Reply #54: Can you link to any of those reports of workers with RADIATION poisoning?

[FBaggins]

I haven't seen anything close "serious poisining and death" from radiation. It's presumed that a couple died in an explosion, but the highest reported exposures that I've seen are in the "somewhat higher chance of cancer later in life" range.

It has come out today that 2 hours before you wrote your opinion that this was a positive development, that TEPCO went to the PM to ask if they would be allowed to evacuate all of their personnel from the plant.

They've evacuated and returned multiple times. A high percentage of the radiation that has been released has been something they knew about in advance because they were the ones releasing it. They wisely got out of the way each time.

It is not possible for someone to believe this is getting better at this point

We are just about past the point where there is any danger of the 1-3 reactors themselves breaching containment (depending on how you "score" the assumed breach in the torus). The fuel pools are the remaining danger. That's by no means insignificant, but I think the greatest risk was when we thought that #2 had lost containment and was in full meltdown.

Reports are coming out that outside the 30km zone, there are readings equivalent of 40 chest X-rays per hour...

Those have been transient readings. You can't get that dose in an hour if the radiation is much lower by then... and 40 xrays is not exactly a concern. It means that if that level hung around for ten hours you would get the equivelent of a CT scan.