May 27th, various morning reports:
May 27th 10:00 AM JST
TEPCO reports (Every time they work on repairing electrical wiring this happens, partially due to the corrosive effects of having been immersed in seawater). Everything is OK now. THIS IS AT DAINI, not DAIICHI.
At approximately 10:01 am, May 27th, 2011, a fire was found at the distribution switchboard for lighting located in the power panel room for the high pressure core spray system on the first basement level of the Reactor Building Annex Area of Unit 1 which has been shutdown. At 10:04 am, workers of a partner company extinguished the fire and the operator of TEPCO confirmed it. Afterward, at 10:08 am, we reported it to the fire station. The fire station will conduct a site confirmation. There were no injured persons from this incident. There was no impact in terms of the external release of radioactive substances from this incident.
They are continuing to drop the amount of water being injected into Unit 3, but the temperatue has stayed low.
At 8:52 pm on May 26th, we changed the rate of water injection to the reactor through the fire extinction system piping arrangement from approximately 3 m3/h to approximately 2 m3/h. - The current rate of water injection is approximately 2 m3/h through the fire extinction system piping arrangement and approximately 13.5 m3/h through the reactor feed water system piping arrangement
And it looks like the building is now full that they are pumping to from Unit 2 (at least that is what I am guessing)
Since 10:08 am on April 19, we had been transferring high level radioactive wastewater from the vertical shaft near the turbine building of Unit 2 to the Centralized Radiation Waste Treatment Facility. At 4:01 pm on May 26, a transferring operation was stopped
And from NHK on the subject of the leak in the Unit 3 makeshift tank building:. What did you think they were going to do? Let it just dribble? Maybe. The water is leaking into a passage. If the passage can be leak proofed, then it just becomes part of the whole Buildings As Water Storage Tanks complex that they are constructing. If you think about it, that's how the Unit 2 and Unit 3 pipe chases and basements and so forth are functioning now, in addition to the two buildings they are using explicitly as tanks.
TEPCO may need to plug leak at Fukushima plantThe operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant says highly radioactive water continues to leak from a waste disposal facility in the complex.
Tokyo Electric Power Company said on Friday that the water level had dropped by around 3 centimeters as of 7 AM from the level observed at 5 PM on Thursday.
TEPCO had transferred to the facility some of the highly radioactive water flooding the basement of the No.3 reactor's turbine building and nearby tunnel, before it suspended the work earlier this week.
On Thursday, the transferred water was found to be leaking into an underground passage to another building.
The utility firm says it is likely that the water level in the facility will stop falling, but added that it may need to plug the leaks.
The work is expected to be difficult as radiation levels of up to 70 millisieverts per hour have been detected on the water's surface.
TEPCO also faces the urgent task of preventing the contaminated water around the No.3 reactor from spilling into the sea or underground.
Friday, May 27, 2011 12:16 +0900 (JST)
And the G8 and Sarkozy are willing to help Japan
Sarkozy:G8 willing to help Japan
French President Nicolas Sarkozy says Group of Eight leaders have offered Japan their support as it strives to reconstruct itself in the wake of the March disaster and the ensuing nuclear crisis.
Sarkozy is chairing the 2-day G8 summit taking place in the French city of Deauville. He spoke to reporters on Thursday evening about discussions on the first day.
Sarkozy stressed the 7 countries' readiness to support Japan in its efforts to tackle the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant and restore the economy in the wake of the disaster.
The French leader said many of the G8 countries, while recognizing the need to develop renewable energy, think there is no alternative to nuclear power.
Sarkozy added that the leaders are aware there should be enhanced international standards on nuclear safety and are engaged in discussions toward this goal.
France has been promoting nuclear power generation as a national policy.
G8 comprises Italy, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States.
Friday, May 27, 2011 09:24 +0900 (JST)
And this is good (at least I think so!) I'm glad to see a university doing some decent data collection. One reason that conclusions about radiation effects of Chernobyl are so highly disputed is that data collection about the doses that people received are very badly documented.
And the board of education is exactly right: If parents know their kids haven't yet been overexposed, their fears will be eased, which is an excellent thing.
Radiation monitors given to Kawamata children
A town near the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will distribute dosimeters to all school children and monitor their radiation exposure.
Kawamata Town will deliver the dosimeters to about 1,500 children at local kindergartens, day care centers, elementary and junior high schools. Part of the town falls within the evacuation zone around the stricken plant.
Children will be asked to put on the monitors to measure their radiation exposure. The data will be sent once a month to laboratories to check their cumulative levels of exposure.The dosimeters will be provided by Kinki University, which has proposed to measure radiation levels of soil on school grounds.
The Fukushima prefectural board of education says this will be the first municipality in the prefecture to provide radiation gauges to every child.
The town's board of education says it hopes the move will help to ease the fears of parents.
Friday, May 27, 2011 10:11 +0900 (JST)
And the screenings should also relieve people's fears, too.
190,000 get radioactive screenings
Fukushima Prefecture, location of the troubled nuclear power plant, says it had conducted radioactive screenings of more than 190,000 people by Wednesday.
That is about one-tenth of the prefecture's population.
The prefecture began the screening service at welfare centers and other locations on March 13th. It uses special equipment to scan a person's entire body and even the soles of the shoes for radioactive contamination. The prefecture says many of those who come for the screenings are residents with health concerns or persons who make business trips to the prefecture and want to be checked before leaving.
A Fukushima resident in his 60s who received the test on Friday said he was relieved to find he was not contaminated.
Friday, May 27, 2011 14:11 +0900 (JST)
and
Govt to reduce school ground radiation levels
Japan's education minister says the government will strive to keep cumulative radiation levels at school grounds in Fukushima Prefecture below one millisievert per year. The prefecture is home to the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Yoshiaki Takaki also told reporters on Friday that if the levels exceed a benchmark of one microsievert per hour, the topsoil will be removed, and most of the cost will be paid for by the government. Removing the surface soil is said to be an effective method of limiting the radiation exposure of children who use the school grounds.
The government had earlier set a yearly limit of 20 millisieverts of accumulated external radiation for children taking part in outdoor activities. But parents have protested the decision.
Twenty millisieverts per year is in line with the levels set by the International Commission for Radiological Protection when dealing with emergency situations, although it recommends one millisievert per year as a benchmark.
Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato welcomed the decision. He stressed that the government should shoulder the cost of achieving the goal, saying that nuclear power generation has been promoted as a national policy.
Friday, May 27, 2011 13:45 +0900 (JST)
And yes, this is the problem with having a "benchmark" that is unachievable in many places. What if Denver, Colorado, had had a nuclear accident? It's over the limit to start with. 100 milliSieverts per hour is the first point at which anyone claims statistical meaningful correlation between exposure and cancer rates-and even at that point it is disputed.
Really, all the data where the dose people got is well known is from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. And in that case, the dose is well known, because people know exactly where they were when the bomb went off,. However, they received a high dose in one narrow period of time, so that circumstance is well characterized, but extrapolating that data to a low dose received continuously over time is quite a stretch.
1. Consider the case of heat. If you put your hand on a hotplate, and its elements are at 200C, you will get a very bad burn, all in a moment. However, if you hold your hand on a hot plate at 30 C all year long, nothing happens at all, even though the temperature is elevated above room temperature. While that may not be how low leverl exposure to radiation works, it may be. The research really has not been done in a way that the results are inarguable.
2. The people are not the same. The people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a people at the end of a long and debilitating war. There were severe food shortages in Japan, and people were probably worn out from depression and stress.
http://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/content.cfm/food_rations
At the end of World War II, citizens throughout Japan suffered from poverty, hunger, and food shortages. In order to help distribute food, Japanese people were given assigned rations. In reality, living just on the rationed food often did not provide adequate nourishment, and a thriving black market developed amidst the constant food shortages. In this photograph, taken on Sept. 21, 1945 in Tokyo, just after the end of the war, the people lined up are waiting for their rations of beans, as rice was not available to them at this time. The bottles they were carrying were used to transport clean water.
In Hiroshima, food shortages were acute:
http://atomicbombmuseum.org/4_ruins.shtml
When food scarcity became especially acute in the summer of 1946, the city imposed compulsory evacuation of 50,000 people to surrounding farm villages, and arranged for relief rice supplies to be provided.
As we've discussed before, your body (and for that matter the bodies of animals) prefers calcium and potassium and non radioactive iodine to strontium, cesium, and radioactive iodine. This is why Connecticut advises dairy farmers in the case of a nuclear accident to give the maximum amount of calcium to their cattle. The cattle will not store as much strontium or plutonium if they are not calcium deficient.
However, if you are eating a diet deficient in calcium, potassium, and non-radioactive iodine, more of the radioactive materials will be stored in your bones (strontium & plutonium), in your muscles, primarily, and liver and spleen secondarily (cesium) and in your thyroid (radioactive iodine) than in a properly nourished person, where much, if not all of the substances, just pass through him. It's likely then, that the effects of ingesting radioactive materials will be more severe in a malnourished person, such as many of those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time the bomb fell and during the first few years afterward. I would worry particularly about children born during the War, who might never have had adequate nutrition until siginificantly long after the War.
The state of the health of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki does not invalidate the results of the studies done on them, but it does not clarify whether they would have more cancers (or the same) due to radiation than in an adequately nourished population, as to date, there has been no proper control group.
3. The fallout materials are not the same:
Furthermore, what cancers they experienced depend partially on what radioactive materials they experienced. A person exposed only to Iodine 131 for example, would be more likely to get thyroid cancer than leukemia, while a person exposed to more strontium internally would be more likely to get leukemia.
Consequently, the material people were exposed to at Hiroshima (mainly a huge blast of gamma radiation) and what people were exposed to at Chernobyl (long term fallout of iodine, cesium, strontium and plutonium) and now in Fukushima prefecture (mostly iodine and cesium, with a little bit of strontium in some of the worst areas) may show different results.
There are adjustment factors in dosing to adjust for the different types of radiation produced by different radioactive materials, and adjustments have to be made between "internal dose" (due to radioactive materials having been incorporated either temporarily or permanently into your body) and "external dose".
From what I have read to date, I don't really believe we have advanced much from what was known in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan. 1958,"Somatic Effects of Radiation," by Austin M. Brues, Pages 12 to 14
http://books.google.com/books?id=dQ...m=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
The above page discusses at length the inconsistencies in research in 1958. Mice exposed at low doses actually lived longer. Mice who were exposed over their whole bodies to a higher dose got leukemia, but mice exposed over half of their body did not get leukemia. A Dr. Lewis was advocating what we'd call now the Linear No Threshold theory, but though many other people subscribed to that theory, many others found significant inconsistencies in it. Lewis studied data from infants whose thymus had been irradiated, patients who had received heavy radiation for spinal arthritis, people who were in the three central zones at Hiroshima, and in radiologists, and was looking at the incidence of leukemia. (Notice that other than the radiologists, the doses were received in high amounts for a limited number of times). And the radiologists were not getting a low, continuous dose either, nor was their actual dose known, especially prior to 1950.
The author says:
"It would not seem necessary to devote so much space to a critique of this particular aspect of a broad subject, were it not that Lewis' tentative hypothesis has met with wide acclaim and acceptance as a proven fact by scientists with less familiarity with the subject who have undertaken to predict categorically that so-and-so many case of leukemia have caused by very small additions to the natural radiation background. This has been used as an argument against the continuation of bomb tests; it might only be observed that much stronger arguments can be brought both for and against tests than this very tenuous and sentimentally loaded one."
A recent article on cancer in radiologists:
http://radiology.rsna.org/content/233/2/313.full
"The authors reviewed epidemiologic data on cancer risks from eight cohorts of over 270,000 radiologists and technologists in various countries. The most consistent finding was increased mortality due to leukemia among early workers employed before 1950, when radiation exposures were high. This, together with an increasing risk of leukemia with increasing duration of work in the early years, provided evidence of an excess risk of leukemia associated with occupational radiation exposure in that period. While findings on several types of solid cancers were less consistent, several studies provided evidence of a radiation effect for breast cancer and skin cancer. To date, there is no clear evidence of an increased cancer risk in medical radiation workers exposed to current levels of radiation doses."
Which of course, leads people to argue that there is or is not a threshold, or there is or is not a linear relationship. In the early years, where cancers were definitely found, dosing of radiologists had little hard data. In that era, your have for example, Marie Curie carrying around a bottle with radium in it in her pocket all the time so that she could show it to people. And doses were measured by how red your skin might have gotten when you were exposed. It was not very exact. In the later periods, when no clear cancer risk could be found, and dosing measurements were fairly reliable, people were trying to keep the dose low enough so that they didn't get cancer, and they didn't.
And you can't be definitive about cancer risks till all of the members of a particular cohort have died. Even the BEIR study in Japan is not definitive yet, because there still are a large number of survivors of the bomb blast.
In Chernobyl, the effects are opposite: men especially tend to die of the effects of smoking and drinking prior to when any of the "large cancers" (i.e. not thyroid or leukemia) would typically appear.
In the article following Brue's in the 1958 January Journal of the Atomic Scientists, the following is said:
In the next article in the same issue:
"Brues argues very capably that the dose response curve shouldn't be linear, and that Lewis' analysis doesn't prove that it is. Lewis argues that the response curve could be linear, and by his analyis, it may be. The point we wish to make here is that the data available now cannot prove anything."
Sadly, that is still true. The same arguments are made. Here in Fukushima, there is a chance for definitive data to be gathered on low exposure over a long time to people who are in a good state of health. The delay in gathering it has already been too long.
