nuclear-news

Foolhardy action to drink radioactively contaminated water

“Oh God,” said John Large, a British nuclear expert who has helped assess disasters including the wreck of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, when told of Mr. Sonoda’s actions. “That is incredibly foolhardy and somewhat patronizing to members of the public,”

 if you drink the water you’re potentially providing radioactive particles a pathway into your gut system. It’s then down to how your gut system deals with it. It might ignore it and urinate it out. Or it might say ‘that’s a nice piece of cesium, I’ll store that in muscle tissue’ which is not a goodthing.”….

Japanese Official Drinks Water From Fukushima Reactor Buildings, NYT By ROBERT MACKEY and RAVI SOMAIYA, November 1, 2011, After insisting for weeks that water collected from reactor buildings at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant posed no threat to human health once it was decontaminated, a Japanese government official poured himself a glass of the liquid and drank it on livetelevision on Monday.

The water gulped down by the official, Yasuhiro Sonoda, came from the
flooded basements of two reactor buildings at the plant, which was
severely damaged when a tsunami struck the Japanese coast in March.

As the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported, the safety of the
water drained from the reactor buildings is an issue because the
plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, wants to pump it out
to sea, despite objections from local governments and fishing
cooperatives in the area.

Six months ago, before Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, set up a
filtration system at the stricken plant, more than 11,000 tons of
water contaminated with cesium 134, cesium 137 and iodine 131 was
dumped into the sea, prompting local and international outrage.

In a report on Mr. Sonoda’s stunt, Japan’s state broadcaster NHK
explained that the power company and Japan’s nuclear safety agency
announced last month that the level of radioactive cesium in the
decontaminated water was so low that it was safe for bathing and would
pose no threat to the environment. By Japanese government standards
for radiation, desalinated water that is safe enough to swim in is
also safe to drink……

“Oh God,” said John Large, a British nuclear expert who has helped
assess disasters including the wreck of the Russian nuclear submarine
Kursk, when told of Mr. Sonoda’s actions. “That is incredibly
foolhardy and somewhat patronizing to members of the public,” he
added, still groaning. “The way to reassure members of the public is
not to have accidents in the first place.”

It is difficult to tell, Mr. Large said, how radioactive the water
might have been. Some trenches at the Fukushima site, he said, showed
radioactivity levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour. “The usual
nonmedical level for a human is one millisieverts per year.”

Even if the water Mr. Sonoda drank came from heavily treated remnants,
assessing the level of radioactivity would be very difficult, Mr.
Large said, because water is itself a shield against radioactivity.
The issue would be, he said, “that if you drink the water you’re
potentially providing radioactive particles a pathway into your gut
system. It’s then down to how your gut system deals with it. It might
ignore it and urinate it out. Or it might say ‘that’s a nice piece of
cesium, I’ll store that in muscle tissue’ which is not a good
thing.”….
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/japanese-official-drinks-water-from-fukushima-reactor-buildings/

November 2, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, safety