Thursday, August 25, 2011

#Radioactive Rice Hay From Miyagi Went Far and Wide

The government officials are slowly finding out the extent of radiation contamination all over Japan, and here are only two minor examples that I picked up today.

First, from Mainichi Shinbun Hokkaido local version (7/23/2011; sorry old news that I just found), I learned of the potentially radioactive beef from Hokkaido, which has largely escaped the radioactive plume blowing from Fukushima I Nuke Plant. The cows in Hamanaka-cho ate the rice hay from Wakuya-cho in Miyagi Prefecture that was contaminated with 1886 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium, the level of which exceeded the national provisional safety limit for cattle feed (400 becquerels/kg). Hamanaka-cho is located on the eastern tip of Hokkaido, facing the Pacific Ocean.

Hokkaido officials are perplexed. "We never thought possible that anyone would buy rice hay from Honshu, because it's too costly." It was beyond their expectation.

The second one is the radioactive manure in Yamagata Prefecture. According to Sankei News (8/25/2011), the Yamagata prefectural government announced on August 25 that the cow manure at 7 cattle farms in the prefecture tested between 500 to 2600 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium. All 7 farms were feeding their meat cows with rice hay from Miyagi Prefecture.

What I don't understand is why these farms even bought rice hay from Miyagi Prefecture, when their own prefectures are big producers of rice and there should be rice hay in abundance.

Well, since the leaf compost made out of radioactive dead leaves in Tochigi Prefecture can be mixed with dead leaves imported from Thailand and Bangladesh and sold all over Japan by one company, anything is possible.

5 comments:

Kyotoresident said...

Apparently the reason why this rice hay has travelled so well is because it is famous and supposed to be high quality. Brand wara. It is used for some of the famous brands of beef cows in japan.

Anonymous said...

http://mainichi.jp/select/jiken/news/20110826ddm041040062000c.html

Anonymous said...

What a disaster upon disasters. There must be a FULL quarantine of everything from contaminated areas with no exception. But I fear it is too late as too many contaminated materials have been spread all over Japan with the possible exception of Okinawa. The people must take down their corrupt government and TEPCO.

Anonymous said...

It was a high quality brand hay contaminated with caesium that suddenly became "reduced on sale". You know there's a buyer/s for that. You can't just throw something expensive like that out because someone will lose too much money. This way the grower sells at cost, someone also makes money in between, and in the end someone will be getting a great deal! What's not to like? No one will really know. Radiation can only affect you if you lose your happy disposition(Yamashita ?).

jmdesp said...

So the logical conclusion was, the jp gov should have bought back all agricultural products from the affected region, and burnt them in properly equipped furnace (yes that exists, wood frequently contains pollutants/natural radioactive products, which industrial furnace will filter and capture as ashes. There's stories of those furnaces ashes turning out to be radioactive enough to be classified as low level radioactive wastes, just as a result from natural radioactivity)

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