Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Fukushima - The Elephant in the Room

Famed physicist Michio Kaku says Japanese officials still don't have control of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

In the International System of units (SI), the becquerel (Bq) is the unit of radioactivity. One Bq is 1 disintegration per second (dps). One curie is 37 billion Bq. Since the Bq represents such a small amount, you are likely to see a prefix used with Bq, as shown below:

1 MBq (27 microcuries)

1 GBq (27 millicuries)

37 GBq (1 curie(Ci))

1 TBq (27 curies)

A radiotherapy machine may have roughly 1000 Ci of a radioisotope such as caesium-137 or cobalt-60. This quantity of radioactivity can produce serious health effects with only a few minutes of close-range, un-shielded exposure.

"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Gundersen asserts. "We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl ... The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up."....

Certainly if some of the worst-case predictions materialize, and a sizeable part of Japan turns into a nuclear desert, we'll face urgent questions about where we are heading as a species; this may happen even in a more optimistic scenario....

Fukushima is worse than what we are being told. There is no doubt about that. How bad exactly it is may not become clear for years. Debates about its meaning are likely to stretch much longer. The crisis brings some fundamental questions about our system of social organization to the fore, and the answers may influence what the world looks like in the future.

The government plans to establish a ¥103 billion fund to track the health of all Fukushima Prefecture residents for 30 years, because of radiation leaking from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, government sources said Thursday.

Emergency vents praised by American officials as the devices which will save American nuclear plants from devastating hydrogen explosions were put to the test in Japan — and failed miserably.
Experts and officials at the Fukushima Daiichi plant that was left crippled by a large earthquake and massive tsunami said vents put in place to prevent hydrogen explosions have failed. These are the same vents praised by American officials and currently installed on most US nuclear plants....

The vents are not the only lesson American can learn from the Fukushima disaster. Following the tragedy a review of nuclear plants revealed that many US nuclear facilities did not meet basic safety and security standards.

Some California plants did not even have plans for how to respond in the case of a major earthquake or tsunami. In New York a plant had requested and been granted over 100 safety exceptions to evade certain requirements. Few US plants had any procedures in place to respond power outages on the site or other disasters.

In Japan, 80 percent of the population no longer trusts their government in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. A government which dragged its feet by releasing data in dribs and drabs to disguise the magnitude of the crisis, a government that now finds its self painted into a corner. The nuclear plants radioactivity is turning up in dangerous amounts in products, in sewage and in Tokyo proper. From a clean up stand point it has become far worse than Chernobyl, the Fukushima plant is still hot and the water sprayed to stabilize the situation releases radioactive steam which rises up into the atmosphere. The cooling water then itself becomes radioactive toxic waste, leaking into the oceans.

The Japanese government plans to scrape off the topsoil from contaminated school grounds and to replace it with clean soil and provide the school children with radiation badges. So it's really no wonder, why the government has lost the people's trust. What parent would accept such a solution for their children? The government's actions have been so inadequate and callous in favoring the needs of the corporation over the needs of its people that the losses and damage will now continue in Japan for generations to come. The Japanese products once admired around the world for their quality now face international skepticism for fear of radioactivity.