Fukushima and the world....

When the Fukushima disaster occurred I initially had some concerns about goods being shipped out of Japan directly and handling them. Yeah I was being a bit paranoid but having lived in the UK during Chernobyl and recalling the warnings then I felt I should at least look into the matter so (at the time) I did some research online and could find no information on this being a problem, one way or the other, so I put it into the back of my mind.

Recently Fukushima has been coming up again in the news as they have no way to deal with the problem they have and it appears that it may have been worse then what we were told. This got me thinking again so I did some more research.....

I found info talking about how some countries are refusing shipments of Japanese made goods because they are radioactive!



This blog is a pretty good synopsis of the details...

http://www.agreenroadjournal.com/2014/01/fukushima-radiation-contaminated-cars.html

The article talks a lot about cars and steel but obviously if those items bear radiation then so would a lot of other things as well.



I thought that some of you would want to review this info and share your thoughts. If you have any info to share yourself then I'd love to hear it as well.

Dave

I'm not a physicist so take it for what you will. However... some things come to mind.

It is certainly true that most steel after the Fukushima disaster has been contaminated with at least some level of radioactivity. This is however, not something entirely new. Low-level contamination of all steel has been present since atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons started in 1945. It's one of the reasons the atmospheric test ban treaty was eventually signed and most tests went underground. Most people don't realize it but literally hundreds of nuclear weapons have exploded in the atmosphere during the 50's and 60's in the name of nuclear testing. As a result there is an elevated background presence of reactivity in all steels produced today. One of the reasons mining old deep-sea wrecks for scrap metal is profitable today is that it's one of the few sources of steel that isn't contaminated by radiation (so it's useful in things like geiger counters).

Bear in mind though that this is still a very small amount of reactivity. The fact that 'radioactivity' was measured says more about the accuracy of our measurement tools than about the amount of radioactivity in the product.

There are also some big differences with Chernobyl. In Chernobyl pretty much all the mess created by the meltdown went into the air and was carried all over the place by the wind. This has gone all over the place and you can still notice the effects. For example certain types of mushroom tend to concentrate the radioactive products from the ground, thereby making them somewhat unsafe to eat in huge amounts. Wild boar in Germany and probably most of Eastern Europe is usually tested for radioactivity due to concerns of bioaccumulation; if a pig eats too much of the radioactive mushrooms the meat itself will get contaminated.
But again this is all really low-level crap and says more about the strict laws and measurement methods. You'd have to eat 'radioactive pig' pretty much any week before being able to notice it in your own health.

But Fukushima was different. The amount of reactivity released was way less. And most of it essentially was washed away. So they managed to flood most of it into the seawater, and most of the rest went into the groundwater.

So what's at risk the most? Naturally: seafood...agriculture products...and the water.
I wouldn't worry about the steel. The rest... well I suppose that's monitored. In practise there are really just a few radiation products you have to watch out for, as a lot of them have rather short half-lives, so they're gone pretty soon. And luckily the sea is a pretty big place, so a lot of it gets diluted.
Local groundwater might be a bigger problem though, especially as that's a lot harder to get rid of.

But steel and other manufactured goods? I wouldn't worry about it for a second.

I have a problem with people who reference themselves as proof of concept. All this person writes is not peer reviewed, but rather, opinion pieces passed as scientific fact.

I'm not saying that what they are saying is wrong, but simply spewing links to blogs doesn't make it right.

I'm sure there must be important health impacts, but I had never heard that metal exposed to radiation becomes a self-sustained radioactive emission source.

Some interesting stuff. I am always sceptical of pages like that, and tend to think that looking on google scholar is a much better place, though can be hard to find article which are accessible.

guari said:

I have a problem with people who reference themselves as proof of concept. All this person writes is not peer reviewed, but rather, opinion pieces passed as scientific fact.

I'm not saying that what they are saying is wrong, but simply spewing links to blogs doesn't make it right.

Click to expand...

Agreed...the whole thing reads a bit like the typical tin-foil had conspiracy theory stuff with perhaps a hidden agenda. It wouldn't be the first time people used scare tactics to try and depopularize nuclear energy. Although I'm not necessarily saying nuclear energy is brilliant, that campaign has been somewhat self-defeating as it has resulted (at least here) in more coal plants - which actually emit even more radioactivity, and a hell of a lot more polution and CO2.

I'm sure there must be important health impacts, but I had never heard that metal exposed to radiation becomes a self-sustained radioactive emission source.

Click to expand...

Well the issue is that... we simply don't know. The radiation levels are very low and we simply do not have a good understanding of the impact of such low-level radiation, or how to model the amount of deaths or cancer cases. But you have to at least put it within perspective and compare it to the existing background radiation.

This is my area of expertise to certain extent... I'm a Radiochemist (basically nuclear chemistry) and I can tell you the amount of radiation on those steels will most likely do nothing to you. In fact, you will be exposed to far greater doses of radiation every time you fly. The HAVE been cases of steel contaminated with dangerous levels of radioactivity but not from something like Fukushima but rather when recycling metal some radioactive source has been mixed in and melted, that's rare and has nothing to do with the levels from stuff going in the air.

valgard said:

This is my area of expertise to certain extent... I'm a Radiochemist (basically nuclear chemistry) and I can tell you the amount of radiation on those steels will most likely do nothing to you. In fact, you will be exposed to far greater doses of radiation every time you fly. The HAVE been cases of steel contaminated with dangerous levels of radioactivity but not from something like Fukushima but rather when recycling metal some radioactive source has been mixed in and melted, that's rare and has nothing to do with the levels from stuff going in the air.

Click to expand...

Yeah... you might not want to start making knives from random scraps sourced from medical facilities... There have been several cases where radiation sources used in medical applications (iduno whether it was imaging or radiation therapy stuff) weren't properly disposed of and ended up in general scrap or floating around in the general population.
Although I can imagine glow-in-the-dark damascus would look pretty neat...

Yes, [SUP]60[/SUP]Co (Cobalt 60) is the main culprit there, it's used for treatment and outside medicine for sterilizing food or just modifying it to prolongue the shelf life. One of the worst radioactive accidents was in Brazil during the carnivals, someone found a cobalt source that wasn't disposed off in an old hospital and it ended up being used as makeup with several deaths and injuries ensuing (the stuff is green and it glows in the dark...)

Jovidah said:

Yeah... you might not want to start making knives from random scraps sourced from medical facilities... There have been several cases where radiation sources used in medical applications (iduno whether it was imaging or radiation therapy stuff) weren't properly disposed of and ended up in general scrap or floating around in the general population.
Although I can imagine glow-in-the-dark damascus would look pretty neat...

Click to expand...

Guys, I am a nuclear physicist (not practicing anymore, but do have a PhD in particle physics). If you have some questions - shoot away

I have only once experieced myself the effect of the Fukushima - when local teashop had deliveries from Japan delayed because the goods were being checked for contamination.

The answers from valgard and Jovidah are IMO spot on.

The first technical paragraph in the linked article is correct (the rest I did not read), but I really do not think much of that happened in Fukushima. In Chernobyl it probably did since the reactor there blew off (that was a steam explostion followed by a hydrogen explosion - the wiki article is pretty detailed and worth a read) what spread the fuel material over large area.

As was already mentioned - steel can only be contaminated either if radioactive elements contaminated the production process (not very probable to happen), or if the steel experienced considerable exposere to neutron radioation (think ractor vessel and the components of the primary cooling cirle) and somewho such material would be later re-used - accidentally or intentionally (that did happen in the past in USSR actually - that is second hand information though)

So unless somone has manged to make a blade out of recycled reactor vessel, we should be ok?

I think the reactor vessel is stainless, isn't it? So carbon knifes should be ok? ;-)

"glow-in-the-dark damascus would look pretty neat"

Newfangled kind of antimicrobial blade

Everything is radioactive and has always been, bananas especially, no?

You probably get worse/more radiation from you cellphone and computer router, I'd bet.

RF radiation is as different (though the radiation from a WIFI router is literally the same as what does the work in a microwave oven, just thousand times weaker) from ionizing radiation as daylight is to X rays.

What Life said, those are VERY different animals in terms of the effect they have in materials and tissue.

spoiledbroth said:

You probably get worse/more radiation from you cellphone and computer router, I'd bet.

Click to expand...

A case for not keeping your sharpening station in your kitchen, and forcing patinas... Should there be traces of some emitter in the steel - the food won't care if it's cut with it (hey, food is irradiated commercially and that IS with ionizing radiation), but you want to keep your ingestion of swarf and slurry residue to an absolute minimum! A lot of radioactive material that you could carry safely in your pocket would be terrible news if swallowed.

BTW, said inside of a microwave oven - or in front of a radar - that kind of hazard is from sheer energy, not some special properties of the radiation. A kilowatt of power tends to be bad news for organic lifeforms if applied in an unpalatable manner...

EDIT: Given that the materials used for quality J knives seem to come from only a few foundries, does anyone (Mr. Broida maybe?) have contacts there and could ask them how they inspect scrap iron IF it is even used in a given material?

Pretty much everything that is shipped internationally these days is checked for radiation (mostly only gamma).

BTW, it makes a huge difference whether you irradiate something with photos or neutrons AND whan the energy (in particular in the case of neutrons) is.

valgard said:

What Life said, those are VERY different animals in terms of the effect they have in materials and tissue.

Click to expand...

This was kind of my point. I don't believe that rf radiation is dangerous, so innocuous is the threat from radiated steel being shipped from Japan to your kitchen, that I compared the two. I did not, actually know any specifics about it though. So thanks I learned something

You would definitely want to minimize your *ingestion* of radioactive steel (from swarf or rust). Ingested emitters are not innocuous - why do you think nature paints bananas in radioactive yellow as a warning (The bananas are a joke, emitter ingestion is not).

I can speak radionuclide detection, source, tomb, background, samples and noble gasses and other nuke speak. The thought of knives from Japan glowing in the dark does not keep me up at night.

The suggestion that most international shipping is inspected for trace nuke elements I think is optimistic at best. Even what is inspected is no more than a cursory gamma check. Not a question of technology but one of funding. The history of nuke detection is based on world wide events not on technology evolution.

And if you didn't taste the swarf, how would you know if you liked the stone? :cool2:

@daveb no pro in that field, but any alpha detector I've seen is a fragile enough piece of kit to not last a day in the hands of your average customs barney fife And won't see anything through dense packaging materials...