Is Australia or newzeland safe now and going to be safe if #4 reactor fails?
I don't feel safe living in west coast of BC, Canada. It rains 10months of year. My kids play are exposed to rain all the time, for example they play in the rain during recesses at school. It is driving me crazy. Is a drier place safer than rainy places in terms of radiation? Is it wise to move to a drier part of Canada or move to Australia?
Is Australia or newzeland or south america pretty much shielded from Fukushima radiation leaks? We are considering to immigrate to Australia. According to random google search, they did find radiation in Australia though. But is it still much less than what we are exposed to here and going to be in the future?
Check the jetstream flow for
Check the jetstream flow for N. Hemisphere vs. S. Hemisphere, then join the amazing number of people who have moved to gorgeous Chile. It's wonderful here, best move we ever made, for so many reasons, radiation threats merely one of them (albeit a serious one).
Eventually...
The jet stream is going to help distribute effluent from Fukushima to the northern hemisphere more quickly...
But aren't we taking the long term view? It's going to get to the southern hemisphere in fairly short order too.
There's nothing to prevent it.
Look back to the years of atmospheric nuclear testing of nuclear weapons that occurred back in the 1950s. Those tests were conducted by the USA and the Soviet Union; both of which tested in the northern hemisphere.
However, the fallout went worldwide. It didn't stay in the northern hemisphere.
Those who think that the fallout from Fukushima is going to stay just in the northern hemisphere and won't affect the southern hemisphere are just kidding themselves.
The nuclear testing fallout dispersed worldwide, and the fallout from Fukushima will do the same.
If you don't believe me; and you are living in the southern hemisphere; the go to any University in the southern hemisphere that has a Physics Department and ask them if they see Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 fallout in the southern hemisphere from the years of atmospheric testing in the 1950s by the 2 superpowers.
You can run...but you can not hide. The fallout will find you.
Mark of BRAWM stated...
Mark of BRAWM has addressed the fuel pool #4 issue in this post:
very low danger
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/forum/218/one-more-ocd-question.2012-04-17#c...
"Another part of the answer to this question is that the pool has been reinforced. The pool survived the natural disasters and hydrogen explosions intact, and then steel reinforcements were added in June 2011 to support the bottom of the pool to provide extra safety in case of another earthquake. They are also in the process of adding a cover to Unit 4 to prevent any releases from occurring."
Do you see any air-tight barriers between Japan and Australia?
Do you see any air-tight barriers between Japan and Australia?
There's been this fantasy belief promulgated by some of the same characters that have been stating garbage "facts" about Fukushima; that the lower hemisphere is somehow immune to what goes on in the upper hemisphere.
It's a lot of fantasy trash. There's no air-tight barrier between Japan and Australia, or Japan and New Zealand. Effluents from Fukushima are going to diffuse to Australia and New Zealand, just as they diffuse from Japan to the west coasts of the USA and Canada.
However, you should review the findings and measurements that have been reported by BRAWM and ignore the missives of all the people attempting to hype and sensationalize the Fukushima event for their own parochial purposes.
BRAWN has stated that the amounts of Fukushima fallout that they measured were at levels far below the natural radiation exposure levels due to good old Mother Nature, even at the height of the fallout outflow.
BRAWM has been reporting non-detections for over a year now.
Don't be stampeded by the propagandists for their political agendas. Visit the BRAWM measurements pages and make up your own mind based on good scientific measurements and not some propagandist's hype.
Propagandists' hype
Part of the problem is that people don't know who to believe any more. When reports of almonds and prunes and fish being contaminated come out, what are we to believe? The reality is that if almonds, prunes, and fish are contaminated, then many other things are too. However, because governments are not engaged in open discussion, testing, and monitoring of the issue, people begin to doubt. This is human nature because people want to do what is best for survival, not what is best for commercial industry and the economy. If you read government policy (at least in Canada) on reporting nuclear contamination danger, the policy basically boils down to "people don't like radiation in their food, so we won't report it so as to avoid a panic situation."
You can tell people all they want that radiation from Fukushima is lower than natural radiation. The fact is that natural radiation is natural, and anything else *in addition* to natural radiation is unnatural and an added risk to people. Stop mincing words. It's not always about "levels"; it's just about exposure, period.
That's not consistent with the current science.
The current state of radiation science doesn't hold that any / all additional radiation is bad. That's because of the discovery of a DNA radiation damage repair mechanism that we all have. Just as we have an immune system to protect us from natural pathogens, we have a radiation damage repair mechanism that repairs the damage from natural radiation. Even if you have additional radiation exposure, such as people who live in Denver do relative to people who live at sea-level; the additional damage is repaired with no somatic effects. As long as you don't exceed the repair capacity of the damage repair mechanism, you don't see additional risk.
Much of this science comes locally from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which published recent results in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/12/20/low-dose-radiation/#hide
Berkeley Lab Researchers Find Evidence Suggesting Risk May Not Be Proportional to Dose at Low Dose Levels
“Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses,” says Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”
"You can tell people all they
"You can tell people all they want that radiation from Fukushima is lower than natural radiation. The fact is that natural radiation is natural, and anything else *in addition* to natural radiation is unnatural and an added risk to people. Stop mincing words. It's not always about "levels"; it's just about exposure, period."
And there, it a nutshell, is why it's near impossible to have a rational discussion about radiation. Dose is dose. Dose from "natural" sources is just as damaging as dose from "un-natural" sources.
Yet, somehow, somewhere, we've acquired the meme that "natural" dose can be ignored while dose from "un-natural" sources is infinitely fatal. It just ain't so.
On the west coast of the US the contamination is negligible compared to what you are always exposed to.
I didn't actually say that
I didn't actually say that natural radiation is somehow less harmful than unnatural radiation, in the same way that people say that natural products are somehow less harmful than man-made ones. Everyone knows that natural products can be just as harmful, and that, my friend, is the point. It's all radiation, and all of it is problematic -- even too much radiation from the sun.
The earlier commentary about the body's ability to repair is a good one; however, nobody knows where the threshold is for when the system becomes overwhelmed...correct? In fact, that threshold likely varies from person to person but, even ON AVERAGE, we don't really know the answer to this question. So, in fact, nobody can definitively say how much exposure is safe. In reality all exposure is harmful, otherwise we wouldn't have need of these kinds of bodily repair systems...correct? The repair is a natural response to damage...correct?
Therefore, to say that "The current state of radiation science doesn't hold that any / all additional radiation is bad" is very misleading. In fact, all radiation is damaging, and we should consider it a blessing that we do have some physical mechanisms for reversing this type of damage to a certain, presently unknown, extent. However, we also should do everything we can not to incur this type of damage and, in fact, to prevent it from happening. I don't exactly feel like I'm preaching to the choir on this one, though, given that this site is sponsored by nuclear scientists who, I'm supposing, are not opposed to increasing nuclear energy usage.