Can’t say I’m surprised. Of course, I never cease to be appalled. When it’s someone else’s child or spouse, suffering and death is much more tolerable.

Don’t let me suggest that nuclear power advocates avoid such concerns by either dismissing them (like your libertarian acquaintance), or by blurring the nature and scope of the horror we’re witnessing with irrelevancies and abstractions. Because to suggest that would portray them as easing their consciences by callously wishing away the pain of others.

It’s not polite to suggest that kind of thing.

Oh, don’t worry about that. As a pro-nuclear libertarian informed me today, thyroid cancer is actually no more serious than a case of the flu. Really.

So far, all we have are estimates and very spotty measurements. I think that is unconscionable that better measurements are not available. I am sure the US military has such equipment. I am sure the French have such equipment, and the French have offered to help. Why it isn’t being used to map the radiation field is not something I understand.

The Japanese diet is higher in iodine than the Russian and Ukrainian diet, they did get KI to many of the exposed individuals quickly. Without knowing actual doses any estimates of health problems are pure guess work. Some people guess low, some people guess high. Guesses are not helping.

There is lots that can be done right now to mitigate health effects. The population was evacuated. The evacuated people have greatly reduced exposure compared to what they would have received had they not evacuated. They have received KI. That will tend to suppress absorption of I131. There are drugs that can be used to increase excretion of cesium. Those should be considered too, but as I remember they have side effects that need to be considered too.

All you need to do to avoid adverse health effects from radiation is avoid being exposed. Radiation is easy to measure. They should greatly increase the number of radiation monitoring stations.

What this does show is the danger in leaving spent fuel at utility power plants. That spent fuel should be moved off site as soon as possible to someplace where it is more secure. That is something that could be done quickly and should be done quickly at this plant and at other power plants, including power plants in the US. That is there are few if any technical issues to moving that spent fuel off site. There are many political and social issues. All the technical issues can be dealt with. The social and political issues are much more difficult.

What they should be doing is putting down lots of clinoptilite. Clinoptilite is a zeolite that adsorbs cesium. Not so well from sea water, but very well from fresh water. That would suppress the migration of cesium into the soil, into the water, and into the air.

They need to get shielded places near the facility where workers can be and still work. They need to get shielding in the plant to absorb some of the radiation so that workers can get in there and remove the radioactive materials, put shielding around them and move them to another place.

They need some portable tanks to put the contaminated water in. They need water treatment facilities to start removing radioactivity from that water.

What they need to do is not rocket science, but they need to have been doing it for weeks now. They can’t wait for the â??leaderâ? at the top of the social hierarchy to decide what to do. That is the problem with top-down hierarchies. If you want to find the bottle neck, look at the top of the bottle.

I did note that you posed the question the way a good engineer would– how do we solve the problem?

The thing is, the way the problems appear to me, there’s a good chance that they simply won’t be solved.

Certainly there is nothing to be done about the health effects that are already going to occur for the next several decades. They are simply going to happen, even as people move away from the immediate vicinity of the plant.

The problem of downplaying the seriousness of the health effects is addressed simply enough– stop downplaying them. There will need to be monitoring for years, and if I were running Japan, Tokyo Electric would set up a fund, and will pay into it in perpetuity (multiple generations) to meet all the healthcare needs of affected individuals.

The environmental disaster will be worsening for years. The reason, a few comments back, I posted the link to research on wetlands on the Irish coast (following an accident with substantial radiation release), is because the presence of radioactive materials was not only two orders of magnitude over legal limits– 40 years after the fact– weather conditions locally would stir up silt, and there can be periodic spikes in levels; the biologists were indicating the population declines of some birds seemed to be associated with this.

We can expect this along the east coast of Honshu, in the estuaries, and immediately offshore; nobody should be relying on dilution to cause a gradual decline. Because the release from Daiichi is continuing unabated, the total amount dispersed in the groundwater, soil, and sea is going to be on the order of tons.

The problem of the smoldering reactor cores?

The only solution that ever made sense– they need to be buried. But even that is only a partial solution, because some leaching of materials through the rock and soil will continue for hundreds of years, at least(you might not have read when I mentioned the effects of fracking on rock, and how easily toxic fluids travel miles, without seeming to be impeded by surface elevation variations).

If you have any better solutions, as I said, I’m all ears.

Before we can solve the problem, we have to identify the nature of it:

(from:http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2011/04/fukushima_update_did_nuclear_c.html)

“There is growing evidence that uranium and plutonium fuel at the Fukushima nuclear plant may have continued nuclear fission chain reactions long after the reactors were shut down almost three weeks ago. This worrying development may explain the continued release of some shorter-lived radioisotopes from the stricken site.

Tepco, the plant operator, said earlier this week that it had â?? on 13 occasions â?? detected beams of neutrons near the reactors. Neutrons are produced during fission of nuclear fuel, and are the key driver of the chain reaction that sustains continuous fission reactions in a reactor.
Japan Today reports that “the neutron beam was measured about 1.5 kilometers southwest of the plantâ??s No. 1 and 2 reactors over three days from March 13.”

The neutron beam didn’t pack much of a punch â?? if anyone got in its way, it would likely deliver a dose of just 0.01 to 0.02 microsieverts per hour. But the finding tallies with a recent analysis of other isotopes found at the plant, published in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, hones in on the significance of a very short-lived radioisotope, chlorine-38, in the water in the turbine building of reactor 1.
In an introduction to the analysis, Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, an energy and environment information-provider based in Takoma Park, Maryland, explains:

Chlorine-38, which has a half-life of only 37 minutes, is created when stable chlorine-37, which is about one-fourth of the chlorine in salt, absorbs a neutron. Since seawater has been used to cool [the reactors], there is now a large amount of salt â?? thousands of kilograms â?? in all three reactors. Now, if a reactor is truly shut down, there is only one source of neutrons â?? spontaneous fission of some heavy metals that are created when the reactor is working that are present in the reactor fuel. The most important ones are two isotopes of plutonium and two of curium.

But if accidental chain reactions are occurring, it means that the efforts to completely shut down the reactor by mixing boron with the seawater have not completely succeeded. Periodic criticalities, or even a single accidental one, would mean that highly radioactive fission and activation products are being (or have been) created at least in Unit 1 since it was shut down. It would also mean that one or more intense bursts of neutrons, which cause heavy radiation damage to people, have occurred and possibly could occur again, unless the mechanism is understood and measures taken to prevent it. Measures would also need to be taken to protect workers and to measure potential neutron and gamma radiation exposure.”

(http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2011/04/fukushima_update_more_radiatio.html)

“Yesterday, Kyodo News reported that the first groundwater contamination at the Fukushima power plant had been detected, and cited levels 10,000 times the legal limits. The number came from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the plant operator.

Today, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that Tepco’s data was wrong, although there is little doubt that groundwater has been contaminated. According to Kyodo News:

Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the governmental nuclear regulatory body, said it was ”extremely regrettable” that TEPCO had given incorrect radiation data at the plant for the second time. The agency has strongly warned the operator over the matter and urged it to take steps not to do so again, he added.”

Here’s the first problem, as I see it. Material from the core of at least one, maybe two or three Daiichi reactors, has entered the soil directly, because of full meltdown, and damage to the containment structures caused by the direct effects of the 9.0M earthquake. This has been happening probably for the last two weeks. Surface runoff from the spraying operations are compounding the problem, but not the primary source of groundwater contamination.

Those materials have begun percolating through the soil, entering the aquifer. The contaminated water is therefore spreading, and will continue to do so. Since there is no effective containment of the affected reactors at this point, contamination will continue to increase.

If you know the best way to access those exposed cores, which may be periodically undergoing fission, and to re-establish containment, given the present conditions on the site, I’m all ears.

The second problem is how severe the health effects will be, both on Honshu, and globally.

(http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20285-fukushima-radioactive-fallout-nears-chernobyl-levels.html)

â??Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors â?? designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests â?? to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.

In the 10 days it burned, Chernobyl put out 1.76 Ã? 1018 becquerels of iodine-131, which amounts to only 50 per cent more per day than has been calculated for Fukushima Daiichi. It is not yet clear how long emissions from the Japanese plant will continue.

Similarly, says Wotawa, caesium-137 emissions are on the same order of magnitude as at Chernobyl. The Sacramento readings suggest it has emitted 5 Ã? 1015 becquerels of caesium-137 per day; Chernobyl put out 8.5 Ã? 1016 in total â?? around 70 per cent more per day.

“This is not surprising,” says Wotawa. “When the fuel is damaged there is no reason for the volatile elements not to escape,” and the measured caesium and iodine are in the right ratios for the fuel used by the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. Also, the Fukushima plant has around 1760 tonnes of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site, and an unknown amount has been damaged. The Chernobyl reactor had only 180 tonnes.

The Chernobyl accident emitted much more radioactivity and a wider diversity of radioactive elements than Fukushima Daiichi has so far, but it was iodine and caesium that caused most of the health risk â?? especially outside the immediate area of the Chernobyl plant, says Malcolm Crick, secretary of a United Nations body that has just reviewed the health effects of Chernobyl. Unlike other elements, he says, they were carried far and wide by the wind.

Moreover the human body absorbs iodine and caesium readily. “Essentially all the iodine or caesium inhaled or swallowed crosses into the blood,” says Keith Baverstock, former head of radiation protection for the World Health Organization’s European office, who has studied Chernobyl’s health effects.

Iodine is rapidly absorbed by the thyroid, and leaves only as it decays radioactively, with a half-life of eight days. Caesium is absorbed by muscles, where its half-life of 30 years means that it remains until it is excreted by the body. It takes between 10 and 100 days to excrete half of what has been consumed.

While in the body the isotopes’ radioactive emissions can do significant damage, mainly to DNA. Children who ingest iodine-131 can develop thyroid cancer 10 or more years later; adults seem relatively resistant. A study published in the US last week found that iodine-131 from Chernobyl is still causing new cases of thyroid cancer to appear at an undiminished rate in the most heavily affected regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Caesium-137 lingers in the environment because of its long half-life. Researchers are divided over how much damage environmental exposure to low doses has done since Chernobyl. Some researchers think it could still cause thousands of new cases of cancer across Europe.�

Are you prepared to stop downplaying the seriousness of the health effects? We’re talking thousands of cases of cancer, hundreds if not thousands of deaths, hundreds or thousands of miscarriages, and thousands of birth defects. That’s the record from Chernobyl, and those numbers are still going up.

As we sit here today, with all the information you have, are your prepared still to say Daiichi’s health effects won’t be as bad? Based on what?

There is data and there is interpretation of data. All theory is only interpretation of data. The adoption of the LNT by the NAS is an interpretation. It is not data.

There is such a thing as natural background radiation, something you appear to want to neglect and ignore. Is there a difference between â??naturalâ? radiation such as from potassium 40 (1.35 MeV beta) and â??unnaturalâ? radiation as from cesium 137 (1.18 MeV beta)?

The average person has about 4400 Bk of K40 inside them.

http://rerowland.com/K40.html

Is that 4400 Bk of K40 a hazard? According to the LNT idea it must be. Does the NAS treat the 4400 Bk of K40 that people have inside them as a hazard? The RDA for potassium is 4.7 grams per day. That is ~150 Bk per day. Is ingestion of 150 Bk of K40 a hazard? How does the hazard of ingesting 150 Bk of K40 compare with ingesting 15 Bk of Cs137?

If the LNT is correct, why doesn’t the FDA require that food be labeled so that people can know how many Bk of K40 they are ingesting?

And if can’t measure it, it must not cause damage.

It takes precisely one ion to damage DNA.

Really, what do you make of the National Academy of the Sciences statement, surveying the available research, that there is no level of ionoizing radiation that can be considered safe (whether you can measure it in the field or not)?

I’m calling it like I see it. As I’ve said before, I think Daedalus appears bright and well informed, but rigid in adhereing to what appear to be pre-conceived notions of ‘what should be happening’ at Daiichi. He seems unwilling to consider alternative scenarios.

“Of course, it doesn’t help either to treat the information coming from a heavily invested source like TEPCO as straightforward “facts.””

If you look back at what I’ve been saying, this is the issue I’ve been trying to elucidate– everyone who has built a career in nuclear engineering, especially in some part of the nuclear industry (and a good bit of the regulatory oversight agencies), are ‘heavily invested’.

I’ve suggested that this is true not simply in professional and financial terms, but in psychological terms as well– the worldview that allows someone to be a nuclear advocate, and their view of themselves as a ‘person of goodwill’, would be resistant to information that suggests that nuclear reactors can’t be made inherently safe through any amount of engineering, they’re never been inherently safe (if the historical record is actually taken into account), and there is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation, only how much exposure we keep permitting from unnecessary sources.

So I don’t think I’ve been out of bounds in my statements, we are talking about a life and death issue affecting all of us, and I’m deeply concerned that the same thinking that brought us here would go unchallenged. It’s neither reasonable or scientific to suggest otherwise.

So, unless Mr. Laden requests it (it’s his blog), I’m not inclined to stand down.