Japan: The Most Deadly Manmade Element in Existence — Plutonium — Made It Around the Planet After Fukushima Meltdowns
How bad is plutonium? Considering that one pound of plutonium evenly distributed into everyone’s lungs would kill every man, woman and child on Earth, I’d say it’s pretty bad. And there have been literally tons of radioactive plutonium and other radioactive elements released into the air and ocean environments since 3/11/2011 …
By Sayer Ji – “A recently published study in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity confirms that the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster reached Europe (Lithuania), and included plutonium, the most deadly manmade element (nanogram for nanogram) in existence.
According to the study’s authors the radionuclide concentrations measured indicate there was ‘long-range air mass transport from Japan across the Pacific, the North America and the Atlantic Ocean to Central Europe as indicated by modelling.’ What this means is that every region under the jet stream — which includes half of the planet north of its equator — could have been exposed to some degree of plutonium fall-out; a fact that is all the more disturbing when we consider there is no such thing as a safe level, and that the harm (on the human scale of time) does not dissipate: the half life of plutonium-239 is 24,200 years, and that of uranium-238 is 4,460,000,000 years, which is older than our planet.
In a past exposé, where we identified the likelihood of the occurrence we are now reporting on, we published Jet Stream radiation dispersion projections from Germany’s EURAD system which showed that Radioiodine-131 and Cesium-137 were within detectable concentrations thousands of miles away from Fukushima within days after the event. This was, after all, a nuclear explosion (as occurred also at Chernobyl) producing extremely small particles moving at extremely high velocity, and not a hydrogen-based conflagration, which was erroneously reported to be the case in the first days following the disaster.” Source – GreenMedInfo.com.
Reactor 4: Spent fuel pool was boiling without water after 1/1/2012 – “Following up this article about the decreasing of water level at reactor 4… The blogger woman in Minamisoma leaked information from an actual Fukushima worker. According to her post, after the earthquake of 1/1/2012, the pipe of spent fuel pool for reactor 4 was broken, the pool completely lost its water. The worker stated, Sooner or later, the truth will have to to be widely known. Believe it or not, you will only regret. Wear a mask at least. The pool was boiling without water.” Source – Fukushima Diary.
Fukushima citizens: Series of recent earthquakes are not normal quakes – “Fukushima citizens tweet that recent series of the earthquake feel different from usual ones. mainakata311: ‘I think everyone has noticed it if they live in Fukushima since 311, and paid attention to earthquakes. Suddenly, the way of shaking has changed, isn’t it ? feels like something is exploding underground, like a bomb.’ … Butyoo1488: ‘I live in Ibaraki, but my family, and people around me feel the same way too. It’s not a normal earthquake, but a short quake as if something was exploding underground. I haven’t felt that quake for 40 years. It happens everyday.’ The only reason to deny the possibility of hydrovolcanic explosion underground is because the radiation level is not spiking up after the earthquake, but I doubt if the steam comes right above the epicenter.” Read more.




Here’s a link to the abstract of the original article:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22206700
Pu from Fukushima was claimed to be detected in exactly one sample, at an activity of 44.5 nanoBq/cubic meter.
One Becquerel (Bq) is one atomic decay per second. A nano-Bq is one decay every billion seconds, which is about 32 years. So the Pu activity in Vilnius is one decay every (32/44.5) = 0.72 years, or about one decay every eight and a half months in a cubic meter of air. (They drew lots of cubic meters of air through a filter for about 3 weeks to capture enough particles to measure.)
Let’s compare this to another source of inhaled alpha emitters.
The average radon activity in outdoor air in the US is about 0.4 picoCuries/liter (pCi/L):
http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/consguid.html
A picoCurie is 37 Bq, and a cubic meter is 1000 liters, so the average outdoor radon activity is (37000 times 0.4) = 14800 Bq/cubic meter. Every breath you take (about 1/2 liter) gets you (0.5 * 0.4 * 37) = about 7 atomic decays. All day, every day. Scared yet? It’s worse if you’re taking that hike in the Rockies. There’s a lot of uranium in them thar hills.
So just walking around in the great outdoors, you are breathing about 300 billion times as much radioactivity from natural radon in the air as the good citizens of Vilnius are suffering from Fukushima plutonium.
I don’t think they need to worry so much.
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Thanks for the info DiogenesNJ. Even if only one person were to develop cancer because of Fukushima, that’s one person too many. But I agree, we don’t have to worry so much – I’d rather breathe in radon any day over an iota of plutonium. While we should never want to overestimate the dangers of Fukushima fallout, we should also never want to underestimate the dangers, either. While the average person need not worry about what Fukushima means to them, there are many who have already been horribly affected in one way or another…
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Hi again. Sorry, I made a mistake in calculation — one pCi is 37 *milli*Bq, not 37 Bq. So the divide all the radon numbers by 1000 (e.g. 14.8 Bq/m3, and 300 million times more radon than Pu).
Still, radiologically speaking, radon and Pu are the same thing. They’re both alpha emitters. as is the polonium-210 found in cigarette smoke. So you shouldn’t have a preference as long as the Pu quantity isn’t enough to be a heavy-metal chemical toxin (which it isn’t here by many, many orders of magnitude).
It’s hardly possible to underestimate the dangers of Fukushima fallout outside Japan. It’s probably less risk than walking across the street. Ok, maybe walking across the street twice… :)
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