If people decided that dead puppies are super scary, and evacuated people from any area that had even minute traces of puppy DNA, and spent tens of billions of dollars on cleanup and other alleged harms of dead puppies, would that then constitute a puppy disaster?
I’m not sure where to even start with that.
Let’s try it a different way:
Would you suggest that the best thing TEPCO (who ran Fukushima) could have done the day of the tsunami is just walk away from the plant and let whatever might happen occur? No government intervention…no nothing. Just remove all workers and leave the power plant to its fate.
Of course not. The question is whether this is a special nuclear disaster deserving of so many resources (and public attention), or one that’s a consequence of being a component of the tsunami disaster. If an oil refinery catches on fire, you send in firefighters to put it out. Even if some of those actions are specific to being an oil refinery, that doesn’t mean we call it a petrochemical disaster. We expect that some level of intervention is expected and necessary just by virtue of it being caught in a larger-scale disaster. If a bunch of people claimed that the fumes from the fire affected them, even though there was no evidence of actual harm, and that the fumes rapidly went below background levels, and yet the government still spent tens of billions on evacuations and other efforts, it still wouldn’t be reason to call it a petrochemical disaster. We’d just say they were dumb in allocating resources.
Hurricane Katrina cost the US 195 billion USD and that was “just” a hurricane. And I’ll point out there are still places/businesses/homes not rebuilt from that storm and trying to fix/improve flood control in New Orleans and other low-lying areas is an on-going problem and expense. I’m not sure raw dollar amounts are the proper yardstick with which to measure disasters.
You evacuate areas to prevent deaths and it’s generally best to evacuate too many rather than too few. So you really never know for sure how many deaths/injuries you might have prevented with a successful one.
It is beyond dispute, though, that the evacuations triggered some deaths. See this article for some information on that (Discord tells me it was already posted, but it’s here again for your convenience). Outside of tsunami deaths, the evacuation of the Fukushima area caused/triggered 2300+ deaths. Most of those were among the frail and elderly for whom and evacuation was extremely stressful (not that a 9.0 earthquake and following tsunami weren’t also stressful) and who might have died whether they were moved or not.
Outside of the plant itself these aren’t so much “no-go” as “you aren’t allowed to live here”. People certainly can and do go there, it’s just not healthy to remain there for extended periods. As time goes by these areas will become less hazardous due to the way radio-nuclides decay. It’s not a great situation but let’s not exaggerate.
For a nuclear/radiation hazard the people you need to evacuate first are pregnant women and children, followed by women of child-bearing age, then people under middle-age. Unfortunately, you can’t just leave the debilitated elderly behind because someone younger has to care for them. The Chernobyl area has let some pensioners live in some parts of the “exclusion zone” because the radiation hazard in those areas does not cause acute illness and someone 80 or older will almost certainly die of something else before coming down with radiation-related cancer. That’s not an ideal situation, either, but less disruptive than chasing octogenarians and older around the landscape. Basically, there were probably thousands of elderly people for whom staying in place would have been safer than evacuating, except who would care for those people if everyone else left? But because the radiation hazard was somewhat uncertain and no one knew if it would get worse the decision was made to move those people. Well, in an emergency you often have to make decisions without full information and at the time people took their best guess.
No, we can’t know. In retrospect it probably would have been less than the numbers that actually died from the evacuation that occurred if the evacuation had not been as extensive. But I understand that at the time of the emergency that was not something known or easily determined.
The people most impacted by the power plant problems were the workers at the plant, four of whom received radiation burns and one of whom has subsequently died from lung cancer attributed at least in part to radiation exposure. It is possible that other workers will come down with cancer in the coming decades but determining which of those cancers is due to the March Tsunami and subsequent nuclear problems, which due to long term hazards of a job working at a nuclear plant, and just “background” rates of cancer will be extremely difficult to nearly impossible.
Contrast this Chernobyl, where two people died in the immediate blast, over 130 had acute radiation syndrome of which 28 died, possible one heart attack death due to extreme stress, and that’s in just the first three months after the accident. There have been some cancer deaths attributed to exposure to Chernobyl along with a lot of people who have lingering health effects that are likely due to radiation exposure. Around 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer have been attributed to Chernobyl spewing radioactive iodine although most of them have survived due in part to a lot of monitoring of children that caught cancer early (only 9-15 terminal cases reported). Still, having to have your thyroid removed early in life and dealing with cancer sucks, even more when the cancer could have potentially been entirely avoided.
As I’ve pointed out, although you wouldn’t want to linger in some areas around the Fukushima power plant none of them are “instant death” or even likely to cause acute symptoms. Again, in contrast, there ARE areas of Chernobyl outside the immediate grounds of the power plant that are extremely hazardous and not only can but have caused acute radiation syndrome in people exposed.
Chernobyl exploding and Fukushima melting down were both messes, but the notion they’re somehow “equal” is used bovine food. Both the immediate effects and lingering effects in the area around the power plants were, are, and continue to be significantly different.
There were separate evacuations, with some people being moved specifically due to the problems at the Fukushima plant. There weren’t really official government evacuations for the tsunami - when people heard the sirens either they were able to get to higher ground on their own in time or they weren’t. There just wasn’t time to organize government-sponsored evacuations for the tsunami, hence all the alarms and drills and so forth so people would move to higher ground on their own. I gather it’s somewhat like tornadoes in the US, where the government tries to educate people to take cover when the sirens sound rather than waiting for some authority to tell them what to do.
Right. The Irish Potato Famine was an “agricultural disaster”. That some of the people killed by the tsunami were probably at a farm was not.
Indeed. I 100% agree with you.
And what was it they were working to avoid by staying?
Traces of puppy DNA. Or something no more dangerous than that.
If that is your serious answer then why would you say “of course not” to them walking away from the power plant?
Somehow we’re talking past each other here.
Being a large industrial facility severely impacted by the tsunami, Fukushima undoubtedly required a significant emergency response, and would have cost billions in damages regardless. This would have been true for any facility of similar scale.
On the other hand, evacuating out to 20 km due to tiny amounts of radiation, and spending tens of billions on efforts that saved zero lives, was dumb and does not make this a severe nuclear disaster. If people continue to stay away due to radiation fears–costing yet more billions in economic damages–that is also dumb and does not make this a nuclear disaster.
TEPCO had to realize early on that they were not working to save their investment in the facility. It was permanently damaged.
They were working to stop a nuclear meltdown. There is no secret to this at all. We all watched for days or weeks as they fought that one and only problem. They evacuated because they had no way to know how it would play out. Not evacuating people would have been irresponsible.
If the plant workers walked away it would have been a nuclear disaster. Working for weeks to avoid a nuclear disaster seems to me a nuclear disaster. Because the worst was avoided does not make it less concerning. It need not kill a million people before we deem it worse than puppy DNA.
If we’re saying that a non-disaster is also a disaster, on the basis that it could have been a disaster if the operators walked away, then I’m not sure we can come to any agreement here. I suppose any plane flight is a disaster because it would crash if the flight crew decided to stop flying the plane.
…are you arguing that at the time, with the information that they had on hand, the evacuation shouldn’t have happened?
It would be akin to pilots realizing their plane is irrevocably broken. The best they can do is shut off the fuel (SCRAM the reactor). They can then either stay and try to glide the broken plane to a landing somewhere that doesn’t cause more damage or they can bail with their parachutes (pretend they had those) and leave the plane to do whatever it does.
As for evacuating, they could tell the passengers to bail with their parachutes (pretend they had those) or tell them all is fine, sit tight, hope for the best.
It’s mostly about the continued evacuation, really. I don’t begrudge anyone for making suboptimal decisions on the basis of incomplete evidence. But once the immediate problems were dealt with, they should have narrowed the zones fairly quickly on the basis of relative risk. That didn’t seem to happen.
By my calculations, the total amount of radioactive material released by fukushima would fit comfortably in a suitcase. Talking about billions and trillions of Bequerels sounds scary, but the physical quantity that represents is very small. Hundreds of tons of radioactive water released sounds scary, but that radioactive water was only slightly more radioactive than normal seawater.
One gram of Cs-131, a major component of the released radioactivity, has an activity of 3.2 Terabequerel. Most of the releases are described in Petabequerel, so we’re talking about kilograms worth of material. The thing about radioactive elements is because they give off energy they’re very easy to detect. Handheld equipment can detect the decay of single atoms. What other scientific equipment can so easily detect a single atom of a substance? When you read reports of contamination from Fukushima, those reports are often at that scale. We detected a few atoms of radioactive material in this cubic meter of seawater. None of these reports ever indicated an amount of contamination hazardous to health.
Nobody got sick, nobody died. All the “damage” caused by the reactor meltdown was actually due to an extremely cautious and conservative response. Current fears about being near Fukushima have more to do with superstition rather than valid concern.
…considering that this thread is basically a quibble over the definition of the word “disaster”, I’m not sure if “evacuation” is the correct word to be using here, and “continued evacuation” is really pushing the limits. The evacuation orders have been lifted. Many people have moved and settled in other parts of the country and don’t want to come back. And some areas are still being decontaminated. None of this is “dumb.” It’s a big, complex, multi-layered situation that is much more nuanced than just “nobody died.”
That’s not really relevant to the question as to whether a disaster occurred.
The first fact of a disaster is that a multi-billion dollar power generating facility destroyed itself beyond repair. The tsunami did not destroy it. The tsunami damaged the facility’s power generation capacity, and as a consequence the facility destroyed itself. Specifically because of the nuclear contamination, even the land itself is likely a write-off for the economically realistic future. That, solely in itself, is a nuclear disaster, even before we talk about the impact on the community.
Whatever you think of the alleged over-evacuation of the community (and I’d want to see data on that), the fact remains that the evacuation was required because it was unclear whether the outcome would be on a Chernobyl scale. That itself is a nuclear disaster, whatever hindsight reveals about the actual hazard.
Then there is the fact that the ultimate remediation cost is projected to reach $200 billion, with neither reactor nor usable land to show for it at the end. That is a nuclear disaster, in a way that didn’t happen in any other type of destruction that you want to compare this to (boats crashing into houses, dam breakage, etc).
I would humbly suggest that if you care about generating good PR for nuclear energy, a good strategy would be one that shows sober consideration of the economic and social impacts of nuclear-related incidents. Dying on the hill of “There was no nuclear disaster at Fukushima” is not that PR strategy, even if you prevailed in every purely technical point of the argument (which is not happening).
I’d be curious who here would have stayed in their home, a few miles from Fukushima, when this was happening, with their SO and three kids and two dogs and a cat?
The final one was in 2022. That was two years after radiation levels went below 20 mSv/year (and I expect that was already a worst-case measurement).
In contrast, US occupational limits are generally 50 mSv/year. And illustrating the scale we’re talking about:
By example, for a cumulative occupational dose of 1,000 mrem (10 mSv), the chance of eventually developing a fatal cancer can increase from 25% (as noted above) to 25.05%.
So we are talking very small risks already. And the US occupational limits are not balancing relative risk. There’s little downside to setting very conservative limits, especially since the exposure should be nearly zero in a normally operating facility.
But for Fukushima we have to consider relative risk; people dying early (for a variety of reasons) because they’ve been displaced from their homes. That warrants a much higher threshold than what they actually used, since the tiny increased risk of cancer has to be balanced against the harms of continued displacement.
If you have privileged knowledge about the actual and correct final cost of remediating the Fukushima meltdowns (a process that is still ongoing), you should share it so we can evaluate how the professionals directly involved in the process got it so wrong. Until then I’ll go with the published $200 billion figure.