There was no nuclear disaster at Fukushima. The disaster there was a tsunami caused by an earthquake in the ocean. That danger is the same for any facility, of any sort, on a seacoast.
Agreed. We might develop practical fusion power eventually, and it’d be great if we did, but we should plan around the case where we don’t.
The release of radioactive water was somewhat of a disaster, was it not?
The terrible design built in such an area is part of the reason so few trust nuclear power.
- The accident was rated level 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, due to high radioactive releases over days 4 to 6, eventually a total of some 940 PBq (I-131 eq).
So maybe not a Chernobyl disaster, but a disaster all the same. Especially as the 4 reactors are shot because of the tsunami.
It could have been worse if not for the bravery of some of the older technicians. The plant was not designed for placement where it was.
A very minor one. The ocean (naturally) has 15,000,000 PBq of radioactive Potassium-40.
Iodine-131 has a very short half-life (8 days). So even that 940 PBq is less important than it seems, because the effect over time is so low. In a few months, it would have been negligible even if it hadn’t been diluted by the ocean. Meanwhile, that K-40 (with a half-life of >1B years) continues on.
And to contrast:
Fukushima increased average ocean radioactivity by <0.001% for a very limited duration (weeks). It was the worst release of radiation that the industry has had in decades. Most years, the number is zero.
Meanwhile, we are increasing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 by about 0.5% each and every year. It doesn’t go away on its own. It will be like that for decades even if we stopped tomorrow (which we won’t).
We could have slowed this enormously if we’d bet bigger on nuclear decades ago. Well, it’s too late now. But we can not do the stupid thing by closing existing plants.
Everything in Fukushima was wrecked by the tsunami. When industrial facilities are wrecked, they often release dangerous substances. By far the worst offender in this regard, in the tsunami, was an oil refinery. But you can’t use that as evidence that the oil industry is dangerous, either, because the disaster wasn’t caused by anything actually relating to oil.
What’s perhaps more notable is that, alone among all of the city’s infrastructure, the nuclear power plant almost didn’t fail. If the city had instead been hit by the second worst tsunami in recorded history, the plant would have been fine.
It was.
Maybe a PR disaster, in that people pointing to this incident have been able to do great damage to the cause of “going nuclear” in the interest of averting climate change induced disaster.
But no, it wasn’t a disaster by any other metric. I don’t think there has been a single death or illness caused by the so-called “disaster”, and the evacuation of thousands of residents - while motivated by admirable abundance of caution - really just contributed to the aforementioned PR debacle.
It’s also important to note that the nuclear waste released by burning coal far eclipses that created by nuclear power plants (including waste) and is comparable to that released during nuclear accidents.
According to this paper, coal releases
and the world burns ~20 billion kg of coal every day. Add it all up and it is something like ~10 PBq / year of various waste much of which is released as fine particulates in the air and the rest as fly ash. This waste is also much nastier than the iodine 131 released at Fukushima which, as Dr. Strangelove noted, has a half life of 8 days and mostly ends up as inert Xenon.
If there was a nuclear disaster at Fukushima, then we might want to define what the word disaster means.
No, it actually wasn’t. The radioactive water released into the ocean is such a small amount compared to the entirety of the entire Pacific as to be of no concern, as mentioned in other posts in this thread. Right next to the plant, yes, radiation in the water increased temporarily but it wasn’t enough to kill sea life or cause a permanent hazard. People in California who bought radiation detectors out of concern the fish they bought was radioactive often found their trendy granite counter tops were spewing more rads than the fish they put on it. People in general have a very poor understanding of radiation and its hazards.
I include myself in that. Although I have tried to educate myself about radiation and I am nowhere near an expert, I’ve just gained a greater appreciation of my limits of understanding.
The design of the nuclear part of the plant was actually pretty good - it did, after all, survive both a major earthquake and initially the tsunami which was far larger than ever anticipated. What failed was the back up power, based on the older diesel technology. If those generators had been able to keep going (that is, had been adequately fueled) a melt down would have been avoided.
Back-up generators in low-lying, flood vulnerable areas of a complex have been noted as a weak point in disasters for decades now. It was a problem in post-huricane Katrina in New Orleans, where critical facilities like hospitals had their back-up generators in places like basements, which flooded. There have been some efforts to elevate such generators rather than putting them in basements, but such modifications after a place has been built are difficult at best. Going forward they should be designed to be elevated from the get go.
Yes, there is a lingering radiation hazard in and around Fukushima - on land. Not in the ocean adjacent to the power plant.
As for “such an area” - there are virtually no places on Earth that aren’t prone to disasters of one sort or another. And even if you find such a place that won’t prevent, say, a country run by callous idiots that started a war from screwing around with a power plant, see Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Not quite. The reactors were just fine after the tsunami. What trashed the reactors was failure of cooling because the back up diesel generators failed due some being flooded/damaged by the tsunami, and inability to re-fuel those that were operational at all. After which sea water was used to cool the reactors to prevent an even worse situation.
No injuries outside of the plant. Two workers in the plant in the immediate aftermath did receive some radiation injuries/burns, but they have since recovered. You didn’t have direct deaths from radiation at Fukushima like you did at Chernobyl.
So yes, the nuclear plant at Fukushima was wrecked, but it wasn’t because of a flaw on the nuclear side. It was largely a failure of the petroleum-powered backup generators, and that was largely due to poor placement and inability to re-fuel. Let’s hope we’ve learned from that.
Isn’t that about like saying that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights?
I mean, technically it wasn’t a nuclear disaster in that there wasn’t any kind of safety incompetence or mistakes made in terms of dealing with the tsunami, but in the sense that the cores melted and a lot of radioactivity was released, it meets a lot of the other criteria.
That said, I don’t think it’s a huge red flag for the future use of nuclear energy. I’d call it a learning experience more than anything else. Like @Dr.Strangelove points out, nuclear energy is by FAR the best option we have available to us for widespread power generation. I’m all for renewables, but at the moment they’re too variable and inconsistent to actually be reliable (ERCOT is saying that the upcoming October eclipse could cause power issues 
), so nuclear is the only real option that we have that doesn’t generate greenhouse gases.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who I think would know a thing or two about nuclear energy, rates Fukushima a 7 (Major Accident) on the Internation Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). That’s the maximum on the scale and there’s only been one other nuclear accident that is rated as severe – Chernobyl.
I don’t see why not. If fewer people drove cars, there would be fewer car crash deaths, even the ones in which the drivers were driving as safe as they reasonably could but then got blindsided or had a sudden mechanical failure.
Similarly, if we had two refineries of two different substances with the same risk of being released in a tsunami, and the only difference was that the first substance had a greater total harm should it be released, I see no reason why, all else being equal, the first industry is more dangerous than the second.
And yet, Chernobyl directly killed more people, almost certainly indirectly killed far more people, and contaminated a greater area for a longer period of time. Which demonstrates why containment buildings for nuclear power plants are a really good idea.
Chernobyl was also directly caused by a malfunction at a nuclear plant. Fukushima didn’t happen until the plant was subjected to not one but two major natural disasters.
Yes, both were major disasters but they aren’t the same thing at all, and the long term consequences of each will also continue to be different.
The plant was struck by a natural disaster, which caused damage to it. There was no nuclear disaster.
A disaster causes serious damage or major problems, which did not occur at Fukushima due to anything nuclear-related.
If the scale puts Chernobyl and Fukushima both at the highest level, then it’s a stupid, useless scale. As noted above, the burning of coal releases more radiation than Fukushima. Apparently our entire coal burning industry is a 7 on this scale as well? (Actually, I’m fine with that, coal burning is if anything much worse than Chernobyl).
An incident that releases a large amount of radioactive material is a textbook example of a nuclear disaster. The exact chain of events is important, but doesn’t make it not a nuclear disaster.
The Fukushima disaster itself should reassure us that nuclear power can be made safe, because the failure mode was outside the reactor.
I think you should go tell the IAEA that.
Do you consider the burning of coal to be a nuclear disaster?
The fault is acrually not with the scale, it is with the Japanese government. I apologize for the confusion.
The IAEA defines the scale but it does not rate incidents. The Japanese government did so, after initially rating it a 5 (so 100 times lower, it’s a log scale). This was basically a (very damaging) political stunt, and has been criticized by many.
Anyways, I am by no means the first, nor remotely the most qualified, to criticize fhe scale: