What Is a Tsunami?

By Laron

By Matt Williams via Universe Today, 24 June 2015

The wave from a tsunami crashes over a street in Miyako City, Japan on March 11th, 2011. Credit: REUTERS/Mainichi Shimbun

For people living in oceanfront communities, the prospect of a tsunami is a frightening one. Much like earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes and tornadoes, tsunamis are one of the most destructive natural forces on the planet. And much like these other phenomena, they require the right conditions to happen and are more common in some areas of the world than others.

Knowing how and when a tsunami will strike has therefore a subject of great interest for scientists over the ages. But for anyone who has lived in certain parts of the world where “tsunami zones” are common – namely Japan and the South Pacific – it is a matter of survival.

Definition:
Numerous terms are used in the English language to describe large waves created by the displacement of water, with varying degrees of accuracy. The term tsunami, for example, is literally translated from Japanese to mean “harbor wave”. There are only a few other languages that have an equivalent native word, though similar meanings can be found in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Indian Subcontinent.

The term tidal wave has also been used, which is derived from the most common appearance of a tsunami – an extraordinarily high tidal bore. However, in recent years, the term “tidal wave” has fallen out of favor with the scientific community because tsunami actually have nothing to do with tides, which are produced by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun rather than the displacement of water.

Tsunamis initiate when an earthquake causes the seabed to rupture, which leads to a rapid decrease in sea surface height directly above it. Credit: howitworksdaily.com

The term seismic sea wave also is used to refer to the phenomenon, due to the fact that the waves most often are generated by seismic activity such as earthquakes. However, like “tsunami,” “seismic sea wave” is not a completely accurate term, as forces other than earthquakes – including underwater landslides, volcanic eruptions, underwater explosions, land or ice slumping into the ocean, meteorite impacts, or even sudden changes in weather – can generate such waves by displacing water.

Causes:
The principal cause of a tsunami is the displacement of a substantial volume of water or perturbation of the sea. This is usually the result of earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, glacier calvings, or more rarely by meteorites and nuclear tests. The waves formed in this way are then sustained by gravity.

Tectonic earthquakes trigger tsunamis when the sea floor abruptly deforms and vertically displaces the water above. More specifically, a tsunami can be generated when thrust faults associated with convergent or destructive plate boundaries move abruptly and displace water.

Tsunamis have a small amplitude (wave height) offshore, and a very long wavelength (often hundreds of kilometers long), and only grow in height when they reach shallower water. Once there, the wavelength shortens as the wave encounters resistance, thus increasing the amplitude increases and causing the wave to rears up in a massive tidal bore.


In the 1950s, it was discovered that tsunamis larger than what had previously been believed possible could be caused by giant submarine landslides. These rapidly displace large water volumes, as energy transfers to the water at a rate faster than the water can absorb. Their existence was confirmed in 1958, when a giant landslide in Lituya Bay, Alaska, caused the highest wave ever recorded (524 meters/1700 feet).

A village near the coast of Sumatra that was devastated by the Tsunami that struck South-East Asia in 2004. Credit: US Navy/Public Domain

In general, landslides generate displacements mainly in the shallower parts of the coastline, such as in closed bays and lakes. But an open oceanic landslide large enough to cause a tsunami across an ocean has not yet happened since the advent of modern seismology, and only rarely in human history.

Meteorological phenomena, such tropical cyclones, can generate a storm surge that will cause sea levels to rise, often in coastal regions. These are what is known as meteotsunamis, which are tsunamis triggered by sudden changes in weather. When such tsunamis reach shore, they rear up in shallows and surge laterally, just like earthquake-generated tsunamis.

Tsunamis can also be triggered by external factors, such as meteors or human intervention. For instance, when a meteor of significant strikes a region of the ocean, the resulting impact is enough to displace high volumes of water, thus triggering a tsunami. There has also been much speculation since World War II of how a nuclear detonations have trigger a tsunami, but all attempts at research (especially in the Pacific) have yielded poor results.

Characteristics and Effects:

Tsunamis can travel at well over 800 kilometers per hour (500 mph), but as they approach the coast, wave shoaling compresses the wave and its speed decreases to below 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph). A tsunami in the deep ocean has a much larger wavelength of up to 200 kilometers (120 mi), but diminishes to less than 20 kilometers (12 mi) when it reaches shallow water.

When the tsunami’s wave peak reaches the shore, the resulting temporary rise in sea level is termed run up. Run up is measured in metres above a reference sea level. A large tsunami may feature multiple waves arriving over a period of hours, with significant time between the wave crests.

Tsunamis cause damage by two mechanisms. First, there is the smashing force of a wall of water traveling at high speed, while the second is the destructive power of a large volume of water draining off the land and carrying a large amount of debris with it.

It is often difficult for people to recognize a tsunami in the open ocean because the waves are much smaller further out at sea than they are close to shore. As with earthquakes, several attempts have been made to set up scales of tsunami intensity or magnitude to allow comparison between different events.

Ships try to extinguish a blaze at oil refinery tanks in Ichihara, Chiba Prefecture, after the tsunami that struck in March, 2011. Credit: EPA

The first scales used routinely to measure the intensity of tsunami were the Sieberg-Ambraseys scale, used in the Mediterranean Sea and the Imamura-Iida intensity scale, used in the Pacific Ocean. This latter scale was modified by Soloviev to become the Soloviev-Imamura tsunami intensity scale, which is used in the global tsunami catalogs compiled by the NGDC/NOAA and the Novosibirsk Tsunami Laboratory as the main parameter for the size of the tsunami.

In 2013, following the intensively studied tsunamis in 2004 and 2011, a new 12 point scale was proposed, known as the Integrated Tsunami Intensity Scale (ITIS-2012). This scale was intended to match as closely as possible to the modified ESI2007 and EMS earthquake intensity scales.

Tsunamis throughout History:

Japan and the Pacific Ocean may have the longest recorded history of tsunamis, but they are an often underestimated hazard in the Mediterranean Sea region and Europe in general. In his History of the Peloponnesian War (426 BCE), Greek historian Thucydides offered what could be considered the first recorded speculation about the causes of tsunamis – where he argued that earthquakes at sea were the reason for them.

An aerial view of tsunami damage in Tohoku. Credit: US Navy

After the tsunami of 365 CE devastated Alexandria, Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus described the typical sequence of a tsunami. His descriptions included an earthquake and the sudden retreat of the sea, followed by a gigantic wave.

More modern examples include the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami (which was caused by activity in the Azores–Gibraltar Transform Fault); the 1783 Calabrian earthquakes, which caused several ten thousand deaths; and the 1908 Messina earthquake and tsunami – which caused 123,000 deaths in Sicily and Calabria and is considered one of the most deadly natural disasters in modern European history.

But by far, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was the most devastating of its kind in modern times, killing around 230,000 people and laying waste to communities throughout Indonesia, Thailand, and Southern Asia.

In 2010, an earthquake triggered a tsunami which devastated several coastal towns in south-central Chilem, damaged the port at Talcahuano and caused 4334 confirmed fatalities. The earthquake also generated a blackout that affected 93 percent of the Chilean population.

In 2011, an earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku led to a tsunami that struck Japan and led to 5,891 deaths, 6,152 injuries, and 2,584 people to be declared missing across twenty prefectures. The tsunami also caused meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex.

Tsunamis are a force of nature, without a doubt. And knowing when, where, and how severely they will strike is intrinsic to ensuring that we can limit the damage they do cause.

Universe Today has articles on about tsunamis and causes of tsunamis.

For more information, try tsunami and causes of tsunamis.

Astronomy Cast has an episode on Earth.

Source:
Wikipedia

Posted with permission from UT

Dismantling Fukushima: The World's Toughest Demolition Project; Taking Apart The Shattered Power Station And Its Three Melted Nuclear Cores Will Require Advanced Robotics!

March 05, 2014 - JAPAN - A radiation-proof superhero could make sense of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in an afternoon. Our champion would pick through the rubble to reactor 1, slosh through the pooled water inside the building, lift the massive steel dome of the protective containment vessel, and peek into the pressure vessel that holds the nuclear fuel. A dive to the bottom would reveal the debris of the meltdown: a hardened blob of metals with fat strands of radioactive goop dripping through holes in the pressure vessel to the floor of the containment vessel below. Then, with a clear understanding of the situation, the superhero could figure out how to clean up this mess.

Photo: Kyodo News/AP Photo

Unfortunately, mere mortals can’t get anywhere near that pressure vessel, and Japan’s top nuclear experts thus have only the vaguest idea of where the melted fuel ended up in reactor 1. The operation floor at the top level of the building is too radioactive for human occupancy: The dose rate is 54 millisieverts per hour in some areas, a year’s allowable dose for a cleanup worker. Yet, somehow, workers must take apart not just the radioactive wreck of reactor 1 but also the five other reactors at the ruined plant. 

This decommissioning project is one of the biggest engineering challenges of our time: It will likely take 40 years to complete and cost US $15 billion. The operation will involve squadrons of advanced robots, the likes of which we have never seen. 

Nothing has been the same in Japan since 11 March 2011, when one of history’s worst tsunamisflooded Fukushima Daiichi, crippled its emergency power systems, and triggered a series of explosions and meltdowns that damaged four reactors. A plume of radioactive material drifted over northeast Japan and settled on towns, forests, and fields, while plant workers scrambled to pour water over the nuclear cores to prevent further radioactive releases. Nine months later, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the utility company that operates the plant, declared the situation stable. 

Stability is a relative concept: Although conditions at Fukushima Daiichi aren’t getting worse, the plant is an ongoing disaster scene. The damaged reactor cores continue to glow with infernal heat, so plant employees must keep spraying them with water to cool them and prevent another meltdown. But the pressure vessels and containment vessels are riddled with holes, and those leaks allow radioactive water to stream into basements. TEPCO is struggling to capture that water and to contain it by erecting endless storage tanks. The reactors are kept in check only by ceaseless vigilance. 

TEPCO’s job isn’t just to deal with the immediate threat. To placate the furious Japanese public, the company must clean up the site and try to remove every trace of the facility from the landscape. The ruin is a constant reminder of technological and managerial failure on the grand scale, and it requires a proportionally grand gesture of repentance. TEPCO officials have admitted frankly that they don’t yet know how to accomplish the tasks on their 40-year road map, a detailed plan for decommissioning the plant’s six reactors. But they know one thing: Much of the work will be done by an army of advanced robots, which Japan’s biggest technology companies are now rushing to invent and build.

The Site: During the 2011 accident, reactors 1, 2, and 3 ­suffered partial meltdowns. Explosions shattered reactor
buildings 1, 3, and 4. Reactors 5 and 6 are undamaged.  Illustration: James Provost

Here’s some more bad news: Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the only other commercial-scale nuclear accidents, can’t teach Japan much about how to clean up Fukushima Daiichi. The Chernobyl reactor wasn’t dismantled; it was entombed in concrete. The Three Mile Island reactor was defueled, but Lake Barrett, who served as site director during that decommissioning process, says the magnitude of the challenge was different. At Three Mile Island the buildings were intact, and the one melted nuclear core remained inside its pressure vessel. “At Fukushima you have wrecked infrastructure, three melted cores, and you have some core on the floor, ex-vessel,” Barrett says. Nothing like Fukushima, he declares, has ever happened before.

Barrett, who is now a consultant for the Fukushima cleanup, says TEPCO is taking the only approach that makes sense: “You work from the outside in,” he says, dealing with all the peripheral problems in the buildings before tackling the heart of the matter, the melted nuclear cores. During the first three years of the cleanup, TEPCO has been surveying the site to create maps of radiation levels. The next step is removing radioactive debris and scrubbing radioactive materials off walls and floors. Spent fuel must be removed from the pools in the reactor buildings; leaks must be plugged. Only then will workers be able to flood the containment structures so that the melted globs of nuclear fuel can safely be broken up, transferred to casks, and carted away.

Many of the technologies necessary for the decommissioning already exist in some form, but they must be adapted to fit the unique circumstances of Fukushima Daiichi. “It’s like in the 1960s, when we wanted to put a man on the moon,” says Barrett. “We had rocketry, we had physics, but we had never put all the technologies together.” Just as with the moon shot, there is no guarantee that this epic project can be accomplished. But faced with the wrath of the Japanese people, TEPCO has no choice but to try.

To begin the first step—inspection—TEPCO sent in robots to map the invisible hot spots throughout the smashed reactor buildings. The first to arrive were the U.S.-made PackBot and Warrior, hastily shipped over from iRobot Corp. of Bedford, Mass. But Japan is justly proud of its own robotics industry, so the question arose, Why didn’t TEPCO have robots ready to respond in a nuclear emergency?Yoshihiko Nakamura, a University of Tokyo robotics professor, has the dispiriting answer. The government did fund a program on robotics for nuclear facilities in 2000, following a deadly accidentat a uranium reprocessing facility. But that project was shut down after a year. “[The government] said this technology is immature, and it is not applicable for the nuclear systems, and the nuclear systems are already 100 percent safe,” Nakamura explains. “They didn’t want to admit that the technology should be prepared in case of accident.”

Still, some roboticists in Japan carried on their own research despite the government’s indifference. In the lab of Tomoaki Yoshida, a roboticist at the Chiba Institute of Technology, near Tokyo, robots have learned to crawl over rubble and to climb up and down steps. These small tanks roll on a flexible series of treads, which can be lifted or lowered individually to allow the bot to manage stairs.

After the Fukushima accident, Yoshida’s academic research became very relevant. With seed money from the government, he constructed two narrow metal staircases proportioned like the 5-floor staircases inside the Fukushima Daiichi reactor buildings. This allowed Yoshida to determine whether his bots could navigate those cramped stairs and tight turns. His acrobatic Quince robots proved themselves able, and after hundreds of tests they received TEPCO’s clearance for field operations. In the summer of 2011, the Quince bots became the first Japanese robots to survey the reactor buildings.

The Quinces were equipped with cameras and dosimeters to identify radioactive hot spots. But the robots struggled with a communication issue: The nuclear plant’s massive steel and concrete structures interfere with wireless communication, so the Quinces had to unspool cables behind them to receive commands and transmit data to their operators. The drawback of that approach soon became apparent. One Quince’s cable got tangled and damaged on the third floor of reactor 2, and the lonely bot is still sitting there to this day, waiting for commands that can’t reach it.

Armed for Duty: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries contributed this two-armed bot, the MHI-MEISTeR. Its arms can
be fitted with a variety of tools, including one drill that can take a core sample from concrete walls and floors. Each
arm has seven degrees of freedom, making the bot a versatile and flexible worker.  Photo: Kyodo/AP Photo

Back at Yoshida’s lab, where modest bunk beds bespeak the dedication of his students, the team is currently working on a new and improved survey bot named Sakura. To guard against future tangles, Sakura not only unspools cable behind, it also automatically takes up the slack when it changes direction. It’s waterproof enough to roll through puddles, and it can carry a heavy camera capable of detecting gamma radiation. The bot can tolerate that radiation: Yoshida’s team tested its electronics (the CPU, microcontrollers, and sensors) and found that they’re radiation-tolerant enough to perform about 100 missions before any component is likely to fail. However, the robot itself becomes too radioactive for workers to handle. Sakura must therefore take care of itself: It recharges its batteries by rolling up to a socket and plugging itself in.

The second step in the Fukushima decommissioning is decontamination, because only when that is complete will workers be able to get inside to tackle more complex tasks. The explosions that shattered several of the reactor structures sprayed radioactive materials throughout the buildings, and the best protective suits for workers in hot zones are of little use against the resulting gamma radiation—a worker would have to be covered from head to toe in lead as thick as the width of a hand.

After the accident, the Japanese government called for robots that could work on decontamination, and several of Japan’s leading companies rose to the challenge. Toshiba and Hitachi have designed robots that use jets of high-pressure water and dry ice to abrade the surfaces of walls and floors; the robots will scour away radioactive materials along with top layers of paint or concrete and vacuum up the resulting sludge. But the robots’ range is defined by their own communication cables, and they can carry only limited amounts of their cleaning agents. Another bot, the Raccoon, has already begun nosing across the floor in reactor building 2, trailing long hoses behind it to supply water and suction.

To clear a path for the robotic janitors, another class of robots has been invented to pick up debris and cut through obstacles. The ASTACO-SoRa, from Hitachi, has two arms that can reach 2.5 meters and lift 150 kilograms each. The tools on the ends of the arms—grippers, cutting blades, and a drill—can be exchanged to suit the task. However, Hitachi’s versatile bot is limited to work on the first floor, as it can’t climb stairs.

 

Out Of The Pool: Spent fuel pools inside the damaged reactor buildings contain hundreds of nuclear fuel
assemblies. TEPCO is emptying reactor 4’s pool [top] first. In the extraction process, a cask is lowered into
the pool and filled with radioactive fuel assemblies. Then the cask is transported to a safer location,
lowered into another pool [middle], and unloaded. The job is made more complicated because
some of the assemblies are covered with debris [bottom] from the accident's explosions.
Photos: TEPCO

Removing spent fuel rods is the third step. Each reactor building holds hundreds of spent fuel assemblies in a pool on its top floor. These unshielded pools, perfectly safe when filled with water, became a focus of public fear during the Fukushima Daiichi accident. After reactor building 4 exploded on 15 March, many experts worried that the blast had damaged the structural integrity of that building’s pool and allowed the water to drain out. The pool was soon determined to be full of water, but not before the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had caused an international panic by declaring it dry and dangerous. The reactor 4 pool became one of TEPCO’s urgent decommissioning priorities, not only because it’s a real vulnerability but also because it’s a potent reminder of the accident’s terrifying first days.

The process of emptying that pool began in November 2013. TEPCO workers use a newly installed cranelike machine to lower a cask into the pool, then long mechanical arms pack the submerged container with fuel assemblies. The transport cask, fortified with shielding to block the nuclear fuel’s radiation, is lowered to a truck and brought to a common pool in a more intact building. The building 4 pool contains 1533 fuel assemblies, and moving them all to safety is expected to take a year. The same procedure must be performed at the highly radioactive reactors 1, 2, and 3 and the undamaged (and less challenging) reactors 5 and 6.

Containing the radioactive water that flows freely through the site is the fourth step. Every day, about 400 metric tons of groundwater streams into the basements of Fukushima Daiichi’s broken buildings, where it mixes with radioactive cooling water from the leaky reactor vessels. TEPCO treats that waterto remove most of its radioactive elements, but it can’t be rendered entirely pure—and as a result local fishermen have protested plans to release it into the sea. To store the accumulating water, TEPCO has installed more than 1000 massive tanks, which themselves must be monitored vigilantly for leaks.

TEPCO hopes to stop the flow of groundwater with a series of pumps and underground walls, including an “ice wall” made of frozen soil. Still, at some point the Japanese public must grapple with a difficult question: Can the stored water ever be released into the sea? Barrett, the former site director of Three Mile Island, has argued publicly that the processed water is safe, as contamination is limited to trace amounts of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium is less dangerous than other radioactive materials because it passes quickly through the body; after it’s diluted in the Pacific, Barrett says, it would pose a negligible threat. “But releasing that water is an emotional issue, and it would be a public relations disaster,” he says. The alternative is to follow the Three Mile Island example and gradually dispose of the water through evaporation, a process that would take many years.

TEPCO must also plug the holes in the reactor vessels that allow radioactive cooling water to flow out. Many of the leaks are thought to be in the suppression chambers, doughnut-shaped structures that ring the containment vessel and typically hold water, which is used to regulate temperature and pressure inside the pressure vessel during normal operations. Shunichi Suzuki, TEPCO’s general manager of R&D for the Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning, explains that one of his priorities is developing technologies to find the leak points in the suppression chambers.

“There are some ideas for a submersible robot,” Suzuki says, “but it will be very difficult for them to find the location of the leaks.” He notes that both the suppression chambers and the rooms that surround them are now filled with water, so there’s no easy way to spot the ruptures; it’s not like finding the hole in a leaky pipe that’s spraying water into the air. Among the robot designs submitted by Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Toshiba is one bot that would crawl through the turbid water and use an ultrasonic sensor to find the breaches in the suppression chambers’ walls.

If robots prove impractical, TEPCO may take a more heavy-handed approach and start pouring concrete into the suppression chamber or the pipes that lead to it. “If it’s possible to make a seal between the containment vessel and the suppression chamber, then the leaks don’t matter,” Suzuki says. One way or another, TEPCO hopes to have all the leaks stopped up within three years. Sealing the leaks is a necessary precondition for the final and most daunting task.

Water, Water Everywhere: Groundwater flowing through the site mixes with radioactive cooling water leaking
from reactor buildings and must therefore be stored and treated. To contain the accumulating water, TEPCO
is filling fields with storage tanks [bottom]. These tanks must be monitored for leaks [top]. In August 2013,
TEPCO admitted that 300 metric tons of contaminated water had leaked from one tank. 
Photos, top: TEPCO; bottom: The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP Photo

Removing the three damaged nuclear cores is the last big step in the decommissioning. As long as that melted fuel glows inside reactors 1, 2, and 3, Fukushima Daiichi will remain Japan’s ongoing nightmare. Only once the fuel is safely packed up and carted away can the memory begin to fade. But it will be no easy task: TEPCO estimates that removing the three melted cores will take 20 years or more.

First, workers will flood the containment vessels to the top so that the water will shield the radioactive fuel. Then submersible robots will map the slumped fuel assemblies within the pressure vessels; these bots may be created by adapting those used by the petroleum industry to inspect deep-sea oil wells. Next, enormously long drills will go into action. They must be capable of reaching 25 meters down to the bottoms of the pressure vessels and breaking up the metal pooled there. Other machines will lift the debris into radiation-shielded transport casks to be taken away.

Making the task more complicated is the design of the reactors. They have control rods that project through the bottom of the pressure vessels, and the entry point for each of those control rods is a weak spot. Experts believe that most of the fuel in reactor 1, and some in reactors 2 and 3, leaked down through those shafts to pool on the floor of the containment vessel below. To reach that fuel, some 35 meters down, TEPCO workers will have to drill through the steel of the pressure vessel and work around a forest of wires and pipes.

Before TEPCO can even develop the proper fuel-handling tools, Suzuki says, the company must get a better understanding of the properties of the corium—the technical term for the mess of metals left behind after a meltdown. The company can’t just copy the drills that broke up the melted core of the Three Mile Island reactor, says Suzuki. “At Three Mile Island, [the core] remained in the pressure vessel,” he says. “In our case, it goes through the pressure vessel, so it melted stainless steel. So our fuel debris must be harder.” The melted fuel may also have a lavalike consistency, with a hard crust on top but softer materials inside. TEPCO is now working with computer models and is planning to make an actual batch of corium in a laboratory to study its properties.

When the core material is broken up and contained, it will be whisked away to some to-be-determined storage facility. Over the decades its radioactivity will gradually fade, along with the Japanese public’s memory of the accident. It’s a shame that those twisted blobs of corium are too dangerous to be displayed in a museum, where a placard could explain that we human beings are so clever, we’re capable of building machines we can’t control.

Depending on whom you ask, nuclear power stations like Fukushima Daiichi are exemplars of either humanity’s ingenuity or hubris. But, the museum placard might add, these metallic blobs, plucked from the heart of an industrial horror, prove something else—that we humans also have the grit and perseverance to clean up our mistakes. - IEEE Spectrum.

Fukushima Radiation Damages Thyroid Glands Of California Babies

A study published in the peer-reviewed Open Journal of Pediatrics has found that radioactive Iodine from Fukushima has caused a significant increase in hypothyroidism among babies in California.(1) Even though Japan is 5000 miles across the Pacific Ocean, the study found that elevated airborne beta levels on the West Coast are directly correlated with this common trend among newborn babies after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.

Congenital hypothyroidism is rare, but serious. It normally affects one child in every 2000, which can now be expected to rise. All babies born in California are monitored at birth for Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) levels in blood, since high levels indicate hypothyroidism.

Using data obtained from the State of California over the period of the Fukushima explosions, researchers examined congenital hypothyroidism (CH) in newborns and compared data for babies exposed to radioactive Iodine-131 and born between March 17th and Dec 31st 2011 with unexposed babies born in 2011 before the exposures as well as those born in 2012. Confirmed cases of hypothyroidism increased by 21% in the group of babies that were exposed to excess radioactive iodine in the womb. 44.2 percent of 94.975 sampled Fukushima children have had thyroid ultrasound abnormalities as a likely results of their exposure to radiation.(2)(3)

Although less than three years have elapsed since the meltdown, health effects of low-dose exposures from fallout should be analyzed, especially for those in the earliest stages of life. Health status measures after March 2011 such as infant deaths, neonatal deaths, birth defects, stillbirths, low weight births, premature births, and cancers in the first year of life can be analyzed. Short-term findings of the young can serve as a warning about potential long-term adverse health effects on populations of all ages.  Fukushima fallout appeared to affect all areas of the US, and was especially large in some, mostly in the western part of the nation (2)

Only a few days after the meltdown, I-131 concentration levels in California, Hawaii,  Alaska, Oregon and Washington were up to 211 times above the normal level. At the same time, the number of congenital hypothyroidism cases increased dramatically, seeing a 16 percent increase from March 17 2011 to December 31 2011. In 36 other US states outside of the exposure zone, the risk of congenital hyperthyroidism decreased by 3 percent. Researchers believe that this finding may serve as further proof that Fukushima has something to do with the unusually high results found on the West Coast.(1)

Radioactive iodine that enters into the body usually gathers in the thyroid, which releases growth hormones. Radiation exposure stunts growth of the body and the brain, and also leads to long-lasting effects which were studied during the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during its meltdown in 1986. 10 years after that incident, researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that higher absorption of I-131 radiation led to an increased risk of thyroid cancer among victims of the Chernobyl incident.

 Japan is by order of magnitude, many times worse than Chernobyl. Never in my life would I think that 6 nuclear reactors would be at risk. I know the GE engineers that helped design these reactors, they resigned because they knew they were dangerous. Japan built them on an Earthquake fault. We are dealing with diabolical energy, this is the greatest public health hazard the world has ever witnessed – Dr Helen Caldicott

Here’s a video that sums up the situation quite well.

Here you go another video (in Cantonese, with excerpts in English) that explains the situation:

I’m not trying to spread fear, nor am I afraid of what has happened in Fukushima, but when it comes to environmental disasters, the nuclear fallout at Fukushima has to be among the worst that has ever happened in the history of humanity. At one point, over 300 tons of contaminated water had been flooding into the Pacific Ocean from this disaster every single day. Japanese experts estimate Fukushima’s fallout at 20-30 times as high as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings. There is definitely a lot we are not being told here, just like we weren’t with Chernobyl. Water continues to leak, and that area is still prone to an earthquake. Despite the magnitude and extent of this disaster, it’s not something to ignore, there are always steps and things we can do to create change.

Fukushima should be the last (out of many) experiences we need to help us realize that we don’t have to produce energy this way. Boiling water using nuclear energy in order to generate enough heat and steam to push a turbine is a very elementary way to generate energy. We have technologies that render nuclear power obsolete, like free energy.

We’ve had multiple studies indicate the correlation between consciousness and our physical material world. Thoughts, prayers and healing energy sent to Fukushima and the waters affected also helps. Incidents like the one at Fukushima are an indicator for us to  utilize the power of consciousness to heal the planet as well as ourselves, and to shift our means of producing energy to something better.  We still have a window of opportunity to change things, events like this should cause the entire collective to stop and at a stand still, stop with their daily routine, and just say enough is enough, it doesn’t have to be this way and there are better ways to do things here.

Related Articles:

Fukushima: Your Dyas of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Are Over

Sources:

(1) http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=28599

(2) http://www.fmu.ac.jp/radiationhealth/results/

(3) http://rt.com/news/fukushima-children-thyroids-abnormalities-cancer-444/

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2164974/fukushima_fallout_damaged_thyroid_glands_of_california_babies.html

http://rt.com/usa/fukushima-us-children-thyroid-291/

- See more at: http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/12/16/fukushima-fallout-damages-thyroid-glands-of-california-babies/#sthash.cNkRUK4V.dpuf

Radiation cloud to hit the US West Coast - Message from Dr. Simon Atkins

via transients.info

I caught up a few times with Dr. Simon Atkins in Sydney last month and it was great to finally meet him. Simon has sent along this message in relation to the Fukishima radiation situation and the news of another radioactive cloud coming out of reactor 3. As you can see below, he is fine if you share this with others.

An old nuclear fallout map (not current)

By Climate Risk Scientist Dr. Simon Atkins, 30th December 2013

I figure you would want to know the truth, and so I do not mince words in this email.
If you do not want to know anything about how Fukushima radiation is entering the US food supply, then please do not read any more of this email.

Many radiation clouds from the Fukushima catastrophe have been moving downstream over the last 1,000+ days, and the cumulative radiation and the different types of radiation isotopes / nuclides (of strontium, plutonium, tritium as well as cesium and others) have been intensifying and are entering the food chain in the United States.  The bio-accumulation of radiation in people is already causing many primary and secondary radiation poisoning symptoms.  Families, especially with children younger than 16 as well as those single adults, couples, and older folks with immune challenges, are already doing everything they can to think of and act upon ways to either move further east or get out of the USA all together.  These choices are not easy.  But with radiation, you cannot see, smell, feel, taste or hear it coming.  We are blinded, deaf and dumb to this catastrophe.  Unfortunately, as an atmospheric scientist for 25 years, in watching the Jetstream and sea currents, there is no end in sight. The Japanese government is not doing a single thing to make this better or try to solve it.

And this is the latest news ramping-up the detection of contamination spreading into the United States:  http://www.turnerradionetwork.com/news/146-mjt.  This is worse a warning than I have been giving, but I do believe a lot of it is true.

It's incredibly sad, I am just about lost for words.  I have been predicting this for over 2 and a half years now.  Many of you knew that I left the United States and moved my family out of the country because of this.  I have to say it bluntly:  the radiation contamination into America is going to get much worse especially since nothing is being done to solve it.  We literally have rogue "terrorist" governments -- the USA and Japan -- that are looking blindly the other way, doing absolutely NOTHING to solve this or tell the American people.  The sickness, mutations, and slow deaths from cancers, and other immunological degenerative dis-ease and illness in America will be on the increase, more and more every quarter.  The suffering and chaos will be at times worse, because let me blunt again, some will see no answer, and will 'lose' it.  This is just another one of the dangers to society-at-large when a Black Swan slowly unfolding event (with an acceleration of impacts over time) is happening without being greatly solved.

PLEASE send this out to everyone you know.  Yes, you may forward this with my signature.  You can also follow my tweets at:  @DrSimonAtkins.  Post this or any links on Facebook.  You can also do Web searches for "Dr Simon Atkins + Fukushima" to listen to radio interviews where I provide a list of anti-radiation products.  I am doing the best I can to make everyone aware of this.  There will be delays in answering any question via e-mail.

Too much of Mainstream Media is following a script full of lies, some knowingly, some unknowingly. I ask you to empower yourself to get more information. Go to www.ENEnews.com.  Soon though, more "brave" TV stations will go up against "The System" to report on Fukushima.  And you will begin to hear more about Fukushima, whereas now, most Americans literally have no idea what is truly going on.

People that you know in potential harm's way need to REALLY take this warnings very seriously.  I am on record for saying that after March 2014, and I stand with my prediction, that a social movement will begin (due to the Fukushima disaster's impacts & effects inside America), and life in the USA will change a lot.

Think of ways you can change your life accordingly.  Remember, in the past, there have been thousands upon millions of people that have "fled", left, or otherwise gone to another part of their country or out of their country for all types of reasons in the past.  These have been social migrations, and I believe another one is soon going to begin.  We are now in a "Post-Radiation" world, and Fukushima is easily the biggest environmental disaster that has ever happened. 

God Bless. In peace, 
Simon

FUK-U-SHIMA: 28 Signs That The U.S. West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried With Nuclear Radiation From Fukushima - Map From The Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center Shows Elevated Levels Of Radiation Across The United States!

October 27, 2013 - UNITED STATES - The map below comes from the Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center. It shows that radiation levels at radiation monitoring stations all over the country are elevated. As you will notice, this is particularly true along the west coast of the United States. Every single day, 300 tons of radioactive water from Fukushima enters the Pacific Ocean. That means that the total amouont of radioactive material released from Fukushima is constantly increasing, and it is steadily building up in our food chain. Ultimately, all of this nuclear radiation will outlive all of us by a very wide margin. They are saying that it could take up to 40 years to clean up the Fukushima disaster, and meanwhile countless innocent people will develop cancer and other health problems as a result of exposure to high levels of nuclear radiation. We are talking about a nuclear disaster that is absolutely unprecedented, and it is constantly getting worse. The following are 28 signs that the west coast of North America is being absolutely fried with nuclear radiation from Fukushima…

1. Polar bears, seals and walruses along the Alaska coastline are suffering from fur loss and open sores… 

Wildlife experts are studying whether fur loss and open sores detected in nine polar bears in recent weeks is widespread and related to similar incidents among seals and walruses.

The bears were among 33 spotted near Barrow, Alaska, during routine survey work along the Arctic coastline. Tests showed they had “alopecia, or loss of fur, and other skin lesions,” the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement.

2. There is an epidemic of sea lion deaths along the California coastline…
At island rookeries off the Southern California coast, 45 percent of the pups born in June have died, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service based in Seattle. Normally, less than one-third of the pups would die. It’s gotten so bad in the past two weeks that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event.”

3. Along the Pacific coast of Canada and the Alaska coastline, the population of sockeye salmon is at a historic low. Many are blaming Fukushima.

4. Something is causing fish all along the west coast of Canada to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.

5. A vast field of radioactive debris from Fukushima that is approximately the size of California has crossed the Pacific Ocean and is starting to collide with the west coast.

6. It is being projected that the radioactivity of coastal waters off the U.S. west coast could double over the next five to six years.

7. Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.

8. One test in California found that 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna were contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.

9. Back in 2012, the Vancouver Sun reported that cesium-137 was being found in a very high percentage of the fish that Japan was selling to Canada…

• 73 percent of mackerel tested
• 91 percent of the halibut
• 92 percent of the sardines
• 93 percent of the tuna and eel
• 94 percent of the cod and anchovies
• 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

10. Canadian authorities are finding extremely high levels of nuclear radiation in certain fish samples…
Some fish samples tested to date have had very high levels of radiation: one sea bass sample collected in July, for example, had 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium.

11. Some experts believe that we could see very high levels of cancer along the west coast just from people eating contaminated fish…

“Look at what’s going on now: They’re dumping huge amounts of radioactivity into the ocean — no one expected that in 2011,” Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, toldGlobal Security Newswire. “We could have large numbers of cancer from ingestion of fish.”

12. BBC News recently reported that radiation levels around Fukushima are “18 times higher” than previously believed.

13. An EU-funded study concluded that Fukushima released up to 210 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 into the atmosphere.

14. Atmospheric radiation from Fukushima reached the west coast of the United States within a few daysback in 2011.

15. At this point, 300 tons of contaminated water is pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

16. A senior researcher of marine chemistry at the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute says that “30 billion becquerels of radioactive cesium and 30 billion becquerels of radioactive strontium” are being released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

17. According to Tepco, a total of somewhere between 20 trillion and 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium have gotten into the Pacific Ocean since the Fukushima disaster first began.

18. According to a professor at Tokyo University, 3 gigabecquerels of cesium-137 are flowing into the port at Fukushima Daiichi every single day.

19. It has been estimated that up to 100 times as much nuclear radiation has been released into the ocean from Fukushima than was released during the entire Chernobyl disaster.

20. One recent study concluded that a very large plume of cesium-137 from the Fukushima disaster will start flowing into U.S. coastal waters early next year…

Ocean simulations showed that the plume of radioactive cesium-137 released by the Fukushima disaster in 2011 could begin flowing into U.S. coastal waters starting in early 2014 and peak in 2016.

21. It is being projected that significant levels of cesium-137 will reach every corner of the Pacific Ocean by the year 2020.

22. It is being projected that the entire Pacific Ocean will soon “have cesium levels 5 to 10 times higher” than what we witnessed during the era of heavy atomic bomb testing in the Pacific many decades ago.

23. The immense amounts of nuclear radiation getting into the water in the Pacific Ocean has caused environmental activist Joe Martino to issue the following warning…

“Your days of eating Pacific Ocean fish are over.”

24. The Iodine-131, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 that are constantly coming from Fukushima are going to affect the health of those living the the northern hemisphere for a very, very long time. Just consider whatHarvey Wasserman had to say about this…

Iodine-131, for example, can be ingested into the thyroid, where it emits beta particles (electrons) that damage tissue. A plague of damaged thyroids has already been reported among as many as 40 percent of the children in the Fukushima area. That percentage can only go higher. In developing youngsters, it can stunt both physical and mental growth. Among adults it causes a very wide range of ancillary ailments, including cancer.

Cesium-137 from Fukushima has been found in fish caught as far away as California. It spreads throughout the body, but tends to accumulate in the muscles.

Strontium-90’s half-life is around 29 years. It mimics calcium and goes to our bones.

25. According to a recent Planet Infowars report, the California coastline is being transformed into “a dead zone”…

The California coastline is becoming like a dead zone.

If you haven’t been to a California beach lately, you probably don’t know that the rocks are unnaturally CLEAN – there’s hardly any kelp, barnacles, sea urchins, etc. anymore and the tide pools are similarly eerily devoid of crabs, snails and other scurrying signs of life… and especially as compared to 10 – 15 years ago when one was wise to wear tennis shoes on a trip to the beach in order to avoid cutting one’s feet on all the STUFF of life – broken shells, bones, glass, driftwood, etc.

There are also days when I am hard-pressed to find even a half dozen seagulls and/or terns on the county beach.

You can still find a few gulls trolling the picnic areas and some of the restaurants (with outdoor seating areas) for food, of course, but, when I think back to 10 – 15 years ago, the skies and ALL the beaches were literally filled with seagulls and the haunting sound of their cries both day and night…

NOW it’s unnaturally quiet.

26. A study conducted last year came to the conclusion that radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster could negatively affect human life along the west coast of North America from Mexico to Alaska “for decades”.

27. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is being projected that the cleanup of Fukushima could take up to 40 years to complete.

28. Yale Professor Charles Perrow is warning that if the cleanup of Fukushima is not handled with 100% precision that humanity could be threatened “for thousands of years“…

“Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years.”

Are you starting to understand why so many people are so deeply concerned about what is going on at Fukushima? - Scoop.