Radioactive rain in California

More Fear mongering is not needed. You provide no links to any information about this radioactive cloud, as well as you make no distinction between natural background radiation in produce vs deadly killer invisible rays of doom. A 7+ earthquake might not be as devastating to Diablo Canyon in SLO as you are saying as the Japanese Earthquake survived the 9+ quake fine, the issue was the diesel generators that got lost with the tsunami and the cooling pumps lost power after 8 hours, freak of nature, but now that it has happend I am pretty sure they will make changes there to prevent it. Plutonium is very heavy so it is unlikely to make it all the way here in the jet stream. Go smoke something, go for a surf or grab a beer and relax, your not going to die or get cancer from radiation today.

Please consult this chart before you go freaking out. - http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Holy shit, the sky is falling! Duck, cover, and troll!

#thumbnail

And if you read your article:

"For example, in the rain water we collected in 18 hours between March 17 and March 18 we observe an activity of the isotope of I-131 (Iodine-131) of 4.26 Bq/l. At this level, you would need to drink 632 liters of this rain water to obtain the same radiation effects you obtain on a round-trip flight between San Francisco and Washington D.C. Therefore, the increase in radiation levels in the rain water due to the events in Japan remain extremely small."

OMG ATOMS!

edit: Plus the half-life of I-131 is 8 days which is relatively short for "radioactive" material. Do some research instead of trolling news headlines. Better yet just be a shut in so there's less traffic and smaller crowds in the line-ups.

That chart is no longer accurate, Luke, given how many times TEPCO has revised their "estimates". Especially now that they admit that the plant has spewed "at least 1/10th" of what Chernobyl did, which is a fucking lot. And they still haven't stabilized the reactors or the spent fuel pools, nor does it look like there's any end in sight. At least Chernobyl had the common courtesy to immediately eject most of its core into the atmosphere and onto neighboring buildings. That meant the damage was pretty much done and there was no danger of any further criticality. That is not the case here, nor will it be for a while.

Despite all this, I'm not freaking out, but only because there isn't really anything I can do. If this shit is coming over here, it's going to be everywhere. I will be surfing in it, eating it, and drinking it. There's really nowhere to go, so fuck it. I'm gonna surf a few times this week and get my daily becquerels. Stack dem' sieverts. Catch a few curies. Roll in summa dem roentgens.

My family in Slovenia was right in the path of Chernobyl fallout and said the leaves that year just decided to fall off the trees green. Bizarre and intense. Most of them are pretty healthy and the one that's dead was a 30-year smoker.

Whatever.

Do it live!

How I act about all this, is basically summed up by the following tenet:
What would a honey badger do?

nothing can stop the honey badger!
the honey badge don't care its getting irradiated like a thousand times. Eww whats that in its mouth? a radioactive cobra?

A radioactive cobra eating a mutant vampire cockroach.

Actually, the only thing the honey badger fears are those dirty Minna Street sea otters.

A Minna water weasel really is quite scary come to think of it. That water weasel has absolutely NOTHING to lose, so yeah, I can see it going all-in on whatever it chooses to do.

Maybe you should also be concerned about how many people die each year mining coal or breathing in the air pollution from it? Its good to learn more about nuclear power and accidents but you need to consider the big picture that however we get electricity their are problems with it. Myself I would rather live next door to a nuclear plant then a coal fired one, and I lived right over the hill from Diablo Canyon for 5 years. The U.S. just like Japan has probably slacked a bit on the regulation side of things, a symptom of the "deregulation" mentality that Regan then Bushes preached.
Check this link for death per amount of electricity generated:
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d...
Then if you can listen to this Forum on KQED episode about Nuclear Energy
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201104010900

@tehdely- I like your "big picture" view, worrying about everything will surely take years off ones lifespan.

Minna Water Weasel

Maybe not the best audience for spreading panic

The scariest thing about this post is that there is someone with the name "Broseidon". Nicely done sir!

I saw a photo of a minna water weasel once. But, the Minna Street Recycler was choking it. I think he had just finished a bottle of honey badger wine and was slamming radioactive rain into his arm. http://www.olddirtyalley.net/2010/09/01/the-minna-street-recycler/#com-h...

@pistol shrimp: IMO, the likelihood of getting a significant dose of radiation from Fukushima via rainwater in NorCal is about the same as the likelihood of getting one from the ocean in Norcal. They're both close to zero.

I don't know enough about the specifics of the Fluid Dynamics equations which govern either system, but one can still use some intuition. If you blow a smoke ring into the a easterly wind, what are the chances the smoke particles in your smoke ring will stay in the general vicinity of each other until they get to Japan? About zero.

The radiation which gets spewed into the air and into the ocean will get diluted the further one is from Fukushima. The part of the earth that gets f*cked up is the land around the power plant. The radiation has a chance to settle there and once on the ground, it stays there.

On another note: I think the comparisons, even by the Japanese government, to Chernobyl are way off base. Chernobyl didn't have a containment dome. It burned uncontrollably. Fukushima, in contrast, has containment. There are leaks, but it's just not the same. Us in Norcal don't have anything to worry about. If you're gonna worry, worry for the Japanese in that area. They're the ones who are in danger, not us.

I'm speechless that there's honey badger wine, and I think I'm going to buy and then drink some and proceed to take the blue pill with respect to radiation curies and becquerelseseses.

Surf tomorrow! ^_____^

Edit: I think I know where to get honey badger wine!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/04/14/national/a04...

One of the off-shoots of Chernobyl was new data on the exposure of newborns and small children to I-131(which I've only seen referred to, NOT actually cited - THAT would be pertinent and if anyone can find a link to that data I might be interested in seeing it).

As regular iodized salt will lead to less uptake of I-131 I've been giving my daughter a little extra salt every now and then, just in case, to offset any extra I-131 in the environment. Probably not a bad idea if you have little ones. I'm not worried about myself personally and I wouldn't do anything more than what I'm doing now.

"wonder if it includes the the 1mil + that died from Chernobyl?" What's your source on this one? appx 60 people died as a direct result of Chernobyl. Estimates about long term cancer deaths vary widely but Greenpeace claims around 200,000 and that is the highest one I've heard of. I'm rembering these numbers from the forum radio show I listed above so I'm not claiming to be exact....

I wish I could remember where I saw someone say it, but, I remember when I heard it that 1) I should confirm that number 2) It sounds completely plausible as the thyroid is smaller on lil ones

Still can't find hard numbers, but here :

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs303/en/index.html

(world health organization chernobyl report)