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hey george,, jim and amianda

9.2 earthquake here in 1964. Very glad to be living at 1500' (alhough only three miles from ocean) and to have no nuclear power plants within 1800 miles. But as a marine scientist I am very concerned about the impacts of all the contaminated water being discharged to the sea at Fukushima.

@Tippytoe And they have cut funding for LORAN. So if GPS fails we will have?

Alaskan...your expertise will be needed in the days ahead as we assess the damage being done to our oceans

@George Gibb NISA Publishes a bunch of reports daily www.nisa.meti.go.jp

@all I am so happy to hear that old familiar click. Thank you George and I would be glad to chip in for upkeep costs as needed.

@Alaskan Sweet! I don't think they even teach that anymore.

Its not cost effective to plan for everything...there is a process the use called risk management part of which is risk assessment and there are mathematical formulas based on cost.

Some of the methods and documents that are used to calculate risks are here www.nist.gov

@Sin and others. I understand you can't plan for everything. I do have a math and science background, which is why I worry, especially when it comes to risk management. Risk management is one of the huge reasons we are not getting info we should about this incident. In studying TMI and Chernobyl you find incidents were gov't knew things were very precarious, but wouldn't evacuate because it will cause panic, people will die because they can't handle the situation gracefully. So what happens, someone runs the numbers and they see, well, if we evacuate Tokyo we have nowhere for people to go, and x number people will die. But if we keep quiet, well, yeah sure tons of people will die in the next decade or two, but we have plausible denilability.

meretisa I don't know. It seems to be a ver complicated stem that requires a lot of factors such as does rate, body type, time of exposure and so on. It is possible that the figures are wrong, most of it seems like guess work to me, but I am not an expert.

@Meretisa I don't think they are off, but the problem is that in some media reports they use microsieverts, and in some they use millisieverts. My understanding is that at 100 mSv is when they can definitively link exposure to cancer, where every 100 mSv is about a 1% increase in getting cancer from the exposure (at some point in your life). For children there is a higher chance of getting cancer at 100 mSv.

hey, I am not well versed in many areas, just a desire to learn and exchange information

Sinthia- sorry, just asking.

Rule of thumb is that exposure to 1 Sv (1000 mSv) will mean your chance of getting cancer is 1%, chance of dying from cancer is .05%. It's linear so exposure to 2 Sv would be 2% chance, etc. This is the lifetime % chance, not immediate effect. Once you start having larger doses your effects would be immediate though (radiation sickness, burns, etc.)

IDS- thank you. I've seen it before. It doesn't show symptoms. I'm just saying that the symptoms listed on the Reuters as being for millisieverts don't jive with those listed on wikipedia.

@Meretisa I couldn't link to Wikipedia but the Reuters story appears correct. But that Reuters story is talking about short-term acute effects of radiation, which are different from long-term effects (everyone in the surrounding area for decades to come).

Jojo- here is another try at link to wiki: en.wikipedia.org the chart is in Sieverts, but corresponds closely with the millisieverts listed on Reuters article. I know is referrign to short term- so was this link- was talking hours to months and giving symptoms that mirrored the ones on Reutes.