2014/07/20

Fieldwork 7 or 1.15μSv/h in a Vegetable Field near Tokyo

Original Text from Zukunashi no Hiyamizu's Blog:http://inventsolitude.sblo.jp/article/100066627.html




On May 11th in the afternoon, I went for a walk for some exercise. This time I just took my Air Counter with me and left my heavy survey meter at home. 

At around 2.30 pm, my reading went up to 1.15μSv/h in the middle of a vegetable field. It is more or less the same as the 1.1μSv/h measured at the Okumamachi Fureai Park (only 4 km away from The Fukushima Daiichi plant) on the same day! Now this was a shock.

The following is the record on the dosimeter. I had started to measure the air dose rate from about 1 pm and at 2 pm had measured around 0.3μSv/h. 




(時刻 time)

1.15μSv/h is the highest reading that I had had during the 1 1/2 years of use of this dosimeter.

As you can see it was just for a short while that I measured such a high dose rate. As I moved about I still had high readings. I presume that there was an air current that carried radioactive substances near the ground. 1.15μSv/h is the equivalent of 300.000 Bq/m2 of cesium in the soil.

According to the following map the spot was at altitude 25.5m, in an area with mostly vegetable patches where urbanization is restricted.



松戸駅 Matsudo station
測定地点 location of measurement
船橋駅 Funabashi station
江戸川河口 mouth of Edogawa river



They were burning something in a home-use incineration unit nearby but the wind wasn’t coming from there. The wind was coming from the south and wasn’t strong.







The following spot was quite far away from the previous one. The altitude is about 14m lower. The readings are not much different.




Where do the radioactive substances come from? It could be radon but would it rise so much on a plateau? There are incineration plants and waste recycling centres of Funabashi city in Sanbanse near the mouth of the Edogawa River. They are 8 km south of where I measured. If the chimneys of these plants are high then I guess the emission could travel quite far. It wouldn’t be unnatural to think that the emissions would have an impact on the surrounding environment in a radius of 8-10 km. I shudder to think that there are plants that release radioactive gas of 1μSv/h everywhere though.

I do not like the idea of taking a walk in a place where I can measure more than 1μSv/h. This is a dose rate where I literally should be running away from. 

So on May 11th I was irradiated. These days, every time I go out to the countryside I get irradiated. I am starting to have the feeling that I cannot live near Tokyo any more.






Radiation Dose Estimates according to the US Department of Defense

Original Text from Zukunashi no Hiyamizu's Blog: http://inventsolitude.sblo.jp/article/101771049.html


June 20th, 2014

The Unites States Department of Defense (USDD) has uploaded a report on radiation dose estimates for American civil servants that were in Japan at the time of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident. 



According to the USDD the estimates were calculated based on the assumption that one spent “24 hours outdoors, having a constantly high physical activity level and associated breathing rates, and being exposed to the radiation measured in the air, water and soil over the entire 60- day period” from March 12th to May 11th 2011.

Let’s have a look at the adult estimated radiation dose. The left axis is for the thyroid dose estimates and the right axis for the whole-body estimates. N.B. the scale for the right axis is a tenth of the left.

Estimated Radiation Dose for Adults



The second chart gives the estimated radiation dose for non-adults. Here I typically used the case of Hyakuri Air Base but the trend is followed more or less at all locations of the survey. The unit used here is mSv. 


The thyroid radiation dose is highest in the age group of 1-2 yrs and then declines in the order of 0-1 yr, 2-7 yrs, 7-12 yrs, 12-17 yrs. The adults’ estimate is more or less the equivalent of that of the 12-17 year olds. As I mentioned before, this trend can be observed at the other locations of the survey. The whole-body radiation doses follow the same pattern as well.

THYROID ESTIMATE: HIGHEST IN HYAKURI
We know from independent reports that at Yokosuka Naval Base measures were taken to insulate the houses from the outside air. In the Atsugi Base families were evacuated from March 17th onwards. On March 21st the aircraft carrier George Washington left Yokosuka as an emergency reaction. However, in Hyakuri, Oyama and Sendai the adult estimated dose rates for the thyroid are even higher than in the before-mentioned bases around Tokyo (4 mSv) with Sendai being the highest (12 mSv). If you include the children, you get the exceptionally high measure of 27 mSv for the 1-2 year olds of Hyakuri Air Base.

The Hyakuri Air Base is a highly contaminated zone. On March 15th and 21st, a radioactive plume passed the nearby city of Hokota. 

The following graph that shows the estimated thyroid radiation dose of all the age groups (in mSv) stresses the exceptionally high dose rate for Hyakuri as well.

Thyroid Radiation Dose, All Age Groups


Personally I have doubts about how accurately a radiation dose expressed in Sv can reflect the damage done to the human body. Sv is used to indicate how an object heats up by receiving energy from a radioactive source. It does not indicate the damage that was caused in human cells, their DNA and tissues. Strontium, cesium or radioactive iodine each act differently in the human body and hence have different effects on the organs. I therefore think that it is difficult to predict the scale of health damage simply using figures in Sv. 

However, some experts say that concerning the thyroid its dysfunctions occur in proportion to the received radiation dose. If this is true, considering the high radiation dose of the toddlers in the Hyakuri Air Base, I fear that the health deterioration might become very serious there. The toddlers in Hyakuri received more than twice the radiation dose the toddlers in Tokyo or Yokosuka did, places where the radiation dose was considered too high for American civil servants to stay. This thought breaks my heart.

SENDAI: CONTRADICTIONS
In Japan there has been little information available on the air dose rate of Sendai and when there is, the dose rates are relatively low. Compared to those figures, the thyroid estimates of the USDD for Sendai seems disproportionately high.

A US sailor has filed a lawsuit against Tepco along with 71 other sailors of the Operation Tomodachi. The health damage that he has been suffering from as a result of his mission measuring the contamination at Sendai airport (Natori city and Iwanuma city) doesn’t seem to match the relatively low air dose rate of the city of Sendai published by the Tohoku University. 

There is too little information on Internet about the rural areas and it has therefore been difficult for me to grasp the state of health deterioration there but looking at the adult thyroid estimates one can only predict at least as much, if not much more, health deterioration than in Tokyo for Oyama and Sendai.

THE OTHER USE OF THE DATA
I presume that the USDD mainly used the raw readings of radioactive iodine to calculate the thyroid estimates of each location. Cesium would have been taken into account as well, since it could cause thyroid dysfunction, yet I can imagine that they would have done it in a conservative way. On the other hand, the whole-body estimates would have been calculated based on the readings of gamma rays in general, like those of cesium, iodine and other nuclides. This assumption enables us to estimate the amount of radioactive iodine and gamma nuclides that the USDD had at each location.

It looks like the USDD applied the estimates of certain places to the nearby cities. So I did the same and created the following maps using their estimates. 








Health problems may rise in the whole North hemisphere


Original Text from Zukunashi no Hiyamizu's Blog:http://inventsolitude.sblo.jp/article/101570148.html


This shows the readings of the global monitoring stations of CTBTO, copied from “Survey of Man-made Radionuclides in the Atmosphere using IMS by CTBTO,” a report by Chusiro Yonezawa and Yoichiro Yamamoto. 



Here are main monitoring posts indicated on a CTBTO map. Radionuclides originated from Fukushima were detected all over the northern hemisphere. 


This is a screen shot taken from “Global deposition of Cs-137 radionuclides from the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident.” by CYI VISLAB of the Cyprus Institute. To make it easy to see, colors were adjusted.

About 70 days after the accident:



This simulation result matches the fact that the reading in Florida was about the same as the West Coast in CTBTO’s survey.

In North America, some health problems are reported to be linked to the contamination.

Birth defect deaths in West Coast state hit record levels during 2011 Spiked 60% statewide, then returned to normal in 2012 New gov’t document lists ‘Fukushima release along west coast of US’ as possible factor in birth defect cluster

After Fukushima, there has been an increase in deaths in the United States This has been corroborated by findings of deaths, particularly of children younger than 1 year in British Columbia

U.S.Nuclear Authorities publicly stated that only a tiny amount of radionuclides from Fukushima fell on North America. If that’s true, it’s possible that considerable levels of internal exposure occurred.

Research institutes in Vilnius, Lithuania and Spitsbergen (Norway) reported that radionuclides such as cesium from Fukushima have been found. 

A simulation (conducted by a French government institution Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics) indicates the plume reached South East Asia, Philippines, and Indochina.



The Cyprus Institute's simulation suggested the same.

It is difficult to prove the effect of radiation exposure on health problems, but data showed increases in the numbers of sudden deaths and cancers after the Chernobyl accident.

If indeed the number of health problems rose in North America, the same may happen in other areas in the whole North hemisphere. In Japan it is getting harder to receive appropriate medical support. There are countries without adequate medial system in South East Asia. This is a source of concern.










People living overseas damage their health after brief stay in Japan.

Original Text from Zukunashi no Hiyamizu's Blog:http://inventsolitude.sblo.jp/article/100080574.html

There are several comments posted by Japanese people living overseas, and they said that they upset their health after coming back temporarily to Japan. In addition, I heard a few stories about that foreign citizens upset their health, or were strongly suspected of internal exposure to radiation during their stay in Japan.

The followings are just a few of cases.

Case 1   A Japanese nationals living in West Coast stayed in Tokyo for a few months a year for these 3 years. She had the last checkup and found its TSH value near 30, then started to take the drug immediately. During her stay in Japan at midsummer in 2013, she shivered from cold and wore borrowing sweater. She purveyed her meals from Japanese supermarket in West Coast.

Case 2  A Japanese nationals living in Australia was at some place in Japan near the Sea of Japan with her daughter when the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred. They went to Toyama prefecture for safety in Mar.14. After that, they went to Haneda Airport by air in Mar 17 and went to Narita Airport by land soon. Then they departed to Australia around 21 o’clock on the same day. After going back to Australia, she suffered from menstrual problem and hair loss those she rarely experienced before. After a while, she came back to Japan twice about for 10 days each. During the first stay in Japan, she had pain and nagging feeling in her eyes. Just after the second stay in Japan, she felt chilly and suffered from severe iron deficiency. Although she recovered from iron deficiency by taking drugs, she still suffers from chill, pain and nagging feeling in her eyes and visual loss. In Australia, she ate foreign meals except Japanese seasonings like soy sauce and miso. According to her story, her Japanese friends in Australia cannot go back to Japan without falling sick, heart pain, fever and eye pain.

Case 3   A Japanese nationals living in Europe stayed at Kyoto for a month from Oct, 2011. She/he found blisters in her/his forehead during the second week. After that, her/his nose was runny for a while. After going back to Europe, she/he had got a big bruise upper back of the leg twice, and also suffered from cold-like symptoms for 2 weeks in 2013. Finally she/he developed cystitis in 2014.

Case 4   An American woman in her 20s participated in a study abroad program in Kyoto for three months, from the end of August through the end of November, 2011. During the penultimate week of her stay in Japan, she spent one week in Tokyo, Nikko and Sendai. She ate Sushi near Tsukiji Uoichiba in Tokyo, but she did not eat any fish in Nikko and Sendai. Also she did not eat any dairy during her short trip. While in Nikko, where she went hiking through forests of colorful maple leaves, she began experiencing strange headaches and fatigue. As she traveled by bullet train to Sendai, the train stopped in Fukushima. Her headache that was lingering for the past three days suddenly magnified into a piercing migraine. By the time she arrived in Sendai, her pain had completely dissipated. For the next three days, she felt fine. In mid-November she returned to Kyoto, where she spent her final week in Japan. During the last four days, she experienced a migraine again. She flew from Osaka to Tokyo and then from Tokyo to the U.S. During the entire transpacific flight, she felt unexplainable stabbing pains in her stomach, nausea and delirium. By the time she arrived back home, she felt relieved that her pain was gone. The following morning she woke up with a bloody nose. During the next month, she experienced daily nosebleeds, headaches and dizziness. She felt chronic fatigue and weakness. During the second week of December, she vomited for two days straight, uncontrollably purging all of the liquids from her body. On those days, she could not consume food. Her body became weak and drained of energy. She continued to have nosebleeds halfway into January. Since mid-January 2013, these symptoms have stopped.

Case 5   An unidentified foreign student came to Japan to study in April, 2011. She/he measured her/his exposure through WBC, which resulted in certain internal exposure caused by radioactive iodine. Then she/he was very surprised and went back to her/his home country immediately.

The followings are my guesses those are guided by these cases.

1. After Mar 15, 2011 in the area around Tokyo, there were still many radioactive substances in the air (indoors or not) after the radioactive plume had left. The inside of transportation is polluted. So did everything like clothing, furniture and bedding. Additionally people in Tokyo were exposed to the radiation by breathing polluted air.

2. Agricultural products have kept on being strongly polluted by radioactivity since Mar, 2011. Polluted agricultural products were distributed in large quantities in restaurant industry.

3. Food products around Kansai area (Kyoto and Osaka) in the autumn of 2011 seemed to be appreciably polluted by radioactivity. Since there is a high possibility that people living in Kansai area were exposed to the radiation by breathing polluted air, they are in danger of damaging their health for a long time.

4. I guess that American student in case 4 would have been exposed to the radiation since she was already in Kyoto. She ate polluted food in Kyoto, and was exposed to the radiation ever so much in Tokyo, Nikko and Tohoku district. For this reason she was plagued by ill health for a while even after returning home. 

5. With regard to case 1 and 2, you would see that the more they came back to Japan, the stronger their body reacted to internal exposure. What we can learn from this is that it is possible for the people, who have been in Japan since Mar, 2011 and damage their health, to have even worse health problems especially after eating strongly polluted food.


Discussion about “search words”



Original Text from Zukunashi no Hiyamizu's Blog:http://inventsolitude.sblo.jp/article/101702183.html


“Many people recently die. It is the result of the radioactivity?”,“Sudden death is connected with radiation exposure?”, “Will many people die this year?”

I would answer to these questions with confidence, “That is sure” .There are many individuals who get access to my blog by typing “radioactivity” or “health damage” into a search engine. The following is search words and the number of searches in June 2014.



Since they find that they could no longer rely on the doctors or government, they would have no choice but to search Internet for the information.

The followings are the search words of serious situation since the middle of Dec 2012. Recently there are wide variety of illnesses in search words like “disorder of eyes” and “toothache”.

“leukemia, died in 3 days”
“age of 52, subarachnoid bleeding”
“wake up and suddenly die”
“suddenly being unconscious, feel cold”
“myocardial infarction, keel over and die”
“I woke up in the morning and found my brother had died”
“So many people recently die. It is because of radioactivity?”
“Does radiation exposure have something to do with sudden death?”
“My co-workers died after another”
“Why do many old people die?”
“Healthy people die unexpectedly of leukemia, why?”
“I have a sense of dread that I have a child”
“My husband suddenly died, subarachnoid hemorrhage”
“My husband is beginning to be concerned about radioactivity only recently”
“blindness, infant”
“radioactivity, dental pain”
“Will I die of exposure in the future if I continue to live here Tokyo?”
“north Kanto (around Tokyo), crematorium, 3 weeks wait”
“My acquaintance suddenly looked pale and died”
“Five-year-old child suddenly died”
“Although I am suffering from leukemia, bioclean room is always full”
“Sometimes I have an excruciating pain in my Adam's apple, what should I do?”
“I am butterfingered”

Young women, who were not interested in radiological problem, begin to see the abnormal changes around them and think that “Something is wrong…”. As no one let them know, they have no choice but to search Internet. I wish they could notice the danger of radioactivity much earlier… I can't help it.

Referring to population change of Ukraine after Chernobyl accident, the birth rate had been decreasing from the following year first. On the other hand, the mortality rate had been increasing slightly for an initial duration of 3 years. But, it had been increasing significantly after 4 years of Chernobyl accident.

Deadly health damages that occur in a short time after exposure are considered to be cardiac muscle damage and cerebral vascular disease. In Japan, I saw an upsurge in myocardial infarction so far. Cerebral infarction and subarachnoid hemorrhage are also , but they are relatively rare cases. Recently leukemia cases are increasing, and deaths from interstitial pneumonia, lung cancer, leukemia and brain tumors are likely increasing.

We can not do anything to cancel initial exposure now. You will develop these serious diseases sooner , if you do not make efforts to avoid exposure. I desire you to avoid internal exposure caused by contaminated food and drink. For you and people who rely on you.!


The Imperial General Headquaters again? A notice too simplistic ; the cesium contamination of Minamisoma might be amplified during removing the rubbles.


 Original text from Blog of Koichi Oyama in Minamisoma City : http://mak55.exblog.jp/20907679/

http://news24.jp/nnn/news8656707.html

'Sources recently learned that the radioactive fallout wasn't from the time of the accident'
What? I had to question the wording of this NHK report,  as radio-contamination of rice stalk planted in 2013 is obviously not of the accident in 2011.


Moreover, it concluded definitively that it was radiation spewing from Unit 3 during demolition work without suggesting other possibilities, and then just issued an irresponsible alert over the contamination.

The NHK report didn't give either details on the detected radioactive materials or microgram.
Neither did it mention the 'black thingy', which turned out to be bioaccumulation, or radioactive bird droppings.


From what basis was the cause decided to be air dose of Unit 3 during the demolition work, when the radioactive materials came out in clusters?

I felt 'oh no, not again'.
Radioactivity has been dispersed not only over the monitored rice paddy 23km away from the accident site but everywhere.

Death ashes obviously fell across the cities and roads, which keep being disturbed by the traffic.


Mass media brainwashing


I am going to contact Akaba vice minister of economy and industry, director of Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters, city mayor and chairman of Minamisoma tonight to provide evidence to the pollution dispersion.


NHK ducked the issue by asserting that 'one of the causes' is the demolition operation.


http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20140714/k10015992301000.html


Death ashes are even attaching to the clothes...
NHK just made the whole story that the detected contamination was due to the demolition work and avoided the pollution dispersion issue. We call it information manipulation.