http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-g ... t-12892383

They are finding Plutonium around the area of the reactors now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12889541

So, this radioactive iodine is the stuff with a half life of eight days?

A tweet I caught last week summed it up. Essentially it said (paraphrased) "if this disaster has shown one thing it's just how poor science education has become".

How exactly do they know this is caused by the reactor? Could it possibly be an increase in general background radiation?

Either way... not exactly worried by it, even with any threat of fallout it's being handled pretty well

And if by a reactor why not one from the UK? Or do all reactors have fingerprints?

And how the media scare monger, rather than inform and report.

Following this radiation release around the globe is fairly straightforward, just like watching smoke blow in the wind you'll have a good idea where it is heading.

I'm not sure if the nuclear attribution capabilities are as good as those put forward in Sum Of All Fears though.

Well quite (stares pointedly at the BBC). Iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days, so obviously after a few weeks what may have been released will have decayed to undetectable levels. Doesn't mean it can't harm someone in the meantime, but you do actually have to absorb quite a lot of it to have any detrimental effect.


One suspects it's not an increase in radiation they've found, rather than they've actually found traces of iodine-131. That's a byproduct of nuclear reaction and doesn't really exist in nature (with a half life of 8 days, any that had existed in nature has long decayed to infinitesimally small quantities). However I doubt there's any way to say for certain a trace amount of iodine-131 has come from a particular reactor. I suspect they've made the assumption that, because the Fukushima plant is the only one that's been releasing any waste at all into the atmosphere recently, that's where it's come from.

Iodine 131 won't have escaped form the reactor core(s) because they were never breached. It could possibly have been emitted from the spent fuel rods, which have been exposed to the air and were subject to the hydrogen explosions we all saw footage of.

I've been on two long haul flights in the last month. I rather think that's exposed me to more radiation than Fukushima has. But nobody's going to stop going to nice sunny holiday spots because of radiation are they? Well, maybe if you were planning to go to Bikini atoll but otherwise...

Jon

I am quite frankly not even in the slightest bit worried. The amount of extra radiation that I will get will be so insignificant that I doubt that I will any increased risk of cancer or super powers.

That's what I meant.

The way glasweigans act there prob isint any differance between a radioactive zombie glasweigan and a "normal" glasweigan

Given the average glasweigans diet I doubt it is radiation that will kill them off

They'll probably claim Buckfast has anti-radiation sickness properties.

Latest is they've announced they've written off all four damaged reactors and are asking the local population whether they want 5 and 6 - which shut down safely when the quake hit - to be brought back into service. God knows what they're going to do long term; Japan is still suffering brownouts because of the loss of Fukushima Daishi 1-4. There was a march in Tokyo at the weekend calling for the deprecation of all nuclear power in Japan but they simply don't have a viable alternative for natively generated electricity.

BBC Are reporting it as they've admitted they were 'unable to completely cool' the reactors, which misunderstands the physics of nuclear reactors by a wide margin. Again. And they've reported the huge death tool of the earthquake/tsunami in a report about the reactor crisis when the number doesn't relate at all to the story. Again.

Jon