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Maybe they need to cut off all the branches and the leaves of cedar right now or glue the pollen so it won’t fly away. Otherwise radiation will spread around again even though they decontaminate. In 20km area, there are countless numbers of cedar. That will be a really hard but we need to do something for it. Who’s in charge of that in the government? I wonder if he/she thinks of that.

Mochizuki Commentary

[...] Now it’s known that most part of the plume is stuck to the trees or soil in the mountains, where you can hardly decontaminate. [...] Radioactive pollen will set off from the ground and fly to south (Tokyo) again. We take pollen into our lungs or eyes, which causes severe internal exposure

Eisuke Matsui, a lung cancer specialist who is a former associate professor at Gifu University's School of Medicine, argued in his papers submitted to the conference that the victims of Chernobyl in the neighboring present-day country of Belarus have suffered from a raft of other problems, including congenital malformations, type-1 diabetes and cataracts. Matsui cited a lengthy and detailed report of research by the Russian scientists Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko and Alexey V. Nesterenko that was published in 2007, and republished in English in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences under the title "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment." Matsui stressed that, based on such evidence, the Japanese government should approve group evacuations of children — at the expense of the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. — from certain parts of Fukushima Prefecture. He cited some areas of the city of Koriyama, 50 to 60 km from the stricken nuclear plant, where soil contamination by radioactive cesium-137 has reached 5.13 Curies per sq. km. That is the same as in areas of Ukraine where residents were given rights to evacuate, Matsui said. In fact in June, the parents of 14 schoolchildren in Koriyama filed a request for a temporary injunction with the Fukushima District Court, asking it to order the city to send their children to schools in safer areas.

In the ongoing civil suit, those parents claim that the children's external radiation exposure has already exceeded 1 millisievert according to official data — the upper yearly limit from all sources recommended by the ICRP for members of the public under normal conditions. Following a nuclear incident, however, the ICRP recommends local authorities to set the yearly radiation exposure limit for residents in contaminated areas at between 1 and 20 millisieverts, with the long-term goal of reducing the limit to 1 millisievert per year. Meanwhile, Hisako Sakiyama, former head researcher at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, delved into the non-cancer risks of exposure to radiation. In her presentation, she referred to a report compiled in April by the German Affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Titled "Health Effects of Chernobyl: 25 years after the reactor catastrophe," this documents an alarmingly high incidence of genetic and teratogenic (fetal malformation) damage observed in many European countries since Chernobyl.

Sakiyama also pointed out that the German report showed that the incidence of thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure was not limited to children. For instance, she cited IPPNW survey findings from the Gomel district in Belarus, a highly-contaminated area, when researchers compared the incidence of thyroid cancer in the 13 years before the Chernobyl explosion and the 13 years after. These findings show that the figures for the latter period were 58 times higher for residents aged 0-18, 5.3 times higher for those aged 19-34, 6 times higher for those aged 35-49, and 5 times higher for those aged 50-64. "In Japan, the government has a policy of not giving out emergency iodine pills to those aged 45 and older (because it considers that the risk of them getting cancer is very low),"' Sakiyama said. "But the (IPPNW) data show that, while less sensitive compared to children, adults' risks go up in correspondence with their exposure to radioactivity."

Further post-Chernobyl data was presented to the conference by Sebastian Pflugbeil, a physicist who is president of the German Society for Radiation Protection. Reporting the results of his independent research into child cancers following the Chernobyl disaster, he said that "in West Germany ... with an exposure of 1 millisievert per year, hundreds of thousands of children were affected." He noted, though, that any official admissions regarding health damage caused by the 1986 disaster in the then Soviet Union came very slowly and insufficiently in Europe. Indeed, he said the authorities denied there were health risks for years afterward. In response, an audience member who said he was a science teacher at a junior high school in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, asked Pflugbeil to exactly identify the level of exposure beyond which residents should be evacuated. While acknowledging that was a very difficult question, the German specialist noted later, however, that he would think pregnant women should probably leave Fukushima — adding, "I have seen many cases over the years, but I come from Germany and it's not easy to judge (about the situation in Japan)."

At a round table discussion later in the day, as well as discussing specific issues many participants made the point that science belongs to the people, not just experts — the very point that underpinned the entire event. As Wataru Iwata, director of the Fukushima-based citizens' group CRMS, one of the forum's organizers (which also conducts independent testing of food from in and around Fukushima Prefecture) put it: "Science is a methodology and not an end itself." In the end, though the citizens' forum — which ran from 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. — arrived at no clear-cut conclusions, organizers said that that in itself was a good outcome. And another conference involving citizens and scientists is now being planned for March 2012.

The Ministry did the survey twice in June and August. It selected the survey locations from the areas that showed relatively high level of cesium deposition in soil in the Ministry's aerial survey after the accident. 50 river locations and 51 wells were selected. Radioactive cesium and iodine-131 were measured in all 101 locations. Strontium and plutonium were measured in 10 river locations where the air radiation was high. Similarly, at 6 wells, only strontium was measured.

The highest cesium-137 (half life 30 years) for the river water was detected in Mano District in Minami Soma City (37 kilometers north by northwest from the nuke plant), at 2.0 becquerels/kg. The average amount of cesium-137 in river water was 0.58 becquerels/kg. The highest cesium-137 for the well water was detected in Nukazawa in Motomiya City (54 kilometers west of the plant), at 1.1 becquerels/kg. The average for well water was 0.49 becquerels/kg.

According to the Ministry of Education and Science, "Radioactive materials in both river water and well water are far below the provisional safety limit of 200 becquerels/kg". However, according to the Ministry's national survey in 2009, the highest level in river water was found in Akita Prefecture at 0.00037 becquerels/kg (ND in Fukushima). So, 2.0 becquerels/kg of cesium-137 detected this time in Fukushima is 5,400 times as much as the highest level in 2009 in river water. As to 1.1 becquerels/kg of cesium-137 from the well water, it is 6,500 times as much as the highest level detected in tap water in 2009.

The largest amount of strontium-90 (half life 30 years) was detected in a river in Onahama in Iwaki City, at 0.018 becquerels/kg, 5.14 times the level detected in the 2009 survey. Strontium-90 in well water was the same level as before the accident. Plutonium and iodine-131 were below the detection limit.

According to the Ministry's calculation on the internal radiation if one drinks the river water that had the maximum amount of radioactive materials for one year, cesium-137 would result in 0.025 millisievert, and strontium-90 in 0.00049 millisievert.Hmmm. They tested an alpha emitter (plutonium) and a beta emitter (strontium) in water in locations with high air radiation? What does high air radiation have to do with alpha and beta emitters? And what about other nuclides, like cobalt-60?The Ministry of Education tested water at these locations twice: first in late June to early July, then in early August. Looking at the result, there are two locations where the amount of radioactive cesium significantly INCREASED during the one month, indicating perhaps the inflow of radioactive materials from the surrounding mountains.The Ministry's document has very poor resolution, but here's the page that shows charts of cesium-137 detections (page 19 in the document):

"The biggest problem is whether we can win the residents' consensus," said Kazuhiro Shiga, an official working on decontamination at Minami Soma city, about 25 km (15 miles)northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The government has so far raised 220 billion yen ($2.9 billion) for decontamination work and the environment ministry has requested about another 460 billion yen in the budget for the fiscal year from next April. Some experts say the cleanup will cost trillions of yen.

The U.N. atomic watchdog suggested this month that Japan should be less conservative in cleaning up vast contaminated areas, saying that there are cleanup methods that do not require storage.

He noted that while the North Anna nuclear facility, near the quake's epicenter in Mineral, Va., successfully shut down Tuesday, one of its backup generators failed to work. The plant declared an "alert" — the second lowest of NRC's four emergency classifications. It regained its electricity seven hours later but is not yet back in operation. Twelve other nuclear power plants along the East Coast and upper Midwest declared an "unusual event," the lowest classification. They resumed normal operations by the end of Tuesday. They are: Peach Bottom, Three Mile Island, Susquehanna and Limerick in Pennsylvania; Salem, Hope Creek and Oyster Creek in New Jersey; Calvert Cliffs in Maryland; Surry in Virginia; Shearon Harris in North Carolina and D.C. Cook and Palisades in Michigan.

"It's unclear how they (U.S. reactors) would stand up," says Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit group critical of nuclear energy. He says the lack of transparency about their preparedness "provides an additional smokescreen" that implies the public should just trust them. "It's not 'trust us.' It's a regulatory process," says Steve Kerekes, spokesman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. He says each plant looks at historic seismic activity in its area, designs against that and upgrades systems as needed. Last year alone, he says, the industry spent about $7 billion on capital improvements.

Yet not all that money was spent on safety, and the regulatory process is "based on industry self-assessment," says Robert Alvarez, scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and former senior adviser at the Department of Energy. "You can imagine the conflicts of interest that arise." So how prepared each nuclear plant is for an earthquake, he says, is "pretty much what the operators say it is."

Jim Norvelle, spokesman of Dominion Virginia Power, which operates the North Anna plant, says its two reactors were built to withstand ground motion of 0.12g to 0.18g, depending on soil composition. He says that translates into magnitudes of 5.9 to 6.2. He says that although one backup diesel generator leaked when Tuesday's quake cut off power, the plant had a spare generator and redundant safety systems to keep the reactors' radioactive cores cool.