Japan earthquake - contamination & consequences outside Fukushima NPP

Azby

(This has been cross-posted)
I attended the talk at Temple Univ. in Tokyo on Tues. night (July 3), at which Dr. Ryu Hayano, Nicholas Sternsdorff, and Satsuki Takahashi spoke. I was particularly interested in hearing what Dr. Hayano had to say, because he has been spearheading many important efforts in Fukushima, such as measuring the radiation in school lunches and measuring people's internal contamination with whole body counters. His name has come up quite often here. His work has been extremely conscientious and reliable, and has brought him into conflict with the government and his university at several points. His presentation was a model of clarity, and he engaged the audience very well by dotting it with questions which we answered by holding up sheets of paper with "T" or "F." *Such as, "About 10% of food from Fukushima has exceeded the 100Bq/kg standard," *(F, only 2%), and "No milk from Fukushima has been shown to be contaminated" (T, none has). His slides are available here:

http://www.slideshare.net/safecast/temple-u-20120703

Hopefully a video of his talk will be posted soon as as well. I'd like to give a brief summary of what he said.

--Their WBC measurements in Minamisoma and Hirata have been very extensive and accurately performed. *Between Nov 2011 and May 2012 they've measured about 10,000 people. In Hirata, about 15,000 people have been measured. The vast majority have shown no internal contamination. The levels of others has been extremely low compared to people in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus 5-10 years after the Chernobyl accident. In fact the levels are much lower than the average internal contamination of Japanese people measured in 1964 at the height of nuclear weapons testing. More on that below.

--He spoke a lot about calibration issues and how they solved them. He said that around the end of last year, CRMS, who had been conducting WBC measurements in Fukushima, was about to release a report claiming that the entire population of Fukushima had 20Bq/kg of internal cesium contamination. Dr. Hayano insisted on re-analyzing the data himself to see if their measurements were accurate or not. By calibrating their machine with a plastic "phantom" known to have 0Bq/kg, he determined that their reading of "20" should have been "0." He likened it to using a scale that was set to "20kg" when no weight was on it to weigh people. So the internal contamination of almost everyone CRMS had measured was 0Bq/kg!! *This has been borne out in subsequent measurements. (Imagine what we'd be dealing with if CRMS had released that report!!)

--They have remeasured everyone who showed internal contamination after a period of months, and based on that have shown that in almost every case people's body burden of cesium has been sharply decreasing; the slopes of the decrease indicate that most of these people are consuming close to 0 Bq/day. Therefore he concludes that the food screening has been very effective. *Of 10,000 people only 2 showed an increase between Nov 2011-May 2012, and they were farmers who have been eating a lot of their own food.

-- "Duplicate portion" measurements of food were conducted with 100 families in Fukushima in April 2012. Only 10 consumed any contaminated food; of those, only one family received more than 10Bq/kg --12 Bq/kg to be exact (the natural radioactive potassium each family consumed however ranged from about 20-50 Bq/kg). Based on the WBC measurements and these studies he expects that very few people in Fukushima will have more than 0.01mSv/yr internal exposure. This is so vastly lower than the 100mSv/yr risk level or even the stricter 10mSv/yr level promoted by others, that he concludes that "there is no health risk." This is an unpopular stance as we all know, but it's based on very solid measurements.

--Only 2% of the 53,000 food samples tested by local gov'ts since the new 100 Bq/kg standards came into effect have exceeded this standard. *No milk from Fukushima has been shown to be contaminated yet; no contamination has been found in school lunches in Minamisoma since they started measuring them in Jan 2012.

--On the other hand, soil in Fukushima is very contaminated, and items like wild boar, wild berries, etc. show high levels, so people will have to be very careful to continue effective monitoring for years to come.

--Because the internal contamination has been so low, he thinks that external contamination may present a relatively greater risk (but still very small). Based on glass badge results from Fukushima City, Minamisoma City, Koriyama City, and Soma City, most people there are receiving less than 1mSv/yr.

--In 1964, due to nuclear testing, the entire population of Japan was consuming 5 Bq/kg of Cs137 in their food every day, and this continued for over a year, with average body burdens of 550 Bq. This is much greater than the average levels they have seen in Fukushima so far. He suggested that the exposure in 1964 has not been directly linked to any measurable increase in illness, even after almost 50 years, and that the Fukushima exposures will not either.

--Afterward, I asked him his opinion about the recent WHO report on exposures, and he got very agitated and said it was terrible, because it overestimated exposures so blatantly. *He will be bringing his findings to the UN in a few weeks to push for the data to be included in the WHO Fukushima health risk report due out in a few months.

tsutsuji

http://radioactivity.mext.go.jp/ja/c...3_0518.pdf.pdf Shikoku helicopter map
http://radioactivity.mext.go.jp/ja/c...03_0608Kin.pdf Kinki region helicopter map
http://radioactivity.mext.go.jp/ja/c...4/203_0615.pdf Chugoku region helicopter map

zapperzero

RT reports 300 contaminated Japanese cars were stopped by Russia at the border since the accident.

http://www.rt.com/news/radioactive-j...an-border-624/

tsutsuji

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/artic.../ee/c2ee22019a John E. Ten Hoeve and Mark Z. Jacobson, "Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident", Energy Environ. Sci., 2012, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C2EE22019A, Received 23 Apr 2012, Accepted 26 Jun 2012.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/...lly-fukushima/ Some comments about the above article.

Azby

Thanks for the links, Tsutsuji.
The paper has generated a lot of commentary. Quite a few people I know have dismissed the mortality and morbidity findings as impossibly low, while quite a few others think they are wildly over-stated. For those who haven't read it yet, the authors predict between 15 to 1,300 cancer mortalities (with a mean of 130) and from 24 to 2,500 cancer cases (with a mean of 180). They point out that approx. 600 deaths have been attributed to the evacuation itself.

This article by Mark Lynas, which attacks the paper as "junk science," has a very lively comments section with a strong back and forth between Jacobson and Lynas, as well as many others:

http://www.marklynas.org/2012/07/fuk...-junk-science/

Jacobson has collected supplementary info, comments, and replies here:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/j...fukushima.html

tsutsuji

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-...1230_tako.html Octopus fished in the Fukushima waters was sold in Tokyo and Nagoya for the first time since the accident
http://mainichi.jp/english/english/n...na009000c.html "First seafood shipment from Fukushima Pref. made to Tsukiji market since nuke disaster"

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-...1645_kuni.html decontamination work performed under the direct management of the national government was started for the first time in the evacuation zone, in Tamura city, on 27 July. On that day they did such things as removing fallen leaves at the cemetery, in preparation for the traditional visit at the Obon festival on 15 August. The goal for Tamura is to ultimately decontaminate 400 houses and 420 hectares of forests by March 2013. The decontamination efforts in the 11 cities and villages of the evacuation zone is planned to be completed by the end of March 2014. The Ministry of environment was supposed to prepare the plans by March of this year but in 6 cities and villages such as Futaba, Namie and Tomioka, the plan has not been prepared yet. Among the cities and villages where the plan was prepared, only in two of them, Tamura and Naraha have the contractor companies been decided.

clancy688

Nature: "The biological impacts of the Fukushima nuclear accident on the pale grass blue butterfly"

http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/1208...srep00570.html

cockpitvisit

According to the EX-SKF blog, this research is flawed and it is normal for these butterflies to have genetic defects in colder climates (the natural habitat is Okinawa):

http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2012/08/b...fukushima.html

tsutsuji

http://radioactivity.mext.go.jp/ja/c...4/203_0727.pdf Hokkaido helicopter map

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-...plutonium.html The ministry of education and science released a study performed last June and July, taking earth samples in Fukushima prefecture and looking for plutonium concentrations. Plutonium was found in 10 locations. 0.69 Bq/m² of Pu238 and 2 Bq/m² of Pu239 and Pu240 put together were found in Iitate. It is thought to be a release from the nuclear accident. Plutonium had been found in 6 locations in a previous survey performed in September 2011.

http://radioactivity.mext.go.jp/ja/c.../5600_0821.pdf The ministry of education and science's plutonium survey

tsutsuji

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-...824/index.html The testing of each bag of rice grown in Fukushima prefecture started with 14 bags (420 kg) of early rice in Nihonmatsu on 25 August. 188 testing equipments have been installed in farming cooperatives, etc. for a cost of 5 billion yen. Each bag (30 kg) is tested in 15 seconds. The equipment displays an OK symbol meaning the rice is below the 100 Bq/kg limit. The main harvest is expected in the last 10 days of September, producing a quantity of around 360,000 tons.

mheslep

Cal Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller's Fukushima radiation impact article in the WSJ here, taking issue with Richard Garwin's figure of 1500 cancer deaths over 70 years.

zapperzero

The DoD has published estimated dose rates for locations where US personnel have lived and worked during operation Tomodachi.

https://registry.csd.disa.mil/regist...e3iPc3ePbh8Le0

tsutsuji

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-....html　& http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-...910/index.html The number of seafood species fished off the Fukushima prefecture coasts as part of "test catches" has been brought to 10 species. The "test catches" began in June 2012 with only 3 species of octopus and whelk. The species added in September include horsehair crab and Japanese flying squid. Radioactive substances were not detected in these species in tests performed by Fukushima prefecture government. On 10 September 2012 at around 03:00 PM, 11 fishing boats came back to Matsukawaura fishing port in Soma City, carrying a 4300 kg catch. Some samples will be tested for radiations, and if the test result is OK, it will be sold for example on the local market from 11 September. It will be the first time that seafood suitable for eating raw coming from Fukushima waters is sold on the market.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/20120911_13.html "High levels of radiation have recently been detected in some fish types. A cod landed at a port in Aomori Prefecture in early August was found to be exposed to 132.7 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram. That was 1.3 times the government safety limit. Radiation 380 times the limit was detected in a rock-trout caught off Fukushima in early August. A black sea bream caught off Miyagi Prefecture, in July was 33 times over the limit".

zapperzero

So, which is it? No contamination? Some contamination?

Rive

By the numbers and the news it's the worst kind - sporadic contamination.
So practically every 'dose' of fish should be tested independently.

zapperzero

http://www.city.koriyama.fukushima.j...innitirann.pdf

everything in Koriyama is a bit dirty...

Sorai

After scrolling through the document I see an overwhelming majority of non detections, with detection limits between 20 and 30 Bq/Kg for the most part, that is.