Post
by John HG » Fri Aug 23, 2013 3:50 pm
Howard, it was almost a year ago, when I said to you (in this forum),
"If you want to have a real discussion, let's do it with facts, not an accumulation of opinions!"
So, I will give it another shot. I saw the numbers you posted (from the Guardian article) and I haven't seen anything else, official, so I take them with a grain of salt (BTW, I take officially released numbers that way, as well). However, over the last week or so, I have read a dozen different articles on the subject, and they are all the same, fluff, numbers totally out of context for the sake of "shocking" the reader, etc. I've seen the "300 tons of water a day leaking...". It sounds huge, right? Let's see, Olympic sized swimming pool contains 660,253 gallons of water, and water is 8.345 lbs/gal, so (hopefully I didn't drop some zeroes, somewhere...)
660,253 gal * (8.345 lbs/gal) * (1 ton/2000 lbs) = 2,755 tons of water in an Olympic sized pool. Even at a leakage of 300 tons/day, that's one swimming pool every 9 days. To put it in perspective, that's like a drop of lake Erie,
Lake Erie: 115.2 mi^3 * (1.10111715E+12 gal/mi^3) = 1.2685E+14 gal ~ 5.2928E+11 tons, that' 529,281,625,000 tons, so 300 tons per day is 0.000000057 % of Lake Erie,
And an even smaller drop of Lake Superior,
Lake Superior: 2,903 mi^3 * (1.10111715E+12 gal/mi^3) = 3.1965E+15 gal ~ 1.3337E+13 tons, 13,337,000,000,000 tons (so 300 tons a day is 0.0000000022 % of Lake Superior)
Should I also try and get the equivalent numbers for the Pacific Ocean?
Also, none of the articles that I read had the radiation levels in the water! How come they are not published by all these big news outlets? The numbers are out there (as posted in your referenced link). But even at that, the way all the articles I've read are written for shock value and fear-mongering.
And, before everyone jumps all over me, I'll be the first to admit that the situation in Fukushima is a mess, nobody is denying it. However, instead of the media proclaiming the end of the world, and sea life as we know it, please do your homework. Get the facts. Put the situation and radiation numbers in perspective and let us know what they are, so we better gauge the situation. Don't treat us like sheep!