The Ministry of Education and Science announced on October 31 the "result" of the survey they did in June. Much like announcing the result in July (2PM on July 29, to be exact) of the survey they did in March about radioactive fallout in Tohoku and Kanto, where radioactive iodine, cesium tellurium and silver were found in abundance in Tokyo (see my post on August 1).
So, if tellurium and silver fell in Tokyo, it is very small wonder that they were in Fukushima soil within the 100-kilometer radius of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.
Maps from the Ministry's announcement on October 31 are as follows. The amounts of tellurium and silver have been adjusted to the amounts as of June 14. I re-oriented and enlarged the maps for easier viewing but the resolution is not that great.
Tellurium-129m, half life about 34 days (the unit is becquerels/square meter):
Silver-110m, half life about 250 days (becquerels/square meter):
Silver-110m probably came from melted control rods, and went all the way to Tokyo.
The announcement is NOT accompanied by the table that has actual measurements at these locations. But Mainichi Shinbun (10/31/2011) reports that the highest amount of tellurium-129m was found in Okuma-machi at 2.66 million becquerels/square meter.
The Ministry's fallback position of course is "they won't affect the health very much because the radiation from these nuclides is "small" compared to those from radioactive cesium.
Sure. They are shorter-life nuclides, which means radioactivity is stronger. Even if they simply pass through the body without accumulation, I would think they zap the body with radiation as they pass through. External exposure is another matter. I fearfully recall that many kindergarteners and elementary school pupils all over Tohoku and Kanto were made to plant rice with bare feet and hands back in April and May. (And they are made to dig up the sweet potatoes with bare hands now.)
What's interesting is the third map which plots the ratio of tellurium-129m to cesium-137. The tellurium-129m ratio is very pronounced south of Fuku-I nuke plant, toward Iwaki City and southern Ibaraki Prefecture:
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3 comments:
"Sure. They are shorter-life nuclides, which means radioactivity is stronger." Becquerel is a unit of radioactivity, so that variable is already included in the data.
To clarify Anon comment.
Becquerel is literally dis integrations per (unit) per second.
If you are 70 kG and you have an internal Becqeurel of say 200 Bq/kG that means every second, there are 14000 reactions where matter changes states and in the process lets out a high energy particle, that since it is inside your body, will be a "direct hit" on something that you actually need, cells, DNA, you know....you!
But that is per second, per day there will be 1.2 million high energy releases striking direct hits within your body.
Now lets say that there are 100 Trillion cell in the human body.
In 4 years you get 1.7 BILLION direct hits on elements of "you" any which hit can damage DNA or start a cancer or other disease.
So maybe in 4 years, every 1/50,000 of you takes a direct hit, any one of which can become cancer or disease, or damage your DNA.
And for an internal emitter, they won't be spreading out their direct hits among all your cells equally, they will be blasting the heck out of the cells that are nearby, and even if these cells have reactive protective mechanisms, with a continuous onslaught, it is easy to see how they could become damaged beyond recognition.
Out! steveo
Let's keep in mind that Fuku I and II together have TEN total reactors. Six that we hear about, and four more Mark II units about ten miles to the South that we never hear about. ALL of them lost primary supply service pumps to their single point of failure: the ocean. The four to the South at Daini wound up for a time all depending on ONE generator which couldn't hack it, and ALL of the torus temperatures exceeded 100 degrees Celsius relying on back up systems which did not function as intended, but couldn't have anyway since they were never intended to cool the cores for days.
"The tellurium-129m ratio is very pronounced south of Fuku-I nuke plant, toward Iwaki City and southern Ibaraki Prefecture:"
I suspect that is because there was a largely unreported accident at the separate four reactors at Fukushima II (Daini) which is about ten miles to the south of the six striken reactors at the Northern Plant. Smoke was seen rolling out of one of them. You can see the four untalked about reactors on Google Earth.
Here is the omitted, in the Main Stream Media, that is, Greek Tragedy that was going on ten miles to the South in which nearly everyone didn't realize there were two "Unit Number One-Fours" and that Tepco evacuated citizens there also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daini_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Tepco claims they achieved cold shutdown on all of them, but cold shutdown is a process of cooling that takes many days/weeks to achieve if the plant was on line as Tepco said. Without your primary heat sink (the Ocean) via heat exchangers, it's problematical whether or not Tepco had meltdowns on these four reactors also.
These are all just my opinions only, and I could be wrong.
TJ
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