Sunday, December 4, 2011

#Radiation in Japan: 17.9 Becquerels/kg of Cesium from School Lunch Milk

Despite the protest from the milk industry and the milk distributors, Chiyoda-ku, one of the 23 Special Wards in Tokyo, conducted the analysis of the food served in the school lunches at elementary schools, middle schools, kindergartens and nursery schools in the ward.

At one private nursery school, 17.9 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium was detected.

Chiyoda-ku's result is here.

Chiyoda-ku measured the entire cooked lunch at each school. It is not known if this radioactive milk was already served and consumed when they tested.

19 comments:

no6ody said...

Best hopes for all Japan to eat low on the food chain... with Geiger counters and HEPA masks for all.

Mauibrad said...

JESUS. TROUBLES THERE.

Anonymous said...

Do you have a link for the milk industry's protest of the testing?

zed said...

Giving this shit to children is a criminal act.

I hope the upcoming trials for crimes against humanity nail all these miserable scum to the WALL.

Anonymous said...

They would just tell you that they were following the guideline as given by the government. This thing will roll up hill, some random minister resigns, in the Japanese world, ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom all the well again!

Anonymous said...

If my child had to endure this-Tokyo would be on fire.

To anon questioning the author: Why don't YOU look up the link for the milk industry's protest?

arevamirpal::laprimavera said...

I linked the milk industry's protest against releasing the test result. It's in Japanese. Translation will have to wait till I have a faster connection.

The industry is afraid of "baseless rumors" (which means to me they have been feeding children with radioactive milk.)

Anonymous said...

The report from Chiyoda-ku lists 27 schools at which tests of food and milk were conducted - only the one nursery noted above by author had detected cesium in the milk. For about half the schools the testing for milk was grouped together (as in like they had the same source), the other half listed milk and food tested as separate components.

For the school noted the milk and food were separate:
Iodine-131 not detected
Cesium-134 6.9 Bq/kg
Cesium 137 11 Bq/kg
(=17 kg)

Sample tested for milk was 2 litres. One portion of each dish for food.

All the other locations had 'not detected' as the result in food or milk.

Report does not list supplier of milk but says that info is available from individual schools or on their home pages.

Also in the report it lists the machine used to test and that test time was 1000 seconds and 'detection limit' was 5 Bq/kg. What does that mean and what impact does it have on the result?

Atomfritz said...

At least we have to "thank" the milk industry for their downmixing the radioactivity in the milk.
This drastically reduces/averages the individual contamination of the milk.

This system has also other "advantages".
It "protects" the farmers as much as it puts them under pressure.

Just think about this mixing scenario:
First you mix
-10 units of milk from "hot spot farms" (10% of farms in 100km radius) with 1000Bq/l average
-100 units of milk from "hot farms" (50% of farms in 100km radius) with 100Bq/l average.

You get milk with slightly above 100Bq/liter. Though legal to sell, this will make the milk almost unsellable. And processing this milk to milk powder and sell it to countries like Somalia is something hairy. Seeing the bad publicity that German milk industry got trying to export the resulting 5000+ Bq/kg milk powder after Chernobyl, Japan's milk industry probably preferred another "solution", as the German milk powder ended up as solid low-level waste in some storage.

So they mixed the already-downblended Fukushima milk with milk of other prefectures in a ratio of, say, 1:6.

And bingo, only 18 Bq/liter left!


And now back to the farmers - they are constantly blackmailed by this system.
If they dare to have checked/tested their own milk, they risk to lose their income if their milk exceeds the limit.
So they are under pressure to not speak up.

This system contributes much to that little actual data will become public about how much the agricultural products are actually contaminated.

Anonymous said...

Hi guys:

anybody can tell me how many Bq/kg are contained in bananas?

Thanks a lot.

M.

Anonymous said...

sOOOOO... the denial in Japan is sOOO big they are going to sacrifice the children as well. Gonna be a good time when every child born over there is like sigmund the sea monster. This is good old fashioned genocide

Majia's Blog said...

Regarding bananas

The radioactive potassium in bananas is not absorbed by the body under normal conditions so this question is not relevant.

For cancer risk statistics for absorption of radionuclides using the ICRP model, see here

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/federal/402-r-99-001.pdf

However, the stats here probably do not apply because of this important caveat, stated on page 3

"For both internal and external exposure, a risk coefficient for a given radionuclide is based on the assumption that this is the only radionuclide present in the environmental medium. That is, doses due to decay chain members produced in the environment prior to the intake of, or external exposure to, the radionuclides are not considered” page 3

This is why, as Busby states, the ICRP model is not predictive in real world situations of exposure.

Matt said...

bananas are something like 130 bq/kg.... i think
even if the question is irrelevant, it warrants an answer

Anonymous said...

Matt did you read what Majia just said?

Mike said...

are radionuclides distributed evenly in milk? or in atomfritz's hypothetical, if the milk were bottled, would some bottles be over the limit and some under?

Mike

Anonymous said...

So what?
You think anyone cares or is going to do anything about it?

Absolutely not!

Let's see....if every nuke plant emits radiation continuously (and they most certainly do), and there are just under 500 known nuke reactors in the World....seems like the smoking gun to explain the 100,000% jump in cancer rate spikes around the World!

But, radiation is good to eat right? Except for that famous fisherman who ate it...the TEPCO CEO who ate it....the 1000's of workers who ate it.....I think it didn't agree with their DNA. Actually, it blew up their DNA!

Yahtzee!

arevamirpal::laprimavera said...

So what?
You think anyone cares or is going to do anything about it?

I do think someone cares.

Yosaku said...

Hi Majia,

With respect to the risk coefficients, this is why the EPA report provides risk coefficients for each isotope of significance in the decay chain.

In fact, the remainder of the EPA’s paragraph that you quoted above explains this:

"However, a separate risk coefficient is provided for each decay chain member of potential dosimetric significance. This allows the user to assess the risks from ingrowth of radionuclides in the environment."

Atomfritz said...

@ mike

It depends on the dairy's size and capacity.

Today's dairies can be big industrial plants, with cooling tanks of hundreds or thousands of cubic meters.
The bigger they are, the better the milk can be "standardized", so that every supermarket sells the same milk, even if it is branded differently.

So smaller, independent local dairies are in disadvantage, and so (at least in Germany) the whole country's milk needs is supplied from about a dozen giant industrial dairies, aside from a few smaller ones serving only niche markets (like ecologically produced milk products).

I don't think that it will be much different in Japan.

In total this is not very ecological, as milk is transported many hundred kilometers nowadays, like mineral waters.

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