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An unstoppable tide of radioactive trash and chemical waste from Fukushima is pushing ever closer to North America. An estimated 20 million tons of smashed timber, capsized boats and industrial wreckage is more than halfway across the ocean, based on sightings off Midway by a Russian ship's crew. Safe disposal of the solid waste will be monumental task, but the greater threat lies in the invisible chemical stew mixed with sea water.

This new triple disaster floating from northeast Japan is an unprecedented nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) contamination event. Radioactive isotopes cesium and strontium are by now in the marine food chain, moving up the bio-ladder from plankton to invertebrates like squid and then into fish like salmon and halibut. Sea animals are also exposed to the millions of tons of biological waste from pig farms and untreated sludge from tsunami-engulfed coast of Japan, transporting pathogens including the avian influenza virus, which is known to infect fish and turtles. The chemical contamination, either liquid or leached out of plastic and painted metal, will likely have the most immediate effects of harming human health and exterminating marine animals.

Many chemical compounds are volatile and can evaporate with water to form clouds, which will eventually precipitate as rainfall across Canada and the northern United States. The long-term threat extends far inland to the Rockies and beyond, affecting agriculture, rivers, reservoirs and, eventually, aquifers and well water.   Falsifying Oceanography

Can Japan do better than Chernobyl?, Australian Broadcasting Corporation by Dr Margaret Beavis, Jan. 6, 2012:

[...] There have been many failures in the handling of this situation. But perhaps the greatest relate to the government’s duty of care to protect Japanese citizens. The government failed to act on information about radioactive plumes. In doing so it exposed many communities to harmful radiation, and many evacuated into even higher radioactive areas. In addition, the government has declared the “safe” allowable limits for radiation exposure can be changed from the internationally accepted levels of 1 mSv to 20 mSv a year. Women and children are particularly sensitive to radiation exposure. Subjecting children to 20mSv a year for five years will result in about 1 in 30 developing cancer. After Chernobyl anyone likely to be exposed to more than 5 mSv a year was evacuated, and those in areas of 1-5 mSv were offered relocation and bans were placed on eating locally produced food.

Finally, there is an ongoing culture of poor monitoring, poor information release and cover up. It continues to significantly under report radiation levels, claiming total radiation releases at approximately half the level of observed releases detected by world wide Nuclear Test Ban Treaty monitoring sites. Current radioactivity levels are measured at 1 metre off the ground, not at ground level where children play and where radioactivity levels are significantly higher. [...] From a public health perspective the Japanese government continues to fail to protect its people, particularly its children. To quote Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, “At this point, the single most important public health measure to minimi[s]e the health harm over the long term is much wider evacuation.” [...]

Officials in Fukushima Prefecture say they have detected high levels of radiation in a new building. They say a construction material may have been tainted with radioactive substances from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  The officials say the contamination was found at a 3-story apartment building in Nihonmatsu City that was completed last July. The city checked the condo for radiation in December after regular monitoring found that children living there had been exposed to higher levels of radiation than other children over a 3-month period. The city found that the radioactive cesium level on the first floor was 1.24 microsieverts per hour, which is higher than outside. [...]

The linear no-threshold model (LNT) is a method for predicting the long term, biological damage caused by ionizing radiation and is based on the assumption that the risk is directly proportional to the dose at all dose levels. In other words, the sum of several very small exposures have the same effect as one larger exposure. The LNT model therefore predicts higher risks than either the threshold model, which assumes that very small exposures are negligible, or the radiation hormesis model, which predicts the least risk by assuming that radiation at very small doses can be beneficial.

Because the current data is inconclusive, scientists disagree on which method should be used. Before the nuclear industry existed, the only health concerns were based more around natural occurring radiation and our bodies had a mechanism to protect us by the release of melatonin for example. Higher levels of radiation were found to in areas where radioactive elements existed naturally and, some have proven to be fatal. As the nuclear industry started and the science of ionizing radiation damage matured, the industry had to develop guidelines which could be used to set limits. Unfortunately those limits were established on the basis of probabilities of getting cancers etc. to the body due to the exposures. Acute and Chronic doses were established. The devastation caused by the bombing in Japan were used to form some basis of exposure.  That information has had application in the nuclear industry through the years.

Companies that hire workers who are untrained and uneducated about working in areas where the risk of receiving radiation exposure and dose exists,  should be fined if those workers are found to be unfamiliar with their work, safety, protective clothing and proper procedures. The industry throughout the world hires these workers sometimes referred to as “Road Whores”, some of which have experience and are trained, but many of which are labor type workers doing the seemingly least important but necessary tasks.

The misinformation on thorium is highly promoted by the nuclear industry and various companies that want investment dollars for thorium reactors and fuel

One myth is that thorium is safe. Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 billion years (billions, not millions). Thorium-232 is also highly radiotoxic, with the same amount of radioactivity of uranium and thorium, thorium produces a far higher dose in the body. If someone inhaled an amount of thorium the bone surface dose is 200 times higher than if they inhaled the same amount of uranium. Thorium also requires longer spent fuel storage than uranium. With the daughter products of thorium like technetium‐99 with a half life of over 200,000 years, thorium is not safe nor a solution to spent fuel storage issues.

Another myth is that thorium reactors can run at atmospheric temperatures, in order to produce power they must be run differently and would not be at atmospheric temperatures. Many of the thorium reactors use liquid sodium fluoride in the reactor process. This material is highly toxic and has its own series of risks. The creation of thorium fuels is also not safer than creating uranium fuels. Thorium poses the same nuclear waste and toxic substance problems found in mining and fuel milling of uranium.

Startling Revelations about Three Mile Island Disaster Raise Doubts Over Nuke Safety, Institute for Southern Studies by Sue Sturgis, April 3, 2009: