[lbo-talk] Math fun with fear and Fukushima

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Wed Jun 22 18:39:04 PDT 2011


`` `Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind', Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera....

`Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,' he said, `You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.' ''

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638.html

It's pretty scary. It also mentions the SF Bay Area as having report spikes in infant mortality in April.

``In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.

The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.''

The original source was here,

http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

``The unborn and babies are more vulnerable because the cells are rapidly dividing and the delivered dose is proportionally larger than that delivered to an adult.''

They imply the deaths were caused by radiation. From what I read a few months ago direct radiation poisoning requires way too much radiation. By way too much, I mean such a source couldn't be a mystery. The more likely cause might be a suppressed immune system which could go undetected and the newborns and infants die of flu or pneumonia.

The authors don't mention suppressed immune system. What they talk about are low birth weight and premature babies. That seems also likely. Our infant mortality rates are bad in this region and getting higher.

I had to look it up. Human embryo cells divide in 15-20 minutes, while adult cells divide 8 hours to 100 days. (My much beloved HP 42S calculator died recently.) So their idea seems likely that proportional dosage could be much higher. But they don't discuss what proportion higher. Proportions come in all sorts of shapes.

Roughly estimating the proportion it looks like accumulation under the effect of compound interest rates. Checking some formulas, it looks even worse. It is the continuous compound rate. The proportion actually resembles the k growth rate equation and not a regular integer exponient n.

The fastest divisions occur in skin and the GI tract lining. But skin and GI cancers are still too slow to explain these infant deaths. I think we should look at a lymphatic system connection. It has all the right pathways: tonsils, thymus, bone marrow, digestive system, and it is part of the immune system. This is why a drop in white blood cell counts is a possible indicator of radiation, which means the body is less able to defend itself against common pathogens.

Nobody knows what I am talking about right? Here is the wiki. Just look at the graphs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

Interpretation. Normally we assume a direct proportion: more radiation, more danger. This is a linear relation, the straight line. There is also the fact that radiation exposure is cumulative over a life time. But because of cell growth and division rates the relation is more like a cubic function, F(x) = x^n, were n=3 proportion for healthy adults. The danger rises even faster for the very young in a near k rate of proportion, i.e. F(x) = x^kt, where k = 2, and t is empricially determined, in this case t = 20mins This is the reason the appearance of the baby white rabbit with no ears was important.



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