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Summer Of Radiation 2011

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On March 11, 2011, we as humans have been presented with an unprecedented catastrophe never seen before in human history. The worlds worst nuclear accident occured at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.

A 9.0 earthquake occured at 14:46 JST on Friday March 2011, with the epicenter near the island of Honshu. It resulted in maximum ground accelerations above their designed tolerances. The Fukushima I facility had not initially been designed for a tsunami of the size that struck the plant. A 50 foot tsunami arrived approximately 50 minutes later, flooding the basement of the Turbine Buildings and disabling the emergency diesel generators. The 6 units on-site were damaged to varying degrees.

On May 12, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) engineers confirmed that a meltdown occured, with molten fuel having fallen to the bottom of the reactor’s containment vessel, and most of the fuel had melted. Water was pumped into the reactor #1, in an effort to prevent the worse-case scenerio-of overheating fuel melting its way through the containment and discharging large amounts of radionuclides into the environment. In June, the Japanese goverment confirmed that Unit 1 reactor vessel containment was breached. Pumped cooling water continues to leak months after the disaster.

Radioactive material has been released from the Fukushima containment vessels as the result of deliberate venting to reduce gaseous pressure, deliberate discharge of coolant water into the sea, and accidental or uncontrolled events. On March 29, at times near Unit 2, radiation monitoring was hampered by a belief that some radiation levels may be higher than 1000 mSv/h but that “1000 millsieverts is the upper limit of their measuring devices.

The Fukushima accident has led to radiation, including iodine-131 and caesium-134/137, being observed around the world. The radiation is showing up in rain, milk, rice and who knows what else. Radioisotopes can be concentrated by precipitation or by bioaccumulation (where plants/animals, including ultimately humans, selectively take up and concentrate particular elements). Detectable levels of radioactive isotopes in milk were present in 6 of the cities tested by EPA in the USA. A University of California, Berkeley team observed Iodine-131 in rainwater. In June 2011, a shipment of green tea from Shizuoka province to Paris, France, was found to be contaminated with levels of radioactive cesium at more than twice the EU standard. In August, rice has been contaminated as well.

Japan towns, villages, and cities around the Daiichi nuclear plant are being evaluated. TEPCO estimates 520-tons of radioactive water is in the sea from efforts to cool the units, and groundwater radiation levels at the nuke plant are rising. Radioactive water continues to leak into sea from cracks in concrete.

Another issue is the radioactive spent fuel rods, which could number into the tens of thousands, were blown into the atmosphere and scattered up to or even more than two miles away. There may have been up to 20-30 years of stored fuel rods. This is why I believe the evacuation area will be expanded even more, and the contamination will get worse. The rods are just lying around on the ground instead of in the pools of water that helped contain them. How to dodge this debris that is scattered all around will prove difficult.

We’d be lucky if we only had to worry about the spent fuel rods from a single holding pool. We’re not that lucky. The Fukushima Daiichi has seven pools for spent fuel rods. Six of these are (or were) located at the top of six reactor buildings. One “common pool” is at ground level in a separate building. Each “reactor top” pool holds 3450 fuel rod assemblies. The common pool holds 6291 fuel rod assemblies. [The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods.

The fuel rods must be kept submerged in water. Why? Outside of the water bath, the radioactivity in the used rods can cause then to become so hot they begin to catch fire. These fires can burn so hot the radioactive rod contents are carried into the atmosphere as vaporized material or as very small particles.

Workers at the plant say the ground under the facility is cracking and radioactive steam is escaping through the cracks. Now a grave concern is with the contamination of the aquifers that millions of people rely on is becoming a reality.

With only 5 months into this sad tale, nobody knows what the future may bring. If this is not under control in the foreseeable future, this can morph into a dread on the world’s people and inhabitants that will manifest into unimaginable horrors.

Their is anxiety in Tokyo over radiation in tap water. The government’s nuclear accident taskforce tested 1,149 children aged up to 15 about two weeks after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered meltdowns, blasts and fires at the Fukushima plant. Forty-five per cent of children tested in the region around Japan’s stricken nuclear plant were found to have traces of radioactive elements in their thyroid glands. Emmissions from the Japan plant surpass Chernobyl levels.

What is unimaginable is the lack of media coverage in the mainstream media. It understand they don’t want to spread panic, but if it becomes real bad; panic will be the least of our problems. Radiation sickness, contamination of the worlds water and food supply will become the new reality. Everyday life in Japan has changed FOREVER, everyday life in the world will change also.

The sky IS crying, but it is not tears; it is black rain. Black rain is a term used by survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to describe the nuclear fallout from the bombs, which initially occured in the form of precipitation.

The earth is a contained environment, so what happens anywhere around the globe will effect everything and everyone. Everyone SHOULD be concerned about this, but no; seems like everyday life goes on in America; baseball, football, movies, fastfood, popcorn and by the way, pass me an ice-cold beer. Well enjoy it now, I hope that I am wrong, but life is going to change for all of us, if not sooner; it will be latter. Then when we get the news that we don’t want to hear, it will be too late.

I thought finding food without high-fructose corn syrup was hard. Where are we going to find clean water, clean meat, clean rice, CLEAN GENES? Contaminated environments induce mutations that induce cancers and disease. I can see a future spike in cancers not only in Japan and the Asian countrys, but also around the world.

We will see the first SERIOUS effects just in time for the new year, nine months after the initial release. Their will be no need to wait ten years, given that the reactors will continue to spew out radioactive material for 50 to 100 years. The situation will most certainly be alot worse 10 years from now. Japan may be inhabitable by then; whose to say how the Northern Hemisphere will fare. Like a sponge, the crust of the earth will absorb these elemental poisons.

What if you were told that the radioactive isotopes have found its way into your food, water, and milk. If it is true that means it is also in your meat, cheese, yogurt and more. It just goes to show have easy it is for this poison to easily migrate, if it is on the grass that the cows eat, it gets into the meat, then out into the milk, which is processed into alot of other products that we consume. It goes to show how easy it would be to end up in ALOT of the products that we eventually digest, which ends up becoming apart of you and me.

Traces of radiation from Japan’s damaged nuclear power plant have been turning up in Cleveland’s rainwater. Professor Gerald Matisoff from the Case Western Reserve University, and his grad student, had been collecting rainwater from the roof of a campus building every two weeks. They had been monitoring particles found in rain to better understand what has been falling into Lake Erie. Their research is part of an EPA funded study. Their latest sample taken from the roof of Case Western’s A.W. Smith Building on Friday (March), revealed trace amounts of Iodine 131, a radioactive isotope that started leaking from a Japanese nuclear power plant following an earthquake that triggered a tsunami. “The evidence, so far, is that it poses little threat at the moment,” Matisoff said

Contamination of these poisons will effect our dna which replicate our genes, which are responsible for the simple, but complicated systems that are responsible for life itself. Contamination of that system leads to disease, which cancer is only one mutative expression. Would you be concerned? I want to find out for myself. I want to purchase a radiation detector to measure the rainwater and foods that I come across in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, to determine how contaminated it is here in the 440 area code.

Dr. John Apsley warned that “there is really no safe level of radiation” and lamented that, since it has a half-life of 25,000 years, it is “constantly emitting destructive effects upon our cells” once inside the body. Apsley praised the benefits of kelp as a means of warding off the damage of radiation and shared the tale of two different Japanese hospitals which were about on mile away from the atomic blasts of World War II. One hospital used all natural seaweed and vegetables and the other used commercial foods. In the former institution, “virtually 100 percent” of the people lived, while, in the latter hospital, all of the people died.

Why a disaster of global reach with such long term environmental and health impacts that has the potential to devastate not just one country but the planet, is allowed to be handled by a company. This is outside the power or skills of the Japan government and definitely way beyond TEPCOs skills to fix. This is a global issue requiring a global response, the world should be helping together.

Just think. If we even have the capacity to still have NORMAL, non-mutative cancer ridden children, your childrens, childrens, childrens, childrens, childrens, childrens, childrens, childrens, childrens, childrens, children will still be talking about this. Maybe this will help us understand if nuclear energy is worth it.

I never was for nuclear power, this galvanizes my stand.

HOW TO PROTECT ONESELF: Everywhere around the internet I see Potassium Iodide as the fix for thyroid gland protection from exposure to radioactive iodine. What is Potassium Iodide? This site Natural Health Home Remedies seems to have some of the best tips about benefits AND THE DANGERS of taking Potassium Iodine.

Bee pollen has a natural form of iodine in it, SOOOOOO…AS LONG AS YOU ARE NOT ALLERGIC TO BEE POLLEN.

In 1992, Steven Schecter N.D., senior professor at the Alternative Medicines Research Institute and director of the Natural Healing Institute, published a compelling book entitled Fighting Radiation and Chemical Pollutants With Foods, Herbs and Vitamins: Documented Natural Remedies That Boost Your Immunity and Detoxify. There, Dr. Schecter states that bee pollen could be used to significantly reduce the ususal side effects of radium and cobalt-60. He also reports that bee propolis had been documented to be effective in clinical stages of radioepithelitis, the inflammation of epithelial tissues due to radiation.

There are forms of iodine that come from seaweed, kelp, and other seafoods; but with radiation contamination of the seas around Japan from where some of the best sources used to come from, I would be cautious now where exactly the source location it is coming from.

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