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IAEA team urges gov't to focus on reducing radiation danger to public

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It's ok, nobody is expecting shocking truth from IAEA.

3 ( +4 / -1 )

1 week and all will be well...........

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Spill the beans please!

2 ( +2 / -0 )

IAEA Report: "No immediate risk to human health."

-1 ( +3 / -4 )

IAEA is an organization promoting nuclear power, let s keep that in mind.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

The IAEA is there to support and defend BIG NUKE!

Exactly, it's heartbreaking how IAEA wont even think to let everyone know the details of there findings in reference to the incident at Daiichi.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Believing everything allows for bliss!

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The task of restoring towns and villages even in lightly contaminated zones is complicated, with high costs and logistical issues of where to store soil contaminated with radioactive cesium after it is removed.

Forgot to mention the hotspos in other prefectures need to be decontaminated Chiba, Yokohama, Funabashi City, in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, says relatively high levels of radiation have been detected at a local park. Yokohama City has stopped using dried shiitake mushrooms in school lunches after detecting 350 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium in its stocks. 830 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium, exceeding the government's limit of 500 becquerels, was detected in shiitake mushrooms grown outdoors on logs in a city in Ibaraki Prefecture.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/14_19.html

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/14_14.html

4 ( +4 / -0 )

Thank you Utrack for posting a sensible post here. To others - Is anybody FORCING you to stay here?

0 ( +3 / -3 )

In essence the cleanup will bleed the Japanese economy at the same time the radiation is killing its people.... tragic

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Wouldn't it be cheaper just to move people out of the heavily contaminated areas and let nature take its course, instead of removing all this dirt to all over Japan? This solution of "decontamination" is a complete pipe dream.

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I calculate that if 10 cms of topsoil was removed from 13,000 km at dry weight would be something like 1,625 million tons. 1,650,000,000. That would fill thousands of Tokyo Domes?

Zichi, thanks for the info. My question to you is how often the soil has to be removed? Once a year?

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If japan had another serious earthqukae in Kanto area. Honshu will be doomed. Very sad !!!!

The lies are there so the public will not panic.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Quiet a lot of produce and products are/were manufactured there, all those would also need to be relocated and new workers hired as the old ones most likely would be spread out by than across the whole country.

Another thing is look at the map not much roads to move produce north/south on the main-Island, so making the whole area off-limit means that the all goods going north/south would be need to re-routed. Agreed, advisable but not really feasible as that move would bankrupt a LOT of businesses and people.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Wouldn't it be cheaper just to move people out of the heavily contaminated areas and let nature take its course, instead of removing all this dirt to all over Japan? This solution of "decontamination" is a complete pipe dream.

Cheaper? Maybe. Better? Not a chance. Japan is only so large, and the population will continue to expand for the years to come. Just abandoning an area that huge with concentrated contamination will leave that area unlivible for hundreds if not thousands of years. They do not have the luxury of throwing away 8000 sq km of space. Shaking the current economic state is a small price to pay for the health of humans for generations to come."

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Japan is only so large, and the population will continue to expand for the years to come.

You must have just teleported in from the 1960s. Japan has one of the lowest birtrates in the world and the population is shrinking and will continue to shrink. This country is actually littered with empty houses and there are many ghost towns in the smaller valleys. There is still plenty of land in the Tohoku region and Hokkaido. Its just that there is not much work in those places and commuting would be pushing insanity.

Most of these contaminated places should be abandoned. Because if they aren't, then contamination will be spread by human movements. If the government has to launch a program to start new communities in safe areas, even to teach people how to farm for their own food and have them abandon their desk job, so be it. The government should have started a program to fill those empty houses all over Japan years ago anyhow and could do that too. Its certainly better than poisoning the rest of the country for this crazy dream of nuclear souji. They must have been brainwashed from all that cleaning they did in school to think this will work. And its the kids who will suffer from their folly. Banzai, yamato damashi, and seiso jikan are just not going to work. Worse, it threatens me and my family who are out of the contaminated zone. It makes me contemplate going on a hunting expedition to cull idiots.

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zichi Oct. 14, 2011 - 08:57PM JST

I calculate that if 10 cms of topsoil was removed from 13,000 km at dry weight would be something like 1,625 million tons. 1,650,000,000. That would fill thousands of Tokyo Domes?

I guess you mean 13,000 km squared. First, the depth being bandied about for removal is 5 cms. Second, weight is not a good estimator of how much a given volume will be filled - volume is.

13,000 km squared is 13,000,000,000 metres squared. Multiply that by 0.05 metres (5 cm) and you get 650,000,000 metres cubed. Tokyo Dome has a volume of 1,240,000 metres cubed, so you're talking around 524 Tokyo Domes worth of volume - neglecting compaction of the soil, and whether it's necessary to remove that much.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Wouldn't it be cheaper just to move people out of the heavily contaminated areas and let nature take its course, instead of removing all this dirt to all over Japan? This solution of "decontamination" is a complete pipe dream.

Cheaper? Maybe. Better? Not a chance. Japan is only so large, and the population will continue to expand for the years to come. Just abandoning an area that huge with concentrated contamination will leave that area unlivible for hundreds if not thousands of years. They do not have the luxury of throwing away 8000 sq km of space. Shaking the current economic state is a small price to pay for the health of humans for generations to come."

The population of Japan is declining not expanding. I, too, wonder why they don't just move people out of there. Since part of decontamination means moving topsoil, where is that soil going to go. Better word for it is spreading the contamination around.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

zichi Oct. 15, 2011 - 12:23PM JST

Star-viking,

Thank you for the correction. When it comes to top soil removal it won't be a precise science. They won't be measuring it.

No problem zichi. As for the top soil removal - yup, it won't be exact - but I guess for every 6 cm they remove somewhere they'll be getting 4 cm elsewhere.

Also as you also probably realise, it will be impossible to remove all the topsoil from 13,000 sq km, there are >buildings, roads, mountains, rivers.

True, but I think it's important to focus on the areas which are contaminated to the extent that the lives of the residents will be impacted. Also, as was mentioned in an earlier story, a lot of the radioisotopes have been washed off the land, buildings, roads etc and concentrated in drains. We might not have to do too much work in areas where this has happened.

I'm sure we can at least agree that it's a very large area and a mega task to be under taken?

Your proposal would be huge, but by the time it'd be half-way through I'd think the remaining work could be cancelled - what with soil radiation declining with time.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

The government needs to move people out of the most dangerous areas. It happened in 1945. Millions fled Tokyo and other cities. It can happen again in a much more guided fashion today. Farmers can take over empty fields that are ubiquitous.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

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