This VICE article says that the situation at Fukushima is still bad, getting worse in a lot of ways, and possibly will not ever be fully and appropriately dealt with.[
Thus far my experience with VICE has been very positive: articles seem to be well-researched and well-documented. Analyses seem to be painstakingly complete, taking a multitude of factors into account to form a cohesive picture and to better understand any difficulties or conflicts. So if anyone can find errors in the story or contradictions in source materials, etc. please feel free to call attention to it, because thus far my own experiences are telling me to trust the information as presented in the article.
I know we discussed the initial disaster at length here on the Dope, but now that 3 years have gone by, what do we know? What is different? What needs to be done, what is being done, and when will it not need to be done anymore? Is there a time when the international community steps in and supervises the situation and it’s clean-up? Who can declare that what TEPCO is doing is not satisfactory? And how can we know that without the information that TEPCO seems to consistently withhold?
It’s no surprise. Chernobyl is still being “dealt with”, which means building an even bigger building over the destroyed reactor and dangerous core material. At some point in the future, when that building starts to crumble, and if there is still an advanced civilization, it’s time to build another one.
That situation is an open disaster (no containment building at all), and there is quite simply no way to clean up a ruined reactor core. The partial melt down of TMI took decades to “fix”, as in removing the partially melted fuel, which wasn’t very radioactive, it had only been running for less than three months. But the rest of the contaminated TMI site is still sitting there, they simply put off dealing with the “basement” until they decommission the other reactor.
So a very minor (compared to Fukushima of course) reactor disaster (TMI) still hasn’t been dealt with, 35 years later. Neither has Chernobyl, so it’s not actually a surprise that a disaster that is so very very much worse isn’t going well. That data and info is hidden, distorted or simply lied about, no surprise.
I believe that Japan scaled down their nuclear energy use for a few years, after Fukushima, and there’s been a struggle to get them re-activated. Now that they’ve been turned back on, it’s alright to start releasing negative information about Fukushima again.
My take is that a news organization that puts out stories with headlines including the words “No One Wants You To Know” is guilty of the same sort of sensationalism (or worse) than the “traditional” news sources it aims to replace. I gather it would have been less sexy to say “The utility and some Japanese government officials have been delaying release of important information”.
I note that the VICE article talks about a reported increase in thyroid cancer incidence in Japanese children from the affected area. What I didn’t see mentioned was the likelihood that the increase is tied to intensive screening.
The VICE article also heavily quotes Helen Caldicott, whose credibility on the subject of nuclear energy and reactor accidents is questionable.
I think I’d want to confirm allegations in that article with other, more trusted sources.
Ah, I thought it was just a few. I also thought I had read an Economist article stating that they were going online…
I wouldn’t have guessed that they would be able to operate entirely without nuclear energy. They must be eating through a huge chunk of coal (and presumably running their coal plants beyond capacity…?)
Given that radioactivity diminishes over time, there actually is some merit to waiting before “dealing with” the TMI basement. Letting a few decades go by can make the site safer to death with. Of course, there are trade-offs in such a wait, but it’s not simply a matter of ignoring the situation.
Would you complain that a fire department is not “dealing with” the remains of a burned building if they wait a day or two for the wreckage to cool, find any remaining hotspots, etc. and therefore make it safer for workers to clean up? The thing is, for a nuclear accident the wait isn’t days, it’s decades. Meanwhile, you have to contain the site. For something like Chernobyl or Fukushima that’s not a trivial task.
It sucks that you were pretty much exactly right in your initial descriptions of just how bad this incident was and will be. I don’t imagine that any of the people who called you names have withdrawn their criticisms or apologized, have they?
The problem is that if unremoved fuel is still fissioning, it generates more decay products. I don’t know how long a damaged reactor can continue to “smolder”, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was decades or even centuries.
Beyond that, the TMI basement is contained and not going anywhere. It’s probably safest right where it is; dismantling it and dragging it off somewhere else drastically raises the chances of contaminating all sorts of stuff.
Thanks for the heads-up about Miss Caldicott; I had never heard of her before the VICE article. Of course, I’ve never heard of the guy who’s blog you linked to either, but he seems to bring up some valid points.
The idea that the screening simply uncovered more thyroid cancer than would normally be uncovered doesn’t seem to jive with the statistics and what it seems the numbers should have been, but I’m willing to sit that out and wait to see what future data indicates or to take a look at other evidence. I’ve read more about Iodine 131 tonight than I ever thought I would, for instance.
If we take those pieces of info out, tho, Jack, does it affect much about the perception of the situation in Fukushima today?
That’s because it isn’t backed up by any science. Your “source” is simply something somebody made up to try and cast doubt on even the possibility that children were exposed to Fukushima radiation.
See? Who needs science, actual testing, facts, when you can just make something up? And the people who don’t want Fukushima to be a problem will just buy it. The “source” goes on to claim other things it just can’t know, like the exposure rates and amounts.
See? They just say something, and it becomes true, because they want it to be true. And these same people think they actually know something. They somehow know more about medicine and the Japanese doctors involved. They are experts about children’s health and radiation exposure and cancer rates.
They “know” that if we checked children they would all actually have thyroid cancer rates a hundred times higher than what is currently stated by medical experts.
And because the nuclear believer wants this to be true, they simply believe it, and the problem, for them, is solved.