[ RadSafe ] Anyone in Berkeley, CA on Fukushima Response Group Formation

Mon Aug 20 07:08:30 CDT 2012

Roy,

Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant to say is that for some reason, the NY Times is much more effective than the locals are at telling people in Berkeley they are off track.

The NY Times treated the failure to take kids on an outing because of worry about "hundreds of picocuries" as a poor choice, and so the schools each time backtracked on their decisions.

Sequence: group (I am not it and I do not support it) forms to warn us about dangers from tritium from LBL. Months later, schoolchildren denied trips (I don't remember the first school district, but neither was Berkeley Unified). NY Times has an article on what people are doing in Berkeley. Kids get school trips. A year or two later schoolchildren in a second district denied trips. NY Times has an article on what people are doing in Berkeley. Kids get school trips. We never hear from group again.

What I tried to communicate is that communication like yours failed woefully. Explanations were tried. NY Times ridicule, however, succeeded. 

I agree, shame on the scare mongers. But as this list as seen, people, even those in other fields of science, have their own ideas about science different from what mainstream scientists accept.

Speaking of which, a friend who teaches writing asked me to find an explanation of scientific consensus for her course. This is the best I've found: http://www.wunderground.com/climate/facts/there_is_consensus.asp

> Karen,
> 
>     I was initially tempted to ignore you comments.  However, I found what you 
> wrote to be extremely disturbing.  I can only hope that you were jesting when 
> you wrote "That's what we had to do with the people who were worried about all 
> the radioactivity kids were exposed to going past Lawrence Berkeley Labs on 
> their way to Lawrence Hall of Sciences (tritium from the labs). In vain did 
> people say that the extra exposure was comparable to going to school at 1/8" 
> higher elevation. (Fortunately in Berkeley, only the wealthy live in the 
> hills.)"  I've been to the Lawrence Hall of Science and it is a wonderful 
> facility and it would be a perfect destination for school outings.  If an 
> organization scared people away from the facility on some cooked up, round 
> about, back door attack on the Lawrence Berkeley Labs, then shame on the scare 
> mongers!   Take a look at:
> http://www.lbl.gov/ehs/esg/tritium/tritium/TritCh4.html 
>   
> "The major natural source of tritium is cosmic ray reactions in the upper 
> atmosphere. A minor portion of the annual natural tritium production comes from 
> the earth' crust, a result of neutron capture reactions by 6Li in rocks. The 
> steady-state global inventory of tritium from all natural sources is estimated 
> to be in the range of 1 to 1.3X1018Bq [Okada and Momoshima, 1993]. Based on a 
> 12.3 year half-life, this inventory corresponds to an annual production of 
> 0.062 X 1018Bq/y. Measurements taken before open-air nuclear testing began 
> (before 1950) indicate that HTO in natural waters in the U.S. ranged from 
> 0.14-7.9 Bq/L for Chicago rain water, 0.16-0.21 Bq/L for Lake Michigan water, 
> and 0.30-0.77 Bq/L for the Mississippi [Okada and Momoshima, 1993].
>  X1018Bq of tritium [Okada and Momoshima, 1993]. It is estimated that, in the 
> 1990's, the legacy of the nuclear weapons test of the 1950's and 1960's is an 
> additional 52 X 1018Bq of tritium in the current global inventory [Okada and 
> Momoshima, 1993].  
> 
> Anthropogenic sources of tritium in recent decades have far exceeded natural 
> sources. Atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and 1960s are estimated 
> to have produced from 185 to 240
>  X1018Bq/y and off-normal releases an additional 0.001X1018Bq/y with a resultant 
> steady-state buildup of 0.4 X 1018Bq globally [Okada and Momoshima, 1993]. Based 
> on total previous levels of production, the legacy of luminous products (such as 
> watch dials) is estimated to currently release 0.4X1018Bq/y with a resultant 
> steady-state build up of 7.4 X 1018Bq globally [Okada and Momoshima, 1993]. 
> However, the luminous-dial source is expected to decrease in time.
> Normal releases of tritium from nuclear facilities are estimated to produce 0.02
>  
> The combined natural and anthropogenic emissions of tritium result in a current 
> global inventory of approximately 53 X1018Bq, which is about 50 times greater 
> than tritium levels due to natural sources alone. However, much of this tritium 
> is deposited in the deep ocean where it is unavailable to the circulating waters 
> of the Earth. Okada and Momoshima [1993] estimate that current levels of tritium 
> in surface, ground and rain water are in the range 0.1 to 8 Bq/L. Based on these 
> concentrations they estimate that current tritium levels in humans are 1.7 Bq/kg 
> and result in an annual dose of 0.05 mGy per year (or 0.09 mSv per year assuming 
> that the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) is on the order of 1.8)"
> 
>     Given the school children the world over are being exposed to naturally 
> occurring tritium, are you going to write to the NY Times and propose the 
> elimination of cosmic ray reactions in the upper atmosphere?  No, I suppose that 
> would be absurd.  How did your organization "control" for all of the other 
> sources of tritium to determine the exact origin of the alleged tritium that 
> children were being exposed to as they were driven up the hill to the Lawrence 
> Hall of Science?  Could it be possible that there really isn't any way to tell 
> the origin of a tritium atom on the loose in the atmosphere?  In other words one 
> would have to infer that any tritium atoms concentrations that were measured and 
> were determined to be statistically significantly greater than background were 
> from Lawrence Berkeley Labs given that one can't tell the difference between 
> naturally occurring tritium and tritium made at the labs.  Were your measuring 
> techniques and statistical determinations held up to peer review scrutiny?  It's 
> really easy to make allegations and point a finger at an organization that will 
> in all likelihood ignore your accusations, but that doesn't make your 
> allegations valid! 
> Roy Herren 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Karen Street <Karen_Street at sbcglobal.net>
> To: The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) Mailing List 
> <radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu>
> Sent: Sun, August 19, 2012 7:55:30 PM
> Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Anyone in Berkeley, CA on Fukushima Response Group 
> Formation
> 
> Wait for the NY Times to cover it. That's what we had to do with the people who 
> were worried about all the radioactivity kids were exposed to going past 
> Lawrence Berkeley Labs on their way to Lawrence Hall of Sciences (tritium from 
> the labs). In vain did people say that the extra exposure was comparable to 
> going to school at 1/8" higher elevation. (Fortunately in Berkeley, only the 
> wealthy live in the hills.) Then some school decided not to send any kids to the 
> lab, and the Times covered it. When another school made the same decision a year 
> or two later, the Times covered it. (Normally, it only takes one article in the 
> Times.)
> 
> I am sympathetic with the group's complaints about the workers. In the US, 
> Nuclear Energy Institute had a blog post saying we hire contract labor as well, 
> but we train them—we don't pick laborers up on street corners and pay wages far 
> below what everyone else gets. 
> 
> 
>> Here is an interesting posting by activist Carol Wolman from the
>> FukushimaFalloutForum Yahoo group - there is meeting of a group in
>> Berkeley at 2PM today - note the rhetoric about Fukushima - also note
>> the last line that they are forming groups like this all over the
>> country
>> 
>> 2 pm on Weds August 15th, at 2550 Dana #5B (at Parker).
>> Home of Cecile Pineda, author of Devil's Tango, How I Learned to Fukushima.
>> Our purpose is to raise public awareness of the dangers from the
>> nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi (F-D) which were damaged in the
>> earthquake/tsunami of March 11, 2011. Radiation that was released at
>> that time, that is still being released, and that would be released if
>> another massive earthquake, typhoon, tornado or manmade error
>> precipitates another explosion there- all present huge hazards to the
>> Bay Area and to the planet.
>> A few of us met with Yastel Yamada last week. He is a founder of
>> Skilled Veterans Corps of Fukushima (SVCF). We learned that the owner
>> of F-D, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has subcontracted to 400
>> different companies, with no overall project manager. TEPCO says it
>> can't allow the 700 elderly volunteers of SVCF to work on the
>> containment/cleanup because it has no hiring authority, and all the
>> subcontracted companies have their own employees. We learn from the
>> news that TEPCO is partly owned by the Mafia, the workers are
>> underpaid and overexposed to radiation, the work is sloppy and
>> inadequate, there are lots of leaks, TEPCO is less than candid with
>> information. Cleanup and containment are way too slow, not centrally
>> controlled, not done by people who are experts in this area.
>> Therefore, SVCF and we are advocating internationalization of F-D,
>> which can only happen if there is enough worldwide pressure, from
>> governments and from the people.
>> There is an active Fukushima Responders group in Sebastapol, which
>> meets frequently to plan public events, run a website,
>> http://fukushimaresponse.com/, hold workshops, lobby, etc. They are
>> vigiling every Friday, in support of the Japanese people, who turn out
>> every week by the 100,000's to protest the restarting of nuclear
>> plants in Japan. We will network with them, and with other FR groups
>> now forming around the country.
>> __
> 
> -

--
Best wishes, 
Karen Street
Friends Energy Project
blog http://pathsoflight.us/musing/index.php