nuclear-news

Report: Yellow radioactive substance in Kashiwa neighborhood near Tokyo — “I saw the roofs of other houses, most of them were covered with it”

http://enenews.com/report-yellow-radioactive-substance-in-kashiwa-neighborhood-near-tokyo-i-saw-the-roofs-of-other-houses-most-of-them-were-covered-with-it

August 9, 2012 report by a resident of Kashiwa, near Tokyo translated by Fukushima Diary:

“..Around the end of July, I had the professional cleaners wash the roof of our house.

The roof was covered with something like this yellow moss. It was 0.7 μSv/h on its surface…”

“…The radiation level was 14 μSv/h. I haven’t measured higher than 10 μSv/h before. It makes sense why the radiation level is high on the second floor…”

FROM THE COMMENTS….

the picture shows a common roof lichen that lives off minerals in the tiles…

and lichen is very good at assimulation radionuclides such as cesium..

cesium has a penetration of about 6 meters from source, i believe. this would account for higher readings in the top floor.. the rain and particulates, have deposited on the roof..

it would be interesting to test this material for strontium and plutonium for that matter…

americium in the Finnish environment (daughter product of plutonium)

2.1 × 1012 Bq. This calculation was based on the observed 241Am/239240Pu ratio of 0.107 in lichen samples from the years 1963–1965 (Jaakkola et al. 1981)

http://www.borenv.net/BER/pdfs/ber14/ber14-427.pdf

Using Lichens To Assess Airborne Deposition Around Selkirk: …. That is, arsenic, barium, boron, cadmium, molybdenum, silver, strontium, sulfur and zinc

“Lichens growing on tree trunks are well established as good indicators of past deposition of airborne dust and gases. Lichens have been used as bio-indicators of air pollution since 1866. The relationship between lichens and air quality has been reported in over 1,500 scientific papers. ”

http://www.gov.mb.ca/conservation/eal/publs/lichenstudy.pdf

AND THIS COMMENT

Great poems johnnyo (bravo) and Kumar (huzzah). 311

311 points to arc fir the lichens info. A very interesting 2003 article about the Sami culture shows how this affected their lives from Chernobyl:

“Cesium 137 intruded into Sámi life foremost by contaminating their food supplies. Through rainfall following the explosion, radioactive fallout permeated freshwater lakes and inland forests, thereby contaminating fish, wild game, berries and other plants (Stephens, 1995). Most detrimental was the contamination of lichen, the main winter staple of Scandinavia’s reindeer. Lichens have no root system so they extract nutrients directly from the air, thereby acting as virtual radioactive sponges, absorbing incredible amounts of airborne cesium 137 and passing it straight onto the deer. Lichen is an extremely slow-growing plant, taking 30 years to regrow completely (Vitebsky). Thus, radioactivity in affected lichen may not drop to safe levels short of 20 to 30 years after contamination. The effects of the contaminated lichen were not fully realized until after the first post-Chernobyl autumn slaughter season; then scientists began to measure levels of radioactivity in slaughtered reindeer.”

http://www.utexas.edu/courses/sami/dieda/socio/chernobyl.htm

SP: Many items in that article that may prove helpful to Japan. The problem is the government is reluctant to test food thoroughly and even more important…compensate food producers for losses.

August 12, 2012 - Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized