The only thing to fear, is fear itself;
In common with Three Mile Island, Fukushima doesn’t seem to have caused any deaths from radiation; even at Chernobyl the demonstrable death toll which resulted from radiation exposure was small compared to events like Bhopal or the Banqiao dam failure.
What created the human misery at Fukushima was the response – not the immediate precautionary evacuation but what followed and ironically what preceded. The only other area currently excluded because of human activity is Chernobyl. It follows, to the rational non-expert, that the levels of radiation throughout these exclusion zones must represent a higher risk than any other man-made threat on the planet.
h/t Eric A.
Canadians should invest in condo’s around Fukushima while lkand is cheap!
Get them now while supplies last, anyone interested let me know and I’ll make you a deal.
I saw something the other night on 60 Minutes about Fukushima. They expect the “cleanup” to take 40 years. FORTY. YEARS. What a joke.
Down here in the states the biggest impediment to cleanup of “contaminated” are the lawyers. Superfund was indeed a “super fund” for the legal community.
Tsunami 50,000 Nuclear Reactor 0
My read on the disaster was that the tsunami/earthquake killed more people directly than the reactor explosion and melt down – however these industrial nuke accidents have cumulative health effects on residents that won’t become evident for decades as the elevated exposure to isotope ticks away in their metabolism like a time bomb
– decades down the road there will be incresed rates of thyroid cancers and other ailments directly attributable to isotope exposure – just like Chernobyl – however the liability of the reactor operator decreases as time goes on – and isn’t that always the bottom line when it comes to learning the truth about industrial accidents of this magnitude – it’s about limiting corporate liability by clouding the perceptions of cause and effect.
I would guess that the German reaction and shutdown of their nuclear fleet has / will killed more poor Germans from higher energy costs, especially considering their failed renewable policy
There was no “reactor explosion”. What there was was an explosion produced by hydrogen in the secondary containment. This is very different than a reactor explosion. Nearly all of the radioactive material in the fuel is still in the reactors.
“…decades down the road there will be incresed (sic) rates of thyroid cancers and other ailments directly attributable to isotope exposure – just like Chernobyl…”
No. The latency period for thyroid cancer has already passed. It comes only from exposure to Iodine 131 which has a half-life of eight days. In short, it disappeared long ago. If thyroid cancer hasn’t shown up now, it never will.
As for “other ailments”, no. The public exposure levels were far too low for any such to be observed. Just as with Chernobyl, there were no “other ailments” that ever appeared.
If there is any increased incidence of leukemia, that will show up approximately 10 years after the accident or not at all. There was none from Chernobyl. Since the radiation releases from Fukushima were much less, there is unlikely to be any from Fukushima either.
Your slur about reactor liability is just that, a slander for which you have no facts and no evidence. In short, this entire post of yours could have been written by a Greenpeace fanatic, and it’s just as empty of facts as their propaganda.
Sid, that’s because the level to which land has to be reclaimed to is below natural background radiation levels. It’s an impossible standard invented by the Japanese government far in excess of what is called for by science or any internationally accepted standard. Fact is, the vast bulk of the evacuated land could be reoccupied tomorrow with no detectible effect ever on the population.
“decades down the road there will be incresed rates of thyroid cancers and other ailments directly attributable to isotope exposure – just like Chernobyl”
So Fukushima is just like Chernobyl?
One reactor was Western (General Electric) designed and had a containment dome above it. The other was Soviet (Kurchatov Institute) designed with no containment dome. Nucleophobes won’t get the difference.
More people died in Ted Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick, MA than were killed by radiation at Fukushima.
More people in Canada have been killed by cows than in nuclear accidents.
It’s called relative risk.
Nucleophobes won’t get it.
…
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has no confirmed casualties from radiation exposure.
The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), released a report on the Fukushima accident April 2nd, 2014. It stated that the scientists have found no evidence to support the idea that the nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011 will lead to an increase in cancer rates or birth defects.
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html
None of the workers at the plant have died from acute radiation poisoning.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/05/25/news/radiation-didnt-cause-fukushima-no-1-deaths-u-n/#.U2–DyiJvM0
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
The difference from an Industrial Response is someone will have to take responsibility. The reason for its existence is a profit.
A Bureaucratic response is their need to satisfy political masters who are only concerned with self interest. Cheers;
Thorium SALT style reactors are our future.
Non-pressurized reactors, an efficient use of the fuel, small plant footprint, portables are possible, a boundless supply of fuel and by-products without any transuranics should mean embracing this technology!
Oh, and no CO2 either.
But, nucleophobes will not let science or common sense get in the way of ideology, again.
Yeah, but you are ignoring the impact of the “experts” such as Dr. Fruitfly, who declared the west coast of north America would be would be untenable long before this.
The harm from the Fukishima nuclear reactor incident is mostly economic. Though in such a small but highly populated country agriculture production is also a casualty for the area.
Because of the radiation factor, clean up and repair or replacement of a electrical power plant takes longer and costs more. That is a fact about nuclear power plants. It is also one of the cost factors in the engineering.
Remember, this incident happened because the backup diesel power plants were not designed to work under flooding conditions. Though, Japan has had diesel submarines for a long time!
Fuel wise nuclear power is cheap. Capital wise it is is very expensive. nuclear containment will always be an issue. It is just part of the cost/benefit analysis.
As China is becoming more economically powerful, it is also becoming more militarily aggressive in defense of it’s economic “interests”. It has been expressing that by bully it’s neighbours, including Japan.
So Japan, having lost faith in the U.S. guarantee of protection inadequate under the Obama administration(think Ukraine), is arming up. Japan can assemble nuclear weapons within a week once it decides to do so.
A vulnerability in any military conflict would be attacks on it’s nuclear reactors, both for a breach of the containment and for the difficulty and danger of repairing them. Getting it online and generating electricity would be critical in a war and post war situation.
On a small island nation like Japan losing access to agricultural production, even it is only for a few decades or 100s of years is serious.
When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor was breached in 1986, the wind was blowing north into neighbouring Belarus. Approximately, 25 percent of it’s agricultural productive land was contaminated. Unlike radioactive iodine 131, much longer lived nuclear isotopes are involved.
The CIA has a map outlining the area and degrees of contamination.
Eric’s linked article is fine as far as it goes. It’s part of his job.
Learning proportionality regarding radiation released is good to know, but it is only part of the analysis.
“Oh, and no CO2 either.”
Carbon dioxide is a trace atmospheric gas (~400 ppm) and serves as a free fertilizer. It’s a positive externality from the combustion of hydrocarbons.
Does the atmosphere have too much CO2 or too little. Me thinks we have a CO2 deficit.
More CO2, more crop yields. No carbon, no life.
This guy is a notorious troll who cannot even look up the
correct spelling for William Of Ockham. It makes him
sound smart though. He was pretty much driven away from
The Jawa Report because too many people were correcting
his grasp of the facts.
At Chernobyl, there was a reactor core breech. But apart
from the 30 or so firefighters who were spraying water
through the hole in the roof, very few people were effected.
The incident in Fukushima was as big a non event as the Three Mile Island “Accident.” Every time there is a minor nuclear incident,
the liberal media tries to scare the crap out the people with
picocuries, half-lifes and other things they know nothing
about. Very few people even know what a half-life is!
“Reports are that radiation levels on the East coast have
risen by x picocuries” is meaningless unless you also tell
the public how much a picocurie is. The same goes for
half-lifes, if popular myths were true Hiroshima and
Nagasaki would be uninhabitable for a thousand years.
Radiation is no different than chemical exposure, the devil
is in the dose. Too many people who survived high doses
in the bombings in Japan are still alive, so I am not
going to piss my pants worrying about some minute exposure
from Fukushima.
My read on the disaster was that the tsunami/earthquake killed more people directly than the reactor explosion and melt down – however these industrial nuke accidents have cumulative health effects on residents that won’t become evident for decades as the elevated exposure to isotope ticks away in their metabolism like a time bomb
Insignificantly.
Sorry, it’s just not bad enough to be a “time bomb” to much of the population, if anyone. The level of exposure just isn’t there – this is radiophobia.
(Reminds me of people who think Everyone At Hiroshima Died From Cancers And Stuff!
But, no, it’s been extensively studied by the Japanese government.
As of 2000 – their latest FAQ numbers – the total death toll from leukemias and solid cancers that could be blamed on the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was … 1,900.
Comparing the RERF’s numbers to the estimated 68 milliSievert exposure of the nearest Fukushima residents, we can expect… jack all effect on their health, honestly.)
A lot of people don’t know but the other 3 reactors at Chernobol continued in use for about 15 years after the melt down.. They basically concrete capped the bad one. But kept on running the rest..
S.Korea is already working on portable molten-salt reactors, and by portable I mean the size of a box car or smaller that can power 2500-25000 homes.
Yeah well, it’s just the same as the handwringers whining about the use of DEPLETED uranium tank gun rounds by the US Army during the Gulf Wars.
The more radioactive a material is, the shorter it’s half-life and visa versa.
A material with a half-life of hundreds of years produces a particle emission once every decade or so.
China Syndrome is a Hollywood invention…..Chernobyl proved that. The core melted down, mixed the fuel with the material of the fuel rods and then was diluted further by the material of the reactor vessel, and formed a puddle on the concrete floor….optimal conditions for the China Syndrome…..but it never happened.
me thinks Occam was filling in for north of 60 on this one!!!
Just ask yourself how quick both Nagasaki & Hiroshima came back to being functioning cities.
Sorry, Occam, that’s BS. The cumulative effects of Fukushima are incredibly small relative to normal background radiation. The increased dosage rate for the public around the reactor was equivalent to that of a New Yorker moving to Denver for a year. If you think this is a risk, don’t ever get another dental X-ray or walk through an airport scanner.
As for Chernobyl, outside of first responders, who were not properly equipped, the most significant impact to people was the result of the government not reporting the event, which led to delays in evacuating the area and children not being treated with iodine pills. And there has been none of the expecting increase in tumors, cancers or other diseases predicted by alarmists.
If anything, Fukushima increased my confidence in the nuclear industry. Any astute observer would feel the same way.
And yours could have been written by the utility’s PR firm – or read directly from their press release. AAR, the long term effects of Fukashima on health are unknown yet – of course unless you wish to make conjecture into fact as the AGW cult do. All that is available now in terms of unbiased speculation is impartial 3rd party assessments on exposure dosage and a educated guess based on past actuarial evidence – but maybe you’re right in assuming governments and other large special interests never lie or mislead us if it’s in their best interests.
http://www.fairewinds.org/cancer-risk-young-children-near-fukushima-daiichi-underestimated/
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/12/fukushima-radiation-hits-west-coast.html
Me? Greenpeace? ROTHLMAO! Talk about “slander for which you have no facts or evidence” – clean up your own hypocrisy before you point fingers. Without diversity of opinion SDA would be just another lock step partisan echo chamber like the CBC or a mosh pit for hash tag zombies. The object is to engage and discuss not shout down, slander and have hissy fits at divergent opinion – that’s lefty’s drag.
Occam, your links are purest crap. First they’re both written by well-established antinuclear agitators. But let’s deal with some substance. The first one says there’s no safe dose of radiation. This is a deliberate misinterpretation of LNT, which was created as a hypothetical demonstation of risk, not a predictor of consequences. If you don’t understand the difference beween those two concepts you have no business in this discussion.
The second article says two things of consequence. The first is that there is natural radiation and there’s man-made radiation. This is mystical nonsense. Alphas are alphas, betas are betas, gammas are gammas, and neutrons are neutrons regardless of the source. They all have measurable energies and well understood biological effects.
The second thing it claims is a level of harm in excess of what is predicted by LNT. This too is utter drivel. It’s based on a single epidemiological study (I trust you know what that is), it’s a data dredge with an RR level well below 2 (meaning it has no statistical significance and thus invalid), and most importantly has absolutely no clinical or observational evidence supporting it (this failure alone invalidates an hypothesis backed only by epidemiological statistics). The use of Trojan numbers alone by the author indicates that it’s utter crap.
As to your first sentence, yes, the long term effects of specific radiation exposures are well understood. In general, from what Hiroshima and Nagasaki have shown is that the actual results under-perform relative to the expected from LNT. This is verified by things like the US shipyard study in the 1990s which looked at the long term health impacts on half a million workers actually exposed, thus providing definitive information on chronic dose as well as prompt dose.
Both of these articles could have been written by any run of the mill Greenpeace fanatic. Out of your own mouth are you condemned. So which is it: are you a liar or a dupe?
Good point! They are birds of a feather.
cgh, he is the same guy who was trolling The Jawa Report.
My take on him is that he is one of those guys still living
in his parents home after earning a degree in cultural
anthropology.
The only facts he can recite are those he can skim from online
sources, usually left-wing web sites much like North of Pyongyang.
As to his assertion that SDA could become a ‘Partisan echo chamber,”
this is unlikely to happen if he and others had at least a few
facts on their side. We love a good debate, especially with
opponents with some command of the facts.
Sasquatch, I was waiting to see who would be the
first to make the point you made about the half
life of radioactive materials.
Aside from the point you made about more energetic materials
having shorter half-lives, most people do not even under-
stand the concept of half-life.
If an element has a 100 year half-life, that means that
in 100 years, half of the energy would be spent. Half of
the energy that remained would be spent in the next 100
years, so that in 200 years, 1/4 of the initial energy
would remain and so on….
So, the anti-nuke alarmists could rightly claim that this
element would remain radioactive after a thousand years,
it means nothing if one does not know the levels.
Occam [sic] should read Trashing The Planet by Dr. Dixie
Lee Ray. In her chapter on nuclear energy, she related
an accident at a nuclear weapons plant. A guy was pouring
a radioactive slurry from a beaker of one shape into a
beaker of another. Just the shape of the beaker was enough
to cause criticality.
This caused the same kind of blue flash that doomed John
Cusack in that horrid anti-nuke propaganda and historically
false POS Fat Man and Little Boy. The scientist or tech-
nician lived a normal life with no adverse effects. If
he were to read her book, he would also understand the
concept of Hormesis.
BTW. Dr. Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission
under Eisenhower, and knew more about the subject than
Occam. [Sic}
But if the information is not on a left-wing web site where
he can cut and paste, I doubt he will ever read it!
cgh, you keep impressing the hell out of me! Your statement
about “No safe dose of radiation” is right on. This is the
single biggest fallacy of the environmental left.
In an age in which we are able to detect substances in the
parts per billion range, (And even less) charlatans like
Rachel Carson and others began to put forth the fiction
that there was no save level of exposure to toxins or
radioactivity. This is the Big Lie that would put Joseph
Goebbels to shame.
As a Millwright working in power plants, refineries and
paper mills, I was required to take a course in confined
space entry. We usually used a “Sniffer” that monitored
O2 levels, CO, H2S and CH4. We learned about LEL (Lethal
Exposure Levels,) among other things. The levels were
set so laughably low that if a worker struck an arc with
a welder, he would set off the O2 alarm even with the best
ventilation we could arrange. A good fart could set off the
H2S alarm.
One day, a coworker came to me with a chunk of white
fibrous substance and asked me if I knew what it was.
I said yes and proceeded to snort it like it was cocaine.
My buddy nearly crapped his pants! It was Asbestos. I
suppose Occam [sic] will never understand why I did
what I did.
Lets not forget according to media hysteria the fallout from Fukushima was supposed to irradiate at least half of the Pacific Ocean with waves of radiation lapping at Canadian shores.
Lots of trivializing of the issue here. If this reactor was in Saskatoon and everyone in Saskatoon was told they had to leave and could never return in their lifetime, I think the trivializing would cease.