IBT: Fukushima mutant daises: Deformed flowers spotted at Japan's disaster site

[China]

Apparently the Fukushima thread(s) have been archived so I'll have to start a new thread for this:

 

Fukushima mutant daisies: Deformed flowers spotted at Japan's disaster site

 

Photographs of deformed daisies are doing the rounds in cyberspace, four years after the deadly Fukushima nuclear incident in Japan.

 

 

The white flowers are claimed to be the latest in the long-list of victims, which have experienced deformation over nuclear disasters.

 

The images of the deformed flowers were posted by Twitter user @San_kaido from Nasushiobara city, located about 110kms from Fukushima.

 

The tweet the user posted read: "The right one grew up, split into 2 stems to have 2 flowers connected each other, having 4 stems of flower tied belt-like. The left one has 4 stems grew up to be tied to each other and it had the ring-shaped flower. The atmospheric dose is 0.5 μSv/h at 1m above the ground."

 

Click on the link for the full article

[dfitzo53]

Anybody else feel like these are going to be named butt-daisies?

[zoony]

That looks like a Dali painting

[mcsluggo]

i was thinking 

 

Anybody else feel like these are going to be named butt-daisies?

 

i was thinking more along the lines of tthis...   (but yeah, same general region)

 

[MattFancy]

Made me think of the big flowers they find in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

[GoSkins0721]

How long before we see mutant humans & animals in the streets near Fukushima?

[PokerPacker]

Made me think of the big flowers they find in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

Turns out TGRI is in Japan. Guess Shredder doesn't have to come to New York to get his hands on it.

[Taylor703]

How long before we see mutant humans & animals in the streets near Fukushima?

Apparently they've already had a rabbit born without ears

[dfitzo53]

i was thinking 

 

 

i was thinking more along the lines of tthis...   (but yeah, same general region)

Vajaysies does have a certain ring to it.

[Mufumonk]

Made me think of the big flowers they find in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

 

Made me think of The Wall:

 

[Corcaigh]

Apparently they've already had a rabbit born without ears

What do you call a rabbit without ears?

It doesn't matter. It can't hear you.

[China]

Photographer and filmmaker Arkadiusz Podniesinski visits Fukushima

 

 

Dump sites with sacks of contaminated soil are usually located on arable land. To save space they are stacked in layers, one on top of the other.  Millions of sacks. Aerial view.

 

 

Although the town is completely deserted, the traffic lights still work, and the street lamps come on in the evening. Now and again a police patrol also drives by, stopping at every red light despite the area being completely empty. They also stop next to our car and check our permits carefully.

 

 

Finally we visit Masami Yoshizawa’s farm, who, like Matsumura, returned to his ranch shortly after the disaster to take care of the abandoned animals.  Yoshizawa’s story is more interesting, however. Not long after the accident his cows started to get mysterious white spots on their skin. Yoshizawa suspects that this is due to the cows eating contaminated grass. He is trying to publicise the case, he is in contact with the media, and protests in front of the Japanese parliament, even taking one of his cows. Unfortunately, apart from financial support and regular testing of the cows’ blood, there is no one who is willing to finance more extensive tests.

 

 

The town’s close ties with the nearby power station are not just a question of the short distance between them. Next to the main road leading to the town centre I come across a sign across the street, and in fact it is a slogan promoting nuclear energy, saying „Nuclear energy is the energy of a bright future” – today it is an ironic reminder of the destructive effects of using nuclear power.

 

Click on the link for more

[China]

And in other Fukushima news...

 

Taxi drivers report 'ghost passengers' in area devastated in 2011 tsunami

 

SENDAI--In early summer 2011, a taxi driver working in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, which had been devastated by the tsunami a few months earlier, had a mysterious encounter.

 

A woman who was wearing a coat climbed in his cab near Ishinomaki Station. The woman directed him, “Please go to the Minamihama (district).” The driver, in his 50s, asked her, “The area is almost empty. Is it OK?” Then, the woman said in a shivering voice, “Have I died?”

 

Surprised at the question, the driver looked back at the rear seat. No one was there.

 

A Tohoku Gakuin University senior majoring in sociology included the encounter in her graduation thesis, in which seven taxi drivers reported carrying "ghost passengers" following the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

 

Yuka Kudo, 22, went to Ishinomaki every week in her junior year to interview taxi drivers waiting for fares. She asked them, “Did you have any unusual experiences after the disaster?”

 

She asked the question to more than 100 drivers, and many ignored her. Some became angry. However, seven drivers recounted their mysterious experiences to her.

 

Another taxi driver who was in his 40s told of an unexplainable occurrence.

 

According to the driver, a man who looked to be in his 20s got in his taxi. When the driver looked into the rear-view mirror, his passenger was pointing toward the front.

 

The driver repeatedly asked the man for his destination. Then, the passenger replied, “Hiyoriyama" (mountain). When the taxi arrived there, however, the man had disappeared.

 

The seven drivers' accounts cannot be easily dismissed as simple illusions. That is because if a passenger climbed in their taxi, the driver started the meter, which is recorded.

 

If the passengers were indeed "ghosts," they were still counted as riders. As a result, the drivers were forced to pay their fares.

Some of the seven drivers jotted down their experiences in their logs. One showed his driver’s report, which noted that there was a fare that went unpaid.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Dan T.]

And in other Fukushima news...

 

Taxi drivers report 'ghost passengers' in area devastated in 2011 tsunami

 

SENDAI--In early summer 2011, a taxi driver working in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, which had been devastated by the tsunami a few months earlier, had a mysterious encounter.

 

A woman who was wearing a coat climbed in his cab near Ishinomaki Station. The woman directed him, “Please go to the Minamihama (district).” The driver, in his 50s, asked her, “The area is almost empty. Is it OK?” Then, the woman said in a shivering voice, “Have I died?”

 

Surprised at the question, the driver looked back at the rear seat. No one was there.

 

 

 

 

Okay that just sent a chill down my spine. 

[Elessar78]

[China]

THE ROBOTS SENT INTO FUKUSHIMA HAVE 'DIED'

 

(Reuters) - The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”: a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site.

 

...

 

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods.

 

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel rods in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed.

 

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods.

 

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel rods in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[TheGreatBuzz]

I teach radiation safety. Things like this are even scarier when you know what you are talking about.

PS I hate sieverts. It's the stupid metric system of the radiation world. 'Merica

[zoony]

The time of Godzirra is nigh

[tshile]

So.... Are they ever going to reach a point where it's at least not getting worse?

[GoSkins0721]

So.... Are they ever going to reach a point where it's at least not getting worse?

 

Yeah, I think that will be in the year 2525, if man is still alive

[Zguy28]

They need to find a way to jettison it into space or something, but then it would probably explode in the atmosphere and really mess things up.

[PokerPacker]

Yeah, I think that will be in the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive

[Boss_Hogg]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150723-fukushima-mutated-daisies-flowers-radiation-science/

 

Are ‘Mutated’ Daisies Really Caused by Fukushima Radiation?

 

The radiation at the site where the stretched-looking Shasta daisies were photographed was 0.5 μSv/h, wrote @san_kaido, an account set up in the Tochigi Prefecture Nasu district to disseminate information about radiation and Fukushima. That might sound scary, but that level is considered only slightly above normal and is classified as safe for “medium to long term habitation.”

 

It’s possible the flower deformity could have been induced by radiation, says Jeffrey J. Doyle, a professor of plant biology at Cornell University. However, “this is a pretty common mutation in daisies that I’ve seen sporadically in various places not associated with radioactivity,” he says.

 

There are many factors that can cause the oddity, Doyle says, from chemicals to diseases, a hormone imbalance, or random mutations to inherited genes. This particular malformation has been seen in numerous species of the world’s 20,000 members of the daisy family, from Holland to Idaho.

 

He's not ruling out a role for Fukushima: “It wouldn’t surprise me to find mutations of all types, including this one, in places that have higher than average levels of mutagenic agents, such as a radioactive site or toxic waste dump.”

 

But this single plant is not enough to make a connection. If many other plants were found in the immediate area with mutations, that would provide more evidence of a possible link, he says.

 

Even if radiation levels were 10 times what was reported at the site, “the dose rate would be highly unlikely to induce a significantly higher level of mutations,” says Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But at areas closer to the release site, local dose rate levels were much higher at the time of the accident and possibly could have caused high additional mutation rates in flora in highly contaminated areas.”

[grhqofb5]

I teach radiation safety. Things like this are even scarier when you know what you are talking about.

PS I hate sieverts. It's the stupid metric system of the radiation world. 'Merica

What do you think about radiation therapy?

[China]

Research: Fukushima radiation reaches U.S. shores for first time

 

WOOD HOLE, Mass., Dec. 12 (UPI) -- For the first time since the nuclear disaster in 2011, radiation from Japan's Fukushima plant has reached the West Coast of the United States, according to a New England researcher.

 

It's a minuscule amount -- less than one-thousandth the standard for drinking water or a dental X-ray. But it's notable considering the amount was detected 5,000 miles from Japan five years after the disaster.

 

From his lab another 3,000 miles east in Massachusetts, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution chemical oceanographer Ken Buesseler discovered samples of seawater taken in January and February from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in central Oregon contain radiation unique to the power plants. It wasn't until last week that it was reported by a media outlet, the Statesman Journal, which serves the Oregon area where the samples were found.

 

"Not to downplay it, but the levels we are seeing are quite low," Buesseler told UPI.

 

He said it wouldn't stop him from eating seafood or swimming in the Pacific Ocean.

 

Click on the link for the full article