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wtmusic

(39,166 posts)
17. Well at least it's not 'G' radiation, that would be really bad.
Sat Oct 6, 2012, 06:34 PM
Oct 2012

No wonder you're concerned - you have a very poor understanding of radiation and what happened in Japan.

1) The fires at Fukushima have been controlled for a year and a half (no fires are still burning).
2) There is no such thing as 'F' radiation.
3) There is not statistically-relevant increase in global radiation, at the present time, from either Chernobyl or Fukushima.
4) There was never a "nuke explosion" (nuclear chain reaction, like in a bomb) at Fukushima.

Here's some perspective: barely three weeks after the disaster, radiation levels were only slightly higher in Tokyo than they were in New York City:

"Many countries have naturally occurring radiation levels that exceed Tokyo’s, said Bob Bury, former clinical lead for the U.K.’s Royal College of Radiologists. A 30-fold surge in such contamination in Tokyo prompted thousands of expatriates to leave Japan after the March 11 tsunami knocked out power at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, triggering the crisis. Radiation in Tokyo is barely above levels in London and New York even now, analysts said.

“The situation in Japan looks set to follow the pattern of Chernobyl, where fear of radiation did far more damage than the radiation itself,” Bury said in an e-mail referring to the 1986 accident in the former Soviet Union, the world’s worst nuclear disaster. “Whatever the radiation in Tokyo at the moment, you can be fairly sure it is lower than natural background levels in many parts of the world.”

Exceeds New York

Tokyo’s radiation level is only slightly higher than New York, where an average of 0.095 microsieverts an hour was recorded in the seven days to yesterday, according to a real- time Geiger counter reading set up as part of the Background Radiation Survey, a project where owners of the equipment feed their readings into a central database. The level in Tokyo the day before the accident averaged 0.0338 microsieverts an hour."

http://onhudson.typepad.com/onhudsoncom/2011/04/radiation-levels-in-cities-around-the-world-exceed-tokyo-today-is-that-a-comforting-thing-.html

Particles of the heavy metals from both places are now scattered from Japan around the globe to China. And there they sit with half-lives of sometimes 30-200 years.

Particles of radioactive materials are scattered around the globe, and some have half-lives much longer than 200 years (plutonium's is 80 million years). Even still, from a statistical standpoint, you're about 2 million times more likely to die from starvation than radiation from Fukushima.

Knowledge will set you free. Media hysteria peddled by idiots like Arnie Gundersen won't.

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