Senator Wyden: Fukushima Worse Than Reported

[jeff47]

14. If you want to claim a threat, do the math.

Tons of radiated water dumped into the Pacific sounds enormous. We're all gonna die!!!

Except the pacific is 64.1 million square miles with an average depth of 2.7 miles (source). Meaning it's about 170 million cubic miles of water.

At 32 degrees F, water weighs 62.42lbs per cubic foot (And I'm using 32 degrees for convenience - I don't know the average temperature of the Pacific, but it doesn't change much within reasonable ocean temperatures - 62lbs per cubic foot at 100 degrees F).

So...The Pacific weighs about 780,000,000,000,000,000 (7.8 x 10^17) tons.

Let's say they dumped 100 tons of water into the ocean. That's a lot of water. But it's 0.00000000000128% (1.28 x 10^-14 percent) of the Pacific Ocean.

Suddenly, claims that that water is going to poison the entire Pacific seem significantly less plausible.

No one else can help Japan? Like Japan knows what they are doing even tho after a year has gone by and there is still a HUGE problem?

Uh-huh. Just how long should this cleanup take? I mean, you yourself must be some sort of expert since you know exactly how long the cleanup should take.

Oh wait, you're just spewing fear without even bothering to break out a calculator, much less showing any expertise.

So...how long did it take to clean up Chernobyl? Oh wait...they're not done yet. So you expect Fukushima be cleaned up in a year, when it's been 26 years since Chernobyl and they're not done.