Special facility to monitor radiation levels at Yokosuka naval base
September 19th, 2008 by James
With the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington set to arrive soon at its new home port of Yokosuka, the Japanese government has responded to concerned citizens by setting up a new radiation monitoring facility near the American base:
The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry poured in about 300 million yen into the construction of the facility, which began monitoring radiation on Sept. 1.
Officials stationed at the two-story facility will check data from 10 radiation monitoring posts inside and around the U.S. naval base.
In the event of abnormal levels of radiation being detected, the officials will ascertain the quantity and severity of radioactivity using high-end analyzing equipment.
The data would be used for damage assessment and countermeasures, according to the government.
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A bit late, ain’t it?
So a government-run facility? And worse, a JAPANESE government run facility? What’s the chance they will actually annouce any incidents in a timely manner? 50/50? Does it depend who the Prime Minister is? or how threatening China and North Korea have been recently? or if the USA has been too pushy about rice imports?
How long will the delay be between any detection and any announcement? Can pretty much guarantee with the Japanese tendency to wait for approval, yet there being no clear definition of who ultimately can grant approval, that any irradiated folks will find out 3 days after the fact.
300million yen?
How about something more simple, pay for people with binoculars to see if the crew starts freaking out and radiation alarms go off on the ship. That SHOULD be a much better deteftion system than a few sensors scattered far, far away from the ship.
300 million yen for a useless gesture which won’t change any minds.
300 million yen – OUCH!
For 10 monitoring stations – DOUBLE OUCH! (especially when they could be setup and automated for way less then 1/100th of that cost).
To monitor something that has a zillion times better track record then their own Nuclear Power Plants – PRICELESS!!!!!!!!
If the Japanese facility announces dangerous levels of radiation before those who are actually generating the radiation then something is really, really wrong.
But, I suppose when it comes to radiation, overkill in safety measures probably isn’t such a bad thing.
If only they would be so concerned about JAPANESE nuclear reactors.
Seriously, are ANY Japanese nuclear reactors surrounded by 300 million yen monitoring sensors?
If you’re going to make the ridiculous claim that Japanese nuclear power plants are not equipped with radiation monitoring sensors, please back it up with some sort of evidence.
Are you calling into questions general safety standards? The issue being discussed is nuclear monitoring.
There have been three civilian nuclear accidents and one military accident involving Japan, the worst being a level 4 on the nuclear events scale. (5 in the U.S., 7 in Ukraine)
There have been four civilian and twenty seven military nuclear accidents involving the U.S.
“Clearly you have no comprehension of what QA/QC is, from your statement.”
Oh please, dismount from your white horse.
So you’re saying that nuclear monitoring is the same as QC on an iPod in a factory production line?
There have been problems in the past at Japanese nuclear plants, but that does not prove that the radiation monitoring sensors at Japanese power plants are less expensive or effective than those being installed in Yokosuka.
By the way, I am considering an update to the discussion policy of this site to ban the use of overly pretentious language. Over the last few months I have seen a trend toward the meaningless use of weighty-sounding words and phrases, especially Latin terms and acronyms such as QED. Not everyone commenting on this site speaks English as their first language, and even many who are native English speakers are not familiar with such terms. If you want to get your point across, please use plain English instead of snarky pretentious language.
Intelligence is not measured by how many Latin terms one can throw into a discussion.
If you want to have reasonable arguments with users on this site, I suggest you concentrate on using plain English that your opponents can understand. You might see it as dumbing down the discussion, but I see it as making discussions easily understandable and approachable to everyone.
27 U.S. military nuclear accidents? huh… within what period of time? Out of how many facilities?
Ok, so Level3 made the distinction earlier between detection and announcement.
So I was just thinking that if there were a problem, the USS George Washington would detect it way sooner than the remote facilities. If they choose not to announce it and the Japanese facility announces it first, there would be cause for concern over the U.S. base’s accident disclosure policy, or whatever. I don’t know, probably wouldn’t happen like that, though.
Here is some Latin to supplement my intelligence:
sine qua non
cogito ergo sum
Biggus Dikkus
“27 U.S. military nuclear accidents? huh… within what period of time? Out of how many facilities?”
Since the dawn of the nuclear age.
Actually, the source I originally pulled that from seems like it had cut out quite a few events, so there have been considerably more incidents:
http://www.cdi.org/Issues/NukeAccidents/accidents.htm
All of those incidents in the article (done by a super biased anti-nuclear soure) were related to weapons. Find some cases related to propulsion/ energy creation, since that is what the case is here. Japan’s track record is horrible compared to the U.S., and they have far fewer reactors in operation. Perhaps they should work on monitoring themselves first. I’d rather be next to a U.S. ship’s reactor than any of Japan’s any day of the week.
I found 5 US accidents to three Japanese ones, and all the US accidents were more serious than any Japanese one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents