MUTANT ZOMBIE CANCER PLANTS

Not BRAAAINNNSSS...
It's GRAAIINNNNSSSSS....

Well, now that that's out of the way, let's get to talking about those mutant zombie cancer plant's I mentioned. Most of the radioactive food we eat comes from one path: plants absorbing radioactive water/soil isotopes and us eating those or plant absorbing stuff then transferring it to animals that eat them which we then eat. What happens to humans after they start drinking radiation contaminated water or eating radiation contaminated food from those nasty radioisotopes spreading through the environment from fallout/improperly disposed of nuclear waste/facility accidents? Bad stuff: cancer, nausea, defects, possible genetic repercussions for you and any future children. Yeah, nasty stuff. Similar stuff happens to animals, most people know cancer isn't specific to just humans. But, did you know plants can get cancer as well?



Cancer is usually associated with the terrible thing that afflicts upwards of 40% of humans and is frequently fatal. Cancer is really just rabidly reproducing cells. That's it. Something so simple can cause so much pain and suffering and cost so much money. It sucks, a lot, when your own body just fills up with a mass of useless cells in places where they don't belong. I went over this in a blog a few weeks ago but I'll summarize it briefly. Cancer comes in stages 0-4. 0 is in-situ, like brand new, single location cancers that aren't as bad, relatively. Stage 1 is localized where they start growing in place and being a big nuisance where they shouldn't, moving to adjacent tissues, moving nerves, pressing on things, like a golf ball inserted somewhere in your body. Stage 2-3 is where the cancer enters the lymph and starts to mobilize. A lot of time Stage 3 is showing up in the lymph nodes and causing problems. Eventually, stage 4 starts where there are too many mobile cancer cells for the lymph nodes to strain out and they spread throughout the body, overwhelming the immune system. Tons of golf balls and damaged tissues all over the body. Bad.
All this comes from a couple strands of DNA getting hit by the ionizing radiation in the contaminated food. So, can plants get cancer? The answer is yes since plants are made of cells, and these cells can also be damaged or infected and start to reproduce rapidly. Plant cells, if you remember your old Biology lectures, have cell walls made of cellulose which makes them much more rigid. Because of this, it is very hard for cancers to move far from their origins. This tends to produce bumps or knots in the wood that look like:

 

So there you have it, a possible treatment for cancer is making our cells stronger and stopping the spread of cancer. The human race has mimicked Mother Nature before so this may be one more time she can help us.
The cure for cancer may not be out there but maybe ways to preempt it are! Plants found a way.
Sorry for lack of mutant and zombie related themes.

-Michael

The fallout on fallout in Fallout

Completely unrelated and shameless plug for what I'm listening to while I write this:
since you're either perusing the internet for nuclear related topics or a Nuclear Eng. classmate "encouraged" to read this, I'm guessing there's a decent possibility you're a Star Wars fan,. If that's true and you fancy EDM music, I would highly recommend the new Star Wars Headspace album produced by Rick Rubin.
"Neither stale tribute nor sloppy lovefest, Headspace aims for simple fun and hits it square, like a T-16 targeting womp rats back on Tatooine."

Okay, back to business! This post came about from the idea that Fallout 4 may actually be a semi-accurate depiction of survival and long term effects of thermonuclear war. After some reading, i found 2 articles that really summed up what I wanted to say, i didn't think it necessary to butcher them and put it here. Instead, here's the first one that talks about almost exactly what I wanted to say. Next, here's one that simplifies a lot of the hard to understand stuff about dose terms, decay rates, and other background explanations that might help you understand better rather than just accept what is being said.


Basically, Fallout may actually be a good depiction of what the landscape would look like after a thermonuclear war. The mechanics behind it (like immediate curing from radiation poisoning)  and the mutant animals, not so much.

Moving on from the reference in the blog title that grabbed your attention, it's time for a real world reference and application of the topic!

Fallout lore states, in reference to what caused it to be a nuclear wasteland: "the city of Las Vegas, from Fallout: New Vegas, was the target of 77 nuclear warheads alone" and page 11 of the Fallout 1 game manual states "the average size of a nuclear warhead is between 200-750 kilotons." Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site
 ranging from 10 kilotons to 1 megaton yield. So, why doesn't Nevada look like Fallout? Well, it kind of does, being a desert, but again, no mutants. The main difference is the manner in which the detonations happened. In Fallout, they hit cities which caught on fire and pumped tons of carbon into the atmosphere all while poisoning the landscape and water supplies. In real life Nevada, most of the tests were underground and in the middle of no where, thus no giant city to burn and mostly contained poisoning. But what about the groundwater and landscape?

This is of growing concern to Nevadians (? Help please ?). The contained radioactive fallout is still there. Fortunately it's underground in a desert with a naturally low water table but eventually, it still reaches the water table and can then be transported wherever the water goes. Unfortunately, once it gets there, it cannot be removed except by time and we can only monitor that transport and decay progress. This article says about 300 million Ci is contained in the slow-moving aquifers underneath the desert. For now, it's a waiting game to see if the contaminated water will move out from under the test site and how fast it will decay. Moving 12 - 18 inches a year, it's no Usain Bolt, but it is steadily moving to dangerous water table locations where people in Nevada drink from (if not already there). Nevada is petitioning the government for recompense for the damages and is fighting against a "massive part of their state [becoming] a permanent environmental sacrifice zone." 
Gotta go! More next time!

-Michael

Big Ass Post for a Big Ass Bomb

The biggest bomb ever detonated, in fact. Tsar Bomba. The design allowed for a 100 MT blast but it was scaled down to *only* produce 50 MT to avoid too many problems from the fallout. 50 MT. M as in Mega. Little Boy, the first atomic bomb dropped in an act of warfare, detonated with a 15 kt yield. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had a 21 kt yield. Tsar Bomba was over 2500 times more powerful of an explosion than either of those. and it could've been double that, 5000 times larger, had the Russians figured out a safe way to detonate it!!

To give the Soviets some credit, they decided not to build the 100 MT version because of the serious health hazards a detonation of that size would've posed to the northern areas of the USSR. The resulting mushroom cloud being 64 km high, about 1/5 of the way to where the International Space Station orbits (330), would lead you to believe it would have immense fallout repercussions, I'll get into this later on.

The weapon itself weighs 27 tons, they had to strip just about everything they could from the plane they dropped it from, a Tu-95, including extra fuel tanks and the bomb bay doors. This is the Tu-95,

 which for reference, is about 2 times the size of a Boeing 737:

So, basically you've got this big plane carrying a big bomb which is going to make a big explosion. But, lot of people forget that you've gotta watch out that the bomb you drop doesn't have an explosion so large that your bombing run becomes a suicide run. To prevent this, they attached parachutes to the bomb so it fell slower and gave the pilots 45 extra seconds to gtfo. The bomb detonated 4 km off the ground, about 6.5 miles high, but the actual fireball never touched the ground, the shock wave was so immense that it kept if from actually reaching the ground. This shock wave was so large, it circled the earth at least 3 times before dissipating.

Onto the fallout aspect since that's what triggered this and last post in relation to atmospheric radioisotope dispersion. Like I already said, the bomb was supposed to be 100 MT but to modify it to 50 MT, the Soviets put a lead shield around the third and (people think) the second stage to cut down on fast fission of the U-238 there. That's right, I said third stage, as in the bomb had 3 stages.

If you aren't familiar with how thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bombs work, here's a quick update(I'll probably be on some government watch list for a while after this). Like a regular bomb, nuclear weapons work by putting as much energy as you can in as small a space as you can until it is all released at once. Nuclear fission, things splitting apart, releases a lot of energy if done right. That's how nuclear power works; split uranium-235 apart, use the heat to boil water to steam, use steam to turn turbine and make electricity flow. Little Boy and Fat Man were fission type bombs. Make an assembly that isn't critical but can be made to go supercritical somehow and then hold it together as the energy builds until it blows itself apart. Very dirty. They typically blow apart before they're burned up all the nasty stuff thus spreading the radioactive junk everywhere. Most hydrogen bombs have 2 stages, fission and fusion. Fusion is combining atoms for WAY more energy, but also harder to achieve. Hydrogen bombs use a fission explosion to create a fusion explosion, the "smaller" fission explosion pushes the fusion part together so hard that the atoms combine and release WAY more energy. This explains why Little Boy and Fat Man only had 15-20 kT yield but shortly after the US was detonating 10 MT bombs fairly easily. So, little explosion causes big explosion. For Tsar Bomba, there was a third, bigger explosion set off by the second big fusion explosion, another fusion assembly ready to be pushed together and go boom.

Back to why fusion bombs are cleaner. Most bombs are made in a uranium-238 container both to shield the users and contain the explosions. Like I said, fission blows itself apart before it burns up and spreads its nastiness. Fusion bombs, however, burn up much faster and thus are able to burn up a lot of the nasty before it is physically able to be propelled apart. Tsar Bomba is reported as "the "cleanest" weapon ever tested with 97% of the energy coming from fusion reactions. The effect of this bomb at full yield [100 MT] on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%."

Since even the Russians didn't want to irradiate the entire world, they put in place lead shields around the second an third stages to stop fast neutrons from interacting with the uranium-238. According to nuclearweaponstests.org, "This reduced the yield by 50% and eliminated 97% of the fallout (1.5 megatons of fission, instead of about 51.5 Mt), yet still proved the full yield design." So, basically it was a massive explosion but because most of that came from massive fusion reactions which clean themselves up for the most part, it was relatively the cleanest detonation. For perspective, the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs had an efficiency of only 1.4% and 17%. This means that 1.4% and 17% of the fissile material in the bomb reacted, the rest was blown all over the place by the detonation.

Now, the bomb was huge, but relatively inefficient as well. Most of the power of the blast was channeled upwards into space by that shock wave that prevented it from touching the ground. Again, it was a freakin huge bomb so it leveled the crap out of the island, Novaya Zemlya Island, that it was detonated over. It melted the rocks. It broke windows and destroyed houses 34 miles away. It could've given you 3rd degree burns 64 miles away. You could feel the heat 170 miles away. Impressive but....


The best part of all of this, which puts the whole arms race flexing of the Cold War into perspective is this sentence from tsarbomba.org: "The bomb served no military purposes. For that, it would be too heavy to carry and there was no plane able to do intercontinental flights with such a load."

It was useless. Relatively useless. The moment you've all been waiting for:

here's the video of it exploding. 

Awe inspiring and chilling at the same time, isn't it?

Here's another Ronald Reagan one because I think it's fitting.

-Michael

Nuclear fallout, it's a...blast?

Alright. That's it. All my creative genius wasted in one terrible pun. Now the rest of this blog is going to be lame, right? 

(really old reference, if you've got 2 minutes of your life to waste, check out the Youtube video that started it)

I'm going to talk about nuclear fallout, the residual radioactive material, from weapons tests and the far reaching environmental effects it can have. First of all, there's 2 primary kids of detonation, air burst and round burst, both with different implications on how the fallout behaves. Air bursts occur when the bomb detonates above the ground and in this case, the fission products from the bomb vaporize and are drawn up quickly into the stratosphere. Depending on winds and other meteorological conditions, they settle back toward the earth more slowly than ground bursts. In a ground burst, the ground around the bomb is vaporized and drawn up with the mushroom cloud, but because its chunks of rock or whatever was on the ground, the particles bond to the radioactive particles from the bomb and up to 50% of the fallout falls to the ground within 24 hours afterwards.

If viewed from the "solution to pollution is dilution" aspect, the air burst has less fallout since it falls slower and thus is more spread out. The larger particles from the ground burst contaminate the area immediately as well as spread through the air like an air burst. The largest example of an incident like this was the Castle Bravo incident in 1954, where a theoretically 6 Mt air burst bomb test produced a 15 Mt explosion and coupled with poor weather conditions, spread farther and had much worse impacts than were anticipated. Pretty gruesome radiation exposures of nearby island and more in the Pacific Ocean became a national incident which led to attempts to end atmospheric nuclear bomb tests, finally done in 1963.

In 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the U.S., Soviet Union, and Great Britain and tests moved underground, though France and China continued atmospheric testing for 11 and 17 years, respectively. There are also radioactive fallout concerns from these, just not as environmentally destructive. From 1952 to 1962, there is evidence showing an increase in cancers in counties around the Nevada nuclear test site. Iodine-131 is the main contributor to thyroid cancer since thyroids tend to gather iodine that enters the body. Additionally, caesium-137 and strontium-90 pose significant health concerns from the fallout because of their half lives and decay modes (30.17 y and 1.176 MeV beta and 28.79 y and 0.546 MeV beta, respectively).

This graph shows the per capita thyroid doses resulting from atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site from 1951-1962.  This post is already really long so I'll cut it off here, I could talk about this stuff for a while since it's so interesting. Hope you learned something about how dangerous the nuclear testing age and the Cold War were, I also hope you didn't grow up in the red region of that map between 1950 and 1960. 

-Michael

 

   (Too ironic not to add)

Let's Play Acronym!

We all know it's challenging to read laws or standards, really anything more than a fairly simple bullet point list and I'll start to lose interest after the first paragraph or less. These are very important documents but you're pretty unlikely to read them for pleasure, unless you're a really bored masochist or it's your job/assignment to. Added to the dry, complex nature of all the regulations out there for the nuclear community are infinite acronyms and backronyms that serve to confuse the casual or unfamiliar reader even further. So, here's a list of a bunch that you might need to concern yourself with as a member of the public:

1. NPP: Nuclear Power Plant
2. NRC: Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
3. IAEA: International Atomic Energy Agency
4. BWR: Boiling Water Reactor
5. PWR: Pressurized Water Reactor
6. CERN: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or
                 European Organization for Nuclear Research
7. DBA: Design Basis Accident
8. DOE: Department of Energy
9. SNF:  Spent Nuclear Fuel
10. HLW: High Level Waste
11. ILW: Intermediate Level Waste
12. LLW: Low Level Waste
13. INSAG: International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group
14. MOX: Mixed Oxide (fuel)
15. PSA: Public Safety Assessment
16. CFR: Code of Federal Regulations
17. ATWS: Anticipated Transient Without Scram
18. GDC: General Design Criteria
19. LOCA: Loss of Cooling Accident
20. AFW: Auxiliary Feed Water
21. IRPA: International Radiation Protection Association
22. ANSI: American National Standards Institute
23. ALAP: As Low As Possible
24. ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable
25. ALARP: As Low As Reasonably Practicable
26. ALATA: As Low As Technically Achievable
27. ARGONAUT: Argonne Nuclear Assembly for University Training
28. ARMS: Rrea Radiation Monitoring System (not appendage on your body)
29. ARS: Acute Radiation Syndrome
30. FSAR: Final Safety Analysis Report

31. RSIC: Radiation Shielding Information Center

32. ICRP: International Commission on Radiological Protection

33. ASME: American Society of Mechanical Engineers
34. RPV: Reactor Pressure Vessel
35. JANAP: Joint Army-Navy-Air Force Publication
36. USPHS: U.S. Public Health Service

37. LEP: Local Emergency Protection

38. BTS: Brazilian Thorium Sludge

39. COPS: Containment Overpressure Protection Systems

40. B&W: Babcock & Wilcox Co. (now Framatome)

41. BONUS: Boiling Nuclear Superheat Reactor

42. BPVC: Boiler and Pressure Vessel Committee
43. PA: Protected Area

44. BOL: Beginning of Life

45. ATWT: Anticipated Aransient Without Trip

That's 45 right there and you probably skipped to the bottom of the list to read down here and now that you realize there isn't much, you went back up and read the rest of the list because you felt bad. It's okay, this is just an example of the how the human brain reacts to vast lists of information. This was a list of 45, here is a list of 4500 acronyms published by the NRC. I pulled these off of this Nuclear Energy Agency website and that NRC list in the sentence above. Nuclear safety is important it's everyone's right to know what you're being protected from and how.

-Michael

How Can Radon Hurt You?

So tonight's blog idea comes from my roommate who has lived in the Central states with a basement his entire life and had only heard of one Radon, Radon Randell, quarterback from the TV show Blue Mountain State. Since it is a fairly large concern with a fairly simple solution, I'll go ahead and talk about it but leave the heavy lifting to the EPA. Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive element that is a stage in the decay chain from uranium and thorium to lead. Natural uranium and thorium, having half lives of 4.468×10⁹ years and 1.405×10¹⁰ years respectfully, were all created when the earth was created and decay continuously. Eventually, they both reach lead and are stable, but it's this steady production of radon underground that slowly leeches upwards that is dangerous. Because it is such a heavy gas, it tend to stick to lower areas, thus, without air movement it will settle in depressions. 

The most dangerous part of this is that is slowly gathers in basements and without ventilation, it will stay there, growing in concentration, as the unsuspecting  homeowner breaths it in continuously. Because it has a fairly short half life of ~3.8 days and emits alpha particles, it is fairly harmless unless ingested or breathed in. Once inside your lungs or stomach, the cells there aren't able to deal with the emitted alpha energy and are damaged, leading to cancers. 

<sup>Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer following smoking. Studies of this are further complicated because it's hard to study the effect of radon on lung cancer because the results are so obscured by smoking. The upside to the dangers of radon is we've grown accustomed to it's constant presence as a species. This means that once you can reduce its levels to near background, then you've done about as much as you can to reduce your risks. 

So, TLDR: solution to pollution is dilution. In this case, ventilate your house to the outdoors and move on with your life to more serious concerns like the radiation from the bananas in your kitchen. For more on if your county is at a larger or smaller danger, check out this map from the EPA. Also, test kits for your house are free or cheap so its worth it to check them out! 

Plenty of things in the world can kill you, this is thankfully one that can be mitigated easily so you can keep on being 'Murican.

-Michael</sup>

 

The Demon Core, Nuclear Work Related Risks Then and Now

Nuclear Engineering, if Tom Cruise worked in the field, you might call it a "Risky (Cancer) Business"

Too far? Okay well today's topic is cancer risk of radiation, specifically to people who work in the nuclear field. The blog title credit comes from our class lecture Feb 5 when we watched the clip of "Fat Man and Little Boy" when John Cusack, playing fictional scientist Michal Merriman, performs a criticality experiment to measure how a plutonium source behaves in the early stages of a nuclear bomb detonation. He's holding two things that aren't supposed to touch apart with a flat blade screwdriver, turns out this was a bad idea when the screwdriver slips, they two halves to this sphere come together and the experiment goes wildly out of control, irradiating him and the others in the room, him dying of radiation poisoning 9 days later and the other surviving. This was a real situation with a real core, nicknamed "The Demon Core" (Professional Wikipedia Source) and it was really held apart by a screwdriver, although the scientist killed was actually named Louis Slotin. This was the second person killed by this exact core, the first being another scientist, Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. exactly 9 months earlier.

All very interesting, but onto the real meat of this post and how that all relates to cancer risk. It's a stereotype that nuclear engineers or any other nuclear workers face that their job sucks or is terrible because they're going to get cancer from it, if they haven't already, and that nuclear things are terrible for the world because: cancer. Most of this is caused by innocent ignorance of the topic, less than 1% of the US population will ever operate or work on a nuclear project, and most of what the public hears is bad news about accidents or what prominent people say about nuclear energy, see my last blog post about media and nuclear accidents or my friend's post to start on what relevant US figures might say.  Don't get me wrong, cancer is a very real risk when dealing with radioactivity, but an important caveat to this is that there is A LOT of effort that goes into protection of the workers and even MORE (10-100x lower limits) that the public is allowed to be exposed to. 

 To try to spark ideas, provide valuable topics /explanations, and expand the amount of readers I may have, I've decided to try to ask friends or family that have almost no nuclear experience besides knowing me if they have any immediate questions that pop up when I the next few weeks' blog topics. I came to this attempted direction when the blog came up while talking to a good friend of mine on deployment in the Army, the exact way I put it was, "do you have any questions about cancer risks and nuclear engineering sh*t." He asked what the average amount of exposure you would encounter across your career is and if it is detrimental to your long term health. Well, here comes the part the media would quote: It depends based on what you do relating to nuclear, reactor repair, operation, national lab experimentation, etc but it is limited to 5 rem/year and yes, it can be detrimental. 

Next, the part the media may not quote. 10 CFR Part 20, Title 10 (Energy) of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 20 deals with radiation exposure of workers and public as well as monitoring, controlling, and dissemination of such information to the public and workers. For the year 2013, 135,681 people were monitored, 57,115 of which received a measurable dose. The average dose per person was 0.15 rem.

This value can be compared with the 0.31 rem that the average person in the United States receives annually from natural background radiation. Worldwide annual exposures to natural background radiation are generally expected to be in the range of 0.1 rem to 1.3 rems, with 0.24 rem being the current average worldwide value (right from 10 CFR 20's Radiation Exposure Information and Reporting System, REIRS, from 2013). 

So, the average is 0.15 rem added onto the 0.31 rem you receive every year from stuff like the sun, bananas, and radon gas leaking out of the ground. Take this with a grain of salt, remember it varies by what actual job you do, but the average is an okay number to use for this purpose. Like skin cancer from the sun, sometimes you get it and you weren't even in the sun for long and sometimes you get it after you've burnt yourself crispy more than enough times. Cancer sort of follows this trend for other nuclear exposures as well: if you get some dose, you can develop it and you can be reasonably sure that if it does, it'll be in the area affected by what you were exposed to. It is a stochastic radiation effect; cancer's probabilistic, it is random in nature. We only know that increased radiation exposure has led to increases in cancer rates from post accident or WWII analysis.  We know that the radiation might penetrate your skin, depending on what type it is. We know that it might interact with your skin or any other tissue/bone/organ it passes through. We know that it might damage a piece of the DNA contained in the cells in that body part. We know that depending on that body part's replication rate, it may not matter for some cancer but for other radiation sickness effects, more frequent replications mean worse consequences from the jacked up cells being replicated. We know cancerous cells tend to go haywire and replicate much faster and that their real problem is they make tumors that may spread and do internal damage to the body from blockage or random lumps of cells tearing things or pressing on things that shouldn't be pressed on.

If you subscribe to hormesis, you believe that some level of radiation is actually good for things because we're developed in an environment with low levels of background radiation for so long. This is a fact, we have lived some level of background radiations the entire lifetime of the earth. However, the effects (good or bad) of this background radiation are unknown. Hormesis theorizes that it is not very small, long term doses that harm you but rather larger doses in smaller time frames. To finally answer my friend's question, my average exposure at a power plant would be approximately 1.5 times that of any normal person, but well within levels where it should be negligible. The NRC regulations are very conservative limits, and I will receive much less than the max limit. Yes, this may affect me long term by increasing my risk for cancer, but this is also assumed negligible because of  low levels. Taking into account I will have less radiation exposure to myself from radon, bananas, and the sun on a submarine, I'll probably have much less total dose per year than an average person and thus actually have less cancer risk.

I'll end here before I go on forever. If you're interested in more, look up the USS Ronald Reagan crew exposure after their humanitarian aid to Fukushima or passing on radiation induced genetic deformations to offspring. Next week brings radon and lung cancer risks, radiation protection standards, and atmospheric dispersion of radionuclides!

-Michael

Fuku-shhhhh-ma

Today we're going to talk about a topic that, to me, has gone un-talked about for a while now. I was turned onto this topic the other day when cruising the Internet, thinking about how quickly stories break and then seem to disappear, I came upon this article: http://www.naturalnews.com/052291_Fukushima_California_radiation.html. Immediately, I realized how long it had been since I has heard about anything even referring to Fukushima in the news. After reading that article and laughing at how ridiculous it was, I decided to look up what other articles have been talking about in reference to Fukushima recently (I won't even bother to debunk that article, the first comment does a superb job).

As far as a few Google searches can tell me, the situation in the Fukushima prefecture has somewhat stabilized. The tourism industry took a large hit after the disaster and still continues to struggle as the area rebuilds. As much as the nuclear disaster rings bells with people when brought up, prior to the accident, the earthquake that triggered it all is the 4th largest in recorded history. The death toll was nearly 16,000 people and the World Bank estimated it caused nearly $235 billion in damages, making it the most expensive natural disaster in world history (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fgw-japan-quake-world-bank-20110322-story.html). Following this, the nuclear disaster occurred, adding more injury and posing long term world health concerns.

So, what happened that distracted the mainstream media from any followup thus far on Fukushima? Well, in December 2010, the Arab Spring began and continued through 2011. On March 11, Fukushima happened. Just prior to this, America's favorite train wreck, Charlie Sheen was cut from Two And A Half Men and continued his public, downward spiral. In May, Osama Bin Laden was killed. The National debt crisis, Casey Anthony's acquittal, SOPA, and others that year distracted the media eye to other, more juicy, stories. 2012 followed with stories of economic upswing and gay marriage advances, Sandy Hook and Aurora mass shootings, Benghazi implications and more. In the year since, outside my nuclear engineering curriculum referencing the accident, I heard almost nothing about Fukushima.

I found some articles on TEPCO, struggling with their personal responsibility to fund the cleanup, but determined to see reparations made for the damage. The area has had radiation monitors installed to let the public know how safe it is, nearly on every street corner. The Japanese nuclear industry took a huge public confidence hit in the accident. This could probably have been precluded by a few smaller accidents happening in the decade prior to 2011, such as Mihama in 2004. These indicate a lack of safety culture, which is good to keeping a nuclear industry constantly aware of the dangers that can come from improperly maintained power plants of any kind. Since the accident, Japan was sort of shocked awake, out of any possible tendency to conceal small safety hazards for the prosperity of the company. Unfortunately, it took a serious ‎INES Level 7 accident for this to happen, but that seems to be how the world learns.


So, to sum it all up, if you find a story that resonates with you, follow it on your own. Pin it, bookmark it, and check back once in a while. I found some fear-mongering and some stuff that seemed curiously too optimistic, the onus falls onto you to look at it with a reasonable eye and please make sure you don't believe everything you read outright. As people are fond of joking about, just because it is on the Internet does not mean it's true, although all too often that seems to be the only justification needed.