Damn, you all are really fired up about this topic; I can’t keep up. One question related to this comment:
Out of curiosity, does anybody know how much Japan spent on mitigating damage from the oil refinery that What_Exit mentioned? The point being is I am not sure the cost is a good way to measure the “disaster.”
The deepwater horizon “disaster” (I don’t think this word is typically used for this event, most people just say oil spill) cost about $65 Billion to clean up if I remember correctly, killed more than 10 times the number of people as Fukushima, and is still doing some very expensive damage to this very day to the fisheries and ecology of the gulf coast, but people are not nearly as afraid of offshore wells as they are of nuclear power plants. I would be willing to bet a good bottle of bourbon that the costs of deepwater horizon when all tallied together are more than 10 times the costs of Fukushima, but as far as I can tell Europe did not reorganize their entire energy infrastructure over this “disaster.” Just doesn’t make much sense to me and I really think that maybe we need to formally define the word.
I very well may have done so out of an abundance of caution, as I earlier described Japan as doing. I’m a pretty cautious person so I could certainly see myself making a mistake there.
Why are we talking about what I would have done? That seems like a complete non-sequitor to the question at hand.
I wouldn’t describe the damage caused by me taking potentially unneeded precautions as a “nuclear disaster” though.
The question is the OP: “There was no nuclear disaster at Fukushima”
Clearly the Japanese authorities felt a disaster was a real possibility. They avoided a bigger disaster by moving people out of the area. Then they spent considerable resources to avoid and/or mitigate a bigger disaster.
You and others seem happy to say there was no disaster. But it was a close run thing as we can see from many days/weeks of considerable effort to stop a disaster (do you need a reminder of what was happening then? There are plenty of articles and videos on it).
Further, the disaster is still happening with the radioactive water release. Yes, I know the release is very minor and will not hurt the environment or people. But, IIRC, the release will take years to complete and the reason is they have been collecting this crud for many years and cannot continue (running out of space). That this is happening 12 years later tells us what happened in 2011 was a serious problem. And it will not be resolved for another decade or more. Not to mention the whole plant is a write-off.
It tells you nothing of the sort. All it tells you is that fearmongering and public pressure has driven their response, just as with anything with “nuclear” in the name.
They have been collecting this water for years. They have run out of space to store it so they are releasing some back into the environment.
They did not collect all this water for years because it is Mountain Spring water. It’s toxic. Everyone knows it. The slow release is so it does not overwhelm the environment.
Since you pointed to the IAEA as a trusted source of information earlier, let’s likewise look to their assessment that Fukushima and Chernobyl both were level 7 events on the International Nuclear Event Scale. They are the only level 7 events on this scale. It is a logarithmic scale, so these events are far and away more serious than every other event on the scale.
I will of course not suggest that Chernobyl and Fukushima were equally damaging or severe. But when the IEAE places these events, and only these events, at the highest order of magnitude, it’s quite literally a category error to insist that these aren’t comparable events.
(The joke here is that, like the 3.6 roentgen on the radiation meter shown in the Chernobyl miniseries, the number was meaningless because it simply pegged the meter at the maximum. Since level 7 is the maximum on the INES scale, the same principle applies. Thousands died from Chernobyl; just one from Fukushima.)
This continues to miss the point that it’s nonsense to judge the initial risk mitigation efforts from our position of having 12 years hindsight telling us exactly what the minimum bar could have been for evacuation and precautions. (And of course, the joke falls flat here, since roentgens aren’t logarithmic. Pegging a logarithmic scale has meaning in ways that pegging a linear scale doesn’t. The fact that there’s no INES level 8 means something).
One core melted down at Chernobyl. Three melted at Fukushima. The only thing that’s exponentially incomparable here is the promptness, competence, and transparency of Japan’s response.
All of the arguments here in favor of calling Fukushima a nuclear disaster boil down to “lots of people thought it was a nuclear disaster”. Well, true. Lots of people did think that. But the point is, lots of people were and are wrong. They were wrong even by the standards of the information they had available at the time.
Yes, it was necessary to evacuate people due to the disasters that really did occur. But by the time those disasters were resolved, the nuclear issues had already been settled for months. 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. Doing so anyway resulted in another, completely avoidable, human-caused disaster.
1 becquerel is 1 nuclear disintegration per second. That’s one atom falling apart. That’s a tiny amount.
An average banana has about 18 becquerels. The average smoke detector has around 32,400. I tried to find a number for the human body as a whole but it always seems to be broken down by element. So… the potassium in your body, some of which is radioactive, has around 4400 becquerels just on its own and it’s not the only source of internal radiation you have. You have plenty of other radioactive atoms floating around inside you because it’s a natural part of the environment and always has been. A becquerel is a very small unit. Saying “billions of becquerels” is like saying “billions of atoms”. The number sounds big but it’s a tiny amount. Your body contains about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Compare that to one billion which looks like this: 1,000,000,000
In fact, instead of becquerels the unit called a curie is a lot more common. 1 curie = 37,000,000,000 (37 billion) becquerels.
Bottom line - talking about radiation in terms of becquerels is a good way to scare the uninformed because the unit is so small and the resulting totals so large.
This argument boils down to you ignoring all the arguments in this thread that don’t fit the above characterization, a number of which were direct responses to your posts.
The radioactive water is NOT a disaster. And they’re releasing it very slowly to make sure it does not become a disaster.
The radioactive water is no more a disaster than the paper towels, mops, etc. used to clean up after a hurricane being hauled away as garbage is a disaster. Yes, the hurricane itself could be called a disaster, but ongoing clean-up, repair, and rebuilding is NOT a disaster.
The only reason they’ve been holding onto this water for 12 years is public hysteria over radiation at any level.
Yes, there are some areas where people should not permanently live right now directly adjacent to the plant but as time goes by that radioactivity will decay and the area will become safe for people again. I’ll just point out that Japan rebuilt both cities that were atom-bombed in 1945 - those were unequivocal disasters - and radiation levels are back to background in those cities. Yes, there are significant differences between atomic airbursts and a meltdown at a power plant, and different types of meltdowns at different types of power plants, but Fukushima is not a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Then I would assert that they are at opposite ends of the level 7 range, which is still a considerable difference. And while within the plants the incidents could be called level 7 the ongoing effects in nearby areas are VERY different. Different types and ratios of isotopes. Different levels of contamination of nearby areas. Maybe we need something to evaluate ongoing effects as well as immediate effects.
Here’s another comparison of disasters: in 2010 Haiti suffered a 7.0 earthquake that collapsed buildings all over the country, including the capital Port-au-Prince. Power and water were cut off. Medical services (such as they were) were overwhelmed. Estimates were more than 200,000 people killed.
The Japan quake of 2011 was 9.0. I’ll just point out that Tokyo is still standing, power interruptions were spotty and temporary and while it was very inconvenient for thousands of people deaths an injuries from just the quake were orders of magnitude less than in Haiti despite the quake being so much greater. Even considering the subsequent tsunami, death rates in Japan were still at least an order of magnitude less than in Haiti despite the Japan quake/tsunami being two natural disasters in the same day and causing a LOT of property damage. In the following decade ordinary life has resumed in most of Japan (outside of a few spots requiring on-going work, like Fukushima). Haiti never recovered and has since dissolved into chaos, increased water-borne illnesses, and violence.
Two very serious earthquakes, two very different outcomes due to all sorts of factors. And the more powerful quake actually killed fewer people and, unlike the lesser one, did not result in decade-long devastation.
Likewise, Chernobyl and Fukushima were both serious incidents, both involved nuclear melt-downs and all the headaches that come with that, but the lingering outcomes are very different. I’ll just point out that while Chernobyl had its Red Forest Fukushima had nothing at all like that - a swath of vegetation killed by direct radiation effects.
Maybe the current nuclear incident scale is good for immediate assessment of a problem. You need to know when you’ve reached the “Holy crap this could get ugly - we need to move people out of potential harm’s way”. But maybe it’s not good for assessing long-term, ongoing effects and concerns.
Since quibbling in this thread is a thing I’ll just point out that there are some areas very close to the plant where people really should not being living permanently. The background radiation in that area would be the equivalent to receiving a whole-body CT scan every year. Now, that’s not immediately lethal - we do, after all, give people whole-body CT scans. But we don’t subject people to that level of radiation without a good reason, such as balancing the radiation exposure against the risks of old-style exploratory surgery, or the need to know what’s going on inside a person to properly care for them during a serious illness or injury. This is particularly important for pregnant women and young children because fetuses and young children are more vulnerable to radiation effects than adults.
Those areas would probably be OK for 80 and 90 years olds to live because they’ll most likely die of something else before coming down with a radiation-induced cancer, if they ever do, because that amount of radiation just increases the odds of cancer, it doesn’t guarantee it. It would be bad for a 4 year old to live there because of how it would add to his lifetime dose and his expected lifespan. Also, 4 year olds have a tendency to do things like dig in the dirt, put dirty hands in their mouths, and otherwise do things that would probably further increase their exposure whereas most 80 year olds know to wash their hands before putting their fingers in their mouths and can probably be trusted not to dig up the yard if advised against it.
But there would be all sorts of PR problems if, on land deemed potentially hazardous for toddlers, Japan built senior housing even if from a scientific and medical viewpoint that could be considered an acceptable thing to do. Why? Because there’s all sorts of emotions wrapped up with this stuff.
Other than the Japanese government’s own numbers, which show that radiation levels were so low that the increase in cancer risk after a lifetime of exposure would be basically undetectable. What other evidence could possibly exist?
Oh wait, I forgot, the scientific fact that certain levels of radiation cause negligible increases in risk (while others kill you outright) is actually just US Propaganda
