This is insanely bad news:
Japan’s science ministry says 8 per cent of the country’s surface area has been contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
It says more than 30,000 square kilometres of the country has been blanketed by radioactive caesium.
The ministry says most of the contamination was caused by four large plumes of radiation spewed out by the Fukushima nuclear plant in the first two weeks after meltdowns.
The government says some of the radioactive material fell with rain and snow, leaving the affected areas with accumulations of more than 10,000 becquerels of caesium per square metre.
Schlemizel
That can’t be right – I keep hearing how That accident proves nuclear power is safe!
Mark K.
As a Nuclear Medicine Technologist for almost 20 years, I know enough to tell you that the 30,000 sq/km will be uninhabitable for 300 years at least. Cesium is nasty.
magurakurin
This news is way worse for me, than you Cole. I live in Japan. The report the other day showed how the mountains on our island, Shikoku, were contaminated at the highest elevations. I’ve renamed them “The Cesium Hills.”
cue industry trolls to tell us how safe it all really is.
MikeJ
Never trust an engineer that says, “ten different things would have to go wrong for there to be any problem!” Only trust the ones that tell you what you can do after everything goes wrong.
As soon as you say “it can’t happen”, it will.
Ked
A Japanese TV host who used to prone Fukushima food and how safe it is by eating it has now acute leukemia. To be fair, it’s hard to prove the cause but all in all it’s huge PR fail.
http://enenews.com/japan-tv-host-diagnosed-acute-lymphocytic-leukemia-eating-fukushima-produce-show
Ked
hey @magurakurin, i live in Yokohama. Did you know the mayor of Kawasaki is from Fukushima and has decided to help his hometown by taking wastes from there and burn them in Kawasaki? It kinda explains why the radioactivity is anormally high around here.
And still no one will take responsibility. Huge fail, from corrupt corporations to corrupt and weak politics.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
It was fear of just this kind of thing that had me traipsing around the US in my youth protesting nuclear power. I have fond memories of my father saying loudly, so anyone in the vicinity could hear: “it’s nice that you have the courage of your convictions, but when you get arrested, don’t call me to go your bail or pay for expensive defense,” while quietly slipping me $1000 so I could post bond without calling home.
BD of MN
I was watching Radioactive Wolves on PBS’ Nature a month ago and what struck me most was the eeriness of the abandoned cities around Chernobyl; miles of stereotypical white concrete Soviet apartment buildings being swallowed up by lush green vegetation and wildlife…
so 20+ years from now when I retire, I can watch the same sort of thing about Fukushima…
Anoniminous
This is why we can’t have nice things.
You DFHs go around breaking nuke plants and spilling radioactive caesium all over Japan. Now I want you all to go to your room and stay there while you think about how you’re going to clean this mess up.
General Stuck
Build a huge vat of poison on top of mother natures hurt locker, and she will let you know, sooner or later, who is the boss of silly humanoids. Pretty soon, they’ll be drilling for oil a mile deep in the ocean.
magurakurin
@Ked: Well, this map might explain why the radiation levels are high in Yokohama. We’re all fucked, more or less, as the Wizard so astutely explained to Travis.
Hey, at least it’s not Strontium 90. What’s a little Cesium between friends, eh?
but apparently cesuim is nothing new in Japan from the article
“Hayano said that even before the Fukushima disaster, soil throughout Japan contained up to around 100 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram due to weapons tests in the Pacific and the 1986 Chernobyl accident.”
nice world we made.
cathyx
I read somewhere that Tokyo will eventually be uninhabitable because the radiation is spreading that way. I’ll see if I can find the link.
Moonbatting Average
Just for perspective, this would be like the entire state of Texas being contaminated (if we are including the whole of the USA, area-wise)
Moonbatting Average
Or, Montana plus Colorado if we are talking the lower 48… awful
ETA: messed up the math the first time :-/
JGabriel
To some extent, this shows that it really doesn’t fucking matter how impressive the safety record for nuclear power is, because a single bad day can contaminate 10% of a country.
Moonbatting Average:
Population-wise it’s like THREE New York City’s. NYC has a population of about 8 million, or roughly 2.7% of the US population.
.
greenergood
this is where the phrase ‘national sacrifice zone’ comes back in fashion on a global level, not just in Nevada
Ked
@magurakurin
wow that’s a scary map. i was considering moving with my family to Osaka or Kobe but to be honest the issues with Monju nuclear plant in Fukui are not really exciting either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Keith G
Well, at least we are off the hook now.
tech98
It’s OK, Japan has plenty of habitable land and not many peopl…never mind.
cathyx
Here is a link about the contamination levels in Tokyo and other cities:
http://enenews.com/jiji-high-radiation-levels-tokyo-linked-fukushima-rain-caused-29250000-bqm-soil-govt-almost-double-last-govt-test
Chet
So, in other words approximately two and a half times the natural radioactivity of the human body, spread out over a square meter, or 10,000 single atomic decay events per square meter per second.
That’s not a whole lot. A becquerel is an extremely small amount of radioactivity.
Gex
Wasn’t this a newer version of a model we used here a lot?
Chet
@Mark K.:
Shouldn’t a Nuclear Medicine Technologist know how much one becquerel is? “Uninhabitable” is absurd.
Morbo
Looks like Randall needs to revise his chart.
magurakurin
@Ked: Monju is bad JuJu, but I have a feeling that it will be shutdown. I have nothing to really base that feeling on, but they have had such little success and the mood is definitely shifting in Japan. Osaka and Kobe have great food. I don’t know Tokyo well, but the little I visited there made me appreciate Kansai. I prefer Kansai to Kanto. But I don’t live in Osaka, either. Shikoku is pretty rural by comparison.
David Koch
From the title, I thought the post was gonna be about the latest Cain sex scandal.
magurakurin
@Chet: I feel so much better now, Chet. I think I’m going to go up to the mountaintops and roll around in the grassy meadows.
Punchy
If that had happened in the USA, all those scientists would be labeled as liars and the science of Gieger counting would be discredited. Then, President Gringrich would move all the darkies into those affected areas, move all the crackers and hot blondes out, and sell the land to China.
That, and 1,594,442 lawsuits would be filed by anyone within 4000 miles of the spill, all claiming cancer-related diseases and the flu were caused by the gamma rays.
arguingwithsignposts
Has anyone else been following Fukushima Diary?
Loneoak
Fukushima is becoming another piece of evidence in Loneoak’s Law of Engineering Ethics: The only people who should be trusted with technologies that carry a very high risk of ecological destruction are people who do not, or would not, need that technology in the first place.
My prime example is geo-engineering and climate change. If we are so helpless in the face of corporate power and wastefulness that we need geo-engineering to fix up our messes then we are not the type of people to be trusted with that technology.
The point about safety and risk is not whether a technology is “safe,” as if there is something inherently safe about any technology, but rather if we have the kind of ethical culture that is capable of handling risk such that we do not burden the least powerful and our ecosystems with all the costs of that technology.
Face
@Chet: 24/7 exposure, for 80-90 years? Cant be good. Not to mention, I’m guessing their government would do the same as ours, and lowball all estimates, so as not to incite mass panic.
JGabriel
OT, but does anyone know if the reason we have a peanut shortage, and that peanuts are therefore up from $4.50/lb to $6.00/lb in the city, is related to Alabama’s immigration law?
Bloomberg:
(Also, NY Times: The Price of Intolerance)
I keep reading about millions of dollars worth of crops being left to rot in Alabama fields — due to immigrant workers justifiably shunning the state for fear of arrest, harassment, violence, and deportation — but the specific crops are never mentioned.
It would be nice if, say, the next time I hear a wingnut bitch about the price of peanuts (or some other produce that’s gone up in price lately), I could respond: “Well, yeah, that’s a direct result of all those anti-immigrant laws you’ve been championing. Now there’s no one around who wants to pick the crops for any kind of money, much less cheaply.”
.
Dork
There’s some sick karma that the first country to be deleteriously affected by atomic energy is the same country 60+ years later to be once again deleteriously affected by self-inflicted atomic energy.
Marc
It would be nice if, you know, they had actually quantified the increased health risks from this. We mock McMegan for her broken calculator, and yet something like this comes without “xxx % increased risk of yyy” or the like and people assume the worst.
I’m not seeing any dosage reports. I suspect that the actual risk won’t be huge given the amounts. Radiation isn’t magic.
eemom
Ah, Cole — it makes me feel less ancient that a young whippersnapper like you remembers that song.
Soonergrunt
OT—Occupy OKC people at Kerr Park, OKC are reporting that eviction is imminent. I drove past the Bricktown police station earlier, and SWAT/SRT vehicles are staged forward there. Bricktown station is about a three minute drive from Kerr park.
I don’t know what to make of this because we hadn’t had any difficulties getting permits issued and renewed until yesterday.
I just got off the phone with a couple of the campers. The day shift captain from the Bricktown station addressed the GA a couple of days ago and told them that with the construction and demolition work going on across the street—this is true, one hi rise being renovated, one next to that being demolished—that those sites had reached a point where they had to have the whole area cleared. Then yesterday, the OCPD told them that they could stay in the lower park and clear out of the upper park and they’ed be OK. This morning, a Sergeant from Bricktown station told them they had to leave the park and that they would not be allowed to move to another park.
They set up a meeting with the Police Chief for 8:30 AM tomorrow morning, but they’ve noted that the Police, who normally have had two cars parked in the alley south of the park haven’t had a presence all day.
They’ve had good relations with the OCPD from the beginning, but it appears that a decision was made on high to remove them. Some campers have left, but through the day more and more people have been showing up as word got out, and a caravan from Norman had just got there at 9:30, raising their number to over 40.
The last thing they heard was that they would be evicted at 11:00 tonight. Since they heard that, they managed to arrange the meeting with the Chief for the morning, but apparently it’s about to happen–I just got a text that police are lining up on the south side of the park.
Bill Arnold
@JGabriel:
An extremely bad day, a 9.0 and a 14-15 meter tsunami. Also, if they hadn’t graded a full 25 meters off the site (need cite better than wikipedia), to build on bedrock and uhmm be closer to the ocean water (lowering pumping costs), then there wouldn’t have been a meltdown, probably.
Two correlated destructive events, which should have been understood to be very likely to be correlated. (The earthquake itself caused motion of over 0.5 g at the site, according to on-site strong-motion seismometers.)
People who worry about these things worry about active attempts to cause correlated failures, e.g. terrorism.
DanielX
Hmmm….what is the Japanese for “we are SO fucked”?
Commish
Don’t worry – a little radiation is good for you!
At Atomic Apologia
Soonergrunt
@Soonergrunt: The livestream feed, http://www.occupyokc.com/index.php/media-and-resources/livestream is offline. They’ve been trying to conserve battery power all day, but they’ve said they would bring it up as soon as it appears something will happen.
trollhattan
Cripes. Is okay, the fission fanbois will be along to tell us everything went as well as could be expected, also, too.
More, here:
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201111260001
Also, also, too,
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201111260021
Our own NRC warned the GE design installed at Plant 1 was unsafe. In the early 70s.
trollhattan
@DanielX:
“Hey, look, it’s the Americans.”
JGabriel
$254M Powerball Prize Won By Already In The One Percent Ass
holeet ManagersGod is dead.
Just kill me now. I’m so sick of rich people getting richer. Now they’re winning the fucking lottery too? C’mon, fuckers, at least leave us desperate people some tiny glimmer, some miniscule photon, of hope.
.
Soonergrunt
@trollhattan:
Leaving aside the fact that in this case, with these circumstances, the best that could be expected was a fucking disaster of massive proportions, one could actually accept that statement as correct.
William Hurley
Horrifying.
For a nation that suffered history’s only direct, intentional use of nuclear weapons to now have this horror occur – at the hands of its own technocrats – causes deep despair in this contributor.
JGabriel
@Bill Arnold:
Like reactors built on California fault lines and in East Coast Hurricane Zones.
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elftx
@JGabriel:
I actually heard about a week or so ago that speculators were driving the price of peanuts up.
MikeJ
@Soonergrunt: There haven’t been any sightings of giant radioactive lizards.
Yet.
JGabriel
@Soonergrunt:
Exactly. That’s the problem. Or one of the problems, anyway.
.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@JGabriel: Diablo Canyon continues to make me nervous. My dad did some work at the place, after it was running, and it made him nervous as well.
patrick II
@JGabriel:
Regarding peanut prices, I have read that drought in peanut growing areas, particularly Texas, has affected the size of the peanut crop this year.
Cliff in NH
Here’s a link to crowdsourced radiation maps of Japan:
http://blog.safecast.org/maps/
some guy
13% lower crop yields due to last summer’s heat and drought mean we will all be paying more for peanut butter. prices expected to continue to climb throughout the winter and spring.
Loneoak
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Yeah, that’s the closest plant to my house. The prevailing winds don’t blow toward us, but I still don’t like it.
Bill Arnold
@JGabriel:
An east coast hurricane and a west coast earthquake aren’t likely to affect the same nuclear plant, I hope.
Bill Arnold
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Yeah, that plant seems risky, but it’s a lot higher above sea level. (85 feet according to one source.)
Cain
Nice John – I caught the lyrics to that song.. “Radioactive” by The Firm.
Ari
10,000 of anything sounds scary, to be sure. But a Becquerel represents 1 decay per second. If you’ve ever turned a gieger counter up to maximum sensitivity (where 1 click = 1 decay) and held it to old fiestaware or granite, or whatever your science teacher used as an example, you know you can easily get that frightening clicking sound from things that aren’t exactly glowing green.
Just for kicks I tried to do a back of the envelope on what 10k Becquerels actually amounts to, using rad pro calculator. Using a distance of 30 cm (about 1 foot), this works out to 0.008 microsieverts per hour, or .2 per day, or 70 per year. Refering to Randall’s trusty chart, this is the equivalent to 1) eating 2 bananas per day 2) 2% of average background radiation 3) 1/6 the background in colorado and 4) about half the radiation you’re getting from the potassium already in your body.
This is back of the envelope, and possibly an overestimate (most people aren’t unshielded and 30 cm from the ground). I’m by no means a radiation expert, so if someone with knowledge wants to jump in and correct this, feel free.
Minor surgery is surgery that happens to someone else, and minor radiation is (I’d assume) someone else’s increased radiation risk. Not to minimize this – I’d be seriously pissed if some fuckup exposed me to this, but some perspective helps. 10000 Becquerels simply doesn’t sound like that much radiation.
Scamp Dog
@Marc: I downloaded a copy of “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of
Ionizing Radiation” from the National Academy Press site, and will try to spend some time tomorrow seeing if I can get a sense of what the risks may be.
I hope they’re on the level of “slight increase over background rates”, but that’s just hopeful speculation for now.
It would be nice if our media people would go through this kind of effort. But actual facts might be partisan, so it’s just better to copy down some quotes, type them up and go home…
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Bill Arnold: Well, I’m not really thinking of tsunami danger there. Active earthquake faults, some of which were not properly mapped when the plant was built, are more worrisome.
Neutron Flux
@Ari:I think your calcs are good enough,as they go. It looks to me like this converter is going from activity to dose, or exposure. That would be external. With contamination, the bigger worry is internal exposure. This comes from breathing it in, eating it in food, or drinking it in water. I’ll look around and see if I can find a way to convert Bq to DAC.
El Cid
Oh well, shit happens.
suzanne
@Moonbatting Average:
I operate as if this is the case already.
Recall
@Marc: They have. It’s zero. There are plenty of places with elevated background radiation, and the populations that live there don’t have elevated cancer rates.
JGabriel
@elftx:
They probably are, because speculators drive up the prices of commodities when there’s a shortage. In other words, speculator activity doesn’t prove that speculators are the cause.
Anyway, I heard there was a peanut shortage several weeks ago — I suspect that speculators would have jumped in asap to take advantage of a tightening market driving up prices.
.
JGabriel
@patrick II:
Thanks, Patrick II. Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember reading something like that too.
Ah well, can’t blame it on Alabama then.
.
JGabriel
@Bill Arnold: Heh. I should have used “or” not “and” — the potential correlated disasters for the east coast being hurricanes and/or flooding leading to a nuclear accident, or, in CA, earthquakes and natural consequences (tsunami, cave-in, aftershocks, et. al.).
.
MikeJ
@JGabriel: Don’t forget that there was a very lower end of major earthquake on the east coast just a few months ago. Just because something is unlikely doesn’t mean it won’t happen. See my comment #4.
moops
10,000 Becquerels/m^2 is not very much radioactivity.
If this amount of radiation increase was harmful, then Denver would be a cancer ward by now.
Now, this on top of an existing contamination problem in the country…well, yeah, that gets crappy.
but US residents live with far more from coal plants and fertilizer.
pseudonymous in nc
Drought, mainly: peanuts can be harvested mechanically — and farmers who may not be able to get the warm bodies to pick more profitable supermarket produce have been talking about going into mechanised crops… oh.
Yutsano
@Moonbatting Average: By square mileage Japan and Montana are almost exactly the same size. However, only one-sixth of Japan can be inhabited (the rest is too hilly and such.) Now put 120 million people there. Now cut that chunk out. I’m amazed the Japanese aren’t in full metal panic right about now.
Mark K.
Yeah Chet, I know. Deal mostly in millicuries myself.
Why don’t you move over there and buy some cheap real estate you fucking twit.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@magurakurin: Hey, whaddaya know, it happened.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Moonbatting Average:
Just for perspective, this would be like the entire state of Texas being contaminated
Except that the Japanese contamination represents a net loss…
magurakurin
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Isn’t great? They spent ages saying that an accident will never happen, not in a million years. Now that it has we hear don’t worry it really isn’t that bad, radiation is no big deal.
makes me think of this old song
There’s the stillness of death on a deathly unliving sea,
and the motor car magical world long since ceased to be,
when the Eve-bitten apple returned to destroy the tree.
Incestuous ancestry’s charabanc ride,
spawning new millions throws the world on its side.
Supporting their far-flung illusion, the national curse,
and those with no sandwiches please get off the bus.
The excrement bubbles,
the century’s slime decays
and the brainwashing government lackeys
would have us say
it’s under control and we’ll soon be on our way
to a grand year for babies and quiz panel games
of the hot hungry millions you’ll be sure to remain.
The natural resources are dwindling and no one grows old,
and those with no homes to go to, please dig yourself holes.
We wandered through quiet lands, felt the first breath of snow.
Searched for the last pigeon, slate grey I’ve been told.
Stumbled on a daffodil which she crushed in the rush, heard it sigh,
and left it to die.
At once felt remorse and were touched by the loss of our own,
held its poor broken head in her hands,
dropped soft tears in the snow,
and it’s only the taking that makes you what you are.
Wond’ring aloud will a son one day be born
to share in our infancy
in the child’s path we’ve worn.
In the aging seclusion of this earth that our birth did surprise
we’ll open his eyes.
Porlock Junior
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
As I recall, it was Diablo Canyon that caused the late great David Brower to say that he had been reasonable once, and had regretted it ever since. [citation needed :]
Robert Sneddon
@Ari: The current Japanese standard for measuring incident background radiation is to sample levels at 1 metre above ground level as that better represents the direct exposure to children. Some of the baseline data from before the accident is not recorded using that height metric so it is somewhat unreliable to compare them directly.
As you said a single Bequerel event is a very small amount of activity and “normal” background and ingestion levels are are usually measured in kiloBequerels — seawater is naturally about 10,000 Bq per cubic metre for example, almost all from potassium 40, the same stuff that makes carrots and bananas noticeably radioactive when held next to a radiation monitor. That’s the same level of radioactivity due to contamination being reported for a square metre of Japanese wilderness.
The major problem with the contamination is food chain concentration of cesium-137 and to a lesser extent cesium-134 but the wilderness areas reported on by this article aren’t being farmed. Where food is being grown the crops and animals are being tested for excessive levels of contamination and the stuff above the very conservative limits set by the Japanese government (about 10% of the World Health Organisation’s recommendations) is being pulled from the market.
MrCheesyPuff
Bequerel Sauce – It Glows.
Cermet
@Chet: True relative to surroundings IF you don’t live there 24/7 but like all people who do not understand physics and biology – you miss facts – cesium is USED by the body so that having that much in the soil, people will tend to pick it up and get the stuff into their system via many routs. The real issue that you overlook is that significant levels will occur within cells and that can be deadly – so, even low levels around you (mostly harmless as direct external exposure) will tend to be concentrated by eating the shit in food/on it and breathing it into your body and prove very deadly over the long term (still, we are talking increased cancer deaths, not radioactive posioning)- yes, low levels (except the rather hot areas) are safe to be exposed to for a few hours a day and few days a week but NOT to live around 24/7. That is deadly considering the type of radioactive material – not the external total dose which the body can handle; unlike the internal dose which will cause a significant increase in cancer deaths. Very different issue here.
bob h
Its not as though they had a lot of land to spare in the first place.
Robert Sneddon
@Cermet: Cesium is not an essential element for health the way potassium is. Cesium taken up into the human body has a “half-life” of about 70 days, in other words if you absorb some cesium half of that amount will leave the body after 70 days, excreted or otherwise lost. After another 70 days half the remaining amount will be lost and so on.
In an environment with persistent amounts of radioactive cesium there will be a certain stable level in the body as it does with the much more dangerous radioactive potassium isotope K-40. The total amount of radioactive caesium deposited in the contaminated areas in north-eastern Japan is quite low, on the order of a few dozen kilogrammes. Compared to the tonnes of radioactive K-40 in the same areas (including the potassium deliberately deposited as fertiliser on croplands which is funnelled into the human foodchain) it poses little or no health risks.
JBWoodford
I tried to relate it to the contamination limits that the US-DOE uses; they’re in disintegrations per minute (dpm) per 100 square centimeters. One Bq is 60 dpm, and one square meter is 100 (100 square centimeters), so unless I dropped a decimal place 10 000 Bq/m^2^ is 6 000 dpm/100 cm^2^. A lab with that amount of surface contamination would be posted as a contamination area (for beta/gamma emitters like Cs-137, total fixed + removable limit is 5 000 dpm/100 cm^2). So it might not sound like much, but in the DOE it’d trigger a bunch of training and monitoring requirements to work there. I don’t see the Japanese government issuing dosimeters to everyone who lives there, though….
chopper
10k Bequerels/sec doesn’t sound like too much, but that statistic is coming from the japanese government which has lowballed every single radiation measurement so far in this debacle. if they’re saying it’s 10K, i’d assume it’s much higher.
daveNYC
@Bill Arnold:
I’d be slightly more sympathetic to the ‘bad day’ argument if it weren’t for the facts that the resulting accident was a complete smoking hole in the ground, and that the plant, earthquake, and tsunami were all in fucking Japan. Japan, earthquake, who’d a thunk! You don’t get to ask hoocoodanode when the answer is ‘everyone’.
Schlemizel
@Dork:
You really MUST give me the title of your history book – you know, the one where Japan self-inflicts atomic energy on itself 60+ years ago.
The crappy old books I read tell me it was not self-inflicted at all.
Michael E Sullivan
The site was designed to withstand an 8.0 and a 6m tsunami. Some report came out that a few years ago, there was an estimate that the area was potentially vulnerable to a 15m tsunami, and suggested recommendations were made to bolster the defenses of the reactors, which, had they been taken, probably would have resulted in no meltdown. That’s a fairly big deal if true.
Also, agreed with the moderate position on just how much 10k bq/m^2 is. The exposure from 10k bq is hardly chernobyl, It’s about twice what you naturally have in your own body primarily from K-40 and C-14. OTOH, that’s per m^2 which means you are getting it from more than just the single square meter you stand on. It’s enough to be concerned about, especially since it won’t be spread perfectly evenly.
OTOH, it’s a bit chicken little to talk about this whole area being uninhabitable for years. For some of the highest exposed areas (bright/dark orange on the little map at TP’s post) this might well be true, but most of this area will at worst require inhabitants to pay some attention to radiation exposure, and at best, it will be like living in the colorado hills, or industrial farm country.
It’s a big deal, but unless these estimates are massively lowballed, it’s not even close to a chernobyl like disaster, even though the actual nuclear accident was probably equivalent or worse. In the context of other damage caused by the tsunami (including many deaths and incredible pollution damages from coal/gas power plants harmed in the same catastrophe), it really shouldn’t represent some kind of damning failure of nuclear power vs. other sources.
Rafer Janders
@JGabriel:
Exactly. Speculators aren’t exactly going to jump in when there’s a surplus, otherwise what’s to speculate about? Speculators come in only after the shortage is foreseeable and/or evident, i.e. they are a symptom, not the cause.
No One of Consequence
Georgia supplies roughly half of the US domestic peanut supply each year. This year, they are pulling in the smallest crop in over 20 years. It is not speculation, magic, or malevolence. Just econ.
– NOoC
Robert Sneddon
@chopper:
How do you lowball a radiation measurement? The readings are what they are, and TEPCO and assorted Japanese government agencies regularly publish radiation measurements of different types from various places on the Web. There are, for example, eight fixed radiation monitors on the boundary of the Fukushima Daiichi plant which are read every ten minutes day and night. You can see the data from them going back to March at http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/f1/. There’s a whole bunch of other info on soil contamination, background levels etc. reported daily which you can find if you’re interested enough to look for them.
An ESTIMATE such as the total amount of radioactive contamination released by the reactors since the explosions isn’t a simple measurement. That number can only be calculated by looking at the amount of contamination found deposited across the land and sea and working the numbers backwards. As better information about areas and levels of contamination has come in those estimates have been revised (usually upwards). It’s still mostly guesswork with big error bars; the actual total could be twice the number they’ve put forward, or maybe half of that. The really important numbers are the levels of contamination of land areas and seawater and they can be, and are being monitored and the actual numbers reported.
Chet
Lol, really? How many furlongs to the hogshead are you getting?