Nearly half of children near Fukushima plant absorbed radiation

Nearly half of children near Fukushima plant absorbed radiation
2011/08/19

IWAKI, Fukushima Prefecture--A survey of more than 1,000 children and babies living near the quake-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has produced an alarming finding: 45 percent of them suffered internal exposure to radiation following the accident there.
...
Tests conducted in Iwaki city, Kawamata town and Iitate village between March 24 and 30 found that 26 percent of under-16s absorbed 0.01 microsievert per hour, while 11 percent absorbed 0.02 microsievert per hour. At least one child recorded radiation of 0.10 microsievert per hour, but officials said that level did not pose a health risk.
...
The finding shows that children's internal organs and tissues may have been exposed to much higher radiation levels during that period than was initially assumed.
...
The Fukushima prefectural government plans to conduct lifelong screening for thyroid gland cancer on about 360,000 children in the prefecture who were 18 or younger on April 1...

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201108180318.html

Run for the hills!!!!

:sarcasm:

hundredths of microseiverts *per hour*.

and you are always posting in favor of nuclear power on the basis that one needs to be accurate.

:wtf:

The fact that it's per hour doesn't raise it to the level of rational concern.

Just convert it to an annual figure and see.

as if it were the total amount, rather than a rate.

you're caught.

And no, I never implied that that was the "total amount". It's perfectly reasonable to assume that someone cites a number in the same context as how it's reported unless they say otherwise. To imply differently is to buid a strawman.

The amount cited is not significant regardless of whether it's a single dose or per hour. No childish word games on your part can spin that.

Try as you might.

and stop playing games.

caught.

Though not what you said in your last post.

"Hundredths or microsieverts per hour" gets that response. It's nothing to get worried about. Hundredths of microsieverts total wouldn't be detectable at this point.

If those are the highest doses in Fukushima's kids, we all got off very lucky.

and you minimized the amount by leaving out the "per hour" part.

thus minimizing the total dose.

you do this all the time on this subject. :shrug:

...done the math? It IS minimal with or without the /h as you should realize if you are intrested in the subject rather than scoring silly rethorical points.

0.01 x 24 x 365 = 87,6 µSv / year.

The average exposure for Americans is about 3.6 mSv / year, so such a dose as described would boost the intake to 3,6876 mSv for your average american. It should be noted that in some places the annual natural background radiation are in the hundreds of mSv and people still live there without glowing in the dark. I was X-rayed this week, that is a radiation dose of about a thousand years exposure to 0,01 µSv/h in one go!

Where's the corium now?

The cited doses are smaller than the variation in radon (also ongoing internal exposure) and gamma (where ex/internal is irrelevant) from one part of the US to another.

Do you know of many people who take that variation into account when they move from San Diego to Scranton? From New York to Colorado Springs?

And for the record. Internal emitters are more dangerous in general because they can damage tissue that alpha and beta particles can't get to from an external emitter. It doesn't matter whether xrays are internal or external because your skin doesn't stop tham. (hint - that's why we use them for x-rays).

Best stick to asking where the corium is. It still expresses your ignorance on the subject, but at least it doesn't give people new evidence.

How can something that is not dangerous at all ALSO be more dangerous in general if it is internal?
Just one of those doublethinks that are required to be pro-nuke I guess.

Furthermore, your analogy fails on the simple fact that medical use of x-rays are one-off and not a continuous exposure hour-by-hour to year-by-year... the nuke industry gives a present that keeps on giving. The children of Japan thank you. :sarcasm:

As for the corium... the meltdown that you said never could happen means its melty and down. Is this something other than an amusing reminder of how wrong you were months ago? No. Where is the corium Baggins, where is the corium?!? It could never happen!

This joke (that is on you) is the joke that keeps on giving, you apparently fail to see it.

Does it even need pointing out the obvious, that your switch from mSv/hr dose rate to Bq/kg is just another example of technical obfusication...

External: holding an aspirin in the palm of your hand will *not* cure your headache.
Internal: taking the aspirin into your body with a nice glass of water *will* cure your headache.

Now for the corium: there is a substance which can never be seen nor caught nor halted that rips through your body by the billions each day... Neutrinos from our Sun and other stars. Actually it can be deflected if, (on the one-in-a-trillion chance) it should slam into one of your DNA molecules.

Where's the corium now??? Well, each child has a little bit of the corium in them.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive (ourselves). PS, by "we" I mean you. Just so we're clear.

"when an explosion shook the nuclear plant and released radioactive materials a day after the Great East Japan Earthquake struck."

Where's the corium now?

Five months later and "An official responded that radiation levels were low in the city, but said she should be careful of grass and roadside ditches." What types of isotopes could last that long?

"The figure is not zero because my body has taken in radioactive materials. I would like to be told whether I am OK or not."

You need far fewer radioactive isotopes to generate the dose if they are internal than if they are drifting around outside you emitting omnidirectional radiation. BUT since Sv describes the absorbed dose and the medical implications of that dose the internal/external argument is irrelevant. It hardly matters if a few radiation emitters internaly gives you 1 µSv or if many more external radiation emitters gives you the same dose - beacuse the dose itself is what matters. That is what tells you how much radiation you have actually absorbed.

just to make the anti-nuke position look bad.

How can something that is not dangerous at all ALSO be more dangerous in general if it is internal?

There are degrees of danger of course.

Furthermore, your analogy fails on the simple fact that medical use of x-rays are one-off and not a continuous exposure hour-by-hour to year-by-year

Do we need to go back yet again and teach you about half-lives? You really think the iodine they were exposed to is there for years?

As for the corium... the meltdown that you said never could happen

You don't get "put up or shut up" do you? You've made that intentional falsehood several times and been challenged on it over and over yet can't come up with a single example (nor will you, because I never said that or anything close to it).

Does it even need pointing out the obvious, that your switch from mSv/hr dose rate to Bq/kg is just another example of technical obfusication...

Lol no. Don't confuse your own ignorance with obfuscation on others' parts. :rofl:

From Wiki:
It hardly matters if you absorb enough isotopes to give you a µSv/h dose or if you get blasted by enough Gamma & Xray to give you the same dose.

Rather than the dose being randomly shared with cells spread across the body.

That's why people take iodine tablets to prevent radioactive iodine from accumulating in the thyroid.

Biological effects can concentrate the radiation dose, iodine in particular. But then if Iodine is what you are so concerned about remember that it has a half life of 8 days and 1µSv/h for a few weeks, even if concentrated, is hardly dangerous.

Five months later and "An official responded that radiation levels were low in the city, but said she should be careful of grass and roadside ditches." What types of isotopes could last that long?

I gave Iodine as an example how ingested radioactive isotopes are different from external radiation.

On what basis?

They asked whether it was safe to continue living in the area. That pretty obviously shifts the topic from prior exposure to potential future exposure.

The first map of ground surface contamination within 80 kilometers of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant shows radiation levels higher in some municipalities than those in the mandatory relocation zone around the Chernobyl plant.

http://sustainabletransition.blogspot.com/2011/05/radiation-map-near-fukushima.html
The map, released May 6, was compiled from data from a joint aircraft survey undertaken by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the U.S. Department of Energy.


It showed that a belt of contamination, with 3 million to 14.7 million becquerels of cesium-137 per square meter, spread to the northwest of the nuclear plant.


The chart shows Cs-137 radiation which has a half life of 30 years.
The red section of the graph shows 19 to 90 microSV / hour of Cs-137 radiation.
That works out to 166 to 788 mSV/ year for people living in that area.
The US limit for an individual’s radiation exposure from a nuclear plant is 1 mSV / year.
The US has set a radiation limit of 50 mSV / year for nuclear plant workers.
Japan has set a radiation limit of 250 mSV / year for nuclear plant workers.
It is going to be a long, long time before it is safe to live in that area.

After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, those living in areas with more than 555,000 becquerels of cesium-137 per square meter were forced to relocate. However, the latest map shows that accumulated radioactivity exceeded this level at some locations outside the official evacuation zones, including the village of Iitate and the town of Namie.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JVgGgvLhoAc/TcqTK_ZnRVI/AAAAAAAAHA0/d6fKhur3RTo/s640/Fukushima+Radiation+Map.png

The measured exposure was to radioiodine in their thyroid.

Do try to keep up. :-)

if the rest of the coverage and facts that have come out are any indication as to what is actually going on.

The end result is more kids and parents live under the spectre of serious illness and death while pundits thousands of kilometeres away pretend like Japan is not experiencing a nuclear fallout armageddon right now.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

...and stock up on canned food, filters and firearmes - the world is coming to an end, running for the hills just wont be enough.

including blood tests.


"When lumps and other suspected symptoms are detected" WOW!

A high proportion of the release from fukushima was in the form of radioiodine and that predominantly impacts the thyroid (since it biologically acts like regular iodine and is concentrated in the thyroid). The same exposure results in a higher absorbed dose for children, so they are most at risk.

Add it all together and, yes, while the kids referenced in this story may not have anything to worry about, there are certainly others with higher doses. There will be thyroid cancers detected in the coming years and they will be more common in those who were kids when they were exposed.

Probably hundreds of them.

But it sounds like Japan has the right plan.

Back in March, the FBaggins proclaimed:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=282831&mesg_id=283008

Is this one of those times when you were not wrong?
You are not changing your story now, are you?

There were reports of iodine overdoses all around the world. Did you miss them? And the comparison was in the US. The number of thyroid cancers in the US caused by radiation from Fukushima is very likely to be zero. Not hard for iodine overdoses to exceed that.

Even by your misreading... there's still a pretty solid chance that the number of excess hyperthyroidism and thyroid papillary cancer in the US from iodine overdoses will exceed the number of thyroid cancers caused by Fukushima.

you have had more than five months to do so and you havent.
Sucks to be you since the archives are back on line.

If you could help out by actually finding some rather than inventing them... that would be great.

The quote of the boy trying to get answers which can not be provided says it all, "The figure is not zero because my body has taken in radioactive materials. I would like to be told whether I am OK or not."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x307574

I'm too old, too slow and too search ignorant to find what I want. Hell, I tried for ages to get some info about the blowout near Indonesia that got suppressed by the Aussies. This was before BP and all about a failsafe "blowout preventer."

Back on topic, I recently saw a film on AlJ's "Witness" program during the Hiroshima remembrance featuring a doctor who founded a hospital for those who have been affected by the 2 bombs, as was he. He was THERE. The doctor finally appealed to the U.N. to recover research documenting similar symptoms and deaths described in the link above. I cannot find a link, but may I assure you the INFORMATION he provided is KEY to understanding the dynamics of what happened.

Just another perspective...

Tante K.

Especially given the screwup whereby they didn't evacuate to the right place because local officials weren't given data on how the radioactive plume spread.

At the end of the article is this tidbit:



This is still a significant exposure to the total population. A decent rule-of-thumb applying the linear no-threshold hypothesis puts the cancer death risk around 1 per 2000 person-rem. If a population of 2 million people receives a dose of about 1 mSv per person that's 2000 person-Sv, or 20,000 person-rem. So we'd expect an excess of cancer deaths of around 100 in that population over time. This rise would be essentially impossible to pick out from the "background" cancer rate, but it's a definite impact of the incident that can't be ignored.

This is pretty much separate from the I-131 exposures.

This is just one subset of the population though... others could be higher.

One thing to keep in mind is that Japan was way ahead of the Chernobyl curve on getting potassium iodide out to people in harm's way and this study is just looking at the thyroid dose. It's reasonable to assume that that decision reduced the absorbed dose for many of these kids.


This is still a significant exposure to the total population. A decent rule-of-thumb applying the linear no-threshold hypothesis puts the cancer death risk around 1 per 2000 person-rem. If a population of 2 million people receives a dose of about 1 mSv per person that's 2000 person-Sv

I know it's back-of-the-napkin, but keep in mind that the reason they're starting with children is that the weighted absorbed dose is much higher for them... so it wouldn't be reasonable to assume the same dose in adults. They also would start with some of the more endangered populations of that 2 million. So while I think it's safe to assume that these are not the highest doses, it's also not reasonable to assume that they're the average.

All of that, of course, assuming we accept LNT as valid at these levels. I for one don't.

sick and tired of reading your supposition, imagination and hot air.

of you not being intellectually curious enough to read these things yourself. Yes. I expected it to be higher. With all the talk of Japan changing their dose limits for this emergency, I assumed there there would be some kids who were above the old limit but below the new one. If you didn't expect them to be higher, please tell us why.

If you had a history of engaging on facts rather than baseless diatribes... it would be different. But there's no evidence that if I gave you half a dozen links to respected sources for each point... that it would make a bit of difference.

you are probably finally correct about this one thing. If you want a reduction in diabtribe, perhaps you should look closer to home.