32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1 Got High Radiation Dose, Tepco Data Show (japantimes.co.jp) 215
mdsolar writes: A total of 32,760 workers at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant had an annual radiation dose exceeding 5 millisieverts as of the end of January, according to an analysis of Tokyo Electric Power Co. data. A reading of 5 millisieverts is one of the thresholds of whether nuclear plant workers suffering from leukemia can be eligible for compensation benefits for work-related injuries and illnesses. Of those workers, 174 had a cumulative radiation dose of more than 100 millisieverts, a level considered to raise the risk of dying after developing cancer by 0.5 percent. Most of the exposure appears to have stemmed from work just after the start of the crisis on March 11, 2011. The highest reading was 678.8 millisieverts.
Only 5? (Score:2)
In the US nuclear workers have a yearly limit of 50 mSv
Re:Only 5? (Score:5, Informative)
https://hps.org/publicinformat... [hps.org]
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This is for insurance purposes, if you haven't gotten 5, you're not eligible to claim your leukemia came from working at the plant.
The impressive part is that without a mishap, the plant workers actually stay under that limit most of the time.
So only 25% more than background? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just being alive exposes you to about 4 mSv a year of background radiation.
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But, but, but... OMG RADIATION!!!!!!!!
For Christ's sake. 174 people got enough radiation that 1:200 people might die of leukemia.
Re:So only 25% more than background? (Score:5, Informative)
But, but, but... OMG RADIATION!!!!!!!!
For Christ's sake. 174 people got enough radiation that 1:200 people might die of leukemia.
No, not 1/200 people. The risk of dying of cancers of the types you get from exposure is about 1 in 100 or 1%. So, if that risk in increase by 0.005 percent, the elevated risk is now .01 x 1.005 = 1.005%. Which means 1 added cancer death maybe in 20,000 exposures.
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Thanks for making the media even more stupid looking than they already are.
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Actually - low dosages of radiation can actually reduce cancer rates:
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So it could be that their risk is now less than it was...
Re:So only 25% more than background? (Score:5, Informative)
https://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
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Yep. External radiation exposure is a topic, but is used as a decoy to camouflage the much more serious and very hard to quantify internal exposures from ingested and inhaled particles, which will simply kill you on the long run.
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Not really. it does not take into account the local concentration in the body. Inhale a very small but alpha emitting dirt particle (such as dust emitted by exploding and melting nuclear reactors), it won't give you a big dosis ( because that's averaged on the whole body), but it will damage the few cubic millimetres around it in the lungs, and will kill you slowly and surely.
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Re:So only 25% more than background? (Score:4, Interesting)
In Boulder where I grew up, the kids fishing pond was made from the abandoned settling ponds of an old mill.
In the late 1960's, the DOE did an aerial survey for lost plutonium from the nearby Rocky Flats Weapons plant after a bad fire at the plant.
All those little hills around the pond that we sat on as we fished were tailings from the Radium mill and were pretty hot.
So, far I've received over 500 mSV from living in this radioactive heaven hole.
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Depending on where you live. Some places have noticeably higher or lower background radiation level. Denver is supposed to have a background level of 6 mSv/year or higher.
A part of me says that's 8 people too few... (Score:2)
Still better than thinking that should be a bit more!
Disaster (Score:5, Interesting)
Employees who work at a nuclear reactor during and immediately after a meltdown should get their healthcare and compensation for life, no questions asked We are asking them to stay and potentially risk horrifying deaths in order to give the public surrounding them time to evacuate; it is a heroic sacrifice for the good of the community and should be built into the cost and risk model of power companies installing nuclear plants.
in the usa will need to get on the SSI/SSDI list t (Score:3)
in the usa will need to get on the SSI/SSDI list to get that and your income can only go so high before you get kicked off of that.
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Employees who work at a nuclear reactor during and immediately after a meltdown should get their healthcare and compensation for life, no questions asked We are asking them to stay and potentially risk horrifying deaths in order to give the public surrounding them time to evacuate; it is a heroic sacrifice for the good of the community and should be built into the cost and risk model of power companies installing nuclear plants.
"horrifying deaths"? I think you've seen too many science fiction movies.
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OK, let's see that :
"In 2012, there were an estimated 8.2 million deaths from cancer in the world"
so according to you, there were all in all only 8200 cancer deaths from nuke accidents.
Nukes exist since roughly 65 years, that would make 126 deaths/year.
It's probably more, much more than that.
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Actually, it's probably a lot less.
Re:Disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Employees who work at a nuclear reactor during and immediately after a meltdown should get their healthcare and compensation for life, no questions asked
Wait, I have a question. Would these people still get free healthcare and compensation if they CAUSED the meltdown? What if they didn't cause it but were merely negligent in preventing the meltdown? What if they were an employee working on site but in a building far from the reactor and had no increase in exposure and did nothing to assist in the recovery effort except something trivial, like emptying the wastebaskets from the offices?
Here's a better question. Why don't we build nuclear power plants that simply cannot meltdown? Perhaps this is impossible based on differing opinions on what is considered a meltdown. We do know how to build safe nuclear power plants but the Department of Energy has been sitting on their hands in allowing people to construct demonstration plants so that their safety can be proven. Instead the DOE does study after study, spending all kinds of money on engineers to look at drawings and simulations, expecting to see a design too safe to fail.
There are probably a dozen companies in the USA, and at least that many more world wide, with nuclear reactor designs that would be much safer than the plants we have now but no one is permitted to actually prove they can work with a real and honest working prototype. Build some prototypes big enough to prove the concept but small enough to contain, put in double safety systems, and turn them on. Test them, abuse them, make them fail. After we've seen how they can fail we can build systems to contain the radiation threat. Simulations are worthless unless you have real world data for comparison. This is why we build cars in CAD and then once built we launch a few of them into a wall to see how they crumple up.
I had someone tell me, who at least claimed to be an engineer, that we should not build any new nuclear reactors until we prove they are safe. I asked, how do you prove anything until one is built? Which I guess is the point, he did not want to see any nuclear reactors built. Which is also what I believe the DOE is doing. No one in the DOE wants to sign off on a nuclear reactor since if anything goes wrong then they will be blamed for it. In the mean time we are burning coal at an incredible rate.
If you think nuclear power is dangerous then compare it to anything else on a megawatt-hour produced to deaths metric and you tell me who is killing more people, is it the nuclear power industry or the DOE for keeping more nuclear power from us?
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Please explain these dangers, I am curious.
Is it dangerous because it is so hot? The salts in a molten salt reactor would top out at about 850C. It certainly will not exceed 1450C because at that point the fuel salt would boil and the metal containment would melt. But we deal with things much hotter all the time. Refining iron and aluminum requires temperatures of 1000C and above. Making concrete requires similar temperatures. This can't be the problem.
Is it because the chemicals are so toxic? Gasses
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So far, one person working on this has been diagnosed with Leukemia thought to be from exposure to radiation during this crisis. Given the size of the group, the years that have passed and the makeup of the group, this is really low. In fact, in a group this size, over a decade, the expected number of leukemia cases is five. So, if we go by the typical statistical logic of the people infected with radiation-hysteria, being exposed to the type of radiation released during the Fukushima incident reduces your
CT Scan (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, it isn't. A CT scan is a one time exposure. The workers at Fukushima used air filters, but even so some of that material ended up in their bodies. That's why it's far more dangerous than a CT scan.
It's impressive that of the thousands of people at the plant, so few were badly exposed. Those who were are heroes.
Re:CT Scan (Score:5, Insightful)
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Depends. If your mum's basement is in somewhere formerly volcanic like Cornwall, it's probably worse than standing above ground.
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No, it's far more dangerous than a CT scan. The stuff emitted gets inside the body (e.g. dust, hence the need for filtration masks and protective suits) and irradiates organs indefinitely.
Unfortunately the equipment doesn't provide perfect protection and most workers were not wearing the full kit anyway.
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less if you live in your Mom's basement like I do.
Actually you typically get more radiation exposure in your basement than anywhere else.
More in some basement (Score:2)
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A CT scan is 30mSv. Also, a CT scan is a single large dosage instead of a low dosage over a long period of time.
Re:CT Scan (Score:4, Informative)
A CT scan is 30mSv. Also, a CT scan is a single large dosage instead of a low dosage over a long period of time.
No it's not. Your information is extremely outdated. The highest dosage you get from a CT scan is for cardiac function imaging. It's because you need to look the heart during several different points through the cardiac cycle.
On a typical 64-slice CT scanner the dosage is 5 to 10mSv for a cardiac function scan. That's going to be the highest dosage as any scanner with less than a 64-slice detector array will give unusable images and a very high radiation dosage. Almost no one is using these for cardiac imaging. A 64 slice CT scanner is very versatile, but not good for cardiac imaging.
Most hospitals are using 256 and 320 slice CT scanners for cardiac imaging currently. And 640 slice scanners are now out in the wild. Rather than needing to spin the array in a continuous helical motion, the high slice scanners can image the entire heart in a single rotation. A 256 or 320 slice scanner can do a cardiac scan with 1 to 2mSv exposure.
There's also dose reduction software. It allows the radiation dosage to be lower and give lower quality images, then clean them up in software after the scan. If you're getting a CT scan for anything other than the heart and it's going to be higher than 1mSv, go somewhere else. And unless there is some reason you need to have the scan done in a CT, such as a non-MRI safe pace maker or other hardware, there's very little need to have this type of scan done. Other than a very specific type of scan, no CT scan should be above 1 mSv.
Bad units or data? (Score:3)
Four parts to this. (Score:2, Interesting)
First, I am STILL waiting for an apology from those Slashdotters who insisted at the time there was no meltdown.
Second, we've known for a long time that there was a high level of incompetence resulting in excessive exposure to radiation. I'm not sure what new information is being included here.
Third, I am much more concerned about the reported design flaw in ALL U.S. reactors that could result in meltdowns. Fukushima, although tragic, is in the past. We should learn from it by studying it closely, but there
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If you're talking about the article from last week when you are talking about "the reported design flaw in ALL U.S. reactors" that is literally a problem with any three-phase electrical system that can be solved by spending a day with an electrician installing a phase-detecting relay. It can be fixed relatively easy without deleting 20% of the generation capacity in the US, or spending hundreds of billions in construction costs.
That being said, the issue deserves the attention of regulators, and should be
It was not 32,000 workers. (Score:2)
I don't think it was actually 32,767 workers... I think its actually -1 on a 16-bit-system.
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32760? (Score:2)
Please let us vote on articles on the front page! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why this submissions is flamebait anti-nuclear energy FUD:
- 5 mSv is background radiation and is a ridiculously low threshold
- 50 mSv is the standard in places like the US
- of those 174 workers exposed to the highest radiation dose, we can expect that one will get cancer -- pretty damn good for what's supposed to be one of the worst nuclear disasters!
- in comparison, how many people got killed by the total lifetime (production to decommission) per energy generated by mdsolar's preferred methods? here's where nuclear stands in comparison: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/... [nextbigfuture.com]
Of course, those that have been here for a while already knew this submission was going to be utter bullshit the moment we saw who posted it.
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- of those 174 workers exposed to the highest radiation dose, we can expect that one will get cancer -- pretty damn good for what's supposed to be one of the worst nuclear disasters!
No, we can expect NONE will get cancer, or at least statistically there will be no more cancers than if they were not exposed.. The already low risk of getting cancer is increased by 0.5%. So if the risk of cancer is 8%, the new risk is now 8.04%
Re:Please let us vote on articles on the front pag (Score:5, Informative)
Several of them will get cancer anyway. We expect one extra to get cancer.
But even that is bullshit, since that is based on a model called "Linear, No Threshold" or LNT [wikipedia.org].
At large doses, ibuprofen will kill you. I've got a bottle of 160 pills in my desk drawer, which should be plenty. According to LNT, since 160 pills at once into one person would cause one death, one pill each into 160 people would also cause one death. So if I gave one pill, one time, to 160 of the Fukushima workers, one more than normal of them would die of liver failure eventually.
Where the analogy breaks down is that in reality, everyone would be getting 1 to 10 ibuprofen pills per day from their environment, and the people living and working in places with higher natural doses get less liver failure. (See hormesis [wikipedia.org])
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Actually, most of the proponents of nuclear power consider nuke plants to be safer than a coal plant, because the coal plant is constantly spewing carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, particulates, and creates fly ash ponds that are extremely toxic, and sometimes breach and destroy entire river ecosystems.
The normal operating condition of a coal plant is fucking horrendous, where the nuclear only causes a problem when a whole string of problems happen at once.
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If the numbers had been larger and the dose lethal, would you still call it flamebait/FUD? It's quite ridiculous how many posters here consider nuke plants as safe as having a coal plant. It's time to eradicate nuclear plants and replace them with wind farms connected to hydro-electric dams that store any excess energy that is not immediately consumed.
You're right, that is ridiculous. Nuclear is in fact much safer.
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As long as it does not explode.
As long as it does not leak.
Yes it will explode at the neighbour's plant, ours are much much safer. Everybody says that.
Yes it will leak, but only when our children will benefit from those leaks. At least that was the assumption. Often it leaks earlier.
But hey, there's at least one really safe nuclear plant : Zwentendorf
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What I find very interesting is all the discussion about the safety of nuclear power because one failed in a one in 500 year tsunami while at that same time a hydro power dam failed and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds of people.
Also, how many people in total were washed out to sea and drowned because of the tsunami? Somewhere around 5000 as I recall. Are people rebuilding their homes within that washed out area? I hope not. Forget the nuclear reactor, look at the hydro dams and the threat another wave l
Silly (Score:3)
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This explains the "50 mSv" claim. It's actually not quite what is represented by the industry.
https://hps.org/publicinformat... [hps.org]
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A perhaps unrelated question, if medical techs get 100 mSv per year for operating X-ray machines and doing bone scans then how does that compare to the exposure of a TSA agent operating a RapeScan machine?
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Hint: In Sweden the military also have to follow laws, so you are wrong.
Radiation Exposure Models are WRONG (Score:5, Interesting)
There sure are some scary comparisons of doses and suggestions of risk without any references in the TFA.
The problem with many exposure limits and risk estimates is that they are all based on the worst case scenario, ultraconservative exposure model: linear no-threshold (LNT). Basically, this model we created in the 1940s assumes that all radiation is bad and more is worse in with a linear dose to risk relationship.
However, there is not much evidence to support this simplistic model, which is what NRC uses to establish dose limits! We've known it is wrong for a long time. There is evidence that other models, specifically radiation hormesis, are correct. We won't change anything policywise because imagine the gnashing of teeth from the Greens when the newspaper article reads "Government loosens radiation rules! FEAR!"
But radiation hormesis is supported by the evidence. It suggests that below a certain level, radiation stimulates cellular and DNA repair mechanisms so that there is an opitmal dose of radiation that is ABOVE zero and that only when you go high on a dose in a given time (threshold) does the damage outweigh the stimulated benefits, but the response may be nonlinear for dose vs risk after the threshold.
Here are just two of the more recent articles on the subject (research goes back a LONG time)
2009, "The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data" Radiology
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
2013, "Linear No-Threshold Model VS. Radiation Hormesis"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
Other fun pieces of information:
A chest X-ray is ~1.5mSv.
An abdominal Cat Scan (CT) is usually 10-20mSv per study.
Natural radiation exposure for Denver, CO (5280ft): 12mSv per year.
Re:Radiation Exposure Models are WRONG (Score:4, Insightful)
It gets better...
5 mSv is the additional annual exposure of your typical aircraft crew flying North American routes. Since that industry routinely hits that threshold, shall we shut it down too?
Re:Radiation Exposure Models are WRONG (Score:5, Funny)
It gets better...
5 mSv is the additional annual exposure of your typical aircraft crew flying North American routes. Since that industry routinely hits that threshold, shall we shut it down too?
Well of course background radiation can be tolerated to much higher levels because it is natural. Processed, highly concentrated radiation from nuclear power plants is much more dangerous.
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Well of course background radiation can be tolerated to much higher levels because it is natural. Processed, highly concentrated radiation from nuclear power plants is much more dangerous.
I wouldn't say much more dangerous. This debate continues in the International Commission on Radiation Protection under the topic of Dose to Dose Rate Effectiveness Factor (DDREF) [icrp.org]. In general, high dose rate, shorter exposure times are considered twice as dangerous, so if you got 10 mSv in one hour, it would be considered 20 mSv. All of the doses that these recommendations were made on were based on their admittedly scant data for lower exposures; you'd need 500 mSv at a minimum to start correlating to ac
I want trn style "Kill Files". (Score:5, Interesting)
On Usenet, I had "Kill files" that could trim the idiots out of my newsfeed. Can we get something similar on Slashdot? Please? Pleeeeease???
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How about we all get off your lawn while we're at it? ;-)
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No, that's what the HOSTS file is for. Kill Files are different.
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Statistically safer, counter-intuitive (Score:2)
Even with the past accidents, "N-power" is statistically safer than the fossil-fuel (FF) alternatives. This is largely because FF causes a general lung cancer increase, and other ailments such as asthma.
N-power seems scarier in part because the deaths and illness tend to be sporadic, typically once-a-decade kinds of accidents, while FF death and illness is more or less constant: low-level but ever-present.
It seems political "safer" to spread the risk evenly rather than have occasional accidents that attract
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"if you rip a few pennies off from tens of thousands of people you are less likely to be noticed than if you rip thousands off from a few."
Great, now come up with a way to fix the entire planet so this is no longer true, and you're off to the races. Let me know when you're ready.
That's good, right? (Score:2)
How I read the title.
That sounds like really good news.
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Summary has a few hundred people with a moderate radiation dose and even the single highest dose is well survivable.
Compare with Chernobyl. How many dead within minutes? How many dead within weeks?
Within minutes? None unless someone were in an area where the steam explosion reached (but then it wouldn't be the radiation that killed them). Within weeks? Those close to the site like the operators of the failed reactor.
To be killed within minutes after radiation exposure requires extreme doses many times the lethal dose.
Use the one Sievert rule. (Score:5, Informative)
Duration of exposure matters, of course, but one should always keep in mind this rule: one sievert is dangerous. It's not always fatal, but sometimes it is. Some corollaries:
The fellow who got dosed with nearly 700 mSv has my sympathy and gratitude. The mantle of leadership and duty falls where it falls, and we all owe a debt to the ones who bear the burden.
SOLAR KILLS PEOPLE (Score:5, Funny)
So in a disaster area a nuclear power plant can cause some radiation leakage and it affects the people who work there. Ok.
Under normal operating conditions the Sun causes cancer [wcrf.org] and kills people with Renewable Solar Radiation!!!!! [aimatmelanoma.org]
Headline: SUN CAUSES CANCER AND KILLS MILLIONS OF PEOPLE!!!
From WHO [who.int]:
Currently, between 2 and 3 million non-melanoma skin cancers and 132,000 melanoma skin cancers occur globally each year. One in every three cancers diagnosed is a skin cancer and, according to Skin Cancer Foundation Statistics, one in every five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetime.
In 2012 alone 232,000 people had new incidents of melanoma, and 55,000 people died from it. [wikipedia.org]
The SUN is MURDERING people! We need to find safer methods to produce energy, I suggest nuclear.
More sensational (Score:2)
I suppose 32,000 is a lot more impressive than 176 received a significant dose and 1 a concerning dose.
2^15 - 2^3? (Score:2)
This is Slashdot. Why has no one pointed out how close to a power of two the number of irradiated workers is?
Really? (Score:2)
"32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1 "
Stop right there: there were 32,000 Workers At Fukushima No. 1?
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If it takes 32,000 workers to run a plant I can see why nuclear has trouble being cost effective.
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Yeah, that's crazy. What were they all doing?
They could have just shut down the reactor and had them all pedal!
I predict (Score:2)
I predict a polite slashdot discussion with well-thought out posts and and properly researched and cited information.
Oh who am I kidding...
Ban "mdsolar", but..do we believe TepCo? (Score:2)
Most of posts here are quite rightly burying mdsolar as the biased shill (s)he is. 5 mSv is zip, nada, nothing...
@Whipslash, please ban the idiot.
Tim, get with the program and stop falling for this crap, even if it's good for a bunch of flaming posts.
The only counter-rant I will offer is that this information purports to come from TepCo and....they've been proven many times to be completely full of shit.
So, yea, voting conflicted on this one,
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Ban MDsolar: Yes please.
BUT WHAT IF TEPCO IS LYING OMGZ?!?!?!
Yeah, maybe they are, but Tepco could lie about the sun coming up every morning and it wouldn't be a justification to not ban mdsolar.
Skipping the linear no-threshold stuff... (Score:2)
...which always comes up with 1000 dead for the smallest release of radioactives because they apply a teeny number to billions of people...this news is that the Fukishima incident has almost certainly released enough radiation that somebody will die who would not have done so had Fukishima never melted down.
Maybe even two people!
Meanwhile, Japan had some 16,000 dead from the other seismic deaths, and over 20,000 died prematurely in the USA last year from the effect of coal-fired power generation on their br
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Call me when you can do base-load. All you have to do is be absolutely certain your power delivery will go on 365x24, with no drops.
Think of the people! (Score:2)
How?
They went on vacation to the beach in Brazil for a week or so.
"Radiation levels are highest at Guarapari’s beaches, a popular seasonal tourist attraction, where readings of up to 175 mSv (millisieverts)) per year have been measured." Global Hot Spots [momtastic.com]
OCD... (Score:2)
Did anyone else get annoyed while reading the summary that the number of workers who received (trivial) radiation doses is 32760, rather than 32768? I mean, it's so close to a very nice, round number, but not quite there.
32,760 workers ?? (Score:2)
does one nuclear plant really have that many workers? sheez it must take 10$$ of the plants power just to support the workers homes
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I'm shrugging over here. This reads like a feel good fluff piece in a scary voice.
Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm shrugging over here. This reads like a feel good fluff piece in a scary voice.
Its not even news. A bunch of workers at the plant got some very low exposure to radiation, on the order of what a pilot gets in his/her job. Throw in some minute mention of increase in cancer risk, and you have the recipe for a FUD meal served up for the uninformed.
The wording of the summary is a good indication of not even knowing the information.... "a level considered to raise the risk of dying after developing cancer by 0.5 percent". So, IF you develop cancer, your chances of death go up by 1/2 a percent? These are the front line workers, and there is essentially no danger. And this is from the same people telling us what a human health disaster Fukushima is? They wont' even try to reconcile that.
Re:Seriously... (Score:4, Insightful)
174 got enough of a dose to increase their chances of dying after developing cancer by 0.5%. Which means there's a 87% chance that ONE guy will die of cancer as a result of Fukushima.
Wow. The second-worst nuclear disaster in history, and it MIGHT cause ONE death. In thirty or forty years....
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>>174 got enough of a dose to increase their chances of dying after developing cancer
Wrong. 174 were shown to have external rad doses in that range. ( with some dosimeters shielded in special lead cases....)
No serious quantification has been done on inhaled, ingested particles, because, nah, that does not happen.
Re:Seriously... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll add on to this by asking some very basic questions on the safety of other power sources. What is the increased chances of cancer for handling the radioactive dust from a COAL powered plant? What of other threats to health like industrial accidents, particulate matter in the lungs, and so forth? Some of those balance out with nuclear given that the steam turbines and such are effectively identical between coal and nuclear.
What of wind and solar? What are the chances of dying from falling from a windmill pylon or a rooftop solar installation? Again some hazards like electrocution balance out because nuclear, solar, and wind all produce electricity. These hazards do need to be counted though since while the hazards exist in both the threat level may not be identical.
I suspect that hydro power is exceedingly safe but when it fails I'd expect massive loss of life. Entire communities can be washed away.
Let's speculate on the increased cancer risks to nuclear power because that is scary. Never mind that you'd be just as dead if you fell off a roof.
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Easy enough to look up: there are various places which tabulate deaths per kilowatt hour of various electrical energy generation sources. I won't spolierize the finale, but guess who wins in terms of fewest death by quite a margin?
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The radiation does is meh, unless you're in the over 100mSv crowd, what's impressive to me is that 32,000 people were engaged working on this reactor - that's a decent sized city.
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Nuclear power may be good for the current two generations. For the next 20000 generations of human beings, it will be a nightmare.
All things leak, diffuse and mix with each other. That's the way entropy works.
Re:Seriously... (Score:4, Informative)
good for the current two generations. For the next 20000
Thats kind of backward. The biggest hazard after Fukushima was iodine-131, which has all gone already. next, the caesium-134 with a 2-year half-life will soon be gone. Caesium-137 is most of what remains, and has a 30-year half-life. So the atoms will be around up to 10 or 20 generations, but it is highly water soluble, so ...
All things leak, diffuse and mix with each other.
Yep, the small proportion of remaining caesium will be long washed away to become an insignificant part of the background before the "current two generations" are gone.
20,000 gen? Pure propaganda. Even now, the radiation from plutonium etc around Fukushima is miniscule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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680mSv will cause radiation sickness if the exposure is within a short time span. You do not know the timespan of this exposure. It may be more than five years in total.
Re:Seriously... (Score:4, Informative)
how about the rest of you
Sorry, no. The messenger has using Slashdot to push anti-nook FUD for years. The well is poisoned. Fuck him and his agenda.
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Years? He's up to 16 articles now in the past week!
Re:Seriously... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Shoot the messenger" means that you treat the bearer of bad news as if they were to blame for the news.
It has noting to do with decrying the messenger as an frequent source of biased and incomplete information, nor the site's unusually frequent use of his submissions (a la Bennett Hazelton and others).
So, no.
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Even Bennett Hazelton didn't submit 17 stories in 1 week.
Seriously look at the history. He's averaged over twice a day.
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It is likely that in order to reduce exposure per person employees from other plants were temporary moved to the disaster site. Looking at the company page on the Wikipedia seem to point to that too, the total number of employees is listed as 38671 and they have a total of 190 power plants of misc. types.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I would hope that if you have a Fukushima-scale disaster on your hands, that more people would be brought in that aren't usually on staff to help.
"We would have gotten it under control, but we were told not to go over budget on contract resources" isn't a good answer during a nuclear accident.
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Haven't read the article, but I would first suspect a translation error - that the 32,000 is actually the number of affected people in the entire area around the plant.
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No. But Tepco probably pulled engineers and technicians from every nuclear facility they operate (there's a lot of them) in order to spread out the dosage, and have more hands available to deal with the issue.
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hmm. Dead people don't overflow and resurrect.