Re: [tlug] How much of radiations measured in Central Tokyo?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

I'm sorry, but I haven't figured out the gmail linebreaking algorithm yet.
I give up, I'm going to hope they use format=flowed with a
reasonableOn Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Nicolas Limare
<nicolas+tlug@example.com> wrote:

> NHK world[1] has most of the NHK programs translated in english, with
> real-time translation of all the press coferences help by Kan and
> Edano,

Waste of time.  Just now Edano gets around to announcing "don't hoard
gasoline!"  Too late, you dumb mofos -- there's no gasoline to buy and
hoard any more, at least not in Tsukuba, and the gas stands long ago
started limiting customers to 2000-yen worth.

> Tepco, the Nuclear Safety Agency and the Meteorological agency.

Unfortunately, these aren't terribly useful either.  At one point I
saw a mention of which nuclides have leaked from the reactors,
including Cs137 and I131 IIRC, but since then, nothing.  AFAICT the
reports from Tokyo are based on the kind of calibration (ie, medically
useful radionuclides in therapeutic concentrations of radiation) that
wakwak uses.  This *may* be accurate, but without knowing the specific
nuclides involved, it's not possible to evaluate accuracy.

>> I pretty sure the Japanese government simply
>> over-extended the exclusion zone and aren't hiding anything (other
>> than the fact that they're in uncharted territory).

Despite my generally optimistic interpretation of events, I can't
really agree with that.  Take a look at the visualization of the
tsunami flows that CL (?) posted URLs to.  Then consider that as a
picture of the winds around Iwaki.  If there were a village in one of
the red paths, and something (such as rain) happened to further
concentrate the radioactives, people within 30km could easily be
exposed to 100 mSv/hr quantities of radiation.  I don't think they're
overreacting.  I assume they've thought about this, and decided that
30km is enough that the radioactive cloud would be diffuse enough
after traveling that distance.

I don't think they're doing a good job of hiding the fact that they're
in uncharted territory, either.

> Tepco has a very has a very bad history of dissimulation and
> unreported nuclear incidents, so to be fair we can't exclude the
> posibility that there is more than what they report to citizens or the
> government.

I'm sure they already have a good idea of the nuclides and their
proportions, but they're not telling us.  Nevertheless, I think it was
a Robert Heinlein novel where it was written "don't attribute to
malice that which can be explained by incompetence."  I think that
Japanese bureaucrats (which includes almost all managers at large
companies, the attitudes are very much the same) are very bad at
providing information (in the incompetence sense more than the malice
sense, although like any bureaucrat there's strong tendency to hoard
information).

I don't think they dare lie, though, or even consciously apply tatemae
principles.  Although it's very unclear what the health implications
of the increased levels of radiation are (for people or for the
reactors!), it's impossible to conceal the increase.  It's also
impossible to conceal the fact that there were explosions in reactors
#1 and #3 -- you can probably see that from Google Earth!  The basic
principle of lying in Japan is "don't say anything, and if asked,
exploit the latent ambiguity in the language to pretend nothing has
happened."  That won't work here, because everybody knows that
earthquakes and nuclear power plants don't mix well.

> But geigers don't lie.

Maybe not, but they do speak in tongues.  Without a prophet to
interpret them, we don't really know what they're saying except that
the news isn't good.  But it's not necessarily that bad.