The mainstream media is reporting that one of the reactors at the Fukushima Plant at Japan is melting down. I guess it is a good thing that we have this conflict over in Libya to take our minds off the radiation; otherwise we might be scared stupid. But then stupid must assuredly be what those in power think we are.
Since the earthquake and tsunami that facilitated the failure at the nuclear power plant, those who purport to be in charge of informing us have inundated us with a thousand little assertions that all contradict one another, in an effort to keep us in a state of uncertainty, when the situation on its face dictates that the consequences of the disaster are dire and destined to be worldwide.
We are literally watching the whole island of Japan being slowly but surely made uninhabitable by the radiation. And why won’t they just come out and tell us this? Because the next question would have to be, “Where are 140 million Japanese going to be relocated?”
I have to believe that the lion’s share is going to wind up here in the good old U.S.A. And why not, as we are a nation of plenty and we owe the Japanese people if you think about it, as we are the ones who brought them into the nuclear age. Face it; we need that Japanese skilled labor to produce the parts we need for everything from our automobiles to our televisions.
I think we are about to find out just how much of our country has been purchased by the Japanese in the last forty years.
As for the American unemployed, well you folks are just going to have to move over a little further. And as for the middle class, you are going to have to give on this one too, as the Japanese people have proven that they are far better workers than you, and should by right, in examining the situation from a world view, be given your jobs, homes, and all other property that by rights should have been theirs all along.
Do you think it can’t happen? Wanna bet?
It might be interesting to note that radiation from Japan is now showing up in rainwater on the U.S. west coast. But not to worry, it’s not going to get in the plant life, and then animal life, hence in our food chain. That stuff only happens in movies. Do not fear what the government is telling you, but rather fear what they are not.
Iodine-131 has been detected in Massachusetts, Florida, and in my state of Pennsylvania.
We were told that the half-like of Iodine-131 is about 8 days.
PA state Government said that the Iodine-131 is ONLY in the rainwater collected..and NOT in the drinking water tested.(diluted enough to become undetectable.)
Well, as you said, rainwater hits the crops the animals, and, in fact probably hit me when I was out and about in the rain last week.
I do not completely understand what a “meltdown” means, but, I imagine that if the cores get hot enough there may be risk of explosion(even though we are told this is not a Chernobyl(yet.)
And, yes, it is hard to find media coverage of the meltdown in Japan, at least enough coverage to have kept me informed enough not to go out and walk in the rain.
I realize that a media source does not want to be responsible for putting out information that may create panic and cause people to stay home and disrupt the economy.
Hence, my conclusion is that people need to use the internet to find people and organizations who are keeping a close eye on the Japan story.
It is my own responsibility to try and find out the facts.
Another issue with the horrific Japan disaster is that the world’s economy will suffer as Japan tries to raise money for it’s rebuilding. Japan is the 2nd largest holder of US Treasuries and Assets, as you have indicated Japan owns a lot of America.
If Japan sells it’s treasuries, or even stops buying US Treasuries,this could cause US interest rates to rise and derail any recovery that the US is experiencing. The dollar would fall if our treasuries auctions begin to fail. So, our own FED will have to buy up the treasuries to take up the slack, resulting in more Quantiative Easing or QE3.
Once again. Another great article. Im feeling a lot more inclined to comment lately just because things are getting that out of hand, and I have to vent. It truley is human nature to make things more difficult then they have to be.. From an enviromental and agricultural aspect, you would think money and greed would not take precedene over preserving human life, or life in general for that matter. For the people that don’t know what social conditioning is, I feel very sorry for. People aren’t putting 2 + 2 together. There are too many “distractions” on a global scale going on. and the true”elite” (if that is what you want to call them), have one of the greatest nations citizen in a very uncomfortable and vulnerable position due to their greed and inhuman pathoses.
Why is it once again we as humans have to make things more difficult then they have to be?
Iodine 131 (low levels they say) being found in rainwater in Northeast Ohio reprted by Dr. Gerald Mastoff of Case Western University.
Radiation has been found in the water in North Carolina, where my son and I live. The state govt. says that it’s not harmfull. So now they expect us to believe radiation is not harmfull ? Well, I guess I’ll drink some Draino with my lunch, since I’ so stupid to have thought radiation is harmfull.
most states in the u.s. monitor their air quality with a network of stations and volunteers utilizing automated data networks and manual instrumentation. all nuclear plants contain monitoring equipment (both inside and outside the facility, usually) and the private sector often assists with the task of operating and maintaining this equipment, sometimes managing it entirely themselves. Utility companies will often work as consultants to the state and still others run their own independent operations altogether. this is done constantly, all the time, no matter if a reactor is in crisis somewhere in the world or not. and their equipment is good. it can detect even the slightest spikes in radionuclides.
do any of you freaking out about this know anything about radioactive particles? let’s start with a simple one – how much radioactive iodine-131 do you need to be exposed to (whether you eat it, drink it, breathe it, or let it sit on your skin) before you need to start popping ki pills and get the hell out of dodge?
the highest radiation levels in the u.s. as a result of what is ongoing at the fukushima plant were recorded last week, on the island of oahu in hawaii, by the epa. their report indicates 1.35 picocuries per cubic meter. that means for every 3-foot, 3-dimensional, cube-shaped chunk of air in that area of the world, 1.35 picocuries was detected by the epa’s instrumentation (a curie is a unit of radioactivity). pico- is a prefix which the absolute layman should just assume means “very very small” – the most common unit of curie used in considering the health of the everyday world, from medicine to nuclear engineering, is the microcurie – twice as large as a picocurie, and still extremely small.
for the radiation levels in hawaii to be dangerous, you’d have to multiply the amount of radiation being detected by roughly 30 million times (over 40,000,000 picocuries) and expose someone continuously to those levels for an hour or two. even at 300,000 times the radiation, it would take days of constant exposure to those levels for it to harm you. that’s how itty bitty the radiation level being detected is. and that’s the worst of it. a few days later in hawaii, the epa reports the iodine-131 levels had dropped to just .18 picocuries. why didn’t it keep going up, if the reactors are continuing to leak crap from their containment vessels? because it’s such a small amount – the wind could take those clouds of radionuclides anywhere. most of the radiation heading west from fukushima prefecture is going to disperse in the air and land in the sea where it will kill nothing because it’ll be spread over too much area.
the half-life on iodine-131 is 8 days, meaning it takes about two weeks for one particle to fully decay (lose all of its radioactive energy). which is why ki pills (which prevent your thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine) are distributed in 14-day packs. that stuff’s not good for you so you should only take it when dosed with harmful levels of radiation and not for more than two weeks. you risk killing your thyroid and yourself after 14 days.
seattle is reporting about .01 picocuries – infinitely smaller than the already-tiny amount recorded in hawaii. and the further west you go, the less radiation you find. what that means is the radiation being found in north carolina or anywhere else is what they say it is – trace amounts. the fear card is being played by many in the mainstream media and the blogosphere, because it is easy to control the thoughts of the masses whilst gripped by irrationality.
and i suppose you think you’re not ever exposed to radiation unless there’s a freak giant earthquake in japan and the backup generators at the nuke plant get wiped out by a tsunami? wrong. your cell phone and the sun expose you to infinitely more radiation every day. those full-body scanners at our airports and other such acts of patriotism for the security of the homeland have more carcinogenic potential than the fukushima mess has produced in the past 2 and a half weeks.
i’m not saying something bad, radioactivity-wise, couldn’t happen at some point in the near future and that officials aren’t being tight-lipped and vague about those possibilities if not downright lying about how bad it is, but right now, even tokyo isn’t necessarily in serious danger. every day that goes by without a criticality event or some sort of meltdown followed up with the widespread release of radionuclides, we get closer to defueling the reactors. one thing to keep is mind is that when it comes to nuclear incidents such as fukushima, time is on our side – the longer we prevent total failure of the reactor cores, the better the likely outcome will be.
scared stupid, indeed. calm down. it’s a major nuclear catastrophe for sure, a nightmare for any nuclear engineer but this isn’t even remotely the same type of problem the soviets experienced at chernobyl. even if a couple of the cores fully melted down and you believe the very worst rumors about the state of the containment vessels, most of the radioactive material isn’t going to get out of the facility let alone japan. the bulk of the elements released will be too heavy – they won’t get far. cesium is the scary one, you don’t want that floating around your local park but no significant levels have been found anywhere in the u.s. yet (meaning even less than the iodine). so for now, the radiation levels found in the states are miniscule, and every passing day gets us closer to defueling all the cores and ending this crisis. and at that time, there will be lessons learned, commissions formed, reports published, and a ton of radioactive garbage to discard. twitter will trend the triumphs of tepco.
and the free world will carry on in chains.
Tom, I understand now. Admittedly our government and Japan’s government are lying to us, but now we should believe their lies because you are parroting them.
Here is a good one for you. Some of your colleagues were claiming that the contaminated ocean waters around that plant are contained to a small area. I guess you are going to tell us next that the ocean currents do not exist and that fish live their entire lives in a one mile contained area.
My only question is who do you work for and who did you piss off to wind up pushing the propaganda on a website, rather than the mainstream media?
Stay tuned, I’ll have more for you to debunk in my article tomorrow.
now, now. i’m not your enemy. and there are a lot of ’em so point that crosshair somewhere else. i work for nobody. even if you think i AM a shill for the mock republic, of all my scribings, doubt not this one true fact – i couldn’t be more unemployed right now and it is killing me. the recession stripped me of clients – no customers, no work! i busk illegally with an ukulele to make ends meet. joe the plumber can kiss my “g” string.
incidentally, you are correct in that i have pissed off a lot of people over the years but it has nothing to do with my googling around for any new fukushima information and clicking what was, at that time, the second link to pop up.
i believe i’m far worse than a government flagbearer! i can add. 🙂 and i am ruthlessly intelligent. concatenate the two and you have a commenter who’s not going to be popular pretty much anywhere on the internet. a scientist among many things, yes, but not part of the establishment we both hate. we’re actually on the same team. i am in support of your war.
there is a fine line between a subversive and a tin-hatter, know what i mean? i can sympathize with your suspicious and venomous viewpoint of my opinion, given the nature of this site. i assure you, i’m nobody of any import. i didn’t debunk anything, either – i didn’t really disagree with anything you said. but i could see regular folks looking at headlines like “MELT DOWN IN PROGRESS CESIUM EVERYWHERE” and not even bothering to do a little investigating or at least get some numbers before letting the fear kick in.
rationale is a handy tool.
did i make superfluous sense (always threatening when it feels like an attack), perhaps employed too much proper syntax to be merely another citizen living in the shadow of big brother, drifting around cyberspace seeking answers? i know that sounds sarcastic, but i chose no sides, licked no boots, drew no lines. your implicit assumption (based on your reply to whalla) that i support nuclear energy in general is unfounded. i came nowhere near declaring any such thing, one way or the other. also, it’s a fairly slimy ad hominem left-hook to equate clear logical fallacies which i didn’t say (there are no ocean currents et al) with what i DID say, which was a rather exhaustive and factual explanation, as a technique for discrediting said statement. i simply reacted to people expressing unnecessary fear and uncertainty.
i realize that we’re not having a formal academic spar here, but if all my collected data is indeed false, every bit of it, propagated by the puppetmasters at the top to keep us from knowing how bad things are both over there and over here… then it can be followed that any information we have at all regarding nuclear energy in general could be entirely falsified. the body of misinformation could (and would) be enormous.
you know, chernobyl blew up essentially because the “up” switch on the control panel really meant “down.” a gross oversimplification, but idiotic as that sounds, leave it to the ruskies to build counter-intuitive gauges and switches into something as potentially harmful as a nuke reactor. these reactors are very complicated steam machines. no cutesy flash cartoon’s ever going to be able to aptly demonstrate that fact. if you don’t get the math, you just don’t get it. and it’s heady stuff. that’s what mathematics are for!
but yes, you are asking for trouble when a given industry’s average innovator tops out in the highest 2% of iq scores. concentrated power is always potentially dangerous. the basic lesson learned from nuclear energy.
my point is, between regular operating b.s. like counter-intuitive control mechanisms, combined with selective or wholesale deception permeating the industry top to bottom (every technician, every programmer, every construction worker, every caffeinated student sitting in a monitoring station, all the cross-disciplinary scientists who act as various consultants and liaisons when required, all the guys in the civilian and municipal bodies who (co-)own and (co-)operate these reactors. as well as every nuclear/electrical engineer and bureaucrat in every developed or semi-developed country ever)… i mean, how could one possibly begin to even say they’ve studied how the reactor works and can give any sort of educated analysis of what the data represents? how do you tell when a pump or a pipe or a scram protocol has been falsified?
you just have to be one of the insiders smart enough to keep two versions of reality in your head at all times? is that it? because if that’s the case, “is it the red wire or the blue wire” is now the difference between uninhabitable cities and pleasant ones. ah. now i’m putting words in YOUR mouth. my apologies. for posterity, i leave my comments in place. consider us even!
but what if, indeed, everything you can be told and taught about nuclear engineering was indeed total bullocks? some reactor design that totally makes sense on paper, crunch all the numbers and it looks good, but doesn’t actually work (probably figured out in the ’50s and ’60s) but has been preserved as the “official” design for all these decades for the purposes of misinformation? not such a stretch.
look, i’m with you that the elites are evil. but at some point you have to draw a line of sanity. even in a world gone mad! if you don’t, our conversation is pointless. we’re just arguing unknowables (everything’s an illusion so there’s no bar against which to measure truth). It’s much like going around in circles proclaiming to one another that our respective religion is the one true faith. unless you’ve grown up in an atheist anarcho-primitivist colony in micronesia, you know those kinds of dialogues don’t work out. and like i said, we’re on the same side so our discourse should be productive.
i understand that fear is sort of an inherent part of your mantra here, because civilization has become very frightening if you’ve the barest notion of what’s really transpiring. to go along with your rampant matrix analogies, it is indeed far scarier to fight for freedom in the desert of the real than it is to sit and eat the juicy, delicious steak on the other side, and that enormous amounts of bravery (acting in the face of fear, rather than without it) will be required to overcome the machines put in place to squash the liberty that it intrinsically ours and elevate a handful of otherwise unremarkable sentient apes to amoral, nigh unto omnipotent command of the entire planet – man and beast and all!
a terrifying notion. but we’ll stand together when the day comes, i hope, and not remember silly hours spent commenting in blogs.
i’m a bit of a pessimist. i apologize if i came on rather strong. i kept my language civil and such. yeah, it was a really stupid idea to put a nuke reactor on a fault line on the coast of japan. it is what it is. i don’t have to like it to learn about it.
i’ve not surveyed the entire country, no. neither has the government, by the way. they don’t have the resources to set up all that stuff everywhere. specialists are hired to do it. cheaper and easier that way. oh, i’m sure the epa and other government agencies have their hooks in it all but the private sector takes care of much of the data gathering as far as air quality is concerned. almost all the data i found came from private companies, university teams, and small engineering firms who do this work on behalf of cities, power companies, and/or states. the only abjectly federal government source for my numbers was the epa, and only because as far as i could tell they’re the only dudes operating the necessary equipment in hawaii, out of the base at pearl harbor.
as well, i’ve a vested interest in not getting thyroid cancer or having mutated babies as i live in los angeles, and have taken readings diligently since the 18th. last week was comprised of torrential rainfall, and i didn’t find anything out of the ordinary in the soil and water samples i collected around the county. i have received similar data from friends of mine in japan, seattle, chicago, warsaw, phoenix, las vegas, and new york. i’m admittedly weak on east coast compatriots, but that’s the region least threatened by these radiation leaks right now anyway.
nobody further east than chicago found anything at all (instruments not sensitive enough to detect trace amounts), and what was found, to me at least, indicates we’re not presently being lied to about the quantity or quality of radioactive material reaching the u.s. from japan. even if it was likely to become much, much worse, they’d probably just feed us the same line but even then, i’d expect people would start getting sick in various ways, and numerous independent thinkers are going to pick up alarming readings rather quickly.
so you don’t believe it. so what? you didn’t disprove any of what i said, you just threw around anti-authoritarian shtick like you drove the nail into my intellectual coffin. so get into those trenches already, and send some correspondents to japan with geiger counters to tweet hourly readings from various places on the island. hell, i’m just one man, by default you’re better equipped for that than i am, and i’ve still been sufficiently successful in my fact-finding.
no, i didn’t provide wiki-style inline citations for my numbers but at least here i am, telling people they ought not to worry and using physics and math to assist in the explanation, because users of your site are expressing very real fear and horror without perspective. i’m only trying to help. why be so willing to flippantly dismiss all of that with a dash of rhetoric, hence feeding into those fears? the media peddles in fear. the feds are veritable fearbrokers. it’s a cheap trick, oldest in the book, but you ought to try to rise above it whenever possible. nobody ever gained anything from losing their head.
as a final aside, a dear friend passed away this past summer in a clean energy lab experiment which reeks of sabotage. his patent died with him. i know what is at stake.
Tom, I am not trying to disparage your honesty, but common sense tells me that the situation in Japan is completely unique and chaotic and thus cannot be predictable. And let’s not forget they are beginning to talk about plutonium fuel rods being exposed.
I am both by no means a nuclear physicist, but if there is a five mile circle around that plant that is releasing massive amounts of radiation, two and a half miles of the circle is out in the ocean. Ocean currents are flowing through those two and a half miles of radiated water carrying its radioactive content with the currents that flow around the world. And fish do move all over the ocean, and bigger fish eat smaller fish.
What I am saying is I respect your education, but for God’s sake man, look at the situation prima facie. Who is monitoring and accounting for every aspect of every source of poisoning? No matter what else, the fact remains 58 billion human being corrupting dollars are weighing in the balance when it is being decided what information will be released and what will not.
Three Mile Island was one reactor. Chernobyl was one reactor. What if the radiation gets so high at the Fukushima Plant that those trying keep it under control have to leave the area or die? And thereafter the rest of the reactors go into meltdown? I have to say in the situation we are in we must err on the side of caution.
As I said earlier the radiation levels, which can be different from one minute to the next and have different reading to the extreme in the space of a mile, are just one of the potential dangers. Do you really think they are being on the level with us in reference to the effects that plant is having in radiating the sea?
You seem to be of the highest intelligence, thus I’m glad you are on our side. But I do not trust any data coming from any government or industry source. I’m not a fool. I hope you are right and I’m so wrong that I’m left to apologize, but I know it will be a long, long time before all of the facts are in.
I was trained not to trust the government and big business. They have not earned any trust.
Well Tom, I guess it is true. You just can’t fix stupid. Thanks for the effort, but some just don’t want to educate themselves. As a nuclear worker, I understand what you are trying to inform others about. Unfortunately, some will blow a few words up just to cause chaos and distort reality. The same people who are hoarding and eating the iodine pills will also choose the body scan over the pat down at the airport. Thank you for putting some real facts out.
Whalla, I do believe it was so called experts that decided to put that reactor facility on a fault line on an island prone to tsunamis. The fact is all of this nuclear crap was heaped on the people of the world without their consent. The fact is we were never asked whether we wanted it or not. I personally do not want to be radiated in an airport or anywhere else, but as I’m sure both of you commenting make your money from other people being radiated, your opinions are your bread and butter.
There is no way either one of you measured radiation across this country, therefore you have to be relying on data put forth by the same government that gave radiation pills to pregnant women on our military bases in the fifties to see what it would do to the fetuses.
You are absolutely a minority here and as a part of the majority I tell you we do not want your nuclear energy, especially while patents for free clean energy are being held in the vaults of your bosses. In other words, speak for yourself, government boot licker.
Dearest Rachel,
If you actually knew me, you would know that I’m far from a ‘government boot licker’, and I was speaking for myself. Don’t know why you would think otherwise. But I do try to keep my opinions to myself when I am uneducated on the subject. Knowledge is power when it comes to nuclear energy. I don’t get paid from ‘people being radiated’ as you suggested. I use meters and monitors to keep radiation from getting to the public from nuclear power plants. The complete opposite to ‘people being radiated’. I have to take a bitch of a test every 5 years to prove I know more than enough to keep my position. Yeah, I walk right into these plants on purpose without fear. Let me repeat, knowledge is power. What I am is a wife, mother, grandmother, and a nuclear worker. It seems that the failures of the past are causing you to fear the future. It’s the media that I question. The media spins facts to sensational sellable stories. I’ve seen a lot of spinning these past two weeks.
I’ve always wondered why nobody wants to stop burning coal when a coal mine collapses and lives are lost. What about green house emissions from burning coal? Why doesn’t anyone protest the use of gasoline when a refinery catches fire. Have you given up driving after the Gulf of Mexico was flooded with oil? Should we ban all chemical plants from producing product when one catches fire or blows up?
As a minority let me be the one to tell you, nuclear power isn’t going to go away within our lifetime.
Whalla, Knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, so I guess we’ll all just surrender to your superior intellect. Radiation is good. We should all seek it out and inundate our bodies with it at all opportunities. And if all six reactors melt down at the Fukushima Plant, no big deal, as it is a localized problem.
As for the ocean being radiated, well it is only the ocean around that plant, ocean currents do not exist; the scales on the fish keep them from being radiated.
As for the tons and tons of nuclear waste all over this world, you can put it in my back yard, because it is a good thing. Hallelujah I’ve seen the light.
Do you think we are imbeciles? Who do you work for that believes they are so all powerful that they can tell the people of the world that we are going to have nuclear reactions going off all around us whether we want it or not?
Clean, free energy exists and those who have been making their livings from these death machines had better realize that the people of this planet are sick of having their lives treated as insignificant to the elite’s wealth.
Maybe we’ll round every one of you up and put you in a colony in that five mile radius around that Fukushima Plant where you can spend the rest of your days telling each other how it is completely safe.
Truly, there is no fool like an educated one, but then $58 billion will purchase a lot of stupidity. $NO SALE$
I think Tom is probably right. Those particles are some little devils, but then again we are dabbling into the area of E=mc2. If you think about it an atomic warhead is relatively dinky in comparison to its destructive potential. I suppose Tom wouldn’t really mind if one single particle from that plant imbedded itself in his lung, I mean considering how small it is and all.
Who can we trust if not the government? Why can people not just say the truth and stop lying? I’m have to admit that I’m really a little scared right now. This is a catastrophe. I’m in Los Angeles right now. I’m only here for a few months. Usually I live in Germany. Do you think it would be better for me if I went back to Germany right away instead of staying here (because of the radiation) ?
I would be very thankful for answers.
Anton,
Tom, who has commented on this story, seems to be highly educated in this field. Considering Rachel’s last comment, I would be interested to hear what he has to say, in reference to your dilemma.
So what says you, Tom?
to anton, and any others wondering if they are in mortal danger by staying on the west coast —
in short: no, don’t leave los angeles until you’re ready to leave. you’re fine. the radiation levels being detected are extremely small – millions of times less than what is required to cause you any biological harm – and as i explained in prior comments, collecting this data is more or less a pure academic exercise for the time being. we are seeing predictable levels of radionuclides resulting from the fukushima disaster thus far, no worse than what we saw after chernobyl (and we didn’t see much), and they’re not going to harm anybody in the states at these levels.
i don’t trust the epa, believe you me. their handling of the clean-up of l.a.’s dirty little secret – the sodium reactor experiment meltdown a half-century ago at the santa susana field laboratory – not to mention willful propagation of a cover-up begun by the department of energy – is reason enough to warrant their disbanding (although i’d like to replace them with an actually helpful and benevolent version of the epa). the only reason i readily quoted their numbers was because their data coincides with my own. i have friends in hawaii, but none of them have access to testing equipment. even if the situation was much more dire in hawaii and the readings were falsified to keep public order, my own efforts indicate that even so, the situation is NOT dire here on the west coast. my gut tells me it’s safe in hawaii, too. from what i can piece together about what is occuring in japan, all the numbers work out.
we’re certainly being deceived regarding the nature and severity of specific events concerning the ongoing disaster, and i won’t comment as to whether this secrecy/deception is at any level conscionable or even necessary (hint: i’m a proponent of free information), but i don’t think they’re lying to us about the radiation levels primarily because they don’t have to, yet. i believe it is not actually a dangerous ecological incident. yet. it’s certainly not a global danger, not even close. again – yet. it IS a mess.
i’m personally not concerned about the radionuclides but if it’ll make you feel better to leave california and catch a flight home – then do it. peace is not prevalent on the planet these days, but if you cannot find it in yourself you won’t it anywhere else, either. so make the decisions that give you peace. i for one am sticking around until i think it’s become unsafe.
but don’t take some random stranger on the internet’s word for it – how am i any more reliable than the government, you know, when it comes down to it? i’m just some guy. by virtue of the government’s monetary and technical resources alone, you should listen to them over me – and obviously the elites have much to gain from keeping us in the dark. so learn what you can for yourself. the internet is both friend and foe in this regard. remember what’s most important. safety of one’s self and family!
as of today, i’m not worried. tomorrow, i may be terrified. many days were spent harried and frightened, while i collected data and took my health and any info pertinent to such directly into my own hands. driving all over the county in the wind and the rain, paying absurd gas prices, digging around in the mud and sampling the l.a. river. it is a day-to-day thing and events move quickly. so stay informed every way you can! web 2.0 gives one easy access to insiders and experts if you know who to look up – engineers and technicians and metering ops across the country are out there and talking about what they know. not on cnn, but in the blogosphere and on forums.
i tread the web with paranoia on my left foot and skepticism on my right, but i don’t think all these people are lying or have been deceived about their own data readings and their professional opinions. they don’t work for the government and they don’t have constant contact with men in black suits. they work for private companies and small research labs doing other stuff. plenty of non-nuclear energy lab work is being performed out there that involves radioactivity of some sort and are thus fda-required to be regularly monitor and report what they find. but they handle their own records. lots of ’em can be found across the web, crummy little websites now being crushed by the weight of their local cybersurfers scrambling for information on the radiation problem. and between them all, you can get a pretty good statistical pool for particular regions from which you can begin to draw some intellectually viable conclusions.
i won’t speculate on contaminated seawater and such. not the scope of my efforts. i just want to calm folks who, like me, live in areas where the radiation spikes from airborne contaminants are going to be higher than other places. that said, if i breathed in all the particles being detected in all of los angeles RIGHT NOW… i wouldn’t even get sick. nothing would happen to me at all. oh, i suppose i COULD get cancer eventually, theoretically, but it’d just be plain bad luck. a weakness in my specific phenotype combined with a particle colliding in just the right way with just the right cell expressing just the right genetic weakness, not to mention the general improbability of such a miniscule and isolated sample of radioiodine-131 not getting detox’ed straight out of your system or decaying fast enough for it to initiate a decades-long mutative chain reaction. it’s so unlikely it’s an utter crapshoot. i don’t expect anybody to suffer ill effects from any radiation exposure they are (knowingly or otherwise) experiencing in los angeles at the moment.
you see, your body CAN process radioactive substances and get them out of your tissue without you running any risk of developing supercancer. your body does it all the time – there is a lot of stuff radiating our bodies on a continual basis in the modern world (refrigerators and computers, for instance), and our cells take care of all those particles, and while some activists out there are convinced anything and everything causes cancer and that every study to the contrary is doctored… well, impossible as it is to believe, that’s simply not the case, empirically speaking. a whole other topic. rest assured, it’s no conglomerated pharmaceutical myth that your body can process and shed radionuclides it may contact. and some compounds, like potassium iodide, facilitate this process when exposed to certain radionuclides (in this case, radioiodine-131).
by the way, do not take ki. repeat. DO NOT take ki pills. it’s highly poisonous and should only be used to treat someone exposed to a genuinely harmful dose of radiation (hint: if a radio shack geiger counter isn’t going off, it’s not harmful). just because a canadian pharmacy will ship you all the ki you want with a free nuclear holocaust survival guide for 100 bucks and a couple of mouse clicks, doesn’t mean you should stockpile or even take this stuff. you can only take 14 days’ worth anyway before you’re worm food.
huge amounts of radioactive particles are required to overwhelm your natural cellular defenses and cause the sorts of damage that can propagate as abnormal cellular growth (e.g. cancer) down the line. obviously, melted down nuclear reactor cores can release the appropriate amounts of radiation to do this to you. but that’s not what is happening right now.
workers at that plant need the ki pills. not you. $1 mcdoubles are far more cancerous than any place on the west coast.
much as i’d like to say i’m an expert, all’s well, and you can trust me – real expertise in this or any field comes with experience and most of my experience is not in the practical applications of nuclear power. i didn’t stick around long enough to get indoctrinated, only to be horrified. my time was spent in laboratories. so… grains of salt, everyone.
i shan’t voice an opinion on what might happen, how it might happen, or when. i can’t say. like the rest of you, i watch and wait.
Tom,
It is being reported that radiation has been found in milk in Spokane, Washington. It is said to be a “minute” amount, but in looking at my conversion charts I can find no cross reference for “minute” in any number.
Remember, what we are facing is not just one cloud drifting over. There has to be a constant flow which is growing more radioactive day by day in direct correlation with rising levels at the power plant.
Tom, you sound like you know what you are talking about and I think you will agree that whatever the situation is right now, it could get a hell of a lot worse in a space of hours or even minutes.
The fact that the oceans are being radiated was acknowledged in the mainstream media today. Hopefully someone will discover some kind of formula for tracking the radiation through the currents as it is entering the food chain.
Remember, big fish eats a little fish, that are eaten by birds, that are eaten by a bobcat, that excretes on the berry seed, that produces the plant, bearing the nuclear berry we will eat.
Thank you for all your work, Tom, and I promise you it will be appreciated if you let the people on this site know of any further changes in the situation.