I hope nobody is near Japan right now!

[steel]

The US Navy ships which were near Japan detected radiation and they moved away from the area.

Hopefully there is nobody out there who is trying to relax and isn't following the news on whatever communication equipment they have!

Even if they are 500 miles away it would still be a good idea to get out of there! Japan has taken all their radiation detectors that are in the area off line so we can't see any data. It looks like this is going to be worse than Chernobyl. The wind has been blowing out of the ocean for the most part ...

I think the best thing to do would be to head South South East for a few hundred miles to get out of the way.

edit:
So you don't have to read through two pages of debate I'll just add what I want to say here. Not fair? Well I started the thread

Chernobyl was a very bad reactor explosion and fire with plutonium production and no containment. Thousands of people died. Could have been a million people (over a long time). It depends on who you talk to, as you can see from reading the rest of this thread.

As for 3 mile island we don't know what happened because there was a cover up, just like what they're trying to do in Japan. Some have said that the scram system failed and the containment building leaked (they told us everything was contained). There was a partial meltdown and some radioactive materials (like iodine) escaped in to the containment building and then leaked outside. They were able to get it under control though.

In Japan one of the reactors in trouble a uranium reactor with 6% plutonium. But all the reactors and spent fuel rods contain plutonium created in the reactor. The spent fuel rods from all the reactors including the plutonium one are being stored in a pools of water near the top of the outer containment buildings which are those square buildings. Two of those buildings have exploded. If the spent fuel rods are not cooled in water they heat up, catch on fire and plutonium goes in to the air ... It is an absolute disaster. The years of spent fuel rods being stored with little protection is the worst part. If a terrorist really wanted to do damage they could fly a plane in to one of those.

Radiation from the first vent off of steam (before the containment building explosions) is due to arrive on the West coast of the US tonight on Friday. It takes about 6 days to get here.

Chernobyl and Japan compared. It looks like the white smoke / steam is coming from where they stored the spent fuel rods maybe?


Here's the Chernobyl fire:


Some pictures of Japan's reactors:




More pictures. click below.

http://pubphotos.postbulletin.com/ph...an_reactor.jpg
http://media.sbs.com.au/news/upload_...110318_aap.jpg

[Omatako]

You will experience the financial impact of this in the US soon enough.

Almost all of the electronics fitted to cars in all the American car factories are made in Japan and Detroit will stop working in about a week (maybe sooner).

Think of the far-reaching effect of that . . . .

[jaschrumpf]

Quit being so alarmist! They've just raised this event to the level of Three Mile Island, which killed nobody, polluted nothing and released no serious amount of radiation. Chernobyl was a weapons-grade-material producing reactor and had a graphite moderator that burned in the open air for a week.

The event in Japan is nothing like that.

I hope you guys are just being jokesters. There's enough stupid panic going on out on the West coast, with people stocking up on iodine tablets -- we don't need to get the sailing community all excited over nothing as well.

[BubbleheadMd]

AFDB link

[PCP]

Originally Posted by jaschrumpf

Quit being so alarmist! They've just raised this event to the level of Three Mile Island, which killed nobody, polluted nothing and released no serious amount of radiation. Chernobyl was a weapons-grade-material producing reactor and had a graphite moderator that burned in the open air for a week.

The event in Japan is nothing like that.

I hope you guys are just being jokesters. There's enough stupid panic going on out on the West coast, with people stocking up on iodine tablets -- we don't need to get the sailing community all excited over nothing as well.

I believe you are wrong. High officials say that it is impossible to evacuate such a high density area and that only 50 Kamikaze workers are preventing a huge tragedy.

Japanese have already raise them to hero status. All countries are saying to all its citizens to abandon Japan.

BBC News - Japan hails the heroic 'Fukushima 50'

BBC News - Japan earthquake: Fukushima nuclear alert level raised

Regards

Paulo

[paul323]

I am with jaschrumpf for now. The situation is serious - brave workers are definitely risking their lives trying to prevent a tragedy - but for now you'll get more radiation from a CAT scan than standing next to the reactors. Countries are not recommending abandoning Japan - but clearly they continue to recommend people move out of the effected are.

Please read the articles you posted - the workers are being exposed to above recommended levels of radiation - 100-250millisieverts. 1,000 millisievert is when you begin to feel ill.

Yes the situation is serious, and it is worth comparing in some ways to 3 mile island, where there was a lot of hysteria, and almost no actual radiation leakage. Additionally, the radioactivity releases in the steam and hydrogen explosions - apparently alarming, but actually indicative of a controlled cooldown process - are short half-life isotopes (hours and days), unlike Chernobyl where you had a graphite fire releasing radioactive smoke into the air for a week.

The BBC remains and excellent source for unbiased, impartial information.

Professor Laurence Williams, former UK chief inspector of nuclear installations, stressed that Fukushima was not another Chernobyl and made it clear if he was living in Tokyo he would not leave:

"....I wouldn't be concerned. This is not a Chernobyl. We are not going to see high levels of radioactivity being put up high into the atmosphere and distributed on the winds. If we do get to the worse situation where the fuel in those reactors slumps because it doesn't have any structural integrity because of over-heating, then there will be a release of caesium and iodine (although the iodine is decaying all the time) and there will be strontium and ruthenium and other things that will come out....my guess is it is a low-level release and very localised it will not be like Chernobyl. People living in Tokyo are 150 miles (241km) away, so I would not be worried."

[jaschrumpf]

So "high officials" -- like the "top men" at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark -- have made such an announcement.

Here's what the International Atomic Energy Agency has to say (link here):

18 March 2011, 12:25 UTC
Contrary to several news reports, the IAEA to date has NOT received any notification from the Japanese authorities of people sickened by radiation contamination.

In the report of 17 March 01:15 UTC, the cases described were of people who were reported to have had radioactive contamination detected on them when they were monitored.

17 March 2011, 14:00 UTC
We are now receiving dose rate information from 47 Japanese cities regularly. This is a positive development. In Tokyo, there has been no significant change in radiation levels since yesterday. They remain well below levels which are dangerous to human health.

As far as on-site radiation levels at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants are concerned, we have received no new information since the last report.

In some locations at around 30 km from the Fukushima plant, the dose rates rose significantly in the last 24 hours (in one location from 80 to 170 microsievert per hour and in another from 26 to 95 microsievert per hour). But this was not the case at all locations at this distance from the plants.
Dose rates to the north-west of the nuclear power plants, were observed in the range 3 to 170 microsievert per hour, with the higher levels observed around 30 km from the plant.

Dose rates in other directions are in the 1 to 5 microsievert per hour range.

170 microseiverts per hour corresponds to 17 mrems per hour. At that rate it would take a person about three hours to get the equivalent of an ordinary chest x-ray -- and that was the highest dose rate found.

This is not a Chernobyl event by any standard.

[jaschrumpf]

Originally Posted by paul323

Please read the articles you posted - the workers are being exposed to above recommended levels of radiation - 100-250millisieverts. 1,000 millisievert is when you begin to feel ill.

A slight correction: the reports are stating the dosage in microseiverts, not milliseiverts. A microseivert is one one-thousandth of a milliseivert.

[PCP]

Originally Posted by paul323

... Countries are not recommending abandoning Japan - but clearly they continue to recommend people move out of the effected are.

..

About USA and Americans I don' know, but most European countries recommended their citizens to leave Japan.

[WouldaShoulda]

Originally Posted by jaschrumpf

So "high officials" -- like the "top men" at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark -- have made such an announcement.

Here's what the International Atomic Energy Agency has to say...

That's just what they want you to think.

Godzilla and Mothra were nothing compared to what's gonna happen next!!