Japan declares 'nuclear emergency' after quake - PART 2

a reply to: fakedirt

Thanks Mate...I'm just not used to reading or following any radiation sites.
This is something we should never have to do...the world shouldn't be this
messed up in the first place...

Cheers
Ektar

More dead whales found in Alaska and for the first time that I have seen they are testing for radionuclides. From ENE this AM


Tests on tissue from one of the whales have proven negative for domoic acid, a biotoxin, and results on two other tests, for Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP) and Cesium-137 radioactivity, are still pending.

a reply to: zworld

hello z
i'm currently reading a research site on radiocesiums in the environment. it may be of interest

www.environmental-studies.de...

f

www.nature.com...

another site describing cesium migration from fuku not only easterly but southerly and to depths of 300m.

It all starts with the Daisies....

ca.news.yahoo.com...

Photos of flowers on Twitter and Instagram may be as commonplace as sunsets and selfies, but one Japanese amateur photographer has captured something a bit more unique than a beautiful bloom.

Twitter user @san_kaido posted a photo of mutated yellow daisies last month, found in Nasushiobara City, around 70 miles from Fukushima, the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster. The photos show daisies with fused yellow centres and with the petals growing out the side of the flower.

The daisies are not the first deformed plants found after the disaster. In 2013, the Daily Mail posted photos of mutated vegetables and fruit, attributing the apparent abnormalities to high levels of radiation found in the groundwater.

More at the link....

a reply to: zworld

I do not know if this is related to whale deaths but, same day news.

By BECKY BOHRER, The Associated Press

Cleanup efforts are underway in Alaska, with tons of marine debris -- some likely sent to sea by the 2011 tsunami in Japan -- set to be airlifted from rocky beaches and taken by barge for recycling and disposal in the Pacific Northwest.

Fishy

Source

a reply to: DancedWithWolves

Alot of these westcoast die-offs are troubling because they seem to happen often in swarms, in other words like the 15+ whales in Alaska this last week, they all died at the same time. Then nothing for awhile, and then another bunch of different fish go belly up in a different part of the coastline, then nothing, then another die-off further south or north or wherever.

It could be a combination of things, but it doesn't seem to be occurring like a couple years ago when species like seastars and sealions would die off continuously over a long period of time.

There are four things currently affecting seawater off our coast in a big way. One is heat as the water temps are 5F or more degrees above normal and fish from the tropics are making their way north, two is acidification which can be directly linked to oyster and scallop dieoffs, three is plastic pollution which is killing off seabirds and four is radiation which is the great unknown at this point because our government has refused to acknowledge it's presence let alone adverse effects.

But it's not just dieoffs. Salmon runs in Alaska have all but disappeared when they were expecting a huge run.

I think when all factors are considered together marine life is freaking out. But the driver very well could be radiation, as the worst of all that has been happening in recent years started in late summer 2011. Since then the sheet has been hitting the fan.

a reply to: fakedirt

Thank you for both of those. Excellent data trove. Was a bit surprised though to see the results of the second one which I think is showing most of the early rads to move southeast and recirculate up the Kurioshi current and not beeline to the California Current and end up here. Different than I thought happened.

The 200 meter depth for cesium was interesting too. I wonder if thats why we aren't seeing it floating ashore even though it's been 50 miles out there for sometime.

a reply to: zworld on July 13, 2015: There is not much in journal or magazine articles on ecological or environmental half life because the concept is completely bogus, without foundation. Be aware that many scientific journals and commercial magazines do not require authors to disclose their financial connections with the global nuclear industry. That's one reason why I rely mainly on published books for facts on nuclear topics, not articles. For example, one 2012 book on basic radiation facts I recommend is by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University College of Medicine ... that book is printed in English, but a Japanese edition is also available: waynebiddle.com...


The half lives of radioactive elements are invariable ... they are fixed from the beginning. Anyone who proves that radioisotope half lives vary at all will be eligible to win a Nobel Prize, *after* that finding is confirmed by independent scientific teams.

The terms "immobilization" and "fixation" in your text examples above refer only to the capture of radioisotopes via chemical reactions, such as in their example of clay-bearing soils. Such captured radioisotopes will no longer be moving around in the environment, but they still exist unchanged, bound to the clay materials in those soil samples.

Any article on radioisotopes that leaves its readers confused is either poorly written or is deliberate misinformation.

a reply to: Uphill

Thank you Uphill. Good information. So those concepts are thrown to the wind.

originally posted by: Uphill



The half lives of radioactive elements are invariable ... they are fixed from the beginning. Anyone who proves that radioisotope half lives vary at all will be eligible to win a Nobel Prize, *after* that finding is confirmed by independent scientific teams.

There have been observations and theories of Decay rate variability.

recently, an experiment at GSI Darmstadt has observed oscillating decay rates of heavy ions. Several controversial attempts have been made to explain this effect in terms of neutrino mixing. We briefly describe the experimental results, give an overview of the literature, and show that the effect cannot be due to neutrino mixing. If the effect survives, it could, however, be explained by hypothetical internal excitations of the mother ions (~ 10^(-15) eV).

arxiv.org...

www.wmsym.org...

F, it looks like the southern transport of radiocesium is indeed occurring as this piece from the Diary states that they found the highest levels in ocean waters south east of the plant. In the early days after the disaster the highest readings were always northeast of the plant, but that is no longer the case it appears. The Kuroshio current isnt as powerful as I thought. fukushima-diary.com...

The heat up in 4's SFP continues. It is now at 74.5 F which is hotter than the high temps for the day. How is this fuel pool (that is empty now) at levels greater than unit 3's SFP was just two months ago, a fuel pool that is exposed to the outside while 4's isn't.

It's been cloudy for days over there with off and on rain and in the last few days the temp has gone up 4 F in 4's pool. Where is this heat coming from.

a reply to: BGTM90

Im way over my head, but it does look like decay rates vary, but very little.

Here's another article explaining why the GSI anomaly occurs, or theorizes anyway. www.technologyreview.com...

some quotes;

"But what the GSI guys found was stranger still. They discovered that the normal exponential decay rate of praseodymium and promethium oscillated with a period of about 7 seconds. It was as if an oscillation had been superimposed on the normal exponential decay curve.

Their experiment is interesting because it is unique. These guys produce a handful of ions in a synchrotron and the measure each one decaying by the change it produces in the resonance of the ion beam as it circulates.

This gives an exact measurement of the lifetime of each ion, rather than an average measurement of the half life of a bulk material, as all other experiments do. It’s easy to see that this effect would be smeared out and invisible in these kinds of experiments.

So many physicists believe that the GSI experiment was actually measuring the properties of radioactive decay in its purest form.

These ideas have broader implications. Giacosa and Pagliara say this effect could explain other strange periodic variations in decay rates that physicists have observed over much longer time scales."

And this article talks about decay rate oscillating from research in the 80s.

arxivblog.com...

"Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates.

We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields).

So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s.

Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analysed the raw data from these experiments and say that the modulations are synchronised with each other and with Earth’s distance from the sun."

What that all means though I havent a clue.

a reply to: zworld

Yes, I have a basic understanding of what they are talking about, but I am not a PHD nuclear physicist, so a lot of it is over my head also. Heres another interesting article about Cs decay affected by solar activity. Again, I'm not saying that I fully understand this, I just wanted to point out to the above poster that decay rate variability is not such a far fetched idea.

When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics. It's a mystery that presented itself unexpectedly: The radioactive decay of some elements sitting quietly in laboratories on Earth seemed to be influenced by activities inside the sun, 93 million miles away.

news.stanford.edu...

a reply to: BGTM90

It's definately interesting stuff, even though understanding it all takes rocket science. Im trying to picture how solar activity or distance from the sun could affect radionuclides on earth. I guess if electricity can affect how fast something decays, a force from the sun could do the same. Im going to look into it more.

I should add that from what I can gather it's a very slight difference so the Wired article of an exponential increase in the half life of cesium 137 is bogus as Uphill states. And it doesn't warrant a descriptor. But still, it doesn't sound like the decay rates are written in stone either.

a reply to: zworld

This:

The half lives of radioactive elements are invariable ... they are fixed from the beginning.

Is a very definitive statement, of which there is evidence to the contrary. I was never implying that there was a significant increase or decrease in the half life of Cs 137, I was just simply showing that decay rates have been observed to vary. Now if we could fully understand these mechanisms which are causing these variations, we may be able to use them to our benefit in the future. Sorry Uphill if it seemed like I was attacking you. I was not, just trying to to point something out and add to the conversation. Hope there are no hard feelings.

originally posted by: BGTM90
a reply to: zworld

This:

The half lives of radioactive elements are invariable ... they are fixed from the beginning.

Is a very definitive statement, of which there is evidence to the contrary. I was never implying that there was a significant increase or decrease in the half life of Cs 137, I was just simply showing that decay rates have been observed to vary. Now if we could fully understand these mechanisms which are causing these variations, we may be able to use them to our benefit in the future. Sorry Uphill if it seemed like I was attacking you. I was not, just trying to to point something out and add to the conversation. Hope there are no hard feelings.

None here BGTM90. Im glad you brought it up. This thread for many of us has been a schooling, and learning what is what is very important. And I didn't mean to infer that you were stating anything other than posting some useful info. When I first got involved in this thread and started researching Fuku I had zero knowledge of radiation effects and have been learning new stuff every day.

I appreciate your input. Thanks.

originally posted by: zworld
F, it looks like the southern transport of radiocesium is indeed occurring as this piece from the Diary states that they found the highest levels in ocean waters south east of the plant. In the early days after the disaster the highest readings were always northeast of the plant, but that is no longer the case it appears. The Kuroshio current isnt as powerful as I thought. fukushima-diary.com...

hello z
what caught my attention was the vertical column aspect of this plume. at depths of 450m plus to surface, the ecological implications are of concern with regards to the contamination of sea life that exists at these depths. it was noted in the report that radiocesiums were found at lower depths.

out the box thinking here....
could the plume transitioning southwards not only be influenced by tidal flow and sub-surface currents, could it be moving topside of the plate boundaries due to say attraction/magnetic influence or some other process not yet identified? ring of fire.

end of out the box thinking...

the contributions I have read on this page have been splendid.

f

I would say that the correlation between nuclear decay rates and solar activity have something to do with resonance.

Am searching now, will see what I can dig up.



An interesting bit:

► The decay of radon is influenced by factors other than the geological and atmospheric environment. ► Radon decay variations exhibit oscillations previously found in decay data from several other nuclides. ► Some of these oscillations seem to be attributable to solar rotation. ► These oscillations are stronger in nighttime data than in daytime data.

Analysis of gamma radiation from a radon source: Indications of a solar influence

IRID appears to have confirmed melt through...at least someone is talking truth. We need more of this if solutions are to be found...even as disturbing as it is.

Document shows nuclear fuel burned through bottom of containment vessel under Fukushima reactor — Official: Leakage we observed indicates melt-through by ‘shell attack’ — “This is a very big problem… fuel debris in the PCV is doing something bad”
Enenews

Take the time to read the link if possible. What is happening with this fuel?

The following image from the Swiss Embassy in Japan was later altered but, was possibly one of the more truthful representations of the Fukushima reality.
Image published by embassy in Japan shows Fukushima melted fuel deep underground


Thoughts?

And thank you to those posting in and/or following this thread. The more minds at work, the more hope.