It is highly curable. You exaggerate the surgical risk. The risk of damaging both recurrent laryngeal nerves is small in competent surgical hands. The more important risk is of permanent hypoparathyroidism after total thyroid resection (1%).

All too many people whose concept of an electron is something about the size of a small pea consider themselves able to accurately judge scientific matters.

Good point. Except I’d add a caveat: sometimes rumors of the government coverup are actually greatly exaggerated. Sometimes the supposed coverup and government lies are actually fabrications or exaggerations by those trying to undermine the government with anti-government conspiracy theories. In fact, that happens quite a bit.

I’d like to add another reason – governments and politicians lie too often. Especially when it comes to covering up something. While this may not be the main reason for so many to get agitated over Fukushima; I wouldn’t be surprised if it was part of the reason why so many don’t believe the “evidence.”

Fukushima reactor is part of the public concern. The Japanese don’t have much living space, so anything that can permanently or semi permanently contaminate a piece of land is of major concern. They can’t make artificial islands as fast as they want to.

The American experiment was designed on the premise that every individual could rule themselves, because they were kings and did not need a king to rule them. But for people that do not understand how the world works, they naturally look for a king to rule them, since peasants are often uneducated and know little of the world beyond the village.

Thus the light of civilization ultimately brings the darkness. The greater the light of American civilization, the greater the darkness that will be produced in the shadow.

That footage still blows my mind. It’s like a hurricane storm surge, but compressed into a half hour rather than several hours. But you get to see how the houses and buildings in front pop loose from their foundations and become huge battering rams for the buildings behind them.

“Alphas are stopped by your skin… if not a thin piece of paper.” No alpha particle can travel more than 2 inches in air so a piece of paper or skin are adequate to stop an alpha. As you note, ingested or inhaled alpha emitters are a horse of another color. Sr-90 is a high energy beta emitter capable of causing severe skin doses or damage to the eye in high doses. Sr-90 is most dangerous if inhaled or digested because it is a bone seeker. Radioisotpes of iodine, most imporantly I-131, in large doses, is likewise dangerous if ingested or inhaled because it is organ specific — thyroid. High energy gamma radiation is the real danger when one is considering external exposure.

The dose rates in the NYP article (300 times ‘safe levels’) is simply BS. LD50/30 is no joke. LD50/30 is swift and absolute; it does not require several years to kill and cancer induction is the least of your worries if you are exposed to LD50/30 doses. I suspect you are well aware of this information, but I feel it is warranted to reiterate for those who have an emotional response to all things nuclear; including Godzilla. 😉

The entire math of half-lives and nuclides is profoundly inverted by the a-scientific.

For the general reader:

LONG half-lives provide almost no prompt radiation. Uranium’s major isotopes have half-lives of great length: 4.5 billion years for U238.

Because there are 6.02 x 10^23 atoms of U in 238 grams of metal even this slow decay can be detected.

ULTRA short half-lives mean that fantastic levels of prompt radiation occur at the site. These are the mechanism for the fantastic radiation figures tossed around on ZeroHedge and such.

Being prompt, they represent no threat to the larger world. You’d have to wade into the reactor — or at least camp out just down wind.

Further, many nuclides emit radiation that is harmless unless you ingest them… Alpha particles… Beta rays.

Alpha emitters are devastating if ingested — Po 209 comes to mind. But most are not a serious biological hazard. Alphas are stopped by your skin… if not a thin piece of paper.

Betas are also pretty harmless — unless you’re being drowned in them. Like Alphas, they have trivial penetrating power.

The true general concern is stuff like Strontium 90 and Iodine 131. Both are all too likely to blend into the human body and cause serious problems.

Strangely, one almost NEVER hears of these beasts when a threat to public health is tossed out by the MSM.

Gamma emitters are — generally — prompt emitters. It’s the fission reaction, itself, that is responsible for most Gamma rays. They are solely responsible for the massive shielding required. The Beta and Alpha rays could be contained by much more modest structures.

Once the reactor is scrammed, the level of Gamma emissions drops like crazy. Naturally enough, there will still be plenty of Gamma emitters as the reactor cools down.

But for the utility personnel the big worry is all of the degenerate debris that somehow always seems to leak out of the containment.

It makes for bad PR, and has every potential to get into the food chain.

In the case of TEPCO, they seem to have made a sequence of goofs… starting with siting the plant on the tsunami coast. (!)