{"id":37259,"date":"2017-02-13T03:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T08:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37259"},"modified":"2020-07-13T10:53:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-13T14:53:00","slug":"most-of-what-journalists-know-about-radioactivity-came-from-watching-godzilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/02\/13\/most-of-what-journalists-know-about-radioactivity-came-from-watching-godzilla\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;[M]ost of what journalists know about radioactivity came from watching <em>Godzilla<\/em>&#8220;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/trending\/2017\/02\/10\/relax-that-scary-fukushima-headline-was-fake-news\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Charlie Martin<\/a> explains why the &#8220;news&#8221; out of Fukushima lately has been mostly unscientific hyperventilation and bloviation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>On February 8, Adam Housley of <em>Fox News<\/em> reported a story with a terrifying headline: &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/insider.foxnews.com\/2017\/02\/08\/unimaginable-levels-radiation-fukushima-pacific-ocean-leaks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Radiation at Japan&#8217;s Fukushima Reactor Is Now at &#8216;Unimaginable&#8217; Levels<\/a>.&#8221; Let&#8217;s just pick up the most exciting paragraphs:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The radiation levels at Japan&#8217;s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant are now at &#8220;unimaginable&#8221; levels.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>[Housley] said the radiation levels &mdash; as high as 530 sieverts per hour &mdash; are now the highest they&#8217;ve been since 2011 when a tsunami hit the coastal reactor.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;To put this in very simple terms. Four sieverts can kill a handful of people,&#8221; he explained.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The degree to which this story is misleading is <em>amazing<\/em>, but to explain it, we need a little bit of a tutorial.<\/p>\n<p>The Touhoku earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, along with all the other damage they caused, knocked out the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi (&#8220;plant #1&#8221;) and Daini (&#8220;plant #2&#8221;) reactors. Basically, the two reactors were hit with a 1000-year earthquake and a 1000-year tsunami, and the plants as built weren&#8217;t able to handle it.<\/p>\n<p>Both reactors failed, and after a sequence of unfortunate events, melted down. I wrote quite a lot about it at the time; bearing in mind this was early in the story, <a href=\"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/blog\/fear-the-media-meltdown-not-the-nuclear-one\/?singlepage=true\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">my article from then<\/a> has a lot of useful information.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>So what have we learned today?<\/p>\n<p>We learned that inside the reactor containment at Fukushima Daini, site of the post-tsunami reactor accident, it&#8217;s very very radioactive. <em>How<\/em> radioactive? We don&#8217;t know, because the dose rate has been reported in inappropriate units &mdash; Sieverts are only meaningful if someone is inside the reactor to get dosed.<\/p>\n<p>Then we learned that the Fukushima accident is leaking 300 tons of radioactive water &mdash; but until we dig into primary sources, we <em>didn&#8217;t<\/em> learn the radioactive water is very nearly clean enough to be drinking water. So what effect does this have on the ocean, as Housley asks? <em>None<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The third thing we learned &mdash; and I think probably the most important thing &mdash; is to never trust a journalist writing about anything involving radiation, the metric system, or any arithmetic more challenging than long division.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charlie Martin explains why the &#8220;news&#8221; out of Fukushima lately has been mostly unscientific hyperventilation and bloviation: On February 8, Adam Housley of Fox News reported a story with a terrifying headline: &#8220;Radiation at Japan&#8217;s Fukushima Reactor Is Now at &#8216;Unimaginable&#8217; Levels.&#8221; Let&#8217;s just pick up the most exciting paragraphs: The radiation levels at Japan&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,28,16,15],"tags":[1085,778,213,1386],"class_list":["post-37259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-media","category-science","category-technology","tag-fakenews","tag-mathematics","tag-newspapers","tag-nuclearpower"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9GX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37259"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58752,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37259\/revisions\/58752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}