Almost a year down the line should be a good time to assess this, but my google-fu is not strong enough. The reports and articles that I can find are old and somewhat incoherent and/or incomplete. The sense of the incident varies from it being fairly small (especially considering the massive natural disasters that caused it) to being reason enough to stop considering nuclear energy as a power source. In any such situation, one turns to the Dope. What was the scale of the Fukushima disaster? Here’s an idea of what I’m looking for
As a direct result of the plant meltdown -
How many people lost their lives or are at risk of serious adverse long term effects?
How many people were completely displaced and are likely to remain so?
How much of the area around the plant has been rendered inhabitable or
significantly risky to inhabit, and for how long?
What is the likely environmental impact - in terms of radioactivity in the food chain etc. (Can we get Godzilla? Please?)
A few of the plant’s workers were severely injured or killed by the disaster conditions resulting from the earthquake. There were no immediate deaths due to direct radiation exposures, but at least six workers have exceeded lifetime legal limits for radiation and more than 300 have received significant radiation doses. Future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have been estimated to be between 100[24] and 1,000.[20] Fear of ionizing radiation could have long-term psychological effects on a large portion of the population in the contaminated areas.
in comparison the Tsunami itself killed 16,000 with another 3000 still missing and unaccounted for.
AFAIK, the reaction on nuclear power here in Japan it a toughening of safety standards but I don’t believe there is any serious talk of phasing Nuclear power out.
One factor is that a lot of radioactive contamination went into the ocean. The same disaster in the middle of a populated continental land mass might have been almost as bad as Chernobyl.
Well, this particular nuclear facility is not of a new design, and was not built with the level of earthquake + Tsunami that it received.
… and yet, the environmental and human life impact while sucking majorly, never rose to the level of what the usual anti-nuclear nutjobs out there were predicting.
Modern reactors can be built that are MUCH safer than Fukishima’s design. And I’m sure the earthquake’s damage on various structures has been/will be studied in order to make safer buildings overall.
There are designs that literally self contain, and self cool if something goes wrong, not because of some contraption/lever/button/program/some system that can fail, but because the way the reactor is built, physics simply takes over.
The issue with nuclear, here in the states specially, is that there are a lot of ignorant, hysterical people that make building new, safe plants an extremely expensive, time consuming, sometimes impossible endevour.
So instead of building plants that last longer, are more efficient, and critically, are much safer, companies update old, outdated, not as safe designs.
There are also some resistances to modern fuels (like molten salt reactors), possibly because older style reactors can produce weapon grade byproducts which apparently governments (like ours) loves.
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What has the scientific community learned from this, so we can apply said lessons to other nuclear facilities to keep them safer
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I’d say the biggest one would be ‘don’t let your reactors get so old. Replace them periodically with newer generation reactors.’ Also, look into your backup power and disaster planning more carefully.
They might also want to learn that ‘shit happens’ sometimes, and disasters can exceed planning. To me, the biggest problem with Fukushima was that they simply weren’t prepared, planning wise, for the scale of what actually hit them. That’s where emergency planning comes in, and that’s the core of where they failed, IMHO. Of course, you never think you are going to get hit by an 8.0+ earthquake AND a huge freaking tsunami, and the probability of such an event happening are small. Even smaller that it’s going to happen to hit a fairly old nuclear power plant that had planned on a tsunami that was 20 feet less than what they got and an earthquake that was a magnitude less, plus who’s backup power was poorly positioned (to where the tsunami waters would be in the event they topped the wall), was fairly isolated logistically (assuming the roads were cut and all land power was completely destroyed) and far from any immediate possible assistance from emergency teams (who were also busy with the massive casualties the disaster that started all this had done).
That’s why you do worst case disaster planning though, and you do periodic drills. I wish my own emergency managers and administration would learn these lessons, but sadly the thinking always seems to be ‘well, it could never happen HERE’.
Compared to the capital, and it’s time value, the remaining costs of nuclear power pale in comparison. This means that in order to be economical, nuke plants must achieve long active lives. Frequent replacement would price this energy source out of the market.
Just going from memory here (and they are BAD memories of endless wrangling ‘debates’ with folks like FXMastermind :eek:), but the Fukushima plant was an older design built in the 80’s. Yeah, you definitely want to get the most out of your plants, and it hadn’t reached the end of it’s life (yet), so your point is a good one. But the disaster planning on it was pretty sub-par and hadn’t been updated (afaik), and the tertiary backup power system was definitely poorly thought through.
The Fukushima disaster was an earthquake and tsunami. The tsunami was caused by the earthquake, and neither was caused in any way by nuclear power. The fact that one of the structures severely damaged by the disaster was a nuclear power plant is no more relevant than any of the other structures damaged.
See this is the point I want to address with facts. The only ones I can find are the ones coremelt mentioned. But can we quantify the other impact. Some of the land around the plant has been cordoned off as no-entry zones. How much? There are apparently three levels of access allowed to irradiated areas. Do we know how much area has been apportioned to each of these?
Maybe so, but I’m referring only to the incident caused at the nuclear plant. Googling “Fukushima Disaster” results in the nuclear incident being the only hits on the first page. Still, if it confuses people, can a mod please change the title to read Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Thanks.
Chronos is wrong. Fukushima disaster refers to the Nuclear disaster where the outer containment buildings exploded due to hydrogren leaks and everything else that happened.
The Fukushima disaster was caused by the Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami, which is the much more serious disaster that wiped out entire villages and left around 250,000 up homeless.
Hate to ask for a cite for this but it just seems too outlandish. Was it really scheduled to go offline three weeks later, or is that just Tepco claiming so?
Weren’t several of the older reactors shut down prior to the earthquake/tsunami? I thought a few of them were being used for storage (it’s been a while and I’m probably misremembering, since I was off bya decade as to when most of the reactors were brought online).
A giant, 1400+ foot wave of personal blog sediment washed over Doperville and threatened to fill up the Pit. It lasted a few months, but things seem to have returned to normal.
