Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects 119
sciencehabit writes: Eating food contaminated with radioactive particles may be more perilous than previously thought — at least for insects. Butterfly larvae fed even slightly tainted leaves collected near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station were more likely to suffer physical abnormalities and low survival rates than those fed uncontaminated foliage, a new study finds. The research suggests that the environment in the Fukushima region, particularly in areas off-limits to humans because of safety concerns, will remain dangerous for wildlife for some time.
In other lingering radiation news, reader Rambo Tribble writes:
Forest detritus, contaminated in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (abstract), is decaying at a much slower rate than normal, building up and creating a significant fire risk. This, in turn, is creating a real potential for the residual radioactive material to be distributed, through smoke, over a broad area of Europe and Russia. Looking at different possible fire intensities, researchers speculate, "20 to 240 people would likely develop cancer, of which 10 to 170 cases may be fatal." These figures are similar to those hypothesized for Fukushima.
Relevent (Score:2, Interesting)
http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/123/e/7/mother_gaia_by_humon-d3fh24i.jpg
Re: (Score:2)
Whilst sadly amusing what the artist misses is that humanity is Gaia's most likely candidate for reproduction than any other species. Whilst we are, sadly, arrogant Homo Sapien represents the apex of evolution on the earth. Whilst nature would go on without humans it would also take billions of years for another species like humanity to emerge, IF another species emerges.
We may die before nature, but our evolution on this planet also serves natures inherent instinct to survive and reproduce elsewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Earth will become unsuitable for life in about 1.2 billion years (give or take a few hundred million years) due to the increase of solar luminosity. There's just not enough time to start over before Earth is turned into a hot, dry rock.
However, hominization takes place on a much shorter time scale (couple of ten million years), so another intelligent species could still arise. Who kn
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Possibly. They just can't progress further due to a few problems (most prominent one: no fire. Use of fire spurred a variety of developments in humans - more efficient use of food, additional social behavior, etc).
Re: (Score:2)
The thing with octopi and such is no family or culture to pass on knowledge. They lay eggs and leave them to develop on their own so every generation is starting from scratch.
People have been successful due to being tribal, family orientated species that builds on the previous generations knowledge. Intelligence by itself isn't enough to develop technology which is what we mean when talking about intelligence.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing with octopi and such is no family or culture to pass on knowledge. They lay eggs and leave them to develop on their own so every generation is starting from scratch.
People have been successful due to being tribal, family orientated species that builds on the previous generations knowledge. Intelligence by itself isn't enough to develop technology which is what we mean when talking about intelligence.
Sure, but dolphins and whales live in family groups as well, it's not just our social abilities that made humans as successful as they are. Fire and agriculture were the two big paradigm shifts that made us what we are today.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a few things that have made us technologically successful hands, communication, culture and so on. Dolphins are missing hands or equivalent while octopi have useful tentacles. Find a video of an octopus opening a jar, it's interesting. Of course as the sibling pointed out, living under water is a huge disadvantage but octopi could evolve to leave the water. The Seattle aquarium was having a problem with crabs going missing in a tank, couldn't figure it out so they set up a camera. The octopus down t
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunetly, I'm a reader, not a writer, but I've been thinking, in a sci-fi context, about a creature on a water planet that evolved tool making ability in a gas pocket inside their body.
Imagine a whale-sized creature with a dozen prehensile tongues, breathing through it's nose, while building machine parts inside it's mouth.
(now, add a Japanese schoolgirl...)
Re: (Score:2)
However, hominization takes place on a much shorter time scale (couple of ten million years), so another intelligent species could still arise. Who knows, maybe the rats will succeed where the apes failed.
I personally witnessed a case of greatly accelerated hominization:
Day 1: odd pink lump
Day 2: lip smacking goober
Month 1: squaller with hiccups
Month 3: large cranium drooler
Month 4: creepy crawler
Month 9: bipedal menace
Year 2: cute backtalking tyrant
Year 5: regal household overlord
Year 10: why why why machine
Year 13: critter
Year 17: varmit
Year 18: best friend
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, once the design phase of millions of years is over, manufacturing can happen rapidly an in large numbers. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Earth will become unsuitable for life in about 1.2 billion years (give or take a few hundred million years) due to the increase of solar luminosity.
Tell that to a few hyperthermophiles. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Relevent (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yup, unbelievably more likely. The suffering caused by coal is just more decentralized, so fucking idiots will continue to ignore it in favor of more easily visible problems. People are goddamn retards.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Normally ACs are the retards, but in your case, you're completely correct. :)
Yea, the long term damage caused by coal is easier to ignore... sad really...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You haven't been mod'ed "funny" yet? Or is invoking a fictional horror story your serious argument?
Re: (Score:2)
Actually several coal seam fires have rendered similar areas larger than fukishima uninhabitable.
So it's both diffuse (4000 deaths a year.. every year.. last i read) and also has large centralized points of destruction as well.
Re: (Score:2)
If youre gonna post strawmen, anonymous is probably the way to go.
What I've generally seen is calls to cut the hyperbole in half and accept Fukushima for what it is.
Dangerous to insects? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cool!
What we have here is the worlds biggest and baddest bug zapper.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, say that now.
But when Mothra is terrorizing cities, don't say we didn't warn you. ;-)
BS (Score:1)
Chernobyl went back to nature, it's beautiful there and animals are thriving with minimal defects.
We haven't seen the worst of Fuki though...
Re: (Score:3)
Chernobyl is *mostly* safe but there are still, and will remain still, some residual effects.
To be honest, the stupid war with russia is probably more dangerous to the folks of that region right now however.
On the other hand fear of Chernobyl radiation may well be keeping soldiers out, making it paradoxically one of the safer areas in the region.
Re: (Score:2)
Local lakes (Tchernobyl borders to a very extensive swamp region, t
Re: (Score:2)
Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
The oceans around Hawaii will probably be damaged too, and a huge swatch of Asia / Europe could be irradiated if the forests around Chernobyl burns all it's accumulating debris. I have no idea how much study has been done on plant growth rates in Japan after we nuked them; I doubt anyone there had the time or knew about soil die-off with all the other damage from the war.
Sadly Chernobyl was due to human stupidity and lack of communication. The equipment only failed because the head engineer purposely pushed the reactor and didn't even bother telling his engineers working in said reactor. Japan plant was also plagued with low-quality construction in addition to being built in a bad location geographically. Safety measures that should have worked failed, the valve that is still leaking is in a very tight space under several feet of highly radiated water, so radiated their submersible drones keep dying.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, had Fukushima had US standards, the backup generators would have been placed above flood levels and the disaster likely averted. Japan's ignorance of this known and acknowledged design flaw was largely their own fault, IMO. Chernobyl, as you said, was an intentional test that wasn't communicated properly. The other major non-test nuclear disaster, Three Mile Island, was caused by an equipment failure followed by misdiagnosis by engineers (a light indicated a valve was closed when it was in fact st
Re: (Score:2)
As for the oceans around Hawaii, they probably were damaged more by the 106 above ground nuclear bomb tests the US did at the Pacific Proving Grounds [wikipedia.org] - I doubt Fukushima and Chernobyl will ever do as much damage as those did, even if all of the reactors there had resulted in full meltdowns..
Yea I was confused about his Hawaii statement, but I suspect this is actually what he was referring to.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually Fukushima did plan for loss of the pumps and had alternative cooling in operation when the reactors melted. The problem was that water pumped in by external pumps (fire engines) never reached the reactors because of damage done during the earthquake.
Re:Debunked (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Debunked (Score:5, Insightful)
Those responsible for this study likely picked this species to serve as an indicator species [wikipedia.org]. Indicator species must be indigenous to the area (check) and are generally the most susceptible to ecological upset (also check).
In high-profile environmental disasters (like reactor leaks), factors such as bio-amplification and bio-accumulation may lead to delayed consequences throughout an ecosystem; indicator species are used as canaries of sorts.
This seems to me like a commonplace study being somewhat misconstrued and given a click-bait headline (in the traditional Slashdot manner).
Re: (Score:2)
This seems to me like a commonplace study being somewhat misconstrued and given a click-bait headline
Yeah. I was thinking they chose something particularly volatile and dissimilar to most human and animal life (caterpillars liquefy into a rough network of filaments and nodes to map out the shape of a butterfly) as a way to sensationalize OMG RADIATION WE'S ALL GONNA DIE!!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The debunking has been debunked: http://www.nature.com/srep/201... [nature.com]
Scroll to the bottom to see the reply from the authors, as well as links to extended papers and data which debunks the debunking comprehensively. It's rather inappropriate to base criticism of work on the short papers published in Nature, which due to the page limit are understood to be somewhat incomplete.
A steaming pile of unscientific fearmongering (Score:1, Insightful)
Radiation == bad, got that. What I didn't see in the article is any mention of baseline data. What was the radiation level in the area before the reactors blew their tops? What naturally occurring radioactive material was in the leaves fed to the butterflies? How much radiation did that produce? What is the rate of naturally occurring mutations in the butterflies without the radioactive cesium in their diet?
I've got even more questions about this study but they didn't seem concerned with actually colle
Re: (Score:2)
To get rid of the scary radioactive stuff we need more nuclear reactors, not fewer. We just need the right kind of reactors.
I'm curious about what kind of nuclear reactors are in our naval fleet. They are obviously small and self contained, other than cooling. Would it be possible for that type of nuclear reactor to be used for anything besides a multimillion-dollar warship?
Re:A steaming pile of unscientific fearmongering (Score:5, Informative)
Go to the original paper, not TFA, and scroll to the bottom for a comment from the authors with links to complete data and longer discussion of the subject. Your concerns are all answered.
http://www.nature.com/srep/201... [nature.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Are you absolutely sure about that? In what context? Do you doubt that background radiation is instrumental in mutations that lie behind evolution? Have you wondered what life forms would exist on earth if there were no evolution?
For everything there is a level above which there is a danger or certain lethality, and below which it is often beneficial or even necessary. Too much [water, salt, potassium, calcium, ...] and you are a dead duck. Too little, and you are a dead duck. In
Radioactive mutations (Score:1)
Mothra (Score:2)
And this is how Mothra got started (not really, but still, Mothra, Godzilla, radiation. See, it all links together...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Sharks (Score:2)
I'm thinkin radioactive laser sharks
bioaccumulation beginning to be noticed (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what the consequences of radionuclides in the food chain looks like. The next step are the lizards and birds that eat these insects. It's not surprising that this is hard to understand, because it happens so slowly.
We are seeing the slow consequence of releasing radionuclides into the environment, they are absorbed into metabolisms because they present as micronutrients that biota can utilise for growth and maintenance. Once ingested into the body they act in two ways.
The first, as alpha, beta and gamma emitters they act directly on the surrounding tissues to gestate cancers in the body, a process that takes about 6 years in humans depending on how energetic the radio isotope is.
The second is through genetic damage to the DNA. These damaged genes are passed down through generations and when certain combinations meet the result is transgenic disease.
These cover the radioactive effects of the emitter, however there is also some elements that are highly toxic as well which introduces a third vector based on toxicity. For those people directly exposed who ingested radio-isotopes at 3/11 it will be roughly 2017 when the cancer rates start increasing, following that bio-accumulation inserts a random period of time and distributions of radioactive materials before they are absorbed causing a statistical increase of particular types of cancer deaths in humans.
Over time we will no longer be talking about death rates but failed births and an overall reduction of the capacity for species, including humans, to reproduce. This will be coupled with a higher rate of mutations and abnormalities for successful reproductions. This will continue to occur for the halflife of the isotope multiplied by 20 daughter products before an isotope is benign. For sr90 with a half life of 600 years this means a 12000year decay cycle, for pu-239 it's a 500000 year decay cycle, from humanities perspective this is effectively permanent.
If anyone wanted a plausible explanation for the Fermi Paradox I believe this is a candidate.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually I think we'll be just fine cranking out generations of imbeciles.
Ironically there is some truth in this as tritium ingested by pregnant mothers leads to decreased brain weight.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sr-90 has a half-life of 28.8 years. Practically no Pu-239 got out (too heavy to volatilize). The bulk of the lasting radioactivity is from the Cs-137 (~30 years). And there's a large amount of the nonradioactive versions of the Sr and Cs competing for the same biology that there will never be any bioaccumulation of radioactivity (rare mushrooms not withstanding).
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
But... but... but.. radiation! We all know from those 50's atom bomb warning movies that radiation lasts for billions and billions of years!
Please, panic more!
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, leaking radioactive plutonium-239 would probably be better than leaking radioactive strontium or cesium due to the inverse relationship between half life and danger to tissue. Plutonium has a half life of around 24100 years, so you could probably have a brick of it in your bedroom and it would never be a health threat to you. Yeah, it isn't the 1.26 billion years of potassium or 14 billion years for thorium (which is in granite), but it still is a very long time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:bioaccumulation beginning to be noticed (Score:4, Informative)
Radiation from Fukushima is not a human-extinction-level concern. It's a one-or-two-extra-people-die-of-cancer concern.
No it's not. That's just as blind to the facts as the "oh god NUCULAR WEAPONS" crowd is. Nobody (as far as I can tell) is saying you're going to die (or even be affected) where you live, who knows how far away from Japan. Nobody is saying this single event will cause the end of civilisation. It won't, because the vast majority of the radiation released was injected into a different food chain that we barely know anything about - the ocean. If you really think the pollution released into the air is the biggest problem here, you're ignoring nearly the entire effect of the catastrophe.
Remember, we're talking about reactor fuel meltdown, not a nuclear explosion. Just like Chernobyl, the explosions that did happen were relatively harmless hydrogen gas explosions that would have been incapable of damaging anything outside of the industrial compound. Once containment is breached, however, you are talking about large amounts of radioactive material submersed in a moving liquid/gas environment. The damage is no longer local and is cumulative, and increases with every minute spent dispersing unstable isotopes into the gas/liquid. You don't have to approach a lethal direct dose - anywhere - for it to spread through the entire food chain and alter life at the most basic level (cell and DNA reproduction itself).
This is a problem that you can't debug, or fix, or predict (irradiation effects only become predictable _well_ above random mutation level, where direct effects start happening, but if you get to that point in the environment your only option now is to leave the planet) once atmospheric dilution has begun, and it will start affecting us *long* before we notice any increase in cancer rates, deformed babies or miscarriages (look up the orphanages in Minsk, btw!). Before that starts happening, we will have extinguished or corrupted most of the species that are a lot less radiation-tolerant than we are. Like insects, which plants depend on for reproduction. Which, in turn, nearly everything else depends on.
Now realize that we are ACTUALLY discussing a triple reactor meltdown that *actually happened* right next to one of the largest material-carrying currents that exist in our atmosphere; containment was breached allowing liquid to flow right in and out of the 3 reactors; that contamination has been happening continuously for the past *THREE YEARS*.
I, too am frustrated by sensationalism and fearmongering surrounding nuclear power generation, but I swear since Fukushima happened and the initial scare faded, the "it's completely safe because you need a lot of radiation to kill someone" crowd has been doing more damage than the fear crowd ever did.
Re: (Score:2)
Ants? (Score:2)
What about ants? :P
20 years from now... (Score:1)
Roachzilla!
Look at the "outliers" they excluded (Score:3)
The word "outlier" is used only once in the whole study. It is in the section on mortality. [biomedcentral.com]
Show this graph to anybody and let them point out which of the 6 data points is the "outlier". I highly doubt that they would pick the data point labeled "Motomiya".
Radiation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I see the word "radiation" used interchangeably with "radioactivity", I cringe.
And then I start wondering what else they got wrong....
The actual mortality rate numbers (Score:4, Informative)
The direcly linked fukushima article is very low on numbers (do journalists think people are allergic to them or something?), but it links to the actual scientific article. There we find this plot of the mortality rate as a function of ingested radioactivity [biomedcentral.com] for the pale green butterfly larvae. The changes in mortality are large, from 20% to 80%. The trend is positive, but noisy. The significance of a positive trend is about 3 sigma.
Re: (Score:1)
The direcly linked fukushima article is very low on numbers (do journalists think people are allergic to them or something?), but it links to the actual scientific article.
Sadly, yes, studies have shown that every time you include an equation, mathematics, or scary looking numbers in an article, you loose a percentage of the readers. Editors for popular articles (which Nature, desipte it's prestige as a science journal, is at heart) know this, and edit accordingly.
hmmm (Score:2)
These are possibly both true.
Chernobyl happened nearly 30 years ago, but it was 100+ times larger than Fukushima and released a lot more long-lived radionucleides.
Fukushima's footprint is a lot smaller and will dissipate a lot more quickly.
Both affected areas are small in comparison to their isolation zones. In general there are areas with much higher naturally occuring radiation/radioactivity levels than the isolation zones, many of which are inhabited.
Even with these accidents (and all the other incidents
Re: (Score:3)
Said the Anonymous Coward hiding behind HIS keyboard, pretending to be.... god knows what ;)
Just sayin.. :)
Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects (Score:2)
"Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects"
(Swats air) "You say that, like it's a BAD thing..."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cue the knee-jerk nuke haters & their BS. (Score:3)
I know, but I'm afraid it's no use pointing out facts. I'd like to think anti-nuke religious zealots could be reasoned with, and maybe a small percentage of them can, and possibly it's worthwhile trying, but for the most part they will just cotinue frothing. It's not as bad as the berserk murdering kind of religious zealoutry, but that doesn't mean the worst elements should get to dictate humanity's policy.
I have very serious reservations about nuclear power implementations, but it's about real problems, no
Re: (Score:2)
There is actually a reasonable solution to the waste [wikipedia.org], but anti-nuclear people say it is a proliferation risk and cannot ever be built, unfortunately. It seems on-site reprocessing can never overcome being a security issue and will always be a proliferation issue despite several countries already pushing forward with Gen IV technology that can run on it (because breeder reactors can make it into fuel). Most designs being implemented (like Russia's BN-350/600/800/1200) are once through without reprocessing,
Re: (Score:2)
How many people will be displaced by global warming that could have been mitigated if we were using nuclear instead of fossil fuels?
'climate change' lies squarely at the feet of the willfully ignorant hippies.
Re: (Score:2)
We don't even need to invoke climate change to show nuclear saves lifes.
Studies show that if all nuclear power plants in the world were instead coal power plants over 2 million lives would have been lost !
If we had 3x more nuclear in the world than today (going from 16% to around 50%) millions of lifes would be saved yearly.
Nothing against deploying lots of solar and winds where it makes sense. Australia is doing a great job. In Germany its mass stupidity because solar is extremelly crappy in the winter and
Re: (Score:2)
Yet, Coal kills 200 thousand people worldwide yearly. Gas and Oil kills conservatively 10 thousand people worldwide yearly. Hydro killed 200 thousand on its worst accident ever, and kills a few thousand every year.
Nuclear has killed over its entire lifetime a fraction of what gas and oil kills every year.
So your concerns are fears. Why don't you instead go demand all coal power plants in the world get shutdown with a year ?
Every form of energy is dangerous. Rational stats show solar and wind kill a little m
Re: (Score:2)
Cold fusion is a myth as far as we know, and the other powers you mentioned are actually forms of nuclear.
Solar is fusion energy from the sun
Geothermal is fission energy from the earth's core
I find it kind of funny that clean energy is usually nuclear (with gravitational such as hydro being the exception), despite anti-nuclear people favoring them.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually hydro is powered by the sun evaporating water and transporting it higher.
And almost everything else we burn was chemicals made using solar energy by plants.
So really *every* power source we use is nuclear.
Re:Cue the knee-jerk nuke lovers & their BS. (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't you move to Fukushima or Chernnobyl?
Fukushima: too many insects. Chernobyl: too many forest fires.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't move to Fukushima or Chernobyl, local govt has made those areas mandatory evac zones. They must be afraid of people moving back and living their lives normally, no cancers or anything. Actually, people have moved back to Pripyat, Ukraine, walking through the forest to avoid the evac checkpoints. They have been visited by reporters, they claim no cancers or any health problems.
Radioactivity is everywhere. If radioactivity levels were a problem, me and my whole family would be dead from cancer a lon
Re: (Score:2)
Germany is doing all of this solar+wind thing to keep burning lots of coal with solar+wind in the spotlight. There is no solution without nuclear to fully cleanup Germany's grid in less than 30 years. The technology for energy storage just isn't there.
Nuclear is a deadly threat to coal and natural gas profits. Solar and wind isn't. That's the real reason for all of this solar+wind push. It just doesn't threaten the coal/gas interests for another 50 years. We should be mass installing nuclear now, continue w