Tokyo radiation levels 23 times normal: officials | Hacker News Reader

Tokyo radiation levels 23 times normal: officials

marketwatch.com

24 pointsAndyIngram23 comments

These numbers are still very very small.

I'm sitting in Tokyo right now working away on my codebase. No need to get worked up over nothing and so far it is nothing. A lot of my friends (mostly foreigners in Tokyo) are getting on trains out to Kyoto or Osaka. I think that's fine; maybe it's better to be safe than sorry. Maybe it's the cynical New Yorker in me but I feel like I've seen too many of these scares before. Sometimes you just have to turn off the TV/Twitter/whatever and get back to work.

Who knows, maybe in a few hours or days I'll be heading out too. I think it's unlikely. Right now, I don't think there's a need .

Isn't Tokyo 150 km from the leaking reactors? The radiation levels for those living closer must be more concerning, if it is 23x background that far away.

The wind is also not blowing on Tokyo. Could be much worse otherwise.

Unfortunately, the wind is going to turn towards Tokyo later today.

There is an evacuation zone of 20 km around the plant, and people between 20 and 30 km advised to not go out. The radiations around the plant are now definitely dangerous, but those are far far above the ones seen in Tokyo.

Right now, from what I can read from Japanese news, and assuming the numbers given by the authority are accurate, there is no danger in Tokyo - 20 x normal is still below what's considered dangerous. What worrying about those numbers are not the number themselves, but what it means if the situation in the plants worsen - and I think people don't really know.

The Japanese gvt announced a couple of hours ago that every region in Japan will regularly update measure of radioactivity, which suggest that they don't try to hide too much, although I would not read too much into it either.

It's not like swine flu where something out of people's control might happen, purely based on speculation. At the moment you're fine, but that's because there are people deliberately keeping things at OK levels. If they stopped, things would stop being OK.

Not to say you should necessarily worry more yet, but just know that its not something that will sort itself out, it will require a solution.

Same here. I'm far more concerned about figuring out how to get IRB to play ball than I am about growing extra limbs or discovering that I'm now a nightlight.

Actually at that level chronic radiation a positive. Long term research on a large group of people in Taiwan living in somewhat radioactive buildings showed significantly lower cancer rates than the populace a whole.

http://toshuo.com/2009/chronic-low-level-radiation-good-for-...

Although this research is interesting, it isn't widely accepted yet. All major authorities still contend that there's not enough evidence to prove that low doses of radiation aren't harmful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#Contr...

To the best of my knowledge no major authority believes the LNT, the threshold model or the radiation hormesis model to be proven.

That said the French Academy of Sciences & National Academy of Medicine did cite the exact same study of Taiwanese people as well as a large number of laboratory studies in its 2005 report that criticized the LNT model.

In any case I wouldn't be worried in the least if I were in Tokyo right now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

why is this upmodded? it seems to me that here at HN many people have a very cargo cult knowledge of physics and radioactivity in special. hey guys, here is the message: radioactivity damages cells and finally kill you. stop the wishful thinking! (btw i have a PhD in plasma physics)

People here in Japan like to go to radium hot springs. Yes, that radium that your parents had your basement tested for. Apparently they think it's good for you to get a little radiation:

http://metropolis.co.jp/features/feature/searching-for-a-cur...

I wouldn't go to it... I think It's crazy. There's probably a good opportunity for research.

I thought that effect was really interesting until I read that the median age of the building's inhabitants was like 1/3 that of the control group, and that simply by adjusting for age the average cancer rates went up significantly.

Even if it is 23 times normal it appears to be lower then living next to Ontario's nuclear plants with 1.1 microsieverts at Darlington, 2.8 microsieverts at Pickering. http://www.opg.com/safety/nsafe/nuclear/ not an expert and the spelling of the unit seems wrong in the story.

The article screwed up the units: it is likely "0.809 microSieverts per hour". Your link's figures are over one year.

That's still way below the "no health issues" threshold of 0.01 Sv/hr (so we're 10 000 times below the threshold)

(source : http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/docs/energy-good-bad.pdf)

The closest to a "no health issues" figure in your article is 0.02 MILLI-Sieverts per hour as the US regulation for maximum allowable exposure to the public in the vicinity of a power plant. So it's actually only about 250 times below that limit. i.e. nothing to worry about right now, but that can change quickly.

quote from table in the article

>Table 2: Symptoms associated with acute radiation exposure

>(dose for one day)

> Dose : 0-0.25Sv. Symptom : none . Outcome : - .

I was not referrign to any regulation, which is understandably way below the danger zone, but about the actual risks. hence the 10000 number.

These figures refer to "acute exposure", and may be different from prolonged exposure. Not sure about that, or about how prolonged the japanese exposure turns out to be.

Oh damn... These figures refer to acute radioation poisoning, i.e. what happens when radiation is so intense that it directly kills so many of your cells that your body can't cope.

Even if at 0.25 Sv none of that happens, you still have a very actual, massively increased risk of cancer and genetic defects in future children. To declare "no health issues", you most definitely want to stay several orders of magnitude below that (there is always and increased risk of cancer and birth defects, but at some point it gets lost in the noise).

I really don't want to sound condescending, but you should not issue statements here if you don't know such fundamental aspects.

7000 microsieverts/year is what we are talking about.

Still, that's 175 plane rides from ontario to vancouver.

At this rate, an average person would still be under 1/7th the ALI for a worker in a field of radiation, assuming rate was held for a year (limit is 50 mSv, or 50000 uSv

The irony is that if you were to fly out of Tokyo today, you'll be receiving a lot more radiation than what's present there because the radiation is much stronger in the stratosphere.

AndyIngram , thanks for the info, and i thought that my friends there in Japan are in danger of radiation. when i saw this news, i thought, WTH, 23 times. it turns out im just overreacting. let's just hope and pray(if you're religious) that Japan could recover quickly. crises like this makes a nation stronger.

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