

Japan to raise Fukushima crisis level to worst, same as Chernobyl - chailatte
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_05.html

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patio11
This makes for a good lesson in marketing and measuring things. In marketing,
if you change the name of a thing on an arbitrary scale, that's newsworthy. If
it hits the best/worst thing on the arbitrary scale, that's newsworthy. No
actual human being gets a banana worth of radiation more or less because this
is a 7 as opposed to a 6 -- it is totally a marketing event.

In terms of measuring things: scales with < 10 points on them do very, very
poor jobs at compressing certain distributions. It's kind of like saying that
someone is in income quintile 5 -- the same quintile as Bill Gates! If you
didn't know that the underlying distribution of incomes looks like what it
looks like, you might assume that second person is omg rich. (Quintile 5
starts at about $90k a household.) Similarly, the scale of nuclear accidents
from "non-event" to Chernobyl to "hypothetical-end-of-the-world" has an awful
lot of very consequential dynamic range in it. The _overwhelming_ takeaway
among lay people from this marketing event is going to be "Fukushima is about
as bad as Chernobyl" -- that is objectively, dangerously false, just like "X
is about as rich as Bill Gates" is likely catastrophically wrong and would
lead to terrible decisions if you acted on it.

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harisenbon
Definitely another case of the media being idgits when it comes to any news
regarding a disaster.

While OP's title "Same as Chernobyl," is technically correct when talking
about the level, the amount of radiation is not comparable.

in fact, from the article:

 _The agency believes the cumulative amount from the Fukushima plant is less
than that from Chernobyl._

And now we're going to start getting phone calls in the middle of the night
again from worried relatives. :/

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patio11
On the plus side, we're not living in Fukushima. Stigmatization of those folks
is already happening at home and abroad, and it just got worse.

(There were sporadic reports of hospitals last week refusing to treat
Fukushima refugees for routine medical care because, apparently, someone who
presumably has had at least one science course in their life still thought a)
they had all received lethal levels of radiation and b) radiation sickness was
contagious. Which still sounds almost sane next to the _Chicago_ news headline
"Radiation detected on passengers from Japan -- is Chicago at risk?")

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rhygar
No need to worry, nuclear power is just fine and perfectly safe for day to day
power needs.

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chailatte
"Haruki Madarame, chairman of the commission, which is a government panel,
said it has estimated that the release of 10,000 terabecquerels (a trillion
becquerels) of radioactive materials per hour continued for several hours
(after the quake)"

<http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/04/84721.html>

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Aron
I noticed that since it was quantitative. Hiroshima was 8 Yottabecquerels,
which would require 9,000 years at 10,000 terabecquerels per hour to
accomplish.

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usaar333
Correct me if I'm wrong, but these units seem all messed up.

A becquerel is the number of radioactive emissions per second. So stating
becquerels per time is like talking about power per time.

Are we talking about a mean over a period, a cumulative total (becquerels
hour), or what?

I'm guessing the Hiroshima blast number is the instantaneous peak.

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Aron
Yeah I mixed my units. We'd have to assume that's a peak figure and that it
continued for a full second (or equivalent) to fix my comparison. I suspect
the peak output was much briefer than a full second. Probably best to throw
out my original comment.

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phlux
Here is a vid talking about how the fuel rods shattered/melted:

<http://vimeo.com/22209827>

