Better on east coast:
BTW there are high altitude jetstreams that must have carried a lot of bad 'smoke' all over the US too.
The US gov has just bought millions of potassium iodide pills:
Low level radiation effects :
Worry about getting old, instead. It's many orders of magnitude more dangerous, and you can do exactly the same amount about it. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
On a sunny day (Thu, 02 Jan 2014 09:25:43 -0500) it happened Phil Hobbs wrote in :
But I am already old :-)
Do not know, but yes, I see people of my age walking with help, messages of funerals, some go in old peoples homes.... Some do sports, I never was much into that, except when very young, does not seem to make any difference. I would like to fly to some other planets to see what it is like there... But NASA seems in no hurry with the tickets. Been all over the globe. done all sorts of things, been poor, been rich, long story. But dangerous? Old age? I think not. LA was more dangerous, and the gangs in NY, I worked for the police in Miami... later when I was back in lowland at work they called me Miami Vice.. Danger? Come on:-)
In Europe, at least in the Netherlands, gov has been adding jodium to the table salt for years, I think they upped the dosage after Chernobyl, not sure.
I was thinking if we, in Europe should accept [more ?] radiation fugitives from the US.
I never wrote this.
There is more, maybe some other time.
Yikes! I guess we should stop drinking the local sea water.
scientific literature, examining more than 5,000 papers involving natural background radiation that were narrowed to 46 for quantitative comparison. The selected studies all examined both a control group and a more highly irradiated population and quantified the size of the radiation levels for each. Each paper also reported test statistics that allowed direct comparison between the studies."
So, they picked the 1% of the studies that proved their point.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
On a sunny day (Thu, 02 Jan 2014 08:18:59 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
No no, if you shine in the dark it saves on electricity cost.
Well, that makes little sense. They needed studies that provided the required data and a control group. Not every study was useful I'd expect.
I am testing my new flexible keyboard from ebay just arrived:
I've noticed an odd pattern... men are mostly likely to die of a heart attack between ages 55-60. If you make it above 60 you're generally OK for quite a long time. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Sud combed the
. The
diated
paper
It is probably even much worse than that, I doubt they have found
46 (if any) studies carrying any substance in support of LNT (that's what health physicists call the hypothesis, "Linear No Threshold")). So it is likely outright fraud (did not even look at the article, nor do I think I ever will :-) ).Jan, the I in salt is put indeed but for other purposes. Iodine deficiency is a cause for worse brain development (smaller brains IIRC), I think they do it since the 50-s or so. Nothing to do with 131I which is the radioactive isotope (and is long gone from Fukushima, 8 days half life). If you have to counteract 131I contamination the quantities you need are orders of magnitude higher, I think they have some KI pills. A guy once said on the radsafe list (lurking where is my main source of that sort of medical wisdom.... ) that you can saturate the thyroid with iodine also using plain iodine tincture (iodine dissolved in alcohol), covering a 10cm diameter patch should be sufficient IIRC. (The danger from 131I is that the thyroid will absorb it all and thus get a huge rad dose and get damaged, hence they counteract by saturating it with non radioactive iodine).
Dimiter
------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff, TGI
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I am pretty sure they were selling iodine salt in the forties. Yep, I chec ked on Wiki.
On May 1, 1924, iodised salt was sold commercially in Michigan.[12] By the fall of 1924, Morton Salt Company began distributing iodised salt national ly. There was a gradual increase in average intelligence of 1 standard devi ation, 15 points, in iodine-deficient areas, 3.5 points nationally, but als o an increase in deaths of older people in iodine-deficient areas due to hy perthyroidism.[13]
Dan
They do that about every 5 years or so due to the limited shelf life of potassium iodide pills.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Yep.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
On a sunny day (Thu, 2 Jan 2014 08:59:44 -0800 (PST)) it happened dp wrote in :
DNA has some self-repairing mechanism, but for that to work I think some specific parts of it must be intact. Over longer times, with radiation above some threshold, those parts could be hit and the self-repair would no longer work. What that threshold is I do not know, it is chemistry, thermal effects, mechanical effects, chemicals, all sort of environmental issues may lower the threshold and increase the sensitivity to radiation, maybe even stress (hormones). There is no reason to assume 'linear', does not even make sense.
Yes, that seems to be a common thing ;-)
Yes, ebay has those too.
Yes, I know, I had 2 liters of the stuff, 1 liter left.
There are a lot of long lived isotopes in the sea from Fuckupshima I think. When a next earthquake comes, problems will multiply.
There is also sea water evaporating near the west coast, possibly carrying radioactive stuff with it in the clouds (storms helps too), that then rains on the land, and the stuff ends up in the food you eat, and of course the fish you eat, the milk (products) you drink, cattle, meat, the whole food chain. Some plants suck it up, banana dose....
I dunno about that radsafe list, I was following the gamma spectrometer google group, and the Geiger counter group some time back.
Build a Geiger counter, and made my own gamma spectrometer (big crystal from ebay, PMT, HV genertor, PIC, LCD display) and those run 24/7. Been logging radiation for a long time, cosmic rays come and go.... When Fuckupshima stuff arrives I hope the equipment will show it. I have a nuclear war detector (ionisation chamber type radiation meter) with calibration source, and some similar pen type detectors to. But anyways we had Tjernobyl already in the eighties, boss told me they were required to replace the air filters in the airco system of a building where we installed electronics because those were so hot (with Tjernobyl stuff).... In those days I had no Geiger counter so I took his word for it, contemplated getting one, but those were freaking expensive (back then everybody wanted one). I think the price of GM tubes on ebay peaked after Fuckupshima too. I thought it better to build mine before that.
Any ideas why the cost and effort to contain and clean up this debacle has seemingly been left to the private corporation responsible? And, not a giant joint international effort to stomp on the problem once and for all?
2 litres ?! What are you doing with it, do you perhaps have a car running on that :D ?
If your GM counter shows it you likely won't need the info any longer :D . Similar with your NaI detector (though much better than the GM). To measure concentrations of interest and make qualitative and quantitative analysis HPGe detectors are used, usually in 10+cm thick lead shields. Basically after an event they take samples, evaporate etc. to reach some measurable concentration then take the spectrum (this is what they do using our spectrometers). But catching anything from Fukushima across the ocean takes some really sensitive equipment, GM and even scintillation detectors won't tell a lot (more like nothing).
In those days things have been relatively hot here (Bulgaria), I have customers telling stories how they measured food samples for just 15 minutes (go/no go, again in a lead shielded Ge detector of course; normally they would take such a spectrum overnight). Nonetheless there are no health effects attributable to it anywhere in Europe (again, this is only wisdom acquired lurking on the radsafe list, the people there do know their thing but I might not have necessarily got it all that correctly). Don't remember the figures of victims within the plant (workers, firefighters etc.). Looking those up on the net is pointless as they tend to get a *10 each year in the media, the reports have no connection to reality at all for decades (if they ever had).
The main isotope which I think they measure years after an event is
137Cs (30 years half life), I am not sure but I think the dominating source still is that from bomb testing during the 50-s. Also Chernobyl and now probably Fukushima. Where it comes from they see by the ratio 137Cs/134Cs, 134Cs has 2.06 years half life. (That's analytical knowledge I have picked from people who use my stuff, I am not that familiar with their techniques, not much beyond what I have needed to do what I do).Dimiter
------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff, TGI
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Because TEPCo would loose all face.
-- For a good time: install ntp --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---
Giant international efforts tend to create a giant mess. Besides, that's not the problem. Let's pretend that there was some magical way of safely extracting all the radioactive stuff from the Fukushima area. Ok, now where do you put it? Dumping it in the ocean when out in the 1950's. The Soviet Union dumped their wastes in remote areas by simply building piles of the stuff. It got so hot inside that they ended up with small radioactive volcanoes for a while. Yucca Mountain wasn't intended for international disposal efforts and shipping radioactive stuff across several states is likely to cause street riots. Shipping the radioactive waste to other countries won't work because no country wants the stuff dumped in their back yard. Certainly not to countries harboring terrorists building dirty bombs.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Mix it with concrete and dump it into an ocean subduction zone.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
I did physics back in the 1960's, and we had several experiments running with Geiger tubes and various other detectors. One was just a big array of Geiger tubes, in 3 plates around 10" square, set in a tube around 6 feet long. So a fast particle like a cosmic ray meson would generate an event on each plate in turn, allowing us to use it as a very rough telescope. A single plate would show background counts around 300-500 per second ( figure from 50 year old memory ). So there were at least that many detectable particles passing through each 10" square of everything - including ourselves.
This was just cosmic ray background - no local radiation source - and the detector was on the bottom floor of a 6 story building. I think at some point we took one of the plates outside, and got about the same count, just to be sure that there was no local source within the building, and that the building wasnt acting as a shield. The most obvious effect that we could see was the change in count when we changed the elevation angle of the tube. At the horizontal, the count roughly doubled compared to the vertical, since particles could enter both ends of the tube from the sky. At the vertical, the earth provided a shield for the back end, reducing the count.
We had no way of timing the events to the accuracy needed to resolve the direction, based on the detection event itself - this was 1966 - and nanosec timing resolution was unheard of.
Detecting extra radiation over that sort of background does not involve any more sensitive detectors - all you get is more counts - it just needs more time and statistical analysis to be sure that what you see is actually not just random fluctuations in the count rate.
Just out of interest I built a Geiger counter based on one of the many kits around at the moment, and that shows around 1-2 or so counts per second. Taking into account its much smaller detection volume, I have no reason to think the count rate now is any different from what it was
50 years ago.So my conclusion is that everything on Earth evolved in a background radiation level at least like that, and developed ways to cope with it.
People who think that any increase of radiation near the background level is harmful are just plain wrong.
-- Regards, Adrian Jansen adrianjansen at internode dot on dot net Note reply address is invalid, convert address above to machine form.
Rubbish. Read the actual link you posted. The shelf life is a purely arbitrary limit set by the FDA, and has nothing to do with the chemical itself. Potassium iodide is stable essentially forever, barring external contamination or leakage.
-- Regards, Adrian Jansen adrianjansen at internode dot on dot net Note reply address is invalid, convert address above to machine form.
Well, that's the way SOME people practice "science"!
Jon
Well, complacency, violation of standards, and just a colossal lack of regard for safety was they way TEPCO ran the plant. It started with the INSANE siting of the plant directly at the water's edge, in the place where they've known about the tsunami phenomenon for 5000 years! There is only one boiling water reactor in the US of the same vintage as Fukushima Dai Ichi #1, and even that one has been retrofitted with a number of safety improvements, as the US NRC has been quite concerned with the danger of a station blackout. All the other BWR I plants were already decommissioned, as they were already aging, and just too expensive to retrofit. The BWR II designs were much better able to cope with SBO, as seen by reactors #2 and #3 surviving well over a day on their inbuilt cooling machinery. The problems with those were that batter power was needed to keep valves open to keep the cooling working. Nobody thought they'd have an SBO lasting for several days.
So, TEPCO got them INTO this mess, they should suffer a lot of the cost to mitigate it. BUT, all of Japan will be paying for some of it, as no company could really shoulder this level of expense. They plant to start digging into the reactors themselves in 2020! Their road map shows the entire site cleaned up by 2060! And, right now, they are scrambling from one catastrophe to another debacle on a daily basis, with leaks, damaged equpment, etc. They have NO IDEA whatsoever where the reactor cores are, how badly they have melted, slumped down and damaged the lower part of the reactor vessels. Nobody can go inside the lower areas of the containment, and even robots sent in have had to be abandoned inside. It is going to be a VERY slow process cleaning up the facility, itself. Cleaning up the general Fukushima countryside may never really happen. It may remain a nuclear wasteland for centuries.
Some interesting reading is at :
If you go to the last page, it has a link to a new forum for more recent posts. TEPCO is releasing some interesting documents on their feeble progress on this.
Jon
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