Cloudy with a Chance of Cancer

Fukushima Speculations

Since I mused a little about my openings on the post I've gotta say this one was a lot better. I'm giving myself a pat on the back right now for my creative genius. You know that it was the cool title that lured you in here. It's okay you can admit it. Excuse my randomness. Sometimes I ramble to put a little bit of a break in between all the nuclear talk and blogging. Well getting back to it....

I found an interesting journal today that documents some of the atmospheric changes that have gone on from the more drastic nuclear accidents. Today, I thought it would be a good post to pass some of these facts to you and share at least some of the amazement I had at these facts about Fukushima.

Radionuclides from the reactor accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant were observed in the surface air at stations in Hanoi, Dalat, and Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in Vietnam, about 4500 km southwest of Japan, during the period from March 27 to April 22, 2011. The maximum activity concentrations in the air measured at those three sites were 193, 33, and 37 μBq m⁻³ for ¹³¹I, ¹³⁴Cs, and ¹³⁷Cs, respectively. Peaks of radionuclide concentrations in the air corresponded to arrival of the air mass from Fukushima to Vietnam after traveling for 8 d over the Pacific Ocean. 

These effects of dispersion and overall travel of nuclear releases are effects that I feel are commonly forgotten. I believe that generally we as people tend to live our lives generally in bubbles, not paying attention to occurrences outside of our spheres of influence and things we notice in our daily lives. Yet readings like these definitely remind us that there is not an impassable wall between what happens in what area of the world another. These particulates did travel somewhere around 8 days to get to Vietnam, some 2500 miles away. These are definitely facts and things we should be concerned with as nuclear activists and I am sure many places have published other readings of increased level of nuclides drifting from far-off locations.

However, when critically assessing for that cancer chance in this particular scenario the results seem to be rather negligible. Just using that action level of 4 pCi/L from the radon example we can see that these values are much lower than what we should be worried about. Well, first we have to account for units which to convert micro bequerel to pCi is about a reduction or division by 1x10e5 (1 micoBq=.000027 pCi). Then to convert from 1 cubic meter to 1 liter  reduces this number again by a factor of 1000. This results in readings somewhere around .00000193 pCi/L and less. Taking the EPA action level advice to be true, I would not worry too much about this particular situation. However, this does not change the fact that it is an important consideration on global impact nevertheless. It is impressive that radionuclides from this one even travelled this far.  Also note that the graph above is integrated across a day it seems.

Cited:
(1) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X1100292X