Good point i think Stunet. So enlighten me, whats the "real" story with the fallout of FUKU?

Good points. It's hard to believe the Inertia got it so wrong though I notice they've retracted the statement and issued an apology.

Good points thermalben. I suspect few people really know what is going on at Fukushima and what the impacts are for the surrounding environment but one can be confident the situation isn't leading to a plume of contaminated water impacting the whole of the Pacific.

The Inertia article and others on that radiation plume are a small part of a global phenomenon of "slacktivism" occurring across all social media and internet sites. The mainstream media pumps out enough poorly researched and misinformed garbage, but this is another leap entirely.

I'm surprised The Inertia are so far behind. This story and graphic were all over the place in July and people have been calling bullshit on it ever since. Funny seeing the comments on their website. Everyone just called them out on it straightaway. Piss poor really.

When news becomes mere content, and content must be continuous, this is the end result. Give me an hour and I could fill a weeks worth of Media Watch episodes.

Ok, thanks Ben. Be good to get an accurate picture sometime... Put it to bed one way or the other.

The news analysis I have seen has been spectacularly poor with very little detail of what is actually going on there. The scary part of this is that those in charge seem to be working on an almost ad hoc basis. It is an incredibly complex situation. Chernobyl was much worse but in many ways more straight forward. Given that, it would appear that the leaks into the ocean are probably the least of the problems. Caesium 137 which is the main concern is a gamma source with a half life of 30 years. Gamma is high energy penetrating radiation that can damage DNA and so cause cancer or birth defects. At higher levels it can kill outright. Its release into the sea is less of a problem than its release into the air or soil as people are less likely to come into contact with it and its concentration should drop off very rapidly from the source through dilution.....but the place is a mess and it is going to take a long time to even get a full picture of what is happening never mind completing the clean up. There is also the possibility that uncontained nuclear fission is still occurring in the site which would be an absolute nightmare to clean up.

Besides using the image, I thought the Surfing article was a good piece of moderating journalism. They had a boffin supposedly with the right credentials explaining the real situation (from his scientific standpoint).

But in the comments section there are just absolute loons screaming about shit all fed by fear and the misinformation this article is talking about.

I mean a scientist comes out and says something with actual scientific backing and they dismiss it as corporate manipulation, as though fear is the only currency of truth.

People's opinions fucking suck (in my opinion).

I thought the same RD. Their excuse for using the graphic was flimsy but the article was sound. They reached out to a noted scientist for an informed opinion and got shouted down for doing so. Twas a crazy reaction.

The inertia removed the offending article entirely. I can't find it on the site now. It was a pretty poor show by the 'distributor of ideas' especially following a recent article they ran admitting they reluctantly run T&A shots of Bikini girls to get their hit count up. So much for serious news. The justification they gave sounded plausible, and the tone was contrite, but what story do they run in top spot today? An expose asking...wait for it..."Does Sex Sell?" With, you guessed it, Alana Blanchard pictured in her bikini.

I give up.

trolley its up @

http://www.theinertia.com/environment/fukushimas-nuclear-ocean-effects/

They have apologized on facebook. I mean its hard to get past the Alana article but here's what they wrote.

Correction Appended: An earlier version of this article featured an image that reflected swell height after an earthquake in 2011, which is not related to radiation dispersal. The posting of that image in association with this very serious issue was an egregious error for which we sincerely apologize.

EGREGIOUS!!!

But yeah stu, on any contentious issue reading the comments is sickening. The Internet is just hatred. I mean, just look at some of the nonsense that has gone on in Swellnet's comments sections. And they are relatively benign issues.

Anonymity makes the coward bold, and fear makes catastrophes imminent.

I think it is a kind of wilful ignorance rather than hatred roubydouby. We have political and religious leaders who constantly undermine the credibility of science. They believe what they want and ignore the rest. The public then adopts the same approach, most obviously on issues like climate change and evolution but also with GM foods and radiation.

What’s disappointing with these sloppy journalistic instances is that it can lead the public to a sense of dismissal or apathy regarding the issue. The issue or real facts get lost in the race to the bottom of tabloid “he said, she said”. It offers an excuses for the perpetrators to continue on their merry way with out accountability. The global warming issue is a stark reminder of this when all the shit hit the fan with schoolyard back biting and with the scientists.

Disappointing. I really feel for the community over there particularly the users of the ocean.

This is a more credible animation of the distribution of radiation. Please look at the scale before pressing the panic button

Great link Blindboy. Seems journalist haven't really learnt from the Gulf War where photos given were of facilities holding WMDs. Nobody really did any homework for themselves just taking the info and spilling it out through their networks.

Tepco have a checkered past involved in coverups. Whatever is going on its smelling pretty fishy

"What is reported is different to what is remembered which is different to what was seen which is different to what was present"

The real media story about Fukushima is not this misleading map but the fact that the mainstream media hardly ever mention it.

In world events "small" manageable disasters get lots of media coverage and sell papers and pull in ratings but when it gets really serious or when big money is at stake as a Dutch PM recently said "you have to lie" - or in Fukushima's case with the media - keep it out of the news as much as possible without being too obvious. Goverments have raised "safe" levels and stopped some radiation testing programs since Fukushima.

My reading on Fukushima from a host of sources is that it is in the long term pretty well the worst environmental disaster ever and will slowly turn Japan into cancer central. Hawaii is right in the path of the winds and currents. So is the USA.

We will all be affected by a steady ratchet up in cancer rates though particles we ingest. My guess is that most of us have a bit of Fukushima radiation in us already. Once a radioactive particle settles into your body perhaps joining with the calcium in your bones - it will sit there emitting damage for decades. "Safe" levels of exposure are all about measuring transitory levels like an Xray - they ignore the fact that particles abound in the leaks and some mimic calcium in our bodies.

This scenario is if things go relatively well! We will have steady and endless leaking of radiation into the air and the sea. But if another earthquake or a human error causes the damaged fuel pools to collapse we could have an event that could threaten everyone in a short space of time.

Fukushima should be the number one environmental and economic issue in the world. It should be front page headlines on a regular basis. Governments around the globe should be helping the Japanese. The USA should forget about meddling in Syria and spend the money on what matters for the world.

Why is this not the case - well put simply - it is too scary and they just don't know what to do to fix it. And they are too scared of the consequences of public panic and that the modern god 'The economy" might get upset. Plus - we can't see the poison or easily measure the impact. So there is plausible deniability.

So again, the real media story is the lack of story. It speaks volumes about how serious it is.

There is a significant amount of truth in what you say frog but I am not sure that things are quite thst bad. On the Strontium 90 issue, it is a risk if it enters your body. The most likely route is through consuming contaminated fish but the Strontium in the fish, from my reading. Is stored in their bones which are not usually consumed. There are certainly other ways for Strontium or Caesium to cause problems but ultimately the huge dilution factor of the ocean combined with what are very significant efforts to contain and treat as much of the contaminated water as they can should reduce the impact. Fish and numerous other products continue to be tested for radiation in Japan so Ithink they have a handle on the public health issues. I will be there in a couple of weeks and I don't intend to take any dietary precautions.
There will be rises in background cancer rates but the people most at risk are those workers who, at great personal sacrifice. are doing the on site clean up. Many of these will almost certainly die prematurely. For the rest of us I suspect the risk is on a par with those we take willingly everyday.

I hope you don't eat too many bananas Frog because they're radioactive too. A plane flight will give you a large radiation exposure too.

Sure, radioactive groundwater leaking into the Pacific is not a good thing, but it's all about the amount of radiation being released, and the dilution of it, decay of it and potential to impact the food chain.

Check out the Banana Equivalent Doses(BED). You can make figures say whatever you want them too.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/10/the-fukushima-radiati...

My guess is the seeming lack of action by the US (where most of this radioactive plume is headed) is because they really aren't that concerned by it. If they were, don't you think they might make abit of noise or try to help?

Since when was a blue fin tuna an apex predator? Talk about chinese whispers ... 'apex' and 'top-order' predators are phrases that have been completely misused by everyone from academics to children. Can't really blame you for being caught in the conundrum, but I urge you to be wary of it. The worst is saying great white sharks are top order predators! Don't make me laugh! They are meso-predators at best.

Keep up the good work otherwise guys!

Whether the danger is real or not, Frog's post got me thinking about the risk of nuclear energy and how ill-equipped humans are to use it.

Paul Ehrlich is an evolutionary biologist who's work was mainly concerned with overpopulation (he wrote The Population Bomb in 1968). Part of Ehrlich's theory is that humans have evolved over many millennia to think only in the short term. I'm being chased by a predator - run. The tribe is being threatened - take action. At most humans had to think just one year in advance, and that only arose when humans began subsistence farming and needed to understand the seasons.

Therefore our thought processes, brain wiring, whatever you want to call it, evolved to think in the very short term. That's all we ever needed to survive. Yet now we have an out-of-control population using up finite resources and can't adequately plan for it. We aren't biologically equipped to take the long view required.

You can add to that, nuclear energy, which effects the Earth and humans for longer than we can adequately grasp, and climate change too.

Mesopredators are mid level. What's above Great White Sharks?

Also, plenty of literature with Bluefin listed as Apex. Might be contentious but you're talking absolutes.

There is variation between guilds, habitats, resource dispersion, seasons (biological and climatic) and behaviours, but general rules:
- Hypercarnivores live in groups to hunt prey that weigh more than their average weight - in the seas, they are killer whales and on the land they are lions, wolves, dholes, dingoes;
- Mesocarnivores live in solitude and hunt prey that weigh less than their average weight - in the seas they are sharks, on land they are almost everything under the hypercarnivores (foxes, jackals, coyotes, cheetahs, leopards, jagyuars, tigers etc); and
- Hypocarnivores live in solitude and eat mainly berries, but may hunt animals that weigh less than their weight, or scavenge protein (bears, raccoons, possums etc).

It works the same for herbivores but the difference is between grazing (grass), browsing (leaves) and then the fungi/frugivores that also browse and graze.

In terms of sharks, humans simply fall (or appear to the predator) within the weight range of their largest prey, which in many cases is seals. Humans are kind of hypercarnivores because we can hunt in groups but we combine tools with strategies ... other hypercarnivores only have strategy - tire them out, select the weak, selectively prey upon the old or the young, or corner them.

With bluefin tuna exceeding 1000lb, I think they classify as an apex predator. Basically a 44gal drum with fins and a mouth bigger than a 20L bucket charging in excess of 40knots, they can mow down alot of prey of considerable size.

I think you are at cross purposes here. An apex predator would usually refer more to its position in the food chain that to its hunting style. Sharks, by this measure, are top order predators. The issue is that higher order consumers concentrate pollutants that can be bio-accumulated, by bio-magnification. The increase is usually, as a rough guide, an order of magnititude at each level.

All apex predators start off as prey. Even a great white is under threat from its own and others when young.

Migratory pelagic, being either schooling or solitary, are still predators very high up in the food chain. Whether they are apex or not could be argued. Tuna, billfish etc will demolish a bait school and readily chase down larger individuals due to their speed. Sharks can do similar but are not always quite as quick, but will pick of the weak and those that stray.

More on topic, I'm not sure on the effects of radiation, but a lot of these large pelagics are known for their high levels of mercury and other heavy metals.

The radio-isotopes of Strontium and Caesiun accumulate in the same way as Mercury and other heavy metals. That is one of the main concerns.

A good resource on this is a book (I have only only read a couple of chapters so far) by Richard Broinowski's "Fallout from Fukushima". In it he cites various reports and studies ( which do seem to vary greatly) regarding the Chernobyl disaster and the number of related deaths and figures. he quotes a 2009 report published by the New York Academy of Science that total deaths at 985 000 thus far and another that "mortalities will continue through to 2065 and result in as many 160 million cancer related deaths" .. As mentioned there are many reports and many different estimates which are much lower - I have just cherry picked a couple. i think that's about 1.7% of total global pop predicted levels by 2065 (or in 1986 - 3.2% at 5b people)- lets say 9billion ( that's dodgy maths i know). which some may say ask at 1.7% what all the fuss is about??

The banana analogy is a classic and invalid example used to deflect concerns by the Nuclear industry.

A banana with Potassium 40 = seventy one ten millionth Curies per gram
whereas Cesium 137 = 88 Curies per gram. A HUGE difference in emmission.

A second common deflection idea is exposure from Xrays or air flight compared to ingested particles. One is a temporary exposure of emmissions which pass through you and are gone. Particles can sit in your lungs or bones for life emitting endlessly. Soldiers back fro Iraq have depleted uranium particles from ammunition heads sittingin their lungs.

Fukushima is pumping out huge amounts of paricles of all types day and night with no end in sight.

A sobering overview is here:

Just remember, the Nuclear industry is not run by clever scientists in white coats doing best practice science. It is run by accountants and huge corporations with profit and cost cutting as the big drivers. The scientists may have had good intentions but were overridden.

Recent floods in the USA partly flooded 2 reactors near the Mississipi. A few more days of rain could have result in two more disasters there. Who put them there not a few hundred metres up the hill well off the flood pain? My guess is bean counters trying to save on water pipes or something like that.

Keep the sheeple quiet and docile and spending is the number one priority of TPTB. Unfortunately Fukushima is too big and too long term to hope it will fade away and fix itself like many problems do.

Even the Greens seem quiet about it - too big and scary for them too I suspect.

Frog, thats pretty interesting stuff champ, the last link was pretty full on tho, alot of numbers?..
In all the talks above, it sounds to me the top of the apex predators will be the "Fukushimavore"which won't be eating berries, but will be hunting with tools like caesium 137.
The scary thing is that its all invisible and not bright purple like the chart above.
Another catastrophe swept under the carpet again, which seems too big and scary to handle.

Thankfully it being online also ensure another thing: peer review.

If it's wrong, it will be exposed and called out as being wrong.