Aegrescit medendo:
No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation — a point confirmed last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise.
But about 1,600 people died from the stress of the evacuation — one that some scientists believe was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels at the Japanese nuclear plant.
Epidemiologists speak of “stochastic deaths,” those they predict will happen in the future because of radiation or some other risk. With no names attached to the numbers, they remain an abstraction.
But these other deaths were immediate and unequivocally real.
“The government basically panicked,” said Dr. Mohan Doss, a medical physicist who spoke at the Tokyo meeting, when I called him at his office at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “When you evacuate a hospital intensive care unit, you cannot take patients to a high school and expect them to survive.”
Isn’t the west coast supposed to glow in the dark by now? Suzuki said it would!
Tsunami 50,000
Government 1,600
Reactors 0
This report in the NY Times is correct. It understates the case somewhat, however. The emergency plan for Fukushima called for an evacuation zone of 10 km should there be a large scale radiation release from the station. The evacuation plan was based upon dose estimates to which the public would be exposed. Even though the measured releases were less than the estimates provided for in the pre-accident disaster evacuation plan, the Japanese government arbitrarily doubled the diameter of evacuation zone, multiplying greatly the number of people to be moved out.
This doubling had neither a scientific theoretical or empirical foundation, purely one of institutional panic, as the author notes correctly. And it is similar baseless panic which prevents re-inhabitation of large parts of the evacuated zone.
You didn’t get the memo all nuclear events are of the same portend and magnitude as Chernobyl.
Why isn’t Jane Fonda jetting off to Tokyo spewing untold tons of carbon into the atmosphere to breathlessly ‘Save the Planet’ by shutting down among the cleanest
power source generators…
Where is Kathleen Wynne and her carboniferous power plant shutdown for a cheap $2 billion, talking up Canadian reactor sales to Japan?
Where is the political stampede to “Save Japan Now”…crickets!
Rarely, does the government version of events correspond with reality.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group ‘True North’
“And it is similar baseless panic which prevents re-inhabitation of large parts of the evacuated zone.”
As well as German energy policy aimed at eliminating nuclear power generation by the year 2020. You know your panic is baseless if you live in Germany and are terrified of being hit by a tsunami.
I had a discussion with a friend who suffers from HDS and when pressed to give an example of why he hates Harper, he coughed up that the government shouldn’t have stopped testing radiation levels off the coast of BC. It was a very interesting concern from someone who chain smokes, is at least 75lb over weight and wouldn’t walk to the end of driveway if he could help it. Health is obviously high on his list of priorities but he certainly couldn’t do anything to help himself. I guess he figures all that radiation ingestion from the West Coast seafood he eats is a greater threat to his health than the known carcinogen that he’s inhaling deep into his lungs for 18 hours a day. I’m sure he’d have a fit if his precious smokes were made illegal but don’t threaten his health with sub-baseline radiation for heaven’s sake!
“the government shouldn’t have stopped testing radiation levels off the coast of BC.”
Regardless of the coastal levels, lets say they are August 6 1945 Hiroshima level, what exactly could the Canadian government do about it anyway?(offer condolences)
Didn’t Ann Coulter get a lot of flack for saying that a little radiation was beneficial? Now I see the same thing in the New York Times.
The Germans can afford to eliminate nuclear – they have soft coal by the gigaton, and they burn it like there’s no tomorrow. Sanctimonious “green” hypocrites of the lowest order.
Is’nt it time to send this Suzuki idiot to the mental institution for the ecologicaly stupid?
My comment, to which you were referring, was about ‘baseless panic’.
No, Germany cannot afford to eliminate their nuclear power plants.
Russia is brandishing their nuclear weapons and America cannot be counted upon to act as a nuclear deterrent.(or counted on for anything, apparently)
Therefore, every nation with any notion of having their own independent government policy needs to have their own nuclear weapons capability and nuclear power generation is the basis of a nuclear weapons capability.
I doubt Russia would be impressed if Germany were to threaten bombing them with lignite.
Merkel to Putin: “I will unleash a Lignite Krieg the like of which has never before been witnessed!”
I recall the time of the German announcement that it “could happen here”. At the time I said, no, Germany will never get hit by a tsunami.
Geoff, he gets several orders of magnitude more radiation from the Polonium 210 in cigarette smoke than living at a nuclear plant fence line, let alone living on the west coast at the height of the Fukushima releases.
Oz, agree with most of your thoughts, but nuclear power plants have nothing useful for nuclear weapons programs.
Well, I hope you don’t really think I was suggesting the Germans try go make bombs with their lignite. 🙂
It never occurred to me that the time might make their own nukes. I dunno that they need to as a NATO nuke-sharing state, but time will tell. Thanks for clarifying Oz.
Sorry, that the GERMANS might make their own nukes – weird-ass spell correction there which I failed to notice before hitting Submit…
The beneficial effects of low levels of ionizing radiation (and toxins in general) has been known of for at least 40 years and is called hormesis. Instead of the traditional measure of toxicity starting at zero and assuming that a straight line exists to the lethal dose, a threshold below which and above which detrimental effects increase. The human immune system didn’t evolve in a zero toxicity environment without any stimulation.
“…nuclear power plants have nothing useful for nuclear weapons programs.”
Spent fuel from NPPs can be fed into reprocessing plants to extract Pu 239, the fissile material employed in the Fat Man over Nagasaki.
“I dunno that they need to as a NATO nuke-sharing state, but time will tell.”
Who shares nukes in NATO? Britain has theirs, France has theirs, and the U.S. has theirs plus permission to station their U.S. nukes on German territory.
Control of those nukes remains entirely in U.S. hands and good thing too, because if those U.S. nukes were launched at Russian military formations from German territory you can be sure that the continental U.S. would be a recipient of Russian nukes.
That being so and Americans being flakey, it would be best that we all had control of our own nukes, instead of pretending the Americans weren’t flakey.
cgh, I don’t want to go to the effort of listing all the crossover shared hardware and technology between civilian nuclear power programs and military use of same, but let me assure you that the equipment and the technicians have so much in common that even Iran could plausibly pretend to have a civilian nuclear program while singly pursuing nuclear weapons.(ditto for Pakistan)
No it can’t. Nuclear fuel is oxidized uranium, material in weapons is uranium metal. Power reactors operate at temperatures far too high to be used for irradiation into plutonium from uranium metal targets. You use low temperature research reactors for such a process.
Every timer I mention radiation hormesis I get strange looks from patients. Radiophobia is widespread and those who suffer from it think that 1200 dead in an evacuation is a reasonable response to a miniscule dose of radiation.
Having a geiger counter is the best way to counter radiophobes by showing them their trendy granite kitchen countertop is “dangerously radioactive”. It’s easy to demonstrate K40 radioactivity and I use a bottle of KCl tablets to check out sensitivity of my Geiger counters.
If there’s a signal from the Fukishima radiation leak in S central BC, I can’t say I’ve seen it. Have had Geiger counters running at my place for 2 years now, and in 2013 my basement had an average count ratte of 15.9 cpm and recently this has dropped to 13.9 cpm. However, this is with 2 different GM tubes and the 15.9 cpm was with a GM tube that had an excess of very short inter-event intervals so a corrected average was about 14 cpm. This is in marked contrast to a bit of U3O8 underglaze I have which gives 60 cpm and the K40 which only takes about a couple of hours to convincingly demonstrate its radioactivity. Presumably if those morons who were bleating about the effect of Fukishima on BC had any credibility, I would have seen an increase in background radiation or greater fluctuations in background.
Next step is to take my 3 Geiger counters and put them under some thick lead sheeting and look for muon showers so I can see how much of the radiation I’m detecting comes from high energy cosmic rays. Also, it’s an excuse to build a coincidence detector for my Geiger counters as background radiation monitoring on its own has become boring.
All true and interesting, Loki. Point is that even by LNT protocol, the actions of the Japanese government were insane.
I agree with many of the comments here. Germany`s policy is idiotic. Canada should be moving towards more nuclear and less coal for power generation. How about Alberta and Sask working on a plant together.