Intro: "Workers at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant were urged by a subcontractor to place lead around radiation detection devices in order to stay under a safety threshold for exposure."
High dose: A subcontractor at the Fukushima nuclear plant reportedly told its employees to hide how much radiation they were exposed to. (photo: AP)
Japan Firm 'Told Workers to Lie' About Radiation
23 July 12
Japan's health ministry said it would investigate reports that workers at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant were urged by a subcontractor to place lead around radiation detection devices in order to stay under a safety threshold for exposure.
he Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported on Saturday that an executive from Build-Up, a subcontractor to plant owner Tokyo Electric Power, told workers to cover the devices called dosimeters when working in high-radiation areas.
Dosimeters can be worn as badges or carried as devices around the size of a smart phone to detect radiation.
Nine workers wore the lead plates around the devices once after the executive's plea, Public broadcaster NHK said, citing the subcontractor's president.
Japanese law has set an annual radiation exposure safety threshold of 50 millisieverts for nuclear plant workers during normal operations.
But a massive earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Fukushima plant in March 2011 led to a breach of containment structures that released radiation, keeping large areas around the plant off limits more than a year later.
A Tokyo Electric Power spokesman told Reuters on Saturday the company was aware from a separate contractor that Build-Up made the lead shields, but that they were never used at the nuclear plant.
Build-Up could not be reached for comment.
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That is what all nuclear power is; insanity.
100,000 metric tons of toxic nuclear waste is generated each year...insanity...
its material that is poisonous to all life...insanity for even considering its use.
Technetium-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and Iodine-129 (half-life 15.7 million years),[78] which dominate spent nuclear fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years. The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Neptunium-237 (half-life two million years) and Plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years)
How is it that no one talks about trying to store such poisonous, corrosive, material?
Its only about money...profit at any price.
even if its poisonous, deadly, cancer causing, planet killing...
profit is more important than you.
It is tough enough to make sane arguments about the impracticality and the failed economics of nuclear power to a public and Congress that fails to fo their homework. You make it impossible when you get the physics so terribly wrong.
We owe it to our argument to get our facts straight.
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