Still No Need to Panic About Radiation Leaks at Fukushima?
As time goes by, there hasn’t been much of a decline in the international panic and fear over the situation at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Reports about leaks localized within the buildings or immediate area of the nuclear plant are fueling new wild speculation about the threat to “Japan.”
Even when there aren’t new developments to report, the English language media manages to invent alarming new stories. Yesterday, the BBC, Associated Press, and other news agencies ran stories saying that Japan’s prime minister had announced the country was in state of “MAXIMUM ALERT” because of the nuclear situation. Kan’s actual words, “最大限の緊張感を持って取り組みたい” ( roughly: “(we are) working with the highest sense of urgency/alert”) was just a bland statement meant to convince people that the government is working hard to resolve the situation. The English translation favored by the BBC and AP misleadingly implied that Japan has a formal alert level system, which had just been increased because of new developments.
Below are some helpful links I’ve come across in the last several days. Those that are looking for level-headed rational examination of the risks might want to check some of them out. The information contained in the links might be particularly useful to residents of Japan who are struggling to explain the situation to hysterical overseas friends and relatives who are bombarding their e-mail inboxes with messages of nuclear doom.
Here are a few links that provide interesting data about radiation levels:
- Fleep.com’s “Graphing Earthquake, Radiation and Water Data in Japan” – A straightforward visual representation of the changes over time in radiation levels in Tohoku and Kanto regions of Japan. [Regular updates are announced via Twitter]
- The Wall Street Journal’s “Radiation Levels in Japan” – An interactive map that shows radiation levels in different parts of Japan.
- Microsievert.net – A cool Japanese site that uses animations to visualize the comparative amounts of radioactive particles floating around the air in Japan. The recent measurements in Tokyo are shown to be below the world average.
- “Absorbed dose rate measurements accross Europe” – data provided by the EU’s EURDEP program shows that background radiation levels in many parts of Europe are higher than the levels recorded recently in Tokyo.
Here are a few articles that don’t fall into the sensationalist mold:
Fukushima: sounding worse, getting better by Bill Durodié (Nanyang Technological University)
The closer the situation comes to being resolved at Fukushima, the clearer it will become what actually happened there. Hence it will sound like matters are getting worse just as they are getting better.
Why Fukushima isn’t like Chernobyl by Alexander Sich (Franciscan University)
At Chernobyl you had a massive, massive release of radioactivity. While we still don’t have the numbers for Fukushima, I would compare it maybe to a matchstick and a stick of dynamite. It’s a crude analogy, but it gives you some insight.
‘Don’t panic’ over plutonium in soil at Fukushima plant by Zena Iovino
The two samples in question show elevated levels of plutonium-238. Though these findings grabbed headlines on Monday, experts contacted by New Scientist say that the contamination is not severe.
“I’m not going to lie awake at night worrying about these levels,” says Dan Strom, staff scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who notes that the US Environmental Protection Agency would deem soil with this level of contamination fit for farming.
“If this site were to be used just for a recreational area – a parking lot or golf course – then you could easily have 100 times this level,” Strom adds.
Turn down the dial on radiation fears by Lawrence Solomon
Since the scientists who pondered these questions [of radiation dangers] were working in the dark, able to arrive only at reasonable guesstimates, they decided it would be safest to assume that the dose was linearly proportional to the danger -the lower the dose, the lower the danger -with no dose so low as to eliminate danger. The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation acknowledged its puzzlement in a 1958 report: “There may or may not be a threshold dose,” it wrote, explaining: “Linearity has been assumed primarily for purposes of simplicity.”
Over time, the committee became less ambiguous and more dogmatic in affirming the linearity theory. The upshot: Almost everyone now accepts the dogma that all radiation poses a health risk, despite all absence of proof.
Viewpoint: We should stop running away from radiation by Wade Allison (University of Oxford)
More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died – and is unlikely to.
In Japan, disaster coverage is measured, not breathless by Chico Harlan
N-H-K anchors do not use certain words that might make a catastrophe feel like a catastrophe. “Massive” is prohibited. Same with “severe.” N-H-K gives its cub reporters an earthquake and tsunami coverage manual — Japan is a country famous for manuals — and here it instructs them in how not to stir panics, and how to properly apologize when calling local officials for updates.
Indeed, N-H-K, as part of its core mission, aims to keep viewers levelheaded.
[Hat tips to Matt Alt, Gakuranman, Daniel Garcia, and many others on Twitter]
- Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
- Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
