Thursday, October 18, 2012

#Radioactive Japan: Government Changes Rules, and 102.8Bq/kg of Cesium in Rice Becomes 100Bq/kg, Rice Safe and Good to Sell


Rice harvested this year in a district in Iwaki City in southern Fukushima was found with 102.8 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium.

Not a problem.

Because under the little-noted guideline from the Ministry of Health and Welfare on March 15 this year before the provisional safety standard of 500 becquerels/kg of cesium expired, you are supposed to round down or up the 3rd digit and use only the first 2 digits. (Jiji article below says the notice was issued on July 5, but the original notice was on March 15.)

So, 102.8 becomes 100. Exactly the safety limit, and that's fine with the Fukushima prefectural government. They say it is "sufficiently safe", meaning the rice will be sold.

From Jiji Tsushin (10/18/2012):

コメ検査で基準値上限=「十分に安全」と県-福島

Rice tested at the upper safety limit, "Sufficiently safe", says Fukushima government

 福島県は18日、2012年産米のモニタリング検査で、同県いわき市で生産されたコメから放射性セシウムの基準値の限度いっぱいの1キロ当たり100ベクレルが検出されたと発表した。基準値は超えておらず、県は「十分に安全」(水田畑作課)としている。

Fukushima prefectural government announced the result of monitoring tests of rice harvested in 2012, which showed 100 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium had been detected from rice grown in Iwaki City in Fukushima. Since it didn't exceed the safety limit, the prefectural government says it is "sufficiently safe".

 県によると、いわき市の旧川部村で16日に採取した玄米で、セシウム134が39.6ベクレル、セシウム137が63.2ベクレル検出された。合計すれば102.8ベクレルで基準値を上回るが、厚生労働省は「(合計値の)3桁目を四捨五入し、有効数字2桁とする」と7月5日付で通知しており、これに従うと100ベクレルちょうどになる。

According to the prefectural government, unmilled rice from former Kawabe-mura in Iwaki City harvested on October 16 was found with 39.6 becquerels/kg of cesium-134, and 63.2 becquerels/kg of cesium-137. Total would be 102.8 becquerels/kg, exceeding the safety limit. However, the Ministry of Health and Welfare had sent a notice dated July 5, 2012 which stated, "Round off the third digit to the nearest whole number and use the first two digits as significant figure." According to the notice, [Iwaki's number] is exactly 100 becquerels.

 県は安全性確保のため、一定数のサンプルを採取して行うモニタリング検査に加え、全ての県産米(約1200万袋)を対象に全袋検査を実施中。これまでに、いずれの検査でも基準値を超えるセシウムは見つかっていない。

The prefectural government has been conducting the test to detect radioactive materials (cesium) on all rice (about 12 million bags [of 30 kilograms of rice]) grown in Fukushima, in addition to the monitoring test with a certain number of samples [per location]. So far, no rice has been found with radioactive cesium exceeding the safety standard in either test.


Uh... it has just been found, hasn't it? 102.8 becquerels/kg?

Japanese wiki on rounding numbers says you should be conservative in rounding the numbers when it comes to safety. In this case, if the safety standard is 100 becquerels/kg and the rice exceeded that standard by whatever small margin, it should have been treated as "exceeding the standard", instead of rounding down and declaring it is "sufficiently safe". If anything, it should be rounded up to 110 and ban the sales to be very conservative and safe.

As one of my Japanese Twitter followers suggested, that wiki entry needs a revision: "You should disregard safety when it involves the government policy, and round down the numbers to fit the safety standard to avoid baseless rumors."

By the way, Fukushima Prefecture tested one more sample from the same village in the monitoring test. That sample was found with 71.8 becquerels/kg, which the Fukushima prefectural government dutifully rounded up and printed "72 becquerels/kg".

Last year, there were 3 samples tested from this particular village in Iwaki City. They were all ND.

23 comments:

Timo Baumann said...

Rounding 71.8 to two digits gives 72, rounding 102.8 to two digits gives 100, because the third digit of 71.8 > 5 while the third digit of 102 < 5. No conspiracy. I agree that safety-critical rounding should always be conservative -- or you can just accept that the true limit is 105bq and be done with it. It's not a fundamental difference after all.

Anonymous said...

Who said it's a conspiracy?

arevamirpal::laprimavera said...

Difference is that by labeling it as 100Bq/kg, they are free to sell this "safe" rice, as "grown in Japan".

JAnonymous said...

Just another way to "update" the standard to 110 Bq/kg. Nothing new here, same as exposure limit for children in Fukushima pref during last year.

By the way, re-testing this sample would probably yield anything between 90 and 110, so who cares.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, pathetic bureaucrats but the 2.8Bq are no problem -- what bothers me are the 100 so, as far as I am concerned, Fukushima rice will stay on the shelf.
Beppe

Anonymous said...

A friend just returned from a two week visit to Toyko. No mention of any radiation, life as usual, and very much a "dont rock the boat" lifestyle. So guess eating rice with over 100 Bq/kg is just fine..or higher as they are just smiling and trusting the government....sad.

doitujin said...

Well, but when the safety limit itself is set by a number without any digits after the decimal point, then, no matter how many digits the x (natural number part) itself has, it would ajust be x.4 = x and x.5 = x+1, etc... it's just the correct way rounding regarding the form of the given limit which is a specific natural number (x = x.0) itself.
Rounding in the government's suggested way would mean, the real safety limit was 104,999999... Bq/kg which approximates 105 Bq/kg. And given that the test results might noit be completely stable, it could be that the food tested was even higher, maybe 110 or 115 Bq/kg or sth. (I don't know the possible deviation range). So the 100 Bq/kg limit is a lie, or at least not taken serious at all by them . And thinking of the fact that there are still so many things remaining untested, the word "safety" is a joke anyway, especially for more radiation sensitive people like children.
But nevertheless, buying something that is near to some safety limit whatsoever doesn't really give the buyer a safe feeling, for good reasons.

Kumachan said...

105Bq/kg are really a problem when bananas around the world are 120Bq/kg and carrots are 160Bq/kg?
Unfortunately the 100Bq/kg was set by that crazy of ex minister Komiyama as self advertisement, maybe for next election.
With the only result that what is illegal in Japan is legal and safe everywhere else with the 1000-1200Bq/kg limit of the Codex Alimentarius.
BTW deer in Sweden has a limit of 3000Bq/kg since Chernobyl.
I think it was our "La Primavera" that posted of that European jam tha become suddenly illegal in Japan with the Komiyama`s limits.

Anonymous said...

Here we go. Banana again. Kumachan, of course you are aware that 100+Bq/kg of cesium is ON TOP OF natural radioactive potassium, I hope. Besides, Codex Alimentarius is for nuclear emergency and the numbers are high because they assume low percentage of food coming from the contaminated areas.

In case of Japan, it's not emergency number, and the percentage of contaminated food is much higher. In eastern Japan, go to supermarket, and most of what you see in the produce section are from eastern Japan and Tohoku. Limit for reindeer in Sweden is for an ethnic minority to make a living.

Anonymous said...

Kumacha,

what are you doing now? Experiments with dogs showed that a single dose of 3.8 millicuries (140 MBq, 4.1 μg of caesium-137) per kilogram is lethal within three weeks.
Do you want your Banana with Cesium? or you like as it is?
Read again, 4.1 μg of caesium will kill you.
while the 31 Bq/g in a banana is far far less harmul. It is very sad that people like you who know nothing tell these kind of lies to other people who need to be carefull with food that is REALLY contaminated.

Then again, the rice is much more contaminated, because to the cesium contamination, you need to add all the other radionuclides that were not included in the test. So you should add Plutonium, unranium, americinium, cadnium, radioactive silver and hundreds more.
The contamination level of that rice is much more to worry about than your banana.

And if you don't think so, than please only food from the very near site of Fukushima, and you will find yourself sick in quite a short time and dead not long after, within a year.
Maybe from blood cancer, or hearth attack, pneumonia, anything really. Good luck with your life, but please before taking a chance to encourage people to be poisoned, think twice and do it yourself first.

Anonymous said...

Kumacha,

one more thing, your banana potassium is removed by the body after a few days, while the cesium get stored much longer.
how about finding cesium and eating it? I am sure you would say no thanks!

Anonymous said...

bananas are 15 to 20 bq/kg, not 100 bq/kg Kumachan.

Anonymous said...

Kumachan
Strontium, which usually comes along with Cesium and is NOT tested at all in Japan, gets into your bones and stays there practically forever. This is quite unlike your banana potassium, which has a very short biological half life.
Hence better stay clear from 100Bq/kg food: if you can choose buy it from somewhere else. Supporting Fukushima producers by eating Tepco s**t is nonsense.
Beppe

Anonymous said...

Before Fukushima: 100 Bq/kg of cesium is nuclear waste — After: 100 Bq/kg of cesium is safe to eat

http://enenews.com/before-fukushima-100-bqkg-cesium-nuclear-waste-after-100-bqkg-safe-eat

Anonymous said...

Again with the bananas. Okay let's add this up. The Japanese have now been eating the equivalent of one banana every hour on the hour since March 2011(these numbers can of course go up and down with Japan's flexible system of science and mathematics).

In addition to everything they eat, breathe, and take in dermally-they have eaten 24 bananas every single day for 20 straight months without cessation.

Would you care to discuss what eating over 14 THOUSAND bananas does to the human body? Diarrhea, for starters?

Oh and there is ZERO eta for containment so this is going to be a nonstop hourly banana-eating session for DECADES.

TechDud said...

no, that would take centuries, perhaps. The half-life of Potassium 40 is billions of years (primarily via Beta & anti-neutrino emission)! That means that very little decay is taking place; the ionization energy is low unless otherwise energized. The wastes we are exposed to, one side of the Pacific or the other, primarily decay in much shorter periods of time (varying in decay's daughter product amounts and concentration); thereby releasing more ionizing energy. It is that ionization energy that wreaks chaos upon our DNA, our mitochondrial DNA, our parasite's DNA, our food's DNA, ...

This bullshit with the bananas; WTF?
It wreaks of Monkey Business!

@Anonymous October 19, 2012 6:52 PM
Where are your bananas from?

JAnonymous said...

After the units bullshit in spring 2011, we are now getting our crap load of caesium-vs-banana bullshit by the Bucqet...

And believe me or not, as anon said above, strontium is THE shit. Now why do people care about Cs but not Sr ? Because we have no clue to what extent Cs can cause cancer, so we will have endless arguments like the electromagnetic waves craze, are mobile phones killing our brains, and so on...

On the other hand, Strontium is very well known to enter the body and stay there in your bones. This happens naturally, but you don't usually find so much Sr90 in the wild. Hence the gov's idea : let's not care about Strontium, and if anybody asks, do any (or all) of the following :
- shrug
- sigh heavily
- say the following magic spell : sho-o-ga-na-i

and live happily for ever after...

Yosaku said...

We would treat the data similarly in the US. The last example in the following US EPA advisory on rounding analytical data is particularly onpoint:

http://www.epa.gov/safewater/wsg/wsg_21.pdf

The MCL for Radium 226+228 is 5 pCi/l. Analytical results of 5.4 pCi/l would be rounded down to 5, bringing the result into compliance even though the original data exceeded the limit.

Kumachan said...

Hello guys, how about using some nicknames so it`s simpler to answer?
I`ll go in order from SG1 to SG7.

To SG1:
"Codex Alimentarius is for nuclear emergency and the numbers are high because they assume low percentage of food coming from the contaminated areas.".
It`s to protect everyone in the world and it is about any nuclear or chemical contamination or simply a region with particular characteristics.
For example in my ex homecountry there are zones with more than 1000Bq/l of radon in the water.
The C A is made counting that you eat 550kg/year of food (and get fat as an American and not slim as a Nihonjin).
Now let`s count your terrible and deadly 105Bq/kg, 100% of it contaminated, so a total of 57750Bq eaten in one year, that divided by 100,000,000Bq/Sv gives you the killing level [eating ONLY contaminated food and more of what a Japanese eats] of 0.5mSv/year.
So Now that, as you say, I`m eating only contaminated japanese food and I`m living in Kanto with a background radiation around 0.5-1mSv/year, I`m getting a total of a bit more than 1mSv/year.
When I was in England and Italy I got an average of 4-5mSv/year of background radiation. Between 9 and 10mSv/y in Norway.
Yes definitely I`ll die of cancer due to radiation living in Japan eating 100% of contaminated food.
BTW Fukushima area produces less than 1% of the food eaten in Japan and you can read here the test results:
http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/topics/2011eq/dl/15Oct2012.pdf

"Limit for reindeer in Sweden is for an ethnic minority to make a living.".
Are you saying that the WHO, in order to SAVE THE SAMI money let them kill themselves and Swedish-Nowegian-Finnish people?
What bastards!
I, in my absolute ignorance, as explained by the truth revealed to me by the 7 SGs, thought that they carefully calculated the annual dose of deer beef eaten there and then chose a safe limit that could garantee a not increase of cancers in these 25 years.
But you are right and I`m wrong of course.
BTW, I ate it in Helsinki.

Kumachan said...

To SG2:
"Experiments with dogs showed that a single dose of 3.8 millicuries (140 MBq, 4.1 μg of caesium-137) per kilogram is lethal within three weeks.".
Your measure has no sense if you don`t say how many kilos of food you gave to those dogs.
For human, you saw that it`s calculated on 550kg.
And 550kg at 140,000,000Bq/kg makes 77000000000Bq that makes 770,000mSv/year, can you see the difference with 0.5mSv/year?
I understand that to multiply one number for another is too complicate for you, but maybe you can still see that, eating ONLY contaminated food, you get a dose that it`s less than 1 MILLIONTH the dose of your dogs.

"4.1 μg of caesium will kill you".
DECIDE!
Is it 4.1μg/kg or 4.1 μg?
Besides 4.1μg in a human body if roughly 2Sv, about 3 times the single most contaminated man of FD1.
In a dog is much more, probably 50Sv if you give it to a Chiwawa. OF COURSE THEY DIE!
The fact that 140MBq are 140,000,000Bq, which means 1333333 times the Japanese limit means nothing to you?
1.3 million times!!!!
Try to drink 1 glass of whisky and then 1.3 million glasses.

"while the 31 Bq/g in a banana is far far less harmul".
31Bq/g is 31000Bq/kg, wow, it`s a super babana!
And I confirm 105 or 1000Bq/kg is far much safer than your 140GigaBq/kg.

"please only food from the very near site of Fukushima"
Well I`m eating the food that all Japanese are eating, isn`t enough?
Why should I eat what no-one is eating?

"hearth attack, pneumonia".
Can you tell US in which study you can get them unless you get ARS in the first day with 6Sv and your white cells go to zero?

"think twice and do it yourself first."
I`m doing myself, I`m living in one of the less radioactive country of the world!

Kumachan said...

To SG3:
"one more thing, your banana potassium is removed by the body after a few days, while the cesium get stored much longer".
Actually cesium has a biologic halflife of roughly 60/70 days and for the body they are chemically the same.
Just potassium you take it everyday and it will be in your body even after your death, Cesium no.

"how about finding cesium and eating it? I am sure you would say no thanks!"
Why should I say "no thanks"?
We all eat the cesium from Fukushima, Chernobyl and nuclear tests.
The Cesium in UK milk was far much higher during the `60ies than after Chernobyl and much much much much much more than Japanese milk after Fukushima.


To SG4:
"bananas are 15 to 20 bq/kg, not 100 bq/kg Kumachan."
As your predecessors you really type just because you have a keyboard bought from daddy, right?
It` 15-20Bq PER banana, I think you banana is about a 100g/0.1Kg banana [or you have a 1kg single banana in your country?] and you get... TADAAAH 150-200Bq/kg.
Retry, you might be lucky.
Actually here they say it`s 3520pCi/kg or 130Bq/kg.
http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm

Kumachan said...

To SG5:
"Strontium, which usually comes along with Cesium and is NOT tested at all in Japan, gets into your bones and stays there practically forever."
Yes, it came along in some places like near my house and it was tested, but everytime it was roughly one 1,000th of the Cesium, then you read the above limit for cesium and you can understand by yourself why it is no more mentioned.
Listen, come here, get your samples as everyone does and check it by yourself.

"This is quite unlike your banana potassium, which has a very short biological half life."
Caro Beppe,
potassium 40 is the constant of your life!
It`s in every part of your body, it`s in your milk [40-50Bq/kg], in your pasta, in your walls, in your GF.
A human body of 70 kilos has a roughly constant value of 5000Bq from K-40 and 4000Bq from Carbon 14.

Kumachan said...

To SG6:
"The Japanese have now been eating the equivalent of one banana every hour on the hour since March 2011".
What do you think you meant?
Let`s say the edible part of the banana are 60g, one every hour for 1 year... If I didn`t make a mistake it`s 526kg of bananas and roughly the equivalent of 0.1mSv/year.
They are going to be definitely fat, but won`t die of radiation.

"In addition to everything they eat, breathe".
Yes, I breathe, and what do you think I`m breathing?
I`m curious.

"Oh and there is ZERO eta for containment so this is going to be a nonstop hourly banana-eating session for DECADES."
Care to elaborate?

To SG7:
"Because we have no clue to what extent Cs can cause cancer".
Why do you think we don`t?

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