BBCLive reports at 1836 that radiation from Fukushima has reached California. The Solono/NAPA Times-Herald and other sources are of course downplaying the amount of "radiation" in the cloud, since the gamma dose rate from it is, indeed minimal. But as I mentioned in my post yesterday, the gamma dose from the plume isn't the actual danger to human health. Possible interior dose from what's in the plume is the real concern.
Yet notice in the Times-Herald article that UC Berkeley has detected iodine, cesium, barium and krypton. They didn't mention xenon, which like krypton is a non-reactive noble but emits beta radiation. Iodine, cesium and barium are nasty, krypton and xenon can be if it's in your lungs when it decays. They'll be falling out over freshly tilled and/or planted fields. The cesium will be uptaken by plants and incorporated like potassium. They've said nothing about strontium, but it's in there. That will also be incorporated into crops as calcium, and eaten by cows (along with the iodine) and concentrated in milk. Hell, people will be eating these isotopes on their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches! But still we get the standard line… "No danger to the general public."
Meanwhile, Japan's version of the NRC has raised the impact level of its inconvenient little mass meltdown to 5 on the IAEA scale of 1 to 7. 7 being Chernobyl, 5 being a mere Three Mile Island. Huh. While I am pleasantly surprised that as this catastrophe has taken shape the apologists and coverup artists have accidentally come off of truths about TMI that some of us have been trying to make public for 32 years (and which were up until last week still classified information staunchly denied by one and all), I've just gotta offer the following screen shot. It was taken from the video Japanese 'officials' requested be taken by a US helicopter crew yesterday, so they could get a look inside the plants at what was happening, since they couldn't see from the ground and the satellite photos couldn't get the right sideways angle…
This is at 29 seconds into the video, a shot into the open side wall of the unit-4 refueling floor area (note the roof, as camera sweeps by, is still intact). I do not know if the large rectangular object on the left is what's left of the spent fuel pool, but if it is it appears to be empty. The issue of concern is the glowing object just to the right. Something very hot is there. My non-engineering sensibilities might suspect that's a fuel assembly in the process of burning/melting. It is not big enough to be a thousand tons of spent fuel assemblies in an empty pool. In fact, it doesn't appear to be IN the pool at all.
CORRECTION UPDATE: I have been informed by a source that the photo is of the unit-1 refueling floor area, not unit-4's.
Which, also to my non-engineer sensibilities, might tend to suggest that the spent fuel at unit-4 isn't in the pool anymore, but rather scattered about in the rubble above and below the refueling level floor. That might help explain why they seem to think that helicopters dumping water in the plant's general direction, and spraying into open holes with fire hoses and water cannons might do some good. If they can slow the individual assemblies from melting in place wherever they happened to land when they were blown out of the pool, they can save themselves a situation where their score on the IAEA scale of something approximating 20.
That's a video by helicopter flying around the outside of the plant. There's something melting in there, it's glowing red-hot. I can guarantee everyone here that if you'd flown a helicopter over TMI during the worst of the accident and its aftermath, you would NOT have seen melting fuel elements exposed entirely to the open air. Because TMI's containment held. Shit got out, but not because it demolished itself. It got out because it was being released on purpose.
So. What I'm saying is that this is NOT a "Level-5" event. It's way beyond that with open to the atmosphere melting. That's at LEAST Chernobyl level. Add to that the three melting reactors (at least one with blown containment) and not just this 1 but 6 endangered/melting fuel pools with 5-7 times as much fuel in each as there is in any of the reactors, and you're well up into the teens on the Horror-Scale already.
So take those kelp capsules now, or potassium iodide if you're one of the lucky who managed to get some before it was sold out. 1 KI tablet per day, up to 12 kelp capsules. And for goodness' sake, wear a mask or bandana over your nose and mouth if you go outside. Please.