PRI: Public Radio International

As Japan tries to clean up radiation contamination, some question whether it's possible

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:56:00 -0500

In Japan, there's a massive effort under way to figure out how to clean up the contamination from the radiation release at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Some wonder if it can even be done.

Ed Hughes

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:08:03 -0500

Finally someone gets a taste of reality. It can not be cleaned up. Large parts of Japan will forever (many generations) be off limits. You can only reduce the increase in future dead zones. That is what Japan is doing now trying to stop it from spreading.

unspokenhermit

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:39:55 -0500

Complete cleanup of the plant and its surrounding area may never be possible. Even the they must keep trying to clean it up as good as possible so that the dispersion of contamination to other areas remains limited. I recently discovered the following dispersion model, which someone had linked to Berkeley’s discussion page. It uses TEPCO emission data to model possible dispersion patterns for Neptunium and Plutonium

http://www.datapoke.org/blog/89/study-modeling-fukushima-npp-p-239-and-np-239-atmospheric-dispersion/

http://datapoke.org/partmom/a=114

If this model is accurate, it is very disturbing. Where are all of the so-called experts who claimed these elements were too heavy to travel far from the plant site?