What is that "qualification" you are asking for? What kind of qualitifaction does it take, to make a statement as simple as "you can't lose what you don't have" AND have it accepted?

What we have here is a situation that is the exact same thing as a politician claiming that crime is on the rise: Just look at the amount of money that has been stolen in each of the last 30 years. It has been rising consistently, it is now 3 times larger. Crime is three times worse!

Not so says Joe Public pointing out that people now also earn 3 times as much money and are carrying around 3 times as money. There is 3 times as much money around to steal. So you would expect the same level of thievery to net 3 times as much money.

But of course, what is clearly a fearmongering politician in the case I described here, is suddenly perfectly plausible as soon as the climate crowd moves in. You, sirs and madams, are disgusting.

We cannot know the truth about something that we are not able to actually read. And slapping an unnecessary 40 Euro bill on an article that is probably less than 40 pages long has exactly that result. It exactly the same as back when people were not deemed fit to read the bible themselves and were instead fed a redacted version of it by priests. You may remember that people had good reason not to be OK with that.

I don't say we cannot know the truth about politicized subjects. What I say is that we cannot know the truth about something we don't know.

No, you won't read the same thing around Fukushima, even if the paper is correct, because there has been no release of Strontium-90 to begin with. Mind you, there is some in the cooling water, but not in the fallout. One of the advantages to have an intact, though leaking, containment is that only volatile components can escape from it. Strontium is not among the volatile components, only noble gasses, Iodine and Caesium. You can keep most of the Caesium inside the containment, if you either have a containment spray system (which the BWR Mark I and Mark II don't have). In this case it takes about 15-20 minutes to remove 90% of it from the containment air. Without the spray, it takes about 8-10 hours to fall out inside the containment.

Unfortunately, GE said about the Mark I containment all the way back in 1966 (part 1, page 50) that it would definitively leak very soon after a meltdown, unlike PWR containments (which also have containment sprays). The old BWR containments were designed around 1960 to prevent "catastrophic death tolls", in case of any accident. Back in their time, they were not designed to prevent fallout in the surrounding area. This came later. In order to prevent those with a Mark I or Mark II, you need reinforced, passively activated, filtered containment vents. Those are required by law in Germany, France and Sweden in all nuclear power plants, including PWRs. Not so in the US or Japan for that matter. In the US, the general rule is that nuclear power plant operators are required to keep their plants up to date, but are explicitly not required to perform major changes to the plant. So, there is a lot of grandfathering going on. Installing filtered vents, seems to constitute such a "major change".

In short: Nuclear power plants are exactly as safe as they are designed to be. And they are designed to be as safe as whatever law (that currently applies to them) requires them to be. Fukushima Daiichi worked exactly as required, it's just that the requirements they were held to by the law weren't exactly stellar.

I won't believe a word about this, unless the full study is available for checking and has been independently reproduced. And when I write "available" I don't mean "you can purchase this paper for the wee lil' sum of 40 Euros".

Sorry, but just about any time I actually read the papers that articles on slashdot or anywhere else are about, the result is typically quite different in the actual paper or the methods employed have obvious holes like insufficient data. The more politically relevant the topic, the worse it gets. Hence, I won't take a word of this seriously.

No it doesn't.

And that, folks, is how you can tell apart arrogant people who are spouting propaganda from arrogant people who don't. The guys spouting the propaganda habitually make up lies. They put words into people's mouths that they would have liked them to have said, because it would prove their point.

Google finds exactly one place on the whole of the internet, in which this quote appears:

You may recognize this as your very own sorry piece of shit.

It seems like nobody noticed. But the parent and the guy who wrote the wordpress article are one and the same person. Me.

Then I wonder why people are so upset about Fukushima Daiichi. You know. Life sort of goes on and people are probably not thinking of all the ways they migth die. They think of all the ways they might live ... so, no probs man. People just move to another place and live. Where's the problem? Why is everybody complaining about it?

Have you ever thought about whether you would accept your own argument, if it came from whoever is talking to you? In this case, obviously not.

I know very well how wikipedia works. And I know what it looks like when something is broken. When the number of dead people from an earthquake gets pushed down to the point that it constitutes a minor point, something is broken. And no, this is not a conspiracy. It is perfectly sufficient that people, like you, publicly play down the importance of cities being destroyed and thousands of people being killed. Just as you do right here in your post.

Let me explain one thing: It does not matter if the towns are being rebuilt (in fact, they are not, because the areas are now designated as unfit for human habitation because they are threatened by tsunamies), you will not see thousands of people coming back from the sea, one by one, no matter what you rebuild and no matter how quickly you rebuild.

That's a vital concept right there: DEATH. It's sort of permanent. It does not have a half life. It does not get washed away by rainwater. (Unlike about one half the cesium, so far, that was released from the reactors.) It doesn't go away by decontamination. DEAD people are DEAD. They even have the nerve to STAY DEAD.

You may disagree with that. I'm sure your view will not be share by many other people.

And no, the brunt of the blame must not go to TEPCO, but to a society that has proven, time and again, to be incapable of planning for catastrophes. That is, to deal with earthquakes that only occur a few times per century in way that does not lead to thousands, tens of thousands or even over one hundred thousand deaths - such as the Tokyo earthquake 91 years ago.

And I'm NOT talking about building 15m high flood walls along the coast. I'm talking about simple measures such as making sure that designated evacuation areas will not get flooded even when a tsunami is higher than expected. It would have saved the lives of thousands of people. But it is obvious from the lack of such measures, that the society as a whole was incapable to even contemplate that possibility. TEPCO is to blame only insofar as it is one small part of this society that prefers to feign mere bravery instead of committing to true preperation in the face of disasters, that are sure to happen again and again.

You're absolutely right that the money is not a solution especially because it would put them into an eternal hell of discrimination (which is already the case because a lot of Japanese treat anybody who got anywhere near radioactivity as if they had some infectious disease). I was tempted to write more on this, but the comment was long enough as it was and I thought the reference to the tsunami victims was enough to show the problems with that.

The most important thing that should be done is to talk rationally about radioactivity. But so long as the anti-nuclear shills keep screaming at the top of their lungs, this is not going to happen - but this is exactly where the psychological problems and the trauma are coming from. It is also where a lot of deaths are coming from and the reason why the evacuations that were supposedly going to safe peoples lives were so incredibly botched that people people died in the vehicles they were evacuated in. Which is hardly surprising, when hospitals are evacuated and incapacitated patients are put in hospital gowns and driven for over 100km without any medical attention.

The blame for the terrible death of those people rests solely with an international movement that is spreading fear and panic in order to gain political power, without any regard for the people they harm. And this harm is much worse than the radiation they claim to be protecting people from.

At least none in the designated evacuation buildings deemed to be safe and high enough, where hundreds upon hundreds of people died. Where are the eyewitness reports of how those were crushed? (Oh right.) Where are the accusations of mayors and emergency planners who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people?

One thing is for sure. You don't care about people. You don't care about their lives, as was made abundantly clear on wikipedia. You don't care about what people lost. Some 400.000 people lost everything, in many cases even friends and relatives, not to mention everything in their households. Documents, photos, clothes. Their homes? That goes without saying. And that's the problem.

I wanted to make the suggestion that everyone of the 100,000 or so people affected by the nuclear accident be paid half a million dollars. A family of four would get $2,000,000. Enough to start a new life. The problem is not the cost. $50bn is about a year's worth of coal, oil and gas being imported to replace nuclear power in Japan. The problem is the other 400,000 who will rightfully say that their losses were so much worse, that they should easily be entitled to get even more money.

Yes, it's a terrible accident and an avoidable one as well. It has been known since 1966 (p.50) that the Mark I BWR containment is unable to withstand a meltdown under any conditions, because it is too small. In case of a meltdown you either vent the containment in a controlled manner, or it leaks uncontrolled. Japan only saw the need to install filtered containment vents in any of its nuclear power plants in 2013 ... they must have had a problem in one of their nuclear plants or something. Strangely enough, neither Germany or France needed that kind of reminder to get to that point. They did it a quarter of a century before that. (And yes, it was after Chernobyl. But it's not like the Japanese never heard about that one.)

Sure, hundreds of thousands in Fukushima prefecture will get cancer. They are right.

Why? Because, as the japanese ministry of health reported in 2006 - some 43% of women and 53% of men get cancer at some point in their lives in Japan. And there are several hundred thousand people in Fukushima prefecture, hence the perfectly accurate and totally meaningless prediction.

Also, I guess I'd be the first "oil shill" arguing for more governmental regulation. Don't you think so?

First: If I was an "oil shill" I'd know about it. I'm not.

Second: If I said it *after* the protests start, then you'd say that what I said is worthless, because I said it after the fact.

I'm not being defensive. It's just activists using circular reasoning and self-defeating arguments all the time.

So, instead of protests *for* better regulation and better technical equipment, all we'll see are protests *against* oil.

As usual, the power hungry activists will not attempt to solve the problem, but instead use the problem to gain more power for themselves. I have never seen any activist trying to solve the problem they are protesting. The protests are just their PR campaigns to get more political power. Saving people's lives? It's not about protesting against exploding tank cars, it's about protesting against oil.

Unfortunately, solving the exploding oil-car problem would legitimize the oil production, so as any self-righteous activist can easily see, you cannot allow companies to actually do something against that. Not only would the publicity and media spectacle of exploding oil tank cars go away, the company that would actually solve the problem would be ... like ... legitimate! So, screw the tanks. Let the explode! We must protest against oil!

Why do you think your sparsely inhabited backwater on this planet is representative for the global car market? And for that matter, why do Tesla owners here in this thread and elsewhere think *they* are in any way representative for any population on this planet whatsoever, with the exception of the upper 0.5%?

Is your smug superiority superior enough to buy everyone else an electric car who can't afford to pay a cool $60,000 or $85,000 for theirs?