There was no nuclear disaster at Fukushima

Great Debates
181

…the underlying premise of this thread is that not only was it not a “nuclear disaster” at Fukushima, but the evacuations shouldn’t have happened, that once the area was stable the Japanese authorities should have just let everyone go home, that the experts advising the local municipal authorities got the science wrong, that the reason Germany decided to get rid of nuclear plants wasn’t because of the decades-long-conversation they had been having over the best way forward for power generation but because of a sudden fear of Fukushima Nuclear Fish, and that by stopping using nuclear power plants Germany is committing a crime against humanity that is orders of magnitude worse than the trans genocide we are seeing all around the world.

If this thread had simply stopped at a quibble over the words “nuclear disaster” then thats fine. Call it whatever you like.

But we’ve got all of this other stuff. And apparently the only evidence to support this other stuff is a line-item from a pamphlet released from the Department of Energy.

You want to show me “clear reasoning?” Then connect all the dots. Show me how it all fits together. Perhaps start with the claim that “once all of the remaining buildings and infrastructure in the city had been inspected for structural damage, and the damage that was found repaired, there was no reason to continue to keep people out.” Because thats where it all starts. What evidence is there to support this assertion?

I mean…what?

Who exactly do you think I’ve “turned too?”

What do you think my opinions on nuclear actually are?

You are making some assumptions here that aren’t warranted. My position on nuclear power is really a great big “meh.” I am sooo emotionally unattached to this particular subject.

And my opinion on this is that you can do what you want. If America thinks nuclear power is the best way forward for them, then who am I to argue? But in the same vein, if Germany or Japan both decide to stop using nuclear power, then let them do what they think is right. These are complex decisions with multiple stakeholders with no easy answers…with no objectively correct answers. Every position will be a compromise. There will be upsides and downsides no matter what road a country decides to take.

I’ve taken issue with some very specific things in this thread. I’ve never claimed nor do I support statements like “fish from Fukushima fisheries are dangerous.” People have argued in this thread that there was “no reason to keep people out” of the exclusion zones once the physical damage had been repaired. I think a claim like that should be supported. And that support needs to be better than a bit of PR.

Because it argues the experts who advised the Japanese authorities got it wrong. That the Japanese authorities wasted billions of dollars doing something they didn’t need to do. That there was no risk to the Japanese people if they were to move right back in after the buildings were repaired.

And the basis for the claim that there was no risk appears to be nothing much more than a bit of PR.

If there is more to that claim then, by all means, feel free to provide it. What would be most convincing would be an analysis of the actual Japanese response, produced by experts in their field. What would be least convincing is a general line item of a single statistic from a PR brochure.

I haven’t “turned to the informational equivalents of PragerU when it comes to this issue.” That’s just flat out wrong. I’ve turned to the experts. And I’ll defer to the experts if you can cite experts that can make a compelling case, supported by substantial evidence, that the Japanese authorities got this wrong.

182

For renewables to meaningfully replace coal or nuclear you need to have them either providing the load reliably or storing the energy to fill in the gaps. We aren’t there yet and we certainly weren’t there in the immediate aftermath of 2011.

I followed this thread closely and I can’t work out why you are not quite getting this very specifc point (which seems obvious to me).

Nuclear is the best, mass, continuous, clean energy source that we have. It is also orders of magnitude safer that any other electricity generating method.

Countries used the Fukushima incident as an incentive to move away from nuclear before that capacity could be adequately replaced by suitable renewables and storage.

By doing so, people have died unnecessarily and greater environmental damage has been caused than if the reactors had remained in service and programs had either been maintained or expanded.

183

Which cite? It’s irrelevant in any case, because nothing can take away the fact that if you have coal plants still operating, and you have enough capacity to shut a plant down, then you should be shutting down your coal, not your nuclear plants.

All your comparisons to the US are a distraction from this obvious point. And anyway, the US would be doing even worse if we had shut down more nuclear plants.

What does that have to do with anything? Climate change causes harm. Not lobbyists. I would rather live in a world where we solved climate change and still had lobbyists than one where we got rid of the lobbyists but we kept burning coal.

Burning coal is the worst thing. And shutting down nuclear is the same as burning more coal.

And again, though I hate to repeat myself, this is totally independent of every other policy. If a country builds 10 GW of renewables–but still not enough to replace all coal–it still remains the case that shutting down 1 GW of nuclear means keeping 1 GW of coal around.

As for your bait-and-switch (conflating Germany with Europe)–the EU gets more electrical energy from nuclear than the US. Germany doesn’t, France makes up for it. No surprise then that Germany does poorly compared to France in CO2/kWh numbers.

184

…it seems obvious to me that there are plenty of reasons why countries have decided to abandon nuclear. And those reasons don’t all come down to “Fukushima.” But a calculated decision on what they consider the best for the future.

Can you quantify this, please.

You are entitled to your opinion. But if the plan is to shut down the nuclear plants, then the best way to do that is to shut down the nuclear plants.

Plenty.

Lobbyists advocating for positions that don’t combat climate change and make them plenty of money causes harm.

Have you even heard of coal lobbyists? The ones that lobby to keep burning coal? What is it, do you think, they get paid to do?

Nope and nope. This isn’t binary.

I hate to repeat myself, but these theoretical numbers you keep throwing around don’t match what actually happened.

There was no bait-and-switch.

You are all over the place now. The EU isn’t a country. And none of this is binary.

And this doesn’t negate my point. There are plenty of good reasons why a country might decide to abandon nuclear. And if they decide to do that, then they have to start doing that eventually. And they can do that while working to reduce emissions in other areas. People can do multiple things at the same time.

And none of this has anything to do with Fukushima fish.

185

Hilarious. You are the one that brought up the EU when we were talking about Germany. It’s your cite started with:

Why is the EU racing ahead of the U.S. in switching from fossil fuels to renewable energies and in reducing emissions

This was your bait-and-switch to conflate Germany with the EU. The EU does better than the US in part because they have more nuclear power generation (about 25% vs. 18%).

Germany has less than the rest of the EU, and guess what–they don’t score so great in carbon intensity compared to other EU nations:

Germany is in the upper ~20%, just behind Bulgaria, with 385 gCO2/kWh. See France and Sweden at the bottom? Let’s see… oh, right, they’re both nuclear heavy! Sweden is lucky enough to have good hydroelectric sources, so they manage to do better than France with less nuclear, but not all countries have such luck.

Oh, and Poland at the top? They burn a fuckload of coal. No surprise, yet again.

186

I’d slightly quibble with that, in that hydroelectric is better. The problem with hydro is just that it’s already saturated: Pretty much everywhere where you could put a hydro plant already has one. Well, that, and the human tendency to overuse the cheapest option, which has resulted in reservoirs being drained.

So nuclear is the best baseline source that still has room for expansion.

And the reason why it’s too slow is because it takes a lot of time to convince people to allow one. Nuclear power isn’t the problem; we are.

It’s logically impossible for what @Dr.Strangelove describes not to have happened. This is literally at the level of basic arithmetic.

187

…hey, still waiting on those cites.

188

…I bought up the EU to make a more general point than the one you are making. And that point still stands.There are plenty of good reasons why a country might decide to abandon nuclear. The numbers in Germany aren’t as bad as you claimed.

And again, none of this has anything to do with Fukushima.

189

And your more general point is false. How is it that Germany is only on par with the US despite greater use of renewables? Simple: they’re keeping their coal open while shuttering nuclear.

And how is it that the EU as a whole does better than the US? In part, because they have more nuclear plants. France in particular. If the whole world had France’s enviably low carbon intensity, the world would not be in so much trouble.

Yes, it does. Fukushima triggered Germany’s renewed interest in shutting down their nuclear plants. I already gave you a cite for this.

More generally, this thread is about how alarmism about nuclear anything is harming the fight against climate change. It is playing out in many countries, and it is not helping that many environmentalists are so easily manipulated by oil company propaganda, to the point where they might be considered allies. Germany is just one prominent example.

190

BTW, statistica.com has some weird paywall going that doesn’t kick in all the time. I screenshotted the figures here if you can’t see them:
https://i.imgur.com/1k8gDjB.png

191

…no it isn’t. You are attributing everything to nuclear. That doesn’t make any sense. Its much more complex than this. It isn’t binary.

This is a cite.

They were already being phased out.

Fukushima did have an impact, but not the one you claim. Merkel’s government had extended the deadlines, but decided to reverse course after Fukushima. It wasn’t “renewed interest.” It was going back to the original plan. which was prudent considering the circumstances.

It wasn’t “oil company propaganda” that fueled the anti-nuclear movements back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s when the decision to phase out nuclear actually happened. Some of us were around back then. Please don’t rewrite history.

And no, they cannot be considered “allies.” That’s utterly ridiculous and echoes the kind of pro-nuclear PR talking points that are all too common in this thread.

Germany is an example of a country that has wrestled with this for a very long time. It made a commitment to move away from nuclear last century, well before Fukushima even happened, and followed through on this last year.

192

…You need cites for the fact that subtracting something from a number makes it smaller?

193

…I’m needing a cite for the rather dubious assertions that you made earlier in the thread that I’ve asked you for a couple of times.

194

It is a good solution but hydroelectric isn’t always continuous. Reservoirs run dry and generation has to be limited.

Plus, as you recognise, locations are too limited to make it a solution suitable for all scenarios and for all countries.

195

I refuse to qualify an incident with 0 fatalities as a “disaster” and would caution that anyone who does might be less than completely honest about their motivations.

196

No-one said it was. But for some countries it absolutely did provide the explicit reason for reducing nuclear generation early and filling in the gap with fossil fuels.

And the claim that nuclear…

Is clearly wrong, seeing as nuclear can continue to generate power 24/7/365 regardless of weather conditions and is not limited to specific geographical requirements.

Which low-carbon competitor is able to do that?

But then the report that you quote from is an explicitly anti-nuclear organisation, so the bias and error is perhaps to be expected.

Not easy to do.

We do know that in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima decisions were taken by various countries to cut existing nuclear capacity and to halt or pause expansion of their programs. With a subsequent shortfall in the following decade that shows, p/a, nuclear being perhaps a hundred TWh behind where it was and was likely to be.

We also know that fossill fuels were used (certainly in Germany with coal) to fill that energy gap.

And we also know that, in terms of deaths per TWh, nuclear is far, far behind those fossil fuel sources that replaced it.

So the best estimates of extra deaths from maintaining nuclear generation as was (or even expanding it) would be “0”.
The best estimates of deaths from the fossil-fuel generation that replaced it is “more than 0”

There is an article here with links to a specific paper here, that consider just Germany’s decision to make the jump from Nuclear in the aftermath of Fukushima.
And another paper here regarding the Japan and Germany decisions more broadly.

The upshot of all of this? more deaths and more environmental damage.

197

But as Florida sinks beneath the waves, California burns to a crisp, and Utah is abandoned to billowing clouds of arsenic, we get to pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves on how we didn’t resort to using any Spooky Atoms to dig ourselves out of the situation.

Did we avoid any dangers by not using the Spooky Atoms? No, this is more of a religious prohibition. As has been pointed out in this thread, it doesn’t matter whether nuclear is factually dangerous or harmful or not. All that matters is that SPOOKY ATOMS BAAAAAAD!

198

What did fuel the movement? Was it an evidence-based adjustment to the national strategy intended to reduce deaths, injuries and illnesses driven by Germany’s energy generation industry?

I have a feeling they didn’t objectively analyze the deaths and illnesses caused by coal emissions, mining, gas pipelines, rooftop solar installation, etc. against the deaths caused by nuclear accidents.

199

That’s impossible, since the evidence shows that nuclear is either the safest form of energy per KWH, or the second safest after solar, depending on your methodology.

The public fears nuclear energy, just like our friend Banquet_Bear, because of decades of misinformation. If I was conspiracy minded, I’d theorize it was the fossil fuel companies behind it - it reminds me of the tobacco companies and how bitterly they fought to stop cigarettes from being labeled as dangerous.

Here, in their own words, is why they are shutting down the plants:

Fearmongering, fearmongering, fearmongering. Keep crying cHeRnObYl over and over again, and people whose understanding of nuclear radiation consists of the Fallout games, The Incredible Hulk comics, and the Godzilla franchise freak out and demand that nuclear plants be shut down.

Factually, nuclear is safest (but note how this link is written to spread fearmongering too! It claims that nuclear is safest even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima, without pointing out that of course Fukushima doesn’t contribute much because the death toll was 1! It still portrays Fukushima as in a class with Chernobyl.)

Global deaths per energy source | Statista.

200

…its all been cited up above. It wasn’t just about deaths, injuries, and illnesses. It was also about sustainability of the industry, the fact that nuclear plants have a shelf-life and would be extraordinarily difficult to and expensive to replace. Instead they are moving towards renewables, with a goal of 80-95% emissions reduction by 2050.

They objectively analyzed many different things. Not just the one thing.

I’m sorry: but do you think this is constructive? You use my name, then proceed to completely misrepresent my position. I haven’t even mentioned cHeRnObYl as far as I can recall, let alone multiple times. I haven’t demanded nuclear plants be shut down. I’ve even explicitly said if America wants to go nuclear? That’s fine.

You can continue to argue against a strawman version of what I’ve said in this thread if you like. But I’m not the one catastrophizing in this thread.