The secret (of Fukushima fallout) is in the tea leaves. Or, more accurately, where the tea is grown:

Poll_Blind

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Tue Jun-14-11 12:20 PM
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The secret (of Fukushima fallout) is in the tea leaves. Or, more accurately, where the tea is grown:

Edited on Tue Jun-14-11 01:13 PM by Poll_Blind

I posted a thread yesterday about radiation arising from radioactive fallout from Fukushima being detected in Hawaii. Naturally, there were some questions about the validity of the readings as other stations on nearby islands may not have reported unusual elevations in radiation as the reporting station in my article had.

While this post grew out of my conversations in that thread, this post is more about the irregular nature of radioactive fallout in general. Normally, when we see a map describing radioactive fallout, the map is a series of rings beginning at a central point and concentrically growing outwards from there. Like this:

Looking at a fallout diagram like the one above, one would assume that the highest concentration of radiation would be in the black area, slightly less-high in the red area and then gradually reducing as it expands outward in the yellow and green areas, with the green area having the least exposure.

This is intuitive and convenient...but also terribly misleading. If, perhaps, the accident had occurred in an environment without weather, this "bullseye" pattern would be more accurate. Below is an image of a map of what a real fallout map looks like. It has a distinctive "leopard spot" pattern. Colonel Vladimir Grebeniuk of the Russian army was tasked with dealing with the Chernobyl disaster and part of his execution of that duty was coming up with a map of the actual contamination (in this case of the Ukraine) by having soldiers with radiation detection equipment cover a large area and take actual on-the-ground readings:

The red areas are highly contaminated, yellow partly and gray are uncontaminated. The full documentary from which this image is taken is called "The Battle For Chernobyl" and can be viewed HERE at YouTube in its entirety, BTW. But one could make the argument that overall, the "bullseye" model of fallout distribution is still accurate. And to that, I present the following map of Europe after the Chernobyl disaster, showing areas which received most concentrated amounts of fallout:

We're back to that "leopard spot" pattern again, even on such a large scale. In fact, in any area on Earth which contains wind and rain and other weather (which is to say, all of it), this pattern will be far more likely than any simple "bullseye" distribution method.

Which brings me to the tea I mention in the subject line and the "secret" it contains. The tea in question happens to be from the two prefectures in Japan, Kanagawa and Shizuoka. Elevated amounts of radioactive cesium have been detected in the tea and so the tea crops and (in some cases) fields had to be abandoned.

What's disturbing, though, is where Kanagawa and Shizuoka prefectures are...which is SouthWest of Tokyo, itself:

From an article entitled Radiation “hotspots” hinder Japan response to nuclear crisis at GayToday:

One of the high-profile casualties from the hotspot phenomenon has been the tea crop in Kanagawa and neighboring Shizuoka, where cesium was found at a level that exceeded the government’s legal limit by as much as 35 percent.

“We never thought that that the nuclear accident would affect our products,” said Susumu Yamaguchi, 58, who heads a farmers’ cooperative in the village of Kiyokawa.

Yamaguchi has lost a crop worth over $20,000. Another farmer he knows has simply given up his field.

Others want answers: How did radioactive cesium from the reactors at Fukushima end up here?

Tetsuo Iguchi, a specialist on radiation monitoring at Nagoya University, says experts don’t know.

"Experts don't know" = Bullshit

The reason why there are fallout "hotspots" in unexpected areas of Japan and as far away as Hawaii and America, etc., is because the wind and the rain do unexpected things and they are the primary vectors of airborne fallout. Period. Wind and rain and weather are unpredictable. And because they are those things, so is the fallout. Just a whole lot deadlier.

OnEdit: I wanted to add something else that I forgot to touch on, and which was covered in the documentary I linked to near the beginning of the message. Shortly after Chernobyl, when the whole incident was swathed in secrecy and incompetence by the Russian government, radiation alarms began going off at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden and their initial response (thinking that it had been their own nuclear accident) and their questions about why there was a shitload of radioactive Cesium in their airspace lead to the Russians having to admit the severity of the damage at Chernobyl. The Swedish airforce performed many flights of jets fitted with air filters which would collect samples of exactly how many radioactive particles where in their air and also to determine exactly what those elements were. Our government has not performed any such tests to my knowledge and instead relied on ground-based equipment which, by it's nature, can sample only a fraction of what a jet with a collection filter can as it flies over a much larger area. Even that extra ground-based monitoring has been discontinued as of a week or two ago.

PB