Arnie Gundersen: 5 radioactive "Hot Particles" breathed in by West Coasters daily - CNN

In April, due to wind direction to the USA from Japan, people in Seattle were breathing in 5 hot particles per day that latch onto lung (Note in the comments that "particle" is the word that gets the nuke boyz crazee! See they think that is more important to point out typos than be concerned the contamination of our air and food!) tissue - says nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen.

Well you boyz are winning! There is very little coverage of Fukushima so we can continue to have our lovely nukes here in the USA! YAY FOR CANCER!

Seattle is where Gundersen had colleagues testing the air.

Watch the video. Kudos to John King for keeping this story alive on CNN

http://johnkingusa.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/07/japans-radiation-twice-as-bad/

:rofl:

What a pantload.

:rofl:

Whooey. It just gets funnier.

or is atmospheric science not part of your credentials...

OTOH, Mr. Gunderson HAS credentials, well DOCUMENTED credentials. You lack those.

And the pseudo-scientific bullshit he keeps pumping out shows that to be the case. His only qualification is a 40 year old degree; he has NEVER been directly involved in running a commercial nuclear reactor; and he's the executive of a company that makes money off trying to shut down nuclear power plants. If someone came along with the same level of credentials ranting about the dangers of wind power in such completely ludicrous and fact-free terms, and they had a vested financial interest in preventing people from using wind power, DUers would go fucking nuts attacking anyone who supported such nonsense. But with nuclear power, it's somehow okay, just so long as we don't talk about the 2000 tons of uranium and thorium released into the atmosphere.

Fukushima? Chernobyl? Nuclear testing? No, I'm talking about the ~2000 tons of uranium and thorium released EVERY YEAR by the regular operations of the coal-fired power plants that nobody on the anti-nuclear side seems to want to address. Nobody has died from civilian nuclear power in the US, but some people find it their number one mission to stamp it out. Meanwhile, coal kills around 40,000 people a year in the US, and no one seems to care. That's almost three times as many people as are murdered in this country.

Gundersen is a fear monger, trying to terrify the public with lies and make a fast buck off of it. He makes outlandish statements that depend on public scientific ignorance, like talking about "five hot particles!!!1one" and putting forward scientifically debunked theories like the effects of "low level nuclear radiation" which actual scientists have continually said are not based on any kind of valid research. Until people can put aside their basic assumptions and look at scientific fact, this kind of pseudoscience is going to continue being an embarrassment to everyone in the reality based community.

so you know

As he himself admits. He was an executive vice president of a company which owned a nuclear plant, which he was never involved with in any capacity more substantive than licensing paperwork. He's a business exec, not a nuclear engineer.

He reports and draws conclusions many of which have proved accurate.

You insist upon scoring cheap points against those who you disagree with, for example the 40 year old degree. Have you noticed that the degrees earned by scientist and engineers age with them? For example (and not as a comparison) in 1945 Einsteins PhD was 40 years old, and did you know that Sarah Palin's degree is only 24 years old and that must make her twice as qualified as Bill Clinton.

You are dismissive of Gundersen because, you believe, he is making a fast buck out of his opposition to nuclear power, but I am sure you idolise those who also make fast bucks from their support of the dying dinosaur.

Guess I can tear up all my degrees and my license then, I got them "years ago".

A Master's Degree in nuclear engineering is not a credential, eh?

What he IS, is a whistleblower, and those trying to hide the truth about the nuclear problems in this country are still attacking him.
Et tu?

"Mr. Gundersen, who lives in Warren, told of the day in 1990 when he discovered radioactive material in an accounting safe at Nuclear Energy Services in Danbury, the consulting firm where he held a $120,000-a-year job as senior vice president. Three weeks after he notified the company president of what he believed to be radiation safety violations, Mr. Gundersen said, he was fired.

He is fighting a $1.5 million lawsuit filed against him by his former employer for continuing to discuss the alleged safety violations publicly after agreeing to an out-of-court settlement. Mr. Gundersen said he believes he was blacklisted, citing an April 22, 1991, letter concerning him that the company sent to 78 people. He also says he was harassed and fired for doing what he thought was right.

Mr. Gundersen's case, according to a number of whistle-blowers and others interviewed, is not uncommon, especially in the nuclear industry. Even though nuclear workers are encouraged to report potential safety hazards, those who decide to do so say that they risk demotion and dismissal. Instead of correcting the problems, whistle-blowers and their supporters say, industry management and government forces attack them as the cause of the problem."

Paying The Price For Blowing The Whistle
By JULIE MILLER
Published: February 12, 1995
New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/nyregion/paying-the-price-for-blowing-the-whistle.html

In a field where you've never actually dealt with a commercial reactor...

Yes, I find that questionable.

Is that what comes out when I cough really hard?

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http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/exclusive-arnie-gundersen-interview-dangers-fukushima-are-worse-and-longer-lived-we-think/58689

2 part interview - on the website

excerpt:

"I have said it's worse than Chernobyl and I’ll stand by that. There was an enormous amount of radiation given out in the first two to three weeks of the event. And add the wind blowing in-land. It could very well have brought the nation of Japan to its knees. I mean, there is so much contamination that luckily wound up in the Pacific Ocean as compared to across the nation of Japan - it could have cut Japan in half. But now the winds have turned, so they are heading to the south toward Tokyo and now my concern and my advice to friends that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed."

So cautions Arnie Gundersen, widely-regarded to be the best nuclear analyst covering Japan's Fukushima disaster. The situation on the ground at the crippled reactors remains precarious and at a minimum it will be years before it can be hoped to be truly contained. In the near term, the reactors remain particularly vulnerable to sizable aftershocks, which still have decent probability of occuring. On top of this is a growing threat of 'hot particle' contamination risk to more populated areas as weather patterns shift with the typhoon season and groundwater seepage.

In Part 1 of this interview, Chris and Arnie recap the damage wrought to Fukushima's reactors by the tsunami, the steps TEPCO is taking to address it, and the biggest operational risks that remain at this time. In Part 2, they dive into the health risks still posed by the situation there and what individuals should do (including those on the US west coast) if it worsens.

Click the play button below to listen to Part 1 of Chris' interview with Arnie Gundersen (runtime 36m:31s):

I have a feeling we are not being told exactly how much long term danger we are in all over the country.

so just like the Japanese the US government has made the call to diminish the concerns.

They know that it will be near impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of the wave of cancers we'll see from this 5-40 years out.

In France pregnant women and children got an advisory not to drink the milk and not to eat leafy vegetables.

You'd think we could have done that minimum step for our citizens.

a family with children. and i agree with you. we just don't know. maybe nobody really does know how it'll all play out. but i want as much information as is available. who knows but at some point there may be choices to be made. it's not as big a deal for me imo as it is for my son and his family in CA (living on the coast and surfing several times a week in the pacific ocean), but for the people in Japan - i feel as if they're under a death sentence the PTB refuses to acknowledge the danger for them especially. but how do we really know anything? Gundersen has been one calm and knowledgeable voice throughout and i am very thankful for his activism.

Gundersen has no scientific basis for the nonsense he spreads. Talking about "five hot particles" is kind of like saying that by going outside your door you're exposed to as much as a thousand watts per square meter of high energy photons... or in other words, sunlight.

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And unlike Gundersen, my personal income is not dependent on making people terrified of something.

Diet and all..

no wonder why our news media is not trusted.

I have been following Arne Gundersen, and am grateful that he is sharing his expertise. We do not need ridicule or hyperbole or platitudes at a time like this, just the simple truth!

Sometimes I marvel at how pathetic the human being is. Not much different than other animals, honestly. But we've grown an intellect that SHOULD be conscious of the things we've created that are also dangerous to our survival.

There are so many attempts to keep the public blind and money in helping to do so..

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See, I've been studying the human body for a while now and I've never heard of these "lung particles."

Are there any health studies that have found 5 hot particles per day cause a statistical increase in cancer or other diseases known to associate with radiation exposure? Also, how does this compare to other periods in world history when there were radioactive releases? What did the average person take in during the open-air nuclear tests of the 1950's-1980's, for example?

I am not feeling well this morning, or I'd try and dig up some references that have been on the forum over the last few weeks.

Basically, it only takes one particle to cause cancer. It may, and it may not. No one knows. So the answer is one.

As for open air testing, those are (if I recall correctly) Pu238, which are far less significant then Ce131, or the Iodine that's coming out of this reactor. I think it boils down to the decay rate. The half-life of Ce is something around 30 years. Plutonium is much longer, and not nearly as active.

When a particle gets into the body, it just sits there and radiates. And from what I've read, the situation effectively magnifies the radiation by a factor of something like five.

It's all bad. Coal also produces this kind of particulate mess. So this isn't new. But it's cumulative.



Also, the other thing that is significant here is that we're at the top of the food chain. So a particle is eaten by the lower level animals, which then is eaten by larger ones that we then eat. And there's the other mode of ingestion. Not to mention just floating particles that get on plant life that we eat.

That's the last place I would have expected hydrogen embrittlement. I studied that in extra curricular welding courses. Or was it material science courses. Both.

We really have to kick this habit.

"Basically, it only takes one particle to cause cancer. It may, and it may not. No one knows. So the answer is one."

No. That's like saying that because there's a 0.00000001% chance of something happening, it's a certainty, which is the WORST kind of false science. The fact of the matter is that 1 particle, or five, or fifty, is not going to hurt you; you'll get more risk of cancer walking through a room where someone is smoking a cigarette.

"But it's cumulative."

No, it's not.

Until it decays to zero, these particulates are all adding up.

And as for the smallest amount that can cause cancer, we don't know. I'm not talking about chances. I'm talking about the environment in which we live. Otherwise we just up the pollution level until it's somewhere below what we think we can tolerate, versus being far more cautious about the environment that we expose ourselves to.

The bottom line is you're probably right. This is background noise. It isn't necessary. And we've got to put an end to the ever increasing potentials we're presented with in our lives.

Because the body is continually replacing itself, this causes it to be constantly repairing itself, it's why you can take repeated doses and have nothing happen. If anything permanent does happen, it's called cancer generally, every other damage causes the cell to die or repair itself. This is why you don't want to take a lot over a short period of time, because you can't repair all the damage done to the various cells. That's basically what radiation poisoning is, you've taken what amounts to an internal sunburn and your body needs time to repair the damage. The risk of cancer is also not cumulative, the event will either cause cancer or it won't, future events don't change the probability of that one event or future similar events.

I'm an engineer. I design for worst case. I'm not sure that analogy is what I'm looking for.

You made it sound like that is how it works. I'm looking at those times when it doesn't work like the textbook. The biological half life says you'll be pretty much free of this particular isotope in several months. But what I am betting on is that there are particles that don't leave. And cells that don't just die, but mutate. This is what this discussion is all about. I know how it usually works. We're talking about how it ends up that we have mutations and cancers. They are the exception. My point is, we don't want this stuff in our environment at all.

It will radiate ONCE, and only once, after which it becomes a physically different particle (which may or may not radiate again, but every decay event gets the atom closer to stability). The probability of cancer from that one event is so low that it's pointless to even consider. As for atmospheric testing, it's still a fission event, which means it produces fission products in addition to unused nuclear material being ejected. I131 has a half life of about 8 days, once it radiates it's no longer I131 (becomes Xe 131 which is stable). The only reason I131 is considered to be as dangerous as it is is due to the fact that the thyroid likes to take it in which causes a focused dose straight to the thyroid. Of course the overall five-year relative thyroid cancer survival rate from 1995-2001 was 96.6 percent. Ce 137 (all Ce) has a biological half life of 5 years, at which point it is expelled from the body which is 1/6 its nuclear half life. This means it only has about a 8% chance of radiating while inside your body, half of the remaining 92% would then be expelled. Sr 90 is worse because it is taken in by the bones because it is chemically similar to calcium. It also has a half life of 28.79 years. However it's also a weak particle emitter of only 196 keV of beta. The issue is that Y-90 is also unstable and emits a more energetic particle with a half life of 64h.

That said, Arnie said a couple days ago it was 10-12 particles, now he's saying it's 5. Either way that's not enough to even make a blip, even statistically, in the cancer rates or the probability that anyone will get cancer.

I have been reading about how these isotopes sit in our bodies emitting photons for years. Magnified many times, for some reason.

But what you bring up has me really wondering what to believe. Ce 137 has a half-life of 30 years, from what I've read. So which is it, 70 days (according to Wiki), or 30 years? Or somewhere in between.

And I never thought photons were dangerous in themselves.

I hate spewing false information. And this is pretty complex stuff. Kinetics of isotope decay.

Ce 137 has a half life of 9 hours.

Basically, Strontium gets picked up and the body looks at it and says, hey this looks like Calcium, and then ships it off to the bones, where it sits for about 30 years. Basically biological half life is the amount of time until the body replaces itself or something like that (my background was nuclear). Supposedly you fully replace your body once every seven years, which actually helps and hurts us when it comes to radiation.

Anyhow, basic nuclear decay is that all atoms want to be stable, and if they're not stable they'll do something to get stable by emitting radiation. Really large atoms typically either undergo spontaneous fission (Plutonium typically does this) or they emit an alpha particle (that's helium). If the atom has too many neutrons for the number of protons it will typically decay via beta minus decay, which is where it shoots out an electron and then one of the neutrons magically turns into a proton. If it has too few protons it will undergo electron capture and a proton will literally eat an electron and convert into a neutron. After all of these events there is a chance for the nucleus to have excess energy which it will typically shed off by a process known as isomeric transition, where it then shoots out photons of varying strength. During the other decay processes the atom will sometimes shoot out photons and neutrinos and other odd things. There are a couple very rare decay methods that I didn't mention, but this covers the vast majority of them. Co60 is feared because it kicks off a pair of 2.5 MeV gamma rays in addition to a beta when it decays with a half life of around 5 years. Co 60 is what they calculate shielding values for because it has the greatest penetration capacity.

Atoms that undergo SF are the worst because they produce massive highly ionized atoms that cause a massive ionic resonance in the affected region which damages molecular bonds. However exposure to atoms that undergo SF is rare. The lightest element I saw was Thorium. Alpha however is much more typically encountered, and accounts for the majority of non-solar exposure. It's the active mover in radon decay daughters, which is why you should get your house screened for radon. The Helium is ionized, so it has a +2 charge which pulls various electrons out of place and causes other issues. Also because of its mass it interacts strongly with matter. Beta are simply electrons (not beta positive, those are actually anti-matter particles but that's a rare reaction). Because electrons are so much less massive than protons and neutrons, they can go further without interacting with matter (and thus better penetrate shielding). This is why alpha does absolutely nothing while outside the body, while beta can actually give you a sun burn. Gamma (that's a photon) has no mass, and no charge, so it can only interact with matter if it scores a direct or near direct strike. It is capable of energizing an electron to break it out of orbit, or it could just energize it a little bit, and then keep going. Or if it's a sufficiently strong photon and it passes near enough to a large enough nucleus, it will split into an electron and a positron (electron anti-matter particle). Every once in a while (1 in a million) it will make 2 electrons because the universe has a slight preference for matter (or we wouldn't exist). Gamma rays occupy the far end of the electromagnetic spectrum, with radio on the far opposite side. Visual light is also in this spectrum. The final type of radiation is produced during nuclear fission, and that's neutron radiation. Neutrons come in two flavors, fast and thermal. Fast ram into molecules and break them apart or vibrate them (this slows them down and eventually makes them thermal). Thermal are moving at ambient temperature speed, but they can get picked up by other atoms and transmute them into things that are unstable. This is why objects subjected to a neutron flux are considered radioactive (even if they're not).

In all of these instances particle strength determines how much ionizing occurs. It's kind of like hitting a bell, the harder you hit it the longer it reverberates and the louder it is. The good thing is that our body can heal damage from this, and if it can't there's a good chance the cell in question will just die. There's also a chance that no damage at all will occur or that anything will even happen. This is why number of particles matters in addition to their types. Also why typically we talk about contamination in either Curie count or Bq.

For more information than you'll ever be able to use on nuclear stuff you need a chart of the nuclides. The one I use is online and located here:
http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/reCenter.jsp?z=90&n=142
It's like the periodic table of elements on crack. It lists every possible combination for an atom to possess. The rows are number of protons (the element) the columns are total nucleons. The other stuff is decay type, prevalence, half life, energy levels, neutron cross section of absorption, Q-value, and other physics stuff that would take me several hours to talk about sufficiently.

TL:DR; Use link above, The half life will cut radiation emitted in half because the atom radiating is no longer the same atom, and if stable does nothing. If the box is black it's stable. e means diagonal down and right 1 each, b- means diagonal up and left 1 each. a means down and left 2 each. Black box means its done.

I've forgotten almost all of it. I just mistyped the Cesium abbreviation.

So this information you've posted doesn't tell me anything about the discussion we're having. What I've read is that one of the mechanisms for causing disease in the body is the photons emitted by this process you've described.

Regardless of how much we know about specific decay of atoms, do we really know just what it takes to cause cancers, mutations, disease? I'm thinking we don't.

This causes the DNA molecules to be damaged, at which point it either fixes itself, dies, creates a mutation that prevents future growth (cell daughters die), or becomes cancer. Basically the ionization severs bonds and breaks the DNA at the wrong spot. gamma/xray, beta, and alpha all create ionization effect, which is why they're assigned quality factors for damage. Gamma and beta are 1, alpha are 20, neutrons depend on if they're fast or thermal and act via a different mechanism but fast are worse. Looking up the QF's; fast is 10 and thermal are 5, although fast can be worth up to 20 depending on how much energy they have, though above a 2 MeV threshold it drops back down to 10 and even as low as 5 above 20 MeV. Probably has something to do with resonance region. Neutrons can create an effect known as neutron hammer, where they strike a nucleus and break parts of it off. Can turn H2O into HO- and screw with pH. Also all atoms have a neutron cross section of absorption and can eat neutrons and become radioactive sometimes, depends on what the next nuclide is. If it were to hit Xe127-131 is would create a stable atom because Xe128-132 are all stable (though the 127 starting place is not with a half life of 36.4 days before it undergoes electron capture and turns into I127, remember that chart of the nuclides). If it stays stable there is a chance for nothing to happen, it will just dump some excess Q energy in the form of photons (the amount would be the difference in Q values between the two nuclides). If it is unstable then the atom could break apart whatever molecule it's in since it would no longer be the same element after the decay event. But it's rare to be exposed to neutron emitters.

Background info on this subject is necessary to understand the actions that cause the health damage and effects, it also shows why info reporting is so critical. Without certain pieces of information the data points aren't useful. If he said we all recieved N16 he'd be blatantly lying, because N16 has a half life of 7 seconds (N16 is the nuclide the creates the majority of radiation outside the primary shield during active reactor operations). If he said Cs 137 it wouldn't really matter because the decay period is too high and so the curie count of those five particles is non-existent. If he said I131 it also wouldn't matter because the chance of getting cancer from such a small amount is not measurable, and after 80 days it won't even show up at trace levels due to radioactive decay. Considering it's one half life just to travel from Japan to America, that already cuts dose in half. But time prior to environmental release also matters because that is time in which the radionuclides can also decay.

The end result is that, 5 particles per day doesn't matter at all, even if you ingested them for an entire year. The chance of getting cancer from such an event is so low it's worth worrying more about getting struck by lightning. The chance of actually dying from that cancer is even lower, since Thyroid cancer has a 5 year survival rate of 96% on average (though less for males, especially if black).

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http://www.llrc.org/fukushima/subtopic/dandelions.htm

Autoradiograph of dandelion leaves picked since the disaster.
An autoradiograph is an image created by placing a specimen in close contact with X-ray film. If radioactivity is present it will darken the image.

This image is from Professor Bin Mori of Tokyo University Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences. There are more autoradiographs on his blog site. He says the pictures show that radioactive materials have been absorbed from the roots and distributed throughout the plants. (That is why the entire leaf shape can be seen.) He thinks the dark dots on the dandelion leaves are where radioactive material landed on the leaves. We don't know where the dandelions were growing.

The dark dots indicate the presence of hot particles. It is not possible to say how large they are. The size of the spots here indicates the spread of the radiation tracks emanating from the particles. It is very likely that the leaves were separated from the film by foil, as the film must be protected from light. Alpha particles from Uranium and Plutonium will not pass through the foil, so the exposure here is to beta and gamma decays. However, from the first explosions, we have predicted that Uranium and Plutonium would be found. Alpha spectrometry and mass spectrometry can confirm the composition. This is the next step, which should be carried out by the Japan authorities (and must have been done, though as far we know the results have not been published.)

What's the maximum permissible number of "hot particles" that can be inhaled per annum?

How many do the average American breathe in normally?

And more importantly, what are the chances that this will endanger us AT ALL?

I want numbers.

So if you inhaled 5 of those particles that's 684.5 amu.
1 atomic mass unit = 1.66053886 × 10^-24 grams
1.13663884967 x 10^-21grams
If you only absorb those 5 particles, the first one would decay in about 10 years. And the event would not be detectable by current instrumentation.