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A comment on Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too. Parent comment

Re:Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too by marshray on Monday May 16, 2011 @03:20PM (#2553795)
And yet tens of thousands of people are dead because they couldn't flee the wall of water, so the tsunami was a disaster, the damage to the nuclear plant was not.

And what about the 70,000+ people in the 20km evacuation radius who have no idea when or if they'll be able to return to their contaminated homes? (or even bury their dead) You're going to tell them Fukushima Daiichi is not a disaster?

At least the people who fled the tsunami are able to rebuild on that land.

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Re:Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too by nasmorn on Monday May 16, 2011 @03:57PM (#2553924)
If the expectations of rising sealevels due to global warming prove correct at all people will laugh at the amounts we lost to nuclear power.
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Re:Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too by nitrogen on Monday May 16, 2011 @05:47PM (#2554312)
The nice thing about rising sea levels is that, apart from the occasional catastrophic flood, the rise will happen gradually enough that most of the affected areas can be evacuated decades in advance. There will be a tremendous loss of infrastructure if e.g. Manhattan is under water, but we'll see the water coming.
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Re:Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too by ars on Monday May 16, 2011 @07:25PM (#2554628)
They'll be able to come back within the year probably.

The land is not contaminated at all, and no one died, so no, it's not much of a disaster as these things go.

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Re:Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too by uvdiv on Monday May 16, 2011 @11:37PM (#2555166)
The surrounding land is heavily contaminated with Cs-134 and Cs-137.

http://i.imgur.com/xu0Pm.jpg

http://www.mext.go.jp/component/english/__icsFiles/afieldfil...

It will be a closed zone for decades. Almost all of the (external) dose in the area right now is from these two isotopes; the rest have decayed. (There's a model of this in [1]). These two will not decay away quickly; Cs-134 has a half life of 2 years, and Cs-137, 30 years.

[1] http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/seminar/No110/Iitate-inter...

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Re:Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too by ChuckMcM on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @03:59PM (#2557627)
It will be a closed zone for decades.

I believe you have misinterpreted the data. The highest measured readings were 91 uSv/hr. That is equivalent to 9.1 mRem/hr (1 mRem = 10 uSv). The lowest dose in the 'red' zone is 19 uSv/hr or 1.9mRem. Public safety is considered to be 'at risk' if you are exposed to > 1000 mRem over 4 days. You can't reach that level in places where they read 91 uSV/hr (best you can do is 9.1244 or 873.6 mRem/4 days. And where its only 1.9mRem you only get 182 mRem/4 days.

The bottom line is that it is safe to go anywhere in the current 80km radius circle, if you are the government and want to minimize radiological hazard you will go through the area that shows the highest activity and identify and clean up any hot spots.

That information btw is in the DoE's contribution to this report.

The second part you missed is that Cs-134 will be down to noise in less than a decade due to decay which will reduce overall dosage. (I've noticed that no one has published the ratio)

So is there contamination from the plant in Japan? Yes.

Does is pose a public health risk? For the most part no.

Will any part of the area be 'off limits' this time next year? Probably not.

Will monitoring continue and specific areas be targeted for decontamination? Almost certainly.

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