WISCONSIN DHS air monitoring results
I recently spoke with Paul Schmidt, who is the Manager of Radiation Protection Section - Division of Public Health - Wisconsin. I asked what monitoring Wisconsin has/is doing regarding potential radioactive fallout from Japan in Wisconsin.
He advised me that they have results from analysis of both Air and Rainfall samples collected from monitoring stations in Madison, WI and from areas around the state that are located near Wisconsin's nuclear power stations.
The sample results listed below are from collections that occured from the week of March 20-26 for Rainwater and "Several weeks back" for the air collection samples. I-131 was the only isotope sampled.
I-131:
Rainwater 15-33pCi/L
Air .015 - .134 pCi/m3
Paul also advised me that they have collected milk samples from around the state and those have been submitted for sampling. He said that additional isotope sampling will be included for the milk. I will try and get these results and post them here when they are available.
I think that having an idea of the results that are being seen around the country will help everyone get an idea of how far this has spread and to what extent the risk is.
What was curious was that the media in Wisconsin reported that levels found were THOUSANDS of times below what EPA levels are. This would ONLY be true for the lower end of air samples. If I understand correctly, the EPA Maximum Contamiment Level for tap water is 3 pCi/L. Rainwater samples would then have ranged from 5-10 times ABOVE the maximum contaminent level established by EPA. While this is still lower than what is being detected in Berkley, it does show that levels in the upper Midwest are above EPA's Maximum Contaminent Level.
-moon1234
Thank you very much for
Thank you very much for sharing that info. If I may make a suggestion, don't settle for simple numbers... ask for a link to where the full test reports can be downloaded. Tell your state agency guy or whoever you talk to that you would like to see complete reports for the tests that were performed, the detection limits and margins of error, the locations and times where sampling was done, the results for all of the radionuclides they tested for, etc. All of those details are something that should have been promptly made available to the public from DAY 1 and thus should be available now.
Remember, this isn't junior high school science class where half-arsed testing and half-arsed documentation and a half-arsed report is tolerable. Citizens and reporters need to politely but firmly request all of the nitty gritty details and settle for nothing less.
Go the distance :)
I am planning to follow-up.
I am planning to follow-up. I did ask if the reports are available online. I was told that near-realtime data is not posted online. I was told that archive data for previous years is available online.
I am not sure which way to look at this. It may be simply that they have never had this type of request before and they don't have a public system setup.
Also keep in mind that in Wisconsin UW Madison Nuclear Physics Department and the Wisconsin State Hygene Lab are a hybrid. The lab uses the University to do some testing and the lab does some testing. This may make for an environment where less transparency is the name of the game. Any mis-step on the part of the Lab or the University may put them in hot water.
Not saying I like it, but it is what it is. I was still disappointed that more testing was not done on a more frequent basis. Agriculture, especially dairy, is one of Wisconsin's hallmark industrys. We do have "The Dairy State" on all of our license plates after all.
This could also be a reason for foot dragging. Wait a few weeks to get new numbers. By then I-131 from the initial fallout will have dissipated to at least a quarter of initial levels.
Maybe I am reading too much into this, but it is disconcerting to say the least. So much money goes into efforts that really don't do much for society. I always thought of Wisconsin being open, transparent and fail. I come from a German family background on both sides and have always seen hard work, transparency and honesty as core values. I always thought I saw this in Wisconsin, even when I did not agree with the idea or thought process.
The true crux is that the people in charge don't feel the need to light fires under the right asses and get them moving. They are relying on EPA to say boo before they really put forth a concerted effort to do what Berkley is doing.
As I said before, Berkley is the ONLY place in the country that is providing testing data with real numbers to the public. What people want to do with the numbers is their business, but I have had somewhat of lessening of worry when I see that the numbers are showing radiation levels below what I am getting from K-40, C-14 on a yearly dose basis.
I think the only remaining concerns for me are to see what milk numbers are. I am hoping they are low as Wisconsin really has no green grass as of yet. Most all cows, including organic, will be eating last years alfalfa and corn silage. The next month or two will be a greening of Wisconsin. I hope that routine milk testing will continue to be done until Fukushima STOPS emitting crap.
The next area of concern will be the ocean. Will the radioactive particles sink to the sea floor or travel in the ocean currents? Will I-131 evaporate from the ocean and to what level?
I suppose we now need to look at ocean models to determine when or if this newly dumped water waste will be showing up on America's shores. I am still surprised they are just dumping it into the ocean and no international country seems to have a problem with this.
I am still surprised they
I am still surprised they are just dumping it into the ocean and no international country seems to have a problem with this.
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South Korea does.
So does China
So does China
Makes you wonder why our
Makes you wonder why our federal (and West Coast state) governments haven't protested.
I wonder if we'll be eating any salmon years from now. Sad.
Moreover, it's frightening how complacent state and federal governments have been about this (Canada is one of the worst) - particularly in focusing only on Iodine-131. All radioisotopes known to be in or produced by the fuel at Fukushima should be sampled.
Cesium-137 is a large threat to our food supply and if absorbed internally through air, food, milk or water, will cause a lot of cancer. It seems our public officials and newspapers/TV are ignoring it. Why? Because they can't rhetorically brush it off with the statement that "it only has an 8 day half-life" like they do with I-131? Which of course is bull anyway, if the plant won't stop emitting I-131 for months.
Dose Comparisons are meaningless
From Europe there is this on the www.llrc.org page. click on "Dose Concept"
CERRIE Majority Report says
Dose is meaningless
..... There are important concerns with respect to the heterogeneity of dose delivery within tissues and cells from short-range charged particle emissions, the extent to which current models adequately represent such interactions with biological targets, and the specification of target cells at risk. Indeed, the actual concepts of absorbed dose become questionable, and sometimes meaningless, when considering interactions at the cellular and molecular levels.
(CERRIE Majority Report Chapter 2.1 paragraph 11).
In other words, where hot or warm particles or Plutonium or Uranium are located in body tissue
or where sequentially decaying radionuclides like Strontium 90 are organically bound (e.g. to DNA) “dose” means nothing.
This is massively significant. Official radiation risk agencies universally quantify risk in terms of dose. If it means nothing the agencies know nothing and can give no valid advice.
Their public reassurances fall to the ground. They can no longer compare nuclear industry discharges with the 2 millisieverts we get every year from natural radiation, or the cosmic rays you’d receive flying to Tenerife for a holiday.
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See this link for supporting quotes from the International Commission on Radiological Protection, Institut de Radioprotection et de Securite Nucleaire, the European Committee on Radiation Risk, the UK Department of Health, ICRP again (2009), and the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority.
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See this link for an account of how, when and why the world's radsafers came to have an unscientific view.