[Peace-discuss] BBC nuclear gibberish - not 8 days, more like 3 months

[Stuart Levy]

More (sorry for not mentioning this too):
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12869184

Here the "no longer a risk after 8 days" is attributed to "officials".

Maybe they mean a spokesman for Japan's nuclear safety agency,
quoted later in the article as saying that because of its 8-day half-life,
"by the time people eat the sea products its amount is likely
to have diminished significantly".  That's a fair statement,
as far as it goes, though not comforting without knowing more.

But it isn't at all equivalent to the sweeping
dismissal that's in the 2nd para of the same article,
which was included in the BBC radio report.

Grr.

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 10:09:46AM -0500, Stuart Levy wrote:
> Heard last night a BBC report of very high (> 1000 times acceptable)
> levels of radioactive iodine in the ocean, a few hundred meters
> from the Fukushima plants.
> 
> This is alarming.  But more alarming is the completely *false* comment
> made twice during the report, once by the commentator introducing
> the story and again by correspondent Chris Hogg, that
> "after 8 days the levels of iodine will no longer be of human concern".
> 
> That sounds comforting.  Stay clear of the water for a week or two
> and everything will be fine, right?
> 
> That figure seems to be taken from the half-life of the longest-lived
> radioactive isotope of iodine, which is indeed 8 days.  But that is
> *not* the time at which it will cease to be of concern.
> 
> Given that the sampled water's iodine level was over 1000 (actually 1250)
> times higher than the amount considered acceptable, it would take over
> ten times iodine's half-life -- around *three months* --
> before radioactive decay would reduce it to 'acceptable' levels.
> 
> Of course other things would happen to the water in that time too --
> mixing with more ocean water, perhaps takeup by marine organisms.
> Decay isn't the only factor affecting environmental exposure.
> But this kind of misstatement is unconscionable.  And it's not hard
> to get it right, as in this Japan Times story:
> 
>     http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110326x1.html
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