Radiation
 

Greetings. I apologise in advance if I said anything wrong.

With Fukushima accident still not in stable condition, the government had tried to ban food that contain radiation above governmental limits, particularly radioactive cesium and radioactive iodine.

Just a few weeks ago, cows that ate contaminated straws were processed and shipped to all prefectures except Okinawa & by the time the government starts to recall the beefs, some had been consumed.

I would like to ask that now in Kansai area (Kyoto, Kobe, Osaka), they are very far away from Tohoku but they were still affected by this contaminated beef distribution; Their other food like vegetables, are they also shipped from Tohoku? Where do Kansai region foods normally come from?

I had also asked this question in another thread in travel advice section, are radiation detectors and/or radiation dosimeters available now in Kansai area? If yes, which exact shop is it?

Will be great if a resident in Japan can answer this thread.

Your guys help will be geatly appreciated.

I suspect you would be more in danger from Food posioning via the normal bacterial route than from radiation contamination.

er, ok.......

I Will basically second what Ryzorian said. At the levels of contamination that have been detected on food, at the top amounts you would still have to be eating it every day for years to have it threaten your health. If you are on a short trip to Japan, the chances of suffering any negative effects is virtually nil.

It's a whole lot of fear-mongering. Even right after the quake and nuclear meltdown there was no real danger to people living in the Tokyo area (which I was) much less those living in Kansai (osaka, kyoto, etc.)
In other words avoid Fukushima and you'll be fine..and don't eat raw meat..the Korean BBQ incidents have me more worried than radiated food.

A voice of sanity as always. Thanks.

Was there late May and early June......... did my homework beforehand on the actual radiation situation with friends in Japan and reputable information sites... and knew that for short term stay, well away from the nuclear plants,... all is just fine.

best,

............john

I see. The problem is I was planning to study in Japan for 7 yrs then I was shock by the contaminated beef distribution.

More like contaminated feed distribution rather than beef distribution, really. I think a key part of this is that they actually bothered to track down and recall the meat, even though the levels weren't all that high...

When it comes to the food situation, you need to be knowledgable about the situation rather than hopping on the train of fear-mongering.

Radiation limits in food are set at a one month or three month base. The calculations, from what I have read, are done by assuming that you eat nothing but that food for 30 to 90 straight days.

In the case of vegetables, the riskiest food in terms of potential contamination, the majority of the radiation is in particle form that a good rinse will remove. Radioactive dust, like any dust, is something that can be mostly washed away before you eat the food. (Regardless of radiation concerns, you should be in the habit of washing your food - it reduces the risk of food poisoning and your exposure to insecticides... Both things that can potentially be more harmful to your health than radiation.)

Now, let us say that you hunted out contaminated meat, picked vegetables from within the evacuation area, and then ate them every day... You would probably have a slightly higher risk of some forms of cancer after a couple years.

The thing is, the majority of food is NOT contaminated. The majority of cows have not been eating contaminated feed in the weeks before slaughter. It would be very very hard... No, pretty much impossible, for someone to manage to eat any significant amount of contaminated food without living in the immediate area around the plant and raising it.

A lot of Japanese food is imported. Vegetables tend to be brought in from fairly local places. Meat, beef particularly, is not a major part of the diet.

Either way though, I find it hard to think you would encounter much of any food at all from Tohoku while staying in Kansai. They are not at all near each other.

Well, it's a kind of principle of it. When the meat shows contamination levels several hundreds of times above the legal limit, the only correct procedure is to track it and shut it down. The farmers and producers are not nuclear physicists and couldn't possibly evaluate the danger (or it's lack of). They were after the money, period, no matter what the cost to anybody else. With this level of ethics, how are they going to act any differently when the problem is BSE or dioxin, or whatever?

I can safely argue that you will not convince a single parent to feed their kids with this beef with mere superficial statistical interpretation. I don't buy beef, Shizuoka green tea nor this year's rice, not because it could be "unsafe", but because their decision to distribute them nonetheless is immoral and unethical (not to mention illegal), and I will express this with my wallet.

Reindeer meat in my home country is still sometimes taken off the market for increased levels of cesium from Chrenobyl (yes, even 25 years after). By the producers themselves, not just by authorities.

And after the rant, info that "Top Valu" branded beef sold at Aeon supermarkets will all be checked for legal levels before being released into the stores. About time, I want more FRESH MEAT!!! A big fat wet slab of red... :mtongue:

The think is, it wasn't the farmers and producers. In the case of the meat, they didn't know there was contamination to begin with. The cows the contaminated meat came from were not environmentally contaminated - they were contaminated because of a specific feed producer selling contaminated feed to the farms. There was no reason to even suspect the meat was contaminated as, from what I recall, the meat found to be contaminated wasn't from anywhere even close to the actual direct contamination. They tracked it to the feed.

Refusing to buy meat is basically closing your wallet to the wrong place, and hurting honest producers. The feed wholesaler was the one in the wrong, and now that this has happened, there is a lot of attention being given to where feed for the cows comes from.

Yes, they are not responsible for the accident at Fukushima. However, there are several steps involved. I wasn't always a physicist. I was born a farmer's son. I say they have betrayed the consumer's trust by feigning ignorance. They should have known better. They should have accepted responsibility for their own produce.

There are decades worth of research data regarding radioactive fallout and agriculture. There is nothing new about it, nothing special, absolutely nothing that is souteigai. It all happened 25 years ago in Chrenobyl, and it happened again, and it proceeded and is proceeding just like research and experience predicted it would. Shirankao simply is not good enough explanation for their immoral behaviour. Even when the news broke out, the practice was still continued, I guess in the hopes of "automatic forgiveness" or similar idiocy. There can be no acceptable excuse for that.

I read that they might get compensation from Tepco. That is good, but only because I think Tepco should pay for everything alone. But that doesn't do anything to return the trust they so lightly threw away. I will eat safe beef again, but I will not buy nor eat contaminated beef (even suspected) under any circumstances. I'm not responsible for the Fukushima accident either, and I don't make innocent suffer for my inconveniences.

Everyone has a point. Regardless of the reasons for causing the beef contamination, I felt that there are still a lot of things the Diet is not telling. I may be wrong but there may be a chance that there are other food contamination not detected but is distributed without anyone knowing. I said so because there are lack of equipments to do all the checkings especially when the officials are already very busy with checking vegetables.

I am not specialise in nuclear physics but I know that there are more than just iodine-131 & cesium escaped from Fukushima Power Plant since March 12th when the first explosion occurred. Plutonium & other alpha emitter isotopes, why were they not being monitored? It is true that Plutonium is heavy in chemical term and therefore does not "float" easily into the air current or sea current like iodine or cesium does. But hey, plutonium is dangerous. I was quite shock to know that a Japanese scientist said in news tv that plutonium is not harmful to human body if accidentally consumed. Plutonium-causing cancers do not develop until 20 years later. And shockingly there is even a safe limit for plutonium in food.

I understand that the geographical location of Kansai is far away from Tohoku but when it comes to food distribution. Even prefecture as far as Shizuoka is affected with its famous green tea.

Aw... I really wish this is all a bad dream.

It eases the mind to study the different types of ionizing radiation, because not all radioactive material act the same. There's not much to learn, and it's quite light reading.

But for those in real hurry:
- Alpha radiation is heavy and does lot of damage, because it interacts strongly with matter. But because it interacts strongly, it does not penetrate so much, and even sheet of paper is enough for a shielding. Not particularly a problem, Am-242 sources are used in standard smoke alarms. Even that one above your head, I'd wager.
- Beta radiation is slightly more penetrating therefore slightly less dangerous. Plexiglass is the usual shielding. Does high damage at short range, but almost nothing at long range. Concentrations can be high, and this is why ingestion (where the ranges are short) is dangerous.
- Gamma radiation has high penetration, because it interacts very weakly with matter. Shielding is lead walls and good running shoes. But because it interacts weakly, it won't do a lot of damage (in any given separate instance in time). With time, of course.
- Neutron... is a problem. And so on.

When ingested, radioactive particles will be passed just like any food within a day (iodine-131 excluded, of course). This is why they said plutonium is not so dangerous when ingested - it will not accumulate and it's emission is mostly weakly interactive gamma type, plus that the possible amounts for ingestion are extremely small. Not much escaped Fukushima. Of course this implies the best possible dream-land scenario that everything will be all right very very soon (Moshimoshi?!? Chernobyl?!? 25 years today and still going hot? Connecting dots here, people! :rolleyes: ) and people don't have to keep on eating that s#it from day to day for decades to come.

Here's a nice page about the radiation situation about 150 km south of Fukushima. It's not a political institute feigning a scientific institute, and it's measurements have been active from the very beginning. You'll notice that there are several types of radiations sources monitored.

So, did I make you look up and look for a smoke alarm? C'mon, be honest! :mtongue:

I now live in Kansai, specifically Osaka. Most veggies, meat , fish in the supermarket that I go comes from Kyushu, Hyogo or even Nagasaki.

That's also true. Delivery truck gas costs money, so produce doesn't come far. You're so lucky.
My lettuce and tomatoes (Maruetsu) comes from Gunma, Miyagi, Fukushima (less and less) and Nagano. There have been very local (probably hand-carried to the supermarket) potatoes and tomatoes lately. Those are tasty, too!
I miss the Farmer's Markets where locals (and I mean "across the street" locals) carry their veggies in the morning to sell. I had one when living in Oume, and in Nagano. It was nice to greet the people who grow your food every morning.

Looking at he webpage noted above......... (Radiation monitoring at KEK | KEK )

I beleive that I am correct that the Cs134 reading of 8.4 x 10 to the minus 10on the 44th test, which was a sample of 1673 cubic meters of air drawn over the period of 5/28 through 5-30, converts to 0.00000000084 Bq/cm3. I think that is the highest reading for any isotope listed the in all the tests on the latest info published.

The average human inhales and exhales about 11 cubic meters of air in a full 24 hour period.

So in a day that is about 11,000,000 cm3. Seems to me the math then puts the daily internal Cs134 exposure rate at that value at about 0.00924 Bq......... Yes/ No?

My understanding is that a Bq is the result of a single radiaoactive decomposition event. So 1.0 Bq is a very small amount of radiation generation.


Also from the above mentioned webpage:

"Transition of concentration of the airborne nuclide in semi-log scale since 15 March. (Bq/cm3) Current concentration level is lower by 5 orders of magnitude compared to 15 March, and is not of health concern."


best,

................john

It's funny to listen to salarymen talking about how bad radiation is for people's health, especially after having smoked a couple packs of cigarettes during the day, living on beef bowls, ramen, and beer for 5 days each week, and averaging 5 hours of sleep each night. Some have breath so bad that it kills flying insects and makes small children cry. Radiation poisoning should be a little closer to the bottom on their list of concerns.

Yes. Actually you did.

I see. How do you know? Are they labelled? (pardon me for asking such a funny question)

How about those who don't smoke & actually live a healthy lifestyle? I mean doesn't cancer worries you? Yes, I understand even without radiation, we will get cancer if we did not look after our diet, exercise & sleep but doesn't cancer worries you?

PLutonium accumulate in the bones even in small amounts. So....

Thank you everyone for your suggustions.

I realised that the limit of I-131 & Cesium were increased 10 times than before the disaster. Any debate on this?

Huh? Oh yeah, so it does. There's always something... Thank you, updated my medical database. That part has lacked somewhat.

Might shine some light on the subject to say "increased from what value to what value".

But just in case, if that is data from the KEK institute, I'd like to remind that that is NOT statistical data for the whole country/prefecture. This is point measurement, and air currents change concentrations. Weather patterns around Fukushima have been weirdly linear, and you'd get different measurements results elsewhere.

Of course. I would not have known if they were not, and that is why you have to learn how to read Kanji :rolleyes:

SOOOOO true.. And don't make me start about the bad breath:eek:

Even here in Osaka, there are some events where they sell produce from Tohoku area and by the end of the day, all items were sold out. It just goes to show that majority of the population are not concern with the radiation.

Much easier to protect a nation from fallout and cure cancer than make a salaryman wash his hands after toilet.
My wife had a name for that peculiar smell especially old salarymen have. What was that again...?

rotting/decaying smell ? :D

Listernaught?
Scopeless?

Actually I meant the chemical "kareishuu" (加齢臭), but those too are... are...
I don't know what the first one means.

Listerine + naught = listernaught! :)

Might shine some light on the subject to say "increased from what value to what value".

But just in case, if that is data from the KEK institute, I'd like to remind that that is NOT statistical data for the whole country/prefecture. This is point measurement, and air currents change concentrations. Weather patterns around Fukushima have been weirdly linear, and you'd get different measurements results elsewhere.[/quote]

Sorry,my mistake, I was trying to say I realised that the legal safe limit of I-131 & Cesium set by the government were increased 10 times than before the disaster. Any debate on this?

Do you ever think of mislabelling?

Serious? Of course it is the products that are not banned by the govt. right?

The products aren't really banned by the government per se..you can still buy beef or veggies or whatever from Tohoku if you feel like it..It's just that in around four prefectures right now farmers are not allowed to ship beef etc. anymore..they call it shukka teishi 出荷停止
Which means it wouldn't hit the markets in the first place anyways

Those who fear radiation so much I'm assuming also refrain from international flights, since you get quite a lot more radiation from being that high up in the air that long (in my case 13 hours US East Coast<->Japan) than you do from eating a Japanese diet while living in Japan (excluding Fukushima) for a long period of time.

Now ,why would they do that :confused:

I have to agree on what Lonthego posted.
I think you will get more radiation by just microwaving your food, or die faster by consuming more mcdonald burger :p

Ooooh! My wife laughed out loud on that! :vsign:
She is really disgusted at the image of a salaryman. That's why I'm not allowed to wear white shirts with pressed pants.

I can think of several reasons, all are numerations in yens. Oh, sarcasm! Sorry!

I heard a rumour that salad has been relabelled in Kanto area in some shops.

Pathetic attempt to retain the appearance of legality while throwing ethics straight to the toilet. It's "whaling for scientific purposes", explaining unpreparedness of Fukushima Daiichi by trying to tell that tsunamis in the most tsunami-stricken coastline in the world "are so rare and small that no special measures were needed".

Must be embarrassing to Tepco that Onagawa nuclear plant (run by Tohoku Electric Power Company) was also hit by a tsunami big enough not to make any difference at Fukushima Daiichi, but was deflected at the barriers. Souteigai my ass! :mad:

Hm. Ok.... Thk you everyone for your reply. Greatly appreciated.

Government lied because you can't evacuate 17,000,000 people. Nuclear industry is huge and has much sway on government policies, in Japan and elsewhere.

They're still figuring that the panic of TRUTH is pointless, I suppose.

The eggsucking bourgeois apologist swine downplaying the damage in Fukushima should commit ritual suicide.

USA is ripe to be next and seems much more corrupt than Japan. Americas Nuclear Nightmare | Rolling Stone Politics

Even China updated their nuclear regulatory practices after this incident. USA now stands alone in total neglect, self denial and ignorance.

Hm...............

I just learned that low radiation means cancer at a later year. What's you guys take on this?