Tohoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster!!!

[cstaylor]

Smoke rising from reactor 3, and the winds are unfavorable for the Tokyo area.

[legion]

Which has nothing to do with the discussion of current events in Japan.

But if you'd like to keep going on this tangent, by all means. Just start a new topic down in Beyond Fucked, as that's the place for such a discussion.

Point taken, I'll take a radioactive raincheck on that thank you.

[cstaylor]

NHK reports the smoke is coming from the spent fuel pool and that the smoke is darkish gray.

[Yokohammer]

NHK reports the smoke is coming from the spent fuel pool and that the smoke is darkish gray.

NHK is reporting that the smoke appears to be coming from the vicinity of the spent fuel pool. Not necessarily from the pool itself.
There has been no increase in radiation level though, so it's probably just somebody burning a pile of old tires. Or something.

[sublight]

Any idea if you can get KI at the US embassy? Not really interested myself, but I heard the Brits were making available for their citizens, and wondered if those sacks of Cheez-whiz at Tameike-Sanno were actually going to make themselves useful for once.

[canman]

Just read that TEPCO has evacuated all staff from the reactor area. That cannot be good. I really feel for the workers that are there trying their best, but whatever they do, it doesn't seem to work, and in the end they work for TEPCO and will get blamed if this all goes south.

[sublight]

As far as worrying about radiation, I see at least 4 environmental hazards arising from this disaster.

1st: Huge amount of toxic chemicals from farms, households, businesses and factories getting dumped into soil and groundwater as a result of the tsunami.

2nd: Vast swaths of farmland rendered unusable for years to come as a result of being inundated with saltwater, debris, and the aforementioned pollutants.

3rd: The huge toxic cloud of burning oil and gas coming from Chiba after the quake.

Distant 4th: a possible increase in radiation within a 30-km radius of the Fukushima plant.

[Yokohammer]

Just read that TEPCO has evacuated all staff from the reactor area.

Where did you read that?

[Mike Oxlong]

A ferry is stranded on a building in Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, northern Japan,
two days after a powerful earthquake-triggered tsunami hit northeastern Japan.

[canman]

Japan Today.

[ttjereth]

Here's an email I just got from a Navy friend at 11:20 today:

"Maybe you don't want to keep hearing this. We just got a big sample that looks like it will equate to 2.2 rem to the thyroid per day down here allowing for a 40% fall-off from the point where the reading was taken to down here. We are going to start distributing KI (potassium iodide), I think. The book says when expected dose is 5 rems per day, you should take KI if you are pregnant or under 16. We are looking at 2.2 rems per day in Yokosuka, but another (conservative) school of thought is, you start taking KI well in advance of 5 rems. The significant point is, something is still coming out of these reactors that is not being reported to the press.

Anyway, don't panic. Stay out of the rain, though."

2.2 rem in Yokosuka??? That's a hell of a lot higher than all of the published numbers I am seeing. all the reports I am seeing say .020~ MICROsieverts in Chiba and this guy is saying 22 MILLI in Kanagawa??:sad:

[Yokohammer]

Japan Today.

Ah ... got it. Thanks.

The full quote is a little more revealing:

After the smoke was spotted at the southeast of the building around 3:55 p.m., TEPCO said it had temporarily evacuated its workers from the site as it assessed the situation.

[canman]

Yokohammer I fear I was a victim of a misleading headline. A while ago the headline was about the evacuation. looking at the article now it is less scare inducing. Have to be more careful.

[Takechanpoo]

[Coligny]

Source CNN:

Smoke now coming out of Dai Ichi reactor #2.

[6:26a.m. Monday ET, 7:26 p.m. Monday Tokyo] White smoke rose early Monday evening from the No. 2 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a Japanese nuclear and industrial safety agency said. The cause of the smoke was not immediately known, Hidehiko Nishiyama said.

[cstaylor]

2.2 rem in Yokosuka??? That's a hell of a lot higher than all of the published numbers I am seeing. all the reports I am seeing say .020~ MICROsieverts in Chiba and this guy is saying 22 MILLI in Kanagawa??:sad:

2.2rem per day, not per hour.

Look, the real problem for those in the Yokohama/Tokyo area isn't gamma radiation, but beta radiation from ingested radioactive material, although the problems are still relatively low.

Numbers from naka-ku in Yokohama are holding steady at 64nGr/hr, about 3 times above normal background radiation. The wind from Fukushima is moving at roughly 10km/hr southward, so if there's anything interesting in those smoke clouds, we'll see it in tomorrow morning's readings.

[cstaylor]

[CrankyBastard]

Nothing for me to worry about.
I got my pills from the Embassy this afternoon.
Now all I've got to decide is, whether to take the blue one or the red one!


The staff very kindly gave me some for the wife, too.
If you're quick, you can get a Yahoo auction bid in on them.

[ttjereth]

2.2rem per day, not per hour.

Yes, but unless the earthquake changed the earth's rotation a hell of a lot more than published, changing from hourly to daily dose does not account for a discrepancy of thousands of times.

Reported rate .020x24 microsieverts, rate in that quoted email 22,000 microsieverts.

That's an awful lot of decimal places just from multiplying by 24.

[cstaylor]

[quote="ttjereth"]Yes, but unless the earthquake changed the earth's rotation a hell of a lot more than published, changing from hourly to daily dose does not account for a discrepancy of thousands of times.

Reported rate .020x24 microsieverts, rate in that quoted email 22,000 microsieverts.

That's an awful lot of decimal places just from multiplying by 24. ]

REMS, sieverts, becquerels... I'm starting to lose my place.

[Kanchou]

rems aren't used any more.

It's grays and sieverts now... which mathematically are the same thing, except greys are how much you've absorbed, and sieverts are how much you're exposed to.

Basically anything less than a total dose of one sievert (that's a million microsieverts) probably won't kill you.

[Takechanpoo]

next is Aussie land.....
30 whales stranded on Tasmanian South Bruny Island beach

[ttjereth]

REMS, sieverts, becquerels... I'm starting to lose my place.

Yeah, it really would be nice if every source could at least agree to use the same damn units. The regular news is generally easy enough to figure out, they just use whatever makes for the biggest and most alarming number.

http://hptech.org/nuclear/convert/sievert.html

[ttjereth]

rems aren't used any more.

It's grays and sieverts now... which mathematically are the same thing, except greys are how much you've absorbed, and sieverts are how much you're exposed to.

Basically anything less than a total dose of one sievert (that's a million microsieverts) probably won't kill you.

Rems shouldn't be used anymore, but they still are a lot of places.

[omae mona]

[Not Invented Here]

REMS, sieverts, becquerels... I'm starting to lose my place.

Here's the deal:

Grays (Gy), Sieverts (Sv), and Becquerels (Bq), are all SI units, which will be seen in Japan.

Grays measure energy absorbed per kilogram of mass, Sieverts do the same but adjust for type of radiation and where it is absorbed to try and quantify things in terms more suitable to predicting biological effects. Becquerels describe the number of times per second that nucleus decay occurs, and you can further derive those units over area, mass, or volume. Remember that 1 kg of water is usually a liter, give or take a few mL for density variations.

Rads are basically like grays, but 1 gray is equal to about 100 rads. Rems are basically like sieverts, and 1 sievert is basically 100 rems. Curies are like becquerels, but 1 curie equals 37GBq, or 37 billion becquerels. Roentgens are sort of like rads and grays, but 1 gray = about 115 roentgens.

Anything that says "counts per second" or "counts per minute" is likely just a direct reading off of some type of meter, which is not a direct equivalent to any of the units I've mentioned to this point. The meter has to be calibrated, calculations specific to the meter must be made, etc, before you can get a real number from that other than how many times the meter's probe was hit by something every second.

[cstaylor]

Here's the deal:

Grays (Gy), Sieverts (Sv), and Becquerels (Bq), are all SI units, which will be seen in Japan.

Grays measure energy absorbed per kilogram of mass, Sieverts do the same but adjust for type of radiation and where it is absorbed to try and quantify things in terms more suitable to predicting biological effects. Becquerels describe the number of times per second that nucleus decay occurs, and you can further derive those units over area, mass, or volume. Remember that 1 kg of water is usually a liter, give or take a few mL for density variations.

Rads are basically like grays, but 1 gray is equal to about 100 rads. Rems are basically like sieverts, and 1 sievert is basically 100 rems. Curies are like becquerels, but 1 curie equals 37GBq, or 37 billion becquerels. Roentgens are sort of like rads and grays, but 1 gray = about 115 roentgens.

Anything that says "counts per second" or "counts per minute" is likely just a direct reading off of some type of meter, which is not a direct equivalent to any of the units I've mentioned to this point. The meter has to be calibrated, calculations specific to the meter must be made, etc, before you can get a real number from that other than how many times the meter's probe was hit by something every second.

Excellent explanation. This should be a sticky.

[cstaylor]

next is Aussie land.....
30 whales stranded on Tasmanian South Bruny Island beach

I thought you were in Osaka?

[Greji]

I thought you were in Osaka?

Naw, knowing Take, he's already on his way to Tasmania with a felleting knife and a loaf of bread.

[cstaylor]

Naw, knowing Take, he's already on his way to Tasmania with a felleting knife and a loaf of bread.

I had to read this twice before I got the correct reading.