Published: August 11th, 2012 at 12:03 am ET
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August 9, 2012 report by a resident of Kashiwa, near Tokyo translated by Fukushima Diary:
Around the end of July, I had the professional cleaners wash the roof of our house.
The roof was covered with something like this yellow moss. It was 0.7 μSv/h on its surface.
[...]
I took 3.6 kg of it with the perfect protective clothing (tyvek, gas mask, goggles, plastic gloves).
[...]
The radiation level was 14 μSv/h. I haven’t measured higher than 10 μSv/h before. It makes sense why the radiation level is high on the second floor.
[...]
When I stepped on the roof, I saw the roofs of other houses, most of them were covered with the same yellow substance. Probably the radiation level is high as well.
They add a warning: “This is very dangerous, please don’t do it. I can’t take a responsibility if something happened to you.”
Published: August 11th, 2012 at 12:03 am ET
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sending...
Extensive and visible yellow poison on the roofs of buildings in a city of 400,000. 16 miles as the crow flies from Tokyo. No place to put it. Wash it down the drain into the water supply?
FEMA might not be the only entity needing a lot of bodybags.
Madness everywhere in Japan..
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Throughout this madness I've tried to stay mellow
Now Tokyo suburbs got roofs of yellow
Moss like gunk, is it living? growing?
Daily more questions, why less knowing?
Got pregnant mothers in poison cleaning
How many babies on rad milk weaning?
Tepgov lying like takin' a breath
Whoring for dollars, pimping out death
School kids smiling when playing outside
"We'll be fine if we just stay off the slide"
We hear different numbers but nothing specific
They've mortgaged our future, killed the Pacific
Raped our one Mother, our once pristine Earth
They know where their stock's priced, not what life's worth
For months anger smolders, let's stoke the fire
We evolved for eons, just one step higher
Accept that we're all one with love as our guide
Cast out greedy evil, with no place to hide
dedicated to or-well. where you been brother? hope you're ok
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Modern Civilization Are You Game?
I am weeping for all of life
Kudankulam has been given permit to load real fuel(?)
By whom I ask?
AERB says the press report
Allowing Extinction By Rad Bombard
And Rad eats
In the face of mounting permanence
Of poisons exploding within us
Non-clonal reproduction undone
By generations of genomic instability
Dam surge dynamic
Rapid climate change surges
I have arrived
Time the destroyer
Always my victory
Brahma's night
Lie fallow for 4.32 billion years
Till daylight arrives
Who will pay?
Ah! Ah! Ah! Ha!
Meri Jeet
Meri Jeet
(My victory!)
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This should have never happened, and it should never happen again.
If people stay there, does anyone know on the average, how long of a life they should expect?
It might help them decide if they should stay or move away.
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Before 3.11 I would say it was the desert sands from China which tend to blow over every spring. But this is August and post 3.11 so who knows what this is.
But what we can bet on is that any "official" analysis results will likely be a lie. The only way to know for sure is for non-governmental or TEPCO people to do their own testing with a gamma spectrometer and/or scintillator to find out what it is made of. Firstly though testing with a Geiger counter would be necessary to check for alpha, gamma, beta or xrays.
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One hour ago:
4.5 Mag. earthquake
East coast of Honshu,Japan
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"I took 3.6 kg of it". If true, that's an awful lot of "stuff" (sample is about 8 pounds). I would guess it is moss. It shouldn't be that hard to distinguish moss from other "yellow substance".
If it is moss, then it is all the more worrisome if it has become that "hot", since everything else could be equally "hot" – roofs, lawns, sidewalks, swingsets, cars… anything exposed 24/7, unless the moss has some special radiation-concentrating ability.
One resident's report could mean almost anything, but if there is followup and the radiation levels are true… then it is far more serious than governments have acknowledged to date.
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hi aigeezer
the picture shows a common roof lichen that lives off minerals in the tiles…
and lichen is very good at assimulation radionuclides such as cesium..
cesium has a penetration of about 6 meters from source, i believe. this would account for higher readings in the top floor.. the rain and particulates, have deposited on the roof..
it would be interesting to test this material for strontium and plutonium for that matter…
americium in the Finnish environment (daghhter product of plutonium)
2.1 × 1012 Bq. This calculation was based on the observed 241Am/239240Pu ratio of 0.107 in lichen samples from the years 1963–1965 (Jaakkola et al. 1981)
http://www.borenv.net/BER/pdfs/ber14/ber14-427.pdf
Using Lichens To Assess Airborne Deposition Around Selkirk: …. That is, arsenic, barium, boron, cadmium, molybdenum, silver, strontium, sulfur and zinc
"Lichens growing on tree trunks are well established as good indicators of past deposition of airborne dust and gases. Lichens have been used as bio-indicators of air pollution since 1866. The relationship between lichens and air quality has been reported in over 1,500 scientific papers. "
http://www.gov.mb.ca/conservation/eal/publs/lichenstudy.pdf
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Thanks, arclight. Yes, lichen seems like a strong candidate, although I seem to remember it is normally without pigment (no chlorophyll), so the "yellow" is perhaps surprising.
In any case, I hope this story gets investigated more. Photos of the rooftops? Detailed analysis of the substance?…
You would think media or citizen-journalists would be all over it.
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Sorry – by "photos of rooftops" I mean large images of several buildings (if appropriate). I found that the photos offered in the article didn't provide enough detail for my geezer eyes.
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Great poems johnnyo (bravo) and Kumar (huzzah). 311
311 points to arc fir the lichens info. A very interesting 2003 article about the Sami culture shows how this affected their lives from Chernobyl:
"Cesium 137 intruded into Sámi life foremost by contaminating their food supplies. Through rainfall following the explosion, radioactive fallout permeated freshwater lakes and inland forests, thereby contaminating fish, wild game, berries and other plants (Stephens, 1995). Most detrimental was the contamination of lichen, the main winter staple of Scandinavia’s reindeer. Lichens have no root system so they extract nutrients directly from the air, thereby acting as virtual radioactive sponges, absorbing incredible amounts of airborne cesium 137 and passing it straight onto the deer. Lichen is an extremely slow-growing plant, taking 30 years to regrow completely (Vitebsky). Thus, radioactivity in affected lichen may not drop to safe levels short of 20 to 30 years after contamination. The effects of the contaminated lichen were not fully realized until after the first post-Chernobyl autumn slaughter season; then scientists began to measure levels of radioactivity in slaughtered reindeer."
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/sami/dieda/socio/chernobyl.htm
SP: Many items in that article that may prove helpful to Japan. The problem is the government is reluctant to test food thoroughly and even more important…compensate food producers for losses.
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