Sunflowers to Clean Radioactive Soil In Japan By Toru Yamanaka | AFP News | Fri, Jun 24, 2011 Campaigners in Japan are asking people to grow sunflowers, said to help decontaminate radioactive soil, in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed March's massive quake and tsunami. Volunteers are being asked to grow sunflowers this year, then send the seeds to the stricken area where they will be planted next year to help get rid of radioactive contaminants in the plant's fallout zone. The campaign, launched by young entrepreneurs and civil servants in Fukushima prefecture last month, aims to cover large areas in yellow blossoms as a symbol of hope and reconstruction and to lure back tourists. "We will give the seeds sent back by people for free to farmers, the public sector and other groups next year," said project leader Shinji Handa. The goal is a landscape so yellow that "it will surprise NASA", he said. The massive earthquake and tsunami left more than 23,000 people dead or missing on Japan's northeast coast and crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant that has leaked radiation into the environment since. Almost 10,000 packets of sunflower seeds at 500 yen ($6) each have so far been sold to some 30,000 people, including to the city of Yokohama near Tokyo, which is growing sunflowers in 200 parks, Handa said. Handa - who hails from Hiroshima, hit by an atomic bomb at the end of World War II - said the sunflower project was a way for people across the nation to lend their support to the disaster region. "This is different from donations because people will grow the flowers, and a mother can tell her children that it is like an act of prayer for the reconstruction of the northeast," Handa said. I also hope the project will give momentum to attract tourists back to Fukushima with sunflower seeds in their hands. I would like to make a maze using sunflowers so that children can play in it. " http://sg.news.yahoo.com/sunflowers-clean-radioactive-soil-japan-114840850.html ...... I think that the sunflower has a magical element to it that destroys contamination but it could also reinvigorate the soil while cleansing it of any radioactive much like the work that good farmers do to rotate their crops to replenish soil in certain areas of our globe. Along with the sight of fields of sunflowers, it must be an uplifting experience to the Japanese who withstood a giant earthquake and followed by a huge tsunami to see those fields of giant sunflowers beckoning their arrival to a once devastated area.
so is this just symbolic or do sunflowers actually have the potential to decontaminate radioactive soil?
I read somewhere once that radioactivity makes plants really take off right after the ground is contaminated. It last about two years if I remember correctly. I'll keep my kids as far away from contamination as possible. I see no magical element in sunflowers that reduce contamination. But they are real pretty.
I did a little "homework" on it and it seems that sunflowers do take some radiation out of the ground and out of the water and store it in the sunflower plant. Well I'll be.
On many farms where crops are rotated, you will find areas of sunflowers that are grown to clean and replenish the soil on a regular basis. This sunflower theory has been used by the earliest settlers to keep the soil fertile for planting. Cannabis plants have also been used. Helianthus sp. "February 1996, Phytotech, Inc., a Princeton, NJ-based company, reported that it had developed transgenic strains of sunflowers, Helianthus sp., that could remove as much as 95% of toxic contaminants in as little as 24 hours. Subsequently, Helianthus was planted on a styrofoam raft at one end of a contaminated pond near Chernobyl, and in twelve days the cesium concentrations within its roots were reportedly 8,000 times that of the water, while the strontium concentrations were 2,000 times that of the water. Helianthus is in the composite, or Asteraceae, family and has edible seeds. It also produces an oil that is used for cooking, in margarine, and as a paint additive. H. tuberosus was used by Native Americans as a carbohydrate source for diabetics." http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/pae/botany/botany_map/articles/article_10.html
The experiment failed as the sunflowers removed only .05 percent of the radioactive cesium in the ground and removing the top two inches of soil proved to be more effective due to the severity of radioactive contamination in Fukushima but the sunflower theory cannot be dismissed altogether.
.... Do you have a link for that? and what do you do with the top two inches of contaminated soil? When you think of the immense work trees do to clean our environment 24/7, a football field of sunflowers would do very well also.
The sunflowers that the ministry had planted in Iitate in May had absorbed around 52 becquerels of cesium per kilogram, according to the ministry. Even if sunflowers worth 10 kilograms were grown per square meter of farmland, only about 1/2000th of cesium in the soil could be absorbed, the ministry said. The topsoil removal method, on the other hand, proved to be highly effective, with radioactive cesium in the soil plunging from 10,370 becquerels to 2,599 becquerels per kilogram after three to four centimeters of the topsoil was scraped off. The method becomes even more effective when the topsoil is hardened by pharmacological agents before being removed, or when the topsoil was taken away all together with grass roots. Both methods could reduce levels of cesium by 82 to 97 percent. http://www.japanprobe.com/2011/09/15/sunflowers-fail-to-decontaminate-radioactive-soil/
At some point, "do nothing" becomes the preferred way of handling the radioactivity. There aren't any areas there, outside the immediate plant, that are unsafe for humans to live in. It's not safe to eat crops and livestock from the contiminated zones, due to bioaccumulation of radionucleides, but simply living there is no problem. There are other places on the planet with higher natural levels of radiation, where people live without any adverse health effects. So, you do nothing, other than ban agriculture there. With a 30 year half-life for the caesium-137 and strontium-90, doing nothing for 60 years has the same effect (75% reduction) as scraping the topsoil from hundreds of square miles and finding a disposal site for it. (That is, spreading it around and raising radioactive dust clouds). The sunflowers pull radiation out so slowly that natural radioactive decay would be removing radioactivity much faster than the sunflowers.
