Japan workers pulled out of reactor, as radiation soars

Reports from Japan say radioactivity in water at reactor 2 at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant is 10 million times the usual level.

Workers trying to cool the reactor core to avoid a meltdown have been evacuated, Reuters news agency says.

Earlier, Japan's nuclear agency that levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the plant have risen to 1,850 times the usual level.

The UN's nuclear agency has warned the crisis could go on for months.

It is believed the radiation at Fukushima is coming from one of the reactors, but a specific leak has not been identified.

Leaking water at reactor 2 has been measured at 1,000 millisieverts/hour - 10 million times higher than when the plant is operating normally.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), has been criticised for a lack of transparency and failing to provide information more promptly.

The nation's nuclear agency said the operator of the Fukushima plant had made a number of mistakes, including worker clothing. ...



via BBC News - Japan workers pulled out of reactor, as radiation soars.

Yes, worker clothing. For example, the stripes should be yellow to signify radiation and not blue. The ankle tape doesn't match the suit stripes, and the shoe colors are all over the place, blue, white, black. ... but the important thing is to get the cooling restored, stop the meltdowns  and contain the leaks!

Sorry, this is really no joking matter. Things could get much worse than they are. Yes, radiation from Japan has been detected in China now, but the thing that I'm concerned about is the plutonium in No. 3 reactor. I was told by a nuclear physicist  that Japan will be nothing like Chernobyl because there won't be an explosion. He said there won't be an explosion because Chernobyl was secretly using bomb material.

Well, it seems the same is true of the reactors in Japan...

The battle to regain control of Japan's stricken nuclear power plant suffered a setback Friday when regulators discovered a reactor core could be leaking radiation. Work was halted amid fears of serious radioactive contamination emanating from the troubled Fukushima Dai-Ichi complex.

"It's very possible that there has been some kind of leak at the No. 3 reactor," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Authorities are particularly worried because the No. 3 reactor uses plutonium - more toxic than the pure uranium used in the others. "We must remain vigilant," Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, calling the situation "grave."

via nydailynews

Don't worry, although some say plutonium is the most toxic substance on earth and that a small amount of plutonium widely dispersed could kill every person on earth...

The Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) reactor which burns with plutonium/uranium is more deadly than those burning on uranium enriched fuel, according to nuclear experts. The Half-life of Plutonium-239 in MOX is 24,000 years and just a few milligrams of P-239 escaping in a smoke plume will contaminate soil for tens of thousands of years. ... - link

... the danger may be overestimated:

Isotopes and compounds of plutonium are dangerous due to their radioactivity. ... The alpha radiation plutonium emits does not penetrate the skin but can irradiate internal organs when plutonium is inhaled or ingested. ... Plutonium is more dangerous when inhaled than when ingested. The risk of lung cancer increases once the total dose equivalent of inhaled radiation exceeds 400 mSv....  studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results. "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during the 1940's; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them. ... Plutonium has a metallic taste. - wiki

Inhalation of about 20 milligrams of plutonium dust of optimal size would be necessary to cause death within roughly a month from pulmonary fibrosis or pulmonary edema - llnl.gov

One web site says Japan's reactors had at least 446 kilograms of plutonium, and it just has to collect in the right place to cause an explosion.

OVER the next few weeks, two ships carrying a secret cargo of dangerous, nuclear weapons-usable plutonium fuel will leave ports in Britain and France and sail around the globe to Japan. On board will be fuel containing more plutonium than in the entire Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons programmes.... The two British flagged vessels... will leave... Britain and ... France carrying the first commercial shipment to Japan of mixed-oxide (MOX) reactor fuel, made from plutonium and uranium. An estimated 446 kilograms of plutonium is contained in the 40 nuclear fuel elements – enough fissile material to construct 60 nuclear bombs.  ... The first plant to use MOX is scheduled to be Fukushima 1, plant. The date has been set to August 22nd, 2010.

Yes, if MOX was used, things could get much worse for Japan. Don't inhale an aspirin sized amount of plutonium or you will expire within a month.  That 446 Kg of Plutonium would only, however, be able to horribly kill about 22.3 million people based on 20 mg being the lethal dose.

The actual deaths would be way less than that due to dispersion, probably under 1 million due to increased cancer. That's just spit-balling.

One site says Chernobyl resulted in 985,000 deaths world wide during the 18 years from the disaster up to 2004 (that's 55,555 extra deaths per year) and the nuclear plant disasters at Japan, since they use MOX, could end up being like like Chernobyl on steroids.

The "steroids" scenario would be terrible, but would it make a dent in our population problem?

The human population is growing by 81.1  million people per year and the rate of growth is increasing day by day. Ten times the radiation of Chernobyl would cause only 555,550 extra cancer deaths per year. To stop our viral reproduction, we would need a disaster that was 1,460 times worse than Chernobyl.

Personally, I'm for birth control. Stop breeding, then the Illuminati won't have to cause earthquakes and plant computer viruses that trigger plutonium releases in Japan. Okay, I'm pretty sure I'm kidding here... pretty sure... Stuxnet reached Japan but there is no evidence I've seen that it infected any of the failed reactors as some claim:

... this computer virus "Stuxnet" effectively disabled the fail-safe defense system of the Japanese nuclear reactors and was synchronized to take place at the time of the 9.0 (newest calculations: 9.1) quake. ... We can also divulge that the 9.0 - 9.1 earthquake and tsunami that hit the nation of Japan was a meteorological terrorist attack launched against Japan by the out-of-control New World Order (NWO) elite who have decided that at least 25% of the world's population must be eliminated before the final financial meltdown collapses the world economy. - link

Believe this stuff at your own risk. I'm still not detecting any higher radiation levels.