Excellent post.
Broomstick, the story someone cited a while back reported on a particular hospital whose staff deserted around a hundred elderly, bed-ridden patients because the government rescue teams they’d been told had been sent didn’t get there by sundown. They decided not to wait any more and walked away from their charges. The same government rescue teams discovered the abandoned patients some time after that.
Why this is cited as a case of government mismanagement beats me. I’ve yet to find a citation of a Japanese official statement saying “Run away! Abandon the weak and infirm! Flee!”
I’m not entirely sure, as I am at best an interested layperson struggling to become more informed on these matters, but as near as I can figure…
If the wind HAD been blowing steadily towards Tokyo…probably not a whole lot. There would have been detectable radiation, of course (there was already) but you have to keep in mind that we can detect very small amounts of radiation. Assuming the same quantity of Bad Stuff had been expelled there likely be more farms whose produce would not be allowed in the food chain. Tokyo itself… *at most *people might be asked to limit their time out of doors, particularly pregnant women and children, but maybe not even that if the rise in radioactivity didn’t reach the normally allowed limits. If the radiation level went from what is normal for Tokyo to, say, what is normal for Denver, Colordao (which actually does, continually, have higher background radiation due to being at a higher elevation) there really would be no reason for people to alter their activities.
So… the answer would be between “nothing that hasn’t already happened” to “slight risk for the most vulnerable, but probably nothing.”
Really, no one seems to consider that in August of 1945 Tokyo probably got some light fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it just doesn’t seem to have made any difference. For that matter, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt on their heavily irradiated sites and there isn’t a higher rate of birth defects or other problems in those cities, either.
The danger is at the plant sites themselves, and the people who were working there during the emergency. The evacuations were largely precautionary, though really if people can avoid radiation there’s a good argument to get out of the way. On the other hand, the amount of natural radiation you get on a flight from Tokyo to somewhere else in order to get away from The Evil Radiation would be over eight times what you would have received staying 20 km from the affected reactor buildings for an entire day.
Just because we can detect something doesn’t mean there’s enough of it to cause a problem.
Radioactivity fades with time, distance, and dilution. If the wind had been blowing towards Tokyo all three still would have applied.
Yes, the article was explicit it was the government directed nuclear evacuation that caused the staff to abandon the patients.
“I heard” doesn’t cut it I’m afraid. I already cited the hospital incident I’m talking about. Now you. 
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
So three explosions, four destroyed reactors, two partial meltdowns, three fires and an unknown amount of radioactive release, and that is spun as “the plant didn’t fail”.
[/QUOTE]
That quote from me was from several days ago (last week in fact), and yet it still remains true…the containment vessels still haven’t failed. They are still doing what they were designed to do…contain the radiation.
You can hem and haw all you want about fires, explosions, partial meltdowns or the old standby ‘we just don’t know and no one can tell us’, but the facts remain that afaik there is no credible source for a large scale release of radioactive materials, no remote detections of high levels of radiation have yet been found, and despite the white smoke coming out of reactor 3 the radiation levels the last time I looked were dropping or stable…not rising or spiking.
I see you using hyperbole and ignorance to try and make your scaremongering points…and, yeah, I increasingly find your posts pretty freaking funny since they are so over the top both in your attempt to strawman others positions and to try and be sarcastic while attempting some sort of faux-restraint and condescension. What are you going to do next week when the imminent disaster at this nuclear plant still doesn’t materialize? What will you do in two weeks or a month when it doesn’t materialize? My guess is that the tune will change, and we’ll start getting increasingly dark CTs about cover ups and the like…
-XT
Stockholders are not engineers and don’t sign off plant designs. The backup to the plants were generators built at lower levels. That’s it. There was no plan C except to watch the buildings explode. This isn’t a design flaw, it’s a lack of redundancy. There is no arm chair quarterbacking involved.
Is this a whoosh, 'luce?
If not, the short answer is, yes, we’ve got a lot of actual data on the effects of ionizing radiation on living organisms. If this is some sort of gotcha question, note that much of that data is from the bad old days of nukes used in anger, and most of the rest is from direct controlled experiment and applied physics. Not gonna dig deep for citations, 'cause they’re readily available for the actually interested. Here’s the second hit that comes up on Google for “experimental basis for health effects of ionizing radiation”.
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
Of course, the coal plant that they are using to provide power to the nuclear plant right now.
[/QUOTE]
Some coal plants are working, others (unsurprisingly) aren’t.
Why you think that coal plants are some sort of magical power generation stations, immune to disaster is beyond me. If there had been a coal fired plant where the Fukushima nuclear plant was it would have been wiped out.
-XT
You’d never know that from some of the other so-called arguments or should I say propaganda being bandied about here.
A statement from the NRC:
-XT
I can live with that. Particuarly with someone like levadrakon - we may disagree about the level of severity, but it’s a civil disagreement and it’s based on what’s known, minimal rumor, and we’re both open to new information that might change our positions.
Well, people started getting sick and dying from radiation as far back as the turn of the 20th Century, when Marie Curie was discovering things like uranium, polonium, and radium. Nicola Tesla x-rayed his hands in 1896 and published a brief paper on the resulting burns. In 1927 Herman Joseph Muller published research on the genetic effects of radiation, for which he later won a Nobel Prize (well, we now know it was the genes affected - genes hadn’t been isolated in 1927 so really his was research on heredity). There were the radium watch-dial painters, who in ignorance were heavily exposed to radium at their work. There was extensive research done on the atomic bomb victims of 1945, and they’ve been followed health-wise to the present. Virtually every atomic accident was student by one government or another, and in recent years that information has been more freely shared. There was extensive epidemiology studies done after TMI. There has been extensive research on Pacific Islanders affected by atomic bomb testing. There were US soldiers deliberately exposed to atomic bomb blast to study the effects of such things on military personnel. There was the 1987 accident in Goiania, Brazil involving improperly disposed of medical machinery. There are all sorts of case studies of people accidentally overexposed during medical procedures - some of which have resulted in injury, and even a few deaths. And, of course, Chernobyl.
In other words, over a century of medical cases which have been extensively studied and studied again.
See above - quite a bit of information actually, and at times under ethically troubling circumstances.
We know for sure certain limits that are clearly unhealthy, or even clearly deadly. Those limits are actually much higher than people suppose. There are those that claim there is no safe lower limit… but that’s a problem because there is naturally radiation all around us, there’s no place in the universe without it. There are folks who say there is a safe lower limit and we’ve evolved mechanism to deal with low levels. Definitely, below a certain level the effect is statistically insignificant, we can’t pick it out of, say, cancer cases caused by other factors.
In between, there’s a whole range of “we don’t know for sure”. However, we’re pretty sure the the lower end of that range is minimally risky, and the upper end is starting to get dangerous. That’s why, in the medical field, there has been a great deal of work to reduce the amount of radiation used in diagnosis - modern x-ray machines use much less radiation than those of half a century ago, for example. We’re more careful to shield peoples’ bodies when possible - that’s why for medical x-rays you frequently get those heavy drapes thrown over your body parts that are not being x-rayed. There’s no need to panic, but if it’s relatively easy to avoid exposure then you probably should, because less is better.
The word radiation scares people - but those same people will get x-rays at the dentist or a CAT scan after an injury without thinking about it. It’s not entirely rational. I think part of it is simply not understanding radiation, and part of it is because you can’t directly sense the danger, so you have to trust others to tell what’s OK or not and it’s hard to know who to trust. Especially when so many who have the knowledge also have motivations to not tell the whole truth, or in some cases even to lie.
And those kinds of unreasonable demands will keep getting exploited by politicians who prefer short-term votes over long-term greenhouse gas effects. Congratulations.
Ah, OK - just wanted to be sure which story you were talking about. That is unethical, but it shouldn’t surprise people that you can find unethical folks all around the world.
That smacks of people looking for a convenient excuse to leave. Meanwhile, we also have stories of heroic sacrifice on the part of other people. Maybe we should just accept that people vary in how they react to a disaster. That doesn’t make abandoning patients OK - it’s deplorable, in fact - but we shouldn’t pretend this is somehow unheard of.
Because too many people want to lay all bad things at the feet of governments today. Maybe they have trouble with the notion that individuals can fail to be responsible all on their own.
Right, because there was only one hospital in the entire tsunami-affected area. :rolleyes: Is there a problem that I want to be certain we’re talking about the same incident and not confusing multiple hospital situations?
That was a much more kind and helpful response than the one I gave. I apologize to elucidator for giving an antagonistic reply to what was in reality an intelligent and appropriate question.
You think triple redundancy is an unreasonable demand?
This is Japan’s electrical grid in summary.
The lack of redundancy means they will now have to rely on fossil fuels to get back on track because of all the damage.
levdrakon, I tried to use your link but it’s broken now - however, I did find the following articles that I think reference the situation you referred to (please let me know if that is correct or not)
From Forbes: Fukushima Visit Reveals Empty Cities, Abandoned Elderly
From Slate: Japanese Hospital Workers Left Elderly People To Die
I found several other references to “128 Elderly” abandoned - the number 128 keeps repeating. However, I note that there is some confusion as to whether this “hospital” or “home for the elderly” is 10 km from the Fukushima plant or 10 km from the edge of the evacuation zone. That 10 km keeps repeating, but the details beyond that differ. The Forbes article clearly shows that not all staff abandoned that facility, and others are staying behind in the city as well (though not many) so apparently no one has been forced out area.
So - either there is a facility 10 km from the Fukushima power plant with 128 residents AND yet another facility 10 km from the evacuation zone that also has 128 residents… or we have conflicting details. I will also note in the Slate story it says soldiers showed up and found the elderly abandoned - there is nothing to say WHY their caretakers left or exactly when.
There is also this New York Times article referring to a facility 15 km from the affect power plant, with “100 or so” residents, but it was also clear that while younger staff were sent away 19 remained with the elderly so, properly speaking, no one there was abandoned.
Really, it’s shame your original link is not working. Could you perhaps clarify this situation? This is the problem with such reporting on disasters, the stories are not consistent. I find it impossible to comment in specifics unless I’m certain we’re talking about the same situation and we have some trustable reporting.
I would like to raise one concern of unintended consequence -
Assume, again for the sake of discussion, that newly popularized fears of nuclear power prevents any newer safer plants from being approved and built in America over the next several decades. Let’s not talk about coal; the simple fact is that the inability to replace them with something else that is carbon neutral (and as much as I believe that renewables can do much of the job in some of the country, they cannot do all of the job or even much of the job in some of the country) will increase the pressure to keep these older and less safely designed plants going a few decades beyond their more ideal retirement dates … especially in an era of a significant price on CO2.
Is there a possibility that fears regarding nuclear safety will prevent replacing aging less safe nuclear plants with newer ones that have designs that are intrinsically safer and actually increase the remote but nonzero risk of a nuclear plant incident?
Here’s what will change my mind: show me statistics the prove the nuclear power is more lethal than coal and/or natural gas per terawatt. If you can do that then I will be against nuclear power.
BTW, you haven’t given your position on AGW.
No, only that I believe that if there had been triple redundancy, you’d be calling for quadruple redundancy, and if quadruple redundancy, calling for quintuple redundancy…