Environmental group Greenpeace said Tepco had “anxiously hid the leaks” and urged Japan to seek international expertise.
“Greenpeace calls for the Japanese authorities to do all in their power to solve this situation, and that includes increased transparancy…and getting international expertise in to help find solutions,” Dr Rianne Teule of Greenpeace International said in an e-mailed statement.
Not that Greenpeace is ever going to say anything other than that nuclear power is the work of the very devil of course. And the headlines do indeed seem alarming:
Radioactive Fukushima groundwater rises above barrier – Up to 40 trillion becquerels released into Pacific ocean so far – Storage for radioactive water running out.
Or:
Tepco admitted on Friday that a cumulative 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium may have leaked into the sea since the disaster.
Most of us haven’t a clue what that means of course. We don’t instinctively understand what a becquerel is in the same way that we do pound, pint or gallons, and certainly trillions of anything sounds hideous. But don’t forget that trillions of picogrammes of dihydrogen monoxide is also the major ingredient in a glass of beer. So what we really want to know is whether 20 trillion becquerels of radiation is actually an important number. To which the answer is no, it isn’t. This is actually around and about (perhaps a little over) the amount of radiation the plant was allowed to dump into the environment before the disaster. Now there are indeed those who insist that any amount of radiation kills us all stone dead while we sleep in our beds but I’m afraid that this is incorrect. We’re all exposed to radiation all the time and we all seem to survive long enough to be killed by something else so radiation isn’t as dangerous as all that.
At which point we can offer a comparison. Something to try and give us a sense of perspective about whether 20 trillion nasties of radiation is something to get all concerned about or not. That comparison being that the radiation leakage from Fukushima appears to be about the same as that from 76 million bananas. Which is a lot of bananas I agree, but again we can put that into some sort of perspective.
Let’s start from the beginning with the banana equivalent dose, the BED. Bananas contain potassium, some portion of potassium is always radioactive, thus bananas contain some radioactivity. This gets into the human body as we digest the lovely fruit (OK, bananas are an herb but still…):
Since a typical banana contains about half a gram of potassium, it will have an activity of roughly 15 Bq.
Excellent, we now have a unit that we can grasp, one that the human mind can use to give a sense of proportion to these claims about radioactivity. We know that bananas are good for us on balance, thus this amount of radioactivity isn’t all that much of a burden on us.
We also have that claim of 20 trillion becquerels of radiation having been dumped into the Pacific Ocean in the past couple of years. 20 trillion divided by two years by 365 days by 24 hours gives us an hourly rate of 1,141,552,511 becquerels per hour. Divide that by our 15 Bq per banana and we can see that the radiation spillage from Fukushima is running at 76 million bananas per hour.
Which is, as I say above, a lot of bananas. But it’s not actually that many bananas. World production of them is some 145 million tonnes a year. There’s a thousand kilos in a tonne, say a banana is 100 grammes (sounds about right, four bananas to the pound, ten to the kilo) or 1.45 trillion bananas a year eaten around the world. Divide again by 365 and 24 to get the hourly consumption rate and we get 165 million bananas consumed per hour.
We can do this slightly differently and say that the 1.45 trillion bananas consumed each year have those 15 Bq giving us around 22 trillion Bq each year. The Fukushima leak is 20 trillion Bq over two years: thus our two calculations agree. The current leak is just under half that exposure that we all get from the global consumption of bananas.
Except even that’s overstating it. For the banana consumption does indeed get into our bodies: the Fukushima leak is getting into the Pacific Ocean where it’s obviously far less dangerous. And don’t forget that all that radiation in the bananas ends up in the oceans as well, given that we do in fact urinate it out and no, it’s not something that the sewage treatment plants particularly keep out of the rivers.
There are some who are viewing this radiation leak very differently:
Arnold Gundersen, Fairewinds Associates: we are contaminating the Pacific Ocean which is extraordinarily serious.
Evgeny Sukhoi: Is there anything that can be done with that, I mean with the ocean?
Gundersen: Frankly, I don’t believe so. I think we will continue to release radioactive material into the ocean for 20 or 30 years at least. They have to pump the water out of the areas surrounding the nuclear reactor. But frankly, this water is the most radioactive water I’ve ever experienced.
I have to admit that I simply don’t agree. I’m not actually arguing that radiation is good for us but I really don’t think that half the radiation of the world’s banana crop being diluted into the Pacific Ocean is all that much to worry about.
And why we really shouldn’t worry about it all that much. The radiation that fossil fuel plants spew into the environment each year is around 0.1 EBq. That’s ExaBecquerel, or 10 to the power of 18. Fukushima is pumping out 10 trillion becquerels a year at present. Or 10 TBq, or 10 of 10 to the power of 12. Or, if you prefer, one ten thousandth of the amount that the world’s coal plants are doing. Or even, given that there are only about 2,500 coal plants in the world, Fukushima is, in this disaster, pumping out around one quarter of the radiation that a coal plant does in normal operation.
You can worry about it if you want but it’s not something that’s likely to have any real measurable effect on anyone or anything.
You can worry about it if you want but it’s not something that’s likely to have any real measurable effect on anyone or anything.
this statement goes for essentially everything happening in the world today or that has happened in the past
"GO. BACK. TO. G.B.S."
However worried you were about tritium in the ocean before Fukushima, increase that by 0.01%
Anything else is not RATIOnal (ie, ratio your behavior to the facts).
You weigh about 10,000 times the weight of a .45 caliber bullet. If I stand 10 yards away and begin firing a Colt Model 1911 at you, you should only increase your anxiety level .01%. Anything else is not rational.
roseweird posted:i guess, but the research is going on in NOTED SOCIALEST STATES china and india and france at least, it's not totally impossible, if new reactor designs eventually become efficient enough then all that thorium lying under north america will be worth something
NoFreeWill posted:nukes are clearly better than coal but nuke-nerds are annoying gbs fuckers who don't understand that profitability is the major reason nuke research and plants aren't gone ahead with, not idiot NIMBY and environmental types.
NIMBY is kind of tame, im a BANANA
NoFreeWill posted:nukes are clearly better than coal but nuke-nerds are annoying gbs fuckers who don't understand that profitability is the major reason nuke research and plants aren't gone ahead with, not idiot NIMBY and environmental types.
A common claim is that the high price of nuclear is caused by EXCESSIVE REGULATION pushed through by NIMBY types, and that nuclear deregulation is necessary to usher in the golden age of cheap energy.
Keven posted:The worlds fattest twins on scooters clocked in at a shocking 74 thousand bananas - more than most people would eat even if they really liked bananas.
thats almost 25 9/11/hr!
Superabound posted:please appoint Keven official director of Rhizzone Bureau of Weights and Measures and 9/11s
guidoanselmi posted:the biggest radiation hazard in most people's lives afaik is sleeping next to someone else and absorbing decay products.
thats the second biggest. first biggest is the sun. the good news is that nobody who posts here will ever have to worry about either one
NoFreeWill posted:nukes are clearly better than coal but nuke-nerds are annoying gbs fuckers who don't understand that profitability is the major reason nuke research and plants aren't gone ahead with, not idiot NIMBY and environmental types.
They also ignore the massive devastation inflicted on the Navajo people by uranium mining, how the French nuclear agencies have been fueling civil war in Mali, and that European countries send their nuclear waste to Italian crime syndicates to dump in Somalia which has caused the rise in piracy..
karphead posted:end world hunger by nuking everyone
thats equal to over a trillion bananas
Squalid posted:NoFreeWill posted:
nukes are clearly better than coal but nuke-nerds are annoying gbs fuckers who don't understand that profitability is the major reason nuke research and plants aren't gone ahead with, not idiot NIMBY and environmental types.
A common claim is that the high price of nuclear is caused by EXCESSIVE REGULATION pushed through by NIMBY types, and that nuclear deregulation is necessary to usher in the golden age of cheap energy.
Also most of America's nuclear reactors are decrepit and falling apart (there was one case where a reactor was shut down by someone flushing a toilet in the facility). Yet the regulatory agencies keep renewing licenses which I wouldn't exacly call over regulation
NoFreeWill posted:They also ignore the massive banana devastation inflicted on the Navajo people by uranium mining, how the French nuclear agencies have been fueling bananas in Mali, and that European countries send their bananas to Italian crime syndicates to dump in Somalia which has caused the rise in piracy..
fixed, you damn hippy
guidoanselmi posted:my proposal for harnessing the raw power of my posting was turned down yet another year.
HARNESS THIS *farts*
*causes tsunami*