No big Fukushima health impact seen: U.N. body (UNSCEAR) chairman

[FBaggins]

The health impact of last year's Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan appears relatively small thanks partly to prompt evacuations, the chairman of a U.N. scientific body investigating the effects of radiation said on Tuesday.

...snip...

"As far as the doses we have seen from the screening of the population ... they are very low," Weiss told Reuters. This was partly "due to the rapid evacuation and this worked very well." Weiss was speaking on the sidelines of a week-long meeting of 60 international experts in Vienna to assess for the United Nations the radiation exposures and health effects of the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years.

...snip...

Weiss said Japanese experts attending the meeting had told him that they were not aware of any acute health effects, in contrast to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. "What we have seen in Chernobyl - people were dying from huge, high exposures, some of the workers were dying very soon - nothing along these lines has been reported so far (in Japan)," he said. "Up to now there were no acute immediate effects observed."

Several thousand children developed thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure after the Chernobyl disaster in the then Soviet Union, when a reactor exploded and caught fire and radiation was sent billowing across Europe. Weiss said a few workers at Fukushima had received high radioactive doses, but "so far the initial medical follow-up of these workers who had high doses, as far as the Japanese colleagues told us, was OK."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/31/us-japan-fukushima-health-idUSTRE80U1AS20120131

[Vincardog]

1. Who remembers when we have a real functioning press? When lies were not permitted to

be printed and not rebutted?

[FBaggins]

2. The press has forever leaned toward stories that sell.

It was at this point, at around day three, that I realised that something had gone seriously wrong with the reporting of the biggest natural disaster to hit a major industrialised nation for a century. We had forgotten the real victims, the 20,000-and-counting Japanese people killed, in favour of a nuclear scare story.

...snip...

As Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, says: “The reporting of Fukushima was guided by the Cold War reflex that matched radiation with fear and mortal danger. Reactors have been destroyed, but the radiation at Fukushima has caused no loss of life and is unlikely to do so, even in the next 50 years. The voices of science and common sense on which the future of mankind depends were drowned out and remain to be heard, even today. The result has been unnecessary suffering and great socio-economic damage.”

Sometimes the media gets it wrong and we all have to hold our hands up here. Twenty thousand-plus people perished in a real disaster, people about whom we in the West have heard very little.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9094430/The-world-has-forgotten-the-real-victims-of-Fukushima.html

[TheWraith]

3. No shit.

Just as those of us who actually understand science said last year.

Of course the people who spent six months wetting themselves, buying boxed milk, talking about fallout killing babies in Iowa, and insisting that it was the end of life in the northern hemisphere--yes, that was said here seriously more than once--are never going to go back and admit that they were wrong or even that they overstated the situation.

[FBaggins]

4. Just wait until those cores make it to the water table!

Boom!

Japan becomes uninhabitable.

[wtmusic]

9. Breaking: the cores have made it to the table!

[intaglio]

5. To break up this little circle - of true believers

What is actually said that the evacuations have ameliorated the health disaster.

This does not prove nuclear power or radio-nucleotide pollution is safe.

I refer you to the article published in The Independent today.
Samples

... The reason is signalled by a symphony of beeping noises from dosimeters on our bus. As we drive through a police checkpoint and into the town of Tomioka, about 15km from the plant, the radioactivity climbs steadily, hitting 15 microsieverts per hour at the main gate to the nuclear complex. At the other end of the plant, where the gaping buildings of its three most damaged reactors face the Pacific Ocean, the radiation level is 100 times this high, making it still too dangerous to work there.

... "The worst time was when the radiation was 250 milisieverts [per year – the maximum, temporary government limit] and we couldn't find people to do the work," explains Kazuhiro Sakamoto, an onsite subcontractor. "We could only work in two-minute bursts, when we were extracting caesium from contaminated water."

... Japan's government has admitted that dismantling the reactors and its 260-ton payload of nuclear fuel will take up to 40 years. Many people believe the government and Tepco will eventually be forced to recognise that the people who fled from this plant a year ago may not return for decades. In the meantime, the work at Fukushima Daiichi goes on. And on.

Perhaps this item from Environmental Pollution quoted by Mother Jones might make you question your beliefs;

... Overall, as expected, the bird community in Fukushima declined significantly in the more contaminated areas.
For 14 species of birds that appeared in both Fukushima and Chernobyl, the decline in population size was more pronounced at Fukushima than Chernobyl.
Among all birds, including the species not common to both areas, more birds declined in Chernobyl than Fukushima.

As for thyroid implications the finding that 1/3 of children from the area have thyroid nodules doesn't seem to phase you in the slightest, especially as this is a high figure for children only and (amongst children) greater than 5% with nodules will develop carcinoma. To bring this into perspective the rate expected of thyroid cancer in Japan is 1.1 per 100,000 for men and 3.1 per 100,000 for women ( Source, Pubmed abstract )

Now add in Wartofski's paper from 2010 which implicates increased radiation doses in the worldwide increase in thyroid Cancers ( Source pdf )

Sorry to break up your little party with facts ...

[madokie]

6. You tried but they don't do FACTS

Their facts are bases on if you tell a lie long and loud enough it becomes fact when in reality that is as far from the truth as one can get. Good luck.

[wtmusic]

8. "1/3 of children from the area have thyroid nodules"

Source please.

[intaglio]

10. Original lead was from DU

but I chased it onwards. Unfortunately I do not speak Japanese to check the partial translation I found against the pdf source documents but for what it is worth here are the links.

Fourscore's original thread on DU
The Ene News article quoting Gundersen this includes audio of the "Planet Radio" interview.
The Ex-SKF source for the (partial) translation
and finally the pdf of the Prefecture's expert committee The tables are in arabic notation and do not seem to jibe with Ex-SKF's take on them.

[kristopher]

11. ExSKF provided an accurate translation.

I don't see what you think is out of whack.

ETA: Are you looking at page 5?

[FBaggins]

14. No... It really didn't

He doesn't have the necessary vocabulary

What he actually did was confuse the issue.

[kristopher]

17. It is an accurate translation.

[FBaggins]

18. Not that you would know

You don't have the vocabulary either.

His piece isn't even internally consistent between his two sources.

[kristopher]

19. Where and for how long did you study Japanese?

It is an accurate translation.

[FBaggins]

20. You could be fluent in both and still not have the vocabulary.

Japanese to English isn't the problem. It's the technical/medical vocabulary that he lacks.

It's like your error a couple weeks ago. It doesn't matter how well you speak English... If you don't know what a 2nd derivative is, you can't translate it into another language.

It was clear that his second source didn't understand the original data... And he used that to clarify his misunderstanding of the first source. He didn't understand why the data was in four categories so he erroneously accepted a source that he thought clarified the problem (and thus went astray).

His vocabulary problem came long before the translation.

[kristopher]

22. You are talking nonsense.

Trying to sound like you have something to say isn't the same as having something to say.

Be specific or admit you are wrong.

PS you were full of it "a couple of weeks ago" also when you tried the same tactic.

[PamW]

23. BALONEY!!

PS you were full of it "a couple of weeks ago" also when you tried the same tactic.
==================

Kris,

Admit it - you do NOT know differential calculus.

From what I've seen; you never took college-level mathematics, and probably not the college-track mathematics in high school.

If you haven't studied the mathematics and are familiar and use those concepts; then you are not going to understand the meaning when somebody uses those concepts in an argument on this forum.

If someone bases their argument on the fact that the sine function or cosine function is limited in magnitude to unity; and you don't know what a sine function or a cosine function is in the first place; then you just flat can NOT UNDERSTAND the argument.

How come you never admit that you are wrong when you are?

PamW

[wtmusic]

12. And it was completely debunked

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002310724#post14

Any information coming from Arnie Gundersen or Helen Caldicott can be safely ignored.

[intaglio]

16. You have a very low standard for debunking

A blanket declaration that someone is "wrong" is most definitely NOT debunking, it is but a statement of opinion and, probably, bias. Quoting a translation without quoting the source of the translation is dubious and possibly deceiving. The meme says it best "citation needed,"

Assume Baggins is correct in his assertion, although I would like to see a link to the translation he quotes, then of those 86 a generous 5% will develop thyroid cancer (10% is more likely) that is some 4 youngsters out of 3,800; a rate of worse than one in 1000. I repeat the normal rate of thyroid carcinoma in Japanese populations is 1.1 per 100,000 for men and 3.1 per 100,000 for women.

Now not only did I post original links I also I have posted other relevant research yet you seem to find such unworthy of comment. Additionally the report from The Independent indicates it will be several decades at best before large areas of Fukushima Prefecture can again be inhabited, yet you seem to find this of no interest.

Mind you, IIRC, both Baggins and Wraith were adamant at the time that the evacuation was purely precautionary and that the evacuees would soon be allowed to return home. There was also some indications that their views were variously that there was no melt-down, that there was no chance of a massive escape of radioactive material and that there was no chance that the melted core could have left the containment and that the water table and the fisheries were safe or would suffer only minor contamination. Excuse me if I regard them as somewhat less trustworthy than Gundersen.

[madokie]

21. Some people have very short memories

I wonder if that is in conjunction with an appendage of the body
Yes I remember exactly what you are saying and it is truth

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. It’s an interesting casting of his comments

In essence, his comments compared Fukushima to Chernobyl. (i.e. relative to Chernobyl, health impacts appear low.) This became “No big Fukushima health impact seen.”

I notice the story dates back to January…


http://www.timescolonist.com/news/Into+Fukushima+land/6184316/story.html

[font face=Times, Times New Roman, Serif][font size=5]Into Fukushima's no-man's land[/font]

Agence France-Presse February 21, 2012

[font size=3]FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI - Every two minutes on the bus ride through the ghost towns surrounding Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, a company guide in a white protective suit holds up a display showing the radiation level. And it is rising.

Passing through the disaster exclusion zone visitors catch sight of houses that look like they could be anywhere in Japan, except for the odd sign that there is no-one to look after them; that no-one has lived here for nearly a year.

…

In parts of this zone, people will be allowed back some time in the next year or so.

Other areas will be uninhabitable for 30 years.

…[/font][/font]

[AtheistCrusader]

13. HYDROVOLCANIC EXPLOSIONS

JUST YOU WAIT

ANY SECOND NOW





HANG ON