Ask HN: Did the Fukushima cloud cause cancer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did the Fukushima cloud cause cancer?

2 pointsnoduerme5 comments

I was living in Spain. 9 or 10 days after the meltdown, I had been tracking the cloud as it passed over the US and then over the Atlantic. As it happened, there was a major rainstorm near Granada the day it passed over. Being paranoid, I told my GF to stay downstairs and we went below. The next day everything was coated in fine yellow dust. I have seen lots of Saharan dust deposited on patios but this wasn't the same.

My friend who lived next door at the time is 52 now and, this year, was just diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. Right around when he was diagnosed, I started having pretty severe shortness of breath which I attributed to "long covid" and haven't checked out yet. Perhaps it's a months-long panic attack or a sympathetic condition to my friend's condition. But my mind keeps returning to that day with the yellow dust that dried up in droplets when the rain mixed with the Fukushima cloud that was only 9 days old.

What are the odds that we both sucked in some cesium during that first pass around the globe? AFAIK it hadn't really rained out substantially anywhere before it hit Spain.

Zero. Whatever dust/pollen you observed on the ground after rainfall, that was not from Japan. That was not the nature of the released radiation.

The radiation released by Fukushima was minute, vastly overestimated at the time, and quickly diluted.

You need to stop stressing out over an event that is now over a decade old.

Half of one tenth of sweet bugger all . . .

Fukushima-related radioactive materials measured across entire Northern Hemisphere [1]

Scarey headline, right?

Check the details:

    The CTBTO's radionuclide stations are designed to register minuscule amounts of radioactive particles and noble gases -- down to a number of a few atoms. The system's sensitivity is second-to-none -- it can detect a concentration of 0.1 g of radioactive Xenon evenly distributed within the entire atmosphere of Earth. A rooftop detector at the CTBTO's headquarters in Vienna still catches traces of emissions from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

They are literally counting atoms and the levels detected outside of the immediate area were way to low to pose any kind of serious health risk.

Precedure wise some of the US National laboratory tests amounted to putting fresh filters in truly massive high volume warehouse size HVAC systems, waiting for two weeks worth of fine particle dust to gather, shaking down the filters to concentrate particulate, and then letting that sit for 48 hours at the heart of an extremely sensitive gamma ray detector in order to get "target of interest" counts in the low hundreds swamped by a sea of always there regular background environmental radiation.

It's a triumph of modern instrumentation that signal was detected .. but not the smoking gun of increased cancer risk.

Although . . . if you do want to worry, there are still trace elements of those several hundred atmospheric atom bomb tests from the first part of the Cold War drifting about [2]

[1] (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110407121343.h...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-fallout-nuclear-weap...

> several hundred atmospheric atom bomb tests

I mean, I know. My uncle was nuked (sort of on purpose) several times. When he was a teenager in Las Vegas in the 1950s, he and his buddies would go out to drink beers in the desert and watch the bombs go off. He said the ash would fall around them like snow. By the time he was 24 his hair was shock white and he was sterile. Oddly enough, he looks exactly the same jolly guy now as he did my whole life, like Santa Claus, and is still playing golf and fishing at 82 years old.

At the time of the rainstorm in Granada, we were hearing that the spent fuel pools on the roof of the reactors couldn't be kept full of water and were burning off into the atmosphere. I can't find the specific readings from around Europe at that time, but I don't think they were "baseline" 24-years post Chernobyl or even anything closely resembling that. To say that equipment is more sensitive is nice; many places I lived no one would still eat wild boar or certain mushrooms all those years after 1986. It is possible for a rainstorm to concentrate fallout from the upper atmosphere, and it also would be harder to detect than these giant HVAC units pulling in sea-level air.

arguable, but being married with kids has more detrimental effects than watching nuclear bombs go off in the dessert

Heh. I've thought that many times about my uncle. He seems immortal. Never even got covid; never wore a mask, never obeyed lockdown orders (and we all did, and were worried about him).

Side note, he's not my blood relative; he married my aunt while they were in their 20s. My aunt ended up in Las Vegas to get what was at the time cutting-edge, absolutely brutal radiation treatment for a cancer wrapped around her brainstem when she was 18. And so she was also sterile. They raised birds in a house in Henderson. The rads eventually got to her, producing a lot of small bleeds and seizures, and she died in her early 50s. He's just still truckin.

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