Doris, this is how my mind runs. When you mentioned truffles as dangerous, I immediately thought of chocolate truffles. I am a hopeless case.
Olympia,
I'm just thankful that nothing seems to have affected the world's chocolate supply, myself.
When I think about truffles these days, it interests me that we hear all about the cesium in German truffles, but there is a complete silence about Italian and French truffles, and I wonder whether that is because the Italians eat and export the truffles, while the Germans complain that the wild boar have too much cesium to eat. Fortunately, considering the price of truffles, I doubt anyone will be harmed by too much consumption of radioactive truffles.
The point you spotlight about how TEPCO could only act on information from seismologists is an edifying one. Certainly you can't expect experts in business or nuclear power to know more about earth stresses than experts in earth stresses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, though. (And keep in mind that I'm not arguing against your point.) Wasn't most of the damage to the actual plants due to the tsunami, not the earthquake? It was the lack of tsunami protection, not the lack of quake reinforcement, that did the plants in. Not that I'm saying TEPCO should be blamed for that, but even the hugely greater intensity of the quake didn't affect the outcome. It was the height of the wave, which swamped the protective walls. I don't know what that means in terms of how things could have been predicted--it still would be something seismologists should have calculated, not the TEPCO business folk, I guess. .
That's substantially right, but the bigger the earthquake, the more the ocean floor displacement and the bigger the wave. If you think the earthquake will be smaller, you also think the wave would be smaller. The type of quake would have been known, because the fault in question was a known subduction fault.
Tsunami Facts from the Tsunami information center
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0930274.html
By far, the most destructive tsunamis are generated from large, shallow earthquakes with an epicenter or fault line near or on the ocean floor. These usually occur in regions of the earth characterized by tectonic subduction along tectonic plate boundaries. The high seismicity of such regions is caused by the collision of tectonic plates. When these plates move past each other, they cause large earthquakes, which tilt, offset, or displace large areas of the ocean floor from a few kilometers to as much as a 1,000 km or more. The sudden vertical displacements over such large areas disturb the ocean's surface, displace water, and generate destructive tsunami waves
This is also a question asked frequently from UNESCO about what determines whether a tsunami will cause damage when it hits shore.
http://ioc3.unesco.org/itic/contents.php?id=206
The wave height from a tsunami is contingent upon how much the sea floor drops or rises, thus displacing the sea water, causing a wave. If the sea floor height changes a lot, over a large area, there will be a bigger tsunami. And the bigger the earthquake, the more likely the sea floor is to change. This occurs at subduction faults, so one continental plate is sliding under another, and everything changes. By definition, this occurs at the surface of the earth, so it is shallow.
The height near the shore depends a lot on the structure of the shoreline. As the wave gets into shallower water, it's height increases, and there can be refraction from the coastline, causing constructive interference, and hence higher waves.
It's good to hear that all the plants are pretty much in cold shutdown. Also, as you have been pointing out, it's good to think that the body can deal with some radiation. But I'm still troubled by the fact that if a plant is really damaged, as Chernobyl was and as these plants have been, they become unusable pretty much forever, and of course the land can't be re-used for anything else.
"Forever" This really isn't true at all. Cesium has a 30 year half life, and will be soon gone from a geologic point of view, but there's more. In fact, the Ukraine is considering opening the Chernobyl evacuation regions this year to resettlement, without there having been any significant cleanup. With a cleanup,even the land adjacent to the plants can be again usable. And as to the area near the plants, Ukraine, and before it the USSR, kept the other nuclear plants in the Chernobyl complex working up until about 2002, and cleaned up the area sufficiently that they could do that. And Fukushima is 1/10 of Chernobyl.
The real question is human fear and worry:
The important question, then, is what level of radiation is damaging to the human body, and what level of radiation you would not worry about, which is, I suppose, a personal decision.
The BEIR study on 100,000 people affected by Hiroshima & Nagasaki was unable to show any increase in any diseases for a single dose of 100 milliSieverts or below. That study included infants and everyone else.
Now a single dose of a toxin is more damaging than small continous doses because your body has repair mechanisms. If you take 100 aspirin all at once, you will have significant problems, and probably die. If you take one aspirin a day, provided that you are not oversensitive to aspirin, you will have less cardiovascular problems, and less arthritis pain, and you can do that indefinitely. Radiation would only work differently than taking, say, aspirin, if the body did not have repair mechanisms for radiation damage. But it does, which is why radiation therapy for cancer works.
Consequently, I would be quite happy to live in an area where the dose level is 100 milliSieverts per year, give or take 10%. What dose per year would worry you? Seriously. I hope you will post an answer.
And 100 milliSieverts per year is 11.4 microSieverts per hour, and almost everywhere outside the plant boundaries and a narrow swath that runs out to the northeast of the plant about 10 km is less than that.
Here's the monitoring points that the government is running. There are more to come. You can click on the points on the map and see what the value of the radiation measurements at each point is. And if you click on the Japanese characters for each, you get a trend chart. There is only one point on this map where I'd think twice about living, and that is about 8 km from the plant, to the northeast (14.4 microSieverts/hour). In fact, I wouldn't mind camping at four of the 8 points on the plant's periphery.
http://www.r-monitor.jp/
How much land do we have to spare on this planet? ...I retain my worries.
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So do I, and that is one of the reasons that I prefer nuclear power. The fact is that all methods of providing power make areas of land unavailable for other uses. Nuclear, even when there's an accident included in the calculations, damages the environment the least, both in normal operation, and after an accident:
This article makes the case clear on hydroelectric dams:
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/12/w...ost-of-electricity.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Hydroquebec dams in Canada flooded and killed everything over a large area. This is a permanent loss of land:
The giant utility, owned by the province, wants to expand its hydroelectric operations in northern Quebec dramatically by building dams on the Great Whale River, a focus of Cree life. Hydro-Quebec contemplates flooding several hundred square miles and altering the flow of 300 miles of wild river, actions conservationists say would cut out the ecological heart of a rocky region the size of Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire
...Reservoir creation eliminated or disrupted many traditional hunting and trapping grounds, the Crees say. In Chisasibi, near La Grande, many Crees can't go back to where their ancestors used to hunt. ''It's all under water,'' said Matthew Coon Come, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees, who number 10,000 in Quebec.
...
Mercury released from rotting vegetation in the new reservoirs has contaminated fish, a Cree staple.
The Crees wanted no part of development and fought it in the courts to no avail. In 1975, as part of a resolution of land disputes spanning decades, they signed an agreement under which they gave up claims to all but 5,400 of 410,000 million square miles
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And dreadful damage is done by dams when they break, as they did at Banqaio in China:
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm
Altogether 62 dams broke. Downstream the dikes and flood diversion projects could not resist such a deluge. They broke as well and the flood spread over more than a million hectares (3,861 square miles) of farm land throughout 29 counties and municipalities. One can imagine the terrible predicament of the city of Huaibin where the waters from the Hong and Ru Rivers came together. Eleven million people Throughout the region were severely affected. Over 85 thousand died as a result of the dam failures. There was little or no time for warnings. The wall of water was traveling at about 50 kilometers per hour or about 14 meters per second.
Solar destroys an even larger area of land in normal operation:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080619/NEWS/806190405/1661
“More than 3,000 Florida homes could begin using clean energy by the end of 2009 if Florida Power & Light receives permission to build a solar power plant in DeSoto County, north of Arcadia.
The proposed solar array, on 1,525 of 13,500 acres the company owns near the Hardee County line, would be the largest photovoltaic power plant in the world at 25 megawatts, according to FPL filings with the Florida Public Service Commission”
The new DeSoto Solar power plant will cover 1,525 acres of ground with solar panels, thus killing nearly all sunlight-needing plants on those 1,525 acres. Yes, check the article. The site is 13,500 acres. Just the solar panels cover 1,525 acres Just to give you the scale, 1,525 acres is 2.38 square miles of Florida real estate.
Yes, for each house on a one quarter acre lot, roughly another one quarter acre lot of the environment must be consumed to provide solar-panel-derived electricity for it. (Or it can be a front for a natural gas plant, which really supplies the electricity).
Natural gas also has its own ecological disasters:
http://www.wjla.com/blogs/weather/2...-s-largest-no-sign-of-stopping-soon-9695.html
The Sidoarjo, Indonesia, mud volcano for example, which was caused by natural gas drilling:
By its fifth-year anniversary in May, the mud volcano will have caused more than 13,000 families to become homeless and buried about 3 square miles (7.8 square kilometers or 1920 acres) of schools and cropland in sediment that’s 65 feet deep in places.
And coal mining has completely destroyed whole mountains here in the US:
This photo of mountain top removal style mines gives an idea of the scope of the problem. The site is completely destroyed:
http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/
Mountain Top Removal in the United States is most often associated with the extraction of coal in the Appalachian Mountains, where the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 2,200 square miles (5,700 km2) of Appalachian forests will be cleared for MTR sites by the year 2012
As you noted, the Ixtoc 1 oil spill, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the more recent Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill, oil destroyed a lot of land.
Meanwhile, the nuclear power station at Millstone powers half the state of Connecticut. The Millstone site covers about 500 acres (2 km²) on the site of an abandoned quarry. Most of that area is green belt, not power plants. And there is a retired third plant there, which could be rebuilt. (in which case, Millstone could power 3/4 of CT.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Millstone-Nuclear-Power-Plant/144341965580715
And curiously enough, the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima didn't destroy any land or environment. The trees and animals are doing fine. It's the people who are reluctant to go there. Some birds, like the white stork, which like to nest on roofs and do well in towns are less, and some like black storks, that perfer human-less spaces are more.
European Bison in Chernobyl
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-48047.html
Wild boar in Chernobyl
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-48047-4.html
Elk in Chernobyl
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-48047-7.html
Wolf in Chernobyl
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-48047-8.html
Prezewalski's Wild Horse in Chernobyl (sadly, hunters are now bold enough to go into the reserve and kill them)
http://blog.arkive.org/2011/07/in-the-news-przewalski’s-horses-poached-for-meat/
