London Wedding Photographer -Wedding Photographer London
Hats off to this photography staff. Awesome.
GingerZ
Information & discussion on: Photography, Science(s), Economy, Discovery, Sailing & Sound-boarding.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Lets Not Forget the Photographers Who Put Themselves On The Line Every Day
TIM HETHERINGTON
Last week, on 4/20/2011: "Conflict photographer Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya's third-largest city, Misurata, during his coverage of the Libya conflict. He is known for directing and producing the film "Restrepo" as well as photographing (and raising the visibility of) major world conflicts in Liberia and Afghanistan Darfur."
Last week, on 4/20/2011: "Conflict photographer Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya's third-largest city, Misurata, during his coverage of the Libya conflict. He is known for directing and producing the film "Restrepo" as well as photographing (and raising the visibility of) major world conflicts in Liberia and Afghanistan Darfur."
Litigation Piling Up At Ernst & Young
Article by Francine McKenna
ACCOUNTING WATCHDOG
April 26, 2011 - 12:36 p.m.
Image Via Wikipedia
I’d rather see than be you, Ernst & Young.
As if the global audit firm didn’t have enough to worry about, now there’s a backdating case, arisen from the grave, threatening a jury trial.
That’s just unheard of.
From the Los Angeles Times on April 15, 2011:
Accounting firm Ernst & Young must face a class action suit over option backdating at Broadcom Corp., a federal appeals court has ruled, saying the auditors knew or should have known about the resulting misrepresentations in the Irvine tech company’s financial statements.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated Ernst & Young as a defendant in the investor lawsuit, overturning a 2009 decision by U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real…The auditors “apparently accepted management at its word, never received requested documentation and issued an unqualified opinion on the accuracy of Broadcom’s financial statements,” the panel said, adding that the accounting firm’s audit “amounted to no audit at all.”
There it is again. The deadly, “no audit at all” phrase.
Ernst & Young is already defending against it in the lawsuit brought by the New York Attorney General for the Lehman failure. Ernst & Young recently petitioned to have that case moved to federal court and to a more friendly judge, Lewis Kaplan. The New York Attorney General filed their brief on March 18 but there’s no word yet on the court’s decision.
A move to federal court would make it easier for Ernst & Young to rid itself of the Martin Act - the broad, powerful anti-fraud statute the state is using to eliminate their need to prove scienter.
"Lyle Roberts in the 10b-5 Daily blog:
Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA), plaintiffs must plead facts creating a strong inference that the defendants acted with scienter (i.e., fraudulent intent) to survive a motion to dismiss.
There’s a growing trend for plaintiffs’ lawyers to use the “no audit at all” approach to survive motions to dismiss in auditor liability cases. Deloitte will also face a jury – unless they settle first – in litigation related to their audit client Bear Stearns. By proving auditors were so reckless in their negligence that it amounted to “no audit at all”, there’s a lesser burden to prove fraudulent intent before proceeding to discovery and, possibly, a trial.
The SEC and PCAOB issued disciplinary orders against Price Waterhouse (PW) India for the Satyam fraud that did not rely on proving scienter. PW India had performed not only very poorly with regard to their audit client Satyam but, in general, throughout their Indian practice.
Section 10A(a) of the Exchange Act requires each audit to include procedures designed to provide reasonable assurance of detecting illegal acts that would have a direct and material effect on the determination of financial statement amounts. No showing of scienter is necessary to establish a violation of Section 10A.
The plaintiffs in the Broadcom case piled on the evidence in their appeal. They successfully convinced the appeals court of Ernst & Young’s possible complicity, at least as a result of their reckless negligence, in the backdating violations that led to significant restatements.
Ernst & Young is going to trial – unless they settle first.
From Lyle Roberts’ 10b-5 Daily blog:
The court found that each of the following three allegations, whether taken individually or viewed collectively, were sufficient to find a strong inference that E&Y had acted with scienter:
(1) E&Y knew the material consequences of a May 2000 backdated option grant that would have resulted in a $700 million charge to Broadcom’s financial results but, despite violations of GAAS, signed off on the grant without obtaining documentation;
(2) E&Y knew that several significant option grants in 2001 were approved on dates when Broadcom’s compensation committee was not legally constituted due to the death of one of the two committee members; and
(3) E&Y presided over corrective reforms in 2003 to prevent and detect any future instances of improper stock option awards without questioning the integrity of Broadcom’s accounting for options granted prior to the corrective reforms.
The court also examined several other factual allegations related to scienter, including allegations of insufficient documentation, weak internal controls, and red flags related to Broadcom’s stock option grants.
And how did Ernst & Young’s lawyers defend the firm? They questioned the contention that the same Ernst &Young partners who participated in Broadcom’s 2005 audit were aware of the earlier alleged backdating that impacted Broadcom’s 2005 consolidated financial statements. Ernst & Young took exception to what they called “roving scienter.”
The court’s response:
“EY, despite serving continuously as Broadcom’s auditor from 1998 until 2008, during which it attested to the accuracy of Broadcom’s financial statements for the multiple years noted in the 2005 Opinion, cannot now disclaim those prior opinions simply because the same individuals were not involved.”
Audit reports in the United States are signed in the firm name, not individual partners as a sign of solidarity, unity, and global brand strength. It’s professionally embarrassing that Ernst & Young would use this defense to, in effect, “have their cake and eat it, too.”
ACCOUNTING WATCHDOG
April 26, 2011 - 12:36 p.m.
I’d rather see than be you, Ernst & Young.
As if the global audit firm didn’t have enough to worry about, now there’s a backdating case, arisen from the grave, threatening a jury trial.
That’s just unheard of.
From the Los Angeles Times on April 15, 2011:
Accounting firm Ernst & Young must face a class action suit over option backdating at Broadcom Corp., a federal appeals court has ruled, saying the auditors knew or should have known about the resulting misrepresentations in the Irvine tech company’s financial statements.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated Ernst & Young as a defendant in the investor lawsuit, overturning a 2009 decision by U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real…The auditors “apparently accepted management at its word, never received requested documentation and issued an unqualified opinion on the accuracy of Broadcom’s financial statements,” the panel said, adding that the accounting firm’s audit “amounted to no audit at all.”
There it is again. The deadly, “no audit at all” phrase.
Ernst & Young is already defending against it in the lawsuit brought by the New York Attorney General for the Lehman failure. Ernst & Young recently petitioned to have that case moved to federal court and to a more friendly judge, Lewis Kaplan. The New York Attorney General filed their brief on March 18 but there’s no word yet on the court’s decision.
A move to federal court would make it easier for Ernst & Young to rid itself of the Martin Act - the broad, powerful anti-fraud statute the state is using to eliminate their need to prove scienter.
"Lyle Roberts in the 10b-5 Daily blog:
Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA), plaintiffs must plead facts creating a strong inference that the defendants acted with scienter (i.e., fraudulent intent) to survive a motion to dismiss.
There’s a growing trend for plaintiffs’ lawyers to use the “no audit at all” approach to survive motions to dismiss in auditor liability cases. Deloitte will also face a jury – unless they settle first – in litigation related to their audit client Bear Stearns. By proving auditors were so reckless in their negligence that it amounted to “no audit at all”, there’s a lesser burden to prove fraudulent intent before proceeding to discovery and, possibly, a trial.
The SEC and PCAOB issued disciplinary orders against Price Waterhouse (PW) India for the Satyam fraud that did not rely on proving scienter. PW India had performed not only very poorly with regard to their audit client Satyam but, in general, throughout their Indian practice.
Section 10A(a) of the Exchange Act requires each audit to include procedures designed to provide reasonable assurance of detecting illegal acts that would have a direct and material effect on the determination of financial statement amounts. No showing of scienter is necessary to establish a violation of Section 10A.
The plaintiffs in the Broadcom case piled on the evidence in their appeal. They successfully convinced the appeals court of Ernst & Young’s possible complicity, at least as a result of their reckless negligence, in the backdating violations that led to significant restatements.
Ernst & Young is going to trial – unless they settle first.
From Lyle Roberts’ 10b-5 Daily blog:
The court found that each of the following three allegations, whether taken individually or viewed collectively, were sufficient to find a strong inference that E&Y had acted with scienter:
(1) E&Y knew the material consequences of a May 2000 backdated option grant that would have resulted in a $700 million charge to Broadcom’s financial results but, despite violations of GAAS, signed off on the grant without obtaining documentation;
(2) E&Y knew that several significant option grants in 2001 were approved on dates when Broadcom’s compensation committee was not legally constituted due to the death of one of the two committee members; and
(3) E&Y presided over corrective reforms in 2003 to prevent and detect any future instances of improper stock option awards without questioning the integrity of Broadcom’s accounting for options granted prior to the corrective reforms.
The court also examined several other factual allegations related to scienter, including allegations of insufficient documentation, weak internal controls, and red flags related to Broadcom’s stock option grants.
And how did Ernst & Young’s lawyers defend the firm? They questioned the contention that the same Ernst &Young partners who participated in Broadcom’s 2005 audit were aware of the earlier alleged backdating that impacted Broadcom’s 2005 consolidated financial statements. Ernst & Young took exception to what they called “roving scienter.”
The court’s response:
“EY, despite serving continuously as Broadcom’s auditor from 1998 until 2008, during which it attested to the accuracy of Broadcom’s financial statements for the multiple years noted in the 2005 Opinion, cannot now disclaim those prior opinions simply because the same individuals were not involved.”
Audit reports in the United States are signed in the firm name, not individual partners as a sign of solidarity, unity, and global brand strength. It’s professionally embarrassing that Ernst & Young would use this defense to, in effect, “have their cake and eat it, too.”
How Iran Became The World's Worst Internet Oppressor
Article by: Andy Greenberg April 26, 2011 - 10:27 a.m.
Reposted from THE FIREWALL
The Internet has fueled, and by some accounts may have even sparked, the wave of revolutions sweeping across the Middle East. So perhaps it’s little wonder that Iran, which has always kept a tight grip on its citizens’ access to the digital world, has stepped up its oppression to become the world’s number one enemy of Internet freedom.
In a report released last week from Freedom House, the civil liberties-focused non-profit analyzed the level of access to an unfettered Internet in 37 countries. Estonia was found to be the most liberal and connected, followed by the United States. Iran hit the bottom of the list, down significantly from the last time the report was compiled in 2009 and the country ranked above China, Tunisia, and Cuba.
What happened? According to the report’s analysis, Iran has cracked down on every front online. Since the Internet was used to organize protests after the disputed June 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s government enacted a Computer Crime Law the next month severely restricting acceptable content online and banning anything vaguely resembling political opposition, including women’s rights, homosexual rights, and content considered insulting to religious figures.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corporation (IRGC) bought a controlling stake in the Telecommunications Company of Iran in September of that year, and already exerted de facto control of the alternative IranCell through former IRGC officials.
That tightened control has also allowed high-level monitoring of content. Encrypted sites like Gmail are often banned to force users towards less-shielded alternatives that allow easier spying, and all data is stored by Internet service providers (ISPs) for six months before deletion so that it can be investigated.
To prevent users from circumventing surveillance, the regime has clamped down on the use of anonymity tools like Tor. In a blog post in January, Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote that one of the five Iranian ISPs is now blocking publicly-known Tor nodes, even when that connection is encrypted. “In a short few months, Iran has vastly improved the sophistication of their censorship technologies,” he wrote. The government was also recently found to be spoofing the SSL certificates on sites to trick users into thinking their connection is secure even when it isn’t.
A result of that crackdown is that more than 50 Iranian bloggers have been arrested. One, Omidreza Mirsayafi, died in prison under questionable circumstances. Hossein Derakshan, credited with founding Iran’s blogging movement, was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison last year.
The Iranian regime has long painted its internal dissent as external foreign meddling. Freedom House writes that the June 2009 protests were considered a “soft war” waged by foreign powers. So don’t be surprised if Iran’s brushes with real cyberwarfare, including the Stuxnet malware that’s thought to have targeted its uranium enrichment facilities, confirm its strange internal logic. Earlier this week, Iran declared that it had discovered a second cyberwarfare attack on its digital infrastructure known as the “Stars” virus. If the country’s ruling regime manages to conflate these purported outside Internet attacks with its citizens’ right to protest, expect Iran’s online crackdown to only intensify.
Reposted from THE FIREWALL
The Internet has fueled, and by some accounts may have even sparked, the wave of revolutions sweeping across the Middle East. So perhaps it’s little wonder that Iran, which has always kept a tight grip on its citizens’ access to the digital world, has stepped up its oppression to become the world’s number one enemy of Internet freedom.
In a report released last week from Freedom House, the civil liberties-focused non-profit analyzed the level of access to an unfettered Internet in 37 countries. Estonia was found to be the most liberal and connected, followed by the United States. Iran hit the bottom of the list, down significantly from the last time the report was compiled in 2009 and the country ranked above China, Tunisia, and Cuba.
What happened? According to the report’s analysis, Iran has cracked down on every front online. Since the Internet was used to organize protests after the disputed June 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s government enacted a Computer Crime Law the next month severely restricting acceptable content online and banning anything vaguely resembling political opposition, including women’s rights, homosexual rights, and content considered insulting to religious figures.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corporation (IRGC) bought a controlling stake in the Telecommunications Company of Iran in September of that year, and already exerted de facto control of the alternative IranCell through former IRGC officials.
That tightened control has also allowed high-level monitoring of content. Encrypted sites like Gmail are often banned to force users towards less-shielded alternatives that allow easier spying, and all data is stored by Internet service providers (ISPs) for six months before deletion so that it can be investigated.
To prevent users from circumventing surveillance, the regime has clamped down on the use of anonymity tools like Tor. In a blog post in January, Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote that one of the five Iranian ISPs is now blocking publicly-known Tor nodes, even when that connection is encrypted. “In a short few months, Iran has vastly improved the sophistication of their censorship technologies,” he wrote. The government was also recently found to be spoofing the SSL certificates on sites to trick users into thinking their connection is secure even when it isn’t.
A result of that crackdown is that more than 50 Iranian bloggers have been arrested. One, Omidreza Mirsayafi, died in prison under questionable circumstances. Hossein Derakshan, credited with founding Iran’s blogging movement, was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison last year.
The Iranian regime has long painted its internal dissent as external foreign meddling. Freedom House writes that the June 2009 protests were considered a “soft war” waged by foreign powers. So don’t be surprised if Iran’s brushes with real cyberwarfare, including the Stuxnet malware that’s thought to have targeted its uranium enrichment facilities, confirm its strange internal logic. Earlier this week, Iran declared that it had discovered a second cyberwarfare attack on its digital infrastructure known as the “Stars” virus. If the country’s ruling regime manages to conflate these purported outside Internet attacks with its citizens’ right to protest, expect Iran’s online crackdown to only intensify.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Global Seismographic Network
I make a regular visit to this site. TONS of information. Thought I would share. There was another magnitude 5.0 earthquate today near the east coast of Honshu, Japan.
Click on the link and keep it bookmark for the latest information on earthquakes around the globe.
* This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.
Magnitude 5.0
Date-Time
* Friday, April 15, 2011 at 14:34:25 UTC
* Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:34:25 PM at epicenter
* Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 39.148°N, 142.282°E
Depth 31 km (19.3 miles)
Region NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
Distances 114 km (70 miles) ESE of Morioka, Honshu, Japan
156 km (96 miles) NE of Sendai, Honshu, Japan
166 km (103 miles) SSE of Hachinohe, Honshu, Japan
444 km (275 miles) NNE of TOKYO, Japan
Location Uncertainty
horizontal +/- 18 km (11.2 miles); depth +/- 7.8 km
(4.8 miles)
Parameters NST=219, Nph=219, Dmin=327.3 km, Rmss=0.79 sec, Gp=104°,
M-type=body wave magnitude (Mb), Version=9
Source
* USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
Event ID usc0002s5g
Click on the link and keep it bookmark for the latest information on earthquakes around the globe.
* This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.
Magnitude 5.0
Date-Time
* Friday, April 15, 2011 at 14:34:25 UTC
* Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:34:25 PM at epicenter
* Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 39.148°N, 142.282°E
Depth 31 km (19.3 miles)
Region NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
Distances 114 km (70 miles) ESE of Morioka, Honshu, Japan
156 km (96 miles) NE of Sendai, Honshu, Japan
166 km (103 miles) SSE of Hachinohe, Honshu, Japan
444 km (275 miles) NNE of TOKYO, Japan
Location Uncertainty
horizontal +/- 18 km (11.2 miles); depth +/- 7.8 km
(4.8 miles)
Parameters NST=219, Nph=219, Dmin=327.3 km, Rmss=0.79 sec, Gp=104°,
M-type=body wave magnitude (Mb), Version=9
Source
* USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
Event ID usc0002s5g
What Japan's nuclear crisis means for public heath (Q&A)
Sorry to keep going back to this subject, but I think we all should be very concerned not only for how this crisis will affect our world economy, but also for the poor souls that are dealing with this and everything else in Japan. I came across this article that's worth sharing.
This article was written by Martin LaMonica.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld.
"By far, the biggest danger from the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant is to the workers who are trying to control a still-volatile situation. But with the crisis likely to play out for months, people are beginning to wonder what the release of radioactive material actually means.
Very low levels of radioactive material have been found in the water supply in Tokyo, for example, and those same particles are being carried by the wind elsewhere in the world.
Workers near the reactor core are being exposed to radiation coming directly from the core and spent-fuel cooling pools. For people living far from the source of the radiation, exposure can come from the radioactive material that entered the air or water during efforts to stabilize the cooling.
Radioactive versions of cesium, iodine, and strontium can enter the body either through the lungs or by eating and drinking affected food. A standard precaution is to prevent people, particularly growing children, from drinking milk in the area of a nuclear accident, since cows can eat grass with radioactive iodine and pass it on to people.
(Credit: Tokyo Electric Power via Martyn Williams)
The Environmental Protection Agency is monitoring and publishing data on the radioactivity in water and milk from Japan in the U.S. and the levels are "far below levels of public-health concern." But some argue that being exposed to even a small dose of the radioactive materials already released--iodine-131 and cesium-137 are the most prevalent--can be significant. If ingested, radioactive iodine can be absorbed by the thyroid gland, with children at the most risk. Cesium-137, which can also lead to cancer by affecting many types of cells, is more worrisome because it has a half-life of 30 years, versus 8 days for iodine-131. Radioactive strontium, which also has a long half-life, is linked to bone cancer and leukemia.
If there is a large-scale release of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor or spent-fuel pools, then the risks will rise substantially.
But in the current situation, how should people evaluate the health risk? How do academics and scientists view this problem? Are sufficient safeguards being put in place?
To get a better understanding of these questions, CNET spoke to two experts in the field to get their views the same week that the Fukushima Daiichi was raised to the highest level possible for a nuclear power accident.
Below is an edited transcript of a discussion with David Brenner from Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research. Later today, we will run an interview with Ira Helfand, the former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a group quite firmly opposed to nuclear power which it says poses unacceptable risks.
In a nutshell, the view of Brenner, who recently testified to Congress on radiation from backscatter X-rays at airports, is that the individual risks are extremely low for people outside the exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. At the same time, a large number of people will be exposed, which means that over the long term, that minute risk becomes more significant.
Q: What is the difference between what workers are exposed to and the rest of the population?
Brenner: It's simply a matter of the radiation dose. It's relatively low for people away from the plant. While we don't know what the doses are, the workers are clearly getting relatively high doses.
Q: There have been traces of radioactive material detected in food and milk here in the U.S. Should people be concerned?
Brenner: In the U.S., the levels of radioactivity in the water and milk both on the West Coast and the East Coast have been exceedingly low. I don't think there are any significant health issues with the level of radioactivity in this country.
It was inevitable that once radioactivity was released in Japan, that some of it would be blown here. What was fortunate is that most of the radioactivity released into the air was blown into the sea but it was inevitable that it would end up in this country...Very little indeed has gotten here because it got heavily distributed. The fact that you can measure it here doesn't mean that it's a high health risk, at least in the short term. That's the situation in the U.S.
In Japan, the doses are still pretty low outside the exclusion zone. Again, the further away people are from reactors, the lower the dose, such as the folks in, say, Tokyo. In Kyoto, it's even lower.
Q: What about the longer-term effects?
Brenner: The health consequences are actually very small for any individual. That being said, there are longer-term issues. The two main isotopes that were released are iodine-131 and cesium-137. The half-life for half the radioactive material in iodine to decay is eight days, so by a month or two later, it's essentially all gone. There's no long-term effect.
Whatever cesium was released will get into the food chain, into the ecosystem, and it will gradually get dispersed. So there will be some in the food and water for generations to come. It will be at some level but it will be at a very low level. What we really have will be a prolonged exposure to very low levels of radioactive from the Fukushima event. That's really what we're stuck with. But the risk for any individual will be tiny.
Although individual risk is low, an awful lot of people exposed to it. Think of the lottery. An awful lot of people will [be involved] because somebody's going to win...[In this case] one would expect some extra cancers in the long run but everybody's individual risk is low.
Some people say that even a tiny bit of exposure should be avoided because it could cause a specific type of cancer, such as thyroid cancer in children.
Brenner: You can think about risk in two different ways. There's the risk of an individual and certainly the risk is very small. You can also think about the lottery analogy. How many tiny individual risks affect a population? It's two complementary ways of looking at it.
From an individual's point of view, one doesn't have to worry. When you're starting to think about what is significant from the point of view of the population and how do we proceed with nuclear power, we need to think about the population.
Should we be restricting food imports?
Brenner: Most of radioactivity being seen in food, water, and fish is almost certainly from iodine. I would expect in a month or two months, those restrictions will probably go away. But what will be left will be much lower levels of cesium in food [in part because less cesium than iodine was released]. It's more than appropriate that Japan and the U.S. and any other country should be monitoring the food. It's not hard to do. I don't expect this will be long-term except in a broader sense.
How do people in your profession decide what's an acceptable risk?
Brenner: We try to think about risk and benefits. Having a CT scan, there's a small radiation risk, but there's a benefit to hopefully getting an accurate diagnosis. It's another story whether we get that balance right since there are alternatives to CT scanners.
You could argue, one should be doing the same estimations for nuclear power. The risk, unfortunately, is the scenario like what we have in Fukushima. What are the benefits of power with oil or use of fossil fuels? It's up to society to make the risk-benefit analysis as best they can. You need to understand risks as well as you can and different folks will come up with different conclusions.
One thing that's pretty clear is that we have in this country and Japan a pretty aging fleet of nuclear reactors. The Fukushima plant was built in the 1970s and there are plenty of similar reactors also built at the same time in the U.S.
It seems to me we're at that point where we have to make decisions about replacing older reactors with more modern reactors that have more defense mechanisms built into them. We can never say anything is 100 percent safe, but they can be a lot more safe.
Are you pro nuclear power?
Brenner: My job is to try to understand the risks. It's for society in general to determine how to balance risks. I'm all in favor of safe nuclear if it can be achieved. Some risks do always exist. The question is do they counter-balance the benefits.
The two extremes around nuclear power are either that it's extremely unsafe and it should be abolished, but that is not true. The other extreme is that it's entirely safe. That's not true either. The reality is in the middle.
It seems that there isn't agreement on the ultimate health impact from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Does that disaster provide much guidance?
Brenner: Most of the epidemiological studies that should have been done haven't been done for political and economic reasons. The Soviet Union broke up shortly after so it's difficult to have Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia work together on it.
The studies that have been done are the low-hanging fruit--studies about thyroid cancer and leukemia which you would expect to see first. There's no question there was a tremendous increase in thyroid cancers and it's pretty clear for [an increase in] leukemia too.
Studies on the more common cancers like lung cancer and breast cancer have not been done. And that's a shame, to put it mildly. Lacking those, people are having to estimate what consequences were because we don't know enough of the effects of very low levels or radiation.
It's still not appropriate to compare Fukushima to Chernobyl, where the containment blew up entirely and large amounts of the core were emitted high into the atmosphere. There was no ocean. I heard a statement that Fukushima was one tenth as hazardous as Chernobyl but I think it is far less.
You testified in Congress about backscatter X-rays at airports. For most people, this is the day-to-day question: how much low-level radiation is OK. Do we know?
Brenner: The argument's a little bit the same [as Fukushima]. The individual risk is miniscule. I didn't hesitate to go through [security] on my flight home. The concern is the population risk because an awful lot of people fly, about 700 million a year in the U.S.
If the TSA wants to scan every passenger, you got a scenario where you have a tiny risk and you take that tiny risk [and multiply it], you do get significant population risk. You could argue that there's risk but it's OK as a benefit. But there are alternative technologies, such as millimeter scanners that don't have this X-ray risk.
An individual who lives in Tokyo doesn't have that choice and there are no individual benefits. Fortunately, for an individual the risks are extremely low.
You readers may or may not know this but 40 percent of them are going to get cancer, so the sorts of increases we're talking about are miniscule. It's a tiny addition to a very large problem.
You've been working on a system where people can do individual testing with a blood test (called the RABIT, for rapid automated biodosimetry tool for radiological triage). Is the goal to get away from statistical estimates for whole populations?
Brenner: Yes. The motivation is a large-scale radiological terrorist event [from a dirty bomb]. In many senses, that scenario is quite like the scenario in Japan with a very small number of people exposed to high doses. And a very large number of people exposed to very small doses and not believing what they are being told. There is a great deal of skepticism in Japan and I'm sure that would be true in this country too. The goal is to have some very high-throughput way of estimating one's dose. So you can try to find the folks who did get high doses who need to be treated. The other part is to reassure people.
We're developing a finger stick approach where you take a drop of blood, something that can be done by nonexperts. You'd have many centers, such as hospitals and railway stations, where you can go have your finger sticked, give a drop of blood, and it would get transported to more centralized local machines. An individual estimate will mean that you won't clog up the emergency services.
What sorts of precautions should someone in the U.S. and Japan take?
Brenner: You don't need to be doing anything. The EPA is testing the water and milk and the levels are all pretty low and will get a lot lower as iodine decays. There's no reason to avoid any food or drink. The same goes for Japan. Yes, there will be some contaminated food [and they are being monitored with spot checks] for the moment. That's what the government is and should be doing [to watch that] it is going to be at reasonable levels.
This article was written by Martin LaMonica.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld.
"By far, the biggest danger from the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant is to the workers who are trying to control a still-volatile situation. But with the crisis likely to play out for months, people are beginning to wonder what the release of radioactive material actually means.
Very low levels of radioactive material have been found in the water supply in Tokyo, for example, and those same particles are being carried by the wind elsewhere in the world.
Workers near the reactor core are being exposed to radiation coming directly from the core and spent-fuel cooling pools. For people living far from the source of the radiation, exposure can come from the radioactive material that entered the air or water during efforts to stabilize the cooling.
Radioactive versions of cesium, iodine, and strontium can enter the body either through the lungs or by eating and drinking affected food. A standard precaution is to prevent people, particularly growing children, from drinking milk in the area of a nuclear accident, since cows can eat grass with radioactive iodine and pass it on to people.
(Credit: Tokyo Electric Power via Martyn Williams)
The Environmental Protection Agency is monitoring and publishing data on the radioactivity in water and milk from Japan in the U.S. and the levels are "far below levels of public-health concern." But some argue that being exposed to even a small dose of the radioactive materials already released--iodine-131 and cesium-137 are the most prevalent--can be significant. If ingested, radioactive iodine can be absorbed by the thyroid gland, with children at the most risk. Cesium-137, which can also lead to cancer by affecting many types of cells, is more worrisome because it has a half-life of 30 years, versus 8 days for iodine-131. Radioactive strontium, which also has a long half-life, is linked to bone cancer and leukemia.
If there is a large-scale release of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor or spent-fuel pools, then the risks will rise substantially.
But in the current situation, how should people evaluate the health risk? How do academics and scientists view this problem? Are sufficient safeguards being put in place?
To get a better understanding of these questions, CNET spoke to two experts in the field to get their views the same week that the Fukushima Daiichi was raised to the highest level possible for a nuclear power accident.
Below is an edited transcript of a discussion with David Brenner from Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research. Later today, we will run an interview with Ira Helfand, the former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a group quite firmly opposed to nuclear power which it says poses unacceptable risks.
In a nutshell, the view of Brenner, who recently testified to Congress on radiation from backscatter X-rays at airports, is that the individual risks are extremely low for people outside the exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. At the same time, a large number of people will be exposed, which means that over the long term, that minute risk becomes more significant.
Q: What is the difference between what workers are exposed to and the rest of the population?
Brenner: It's simply a matter of the radiation dose. It's relatively low for people away from the plant. While we don't know what the doses are, the workers are clearly getting relatively high doses.
Q: There have been traces of radioactive material detected in food and milk here in the U.S. Should people be concerned?
Brenner: In the U.S., the levels of radioactivity in the water and milk both on the West Coast and the East Coast have been exceedingly low. I don't think there are any significant health issues with the level of radioactivity in this country.
It was inevitable that once radioactivity was released in Japan, that some of it would be blown here. What was fortunate is that most of the radioactivity released into the air was blown into the sea but it was inevitable that it would end up in this country...Very little indeed has gotten here because it got heavily distributed. The fact that you can measure it here doesn't mean that it's a high health risk, at least in the short term. That's the situation in the U.S.
In Japan, the doses are still pretty low outside the exclusion zone. Again, the further away people are from reactors, the lower the dose, such as the folks in, say, Tokyo. In Kyoto, it's even lower.
Q: What about the longer-term effects?
Brenner: The health consequences are actually very small for any individual. That being said, there are longer-term issues. The two main isotopes that were released are iodine-131 and cesium-137. The half-life for half the radioactive material in iodine to decay is eight days, so by a month or two later, it's essentially all gone. There's no long-term effect.
Whatever cesium was released will get into the food chain, into the ecosystem, and it will gradually get dispersed. So there will be some in the food and water for generations to come. It will be at some level but it will be at a very low level. What we really have will be a prolonged exposure to very low levels of radioactive from the Fukushima event. That's really what we're stuck with. But the risk for any individual will be tiny.
Although individual risk is low, an awful lot of people exposed to it. Think of the lottery. An awful lot of people will [be involved] because somebody's going to win...[In this case] one would expect some extra cancers in the long run but everybody's individual risk is low.
Some people say that even a tiny bit of exposure should be avoided because it could cause a specific type of cancer, such as thyroid cancer in children.
Brenner: You can think about risk in two different ways. There's the risk of an individual and certainly the risk is very small. You can also think about the lottery analogy. How many tiny individual risks affect a population? It's two complementary ways of looking at it.
From an individual's point of view, one doesn't have to worry. When you're starting to think about what is significant from the point of view of the population and how do we proceed with nuclear power, we need to think about the population.
Should we be restricting food imports?
Brenner: Most of radioactivity being seen in food, water, and fish is almost certainly from iodine. I would expect in a month or two months, those restrictions will probably go away. But what will be left will be much lower levels of cesium in food [in part because less cesium than iodine was released]. It's more than appropriate that Japan and the U.S. and any other country should be monitoring the food. It's not hard to do. I don't expect this will be long-term except in a broader sense.
How do people in your profession decide what's an acceptable risk?
Brenner: We try to think about risk and benefits. Having a CT scan, there's a small radiation risk, but there's a benefit to hopefully getting an accurate diagnosis. It's another story whether we get that balance right since there are alternatives to CT scanners.
You could argue, one should be doing the same estimations for nuclear power. The risk, unfortunately, is the scenario like what we have in Fukushima. What are the benefits of power with oil or use of fossil fuels? It's up to society to make the risk-benefit analysis as best they can. You need to understand risks as well as you can and different folks will come up with different conclusions.
One thing that's pretty clear is that we have in this country and Japan a pretty aging fleet of nuclear reactors. The Fukushima plant was built in the 1970s and there are plenty of similar reactors also built at the same time in the U.S.
It seems to me we're at that point where we have to make decisions about replacing older reactors with more modern reactors that have more defense mechanisms built into them. We can never say anything is 100 percent safe, but they can be a lot more safe.
Are you pro nuclear power?
Brenner: My job is to try to understand the risks. It's for society in general to determine how to balance risks. I'm all in favor of safe nuclear if it can be achieved. Some risks do always exist. The question is do they counter-balance the benefits.
The two extremes around nuclear power are either that it's extremely unsafe and it should be abolished, but that is not true. The other extreme is that it's entirely safe. That's not true either. The reality is in the middle.
It seems that there isn't agreement on the ultimate health impact from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Does that disaster provide much guidance?
Brenner: Most of the epidemiological studies that should have been done haven't been done for political and economic reasons. The Soviet Union broke up shortly after so it's difficult to have Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia work together on it.
The studies that have been done are the low-hanging fruit--studies about thyroid cancer and leukemia which you would expect to see first. There's no question there was a tremendous increase in thyroid cancers and it's pretty clear for [an increase in] leukemia too.
Studies on the more common cancers like lung cancer and breast cancer have not been done. And that's a shame, to put it mildly. Lacking those, people are having to estimate what consequences were because we don't know enough of the effects of very low levels or radiation.
It's still not appropriate to compare Fukushima to Chernobyl, where the containment blew up entirely and large amounts of the core were emitted high into the atmosphere. There was no ocean. I heard a statement that Fukushima was one tenth as hazardous as Chernobyl but I think it is far less.
You testified in Congress about backscatter X-rays at airports. For most people, this is the day-to-day question: how much low-level radiation is OK. Do we know?
Brenner: The argument's a little bit the same [as Fukushima]. The individual risk is miniscule. I didn't hesitate to go through [security] on my flight home. The concern is the population risk because an awful lot of people fly, about 700 million a year in the U.S.
If the TSA wants to scan every passenger, you got a scenario where you have a tiny risk and you take that tiny risk [and multiply it], you do get significant population risk. You could argue that there's risk but it's OK as a benefit. But there are alternative technologies, such as millimeter scanners that don't have this X-ray risk.
An individual who lives in Tokyo doesn't have that choice and there are no individual benefits. Fortunately, for an individual the risks are extremely low.
You readers may or may not know this but 40 percent of them are going to get cancer, so the sorts of increases we're talking about are miniscule. It's a tiny addition to a very large problem.
You've been working on a system where people can do individual testing with a blood test (called the RABIT, for rapid automated biodosimetry tool for radiological triage). Is the goal to get away from statistical estimates for whole populations?
Brenner: Yes. The motivation is a large-scale radiological terrorist event [from a dirty bomb]. In many senses, that scenario is quite like the scenario in Japan with a very small number of people exposed to high doses. And a very large number of people exposed to very small doses and not believing what they are being told. There is a great deal of skepticism in Japan and I'm sure that would be true in this country too. The goal is to have some very high-throughput way of estimating one's dose. So you can try to find the folks who did get high doses who need to be treated. The other part is to reassure people.
We're developing a finger stick approach where you take a drop of blood, something that can be done by nonexperts. You'd have many centers, such as hospitals and railway stations, where you can go have your finger sticked, give a drop of blood, and it would get transported to more centralized local machines. An individual estimate will mean that you won't clog up the emergency services.
What sorts of precautions should someone in the U.S. and Japan take?
Brenner: You don't need to be doing anything. The EPA is testing the water and milk and the levels are all pretty low and will get a lot lower as iodine decays. There's no reason to avoid any food or drink. The same goes for Japan. Yes, there will be some contaminated food [and they are being monitored with spot checks] for the moment. That's what the government is and should be doing [to watch that] it is going to be at reasonable levels.
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