TEPCO: 17 workers have a 5% chance of fatal cancer

[wtmusic]

"Although the threat to human health is smaller than what is widely believed, there may be a public health effect from the damage to the Japanese reactors. As of late May, the 21 most exposed workers have each seen an increase of 0.4–1 percent in their chance of contracting a fatal cancer (Update: Tepco has now examined all 3,700 workers; 107 workers have from 0.4 – 0.8% chance of a fatal cancer, and another 17 have higher exposures, with chances of fatal cancer as high as 5%.) Exposure levels for other workers and the public are much lower, but one can assume that the sheer volume of exposure will produce statistical cancers, cancers predicted by the model, but occurring at a much lower rate than year-to-year variations, with vanishingly small chances of any one cancer being caused by this event. On the other hand, if the nuclear reactors were replaced with coal, in much less than a year, deaths from coal power would clearly exceed total health threats from the Daiichi disaster.

<>

Although the public health effect from the damaged reactors appears small, and although, as the Washington Post says, "Barring a major release of toxic elements from the stabilizing Daiichi plant, radiation experts predict no long-term health impact on residents in the region," the fear of health consequences remains large. People tell me they expect deaths within a year and then a large number of deaths over decades, simply because of the extent of media coverage. Likewise, alarmist actions, such as the Swiss government moving its embassy out of Tokyo, caused some evacuees to assume there was a risk to their health, which made returning home stressful. The greatest health consequence of Daiichi, by far, will be on all whose lives are affected by future energy policy decisions influenced by public overreaction, such as Germany's decision to replace nuclear power with fossil fuels.

Such misplaced fear continues to be fed by the powerful reaction to Chernobyl. Some popular estimates, such as those by Greenpeace, magnify the tragedy many fold. Chernobyl has actually killed 50–60 to date, and may kill 4,000 more over seven decades following that initial exposure. Four thousand is the number who die worldwide from air pollution every year by noon on January 1, according to World Health Organization. WHO says that at least this number died from climate change worldwide over a typical ten-day period in 2000. There would have to be several Chernobyls every month to yield the damage routinely done by fossil fuels."

http://theenergycollective.com/karenstreet/63318/earthquake-tsunami-and-nuclear-power-japan?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=The+Energy+Collective+%28all+posts%29

[kristopher]

1. "Radiation is good for you"

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/ann-coulter-on-the-factor-radiation-is-actually-good-for-you/

[bananas]

2. What bullshit.

"Chernobyl has actually killed 50–60 to date, and may kill 4,000 more over seven decades following that initial exposure"

No, that's wrong, the author is misinformed.

[FBaggins]

3. Probably so...

...but a heck of a lot closer than the multiple hundreds of thousands claimed by the wildest fearmongering.

OTOH, this author makes an error in the other direction as well. The reported dose amounts represent roughly the cited chances of developing cancer from the exposure, not (IIRC) specifically of a fatal cancer.

[bananas]

6. Not "probably", it's absolutely so.

The 4,000 number was blatantly dishonest, and estimates keep increasing as we learn more about the effects of low-level radiation.

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/04/22/how-many-did-chernobyl-kill-more-than-4000

How many did Chernobyl kill? More than 4,000....
Posted by Eben Harrell Friday, April 22, 2011 at 11:28 am

<snip>

Turns out, however, that this figure was never meant to be the definitive estimate. WHO's spokesman Gregory Härtl says it's a partial figure selected by the public relations company that put together the press release; it only refers to deaths in the most heavily affected regions near the plant.

<snip>

In 2006, Richard Garwin explained in detail why the 4,000 figure was dishonest, and acknowledged his own estimate of 24,000 was too low, increasing it by 40% to 34,000 based on the new BEIR VII report:

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/The_Real_Toll_Of_Chernobyl_Remains_Hidden_In_Background_Noise.html

The Real Toll Of Chernobyl Remains Hidden In Background Noise
An aerial view of Chernobyl.

by Richard L. Garwin
UPI Senior News Analyst
Yorktown Heights NJ (UPI) Apr 21, 2006

The headline of The New York Times Sept. 8, 2005 editorial, "Chernobyl's Reduced Impact," indicated that the consequences of Chernobyl are now understood to be substantially less serious than previously estimated.

Unfortunately, although The New York Times is sometimes alert for spin and deception, the writer missed this one, long in the making. The text of the editorial in fact quotes the deceptive report accurately, in indicating that the 4,000 expected deaths are among the radiation workers and those most highly exposed.

But the report and the editorial -- and particularly the headline -- ignored the much larger impact on the less heavily exposed population, which I have long estimated as 20,000 additional deaths from cancer.

<snip>

A long-awaited report from the National Academy of Sciences' Board on the Effects of Ionizing Radiation, BEIR VII has been available at the Web site nap.edu since July 2005. The BEIR VII report judges that each dose of whole-body radiation causes a lethal cancer at the rate of 0.057* cancer deaths per Sv of exposure.

<snip>

A radiation dose of 600,000 person sieverts, corresponding to 34,200* expected deaths might be figured to cause damage to the overall population at the rate of one million dollars per premature death, or perhaps $34* billion. And although it is impossible to identify these 34,200* among the many tens of millions of people who would die from similar cancers from natural causes over the same period, those deaths are nevertheless a consequence of the radiation release. In order to minimize such accidents, the principle of "polluter pays" is quite reasonable.

In any case, the current Chernobyl Forum report totally ignores this dose without even making the argument that its consequences are zero or should be neglected.

As a physicist long involved with nuclear weapons and nuclear power, I can only speculate why the organizations of the Chernobyl Forum found common cause in putting the 600,000 person-Sv radiation dose into the memory hole. With the United States about to assume much of the burden of the consequences of Katrina, some of these influences are particularly poignant.

Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine may well feel that they are suffering an undue burden in supporting the Chernobyl "victims", when there are many other individuals and causes equally deserving of public support in their countries. The nuclear power industry would be much encouraged if a $34* billion liability were somehow written down to $4 billion, not only for this event but for future accidents.

<snip>

As pointed out in this BBC article, this doesn't include non-cancer deaths:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4917526.stm

Last Updated: Tuesday, 18 April 2006, 13:23 GMT 14:23 UK
Greenpeace rejects Chernobyl toll

<snip>

But Greenpeace says in a report released on Tuesday that recent studies estimate that the actual number of such deaths will be 93,000.

Stressing that there is a problem with diagnosis, it adds that other illnesses could take the toll to 200,000.

"Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases," Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte told Reuters news agency.

"The only methodology that is accepted is for calculating fatal cancers."

<snip>

More recent studies have shown that radiation effects have been seriously underestimated:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x296591

Study: Radiation affects birth sex ratio
Published: May 26, 2011 at 4:00 PM

<snip a couple of news articles down to an excerpt from the paper>

5 Conclusions and outlook

Our observations add evidence to findings in the field of
radiation epidemiology indicating considerably underestimated
health risks of the so-called low-level (< 100 mSv)
ionizing radiation ...
This means that the internationally established radiation
risk concept based on average absorbed dose is in error at
three to four orders of magnitude or, more likely, it is
conceptually wrong.

<snip>

And of course the widely discussed NYAS report which estimates 1 million deaths:

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-26-01.html

Chernobyl Radiation Killed Nearly One Million People: New Book

NEW YORK, New York, April 26, 2010 (ENS) - Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility.

The book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," was compiled by authors Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus.

The authors examined more than 5,000 published articles and studies, most written in Slavic languages and never before available in English.

The authors said, "For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

<snip>

http://ifyoulovethisplanet.org/?p=3927

Best of 2010: Dr. Janette Sherman on the true magnitude of the Chernobyl meltdown and the staggering health effects of nuclear radiation

Listen Now Download the show by right-clicking the link.

This week, we hear a repeat of Dr Caldicott’s May 17 program featuring an interview with Janette D. Sherman, M.D. on the long-term effects of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown. Dr. Sherman has recently completed the translation and editing of the book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, published by the New York Academy of Sciences in December 2009, which indicates that nearly one million people were killed by the Chernobyl disaster. Download and read the book for free by following the instructions on this page. Dr. Sherman has been an advisor to the National Cancer Institute on breast cancer and to the EPA on pesticides. She is a resource person and speaker for universities and health advocacy groups concerning cancer, birth defects, pesticides, toxic dumpsites, and nuclear radiation. Dr. Sherman is a specialist in internal medicine and toxicology. She has published more than 70 articles in the scientific literature and also writes for the popular press to provide information to the concerned public. She is the author of Life’s Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer, and Chemical Exposure and Disease. As background for this interview, read the article Chernobyl Radiation Killed Nearly One Million People: New Book. And read the review by Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D. of the Chernobyl book.

http://www.nukefree.org/now-free-download-chernobyl-consequences-catastrophe-people-environment

Now for Free Download: CHERNOBYL: CONSEQUENCES OF THE CATASTROPHE FOR PEOPLE & THE ENVIRONMENT
http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. Oh, sure…

bring “facts” into the discussion…

[bananas]

9. My bad!

LOL!

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Hmmm…

http://theenergycollective.com/karenstreet/63318/earthquake-tsunami-and-nuclear-power-japan?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=The+Energy+Collective+%28all+posts%29

…

Currently (as of late May), the situation is not yet stable; three Japanese nuclear reactors in use at this time will likely leak radioactivity for weeks. (The total leakage of cesium and iodine is so far equivalent to 10 percent of Chernobyl, and this may rise a bit.) …

May, June, July, August… (yeah, OK, so maybe it’s a little out of date.)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVzX3gAxp58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z49_1YkPgPE

http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/fukushima-now-radiating-everyone-sbs-exposes-unspeakable-reality

Fukushima now radiating everyone: 'Unspeakable' reality

August 16, 2011

SBS exposes extreme Fukushima radiation human rights violations while U.S. media remains silent

Australia's Special Broadcasting Station (SBS) exposed the "unspeakable" realities of the Japanese catastrophe in its 60 Minutes program Sunday night during which leading nuclear scientist Dr. Michio Kaku said radiation from Fukushima will impact of all of humanity. The nuclear energy power industry violation of the right to health is apparent throughout the new Australian report.

…

Stopping along the way, the Geiger showed that a head of cabbage registered as much radiation as an X-ray.

"So every time you have a cabbage, you have an X-ray," said Hayes.

Radiation refugees by the thousands, wearing masks, live in cardboard shelters, sleeping on the floors of public buildings, with few possessions and little to no privacy, as Hayes saw first-hand and was documented by SBS.

…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr2PmjdpLqM&feature=player_embedded

…

[miyazaki]

5. I still remember the level of disgust from good scientists

over Kaku's warning to the world concerning the Cassini mission and it's plutonium batteries.
One even remarked with a shaking head , "ha, calls himself a physicist".

[bananas]

8. Yup - and Kaku's been vindicated in at least three ways.

1) NASA said they couldn't increase the fly-by distance - until they realized they could (and did, which reduced the risk tremendously).

2) Solar-powered Juno just launched for Jupiter, proving that the large RTG's on Cassini were not necessary.

3) The solar-powered Mars Rovers were only expected to last 90 days, but they keep going and going like energizer bunnies.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. Well to be fair… Spirit is dead

http://www.universetoday.com/85923/end-of-the-road-for-spirit-rover/

…

Spirit became embedded in soft Martian soil in May of 2009 and that was the beginning of the end. The team spent months planning for her extrication, and then months again attempting to drive her out, but they ran out of time and power in the approaching Martian winter. The team was unable to put the rover in a favorable position to catch rays of sunlight on her solar panels, and after another freezing, grueling winter, Spirit has now likely succumbed to the harsh environment on Mars.

“We drove it, literally, until its wheels came off and at the beginning of the mission, we never expected that would be the way this project would end up,” said Dave Lavery, MER program director at NASA Headquarters.

…

One of the challenges that Spirit faced is that it always had dust on the solar arrays, Callas said, even during the first winter on the Columbia Hills. After a timely dust cleaning event by a dust devil, the team was able tilt Spirit to gather sunshine and she survived. The second winter she achieved a 10% tilt and survived; the third winter, the team was able to find a 30% tilt – again she survived. But the 4th winter, there just wasn’t the right geography in the sand pits of Troy that would enable Spirit to survive after it became embedded.

What is the mood of the rover team? “We all are taking realistic look, as this mission was originally supposed to last only 90 sols, and we thought if we were extraordinarily lucky we’d get twice that much time and that the first Martian winter would be the end of the mission” said Lavery. “Realistically, in every possible definition of the word, we looking at this as a massive success in terms of longevity and the massive science return we got out of the project. As this particular chapter of Spirit’s mission comes to a close, this is very much a celebration of the accomplishments of the rover and the success it has had, and looking forward to the next steps of Mars exploration.”

…

[wtmusic]

11. What does that have to do with Kaku's objections

or...you just can't resist an opportunity to take a cheap shot? :eyes:

http://www.lovearth.org/mkaku.htm

[OKIsItJustMe]

16. Um…

I wasn’t taking a cheap shot.

I believe the quotes made it pretty clear that the problem was not with the solar panels. (i.e. I wasn’t trying to imply that it was.) I was merely pointing out that one of the rovers is no longer operational.

[SpoonFed]

19. hahah... seriously?

May s/he with the purest heart throw the first stone.

[bananas]

12. Ok, but Opportunity is still going

I checked wikipedia before I posted and didn't read far enough,
it sounded like they were both still alive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover

Mars Exploration Rover
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) is an ongoing robotic space mission involving two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the sending of the two rovers—MER-A Spirit and MER-B Opportunity—to explore the Martian surface and geology.

The mission's scientific objective was to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which includes three previous successful landers: the two Viking program landers in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder probe in 1997.<1>

The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90-Martian-day (sol) primary mission was US$820 million.<2> Since the rovers have continued to function beyond their initial 90 sol primary mission, they have each received five mission extensions. The fifth mission extension was granted in October 2007, and runs to the end of 2009.<2><3> The total cost of the first four mission extensions was $104 million, and the fifth mission extension is expected to cost at least $20 million.<2>

In July 2007, during the fourth mission extension, Martian dust storms blocked sunlight to the rovers and threatened the ability of the craft to gather energy through their solar panels, causing engineers to fear that one or both of them might be permanently disabled. However, the dust storms lifted, allowing them to resume operations.<4>

On May 1, 2009, during its fifth mission extension, Spirit became stuck in soft soil on Mars.<5> After nearly nine months of attempts to get the rover back on track, including using test rovers on Earth, NASA announced on January 26, 2010 that Spirit was being retasked as a stationary science platform. This mode will enable Spirit to assist scientists in ways that a mobile platform could not, such as detecting "wobbles" in the planet's rotation that would indicate a liquid core.<6> Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) lost contact with Spirit after last hearing from the rover on March 22, 2010 and continued attempts to regain communications until May 25, 2011 bringing the elapsed mission time to 6 years 2 months 19 days or over 25 times the original planned mission duration .<7>

In recognition of the vast amount of scientific information amassed by both rovers, two asteroids have been named in their honor: 37452 Spirit and 39382 Opportunity. The mission is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designed, built, and is operating the rovers.

<snip>

[OKIsItJustMe]

17. Spirit has another memorial now

“Spirit Point.”
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20110810.html

NASA Mars Rover Arrives at New Site on Martian Surface

08.10.11

After a journey of almost three years, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reached the Red Planet’s Endeavour crater to study rocks never seen before.

On Aug. 9, the golf cart-sized rover relayed its arrival at a location named Spirit Point on the crater’s rim. Opportunity drove approximately 13 miles (21 kilometers) after climbing out of the Victoria crater.

…

The name Spirit Point informally commemorates Opportunity’s twin rover, which stopped communicating in March 2010. Spirit's mission officially concluded in May.

“Our arrival at this destination is a reminder that these rovers have continued far beyond the original three-month mission,” said John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover project manager at JPL.

…

[Throckmorton]

13. Jupiter is not Saturn

The available insolation at Saturn is only 30% that available at Jupiter, requiring an array area of almost 3 1/3 times than on the Juno Probe. The Cassini Probe was also launched 14 years ago, a lot has changed in the PV arena since the mid-90's.

The amount of solar insolation on Mars averages over 11 times that in the Jupiter region, RTGs have never powered probes to Mars, because they don't have too.

[bananas]

14. Mars-96 used RTG's

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x80815

Fifty Years of Space Nuclear Power - with a comment by James Oberg

<snip main article>

1. Jim Oberg Says:
June 29th, 2011 at 5:42 pm

One of the other controversial space nuclear power accidents was the loss of the Russian ‘Mars-95′ probe, as described in my 1999 article in ‘New Scientist’ linked here:
http://www.jamesoberg.com/plutonium.html

The saddest part was how the Russian government and the Clinton administration promoted the false notion — at first a mistake, and later a convenient camouflage — that the craft’s nuclear batteries had safely sunk in the deep Pacific Ocean. Much more likely was that they fell over the Atacama Desert near the Chile-Bolivia border, where local residents were never alerted to watch out for them. Political pretense may have taken a human toll, because nobody seems to have ever even looked for the hazardous objects.

Jim O

[bananas]

15. There were a number of options

There were several alternatives, IIRC using just solar arrays would only have put the mission 1% over its mass limit.
The main objection wasn't that RTG's were being used, it was that such large RTG's were being used on a booster that exploded 1 out of 19 times, and later do a high-speed flyby very close to earth where a slight error could result in reentry.

So one option would be to use smaller RTG's with smaller solar panels.
Another option would be to split it into two missions.
Another option would be to delay the mission until PV technology improved, there's plenty of stuff closer in that could be studied in the meantime - we might've found flowing water on Mars a lot sooner.

IIRC there were two other objections - one was that NASA wanted to do more missions using even larger RTG's, which would result in an accident eventually. And that could have killed NASA, both in terms of public support and financial liabilities.

The other objection was that the military wanted to start doing SDI type stuff with large nuclear devices, so the peace community got involved.

[OKIsItJustMe]

18. Cassini

According to NASA:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/safety/fseis4.pdf

…

The combined total probability that a late launch mission segment accident would result in a PuO₂ release is 2.1×10^-3, or 1 in 476. …