The distribution patterns depend on both the winds and the release intensities from the reactors. And although the current evacuation zones are concentric circles around the plant, it is more likely that dispersed radioactive material will fall in narrow bands, David Richardson, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health, said during the Wednesday briefing. He added, "It's going to be quite a while until we have anything more than a crude understanding of the magnitude and the distribution."
Gathering enough data to create sturdy predictions, however, has so far proved impossible. "The infrastructure is so bad over there, I can't really tell what's going on," Clanton says. "It's very frustrating in terms of determining what is actually happening."
Nevertheless, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and President Obama have reassured Americans that there will not be harmful levels of radiation reaching the U.S. "Whether it's the west coast, Hawaii, Alaska or U.S. territories in the Pacific, we do not expect harmful levels of radiation," Obama said Thursday.
Even as higher-than-normal levels of background radiation are detected in the U.S., it is unlikely to pose a health risk. Simply living at high altitudes or frequent air travel exposes people to extra radiation (via the sun's rays)—commercial flight crews, for example, can in a year accumulate more than three times normal annual U.S. background radiation found at sea level. And safety standards for nuclear industry employees allow for more than six times average U.S. background radiation, which is still far below levels considered carcinogenic.
Fallout fish?
In Japan, winds have been primarily blowing out to sea since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which is good news for the millions of people who live in and around Tokyo. This does mean, however, that most of the radioactive material would be falling out of the air over the ocean, not far from Japan's east coast. "And that means that marine life will pick up this material—and if people eat fish, they will in turn intake this material," Marvin Resnikoff, a consultant at Radioactive Waste Management Associates, said during the press conference.
But Japan's fisheries are unlikely to become another Chernobyl milk incident (in which local cows grazed on contaminated grass produced isotope-tainted milk that has been implicated in many of the 1,800 cases of thyroid cancer documented in children from the affected area).
The Pacific Ocean is no small-town Ukrainian meadow. "The solution to pollution is dilution," Clanton says, quoting the adage and acknowledging the risk of sounding flippant. "The ocean's a big place." Even under the improbable scenario of a large fire in reactor No. 4, in which "it's likely there would be at least a momentary release of radioactive material into the atmosphere," he says, combined with strong winds that carried that material into the ocean, "there's a slight potential that you could detect it in fish later—but even that would be small."
Any ichthyic-bound isotopes would be so few that "they would be very hard to detect," Clanton says, comparing the amounts with the naturally occurring isotope potassium 40 found in bananas.
Dangers of displacement
The NRC's recommendation earlier this week that U.S. residents in Japan relocate to at least 50 miles from the Fukushima facility has caused confusion, given its relatively extreme distance compared with Japanese recommendations—and even local U.S. nuclear disaster contingency plans.
Clanton shares the sentiment of many radiation experts that given the comparatively few number of U.S. residents in the area, "why not be conservative?" For the Japanese government to move the evacuation boundary the additional 30 kilometers would mean dislocating a lot more people. Some 80,000 people within the 20-kilometer boundary have already been evacuated, and many more beyond that zone had left for fear of radiation contamination, The New York Times reported.
And on a population-wide scale, "there's probably much more [health] risk [in displacement] than of the reactor," Clanton says. "Just trying to house and feed them in an environment that's near freezing every night—that's got to be an untenable issue."
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7 Comments
Add CommentThe horrible tragedies in Japan should be responded to by every nation on Earth which has the expertise and resources to do so. The fact is, no place on Earth is immune to natural disasters of that magnitude or greater. Americans must band together to make sure that greedy dirty energy companies can't keep us vulnerable to added threats to our lives and health in order to maximize their windfall profits.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe nuclear emergencies and natural gas and oil fires in Japan should be an object lesson, and dire warning, to every nation. This is why it is of utmost urgency to convert the world's energy systems to TRULY clean, safe, abundant, inexhaustible and FREE energy sources, such as Wind, Sunshine, Geothermal Heat, Tidal/River Flows and Hydrogen/Oxygen extracted from Water using electricity from those sources.
If you think massive conversion to clean energy would be "too expensive", I have 2 questions for you:
1) In your cost/benefit analysis, how do you value the lives of nuclear plant radiation victims, coal miners, drilling rig workers, billions of sea creatures and the millions of people who die from pollution-caused illnesses?
2) If we fail to restore and protect the ONLY known natural life-support system in the Universe, how will you justify that failure to your gasping, wheezing Great-Grandchildren, and what do you think the money saved will be worth to THEM?
If Japan's energy came from self-renewing energy sources, there would be no oil and gas fires or nuclear emergencies adding to the other crises they are facing.
It would be interesting to read real proposals and not only dreams that will never be a reality or help in the discussion, no matter how much we can desire it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs to produce electricity, the wind fails to blow in a more permanent and reliable base, besides the problem of bird killing by wind turbines blades, Sun rays not always make it to the ground with its whole energy, clouds and nights interfere. Sea water and high currents can destroy big electricity producing facilities that use tides, remember hurricanes. Even waste burning is useful but not enough. And there renewable energies list ends.
So we need something else to produce the electrical flow in a more regular basis, and atomic energy is by far the most clean and regular of the electricity providers can offer.
Now of course, as in every industry, there are risks and dangers. Hundred of coal miners are killed in mining accidents around the globe every year, and thousands get sick or injured extracting coal for electricity facilities that doesn’t have even a 10% of the regulations atomic ones have.
Don’t forget the steady flow of millions of Gigawatts of clean energy the 450 atomic powered plants generate minute by minute around the globe, year by year, for the use of human civilization. Only in 2009 the 6 Fukushima plants generated 22,760,000 Gigawats h, preventing 22 billion tons of CO2 entering our atmosphere.
Fretting about atomic energy doesn´t do any good to the combat against global warming, where atomic energy has a predominant place, to replace and prevent CO2 producing facilities.
After all humans are the end users of energy, and we have to assume the risks that comes with any way electricity is produced. Now we have to choose between more global warming and severe climate change or an atomic accident like the one in Fukushima every 20 or more years.
Lets then work in a more positive way for even safer atomic plants with renewable complements to cope for the energy we need now and tomorrow.
This article is based on an assumption that the problem will be purely from a core meltdown. Unfortunately, the latest news is the possibility of re-criticality occurring at spent fuel pool #4. That's a much larger amount of radioactive material than Chernobyl getting hotter very quickly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's already time to re-assess the possible fallout patterns .... what's all-important is not the US, but Tokyo. Let's hope Tokyo doesn't have to be evacuated at this critical time in history.
By the way, Kyodo News has already censored out the reference to a renewed chain reaction. Earlier today it read
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-- Reactor No. 4 - Under maintenance when quake struck, no fuel rods in reactor core, temperature in spent-fuel storage pool reached 84 C on Monday, fire Tuesday possibly caused by hydrogen explosion at pool holding spent fuel rods, fire observed Wednesday at building housing reactor, pool water level feared receding, [b]renewed nuclear chain reaction feared,[/b] only frame remains of reactor building roof. http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/79482.html
Now it reads:
-- Reactor No. 4 (Under maintenance when quake struck)
Renewed nuclear chain reaction feared at spent-fuel storage pool, fire at building housing containment of reactor Tuesday and Wednesday, only frame remains of reactor building roof, temperature in the pool reached 84 C on Monday.
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/79535.html
the following extract is poppycock and balderdash e.g. north-east scotland was only cleared of chernobyl safety concerns in 2010.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"After all, 30 kilometers was the extent of the spread of dangerous radioactive material even at Chernobyl, ...."
The death toll from coal is a lot greater than any possible happening at the Japanese power plants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSc.Am. article reports that over 2400 people died in China's mine accidents last year.
Did anyone notice that?
Nuclear plants are just silent killers of mankind and natural life systems.scientific academies proved that any dose of radiation above the natural background level will cause a corresponding increase in cancer increases and loss of immunity powers particularly in the young and the aged population.The smallest amount of radioactivity can release the alpha and beta particles and gamma ays that that enter the body of living organisms through the air and water and food taken by people and they strike at the body cells and they impact tghe water and cells and ultimately the DNA suffers single or double strand breaks which cause tumours or cancer in life forms.hence promotion of nuclear plants by any head of state amounts to his becoming an environmental criminal and whose actions make the Criminal acts of Hitler in killing millions of Jews by slowly poisoning them in the Gas chambers fade into insignificance , Hence Nuclear plants must be banned in all countries of the world like in Germany and japan whose intelligent heads of states became statesmen and rightly decided to phase out the existing reactors by 2022 or 2030.All the people of the world must unite in this effort of making the life livable by making the worlds nuclear-free.For more scientific details in the scientific articles see web site"DiaNuke.org"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProf.T.Shivaji Rao .M.S[Rice,Texas,1962]
Director,Gitam University,visakhapatnam