Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
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Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
1–10 of 112 posts
Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#2In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.
The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.
I don't know why anyone should take this article seriously. Here's the thing about radiation: We can measure it directly. And scientists have certainly been able to measure radioactivity here in the U.S. that must be a consequence of Fukushima. But here's the thing: those radioactive effects -- here in the U.S. -- are very, very small.
Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#3The quick onslaught of the "it couldn't possibly be a meltdown" message in the mainstream media and the "MIT professor says" emails/webpages, etc all smacked of a propaganda campaign to me. All the while the fuel rods were sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the reactor... and probably leaking through into the ground.
Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the catastrophe than a conspiracy to suppress information, but the forcefulness of the response was striking.
I heard a great (and probably apocryphal) anecdote on the radio a few weeks after -- "After three mile island, the Russians came to the US, performed a detailed analysis, and concluded 'we can't have a three mile island'. Instead, they had a Chernobyl. The Japanese went to Russia, did an analysis, and said 'we can't possibly have a Chernobyl', and instead had their own meltdown. Now we're hearing how modern reactors couldn't possibly have a meltdown like any of three so far."
Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#4Fukushima is a disaster, yes, but this article (particularly the little subsection blaming the USA) is full of appeals to emotion.
Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#5"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes,"
As an Engineer I call bullshit on this.
Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#6I love AJE, but I'm regularly surprised over the amount of balls AJE reporters have in making value judgements on the fly. For instance:
Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?
Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.
Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#7"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant."
Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist:
Joseph Mangano is the director of the "Radiation and Public Health Project":
They are not exactly disinterested parties, and it is fair to say that their article would never be published in a peer reviewed journal:
http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html
Side Note: This is not the most scientific graph in the world, but (in the event of another panicked radiation article) it is always worth linking to the xkcd graph on radiation:
Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#8The quick onslaught of the "it couldn't possibly be a meltdown" message in the mainstream media and the "MIT professor says" emails/webpages, etc all smacked of a propaganda campaign to me. All the while the fuel rods were sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the reactor... and probably leaking through into the ground. Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the cat…
I was shocked at the immediate "this is not a problem" reaction by many people -- particularly here at Hacker News.
Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#9The quick onslaught of the "it couldn't possibly be a meltdown" message in the mainstream media and the "MIT professor says" emails/webpages, etc all smacked of a propaganda campaign to me. All the while the fuel rods were sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the reactor... and probably leaking through into the ground. Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the cat…
I was shocked at the immediate "this is not a problem" reaction by many people -- particularly here at Hacker News.
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Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
#10"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant."
"The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster."
I tried to source this on Google. I can't find the article by Sherman and Mangano, but found this discussion:
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550
It appears the authors cited by AJE were using CDC data. Someone posts the infant death numbers at the Berkeley link. The numbers are very small with a lot of deviation. And it's not clear that they're even being measured against total number of births.
I've heard a lot of praise for AJE's reporting and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that TEPCO and the Japanese government were continuing to understate the risk, but this article seems shoddy and sensationalistic.