Guest writer

Wild overreaction

Don’t cry for me, Fukushima

It seems the same old group of an

ti-nuclear activists are in a feeding

frenzy over the discharge of radioactive water from three Fukushima reactors.

Their claims among the many: Radiation is killing the starfish off California; radiation is piling up bodies of dead sea creatures on the ocean floor; radiation is now somehow jumping from the Pacific Ocean to St. Louis; one plume, shown crossing the Pacific, has radiation levels on the West Coast fatal in a few days to all life save for a few cockroaches; another illustration (and you can’t make this stuff up) shows where, in the Atlantic Ocean near the Falkland Islands, the reactor would come out after melting through the earth.

My favorite is the prediction that the Pacific Ocean will “die” and take most of life in the Northern Hemisphere with it-although no delivery system for the radiation is given. “We must evacuate the Northern Hemisphere!”

What incendiary, false, fear-mongering garbage.

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Let’s get out the back of an envelope and see if we can estimate our actual danger:

First, the oceans are radioactive, mostly from potassium-40 (K-40) with an activity of 12 Bq per liter-a Bq is a becquerel, or a single disintegration, thus a measurement of radioactivity.

Suppose you drank 10 liters of seawater every day for a year. Beside the minor inconvenience of death, you would also be receiving a daily dose of radiation from the K-40. The dose conversion factor of K-40 shows this to be about 22 millirem (mrem) per year.

As a reference, this is about one-half the dose you get from your own blood, and about 6 percent of normal U.S. background radiation, except on the Colorado plateau where it is about 3 percent.

One hundred days after the earthquake in Japan, each of the three Fukushima reactors had an inventory of about 230 quadrillion Bq, for a total of some 700 quadrillion Bq. (A quadrillion has 15 zeros.)

As chance would have it, the Pacific Ocean is estimated to havea volume of 700 quadrillion cubic meters; hence if we could magically dissolve all the radioactive materials in the reactors (little of which will ever see the light of day), we would be adding one Bq for each cubic meter of the Pacific Ocean. As there are a thousand liters in a cubic meter, the activity level increase for the ocean would be one milli-becquerel (mBq) per liter.

To calculate the increased dose, we shouldn’t use the K-40 dose conversion factor, but that of the more aggressive isotope Cesium-137, the radionuclide most often referenced in the horror stories. This yields an annual dose of 0.0049 mrem (gasp!)-equal to an additional seven minutes of average background in the U.S. Or three seconds background for residents of Ramsar, Iran. Or the first three miles at altitude on a coast-to-coast jet flight.

Even this miniscule dose is grossly high. The inventory in the reactors has dropped significantly in the last two years. There is no conceivable way to dissolve the radioactive products now entombed in the reactors and get them into the ocean. And no one is going to consume 2 ½ gallons of seawater a day.

But what is not exaggerated: The actual effect on the ocean, the U.S., and your life is completely negligible. If you wanted the ideal place to dilute radioactive discharges, there is nothing comparable to the Pacific Ocean. It will take care of itself.

I believe the problems are the leftist, anti-nuclear activists such as Helen Caldicott, Chris Busby, David Suzuki, Arnie Gundersen, Paul Ehrlich and his buddy John Holdren (Barack Obama’s science adviser)-along with their “useful idiots.” Until you understand their penchant to trash nuclear power as part of returning us to the environmentalist dream of a de-industrialized America, then nothing will make much sense to you.

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Ed Hiserodt is an aerospace engineer living in Maumelle and is the author of Underexposed: What if Radiation is Actually GOOD for You?

Editorial, Pages 23 on 01/18/2014

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