, or think real hard about how to support billions living in caves, because the surface won't be very liveable if we do this half a dozen or more times.

Kill the oceans, and pretty soon we will have issues with where our next breath comes from. The oceans are what eat most of the CO2 and make most of the O2 we need to live for even a few minutes. We really do need to stop using them as toilets.

If someone else wants to contribute useful knowledge to this thread, I'd suggest a map of pacific ocean currents overlaid with a map of important fisheries (which latter should roughly coincide with a map of algae, plankton, and other fish food). That would be most useful in predicting what's going to happen next. I haven't heard a word on that one, and right now am time-limited to go searching myself.
You'd think the fear mongers would bother, but it seems they haven't yet.

More later, but I opened the can of worms. Data on ocean currents is all over the place as is fishery data. I guess I should have remembered - my dad was at one time chief of underwater acoustics at NRL, and probably some of this data either doesn't exist or is "navy sub guys only".

This would be a great chance for them to fix up the data on currents, actually, as a result of the "free" radioactive tracer the Japanese are providing. Further, there are both surface and deep currents, not all flowing the same way.

The bad news is they extremely overlap the skipjack tuna feeding areas.
And I do like my sushi.
More later...looks like southern California is going to get it first in terms of stuff getting close in, but frankly, it's hard to tell with the counter-motion of some of the currents, and whether this stuff sinks or floats.

It's also quite interesting how much the supposed raw data changes depending on whether you're looking at a site mongering on the trash collecting in the middle of the pacific, or BBC earth, or what.
Eye opening on its own.

Google "pacific ocean currents" and then skip through all the images. And look at BBC on "thermohaline" effects. Saltiness changes surface currents to lower level currents as it changes in the tropics. It's pretty complex...

...

I am very late to this party (at least commenting). DCFusor, you have my greatest thanks and highest regard for your detailed and patient responses to those of us who are not physicists or nuclear engineers. ancona, you have raised lots of good questions.

The conversation here has been of great help to me in adjusting downwards the excessive fearful reports ("George Washington") and their effects on what I have been telling my wife re food from California, tuna from the Pacific (ah, maybe I will eat LESS of that), etc.

PMBug, THIS is why your site is great! PMs are the core topic, but you have a superb group making pmbug.com the best of the "reflective" sites (where we can calmly examine the wide variety of interesting topics that come up).

:two thumbs up!:

(smile)

Reminds me not to buy any fish caught in the Pacific Ocean!

Next time I get sushi - I'll ask them where it came from (even though I'm on the east coast, it's probably the pacific, as most of those fish aren't in the Atlantic).

I'll take a sample home and check it with my gear, just in case and for fun - they'd freak if I brought that kinda stuff into the restaurant.

Looking at the ocean current "data" - I'm shocked, having thought there was a bit more "hard science" there, but evidently, not only is the data sparse, but co-operation low among those collecting it, probably combined with some change over time (those el ninx kinds of things).
Most of the sciences I work in - if there was that much scatter in the data, it'd be VERY controversial, and accusations would be flying, but here it seems the norm. Whether ignorance, or agenda is kind of hard to tell at this point - evidence is favouring a little of both.

What I'd predict is that the fish would go through a peak of nastiness. None at first as it hasn't had time to concentrate up the food chain, rising as the worse concentrations get into the chain and get to us, then falling as most of the fish we eat simply die and wind up as sediment (as does most plankton etc). I'd bet shellfish are going to be among the worse, but that's a guess. Where we are now on that curve, I have zero clue, but like I said, I'll do a little legwork and try to find out.

I would further bet that a sushi place is getting better quality fish quicker than say Long John Silver's. After all, the smell that emanates from places like that is just like what you get if you leave sushi out on the counter for a day or two - most American seafood smells like rotting fish and grosses me out, personally. Guess that makes me a little safer.

Also, remember that the bad stuff tends to concentrate in bones, rather than soft tissue. The links I gave above on the bad guys also show that most just flushes through a being, so...we can hope it won't be an utter disaster worldwide.

DC,
As a result of your posts, I spent some time reading a wide spectrum of commentary and analysis of the Fukushima disaster and have come to the conclusion that there are far too many un-credentialled people out there polluting the data pool. Just as Spearman threw out the lowest numbers as irrelevant pollution, I decided to install my own "Fukushima filter" to see if the data set changed. Indeed, when I filtered out all voices without a degree of some sort in the nuclear field, the data-set changed completely. Interesting to be sure.

DCFusor said:

I'll take a sample home and check it with my gear, just in case and for fun - they'd freak if I brought that kinda stuff into the restaurant.

Click to expand...

haha, I'd love to see the reactions if you started to test in the restaurant. Probably get you a visit from some alphabet agency though...

Nah, it'd just freak out the owner (and the customers), even though she's a personal friend.
Since she is, I don't want to disrupt her operation, and there's no need. Sashimi is just as good when I get it home anyway (assuming it doesn't make the geiger count).

Ancona - you know a degree doesn't make someone smart - or free of agenda, right? It's the rare ones, degree or not, who just want truth. Though I have to say, with a reputation at stake, the degreed guys are a little more careful with their words, at least till they get old enough to not care.

DCFusor said:

Nah, it'd just freak out the owner (and the customers), even though she's a personal friend.
Since she is, I don't want to disrupt her operation, and there's no need. Sashimi is just as good when I get it home anyway (assuming it doesn't make the geiger count).

Ancona - you know a degree doesn't make someone smart - or free of agenda, right? It's the rare ones, degree or not, who just want truth. Though I have to say, with a reputation at stake, the degreed guys are a little more careful with their words, at least till they get old enough to not care.

Click to expand...

wow. someone who knows its sashimi and not sushi. and didn't realize it was your friend!

From Puff Post:
"Japan's nuclear regulator has upgraded the rating of the leaking water at the plant to Level 3 which is a "serious incident". Massive amounts of contaminated ground water are reaching the sea. But that problem cannot even be rated under the IAEA's International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale because it is unknown exactly how much ground water is escaping, how contaminated it is and what effect it is having on the sea and marine products. It is estimated that hundreds of tons of contaminated water are leaking each day"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/fukushima-leak-upgraded_n_3826890.html

It matters not how much water goes into the ocean - happens all the time, every river, every rain - it matters how many curies (or whatever unit you want) are in that water, and what they are made up of. And where it goes (way, way, oversimplified)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/blueplanet/infobursts/ocean_conveyor.shtml

Or mercury: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162...n-in-fish-expected-to-rise-in-coming-decades/

Warning about crappy CD rad detectors. Even the "good" one isn't good enough to test things you might eat: www.blackcatsystems.com/GM/cdv.html

If anyone is buying a geiger counter, let me know and I can evaluate it for you from the ebay link or whatever. Don't get hosed buying one that won't do the job for you.

As soon as I saw the land topology, I realized that Fuk is fu*ked. It's all going into the ocean, at least all that got unclad in the melt/fire. This will NOT end the world, once it's mixed in, it won't make that much difference after a fairly short time - it may even be the best solution there is.

This idiocy of the Japanese trying to make underground walls of ice with huge refrigeration units won't work...I live in the mountains, and I know my water flow in places like that. Over the top, around the sides - they can't stop this. It's not a solution, the solution is to get whatever they can out of the flow, which probably won't be enough to make a big difference, what's gotten loose already shows that most of what can, has already.

You can do stupid things. 1 you get away with, mostly. 2, not so often, 3 if you're lucky. The last time I hit 4 in a row - well, the right side of my skull is now titanium. The Japanese hit 4.
And no, you don't want to see the picture of what I looked like getting out of our "sick care system" either. Gore porn. (all better now, but I can only half-smile like Harrison Ford's grin)


Edit:
Plume to reach US west coast in 3 years: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-fukushima-radioactive-plume-years.html
However, that's not the whole story as regards seafood....who are imbibing this pre-dilution.

DCFusor said:

You can do stupid things. 1 you get away with, mostly. 2, not so often, 3 if you're lucky. The last time I hit 4 in a row - well, the right side of my skull is now titanium. The Japanese hit 4.
And no, you don't want to see the picture of what I looked like getting out of our "sick care system" either. Gore porn. (all better now, but I can only half-smile like Harrison Ford's grin)

Click to expand...

can I ask what happened, or is that off-topic?

Here is a question for DC. When I thought about it for a while, I tried to get creative on the whole water disposal issue, so I thought why not simply freeze it and drop it off in Antarctica where it will never melt? They could appropriate a couple of those floating fish processors that flash freeze thousands of tons of fish, use it instead to freeze the water then work out the logistics of handling it from the shores of Antarctica to some remote interior spot.

KD put in his 2 cents worth today:
On Fukushima: STOP THE STUPID

snip:
I'm happy to entertain a debate. I'm very tired of people running scaremongering crap without a scintilla of scientific evidence or facts behind their claims or thinly-veiled scaremongering.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=223916

ancona said:

Here is a question for DC. When I thought about it for a while, I tried to get creative on the whole water disposal issue, so I thought why not simply freeze it and drop it off in Antarctica where it will never melt? They could appropriate a couple of those floating fish processors that flash freeze thousands of tons of fish, use it instead to freeze the water then work out the logistics of handling it from the shores of Antarctica to some remote interior spot.

Click to expand...

Ancona, I was gonna say there isn't gonna be any ice left in Antartica by spring, but then I remembered that the pole is going to shift and be over Fukishima anyway, so no need to move the ice... :rotflmbo:

Sorry, been out all day. A friend and I cut and split and hauled 5 truckloads of pure, sound, red oak for winter heat, along with going to Lowes to pick up enough materials to build another woodshed to hold it in (we build the shed tomorrow, making 3 total here). So now I'm feet up and beer down, so to speak.

I think I'll be sore tomorrow, but we build that shed - 20 feet long by 4 feet deep by 8 feet high at the lowest part - tomorrow. And then fill it with the wood we've already brought back, and then go get a couple more truckloads we already cut and split. The owner of the land wants us to take what we 'necks call "the laps" (brush, branches, etc) too, and hide them somewhere. Seems fair, the wood is free, it's better stuff than most can afford to make floors and furniture out of, and great for heat this winter...

If there was a redneck olympics for this, I think we'd have taken the gold. I don't think we wasted 10 seconds all day - even unto retracting the wood splitter pusher just the right distance to save time pushing it back into the next log, not the full stroke. And swapping sawing, dragging, holding, turning (saws don't like cutting dirt) all day too.

Jay, it'd be OT here, somewhat em-bare-assing (I mean, 4 in a row, all stupid, and all my fault?). Along with some "political issues". I'll write it up some place you can get to it but the public can't. It will be obvious why when you read it.

Ancona's idea is interesting but probably not practical politically. You'd want to make giant ice cubes, or something small enough to move some way - not one big chunk.
I'd guess the flow rate would be variable and fast sometimes, maybe overwhelming even a huge freezer, but I could be wrong there - we do know how to build some pretty big stuff, and holding tanks to handle peaks.

Then you'd get no end of crap from everyone between where it is and where you want to put it, just like there's a hissy fit whenever NASA wants to launch a reactor - "what if something goes wrong".
No one wants this in their backyard!

Well, almost no one. If I could get a 55 gal drum of "spent" fuel, I'd happily bury it in my backyard, cover it with thermocouples, and have 24/7 power (just like NASA does on deep space probes). I think I could make it safe enough to suit me. But probably not enough to make the worry-warts happy.

You'd have to tow this ice on barges or something so the seamen wouldn't die from the long term exposure to this crap - distance (and the square law) are one's friend in this business. So is speed, but this wouldn't be a fast trip.

Then, how to move it once you get to Antartica, which BTW, has it's own bunch of political weirdness - no one is allowed to claim any land there, it's a big deal UN treaty we all signed off on - everyone. Just research stations, that's it. And you'd be "polluting" the "pure" antarctic we are studying for clues to our deep past with everything from ice cores to drilling into lakes buried under ice for millions of years to see if life it there, and if so, different.
Imagine the greenies reaction...it'd be great theatre, but...noisy, to say the least.

This stuff is radioactively hot enough that it actually makes thermal heat too - so you'd have to keep it colder than normal ice to keep it from melting. Probably not a big issue, but it's there.

For reference, it takes an amount of radiation to kill you that would heat you .01 degree C....and this stuff is many kilowatts or megawatts worth (not that you'd absorb all that - most flies off and heats the air - it's omnidirectional). But it's not just "hire a guy to push meter sized cubes of it on a forklift all day" kinda stuff. Not saying it couldn't be done - it'd be a fine feat of engineering, but the politics, ugh. I understand the former...only.

It's probably why they had so few guys monitoring all those tanks - that can't be a good place for a human to be for very long.

kudos on the wood! we heat with a wood stove. My sister says firewood keeps you warm twice.

It would have been sinful to let this go to waste (though OT). This was a 300+ YO oak that fell due to having its roots washed out from under it in the floods we had recently. Fell across a road, state chopped it in half and pushed half of it onto the guy's land across the road (made him mad). We've got that half - several cords worth - and we really didn't need to be warm on this half - it's summer!
The other 3/4 of the wood - we are not sure how to get it, this thing was 6 feet diameter at the base and even the pro loggers around here don't have saws with > 3' long bars. No way we'd ever have cut something like this down - but once down, dumb to let it rot. If it's going to be CO2 anyway, it might as well heat the homestead this winter (and maybe next). Smells great to have tons of oak around the place, fresh-split.
In the lab, it goes here:
Thermostatic controlled air intake, this sucker is efficient (flue indoors to the roof) and keeps a fire like none other I've experienced. I used a a set of parts from an Ashely re-fitted to a 55 gal drum (and it's better than the drum stove kits for a lot of reasons).


Oh, just to get back on topic, this is a really interesting link to an accident I mentioned earlier - OK, confirmation bias in a sense as it explains just what I did but perhaps in more accessible English. This one actually killed some guys pretty much right off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident
In another, there was once a guy here in the US who had two blocks of stuff, each sub-critical, who used to push them together to see the nice blue glow when they went critical. That one killed a couple people too - a nuclear reactor on one's desk w/o any shielding or distance ain't too smart. Note the numbers of mS in the link, though - we are no where near that even right at the Fuk plant.

I have that problem also (not criticallity). I have cords of oak, some years old, that people were throwing away. We'll still burn it. I was throwing away some wood that had "gone south" and my wife tore my ass up. "You claim to be a doomer? In the Philippines we would use that to cook with, there wouldn't be a scrap of wood ANYWHERE." Same when I worked at the sawmill. She couldn't believe the waste in the wood we chipped.

DCFusor said:

It would have been sinful to let this go to waste (though OT). This was a 300+ YO oak that fell due to having its roots washed out from under it in the floods we had recently. Fell across a road, state chopped it in half and pushed half of it onto the guy's land across the road (made him mad). We've got that half - several cords worth - and we really didn't need to be warm on this half - it's summer!
The other 3/4 of the wood - we are not sure how to get it, this thing was 6 feet diameter at the base and even the pro loggers around here don't have saws with > 3' long bars. No way we'd ever have cut something like this down - but once down, dumb to let it rot. If it's going to be CO2 anyway, it might as well heat the homestead this winter (and maybe next). Smells great to have tons of oak around the place, fresh-split.
In the lab, it goes here:View attachment 140
Thermostatic controlled air intake, this sucker is efficient (flue indoors to the roof) and keeps a fire like none other I've experienced. I used a a set of parts from an Ashely re-fitted to a 55 gal drum (and it's better than the drum stove kits for a lot of reasons).


Oh, just to get back on topic, this is a really interesting link to an accident I mentioned earlier - OK, confirmation bias in a sense as it explains just what I did but perhaps in more accessible English. This one actually killed some guys pretty much right off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident
In another, there was once a guy here in the US who had two blocks of stuff, each sub-critical, who used to push them together to see the nice blue glow when they went critical. That one killed a couple people too - a nuclear reactor on one's desk w/o any shielding or distance ain't too smart. Note the numbers of mS in the link, though - we are no where near that even right at the Fuk plant.

Click to expand...

This is a good example of why we probably won't find intelligent life anywhere else in the universe and probably won't find it much longer here on earth. (Oh, I meant the link to the Japanese nuclear accident and not the stacking of wood )

From Fermi himself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
I hate quoting wikipedia so much - you could know almost everything on there and still not have graduated from the high school I went to (given, it was for the gifted).
There are various versions of this, but the main idea Fermi wound up with (not very well covered in the link) is that:
A: the smartest predators win on any planet as here.
B: they therefore find violence OK, and lust for power in all forms.
C: given A and B above, they tend to self-eliminate before they get too far.

DCFusor said:

From Fermi himself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
I hate quoting wikipedia so much - you could know almost everything on there and still not have graduated from the high school I went to (given, it was for the gifted).
There are various versions of this, but the main idea Fermi wound up with (not very well covered in the link) is that:
A: the smartest predators win on any planet as here.
B: they therefore find violence OK, and lust for power in all forms.
C: given A and B above, they tend to self-eliminate before they get too far.

Click to expand...

D. If they don't self eliminate the odds of a giant meteor strike, major solar event, or massive volcanic eruption, is significant enough to eventually do the job for them.

Depends on how fast they develop and where they are - we're in "the sticks" of our galaxy. I'd bet Drakes formula doesn't account for the "noisier" nature of planets closer in. On the other hand, the number of exoplanets we've found recently makes the estimate of livable planets a lot higher too.

Sometimes I wonder if too much intelligence in a species might be just as bad as too much size (i.e. dinosaurs) and that the universe never intended for its children to play with the matches (genetic engineering, nuclear power, and who knows what next we might discover) and so has a built in self destruct circuit already engineered into the system.

I remember when I had more intelligence yet less wisdom (both) than now. It was pretty dangerous.
I'm lucky to be alive, actually.

The self destruct doesn't have to be built in - even with a level playing field, lack of wisdom + plenty of power to do things would seem enough for self-destruction. Add some waves to that level playing field (my interpretation of how the universe is) - well, you don't really need any special auto-destruct. It's hard enough anyway.

"Anyone who was born with a stomach that gets empty has been self-trained more than Pavlov's dogs or BF Skinner's pigeons." My mom, a pshrink, used to say that one. It's worth a fair amount of deep thought about the implications of all that -

DCFusor said:

I remember when I had more intelligence yet less wisdom (both) than now. It was pretty dangerous.
I'm lucky to be alive, actually.

The self destruct doesn't have to be built in - even with a level playing field, lack of wisdom + plenty of power to do things would seem enough for self-destruction. Add some waves to that level playing field (my interpretation of how the universe is) - well, you don't really need any special auto-destruct. It's hard enough anyway.

"Anyone who was born with a stomach that gets empty has been self-trained more than Pavlov's dogs or BF Skinner's pigeons." My mom, a pshrink, used to say that one. It's worth a fair amount of deep thought about the implications of all that -

Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong. I am a big fan of technology. It's just we seem to get the idea from the power it gives us to think that somehow it confers on us the ability to change the world into something we imagine, when in reality all we might really be able to do is just follow a plan that was already engineered into the system. For example maybe we are supposed to burn carbon, increase the temperature, and the CO2, and make room for the next species that is already anticipated (hoped for?) to be here. We are biased by our own biological needs as your mother noted. We might not be anything more than a rung on a very complex ladder that we are unable to fathom. We might look great as one exhibit in the cosmic natural history museum but we are not the curators.

Update from Reuters:

"Radiation near a tank holding highly contaminated water at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has spiked 18-fold, the plant's operator said on Sunday, highlighting the struggle to bring the crisis under control after more than two years.

Radiation of 1,800 millisieverts per hour - enough to kill an exposed person in four hours - was detected near the bottom of one storage tank on Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co , also known as Tepco, said.

An Aug. 22 readings measured radiation of 100 millisieverts per hour at the same tank. Japanese law has set an annual radiation exposure safety threshold of 50 millisieverts for nuclear plant workers during normal hours."

This gives a new spin on the term "hot water"

Fukishima radiation levels have now increased another 20%. The Japanese are planning on building an ice dam. Godzilla expected to appear any minute.

I think it's all going into the ocean at some point. The ice dam idea seems particularly dumb to me.
It's yet another thing that you put in place, then have to keep working forever, no stopping maintenance/monitoring for even one second. Kind of like a nuke plant - and we kind of know how well that turned out for them. More hubris, and ridiculously, the same type as before.

Luckily, the ocean is huge. It will make a measurable increase in radiation here in about 3 years.
But it will be barely measurable. Could be worse. Going to be the very worst near Japan, and the fish eaters aren't going to be real happy for some time.

Another quake just hit there. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/09/19/japan-fukushima-nuclear-plant/2835493/

Radiation levels in groundwater under Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant are soaring, Tepco said Friday after taking samples from an observation well.

Tepco said 400,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting substances such as strontium were detected in water sampled Thursday from the well located some 15 meters from a storage tank that leaked about 300 tons of highly radioactive water in August.

The level of becquerels, a record high for water in that well, was up 6,500-fold from the 61 becquerels found Wednesday.

Tepco was planning to pump groundwater up from different wells about 100 meters from the leaky tank for release into the Pacific before the water flows into the damaged reactor buildings and becomes heavily contaminated with radioactive materials.

But that plan appears in jeopardy because the sharp increase in the levels of radioactive materials in the observation well suggest the radioactive groundwater is spreading.

By law, water containing beta particle-emitting substances exceeding certain levels cannot be released into the sea. The upper limit is set at 30 becquerels per liter for strontium-90 and 60 becquerels for cesium-134.

Tepco also said water collected Thursday from a drainage ditch near the leaky tank contained 34,000 becquerels of beta particle-emitting substances per liter, compared with 2,300 becquerels the day before.

Water contaminated with radioactive materials flowed into the ditch when Typhoon Wipha hit the area this week, but then much of the water evaporated, leading to the surge in the density of beta particle-emitting materials there, Tepco officials explained.

It is believed some 400 tons of radioactive groundwater is flowing into the Pacific daily.
...

Click to expand...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/10/18/national/water-radiation-soars-at-fukushima-no-1/

"It is believed some 400 tons of radioactive groundwater is flowing into the Pacific daily"

I can't eat fish anymore without that thought crossing my mind....

Measuring radiation in Becquerels is a sure sign someone is trying to scare you, since it's the tiniest unit (you get a few from cosmic rays, and a few more from the rocks you're standing on, for example, already - some 10's depending where you live, where as in any other unit - it's in the micro-somethings for the same amount) If I do the conversion right (it's hard since the energy of each beta is taken into account in the other units, eg they are tissue-damage-based) - this is worse than what you get in a high altitude airplane - and that amount keeps me from wanting to fly on top of the groping situation.

On the other hand, 400k/liter isn't a good number, that would be like sitting on top of my fusor, sans shielding, when it was running full snot - I don't do that! I'm feet back and behind considerable lead.
400k cps will swamp a geiger tube (they crap out at around 8k/s), or anything but a phototube - with fast scintillator and a fast digital counter.
It's in the chest X ray region, but they only turn that on for a fraction of a second at a time.

Without details on how they measured it, it's hard to say how bad that actually is - but it's not good. Beta decay stuff (fast electrons) doesn't go through water well - if they actually measured a liter of water, and got 400k counts/sec - run! On the other hand, water containing 400k beqs of some solute or silt would measure a lot lower than that even though the pure solute or silt would be 400k - and they don't say what they actually did - even if they did, no mainstream reporting would have gotten it right (from experience with reporting).

At any rate, this appears to have been in a test well drilled specifically to show them the worst case in the ground water, not what people are drinking - and my previous remarks about the topology and what would happen in a big rain appear to have been correct - and I'm still glad the ocean is so big, though it looks like I'm about to begin to be a lot more careful where what little ocean fish I eat came from.

We seem to be testing just about the absolute worst possible set of cases and events here - someone has some interesting Karma. This has been like flipping coins and getting 10 tails in a row.

DC,
Fukushima is actually sitting on land reclaimed form a river that was re-routed to build the plant. In addition, it's kind of like a big bowl topographically, at least the plant property is. Anyhow, those monitoring wells are in the immediate vicinity of the reactors themselves, and since the cores have melted through, it's really no surprise that the groundwater is hot. What I object to is the incessant pumping of water in to the Pacific, because although the dilutive effects of quadrillions of gallons of water indeed thins this stuff out, it is in fact being concentrated up and through the food chain.

We may get away with it for a while, but eventually, it does become a problem, especially if/when mutations start. I imagine there are already measurable effects in marine life throughout the area.

Yeah, they put it in a particularly stupid place. As I said, it's all going in the ocean at some point, the question is, how fast and will there be enough mixing to thin it out before it goes far enough to care (for us, the Japanese are already in trouble re fishing anywhere near there). I kind of doubt they'll figure out a way to recover the melted stuff and raise it above any water level anytime soon. In fact, due to their nature chemically, there's a decent chance that most of the cesium and strontium have already been dissolved out - think sodium and water as a similar chemistry - very reactive, with soluble results.

Maybe it will help kill off the plague of jellyfish affecting fishermen world wide at present, but I kind of doubt it. Mutations will of course occur anyway in an ocean this big and with this many crap-tons of DNA in it - most simply kill the host or sterilize it, and the result then is buried under silt, which is a lot better than it being simply dissolved in the water. I don't think we need to worry about Godzilla just yet, but that's opinion.

However, in around 3-6 years, this will be mixed into all the oceans on the planet, and quite dilute if the release rate stays around what it is. Till then, it's certainly safe to eat atlantic fish, if you can find any - the jellyfish plague is reducing catches as we've eaten all their predators (salmon etc) so nothing much is holding them back right now. We're talking broken nets full of 100lb jellyfish being the norm some places these days...scary enough even if they don't glow. They are fed by algae blooms from the Chinese pollution in large part, and already a plague near Japan and elsewhere.

Important to see the wide view - this is one disaster among quite a few, not good, but also not the only one I've run across when looking into this, by far.

Regardless, we don't need to be dumping any more reactors into the oceans. We handled the first "most of a dozen" but that's enough, thanks. And most of those were dumped in very deep water, where the stuff just sits there and doesn't have a lot of life soaking it up.