[Peace-discuss] Japanese warning

Sat Mar 12 17:55:54 CST 2011

Given the tie-ups between the NYT and the nuclear industry, I'd think we'd at 
least want a second opinion...

The author of this piece is a long-time Timesman who's written on and perhaps 
contributed to US science propaganda.  In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq he 
published "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War" (2001), and in 
2007 he did a "Discovery Channel" program called "Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists 
Get the Bomb?"

On 3/12/11 5:17 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> A fair report by William Broad on the dangers of radioactivity from the 
> severely damaged  Japanese reactor. We don't yet know the intensity of its 
> radiations, and so we don't know if they are a serious problem. We are 
> constantly exposed to nuclear radiations, and the safety limits imposed by the 
> responsible agencies are considered super safe; there could be very high 
> multiples of those limits and yet have no observed effects on human health 
> (despite the claims of someone like Wasserman).
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/science/13radiation.html?hp
>
>  The different forms of radioactivity being reported at the nuclear accidents 
> in Japan 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/japan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> 
> range from relatively benign to extremely worrisome.
>
>
>       The central problem in assessing the degree of danger is that the
>       amounts of various radioactive releases into the environment are now
>       unknown, as are the winds and other atmospheric factors that determine
>       how radioactivity will disperse around the stricken plants.
>
> Still, the properties of the materials and their typical interactions with the 
> human body give some indication of the threat.
>
> “The situation is pretty bad,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist 
> who advised the Clinton White House and now teaches international affairs at 
> Princeton. “But it could get a lot worse.”
>
> In Vienna on Saturday, the International Atomic Energy Agency 
> <http://www.iaea.org/> said Japanese authorities had informed it that iodine 
> pills would be distributed to residents around the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini 
> plants in northeast Japan. Both have experienced multiple failures in the wake 
> of the huge earthquake and tsunami that struck Friday.
>
> In the types of reactors involved, water is used to cool the reactor core and 
> produce steam to turn the turbines that make electricity. The water contains 
> two of the least dangerous forms of radioactivity now in the news — 
> radioactive nitrogen and tritium. Normal plant operations produce both of them 
> in the cooling water, and they are even released routinely in small amounts 
> into the environment, usually through tall chimneys.
>
> Nitrogen is the most common gas in the earth’s atmosphere, and at a nuclear 
> plant the main radioactive form is known as nitrogen-16. It is made when 
> speeding neutrons from the reactor’s core hit oxygen in the surrounding 
> cooling water. This radioactive form of nitrogen does not occur in nature.
>
> The danger of nitrogen-16 is an issue only for plant workers and operators 
> because its half-life is only seven seconds, after which it decays back into 
> natural oxygen. A half-life is the time it takes half the atoms of a 
> radioactive substance to disintegrate.
>
> The other form of radioactivity often in the cooling water of a nuclear 
> reactor is tritium. It is a naturally occurring radioactive form of hydrogen, 
> sometimes known as heavy hydrogen. It is found in trace amounts in groundwater 
> throughout the world. Tritium emits a weak form of radiation that does not 
> travel very far in the air and cannot penetrate the skin.
>
> It accumulates in the cooling water of nuclear reactors and is often vented in 
> small amounts to the environment. Its half-life is 12 years.
>
> The big worries on the reported radiation releases in Japan center on 
> radioactive iodine and cesium.
>
> “They imply some kind of core problem,” said Thomas B. Cochran, a senior 
> scientist in the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council 
> <http://www.nrdc.org/>, a private group in Washington.
>
> The active core of a nuclear reactor splits atoms in two to produce bursts of 
> energy and, as a byproduct, large masses of highly radioactive particles. The 
> many safety mechanisms of a nuclear plant focus mainly on keeping these 
> so-called fission products out of the environment.
>
> Iodine-131 has a half-life of eight days and is quite dangerous to human 
> health. If absorbed through contaminated food, especially milk and milk 
> products, it will accumulate in the thyroid and cause cancer. Located near the 
> base of the neck, the thyroid is a large endocrine gland that produces 
> hormones that help control growth and metabolism.
>
> Dr. von Hippel of Princeton said the thyroid danger was gravest in children. 
> “The thyroid is more sensitive to damage when the cells are dividing and the 
> gland is growing,” he said.
>
> Fortunately, an easy form of protection is potassium iodide, a simple compound 
> typically added to table salt to prevent goiter and a form of mental 
> retardation caused by a dietary lack of iodine.
>
> If ingested promptly after a nuclear accident, potassium iodide, in 
> concentrated form, can help reduce the dose of radiation to the thyroid and 
> thus the risk of cancer. In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory 
> Commission 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/nuclear_regulatory_commission/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
> recommends that people living within a 10-mile emergency planning zone around 
> a nuclear plant have access to potassium iodide tablets.
>
> Over the long term, the big threat to human health is cesium-137, which has a 
> half-life of 30 years.
>
> At that rate of disintegration, John Emsley wrote in “Nature’s Building 
> Blocks” (Oxford, 2001), “it takes over 200 years to reduce it to 1 percent of 
> its former level.”
>
> It is cesium-137 that still contaminates much land in Ukraine around the 
> Chernobyl reactor. In 1986, the plant suffered what is considered the worst 
> nuclear power plant accident in history.
>
> Cesium-137 mixes easily with water and is chemically similar to potassium. It 
> thus mimics how potassium gets metabolized in the body and can enter through 
> many foods, including milk. After entering, cesium gets widely distributed, 
> its concentrations said to be higher in muscle tissues and lower in bones.
>
> The radiation from cesium-137 can throw cellular machinery out of order, 
> including the chromosomes, leading to an increased risk of cancer.
>
> The Environmental Protection Agency 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/environmental_protection_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
> says that everyone in the United States is exposed to very small amounts of 
> cesium-137 in soil and water because of atmospheric fallout from the nuclear 
> detonations of the cold war.
>
> The agency says that very high exposures can result in serious burns and even 
> death, but that such cases are extremely rare. Once dispersed in the 
> environment, it says, cesium-137 “is impossible to avoid.”
>
>
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