 |
Working at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station among underground water storage pools; above-ground storage tanks rise in the background. An IAEA expert team visited the site on 17 April 2013 to review Japan's plans to decommission the facility. Photo Credit: Greg Webb / IAEA
|
This, recently, from Energy News:
Study shows Fukushima nuclear pollution becoming more concentrated as it approaches U.S. West Coast — Plume crosses ocean in a nearly straight line toward N. America — Appears to stay together with little dispersion (MODEL)
Published: August 20th, 2013 at 9:43 am ET
By ENENews
Title: An ensemble estimation of impact times and strength of Fukushima nuclear pollution to the east coast of China and the west coast of America
Source: Science China Earth Sciences; Volume 56, Issue 8, pp 1447-1451 Authors: GuiJun Han, Wei Li, HongLi Fu, XueFeng Zhang, XiDong Wang, XinRong Wu, LianXin Zhang Date: August 2013
[...] On March 30, 2011, the Japan Central News Agency reported the monitored radioactive pollutions that were 4000 times higher than the standard level. Whether or not these nuclear pollutants will be transported to the Pacific-neighboring countries through oceanic circulations becomes a world-wide concern. [...]
[...] The time scale of the nuclear pollutants reaching the west coast of America is 3.2 years if it is estimated using the surface drifting buoys and 3.9 years if it is estimated using the nuclear pollutant particulate tracers. [...]
Read more |
The source link goes to a Springerlink page, asking you to shell out $39.95 for a PDF given away freely by the publisher.
I hate them, by the way. More on why I despise Springer and its kin after the article and download links. Admire my restraint. Thank you.
For your perusal, Gentle Reader: the source PDF, An ensemble estimation of impact times and strength of Fukushima nuclear pollution to the east coast of China and the west coast of America, featured in screenshots of each page. The full text is available, below it, in several formats for download, thanks to Science China Earth Sciences.
Links to download source (right click and open in new tab):
Please advise in comments below should any link prove broken or unreacheable for you.
And now, at last, a little bit on the evil that is Springer, part of a four headed monster feeding off of research.
The Cost of Knowledge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
History
Before the advent of the Internet, it was difficult for scholars to distribute articles giving their research results. Historically, publishers performed services including proofreading, typesetting, copyediting, printing, and worldwide distribution. In modern times, all researchers became expected to give the publishers digital copies of their work which needed no further processing. [In other words the publishers no longer had to do all the work - they got the researchers to do it for them, usually for free. --ed ] For digital distribution, printing was unnecessary, copying was free, and worldwide distribution happens online instantly. Internet technology [and the significant decrease in copyedit costs --ed] enabled the four major scientific publishers – Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and Informa — to cut their expenditures such that they could consistently generate gross margins on revenue of over 33%.
[snip]
A change from status quo
On 21 January 2012, the mathematician Timothy Gowers called for a boycott of Elsevier with a post on his personal blog. This blog post attracted enough attention that other media sources commented on it as being part of the start of a movement. The three reasons he cited for the boycott are high subscription prices for individual journals, bundling subscriptions to journals of different value and importance, and Elsevier's support for SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act, and the Research Works Act.
Read more
& hopefully, but perhaps not likely, my intended edits will have remained...
|
Being as I live almost exactly across from Fukushima, perhaps I give you this post by way of distracting myself from the research itself, which is enough to scare me quite. And I thought I was jaded.
Have a nice week-end, and,
Be seeing you.
UPDATE: a screenshot of that wiki edit is here . Here is the paragraph:
ReplyDeleteBefore the advent of the Internet, it was difficult for scholars to distribute articles giving their research results.[1] Historically, publishers performed services including proofreading, typesetting, copyediting, printing, and worldwide distribution.[1] In modern times, all researchers became expected to give the publishers digital copies of their work which needed no further processing – in other words, the modern academic is expected to do, often for free, duties traditionally assigned to the publisher, and for which, traditionally, the publisher is paid in exchange.[1] For digital distribution, printing was unnecessary, copying was free, and worldwide distribution happens online instantly.[1] Internet technology, and with it the aforementioned significant decrease in overhead costs, enabled the four major scientific publishers – Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and Informa — to cut their expenditures such that they could consistently generate gross margins on revenue of over 33%.[1]
Thank you for making this report available. It is good to get the news out, although I cannot suppress a cynical thought that it is typical of the Chinese to gleefully publish data that puts Japan in a bad light, yet diligently hide their own dirty laundry in terms of the pollution of Tibet with Chinese nuclear waste, pollution that is particularly onerous because it affects the area of the world that is the source of the major rivers of Asia...
ReplyDeletegood point. but: in the spirit of the freedom of information, i was glad to sleuth out a link....
ReplyDelete