Infinite Unknown

- US Navy Sailors Sue, Readings On Ships During Disaster (Simply Info, Dec 27, 2012):

We mentioned previously how a group of sailors are suing TEPCO and the Japanese government for withholding information and lying to the public and the US Navy about the radiation levels near Fukushima Daiichi during the early days of the disaster. FOIA releases from the NRC document some of the radiation levels and reporting from those early days that may have been part of the reason for the lawsuit. FOIA documents report a level of 10,000 uCi/cm3 by air filter measurement on the USS Ronald Reagan while it was 100 miles out to sea. This would have been on March 13, 2011. This level converted to becquerels would have been 370,000,000 bq/cm3. The Navy said it was 30 times normal levels. A “Mr. Mueller” in the NRC transcripts reported this regarding the levels found “And so we thought — we thought based on what we had heard on the reactors that we wouldn’t detect that level even at 25 miles. So it’s much greater than what we had thought. We didn’t think we would detect anything at 100 miles.” The NRC discussions also considered this to be a thyroid risk to those on board.

The USS Ronald Reagan also found 0.6 mR/hr from “gamma shine” 130 miles out to sea. This is about 6 uSv/hr and appeared to be taken after they repositioned the ship further out to sea.

People who had briefly been on a Japanese SDF ship were found to have 2500 cpm readings on their feet when they were later checked on a US ship. Mr. Mueller states this in the NRC documents “The shoes were from helicopter crews that flew to a Japanese flag ship that is 50 miles closer to the power plant at sea, so it’s about — it’s about half way so it’s 50 miles from land as well, and it was near the center line of the plume.? So the levels on the Japanese ship would have likely been much higher than those on the Ronald Reagan.

It was also mentioned in the WIki entry that the USS George Washington left the port of the Yokosuka base after radiation levels there began to climb. “Radiation precautions were taken at U.S. bases, including USS George Washington leaving port at Yokosuka after very low levels of radiation were detected there. Part of its air complement moved to Misawa Air Base to support relief operations.^[19]” This little publicized document on the US military analysis of the radiation readings showed increased levels at Yokosuka during the early days of the disaster. Later reporting also showed the drinking water source was contaminated. 4500 families also left Yokosuka AFB at that time. The George Washington was in the middle of overhaul work and was partially disassembled. They completed the overhaul without a shipyard in another location.

This all may shed some light on the motivations of those who filed the suit and what they are basing it on.

Footnote: Japan’s government gave the US military SPEEDI data on March 14th, one day after the high levels were discovered on the USS Ronald Reagan

Note: Thanks to Jason for catching an error in our calculation of the radiation reading conversion for the Reagan’s air filter. We discovered a glitch in our conversion calculator tool causing the final conversion factor to be off. The article has been updated with the corrected calculation.

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Tags: Environment, Freedom of Information Act, Fukushima, Global News, Government, Health, Japan, Military, Nuclear, Nuclear reactors, Politics, Radiation, TEPCO, U.S., USS Ronald Reagan