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Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

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Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#51

Post by Pitarou »

On its own, I can't treat this article as credible. The compensation lawyer presents the strongest possible case for his clients, and the journalist is clearly glossing over a great deal in order to get the juiciest quotes.

From what little details are given, it sounds like the crew of the Reagan suffered from some kind of gut infection, not radiation poisoning. That would explain why they were denied port entry at Guam, and so on.

I live on the fringe of the area where contamination from Fukushima can be detected. To my knowledge, doctors haven't noticed anything unusual yet, and believe me people are watching. Still, the article sends a chill...

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#52

Post by marze »

VLM wrote: post #23

"The levels were incredibly dangerous and at one point, the radiation in the air measured 300 times higher than what was considered safe, Sebourn told The Post." This doesn't mean anything, its technobabble. How many REM or mSv total exposure? "I said something complicated and science-y sounding, so you are supposed to be scared right now". The biggest misfortune is they may even accidentally be correct, just complet…

Well, I wouldn't want to walk around outside with levels at 300 times what is "considered safe".

Japan is just lucky that 95% of the radioactive release from the meltdowns was blown out over the ocean, otherwise a much larger fraction of their island would have become useless for agriculture. If the earthquake occurred during the fall, the winds would have been generally off the ocean.

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#53

Post by sitharus »

AnotherDesigner wrote: post #47

The nuclear apologists are out in full force today. I love how you guys, mostly computer programmers, are so much more informed than experts in nearly every other field of science existing. It must be amazing to be that smart.

It is amazing, but the diodes down my left side hurt all the time.

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#54

Post by Daniel_Newby »

wissler wrote: post #48
Daniel_Newby wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was. The Reagan is nuclear-powered and is capable of carrying nuclear missiles (and quite possibly was at the time). Unless Navy planning has entirely rotted away, that ship was plastered with radiation detectors, crewed with people trained for nuke decon, equipped with NBC (nuclear/bioweapon/chemical weapon) protection suits, and supplied with potassium iodide tablets for thyroid protection.

Then what really happened here?

Probably mass hysteria. It seems unlikely that the captain blithley ignored basic safety measures, and the symptoms reported in the article are not typical for radiation sickness.

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#55

Post by sitharus »

Pitarou wrote: post #51

On its own, I can't treat this article as credible. The compensation lawyer presents the strongest possible case for his clients, and the journalist is clearly glossing over a great deal in order to get the juiciest quotes. From what little details are given, it sounds like the crew of the Reagan suffered from some kind of gut infection, not radiation poisoning. That would explain why they were denied port entry at G…

The symptoms are credible, but the NY Post is not. It's like claiming the Daily Mail knows what the real effects of immigration are in the UK.

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#56

Post by Qworg »

Alex_MJ wrote: post #36
melling wrote: post #33

We're either a one decade or two from having the necessary robotics technology needed to keep humans out of harm's way in these situations. http://singularityhub.com/2013/12/20/nasa-unveils-valkyrie-a... It's really up to us if it's going to be 10 years or 20.

We already can make simple ones, it's a matter of radiation shielding. They don't have to be huge expensive humanoid ones. Robots were used in the Chernobyl cleanup 25 years ago although they ended up getting fried from the radiation. I haven't done much research on the topic of what exists today regarding workarounds for electronics in radioactive environments (if someone has domain knowledge, please tell!), but I s…

There is much more to it than getting hardened electronics. For example, I was talking with some Westinghouse engineers and the biggest problem with the robots at Fukushima were the cameras. The radiation crazes the lenses and you become blind.

Search and rescue is a hard problem and is terribly underfunded. It is also funded in a way that makes long term improvements hard. There is very little money until there's a disaster, then there is a ton of cash you have to spend right now.

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#57

Post by JanezStupar »

zequel wrote: post #19

This is why I wouldn't let my kids EVER enlist. The government has no regard for its enlisted. Doesn't take a genius to think our navy would be in harm's way during a RADIOACTIVE DISASTER. Reminds me of when soldiers were being electrocuted in showers in Iraq because of totally incompetent contractors wiring electricity near the showers.

Sure, better let somebody else's kids take care of the shitty work.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#58

Post by JshWright »

scotty79 wrote: post #38
JshWright wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "simple" reverse-osmosis system? A Nimitz class carrier can produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 gallons of desalinated (potable) water a day. Desalination is very energy intensive, but energy is something that a nuclear powered carrier has plenty of. There are obviously some consumables involved, but it's mostly just energy, and lots of it. RO, on the other hand, requires a lot of high quality, small p…

> The folks who designed the potable water infrastructure for the Nimitz class aircraft carriers were probably idiots. You are not an idiot just for doing something stupid. All people, even the smartest ones have capacity to do dangerously stupid things. In this case they probably just weren't ordered to built a system that can provide clean water in case of the ship being covered in radioactive snow. So the people d…

>In this case they probably just weren't ordered to built a system that can provide clean water in case of the ship being covered in radioactive snow.

I think it's even more likely that they weighed the advantages and disadvantages of each system, and decided that a waste heat desalination system would be a _much_ better fit then a huge, expensive, high maintenance RO system.

My point was simply that this was almost certainly an informed decision, not an oversight (or just 'following orders').

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#59

Post by thaumasiotes »

WalterBright wrote: post #32
simulate wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you have chance 1 in 1000-2000 that you'll die next year. You have a 1000-2000 chance that you'll die when you are no longer an infant but still young. Your chances of dying next year go up as your get older. If you had only 1 chance in 1000 to die each year that would mean that people would live to be 1000 years old on average. A good estimate of human mortality rates can be calculated from Gompertz law: http://fo…

> If you had only 1 chance in 1000 to die each year that would mean that people would live to be 1000 years old on average. Actually it means your chances of living to be 1000 would be 37%. 0.999 ^ 1000 = .37

Your chances of living to be 1000 are approximately 1 in e, 37%, yes. But that has nothing to do with the average age people live to. I don't get 1000 as the average lifespan, though, I get 999. Can someone explain where I'm going wrong with this reasoning?

If there is a 0.001 chance of dying every year, the average lifespan will be 0(0.001) + 1(0.001)(0.999) + 2(0.001)(0.999)^2 + 3(0.001)(0.999)^3 + ... , or \sum_{i=0}^\infty (i(0.001)(0.999)^i). The idea is that to live to the age of 0, you have to die in your first year; to live to be three, you have to live through exactly three years and then die, and so on. Then, \sum_{i=0}^\infty ix^i is x / (1-x)^2 .

So the sum of interest is 0.001 times (0.999) / (0.000001), which is exactly 999.

Re: Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue

#60

Post by rgbrenner »

gwern wrote: post #8
fidotron wrote: post #2

Of all groups you'd hope to be able to detect and protect their staff against radiation, wouldn't the US Navy be fairly near the top of the list? Much as TEPCO may be at fault over the actual reactor the sailors being exposed unnecessarily sounds more like Naval negligence.

Yeah. It does say that > By the time the Reagan realized it was contaminated and tried to shift location, the radioactive plume had spread too far to be quickly outrun. > > “We have a multimillion-dollar radiation-detection system, but . . . it takes time to be set up and activated,” Cooper said. But... if you're on the coast helping deal with the tsunami damage like them and then a nuclear disaster starts, setting i…

CBS - March 2011: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/radiation-detected-on-us-warship...

The U.S. Seventh Fleet said Monday it had moved its ships and aircraft away from a quake-stricken Japanese nuclear power plant after discovering low-level radioactive contamination.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that there were two separate radiation exposures on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. The first was to air crews who were swabbed upon returning from search and rescue (SAR) missions, 17 of whom were found to have received the equivalent of a month's radiation and had to be decontaminated.

The second exposure occurred when the carrier's shipboard alarms went off. Since the Reagan is nuclear-powered, it has sensors to detect radioactivity, said Martin, and those went off as soon as the radiation levels went above the naturally-occurring background.

...

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was about 100 miles offshore when its instruments detected the radiation. The fleet said the dose of radiation was about the same as one month's normal exposure to natural background radiation in the environment, and no one was exposed to levels that would have made them sick, reports CBS News correspondent Celia Hatton.

The power plant and its plume are south of Sendai, so as long as the wind doesn't shift, the Reagan can stay out of the plume and still be in position to conduct SAR missions.

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