Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant."<p>"The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster."<p>I tried to source this on Google. I can't find the article by Sherman and Mangano, but found this discussion:<p><a href="http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550" rel="nofollow">http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550</a><p>It appears the authors cited by AJE were using CDC data. Someone posts the infant death numbers at the Berkeley link. The numbers are very small with a lot of deviation. And it's not clear that they're even being measured against total number of births.<p>I've heard a lot of praise for AJE's reporting and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that TEPCO and the Japanese government were continuing to understate the risk, but this article seems shoddy and sensationalistic.

"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant."<p>Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist:<p><a href="http://janettesherman.com/" rel="nofollow">http://janettesherman.com/</a><p>Joseph Mangano is the director of the "Radiation and Public Health Project":<p><a href="http://www.radiation.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiation.org/</a><p>They are not exactly disinterested parties, and it is fair to say that their article would never be published in a peer reviewed journal:<p><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html</a><p>Side Note: This is not the most scientific graph in the world, but (in the event of another panicked radiation article) it is always worth linking to the xkcd graph on radiation:<p><a href="http://xkcd.com/radiation/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/radiation/</a>

<i>In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.</i><p><i>The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.</i><p>I don't know why anyone should take this article seriously. Here's the thing about radiation: We can measure it directly. And scientists have certainly been able to measure radioactivity here in the U.S. that must be a consequence of Fukushima. But here's the thing: those radioactive effects -- here in the U.S. -- are very, very small.

There's a lot of nonsense in that article. First of all, they keep repeating the words Plutonium and Uranium (particularly "enriched Uranium") and try to suggest that these are the major threats from the accident.<p>They're not.<p>Uranium isotopes have a half-life of billions of years, so whatever radioactivity they emit is spread out over a very long time. Overall, uranium is toxic in the same way that lead is toxic, and the chemical toxicity is probably worse than the radiotoxicity. Even in a completely melted reactor core, uranium dioxide is relativly stable and won't be quickly transported into the environment.<p>The isotopes of concern are primarily of Iodine and Cesium. Radioiodine from the accident has almost completely decayed, although Cesium isotopes may still be hazardous in heavily contaminated areas for years.<p>Currently there seem to be "hotspots" at considerable distances from the plant where doses on the ground are in a range that's at the edge of what nuclear power workers are permitted to get (but rarely do.) There's no proof that radiation at that level is harmful, but no proof that it's completely safe to have that exposure for your lifetime either.<p>Now, it's also BS to say that the threat from spent nuclear fuel that's been sitting around for 10 years is as high as the threat from an active core or one that's been sitting around for three months -- it just isn't; radioactivity decays and heat generation goes down, so it's really unfair to count the number of "cores" worth of danger here.<p>That said, I wouldn't blame people for mistrusting Japanese government, industry and even society. Japan has been the world's leader in nuclear accidents for the past 20 years, and it's often said that they're not completely honest about industrial accidents in general (such as in the auto industry.)<p>Nuclear safety requires a person who's disciplined and (for the most part) follows orders but who also has a strong individual sense of right and wrong and won't follow a bad order. America's nuclear navy works hard to cultivate this ethos, but I'm not sure if it's easy to cultivate this in Japan.

The quick onslaught of the "it couldn't possibly be a meltdown" message in the mainstream media and the "MIT professor says" emails/webpages, etc all smacked of a propaganda campaign to me. All the while the fuel rods were sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the reactor... and probably leaking through into the ground.<p>Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the catastrophe than a conspiracy to suppress information, but the forcefulness of the response was striking.<p>I heard a great (and probably apocryphal) anecdote on the radio a few weeks after -- "After three mile island, the Russians came to the US, performed a detailed analysis, and concluded 'we can't have a three mile island'. Instead, they had a Chernobyl. The Japanese went to Russia, did an analysis, and said 'we can't possibly have a Chernobyl', and instead had their own meltdown. Now we're hearing how modern reactors couldn't possibly have a meltdown like any of three so far."

I love AJE, but I'm regularly surprised over the amount of balls AJE reporters have in making value judgements on the fly. For instance:<p><i>Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?<p>Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.</i>

"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes,"<p>As an Engineer I call bullshit on this.

I'm not a big fan of the automatic approval many on HN give to nuclear power, and I agree that we haven't heard the last of Fukushima.<p>But this article is bullshit. There is no conceivable mechanism for it to have occurred, and no pattern in other cases of nuclear exposure.

One disaster, and people forget the half century of prosperity that nuclear power brought. Worse, the general public is going to see Fusion (fingers crossed) in the same way as fission just because it's also "nuclear power". I'm disheartened.

"'Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,' Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera"<p>OK, after reading the first sentence, I was already suspicious of this article. Quick tab back to HN comments seems to confirm it. Thanks for saving my time, HN.

Fukushima is a disaster, yes, but this article (particularly the little subsection blaming the USA) is full of appeals to emotion.

It will be interesting to see if, in a few years, dentists and doctors start collecting baby teeth, which can then be analyzed for uptake of radioactive materials into bone.<p>This was done in the 50s and 60s in the USA - the large number of above-ground nuclear tests put material in the air, which was detectable in teeth from children living at that time.<p>(link may be biased against nuclear but contains overview of the study): <a href="http://www.radiation.org/projects/tooth_fairy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiation.org/projects/tooth_fairy.html</a>

No it's not. The long-term environmental impact from fukushima is <i>far</i> smaller than that from the BP oil leak last year. The extra radiation being received by people who live a <i>mile</i> from the site is on par with eating two bananas every day.<p>The impact isn't nothing; this is a significant catastrophe. But that article is sensational bullshit.

This article really lowers my opinion of Al Jazeera english.

From the article, it seems as though experts are saying the design of the reactors by GE didn't take into account that Japan has earthquakes.<p>GE was never named directly, but wikipedia says it was their design. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power...</a>

What exactly are "hot" particles that can't be measured with a Geiger counter? I assume they are talking about radioactive particles and not particles with increased temperature. This article sounds like pseudo science to me.

If our best scientific assessments are based on absurdly low-confidence ancillary statistics like these, doesn't that automatically suggest that we shouldn't decide anything based on the results?

In addition to the other criticism.<p>From the article: <i>TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.</i><p>Is there a reference supporting this? I've only seen values for Fukushima radiation as a fraction of Chernobyl (and if I remember correctly, not as bad isotopes)?<p>A while ago, I got multiple comments modded to -10, for questioning the trustworthiness of Al Jazeera. The web site is not connected to the tv channel?<p>(For the record: I don't really know about al J. I distrust most media, except NY Times/Washington Post/BBC as long as they don't write about advertisers.)