jerobeam comments

Good job, DoCoMo - do NEVER EVER surrender to the evil crApple !! I'm a DoCoMo shareholder and I fully spport this decision. Apple only wants to suck profits and imprison users in its "system". What is the cost to consumers and to the carriers who became hostages of this company??

Apple (stupid overhyped products), Rosneft (thief of Yukos assets) and all solar energy companies

most remarks here are amusing to say the least (...) Seibu is in retail

Your remark is most amusing as well. Seibu Holdings is NOT in retail. Its business is railways and hotels. The Seibu Department stores are owned by Seven & I (Ito-Yokado).

only 4 hours? I was at two relatively "benign" AGMs this week (not in Japan) and they lasted between 7 and 9 hours.

it's about time to let all the safe reactors get to work again ! With the declining yen, the coal & LNG bill is killing Japan.

another one that will bite the dust. Boone Pickens, Steel Partners, TCI ... now Loeb. They never learn.

I never really understood why Seibu had to be delisted and "bailed out" when the only problem seemingly was that Yoshiaki Tsutsumi controlled nearly the whole company (88%). Ok, so he broke the minimum-freefloat rules, and he was conviced, put in jail, all that. But what does this have to do with the finances of the company? Why did it suddenly need a bailout? And what happened to all the shares owned by Tsutsumi/Kokudo?

what a stupid picture. You cannot check whether food satisfies the Cesium contamination criteria with such a device. You need at least a sodium iodide detector with a background shield, or better a high-purity germanium detector. But of course it's great for feeding sensationalist nonsense to the populace.

In your haste to disprove me, have you researched what that level is? We are talking about levels of a few mSv per year. Nothing you or me or even children should be worried about. It's a natural dose level in many places in the world. Some places in Austria, Norway etc have radiation levels that go into double-digit mSv/y. Nobody there thinks they ought to evacuate. This is pure alarmist hysteria.

no, they have to reject it because the claim is absolutely frivolous. By those activists' standards, the whole planet should be evacuated because background radiation levels are "unsafe". But there is no place to go, because in space, the radiation exposure is orders of magnitude higher.

...not

@TheQuestion

Ever been to the Hanford site? It's also in the middle of nowhere.

my thoughts exactly. AdWords-Otoko.

I already work on top of radioactive waste so living over it would not be any different. The dose rate in my office is at background level since it's all properly shielded. I would rather live near a disposal site for long-lived radionuclides than a regular dump site. A shielded source is no threat, and especially the long-lived waste is mostly harmless.

What difference does it make whether my body digests proteins and lipids from "regular" corn or an engineered corn which does not require pesticides and uses half the water to grow, all by providing much better crop yields? The planet definitely benefits.

There is a difference between cutting down rainforest and changing local rain patterns and believing that burnig coal and oil (carbon that was previously atmospheric anyway) will bring about armageddon.

To sum up once again, these 3 categories of people (those raging against nuclear, GMO, CO2 with foam on their mouths) are basically (just as the luddites) uninformed and manipulated idiots (should we pity them like Lord Byron or be disgusted since in this age all the knowledge is so easily accessible like in no age before us and there is little excuse for moronism?) that think that technologies invented to benefit mankind should be destroyed because ... well they don't really know why but the essence is they MUST be destroyed - and don't try to reason with them.

I wish we could be governed by reasonable men, and troops could be sent out like the English did against the luddites. Unfortunately their anti-science has become mainstream - with very real grave consequences for us all, and especially the poorest in this world.

Jerobeam: can we burry nuclear waste under your house? yes you can. With proper shielding I wouldn't mind at all. Monopoly on seeds and suing anyone being polluted with GMOs? Communication used to be free (bush drums), now you pay for your telephony. Superior technology costs money. Trading empires of the past also used to have monopolies on technologies that were violently protected (read about the glass/mirror makers of Murano, Venice, or the dutch spice monopoly, or how Henry Wickham stole the rubber tree seeds 1876. Only communists can think that after large sums invested a developed superior technology should be free for all to steal and use without compensation. Climate change is not happening or isn't man made? Which is it? are you one of those that doesn't know that the climate ALWAYS changes (because solar activity, which is nuclear btw, always changes), and that the atmosphere contains 0.04% of Carbon? I question the sanity of anyone that thinks that the carbon content of the atmosphere (especially the tiny fraction that can be attributed to human activity) has any macroscopic short-term influence.

judging by the train frequeny on the Yamanote and the fact that theyust keep going around and around it may ultimately be easier to transform the Yamanote into a giant moving walkway like in Asimov's 'caves of steel'

today's luddites are the anti-nuclear knobheads, GMO protesters and climate change sectarians.

That assumes you ate it continually (roughly so) for the 50 years, and I don't know about you, but I won't eat fish that's been out for more than a few hours, let alone years. If you and your adult family ate 1kg of the fish at one sitting, the long term (longer biological half-life ) dose is actually based on a maximum of 220kBq the first year, 13kBq the second, and 800Bq the third. Actual doses would be much smaller though, since Cs137 absorption depends on your potassium saturation.

No, this is the dose coefficient for a single intake and the 50-year committed dose resulting from this single intake. The committed dose depends on the biokinetics of the radionuclide (reflected in the dose coefficient) and the amount ingested (in the case of ingestion). With inhalation it gets a little more complicated. I don't think you'll have any saturation problems as 254000 Bq of Cs-137 represent only about 0.08 micrograms of material. Of course if you ingest huge amounts of Potassium and Salt (Sodium) there may be less uptake, but the biokinetics of cesium are well-studied and known. If you want to calculate it by yourself, use http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/assessment/dcal.html

the ingestion dose factor is 1.3E-08 Sv/Bq for Cs-137. That means eating one kilogram of this "stone fish" (is there even a market for consumption of this type of fish?) with 254000 Bq will result in a committed 50-year dose of 3.3 mSv. That's about one year's worth of natural radiation, 16% of the dose of an x-ray CT scan, or a bit more than 600 hours of fligh.

"was caught at a port inside the Fukushima plant" There is no doubt fish INSIDE THE FUKUSHIMA PLANT will be contaminated.

It makes me get mad at the media that blew the Fukushima accident way out of proportion, and was incapable of communicating the real implications (more interested in sensationalist news). It makes me mad because blowhard environmentalist deliberately spread lies about the effects of radiation that have zero scientific basis, and they get a huge audience because their nonsense sounds 'sexy' to the media. It makes me mad because the education system is obviously unable to teach people to use common sense and fact-checking, and unable to teach the most elementary principles of physics. The effects in real life on real people can be seen from news reports such as this one. People get hurt 1000 times more because of the media, radical environmentalists and lack of education than from the residual radionuclides from the Fukushima accident. But mental scars can't be detected with a radiation monitor, while the detector is able to detect one single radioactive atom among billions of stable ones - and cause panic even if there is absolutely no reason for that.

well said @Jim Greenidge... people have no clue about nuclear power and radiobiology and apparently it's cool to be anti-nuclear. Well, there is nothing cool about being a moron IMHO.

Good to see Abe is eager to get to work. Yen is already declining, stock market is beginning to rise, nuclear reactors will restart ... all the right things to bring Japan back on track! Go Abe, all the best for 2013!

Manons are still fine by me - the best praline you can find. All these new "designer chocolates" (marcolini etc) are just expensive crap.

later they will complain about increased cancer and CVD rates and blame it on the radiation...

@SS Abe - I believe people from the evacuation zone are being compensated. Why should people that fled from other parts of the country where there was no danger be compensated? If people chose to flee, even if they were told to stay where they are and that there is no threat, that was their personal decision. The operator should not be liable for the hysteria and panic of some people. Instead, I think many media outlets should be sued for compensation because of all the nonsense and drivel that they have propagated about the supposed dangers of the accident (or "disaster" & "catastrophe" in media lingo) and the hysteria they have caused - damaging the psyche of ill-informed citizens and ultimately damaging the economy and the well-being of Japan and many other countries (e.g. Germany).

"Repercusions of the stricken Fukushima reactors are global" ... NOT There is a small evacuation zone around the plant and some foodstuffs from the prefecture are banned from marketing. And that's it. The rest is pure media/activist hype.

"anti-nuclear movement takes a beating"

It is Christmas after all ! (finally some good news)

Whoever is against generating power from nuclear fission is an idiot. The efficiency of the process is orders of magnitude larger than everything else that is currently feasible on the planet (as long as fusion is not commercially available).

Haruko☆Update !

What strikes me is that we are not dealing with real scientists, as far as these paid-off people go, by courtesans. Their credentials have been turned into charms to trick us.

And how did you come to this conclusion? Are you a "real scientist" with the 'right' credentials? Have you been a professor at multiple universities and conducted top-level international research and published your findings in highly regarded journals? Niwa-Sensei did. Btw, the Nobel prize is also privately funded. It obviously goes without saying all Nobel laureates are paid-off courtesans and prostitutes.

Poor Fukushima. Suffer while the pampered "scientists" deny worries you have about radiation poisoning are "overblow."

Prof. Niwa actually moved to Fukushima to work there after the accident. Nobody in Fukushima is physically suffering from the added exposure, they are just suffering because of the irrational fear and perception of people like you who know nothing at all about the effects of ionizing radiation.

The passage you quoted is not a "gem", the LNT hypothesis is used as a practical tool for radiation protection, it is not to be assumed as scientific truth, and ICRP-103 clearly states that. Below 100 mSv it is extremely difficult if not impossible to prove that ionizing radiation has an effect. Look at the dose-effect diagram from the life-span study (LSS) conducted by the RERF (probably another highly corrupt organization by Yubaru's standards since it is funded by various cancer institutes and foundations). There are arguments for and against LNT, and this is a scientific debate. It has no effect at all on radiation protection policy.