After reading Crazy Horse's reference to the study I assumed the increase was two or three - or maybe five - percent increase.  A thirty-five percent increase is shocking.  

Granted it's a first study.  Granted the findings need to be verified.  It's still (barely) possible the increase is just one of those things that happens.  However, the math is as straight-forward as it can be and the findings are consistent with previous episodes.  I rather pride myself on my skepticism and I have a general unwillingness to theorize ahead of data but this is altogether too much like the early studies of the Navaho uranium mine tailings for me not to think the authors have got something.

Gawd, what a mess.


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

So Potentially there's quite a bit more than one cubic meter of active corium and spent fuel at Fukushima. There are around 1000 rods at each reactor - either active or in the SF pool - and each rod holds around 200kg of uranium.

So that's around 200 tonnes. Per reactor.

OK, that'd give you 3 microgram per square meter per reactor that goes boom, if spread evenly across the planet. The potassium background would still be a much bigger problem for anybody not immediately downwind of the plume.

For the people who are downwind of the plume... well, that's a different story, and one where I'm not qualified to come up with even ballpark figures.

Though personally I'd be a lot more worried about Japan having to filter its drinking water for radioactive heavy metals essentially forever.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

A major blow up now of the kind speculated above would be very bad news for those in the plume, but in a world where we are playing around with possible 5°C global warming, probably 2°C global warming, and genetically engineering crops so that we can pump fields with so much poison that it kills off honeybees ~ its seems like the stratospheric fallout would be in the "lets kill of thousands and make life miserable for thousands more" level of bad that we have permitted consistently over the past half century.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

...almost all the
noble gases were vented out into the environment. The ratio of released radioactive iodine to the total iodine contained (hereinafter referred to as release ratio) was IV-44 approximately 1% from the analysis result, and the release of other nuclides was less than 1%.

Results of the re-run by NISA (which found that the pressure vessel was damaged 5 hours rather than 17 hours after the accident, though the timeline of the fuel rod meltdown was the same):

As for release ratio of radioactive nuclides, the analytical results show about 1% of tellurium, about 0.7% of iodine and about 0.3% of cesium.

So further away from Fukushima, I wouldn't worry about the heavy metals, but would worry about the lots of Iodine (even ater decay) and caesium still there.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}