Fukushima workers quoted as saying that they have been exposed to lethal doses of radiation ...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout...ie-if-necessary

Heck of a deal. One day you're going along fine as a worker for a major power company in Japan. Then two weeks later your life is coming to an end.

Pete #2

That doesn't seem likely. The article itself says that 3 workers had 170-180 millisieverts, and that was the worst case that got them sent to hospital for a check-up. You need around 2,000 ms for a fatal dose. No-one has died, no-one is likely to die.

The article is mainly based on an interview, not with a worker, but with a mother of a worker. I'm sorry, but it's not very credible. Maybe they have said they are prepared to die; that's heroic and gung-ho and applaudable, but not the same as actually dying.

The article also has quotes from people who refused to work there. They are as ignorant and paranoid as most of the rest of them. There's so much fear-mongering in the media. The bias and lack of rationality is sad.

Meanwhile an average of 100 people are killed each week mining coal.

Brangdon ... you're definitely right that other professions suffer high death rates. That includes mining, and fishing in some waters off the US coast. Also, the article does rely upon second-hand information. But i wouldn't dismiss the story out of hand. It's likely that the Fukushima workers have radiation exposure meters on their person when they go to the plant each day. So they may be aware how much exposure they are really getting. It's also possible that TEPCO is being moe straightforward with their at-risk workers about the potential consequences of what's going on (even though TEPCO's public reporting has been poor). Since there have been neutron beams and reactor containment failures reported for this incident, I'll be very surprised if some workers don't die from this.

Pete #2

I don't think that's right. What I've read is that 1 Sievert (1000 mSv) is enough for a significantly increased lifetime risk of death by cancer. Generally, radiation sickness starts at 2 Sv. It's five Sieverts that will kill you dead, even if you get medical treatment.

I believe that the legal exposure limit for reactor workers during lifesaving operations is 150 mSv. Based on the news reports I've read so far, none of the Japanese reactor workers have been exposed to anything close to 1 Sievert, much less a fatal dose of radiation.

High resolution photos of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant available here

http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm

Looks like something very heavy was ejected from No3 plant to make the big hole in the No 3 Turbine hall roof.

I've read that the normal US limit for nuclear workers is 50 mSv. The emergency limit for Fukushima Daiichi workers was raised to 250 mSv. Last I read, there were 21 workers there who had reached 100 mSv of cumulative exposure.

There are the two workers who had radioactive water spill into their low boots for almost an hour. The way I have seen it reported, they received about 175 mSv of gamma radiation, but 2-6 Sv of beta radiation to their feet and legs. Beta radiation is not so penetrating, but still, that is ionizing radiation, so that seems like a large dose to me.

However, it was also reported by TEPCO that there were not enough dosimeters in the early days of the crisis. Their supply of dosimeters had been destroyed or washed away somehow by the tsunami so some workers labored without them until they could get more. I remember reports of radiation spikes of 400 mSv/hour at the main gate in the those early days, so who knows exactly how much the workers were exposed to closer to the reactors back when things were really dire?

I'm happy to say that the testing referred to atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons by the several countries who participated on those tests in the Fifties and Sixties. Drop by
http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/09-86753_Report_2008_Annex_B.pdf
and check pages 255, et seq., for the information that quote refers to. The statement was correct, politically and factually. In fact, Pu-238 and Pu-239 are scattered throughout the world as a result of the atmospheric tests those countries conducted. Annex B has more details than I'm interested in, but they're there for those that want to know.

Thanks for the link, but I think that we can safely assume that if your going to find Plutonium in substantially high contamination doses then there are a few places in the world to look, such as Palomares in Spain and in Thule in Greenland and just north of Las Vegas etc not forgetting the widespread contamination in the old Soviet client states. As the earlier fission bombs weren't particularly efficient then I think you can safely assume that the highest proportion of Plutonium fallout found on the Japanese mainland would be from the Nagasaki detonation using a Plutonium weapon. The later larger more powerful weapons tested in the Pacific were primarily fusion weapons which left very little Plutonium behind. These weapons were also much much further away from the Fukushima site compared to Nagasaki.

Of course the idea that the levels of Plutonium contamination of the Fukushima site by the IAEA could not be distinguished between the level of Plutonium fallout from the use of above ground testing from the 1940s to 1960s and from the fuel from a smoldering No3 reactor using 7% Plutonium Oxide MOX fuel which had ejected the top of the inner pressure vessel containment, which surrounds the inner fuel core, 1500 feet into the air to land on the nearby turbine hall to then have vast qualities of Plutonium contaminated hot particles rain down, is the b*lls*it statement.


Edit - The British did drop the largest ever fission bomb in the Pacific, which dwarfed all other previous fission weapons so this weapon may have produced vast quantities of Plutonium fallout.

Edano announced on TV that the plutonium likely came from one of the reactors. However, the amounts found weren't that high--0.18 and 0.54 Bq/kg of soil in the two samples that found plutonium-238, so that's only a few times above background. And plutonium-238 doesn't have to come from the MOX fuel in number 3. It is fission by-product in all of the reactors so at this point, I don't think anyone really knows exactly which reactor it came from since any or all four of them might have had some sort of breach of containment.

Do you like sushi glowing in the dark?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-05...ck-plunges.html