Experts say beach radiation unrelated to Fukushima
Posted: Tuesday, January 7, 2014 2:27 pm |
The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi reactor meltdown in Japan is not the cause of abnormally high radiation levels discovered recently along Surfer's Beach, according to an analysis by independent experts. But exactly why a swath of the local coastline is showing about 14 times the baseline radiation level remains a curious mystery.
San Mateo County health officials reiterated on Tuesday that the beach radiation did not pose a public hazard.
People across the country expressed an interest in radiation on the Coastside in recent days after an online video shot at Surfer's Beach led some to believe what they were seeing was the first major landing of radioactive material on the West Coast attributable to the Japanese disaster. First posted on Dec. 23 on YouTube, the seven-minute video shows the meter of a Geiger counter as an unidentified man off-camera measures different spots on the beach south of Pillar Point Harbor. The gadget’s alarm rings as its radiation reading ratchets up to about 150 counts per minute, or roughly five times the typical amount found in the environment.
The amateur video went viral, drawing more than half a million views to date, and spurring government inspectors to conduct their own surveys.
After watching the clip, El Granada electrical engineer Steven Weiss grabbed his own radiation measurement equipment to test the radiation reports for himself.
On Monday, Weiss carried a Geiger counter in each hand for a second survey of Surfer's Beach. As he descended to the waterline, the readings on his gadgets climbed. He tested various spots: the side of the bluffs and the white sand closest to the waterline, both registering levels that were high but not suspiciously so as far as he was concerned. But when he placed the sensors down near a line of black silt along the back of the beach, the meters on both his gadgets spiked. The counters registered about 415 counts per minute. A cpm of 30 is considered the baseline for radioactivity typically found in the air.
“It's not normal. I've never seen 400 cpm when I just wave my Geiger around.” he said. “There has to be something radioactive for it to do that.”
Weiss is no amateur; for 40 years he has made a living designing Geiger counters, most recently for International Medcom Inc. After he verified the hotspot, he took a sample of the dark sediment and sent it to his company's main offices in Sebastopol for analysis.
International Medcom CEO Dan Sythe later put the dirt sample in a spectrum analyzer to view the radioactive “signature” of the particles, the photon energy associated with each isotope. What he found was different from cesium-137, the fissile material used in the Fukushima reactors. He would know – since the 2011 meltdown, Sythe has visited Japan nine times to help map the cesium fallout.
Instead he was seeing radium and thorium, naturally occurring radioactive elements.
“It doesn’t mean that it‘s OK. It's not something you'd want your baby playing in,” Sythe said. “All we’re saying is this radiation is not from Fukushima.”
Sythe summarized his findings on his blog in the hopes that it would dispel a sense of panic spreading on the Internet that Fukushima radiation was hitting U.S. shores. People were posting online claiming that the West Coast would soon be “toast,” he said, so it was vital to get better information online.
The radiation scare followed a constellation of other alarming news in recent months. Last month, marine biologists announced that starfish were mysteriously disintegrating along the West Coast, a trend that has not been linked yet to any cause. Past computer simulations had indicated that radioactive cesium-137 from the Fukushima reactors could begin appearing on West Coast shores by early 2014. Those findings, published in August by the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Spain, also noted that any radioactive material that crossed the Pacific would likely be diluted and fall below international safety levels.
Public fear and paranoia has clouded the Fukushima issue since the start of the disaster, said Dan Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He believes the problem stems from a vacuum of data from the government, prompting amateur sleuths with Geiger counters to seek their own answers. He pointed out that the Environmental Protection Agency gave assurances to the public in 2011 that the Fukushima radiation posed no public health risk. But later a 2012 audit revealed that many of the EPA’s radiation monitors were out of service at the time of the Fukushima disaster.
For some, that fed the perception that the government had something to hide, he said.
“I'm frustrated because the government should be doing a better job, and the people who are fearmongering are just fanning the flames,” Hirsch said.
The viral video posted last month began spreading on the Internet before government officials took notice. County health officials first learned of the video four days after was uploaded, and they sent their own inspector out to the beach the next day. Using a different unit, the county inspector measured the beach to have a radiation level of about 100 micro-REM per hour, or about five times the normal amount. REM stands for “Roentgen equivalent man,” a measurement of the dosage and statistical biological effects presented by radiation.
Although the radiation levels were clearly higher than is typical, San Mateo County Health Officer Dean Peterson emphasized that it was still not a dangerous level for humans. A person would need to be exposed to 100 microREMs of radiation for 50,000 hours before it surpassed safety guidelines by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, he explained.
Peterson forwarded the matter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state Department of Public Health, agencies with more expertise on analyzing radioactivity. Both of those agencies were contacted by the Review this week, but officials said they were still investigating the situation.
Peterson said he thought it was important to go forward with his information to assure the public that local beaches were still safe.
“I’m completely confident that what we have on the beach is not a public health threat,” he said.
Nonetheless, the presence and concentration of natural thorium and radium at Surfer’s Beach left experts puzzled. Both elements are actually common at beaches. In fact, a 2008 study by the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society found similar concentrations at Southern California beaches.
Sythe offered a couple possible explanations. A vein of thorium could be spilling out from the nearby coastal bluffs, he suggested. Alternatively, he heard mention of an old oil pipe running nearby the beach. Oil pipelines had a tendency to collect heavy radioactive minerals, he said.
Peterson thought the minerals could be just washing up with the salt water from the shores. The radioactive materials all were just past the high tide line, so it made sense that would be where the minerals would build up, he said.
“The conditions that are out on the beach could be the same conditions that have been out there for millennia,” he said. [Reply]
Fukushima robot stranded after stalling inside reactor
Robot stopped moving hours into first inspection of containment vessel, and similar inspection using separate device is postponed
Decommissioning work at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has suffered a setback after a robot sent in to a damaged reactor to locate melted fuel stalled hours into its mission and had to be abandoned.
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said the robot stopped moving on Friday during its first inspection of the containment vessel inside reactor No 1, one of the three reactors that suffered meltdown after the plant was struck by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
Tepco, which recently conceded that the technology for robots to retrieve the nuclear fuel had yet to be developed, said on Monday it would cut the cables to the stranded robot and postpone a similar inspection using a separate device.
Developed by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, the robot was supposed to be able to function for about 10 hours even when exposed to radiation at levels that would cause ordinary electronic devices to malfunction.
The “transformer” robot, which can alter its shape depending on its surroundings, was sent in to photograph the inside of the reactor containment vessel and record temperatures and radiation levels.
It had covered 14 of 18 locations when it stalled, about three hours after it began its journey around the vessel, officials said, adding that they had yet to establish the cause of the problem.
More than four years after Fukushima Daiichi suffered the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl a quarter of a century earlier, radiation levels inside the three reactors are still far too high for humans to enter.
Tepco is pinning its hopes on a new generation of remote-controlled robots, the first of which will monitor the state and location of the melted fuel before others remove it from the reactors’ outer containers.
Last year the dangers posed by high radiation forced Tepco and the government to delay the planned start of fuel removal from reactor No 1 by five years, to 2025. Decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi is expected to take at least 40 years and cost tens of billions of dollars.
Dale Klein, a former chairman of the US nuclear regulatory commission who now advises Tepco, said dangerously high radiation inside the three damaged reactors had made extracting the melted cores particularly difficult.
“Radiation levels in these structures is higher, and working inside them is problematic,” Klein said recently. “This is a challenge that has never been faced before in the world, and there will have to be new equipment developed to make that happen.
“There’s an inherent advantage to the technology that exists here in in Japan to develop those new skills and techniques,” given its expertise in robot technology, Klein added. “Those tools and equipment do not exist today, but the fundamental knowledge of robotic, remotely controlled devices will, I think, be sufficient.” Posted via Mobile Device [Reply]
Originally Posted by Donger:
Are getting near 200,000 deaths yet?
Not sure. I'm pretty sure that whatever the exact number it, it is nowhere near as many as the millions that died during the great Ebola Outbreak of 2014-16. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Amnorix:
Not sure. I'm pretty sure that whatever the exact number it, it is nowhere near as many as the millions that died during the great Ebola Outbreak of 2014-16.
None have died from radiation, as best I can ascertain. [Reply]
