This comes as no surprise. The Japanese are zoning off areas as “uninhabitable”.
The most heavily contaminated spot was in the town of Okuma about two miles southwest of the plant, where someone living for a year would be exposed to 508.1 millisieverts of radiation — far above the level of 20 millesieverts per year that the government considers safe.
Yeah, ~510 mSv (51 rem) per year is quite a dose. And yet, in order to kill someone outright, you’d need to give them a decade’s worth of that exposure in a short amount of time.
It’s a terrible, terrible loss. But unlike other catastrophic industrial disasters, Fukushima’s death toll from radiation remains…zero.
World's Only Rational Man 
This is a better place to post this:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/nuclear/tepco-releases-rare-video-from-inside-fukushima-daiichi
Kinda sad, seems like they just learned the post TMI lessons about how to talk with the public.
Great link, thank you Rana! I caught this in the early A.M., though. Hopefully can check it out thoroughly tomorrow.
Er…later today.
Noooo, there are thousands of deaths already!!!
Statistically, of course.
Statistically I should have died 50 times already.
Let’s have a look at the rest of the country: http://radiation.yahoo.co.jp/
Some explanation: the purple dots show first the current rate, then, below, is the 24/hour average and the last number on the right is per year.
Looking at the rest of the country… Yeah, we’re all going to die.
Where the fuck are you living? An anechoic chamber?
50 times…WTF, wuss.
(Apologies to those who don’t like WTF!)
@MG, I thought mountainbear was bring sarcastic. Even if he/she wasn’t being sarcastic, they could well have been.
I was too 😉
Statistically, we’re lucky there’s even a planet here.
Good point! If you totalled up all the estimated risks, from all known dangers, you probably need to die 5 times or more to account for all that “risk”.
This is actually a really deep matter that I wish I’d seen before one in the morning.
Ahh. It’s not like the guilty parties would understand it at one in the afternoon.