Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Think my librag will publish it?

Dear Editor:

Within hours of the major disasters in Haiti, Chile and Japan, the Red Cross was all over us reminding us of our charitable duties to those unfortunates. How strange is it that a week has gone by since Tropical Storm Irene's landfall and we've heard not a peep from them. Too much expectation that Uncle Sugar will set it all to rights, maybe?

Place your bets, please.

Shelter in place

A few readers haw-hawed when I suggested, back when the wrecked Fukushima nuke plants in Japan were releasing rads to the atmosphere, that we ought to be able to shelter in place.

Well, in one part of Portland right now, residents are sheltering in place due to a haz-mat spill and a temperature inversion failing to disperse dangerous fumes. Good news for them, they won't have to shelter long, there is a frontal passage in progress, and there will be strong sou' westerlies after the front passes to disperse the fumes (and bring them MY way).

It pays to be ready.

The radiation risk to the USA is rising...read the truth here - UPDATED, bumped

UPDATE: 031811 1014 PDT: News flash from Fukushima: They're going to use the "bury it" technique, and drop sand and concrete on (which reactor pile they didn't say) the worst one. That's how the threat was finally ended at Chernobyl, if you recall. This also says something about the actual state of affairs there. Along with the announcement, some engineers said that the first sand dropped would probably turn to glass. Do you know what the melting point of glass is? For silicon oxide glass, it's 2300 celsius

Now please stop telling me that there's no danger. Thank you.

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UPDATE: 031811 0954 PDT: A long-time reader takes me to task in comments below for overstating the radiation risk. I know, PROFESSIONALLY I know, that radiation risk cannot be overstated. Odds? Yes, if you want to give odds that that we will reach a dangerous level of radiation here, those odds are currently long, but so are the odds against a President ripping up the Constitution and enslaving us all, but we've been, quite properly, preparing to fight THOSE possible events for several years now. The bottom line is that when you are facing a risk of unacceptable consequences, you prepare in advance. That's all I've said, and that's all I ever WILL say, until the monitors start to sound their alarms. When and if they do, I will be ready to properly react, and I want my readers to be able to react properly as well,  and that's why I write.

The Japanese Government is lying to the world, mostly by omission, but possibly directly as well. Read my comment below and you will see why I know this. Don't be schmoozed, be prepared.

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It seems that functionaries in every flavor of government are working overtime trying to tell us we have no risk from radiation sickness, even as the situation gets worse in Japan by the hour.

Yesterday in Oregon, a bevy of government hacks got on TeeVee to tell us, no worries, mates. Of course, this was while they were rushing additional testing and monitoring equipment here to provide a greater depth of monitoring for radioactivity from the West.

The US Surgeon General, when asked, said that it might be a good idea to have Potassium Iodide on hand, just in case (smart thing for a doc to say, actually), but then HER bosses forced her to recant, and say there was no need for it.

On the other side of the pond, the Japanese Government is telling their citizens (and the Downwind places, like the USA) everything they want to hear EXCEPT the truth.

The truth is, they have NOT secured the damaged reactors, and in all likelihood, have failed in every respect in their efforts to do so. OUR observers there caught them in a huge lie of omission night before last when they failed to point out, in their most recent assessment, that a spent-fuel pool has run out of water, and the "spent" fuel rods in it were overheating. Since then, the Japanese have tried three different ways to get water in there, by dropping it from helos (they're using the wrong helos, Chinooks, which have to wide a downdraft area from their twin rotors, and too short a bucket cable. They're flying too high, and almost all of their dropped water is dispersing before it gets to it's target. They need some of our Western fire-fighting helo pilots over there.

Then they tried police riot vehicles with water cannons. These cannons have a range of only 50 yards at most, and are not designed to deliver large amounts of water, they are designed to deliver only the water necessary to take a rioter off their feet and deny them a small area they want to occupy.

Next they brought in some airport fire-fighting equipment, which has more deluge capability, but less range even than the riot trucks.

Now they seem to be banking EVERYTHING on the slim hope that their water-level maintenance equipment at the stricken plants is in good shape, and all they need to do is get power to those pumps and push the button, and POOF, the problem will be over.

That's HIGHLY unlikely. With the level of damage visible, how in the HELL is fixed piping supposed to have survived that level of earthquake?

They've had almost a week now to try to save the nuclear material or neutralize it. Yes, neutralize it. You do that one of two ways, one not even thinkable (vaporize it with a thermonuclear bomb/s) and one barely practicable, but it HAS been done: bury it with sand and concrete (Chernobyl). The one thing the Japanese CANNOT do is nothing that works. The nuclear materials will melt down, coalesce into a single mass, and cause untold damage there AND downwind by doing nothing that works.

So, readers, the risk for us here on the West Coast IS rising. The risk for us IS still here.

Ignore the Government, and make your preparations to shelter in place. The best we can do is prepare, and hope we don't have to take shelter.

There are stout hearts in Japan, no doubt about it. One hopes that they find some keen minds to direct them, and soon.

More RadNet monitors deployed

Good thing.

Radiation Safety Resource List

What do you need to get you and your family by this increased radiation hazard we Left Coasters face?

In a word, you need INFORMATION. When Rojo, the outlaw chieftain in "For a Few Dollars More" said, "In these parts, a man's life may depend on a mere scrap of information", the buzzard was speaking for the ages, not just the movie. We need those scraps of information. Here are a few:

• A quick primer on Radiation Safety which I wrote. Over the years, I've boned up on this information both professionally and as a matter of continuing casual interest.
• The current news on the radiation situation in Japan. There are a few good links in this article, also.
• I'm still looking for the most definitive and current source of information, but Yahoo! News seems to fill my needs at the moment.
• NHK World News. This is the Japanese news conglomerate, with a government slant.
• Here's a frequency chart for listening to NHK on shortwave radio. You don't HAVE a shortwave radio? Go to C.Crane & Co and order one. I recommend this one, if you can afford it, and this one if you can't.
• You're going to need to monitor the upper-air wind flow, so here in the PacNorWest, the area (along with the West Coast of Canada and SE AK, the likely areas to see radiation), you go to NOAA and set up a sequence of their surface-weather charts. This one click ought to do it. the way to use these is focus on one area, don't try to watch the whole map as it changes before your eyes. Learn to watch the "wind feathers" for direction. Remember, they point to the place the wind's blowing TO at the quill of the feather. When you see something you want to get back to, punch the "stop" button and then the back-arrow to get beck to that chart to study it in detail. Here's the aviation winds-aloft chart, always select "FL 300" since that is the most likely location of the Jet Stream, which will bring in any radiation we get.
• General information: here's how one of our nuke power providers plans for emergency response. Here's how Oregon manages it's Radiation Safety emergency Planning. In a word, sketchy.
• Finally, here's how our government tracks radiation. BTW, it took me quite a while to find this site, which tells me the dot.gov doesn't WANT IT FOUND.

 

Radiation Safety - Milk Products, Sheltering in Place - UPDATED!

UPDATE: 031611 0737 PDT: The "Fukushima 50", as NBC calls them, are back at work, having survived a severe spike in radiation, which has lessened. The situation is unchanged for us on the US West Coast: there is a slightly higher potential for some radiation to get here, but it's nowhere near time to push any buttons yet or start taping up your visqueen. What you need to do now is make preparations in case you have to do those things. Those preparations shouldn't be extensive, expensive or even time-consuming. The duct-tape and visqueen might set you back $30-50, and depending on your needs for dairy supplies, providing alternates to those which you may store might cost you a significant fraction of your food budget additionally. An hour or so to survey your house and decide where you are going to shelter-in within it, or maybe a call or two to your local Emergency Management people to ask them where the local public shelters will be set up will not take you much time. Spend that time now, then you can sleep better as the networks pour out the bad news to us with firehoses.

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OK, I didn't think I was going to have to mention this, but the latest news has the severity level of the failed reactors event at Fukushima Power Park now at a level 6 out of 7, and still rising. Chernobyl was a level 7 event. Previous information may be out of date already.

• The government has withdrawn all it's crews from the power park, saying that the radiation levels had increased too much to keep them there. (UPDATE: they're back at work!)
• The Seventh Fleet withdrew the carrier Ronald Reagan quite a bit farther away.
• Earlier, the government quietly began contacting former and retired nuke plant workers to ask them to come and serve for the fight. In our nuke system, those would be known as "dead men", for the obvious reasons.

It's time to talk about some preparation. In Japan, significant areas are "sheltering in place" already, that is, remaining indoors and reducing their their exposure to the outside air.

Here on the US West Coast, we need to be prepared to do that. Here are the steps you need to take NOW

• Go to your favorite building supply house when it opens tomorrow and buy 5-10 large rolls of duct tape, and several rolls of visqueen, sufficient to cover entire walls within your house.
• Learn how to make your HVAC (Heating Ventilating Air Conditioning) system operate on inside air only. If you can't make it do that, learn how to secure it and prepare to do without it. You can use a small electric space heater to heat your shelter room.
• Figure out which room/rooms you are going to use as shelter. Materials to shelter in place need to be moved into that room.
• The first food supply to be at risk (we learned this from Chernobyl) is dairy products. Mammalian females (cows and humans) exposed to radiation will store it in their milk, so you have to have substitutes if you use dairy. You have to have enough substitutes to last for maybe 3 months. Buy that now, it might be in short supply very soon.

Above all, don't drop out and kiss this off. If you are not a news junkie now, it's time to become one. Hopefully, we won't have to start sheltering, but if you wait until it's time to do so to prepare for it, you'll be exposed while you are trying to prepare.

Stay tuned, I will try to keep you up on events and preparations right here. If it turns out that we don't have sufficient radiation to shelter from, you can donate the accumulated food to your food bank, and you'll eventually use up the duct tape.

Bookmark this blog, Professor Mass will keep us all posted on wind currents.

...and there are Heroes

...this is DAMN hard to write, I've got the eyeball windshield wipers on High, and I still hardly see the monitor...especially after watching Brian Williams' description of it on the NBC Nightly News. Yes, the networks CAN, in fact, bring the news home with a difference.

The situation at Fukushima Power Park near Sendai, Japan gets worse, but 50 men are standing in the breach, risking their lives, to stem the onrushing disaster.

THESE.MEN.ARE.HEROES.

Make no mistake about it, the situation in Fukushima #4, the reactor that was off-line, is now the major threat. There is no containment vessel where the Plutonium and Uranium fuel rods are stored there, but the collapse of the electric grid in that area killed the ability of the station controllers to maintain a proper-depth water-pool over the enriched fuel rods stored there, the rods overheated, and a fire started. This is a slower version of what happened at Chernobyl.

Without thought to their own safety, these men, THE. MOST. STALWART. LADS. ON. THE. FRIKKEN. GLOBE,

fought the fire, eventually got the upper hand, and re-started pumps to flood the fuel-storage pool.

Every one of them may be dead by the time you read this, and if they live, they've absorbed a LOT of radiation. None of them gave a second thought to their own survival, they only thought of their countrymen, as the wind had changed and blew from the ocean towards the interior, and every man Jack of them knew that if they didn't get a handle on the fire, Tokyo and it's 30 million people was downwind. They all stayed on the job, as a team, they were effective, and the fire is now reported as controlled.

I always have this reaction when informed of true heroism, so if you'll excuse me, I'll dry my eyes and raise a toast of decent Sake to those lads.

KAMPAI! You have my deepest respect /bows/.

Radioactive Fallout 101, lesson One

"Perfesser" Rivrdog here. Credentials first: 1945-present: Son of the FIRST Nuclear Safety Officer in the US Navy. 1969-1984: USAF leg of the Strategic Nuclear Triad, combat aircrew, (nuclear) B52 navigator/Bombardier, AFSC 1525D. Totally trained (by rote memory, and tested yearly) on all forms of radiation safety, radiation avoidance, survival in a radioactive environment, and of course, GENERATING radiation by means of nuclear bombardment. 1988-1995, Oregon Air National Guard, trainer in Nuclear/Bio/ChemWar Shelter Management and Decontamination. Certified on USAF decon apparatus. 1993-2001, Multnomah County Oregon Marine Patrol, certified in nuke accident rapid response dispatch/management & Critical Incident managment training/drilling. 2001-present, continuing self-education.

Now, let's talk about what a Major Nuclear Incident is and isn't.

The guideline is how out-of-control the reactor core is. In Chernobyl, there was a total "meltdown" of the core, where all the control rod insertion failed, and the fuel-core coalesced into one mass, generating a hyper-critical fission reaction, totally uncontrolled. That reaction produced amazing amounts of heat, and created strong thermal explosions which lofted high levels of radioactive materials high into the atmosphere. That was VERY Major, that accident.

In Three-Mile Island, there was a momentary loss of cooling water due to mishandling of the manual cooling water injection system. The reactor core overheated for a time, but did NOT melt-down, and there was a small venting of minor amounts of radioactive steam to the LOWER atmosphere. Strangely enough, I was downwind of that by less than 70 miles, at Dover AFB, MD, in Crew Rest from a C-141 mission I was navigating back from Europe to McChord AFB, WA. The Base system detected the radiation, set off the sirens, and the duty officer had them shut down, thinking it was a false alarm. I slept through it. No Decon was done, no residual radiation remained, but that one VERY MINOR event killed any idea of new nuclear power installations in this country for the next 30 years.

The data and circumstances are still coming in from Japan, and three reactor cores are said to be at risk, two of them in the 3-reactor Fukushima Power Park, but the control rods in all cases are at least mostly inserted, and the remaining uncontrolled reaction in Fukushima #2 isn't increasing, it is being managed with flooding of seawater into the reactor vessel. The explosion that DID occur blew the frangible walls off of one containment building (built that way purposely), but the actual containment vessel is totally intact, and the thermal plume did not make it 2,000 meters into the air. According to Professor Mass of the University of Washinton College of Atmospheric Sciences, a thermal plume at Fukushima would have to get to 9,000 meters (29,550 feet) to get into a jet stream that would bring it to the USA (and if it did, Oregon would get it first). Fukushima HAS had some radioactive leakage, both into the lower atmosphere and the ground water, and THAT will have to be dealt with, but that's a local issue (unless irradiated fish swim all the way here and get into our food chain; Japan will end fishing in those waters for a long time).

Folks, at the current time of writing, at 1127 Pacific Daylight Time, there is NO danger to the USA, and actually, very little to Japan.

Over-reaction.

Yesterday afternoon, CNN ran a story, over and over, entitled "MELTDOWN"...it was obviously a scare piece, and discussed few of the redundant over-rides built into the Fukushima reactors. I received a report shortly thereafter that there was a local rush on to buy and take Potassium Iodide (KI) compound to forestall poisoning by radioactive isotopes of Iodine.

Here's the story on Potassium Iodide.

It works by overloading the human thyroid gland with Iodine, which causes that gland to NOT store any more Iodine until the overload is cleared. The theory goes that if you load up on harmless Potassium Iodide, your thyroid can't store ANY of the harmful radioactive isotopes of Iodine that occur after a runaway nuke reaction, either by NuDet or by a meltdown of a reactor core.

Here's the straight skinny.

Radioactive Iodine-131 is the ONLY isotope that you will be protected from by taking Potassium Iodide, and it is just ONE of several isotopes that can harm you after a nuclear detonation or meltdown of a reactor core. There are Cesium 137 isotopes, Strontium 90 isotopes, and maybe a few others. I-131 has a half-life (half of it decays to other harmless isotopes) of 8 days, so by the time you take enough KI to get your thyroid saturated, and by the time that I-131 gets here from Japan (if it does, it can't now, it hasn't gotten up to Jet Stream level), there won't be a danger from I-131.

There IS a danger though, and it is a SEVERE danger to some people. Some people have Thyroid Disease, and if they take even a little amount of Iodine, they may very well die. In some folks, that disease is undiagnosed well into adulthood. Ask Chris Byrne about undiagnosed Thryoid Disease.

This "meltdown" scare WILL kill some people, but it's not radiation they will die from.

Now, don't blather on in comments about cancer rates following this problem in Japan. They KNOW about that over there, remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What I'm talking about is the IMMEDIATE problem, and to MY mind, that is the over-reaction of the press.