3 Years Later: A Fukushima Worker's Eyewitness Story 148
Lasrick writes "Tuesday, March 11 is the 3rd anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. In this article, a worker at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station gives his eyewitness account of what happened there in the immediate wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami that caused three of the station's reactor cores to melt."
The witness, says the story, "was promised anonymity as a condition of providing his account."
Jeez has it been 3 years (Score:1, Interesting)
cause hearing about it every fucking day distorts the age of the event
Yeah. (Score:5, Funny)
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We will be reading about it in 50 years time, as they finally concrete over the last of it. If I live that long it will be interesting to see what they end up doing with the site.
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Well, this is why nuclear power is so dangerous. If something bad happens, the bad is here to stay.
Re:Jeez has it been 3 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Jeez has it been 3 years (Score:2, Insightful)
This message *is not* brought to you by the American Petroleum Institute.
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Nuclear accidents are expensive.
Stop that.
URANIUM FISSION accidents are expensive. There are plenty of fail-safe, non-weaponizable options for nuclear power that we could adopt at scale within a decade, if people would stop being afraid of the word "nuclear".
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The problem isn't even Uranium. The problem is solid fuel, water cooled reactors. And to a lesser extent reactors cooled by materials that react violently with air or water (like Sodium).
Molten salt reactors have the freeze plug, catch pan and emergency dump tanks that combined with the chemical nature of the coolant salts make every single nuclear fission accident to date be a non event, every single one of them.
The coolant is a solid at room temperature, so even if the reactor is torn to pieces (precision
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I have four on at home right now to think of it. Well, four desktops and two laptops.
You know, I might just turn one or more off tonight.
fusion? (Score:1)
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Fission isn't unsafe. Gross neglect and building reactors in areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen is unsafe.
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Just blame the guy who can't speak English. Ah, Tibor, how many times have you saved my butt?
Re:fusion? (Score:5, Interesting)
"areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen"
That describes the entire nation of Japan pretty much. The earthquake and tsunami of 2011 isn't even the biggest natural disaster in Japan in the last hundred years, the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 killed more than 100,000 people in Tokyo. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 killed about 5,000. The Japanese write books with titles like "Japan sinks!" and make animes like "Tokyo Magnitude 8.0" but they love their country even if it is actively trying to kill them.
Next time you've got a half-day in Tokyo go over to the Metropolitan Towers, the city's local government building near Shinjiku. There's a free observation gallery you can visit on the 36th floor and on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji to the south-west. That's an active volcano, by the way, less than 100km from where 30-odd million people live and work. It's at the corner of three active tectonic plates, the source of the 1923 earthquake I mentioned.
As for "areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen" why do people live in the Mississippi valley with its killer tornadoes (550 dead in 2011 alone)? Do Americans like taking risks that much?
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Tornadoes kill people and destroy townships in central US pretty much every year -- 2011 had an exceptionally high body count, driven in part by a single tornado that wiped out a town and killed over 150 people, but it's usually 20 or 30 minimum even in a quiet year. The Great Tohoku earthquake of 2011 actually killed very few, probably under a hundred people and they were the first substantial deaths from an earthquake in Japan for over a decade. The tsunami that followed killed about 20,000 people but it
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We don't need to wonder how big the tsunamis in the region were because they planted a marker at the highest point an earlier big one reached. It said don't build below here. Guess where they put the nuclear plant, and then didn't put the backup generators on pylons? The disaster at Fukushima Daiichi was guaranteed to happen given a large enough timescale. Sadly, it was that.
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geez, someone who actually followed the news... so rare these days...
Re: fusion? (Score:1)
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Where is my mod points when I need them. Oh, I posted here, wouldn't do any good.
But if I could, I would give you +3 points.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Unless you plan to give up your computer, car, mass transit, pretty much all mass produced goods, and go back to an egrarian lifestyle, you will have to deal with industrial accidents.
But we could have a lot less industrial waste if we cut out the unnecessary industrial output that's associated with a throwaway culture. We shouldn't be replacing all these things all the time. Cars should be made with polyurethane bushings and heim joints instead of these shitty ball and socket tie rod ends, for example, so that they will actually last. Instead they shake themselves apart and the labor costs for replacing what could have been lifetime components become so high that it's cheaper to buy ano
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Doesn't look like FUD to me. I haven't yet seen any evidence that renewables can handle more than a fraction of our energy needs. They are, obviously, not currently sufficient for our needs. While a bit far-fetched to my mind, there could be unintended consequences of use for solar and wind. Particularly with wind power, there is evidence of changes in air currents in response to deployment of turbine farms, which will naturally be expected to increase with further expansion. Also, wind turbines are manufa
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Not unsafe? The likelyhood of failure is higher than you think! Trying to contain the atomic dragon is a fools errand.
Do you know how many people die on the toilet each year while "straining at stool"?
Maybe we should ban that.
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Now, now, we'll have no facts on risk analysis here.
Radiation is scary and must be stopped at all costs.
That's why I'm starting a Kickstarter to blow up that most nefarious of radiation sources - The Sun.
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Except for Chernobyl, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, nuclear have killed thoughout it's lifetime less people than natural gas kills every year. But when you account for the fact that Nuclear is the only solution that could offset all fossil fuel utilization worldwide, and that if it weren't for nuclear, we would have more coal, then quickly you would find out that nuclear has saved millions of lives from not having to breath coal smog, from not killing coal miners, from not killing people from coal mercury, cadmiu
No (Score:5, Informative)
Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
When the power went out things got difficult, communication became harder, the plant was already badly damaged. The tsunami made things a lot worse, and general confusion prevented people taking effective action. On paper it was a recoverable situation that should have been safely dealt with, in practice human nature doesn't cope well with this kind of crisis.
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Reading TFA, I was struck by how the manager seemed to assume the best and sought evidence showing things were worse. When workers told him they couldn't read the coolant water levels anymore, rather than assume the worst (the cooling water had all evaporated) and order seawater to be dumped in (killing the commercial life of the reactor), he repeatedly asked the worker
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in practice human nature doesn't cope well with this kind of crisis.
What "nature" does cope well with flying blind? Before we blame this on the yoomans, perhaps we ought to consider whether an optimally rational actor would have done any better?
Flip a coin... (Score:2)
Flip a coin...heads they would have done better, tails worse. If the coin lands on its edge they would do exactly the same.
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Effects of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost 20,000 people died because they lived close to the ocean.
A few dozen people might wind up with cancer someday because Japan uses nuclear power.
The obvious conclusion? Nuclear power is bad and should be eliminated immediately.
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200,000 people are homeless from the evacuation and will probably die in school gyms.
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And had the nuclear plant not melted down, another 20,000 people could've moved back into the area and attempted to devise ways to survive the next tsunami. But as it is, the meltdown has rendered a big swath of land uninhabitable. The tsunami would've killed those 20,000 either way. But the nuke didn't have to be there making things worse.
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So if another tsunami hits that (evacuated) area, does that mean we credit the meltdown for saving 20,000 lives?
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But as it is, the meltdown has rendered a big swath of land uninhabitable.
It's not uninhabitable. People could live there perfectly fine for a long time I bet, just like some are around Chernobyl. It is probably more danger in the long run than other land, but we are just attempting death avoidance in levels far safer than other situations that we are ok with. Living in the evacuated zone is probably safer than being a coal miner.
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Not even close.
The nuclear disaster causes a lot of people to lose their homes and businesses. Not out of fear, because the area was contaminated well above safe levels and is still being cleaned up. It also forced all nuclear plants in the country to shut down. Even if Fukushima has been fine most of them would have needed to be taken offline for checks and repairs due to the quake being well above their design limits and the damage to them that was immediately evident. In a country with lots of earthquake
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>Comparing the disaster to the deaths from the tsunami is meaningless.
Do you even realize that the earthquake was the root cause of every death? From your post, you make it sound like the meltdown, and the earthquake were unrelated. The point being you suck as risk analysis if you don't understand that when a once in a 1000 years tsunami strikes a area, people will die in that area. The added risk to life caused by also having a nuclear plant in this area was a insignificant increase in the average ri
On the long run (Score:1, Interesting)
>> A few dozen people might wind up with cancer someday because Japan uses nuclear power.
Nope. The first years it was close to 600 in the direct vincinity:
https://nuclearhistory.wordpre... [wordpress.com]
The number is not considering the widespread ingestion of contaminated agricultural produce, and is exponential over the years (or at least over the firt 300 years)
On the long run, Fukushima takes more lives than the tsunami. Much more.
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That 600 was NOT cancer deaths. Note from your link:
And
Note that "radioactivity-casued cancers" are NOT included in that descr
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Wish I had mod points for you. +1
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The gestation period of most cancers is about 6 years. Which means that even the direct effects of the Fukushima disaster won't start appearing until 2017. Radioisotopes analogue micronutrients when presented to a metabolism. Plutonium (pu-239) presents as Iron. Iron is highl
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Plutonium (pu-239) presents as Iron. Iron is highly sought after in oceanic metabolisms and therefore complete uptake of pu-239 into the food chain is guaranteed. This is the nature of bio-accumulation and the effects are cumulative.
Plutonium would be present in the ocean as PuO2, right? Which is highly insoluble. Do we have any measurements on the bioavailability of plutonium in ocean environments?
pu-239 has a half life of 25,000 years and is fatal to humans at a dose of around 1-10 micrograms [oppenheimer].
That depends highly on the form. If it is ingested as PuO2, only 0.04% is taken up, the rest is excreted. Granted, it might be much more bioavalable if it is bioaccumulated.
When the person is buried the isotope will eventually make it's way into the water table, if cremated the ashes will carry the radioisotope back into the air.
Not if it is present as the oxide, which it will surely be after cremation. The oxide is unreactive (unless it is reduced), and heavy, so dust will settle relatively qui
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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.
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He predicted a few of those would be from the accident. /. readers in 40 years will be: the danger of radiation is overrated, as we have no conclusive death from Fukushima.
And that can not be proven.
Likely it won't be a few, but many, however that can not be proven either.
So in 40 years "wikipedia" will write: "there was an increase in cancer, some related it to the accident, however there is no conclusive study that the accident was the reason".
The conclusion by
Germany treated after the chernobyl incident
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Thyroid Cancer.
In this case the cancer rate was like a factor of 10 - 100 above the expected value, and the time relation was undeniable.
Citation needed!!
The only correlation was between children that drunk the milk of the cows that fed on the grass immediately after Chernobyl. The cows died from their exposure.
So I'm sorry, but comparing mega-doses that kids from Chernobyl area got because of contaminated milk, cannot be compared to the rest of the population or Japan in general, because the rest of the population did not suffer from any cancer-rate spikes. If Soviet Union was not in denial with Chernobyl and warned people not to eat contam
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Likely it won't be a few, but many, however that can not be proven either.
There's no reason to believe this is true. The LNT model is known to overestimate cancer incidence, and even using LNT we get "few" and not "many".
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Chernobyl caused a few 10k cancer cases in children, Thyroid Cancer mainly.
However the incidents are not comparable ...
The 'LNT model' is not used to predict cancer, so I have no idea what you want to say.
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Well, that's the problem isn't it, we don't really understand it well enough and can't say for sure what the long term effects will be. We don't even know exactly what happened at the plant because parts of it are still inaccessible. Anyone who claims it isn't that bad is talking bullshit too, because they don't know either.
Re:Effects of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan (Score:4, Insightful)
Who is right?
Those who use the almost 30 years of studies on Chernobyl instead of counter-pulling sensationalized numbers. Anyone coming up with numbers larger than those studies have their arm so deep in bullshit that their shoulder smells.
Despite the accident being much worse and the fallout being over land, the numbers affected are counted in thousands, dixit: "for a total of 9000 Chernobyl-associated fatal cancers". You could reasonably claim that Fukushima should affect one tenth that number and use 1000 as the death cap.
Back of the envelope calculations, but at least it doesn't smell.
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Fukushima area was evacuated much quicker.
Fallout was lower.
That makes a back of the envelope calculation more difficult.
On top of that there are many claims that the Chernobyl death toll was much higher, too.
But: you are right, for a sensible estimate your approach is right.
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Why, thank you!
I am glad to see some can maintain a NPOV on this subject. We need more like you.
But did you account for.... (Score:2)
But did you account for....the California house wife who dies of stress related to the idea that radiation from Japan got into her organic cow milk soy blend?
Re:Effects of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan (Score:4, Interesting)
Or, we might look at the actual data instead of, you know, spilling bullshit. Oh there's none? No, quite the opposite, things get published all the time by scientists in some of the most prestigious venues, but these accounts are not publicized in the mass media, for they are not scary. So let's look at something from this year [pnas.org]. Conclusions? "The mean annual radiation dose rate in 2012 associated with the accident was 0.89-2.51 mSv/y" and "the extra lifetime integrated dose after 2012 is estimated to elevate lifetime risk of cancer incidence by a factor of 1.03 to 1.05 at most, which is unlikely to be epidemiologically detectable." Scary, right? They say that people do get an extra 3-5% chance of getting cancer, so "0.89-2.51 mSv/y" has to be huge, right? Well if you live in the US, as opposed to Japan, you are going to be getting 1.9 mSv/y more exposure, for there is more radon in the air in the US than there is in Japan [wikipedia.org]. And these are country-wide averages, so I am sure that in a country as vast as the US, in some places you will be exposing yourself to a significantly more radiation. This goes to say that if you don't worry about where you live in the world and don't know the local natural radon activity, you shouldn't be any more worried about the Fukushima accident. Not so scary after all? Well, the mass media thought so too, so they've kept silent. In all fairness, this data does not include radiation dosages from 2011, the year of the disaster, but the data shows that there is hardly any increase of mortality there, either [wikipedia.org]
I live in the country with the freest press in the world [wikipedia.org], so you'd expect there to be less fearmongering. Maybe so, but here's my story. On the day of the earthquake, I was in Fukushima, actually making my way through the city to Tokyo in order to fly back home. Granted, I was not near the coast, but that should hardly matter to ill-informed journalists. When I returned to my home country, the press were waiting for the passengers with video cameras, for the flight that I'd booked months ahead happened to be the first out of Tokyo. I was interviewed, and the journalists asked questions like "were you scared?" and "is it because of the nuclear threat that you flew out?", and my answers were quite categorically "no". Was my interview aired? Also no, but people who had left the country, even though they'd been visiting the southern parts and in no danger whatsoever spilled their guts and cried out of fear for the cameras, had their takes on the subject shown. Makes better TV, I'll have to give them that, but not a very objective one.
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I live in the country with the freest press in the world, so you'd expect there to be less fearmongering.
Quite the opposite. I would expect to find less fearmongering in less free countries.
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The Nazis started in with the anti-Jew stuff long before they had the opportunity to take anyone's freedom away.
Do you think the North Koreans have health scares like the antivax stuff or allow news exposes on doorknob bacteria? They may natter on about foreign threats, but I doubt as a Nork you hear anything about local threats like crime, disease, and environmental contaminants.
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You make the same mistake that many on Slashdot do which is to assume that all radioactive material is the same and that mSv/year is the only number you need to look at.
The Japanese government set the limit it 1mSv/year before the disaster, and with good reason. The type of material released from this kind of incident bio-accumulates and can sit for years or decades inside the body. That is what causes cancer, not external radiation levels that usually can't penetrate the skin.
The limit was raised to 20mSv/
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Perhaps you should go back to school and relearn what half-life actually means?
caesium has a biological half life of app. 70 days, so it will not sit in the body for years or decades.
You have 1024mg (milli gram) Caesium in your body ... for what ever reason.
After
70) days it is 512mg
140) days it is 256mg
210) days it is 128mg
280) days it is 64mg
350) days it is 32mg
420) days it is 16mg
490) days it is 8mg
560) days it is 4mg
Should I continue?
Regardless of the amount you get when contaminated: YES IT WILL BE STU
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After around 15 years, the proportion of cesium that is left in the body is close to Avogrado's number. ... Chernobyl is now 26 years ago, still mushrooms and boars and other wildlife from the woods in south germany can not be consumed safely
Only if you don't get more from it via food into your body
After 20 years, you need to start out with millions of moles, or thousands of tons, of cesium in the body for there to be one atom left.
That is nonsense. See above.
You are not even technically correct.
If you thi
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Only if you don't get more from it via food into your body
The original post I commented on talked about bioaccumulation. Your original post calculated how much was left after certain amounts of time. But now you were suddenly always talking about something else? Please stop moving the goalposts.
Simple math: 1mg * 2^10 (for easy calculation) equals 1 gram. 1gram * 2^10 (now we are at 2^20, which equals 20 years) equals 1kg ... 1kg is far away from multiple tons, isn't it?
Are you assuming that the biological half-life is 1 year? Because it isn't. Which I said earlier. And which year acknowledged in your previous post. It is 70 days. That means that 20 years is roughly 100 half-lifes. So after 20 years, the proportion of the original material
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You are right, I forgot to incorporate the correct half life.
However 70 days is only for one of the many isotopes.
Bioaccumukation happens as long as you incorporate the isotopes into the body, so basically no idea what your final point is.
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There is more Radon in the air in the US than in Japan ... (*facepalm*)
You do know that neither the US nor Japan is a 1 x 1 square mile area on the globe, do you?
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Nuclear power plants have no right to cause cancer for anybody, anywhere, and especially not for people who don't work at the plant.
And Japanese society's need for power outweighs a few hypothetical cases of cancer. If we applied your standard to driving, we wouldn't be - since any cars on the road increases the risk of death for everyone in cars or near them.
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One of the people in charge of Fukishima died a few months later from cancer. He got it from smoking.
Japan has a lot of heavy smokers.
OMG BAN THE NUKES!
Re:Effects of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you missed the point big time there. The potential death toll from the most severe nuclear incident in recent memory is fewer than the number of people who die by slipping in a bathtub each day, and absolutely dwarfed by all the things that actually kill people like smoking and car accidents. This makes nuclear energy a remarkably safe thing, which is in stark contrast to how it is portrayed by alarmist facebook posts.
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Quick, ban oceans. It worked for extra large sodas right?
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>As the tsunami is worse, then the meltdown "doesn't count." Hurray for the amazing logic of pro-nuke fanboy
The point is Japan had a horrible natural disaster, that natural disaster was made no worse by having nuclear power in terms of life lost, despite the Japanese making almost the worst case decisions all along. IE at the time these plants were made, the only other realistic option would have been to build at least 30* more coal plants than nukes, those plants would have caused more people to be in
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Exactly, precisely. Fukushima isn't proof Nuclear is bad. It's proof that we are capable of mitigating horrendous disasters.
The Fukushima Daichi is the result of about four events in chain plus one really stupid decision. Should any of the four events didn't happen or the stupid decision wasn't undertaken, the Fukushima Daichi situation would be proof nuclear is extremely safe !
If we did to the airlines what some want us do to with nuclear, all airlines would be shutdown forever.
No eyewitnesses of Kamaishi or Ofunato survived (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [wordpress.com] 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) [nrc.gov] 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.)
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I can understand a large amount of money being diverted by the government or charities to help the victims recover, either physically with homes or psychologically with mental health services.
But paying them money directly might not be such a good idea. It could make them targets and victims once again when people try to prey on them, abusing their emotional
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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 rationa
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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
The most important thing that should be done is to talk rationally about whether humans are mature enough to manage nuclear power safely. It stands to reason that we are not because we're underutilizing the technolgies that we have just to keep the fissibles out of our atmosphere when we burn coal. We're lazy, greedy, self-destructive monkeys and I simply don't trust any of the monkeys with nuclear power.
When we learn to care for people to whom we have no obvious connection, we'll be ready to use power syst
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If you were talking rationally about it you would be talking about radioisotopes, their bio-accumulation in the food chain and, their effect on the human species.
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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.
You mean the pro-nuclear movement? The ones spreading fear and panic over the lights going out, fossil fuels being the only alternative and killing millions when nuclear power isn't chosen, that sort of thing?
It would be nice to have a debate that wasn't instantly polarized by bringing up these groups.
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Power. The disaster had a human component of insufficient preparation, with Fukushima being the most famous part of it. Letting the government maintain control over relief
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You don't care about their lives, as was made abundantly clear on wikipedia.
This guy clearly doesn't understand how Wikipedia works. When a sentence is contested people pile in with more detail and citations. He claims this detail and the citations are evidence of a conspiracy to make more of the nuclear disaster than he feels is warranted, when in fact they are simply a reaction to people adding [citation needed] tags.
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.
Let me explain the current situation to you, then perhaps you would understand why it is such a big deal for those affected.
Victims of the tsunami lost entire towns,
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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 ar
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There's one concept YOU don't seem to understand. LIFE. It sort of goes on. When people choose to live in Japan, or anywhere else on the planet for that matter, they're probably not thinking of all the ways they might die. They think of all the ways they might LIVE. People LIVE for LIFE, not for death.
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.
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It seems like nobody noticed. But the parent and the guy who wrote the wordpress article are one and the same person. Me.
Two comments... (Score:1)
ONE: On the safety of certain technologies
I once learned buildings must actually be planned to fall by themselves... in a controlled way. Were a building to be made absolutely resistant to catastrophe, no one would know what would happen if a catastrophe big enough happens. Instead, it is planned to break at anticipated points, allowing for a safer evacuation.
Can something like a nuclear reactor ever be made so as to be called 100% safe? I guess not. Yesterday it was an earthquake (of all things!), but ther
Bravery (Score:3)
I followed the disaster as it happened on twitter and the news, and like everyone was shocked by the deaths. I find that the criticism of the workers and TEPCO who were put in the most awful of circumstances was disingenuous. How many organizations would have done better? Put yourself in the place of one of the workers on site; power is out, your family may be dead, the water has risen and swept away most of the town, and the reactors around you have cracked in the earthquake. You have no communication, you may be about to be radiated. Many of the workers were evacuated only to be sent back in. What bravery.
We never appreciate the people who face death and do their job.
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I find that the criticism of the workers and TEPCO who were put in the most awful of circumstances was disingenuous.
Uh no. Fuck TEPCO. Everything they've said since the accident has been a lie, or gross incompetence of a totally unacceptable order. The workers have been heroic. TEPCO has been pathetic.
Nothing New or Interesting (Score:1)
The article offers no insight that I didn't know three years ago. I live 90 miles from the Fukushima plant and I've posted several times about what that time was like, as it was happening, from Japan.
No one is living (or dying) in school gymnasiums, as someone above said.
What? (Score:3)
Also, cold weather caused the Challenger to explode.
Re: (Score:2)
massive earthquake and tsunami that caused three of the station's reactor cores to melt
Also, cold weather caused the Challenger to explode.
Thank you. This disaster was caused by GE, Tepco, and the US and Japanese governments. It was guaranteed to happen by design. Whether that design was malicious or idiotic is irrelevant.
Spoiler Alert: The Titanic sunk (Score:2)
Spoiler Alert: The Titanic sunk because it filled with water.
Will be exposed (Score:2)
Not worth reading beyond... (Score:2)
The article doesn't worth reading beyond this paragraph:
"Ultimately, Yoshida would make headlines when he famously disobeyed instructions from TEPCO headquarters to stop using seawater to cool the reactors. Though he was later reprimanded, his disregard for corporate instructions was possibly the only reason that the reactor cores did not explode."
Obviously, the author doesn't know what he is talking about. A nuclear reactor doesn't explode. It melts. Some hydrogen gas may explode, however it has nothing to do with a nuclear explosion.
Re:"Independent Investigation"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently, all the familiar sorts of electrical generation and fueling compounds come with an environmental cost.
Pick your poison: mine coal, crude oil and gas, harness the splitting of the atom, invest in wind and solar collection, damn mighty rivers... there is a documented downside to every way we generate power.
The dottie armchair nuclear scientist in me would argue new nuclear technologies are being kept on the shelf using FUD-like tactics while several of the finite energy options are being used up. This is happening despite the fact that the renewables aren't ready yet to sustain a reliable grid.
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This is happening despite the fact that the renewables aren't ready yet to sustain a reliable grid.
This is becoming less important. Factory work is becoming more automated and the core of the "smart grid" concept involves electricity producers informing electricity consumers as to when they are permitted to use power. Industrial users are already being moved to these sort of systems but the vision is for entire societies to participate in essentially cooperative power distribution. The power can be used when the power is there, aside from the demands which basically keep people working. A little more sto
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Remind me again, what exactly is the downside to wind? Something more than the fact that some birds have a tendency to fly into large objects, I hope.
Noise.
So roughly the same problem that wind generates around trees?
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