Bay Area water supply comes from the only red hot spot of Cs-137 in the US
http://www.ieer.org/offdocs/csdepglo.pdf
Does this map bother anyone? I am moving to SF in a couple of months. So, I did a lot of research lately. It seems Bay Area drinking water is mostly from Tuolumne River, near the only red hot spot of Cs-137 (near Yosemite National Park).
http://www.water-ed.org/watersources/
Please someone tell me I am wrong.
Highest Cancer Rates in Cali
Looks like Toulumne and Mariposa counties have some of the highest cancer rates in California:
http://www.cancer-rates.info/ca/index.php
It seems Monterey is the
It seems Monterey is the place to be. Are Sonoma and Napa red hot due to too much pesticides?
http://www.nrdc.org/health/diseaseclusters/files/diseaseclusters_issuepa...
It seems California has 9 cancer clusters. The most scary thing is most of them are for childhood cancer and birth defect. I read somewhere the residents are blaming neighboring farms.
Watersheds defined
The three hotspot counties in California are Alpine, Toulumne and Mariposa. Alpine is mostly an Eastern Sierra county with water flowing into Nevada via the Walker and Carson rivers. Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the source of San Francisco water is in Toulumne County. Mariposa county is a foothill county mostly not in the high Sierra, with drainage in the Toulumne and Merced Rivers. Toulumne county gets it's water from the Stanislaus River. Modesto water comes from the Merced River. These are the suspect watersheds.
The East bay gets it's water from EBMUD, the source is from Pardee Resevoir on the Mokeulumne River in Amador and Calaveras Counties, to the north of the reputed hotspot.
You are not wrong, but may
You are not wrong, but may be late. This map is for global fallout from the atmospheric testing era.
Yeah, that's right, many areas in the US got 2,000-6,000 bq/m2 of Cs-137. Most of it came from big bombs in the Pacific and the Soviet's tests as well (85 Mt anyone?). It was accompanied by a bouquet of other toxic materials. The High Sierra got the worst of it due to precip amounts.
I have figured that Berkeley got around 65bq/m2 of Cs-134 and Cs-137 combined from Fukushima. Boise I now believe probably got twice that. And that is small potatoes compared to the 60's.
West Coast is mostly OK, unless Marco has bad news. That's how I see it.
BTW, thank you for link.
BC
Why is the east coast so
Why is the east coast so much higher than Nevada? Weren't there a lot of atmospheric tests in Nevada?
Sure there were. But their
Sure there were. But their total yield was small in proportion to the megaton scale weapons set off in the Pacific and Russia. Those bombs blew crap sky high, and as result the entire northern hemsiphere got plenty of fallout.
As for why the east coast is high, basically, total fallout is directly related to rainfall...typically, the western ares recieved less rain and thus less fallout.
The radioactive stuff is
The radioactive stuff is still in the environment where the water comes from, right? So, none of these radioactive stuff is transfered into SF's drinking water NOW? That is the answer I am hoping for because I am relocating to SF very soon.
That is my question about spring water and environmental pollution. For example, we are cooking with Poland Spring bottled water from Maine. Well, Maine is very "hot" from global fallout too. Is the spring water safe? Does the undied Cs get into the spring water still now 50 years later? Or the Cs has already been washed away and consumed by millions of east coasters in the past 50 years that we do not have to worry about it now?
Thanks!
Yeah, it's still there.
Yeah, it's still there. Hell, my own research into this has shown that 80+% of the cesium in my location is pre-Fukushima. What remains to be know is how quickly the stuff is washed away, etc.
As for spring/well water, I would feel no danger is involved. Cesium typically is not found any deeper than 12' and it took it a very long time to get that far. In fact, most of it becomes bound to other chemicals in the soil and stops going down after a while. Check out BRAWM's soil measurements page for further info...
BTW, if you have a surface water supply, a reverse osmosis water filter will remove any junk you are worried about...easy fix.
BC, if you have a choice of
BC, if you have a choice of living in either SF or Boston, which one would you choose at the moment?
I see no difference really,
I see no difference really, at least not from Fukushima. I mean, all that global fallout is from ~50 years ago and none of us gave it a thought until this disaster brought it to our attention that our world has long since been contaminated to varying degrees.
The only potential difference could be a higher deposition of fresh "hot particles" on the west coast, but BRAWM hasn't seen them. Hopefully the WPI data coming out at the end of the month will further clarify this issue.
Well, again east coast has
Well, again east coast has rained non-stop since April. So I am not sure which city has more fresh hot particles, boston or SF? Boston has a annual rain of 42" + 40" snow. SF only have 18" rain yearly.
I think that a good deal of
I think that a good deal of the Fukushima fallout probably was rained out by the time it got towards the Eastern US. Bear this is mind - when we talk about the global Cs-137 deposition during the atomic testing era, we are looking at materials that were blown tens of thousands of feet into the air by huge atomic explosions, to the point where there was almost a constant level of contamination in the air, and any rainfall would bring some of it down. In this situation, the amount of annual rainfall is no doubt the primary indicator for how much fallout an area would receive.
Fukushima is different in two ways - one, it was a discrete event that is now mostly over (atmospherically speaking) rather than a years-long Fourth of July show by monster-boys. Two, the method of dispersion was far less energetic, which would indicate that the materials would stay closer to their source. So instead of a big, hemisphere wide cloud, one would see a more localized area of contamination, which would mean that for the most part fallout would be heavier in areas closer to the meltdown.
FWIW, the Worchester Polytechnic Institue where Kaltofen works had sampling stations in both San Francisco and Worchester, Mass which is only 30 miles from Boston. The results on what they found are supposed to be out at the end of this month.
Thanks BC again! No one
Thanks BC again!
No one seems to know what Fukushima is doing these days, that is the biggest concern. SF feels like at the fore front of everything. Does it really?
We considered moving to SF, Boston, Vancouver, and NEW ZEALAND (there is an oil spill over there today!)
Of course SF is much more desirable than Boston, climate wise.
We even looked at South America before we saw how short life span is over there.
An oil spill from a stranded
An oil spill from a stranded cargo ship off New Zealand is the country's worst environmental disaster in decades, the government says.
Officials say 350 tonnes of oil may have leaked from the 775ft (236m) Rena, which ran aground on the Astrolabe Reef off the port of Tauranga on Wednesday.
Bad weather has halted work to pump oil off the ship.
Environment Minister Nick Smith said the situation was going to get "significantly worse" in coming days.
"This event has come to a stage where it is New Zealand's most significant maritime environmental disaster," he told a news briefing in Tauranga.
Mr Smith said the rate at which oil was gushing out of the ship had increased "fivefold" since it ran aground.
"The government is determined to throw everything possible at minimising the environmental harm of what is now clear to be New Zealand's worst environmental disaster in many decades."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15251319
I've lived in both
I've lived in both Boston ( while attending MIT ) and now
I'm living in the Bay Area.
I prefer the Bay Area to Boston; radioactive fallout or no radioactive fallout.
Isn't Spring water running
Isn't Spring water running on the surface?