EPA: Expect More Radiation in Rainwater

[Octafish]

36. Four decades is as good a guess as any I've found.

What a nice non-industry thinker found is that radioactivity will continue to spew until then:

Fukushima: Living With the Consequences

BY GAR SMITH – MARCH 11, 2013


An excerpt from Nuclear Roulette: The Truth about the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth

This time no one dropped a bomb on us. . . . We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives.

—Haruki Murakami, Japanese novelist

EXCERPT...

Tokyo spent $3 billion on decontamination work in 2011 and expected to spend twice that amount in 2012. The cost for decontaminating the area around the damaged reactors is projected to exceed $13 billion and take 40 years. Professor Tatsuhiko Kodama of the University of Tokyo’s Radioisotope Center projects that a responsible cleanup all the land poisoned by TEPCO’s fallout could cost nearly $10 trillion.

Although the government utterly failed to accurately inform the public about the radioactivity contained in food and certain consumer goods, Tokyo’s leaders now insist that it is safe for some refugees to leave their relocation squats and begin returning home. To justify this, Tokyo has determined that radiation levels 10 times greater than pre-accident background radiation can now be considered “safe.” Fukushima governor Yuhei Sato urged displaced residents to return to their homes and even offered returning evacuees the promise of job opportunities. These include “decontamination jobs.”

Fallout in the Waves

While the ocean’s impact on Fukushima was sudden and specific, Fukushima's environmental impacts on the ocean will be widespread and long lasting. In the first, desperate days of the reactor calamity, the failure of emergency cooling systems on the General Electric Mark I reactors forced TEPCO to cool the seething reactor cores with seawater. With no place to store the irradiated coolant, TEPCO dumped a million gallons (11,500 tons) of seawater back into the Pacific Ocean—with radiation levels 7.5 million times the legal limit. TEPCO told the public that no more than 15,000 terabecquerels had been released into the ocean, but the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) subsequently placed the estimate closer to 27,000 terabecquerels.

China’s State Oceanic Administration reported finding nearly 100,000 square miles of the Pacific tainted with radioactive iodine, strontium, and cesium at levels 300 times above normal. (Cesium-137 is absorbed by phytoplankton, zooplankton, and kelp that are ingested by fish, marine mammals, and humans.) On December 1, 2011, the IRSN reported that the Fukushima disaster had caused the worst ocean contamination in world history—100 times greater that Chernobyl’s pollution of the Black Sea.

In the first days following the accident, nearly 13,500 terabecquerels of seaborne cesium-137 were expected to pass the Philippines before turning north and heading east along the Kuroshio current.Computer models indicated that the huge swirl of radioactive water was heading for Hawaii and could reach the West Coast of North America by early 2013. But it took only a month for airborne radioactive iodine-131 to show up in kelp beds off the West Coast; California State University scientists found levels 250 times normal in kelp sampled in the waters off southern California.

CONTINUED...

http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/fukushima_living_with_the_consequences/

I'd feel a lot better if Japan, the United States, China and whoever else has info would open it up for all to see and think about. As it stands, like in Voodoo Economics, we have to rely on trickle-down science.