“Of course, there's still a nuclear site with three damaged reactors.”
March 14, 2016 6:37 AM   Subscribe

Five Years Later, Cutting Through the Fukushima Myths by Andrew Karam [Popular Mechanics] Radiation expert Andrew Karam, who covered the disaster for Popular Mechanics in 2011 and later traveled to study the site, explains everything you need to know about Fukushima's legacy and danger five years later.

Related:
- Fukushima Evacuations Were Not Worth the Money, Study Says by William Hollingworth [Japan Times]
The costs of evacuating residents from near the Fukushima No. 1 plant and the dislocation the people experienced were greater than their expected gain in longevity, a British study has found. The researchers found that at best evacuees could expect to live eight months longer, but that some might gain only one extra day of life. They said this does not warrant ripping people from their homes and communities.
- Fukushima’s Decontamination Workers from the Margins of Society are Being ‘Exploited’ by Mari Yamaguchi [Japan Times]
The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine. Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations. Vulnerable to exploitation and shunned by local residents, they typically work on three-to-six-month contracts with little or no benefits, living in makeshift company barracks. And the government is not even making sure that their radiation levels are individually tested. “They’re cleaning up radiation in Fukushima, doing sometimes unsafe work, and yet they can’t be proud of what they do or even considered legitimate workers,” said Mitsuo Nakamura, a former day laborer who now heads a citizens’ group supporting decontamination laborers. “They are exploited by the vested interests that have grown in the massive project.”
- Nuclear Refugees Tell of Distrust, Pressure to Return to Fukushima by Yuri Kageyama [Japan Times]
They feel like refugees, although they live in one of the world’s richest and most peaceful nations. Five years ago, these people fled their homes, grabbing what they could, as a nearby nuclear plant melted down after being hit by tsunami, spewing radiation. All told, the disaster in Fukushima displaced 150,000 by the government’s count. About 100,000 are still scattered around the nation, some in barrack-like temporary housing units and others in government-allocated apartment buildings hundreds of kilometers away. Although authorities have started to open up areas near the damaged reactors that were previously off limits, only a fraction of residents have returned. For example, in the town of Naraha, where evacuation orders were lifted in September, 459 people, or 6 percent of the pre-disaster population, have gone back. Most say they don’t want to return for fear of lingering radiation. Some don’t want the upheaval of moving again after trying to start their lives over elsewhere. With government housing aid set to end next year, many feel pressured to move back.
- Fukushima Five Years On, and the Lessons We Failed to Learn. by Dave Sweeney [The Guardian]
The crisis continues today. Japanese nuclear authorities have confirmed that active intervention will be required for the next forty years to stabilise the site, there are on-going radioactive releases and water and waste management issues and charges have just been laid against former senior Tepco officials for “professional negligence resulting in deaths and injury”. In August 2012, I joined a delegation of international monitors and public health experts who visited the Fukushima region. We saw and spoke with people whose lives have been irreparably changed. We drove through abandoned regions and towns empty of both people and hope. We met with elderly evacuees in temporary housing who will never return home. We heard stories of individual bravery and corporate indifference and all to the sinister soundtrack of a disturbingly active Geiger counter. As tour member Hasegawa Kenichi, a Fukushima dairy farmer who can no longer sell his milk, stated “it is important to make sure that what is happening in Fukushima is not forgotten.”
- No Matter What BBC says: Fukushima Disaster is Killing People by Chris Busby [The Ecologist]
The BBC has been excelling itself in its deliberate understatement of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, writes Chris Busby. While calling in pseudo experts to say radiation is all but harmless, it's ignoring the science that shows that the real health impacts of nuclear fallout are around 1,000 times worse than claimed. I am so ashamed of the BBC. It seems, as an institution, to be supporting and promulgating an enormous lie about the health effects of radioactive pollution. And not providing any balanced scientific picture.
- Water, Soil And Radiation: Why Fukushima Will Take Decades To Clean Up [NPR]
"There's no question that the radiation levels have decreased compared to 2011," he says. Some of that drop is due to the natural radioactive decay, but there has also been a huge cleanup effort. Workers across Fukushima have been scraping up contaminated topsoil and storing it in bags. And that's created its own problem, Brown says. "There are now about 9 million bags of decontamination waste from all over the prefecture that are being consolidated into these vast fields with these pyramids of radioactive waste," he says. Just like with the water, regulators aren't quite sure what to do with all that soil. Japan doesn't have a centralized radioactive waste dump to take it to.
- Five Years After The Fukushima Disaster, the Fish Are Proliferating By John Dyer [Vice News]
Sea life is now thriving in the estimated 3.3 millions tons of debris that settled on the seabed of the Sanriku Coast on the northeastern side of Japan's main island after the tsunami that caused the nuclear meltdown, reported the The Japan News, the English-language edition of the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun, on Friday. Citing research by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the newspaper reports that more than 10 times as many marine organisms live in the artificial reefs created by the concrete, scrap wood and other debris than in clear areas. "Ragworms, Gammaridea [shrimp-like] crustaceans and other marine organisms have made their homes there, and channel rockfish, conger and snow crabs come to prey on them," The Japan Times reported. "These areas may become fishing grounds in the future." To make their findings, the Japanese scientists used a robot to take pictures of the ocean floor at maximum depths of around 3,300 feet and distances of 12.5 to 21.7 miles (up to 35 km) off the coast, the newspaper reported.
- 14 Moving Photos of Heartbreak and Hope After the Fukushima Disaster by Michael Forster Rothbart [Mother Jones]
If you were from Fukushima, Japan, would you move back, despite your fears about radiation? This is the question photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart asked as he returned to Fukushima last fall to report on what's happened over the past five years, after a tsunami and nuclear disaster hit northern Japan and destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Some 488,000 people were evacuated from the three-part disaster. In 2015, nearly 25 percent remained displaced.
- Fukushima, Five Years On: Meet the Children Who Lost Everything in Japan's Worst Nuclear Disaster. by Andrew Gilligan [The Telegraph]
Clinging to the roof of City Hall, Mr Toba watched his own house across the valley being ripped up by the tide, knowing his wife was inside it. But his responsibility was to his town. Not until 24 hours later could he make time to confirm that she was missing, or to check on Taiga and his younger brother. He was one of the last people in Rikuzentakata to learn the fate of his loved ones. Taiga and Manabu were making music boxes at school when the earthquake happened. The teacher was just giving out the mechanisms. “We got under the desks but the floor was rocking,” said Taiga. “We realised it wasn’t the usual earthquake. "I thought: ‘Am I going to die here?'” Nobody did die at the school building. By sad irony, it was the kids whose parents rushed to save them who were at the greatest risk.
- Eerie Photos of Fukushima's Ghost Towns by James Whitlow Delano [National Geographic]
It's been five years since a tsunami caused by an earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The wave triggered the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. And the land remains contaminated. Fukushima Prefecture, once known for its fertility, is now littered with large black sacks containing radioactive soil, organic matter, and stone. It was scraped from farmland in an effort to make the area habitable again for the families that have lived here for centuries.
- Caring for Fukushima’s Abandoned Animals by Dan Murano [Washington Post]
Naoto Matsumura, a former rice farmer, lives in Tomioka, Japan, six miles from the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant and within the 12.4-mile nuclear exclusion zone. He lives alone, except for the 50 cows, two ostriches, dogs, cats and other animals in his care. When the earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck Japan in March 2011, the reactor meltdown forced the government to evacuate everyone living inside the exclusion zone. Matsumura, in a 2013 interview, says residents departed so quickly that farm animals were left tied up in barns, chickens were left in cages and pets were left locked inside homes. Matsumura returned months later to find scores of animals dying or dead from starvation. He made it his mission to take care of those he could help.
- In the Shadow of Fukushima, a Ghost Town Struggles Back to Life. by Jake Adelstein [LA Times]
By day, this town bustles. Trucks rumble through, carrying equipment to the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. A temporary supermarket has sprung up to cater to workers employed in the massive cleanup job at the plant; a ramen stand dispenses steaming noodles near City Hall. But a different Naraha emerges after sundown. Traffic stops. The streetlights come on but the neighborhoods are dark. A dog can be heard barking in the distance. A police car patrols the empty streets, its bright red light visible from miles away, like a meteor in the night. Instead of a siren, it emits a mournful lullaby. “It’s true that at night it feels like a ghost town,” says a 45-year-old Buddhist priest, Shukan Sakanushi. “The streets are empty; it’s dark, it’s quiet. But each evening when I go jogging, I notice little by little, more lights are coming on. People are coming back. I believe this town can come back to life. I feel like it’s part of my karma to make that happen.”
- Fukushima Timeline of Events [Scientific American]
- Seconds From Disaster - Fukushima [YouTube] [Documentary]
- Return to Fukushima with Miles O'Brien [YouTube] [PBS Newshour]
- Fukushima: The Truth Behind the Chain of Meltdowns [YouTube] [NHK Documentary]
- Fukushima Daiichi's: Hidden Crises Radioactive Water [YouTube] [NHK Documentary]
- Photographing the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima [YouTube] [Vice]
- The Last Farmer in Fukushima's Post-Nuclear Wasteland [YouTube] [Vice]
posted by Fizz (56 comments total) 72 users marked this as a favorite
 
Previously.
posted by Fizz at 6:40 AM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


Good balanced account I thought, nice change from the ZOMG NUCLEAR ALWAYS BAD narrative.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:42 AM on March 14, 2016 [12 favorites]


Christ, I can't believe it's been 5 years.
posted by dismas at 7:39 AM on March 14, 2016 [6 favorites]


Christ, I can't believe it's been 5 years.

Indeed. I made this post because I was reminded of the incident while packing my gym bag when I picked up my "Run 4 Japan" shirt.
posted by Fizz at 7:41 AM on March 14, 2016 [4 favorites]


There's also an amazing documentary put out from NHK called: 88 Hours - The Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown: Episode 1 . I couldn't find a link to the video but it's worth finding if you are able to. A step by step account of what was happening in the hours after the earthquake and the eventual nuclear meltdown.
posted by Fizz at 8:22 AM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


Its the economics where the real unknowns lie:

How much will a new nuclear reactor cost to build?
How much more than the original estimate will it be?
When will it start to generate?
How late will that be compared with the original delivery date?
How out of touch with reality will the estimated decommissioning costs be?

And a question we do know the answer to:

Which mugs will pick up the extra costs?
posted by biffa at 8:24 AM on March 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


Laughing at people who have concerns about nuclear waste by saying "but science" doesn't seem like the best way to handle perfectly reasonable concerns. Science isn't something you wave in people's face to make them feel inferior for lacking faith that the powers that be are doing science that is actually in the interest of vulnerable people- something science, as done by humans, has a history of being extremely bad at doing. It's one thing to say, "some concerns are inaccurate"- it's another to laugh at people who say, don't want to live in a nuclear disaster site which is perfectly reasonable to not want to do no matter what science you want to wave at people to tell them they should. Playing it safe, given that "science" has a margin of error, is perfectly ok and not something to shame or laugh at people for. Having concerns about the use of nuclear power and it's effects is perfectly reasonable. Objective reality might exist on it's own terms, but humans relationship with knowledge of that truth is imperfect and subject to bias, and the people expected to accept the risks when everyone else decides it's safe are often vulnerable people with very little power, who if they DO wind up being harmed, no one really cares about or takes responsibility for having pressured, coerced, or forced them to accept the risks (or simply left without aid to avoid the risks because it was easier to say the risks are PROBABLY low and leave vulnerable people to suffer the consequences even if they don't want to).

These are complicated issues and I don't think there is anything wrong with discussing nuance but making safety concerns out to be ridiculous seems less than helpful in achieving this.

When you put nuclear power plants near people you are forcing them to take a risk they might not want to take and it's an act of power that constitutes a violation of consent which rests in academic elitism granting the right to violate any and everyone else's concerns as long as you have a science degree. This has been deadly and catastrophic for so many humans to place this level of trust in the academic elite to check their privilege, bias, and their underestimations of their capacity for error.
posted by xarnop at 8:53 AM on March 14, 2016 [9 favorites]


I suspect if people were still living in Iitate (which was heavily dosed by fallout) they would have significantly more than 8 months shaved off their lives.
posted by My Dad at 8:58 AM on March 14, 2016


Its the economics where the real unknowns lie

I'm not an expert of any sort but my impression is that this isn't remotely true. In both Fukushima and Chernobyl only a vanishingly small amount of nuclear fuel was released; so I would think that on that metric it's possible to have a nuclear disaster that's literally a million times worse, if for example a reactor or fuel facility (or even just a high-level waste storage site?) was accidentally or intentionally destroyed during a war by bombing, at any time in human history for millions of years into the future.

But for some reason the IAEA's International Nuclear Event Scale is designed to be logarithmic and also places Fukushima and Chernobyl in the highest possible category. Hence I am suspicious that the public at large, and maybe even the experts, don't have a really good picture of what even the short-term consequences of a genuinely severe radiological catastrophe would be.
posted by XMLicious at 8:59 AM on March 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


I think there's a special place in hell for people who make arguments like the second article. Based on life expectancy, someone may only live a day longer, but it's not nothing that their death is a slow and painful battle with cancer instead of a quicker heart attack or peaceful death of natural causes. I see arguments like this as industry admitting they fucked up but still trying to squirm out of their obligation to deal with the consequences.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 9:00 AM on March 14, 2016 [12 favorites]


XMLicious: I was talking about building new nuclear, as all of my questions made clear.
posted by biffa at 9:21 AM on March 14, 2016


It is worth saying that a significant contributing factor to the Fukushima disaster is the very anti-nuclear-power sentiment that the disaster made worse. We got bit by the self-fulfilling prophecy of an aging infrastructure that couldn't be replaced with safer technology.

In the current world, where these aging facilities exist and we rely on them for power, the result is that by not replacing them when we could or should with safer nuclear facilities, we just keep pulling more blocks out of the Jenga tower and hope. We're not shutting them down and we're not replacing them because we need the power they generate. Given that we need the power, the right answer is to replace the old facilities with safer ones. But we can't do that, either. So we pull another Jenga block, and hope again.

Efficient storage is not here in the present day (and we should put even more money into that research), so we must currently rely on non-renewables. And we have chosen the path to global climate change. How often would we have to have a Fukushima or a Chernobyl to match the damage we slowly do to our environment with fossil fuels?

As a species, humans are not good at assessing gradual, dispersed risk against what I call "percussive" risk. We fear terrorists more than the slow grind of automobile accidents. We fear nuclear meltdowns more than millions of widely dispersed respiratory illnesses and deaths due to breathing in the products of fossil fuel combustion. My opinion is we have made the wrong choice because of this innate risk miscalculation.
posted by chimaera at 9:22 AM on March 14, 2016 [21 favorites]


Hence I am suspicious that the public at large, and maybe even the experts, don't have a really good picture of what even the short-term consequences of a genuinely severe radiological catastrophe would be.

We know what happens when you deliberately hold a prompt-critical reaction by massive inertial confinement.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

See, there's a very real reason that neither the Fukushima reactors nor Chernobyl exploded like that. Physics. As the prompt critical reaction occurs, it's trying to tear itself apart, and unless you use extraordinary steps to contain it -- usually, by using high explosives to squeeze it really hard -- it soon just blasts itself apart and the prompt critical reaction stops.

It is a physical constraint. Prompt critical masses disassemble rapidly unless you take strong measures to hold them together, and even then, they still eventually do so -- just with a vastly larger bang.

It is the same as black powder. Burn a small pile, it makes smoke. Burn a large pile, it makes a moderate bang.

Take the small pile, put it in a sealed pipe and burn it, and it makes a *very* large bang.

What fuel in nuclear reactors does if not cooled is melt. It's actually very difficult-to-impossible to get them to explode*, and if you do, the explosion is a steam explosion or hydrogen explosion, not a nuclear detonation. That melting spreads them out and mixes the control rod material with them, that stops any criticality reactions once the mass spreads enough.

In fact, at Chernobyl Reactor #4, most of the fuel did escape. But it wasn't blown out of the top of the reactor by the steam explosion, or lofted with ash as the graphite moderator burned. It melted and went into the basement. It didn't leave the reactor building, but it did leave the reactor. It's possible that similar has happened at Fukushima (I haven't really looked recently) but when Three Mile Island had the meltdown, the mass never left the containment vessel.




* Exception: Positive void coefficent reactors can be quite easy to explode. That's why Chernobyl happened.
posted by eriko at 9:27 AM on March 14, 2016 [12 favorites]


When you put nuclear power plants near people you are forcing them to take a risk they might not want to take

No, if they're built properly, you're forcibly removing risk, because the air quality is better because you're offsetting the fossil fuel emissions. The risks of nuclear power are, in fact, incredibly low.

We're all so afraid of these things because they're singular, high-profile incidents, and somehow the everyday horrors of coal dust, miner's lung, oil spills, and all of that is just fine?
posted by explosion at 9:27 AM on March 14, 2016 [19 favorites]


As a species, humans are not good at assessing gradual, dispersed risk against what I call "percussive" risk. We fear terrorists more than the slow grind of automobile accidents. We fear nuclear meltdowns more than millions of widely dispersed respiratory illnesses and deaths due to breathing in the products of fossil fuel combustion. My opinion is we have made the wrong choice because of this innate risk miscalculation.

Exactly -- and it's why many ignore global warming, but want to go all in against terrorists. It's why they ignore the fact that in the US, toddlers with guns have killed more people in the last decade that terrorists in the US. It's why they're afraid to fly, but have no problems repeatedly climbing into a car -- a device that is trivially provable to be vastly more likely to kill them than an airplane!
posted by eriko at 9:29 AM on March 14, 2016 [8 favorites]


I think there's a special place in hell for people who make arguments like the second article. Based on life expectancy, someone may only live a day longer, but it's not nothing that their death is a slow and painful battle with cancer instead of a quicker heart attack or peaceful death of natural causes.

As distasteful as the whole thing is, there are ways of adding suffering into that economic calculation. It's all very grotesque, of course, and the mind recoils at what is basically an accountant's view of the value of human life. It is worth wondering what the alternative is, though.

Who should be evacuated after a nuclear, chemical, or other disaster?

A whole hemisphere? No.

Nobody, not even for a few hours? Probably also no.

Somewhere in between those two lies the right decision.

Their research doesn't say that nobody should ever be evacuated after a nuclear accident. They concluded that of the 116k people evacuated immediately after the Chernobyl disaster, 31k were rationally evacuated.

You might well argue that the threshold should be otherwise. That their threshold of an average of 8.7 months lost for the evacuation judgement is wrong. That it should be 6 months, 3 months, 1 month. Even a day (that would probably mean evacuating most of Scandinavia).

Actuarial calculations are nasty, grubby, little things but without this unpleasant mathematics of death, we've really got no way of making those decisions apart from guessing. I don't think that guessing is an ethically superior choice just because it lets us avoid the aesthetically troubling world of the actuary.

I see arguments like this as industry admitting they fucked up but still trying to squirm out of their obligation to deal with the consequences.

This argument is coming from public health academics in England, not the nuclear industry.
posted by atrazine at 9:35 AM on March 14, 2016 [8 favorites]


"the everyday horrors of coal dust, miner's lung, oil spills, and all of that is just fine?"
Nope. You're making assumptions about me that are incorrect. I think trust in automobiles is also really harmful and that we need to build infrastructure that permits people to survive without using them. I think we need to radically change the way we live and that we need people in positions of power to help with this process because many low income people have very little power to make these changes and still be able to work and eat. So many people die because of cars and it doesn't have to be this way if more priority were giving to planning cities and reducing the need for cars to survive. We could invest in building solar/wind/bike power in individuals homes effectively removing dependence on other sources of power for individuals.

Right now I am reading about early nuclear specialists who were trained in the science who opposed nuclear power on safety grounds and they were laughed at by the same people who were laughing about global warming. The more I'm reading about this, and the subsequent assumption that "all scientists agree that science says nuclear power was and is a great idea" sounds a lot more like spin than devotion to science. Don't take my word for it, I invite people to read for themselves.
posted by xarnop at 9:45 AM on March 14, 2016 [4 favorites]


Intrigued by the J-value analysis methodology in the “not worth the money” link. Since all the papers are paywalled, I can't read much in detail. I wonder if it takes worry/stress into account? It's a very difficult balance between expecting governments to release real-time radiation data (which may cause unnecessary panic and is also embarrassing to government and industry) and managing stress.
posted by scruss at 9:48 AM on March 14, 2016


We're all so afraid of these things because they're singular, high-profile incidents, and somehow the everyday horrors of coal dust, miner's lung, oil spills, and all of that is just fine?

No, all of those things are bad.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 10:04 AM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


My opinion is we have made the wrong choice because of this innate risk miscalculation.

Maybe we humans just don't really have the ability to sustain the long term vision/attention and organizational prowess to safely manage the complex technological solutions we're capable of achieving through our best engineering efforts and we need to learn to be humble enough to accept that and live and work with our limitations instead of assuming that since we can theoretically do these kinds of things in a safe and responsible manner, we should just plunge ahead into the breech counting on the fact well be able to improvise solutions to the problems we encounter along the way if we just have enough can-do spirit?

Either that or we need to adapt and finally make the leap to what some people used to call "species consciousness" and stop being so bitter, fractious, and socially petty.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:09 AM on March 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


eriko: I'm not sure why you would bring up nuclear weapons in this thread, but are you saying that if a building full of enriched nuclear fuel was completely destroyed and dispersed by conventional bombing in a war a dozen or a thousand years from now, we have a good picture of what the ecological and human health consequences would be and they wouldn't be too bad? To the degree that we needn't even bother distinguishing between the severity of that and events that have already happened on a reference scale?

You certainly come across as an expert and knowledgeable person on all sorts of engineering topics, so I am very interested in what you have to say. (In fact I was hoping you'd show up in the thread when I wrote my original comment.)
posted by XMLicious at 10:10 AM on March 14, 2016


> I think there's a special place in hell for people who make arguments like the second article. Based on life expectancy, someone may only live a day longer, but it's not nothing that their death is a slow and painful battle with cancer instead of a quicker heart attack or peaceful death of natural causes.

Slow down with the invective there and think it through.

You live in a community. Suddenly you have two choices.

In one case you have a hundred percent certainty that your community is destroyed; your home is abandoned and worthless; your job is gone, and if you had a business, that's gone; you lose everything and have to go and live with strangers and rebuild your life.

In the other case, you have a tiny fraction of a percent chance of dying of a nasty cancer. If the cancer takes an average of 30 years off your life, then that "one day" translates into 1% of 1% chance of getting it.

Another way to see it is great suffering for 10,000 people in one case - or much greater suffering for one person in the other.

But wait - there's more. It turns out that a surprising number of people died during the evacuation. 45 patients basically starved to death in a hospital. 14 senior citizens died after being moved to another hospital. A 102-year-old man committed suicide.

And I'll bet mortality was sharply up amongst the older community in the year after the disaster, though I couldn't find anything on that.

I think a lot of people, if presented with these two choices, would choose to stay in their community. Indeed, knowing a little of Japan and its culture, I think many people would have willingly and even happily faced a tiny chance of a nasty cancer death in order to keep their community together.

This excuses nothing. Fukushima was a great crime. All the TEPCO executives should have been thrown in jail and the key to their cells tossed into the containment facility.

But going on to destroy many communities because of marginal risks that the inhabitants would certainly have been willing to take if properly informed - this decision compounds the error, it doesn't mitigate it!
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:44 AM on March 14, 2016 [8 favorites]


Actuarial calculations are nasty, grubby, little things but without this unpleasant mathematics of death, we've really got no way of making those decisions apart from guessing.

I completely disagree. Protection of human health and the environment shouldn't be a cost trade-off. That's why cost is explicitly forbidden as a consideration in several EPA regulatory statutes.

There will inevitably be debate about what constitutes an acceptable level of risk for people, but cost should not be one of those considerations. I believe if a company buckles under the cost of dealing with its environmental fallout, then it was never viable to begin with.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 11:09 AM on March 14, 2016


Since it's the 30th anniversary next month, here is the first line of my favourite nuclear accident joke:

Why shouldn't you wear Ukrainian underpants?

Answer forthcoming later.
posted by biffa at 11:23 AM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


humans just don't really have the ability to sustain the long term vision/attention and organizational prowess to safely manage the complex technological solutions we're capable of achieving through our best least expensive engineering efforts
posted by j_curiouser at 11:32 AM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


> I completely disagree. Protection of human health and the environment shouldn't be a cost trade-off.

You are talking about something completely different to what you are responding to.

We're not discussing money vs. safety trade-offs before an accident. Clearly TEPCO committed criminal offenses in that regard!

No - we're sitting there after the accident - and we're deciding what to do with people. Do we evacuate all of Japan? Do we evacuate no one?

Clearly the correct answer is somewhere in between these. The only way to correctly evaluate this is actuarially.

Cost isn't even a factor here! The question is, what is the greatest good for the greatest number?

(And even your original claim doesn't hold up. It implies that no amount of economic gain no matter how great and how widely distributed, can justify any risk to health or to the environment, no matter how small. This would basically prevent any human economic activity of any type. I think we should be pushing this trade-off much, much further towards protecting the environment and health than we do now, but it will always be a trade-off...)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:37 AM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


tl; dr: Both over-evacuation and under-evacuation will cause bad results. Only actuarial techniques will let you make the best decision.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:40 AM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


are you saying that if a building full of enriched nuclear fuel was completely destroyed and dispersed by conventional bombing in a war a dozen or a thousand years from now, we have a good picture of what the ecological and human health consequences would be

Blowing a bunch of nuclear fuel up and dispersing it would in many ways make it less dangerous, not more. Creating a nuclear explosion by accident is pretty hard - you can't really do it by firing a rocket at a pile of fuel. You'd just make a big dirty bomb, and if the fuel was new and didn't contain a lot of the fission products that build up as the reactor operates, it wouldn't even be that dirty. The biological effects of that kind of thing are more or less known, even though there might be uncertainty and conservative assumptions in things like dose coefficients due to lack of data. An ecosystem is a big place, and there's bound to be unexpected effects - like the reindeer bio-accumulating Cs-137 after Chernobyl by selectively grazing on mushrooms - but how a scenario like this would play out is not in fact a big mystery beyond all hope of understanding.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:51 AM on March 14, 2016


You are talking about something completely different to what you are responding to.

No I'm not. The responsible party exists (this wasn't a terrorist attack) and should be held financially liable for all aspects of the response, be that evacuation, bottled water, or what have you. A decision should be made based on an acceptable level of risk to the public and not based on how much it would cost the company.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 11:55 AM on March 14, 2016


Its the economics where the real unknowns lie:

How much will a new nuclear reactor cost to build?
How much more than the original estimate will it be?
When will it start to generate?
How late will that be compared with the original delivery date?


Well, Europe's new EPR is, according to the manufacturer, "based on tried-and-tested technologies and principles... Economically, it achieves an unrivalled level of competitiveness".

So how much will it cost? No-one knows. They said the one in Finland would be built for €3.7 billion. And then they started building it in 2005. The best current guess at the price right now is €8 billion, but that was back in 2012 and they're still spending money.

But hey, the first one of anything will cost a bit more. So they're building a second one in France. The second is always cheaper - €3.3 billion this time. Ooops, current price for that is €10.5 billion.

Oh, and they were supposed to be generating power after four years. Finland, if the schedule doesn't slip again, will take thirteen.

Remind me again why, economically, we are not laughing these people out of the room?
posted by happyinmotion at 11:59 AM on March 14, 2016 [9 favorites]


> No I'm not. The responsible party exists (this wasn't a terrorist attack) and should be held financially liable for all aspects of the response, be that evacuation, bottled water, or what have you. A decision should be made based on an acceptable level of risk to the public and not based on how much it would cost the company.

No one here disputes this in the slightest, no one is discussing cost, so I have no idea who you are arguing with.

I personally am saying that the Japanese authorities over-evacuated, and that they caused unnecessary deaths by doing so, and unnecessarily killed entirely communities. I personally am saying that a rational, actuarial approach using real-world data would have saved lives, AND that sharing that data with the communities affected so that they could make their own best informed decisions might have resulted in an entirely different outcome. And that seems to be close to what others are saying.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 12:32 PM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


What happyinmotion said.

I had some years ago, before Fukushima, a chat with a senior scientist at an environmental organization. He told me in confidence that he believed that safe nuclear reactors were quite possible and probably desirable in light of climate change, but that since their engineering culture had shown itself time and time again to be incapable of either planning for disaster, preventing disaster, or adequately handling the disaster when it eventually hit, his organization had no choice but a blanket opposition to nuclear power.

I'd add that it is possible to perform high-risk activities and still get excellent safety results - I'd say that the airline industry is good proof of that. If we are unfortunately going to need nuclear power in order to prevent climate change, then we should be remaking the entire nuclear power industry...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 1:11 PM on March 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


Dr Dracator: Thanks for yet again bringing up nuclear weapons—it's actually kind of interesting how insistently people defending the safety of nuclear-powered electricity generation feel the need to portray their interlocutors as claiming that the danger is of power plants behaving like nuclear weapons, to the point of those defenders being the sole ones introducing the idea into a discussion—but so, to repeat the question a third time and given what you've said there, should a scale for comparing the severity of nuclear and radiological incidents stop at Chernobyl and Fukushima and identify them as the pinnacle of the pyramid and as a "major release of radioactive material" substantially equivalent to the worst possible scenarios, or not?

Am I wrong in believing that a release of a million times as much radioactive material is possible with existing facilities but not represented on that scale? Could even just the destruction of a vehicle transporting a small amount of new or spent fuel release more radioactive material than Chernobyl or Fukushima did?

I mean there are vehicles like that driving around in Ukraine right now, where nuclear power generation, uranium mining, uranium refinement, and construction of new nuclear plants is going on concurrently with open albeit low-level (so far) warfare, right? And we might find ourselves involved in military conflict after the secession of the Trumpfederacy, for all we know.

I certainly find many of the things I've read anti-nuclear activists talk about absurd, like raising alarms over miniscule amounts of 12-year-half-life tritium appearing in the soil directly underneath the center of a nuclear plan. But if the above things are possible, or even just significantly more severe events than what has already happened are generally possible, and the answer is "we have forseen and dealt with all eventualities and you just have to trust us that nothing like that will ever happen" I think we should be openly saying so rather than eliding it and portraying Chernobyl or Fukushima as the worst possible nuclear incidents.

(Or perhaps you are serious when you say that taking all of the fuel at a nuclear plant and distributing it across the countryside would be less dangerous than the operation of a functioning nuclear power plant, and I've completely misunderstood something about why nuclear fuel is the highest category of nuclear waste? I mean isn't the whole safety problem posed by criticality events and why we build core-catchers underneath reactors and things like that, to avoid nuclear fuel being released even underground?)
posted by XMLicious at 1:13 PM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


I lived in Japan on 3/11/11, across the mountains from Fukushima. This was my second-ever comment on the blue:

Opposite coast of Japan here, and the earthquake didn't do much here except make me slightly dizzy, but... my good friend who came to Japan with me lives right on the coast in Fukushima Prefecture. We had a jokey conversation about our school lunches on gchat at about 1pm... haven't heard from him since. Fuck.


My friend turned out to be fine, but funny thing: the Japanese government had one zone (within 30 km of the site, I believe) within which they recommended everyone evacuate, and the US government had another (50 miles - about 80 km) that it recommended its citizens leave. My friend was outside the Japanese evacuation zone but inside the US one. He actually called the embassy and they were like, yeah, get out of there, but he couldn't leave because trains and buses weren't running and he didn't have a car, so he sat tight until someone with a car was able to come get him and drop him off in Aizuwakamatsu. He bummed around with friends for a while, but eventually went back to his home between 30 and 80 km away from Fukushima Daiichi and lived there for another three years.

I have a lot of feelings about the earthquake but really no informed opinions about the evacuation or nuclear anything. I feel like I should but my sadness gets in the way when I try to read about it. I gave money to the recovery effort (at a time when that was a big deal to me) and sat in McDonald's with my friends Skyping on our laptops with worried families in three countries and backing each other up when they demanded we return home immediately. I still have my little "がんばろう日本" omamori thingy hanging at my desk now.
posted by sunset in snow country at 1:17 PM on March 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


Oops, I shouldn't have said "we" there Dr Dracator as I notice that your profile says you're in Greece. Though I suppose anyone might expect to find themselves at war with the Trumpfederacy.
posted by XMLicious at 1:19 PM on March 14, 2016


For all the Japanese people I know, between the government not being forthcoming about the incident and then pushing through with plans to restart the reactors despite widespread public opposition, they just don't trust the government to run reactors safely anymore.

All the data arguments in the world won't do much against such sentiment, and why would they trust what they're told now? Even now its easier to find information in international media than Japanese media, and since most Japanese can't read English newspapers they don't have access to external information.
posted by thefoxgod at 2:02 PM on March 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


I am currently residing 8 miles due east of the last nuclear power plant in California (as the Annual Emergency Information pamphlet reminds me, I am in Evacuation Zone 2 of 10, the closest zone with people living in it). It was the subject of serious protests during its construction (in the days when "No Nukes" was more than movement, it was a concert tour!) but the local focus of the opposition has led to a fairly effective community of 'watchdogs' and maybe one of the safest plants anywhere. But when Fukushima went down on the opposite side of the Pacific, we were watching very intently. Now, we are nearing the end of its original 40-year authorization and requiring re-commissioning and some reconstruction (of course, more nearby earthquake faults have been found since it was built... this IS California). And Pacific Gas & Electric (the same utility that blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno with a gas leak, remember that? We sure do) is considering just shutting it down. Which may not be the best possible outcome, according to some reasonable sources.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:32 PM on March 14, 2016


Why shouldn't you wear Ukrainian underpants?

Because Chernobyl fallout.
posted by biffa at 2:38 PM on March 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


Outstanding post, Fizz. Thank you.

The Japan Times' “Revisiting 3/11: Five years after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake” feature is also worth the read.

Fizz: “There's also an amazing documentary put out from NHK called: 88 Hours - The Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown”
I saw this over the weekend on NHK World. It is very much worth watching. As is Decommissioning Fukushima. Although, like the rest of NHK World's special fifth anniversary programming, it will be similarly difficult to find. (Insert my "NHK doesn't get it" rant.)

lupus_yonderboy: “ I'll bet mortality was sharply up amongst the older community in the year after the disaster, though I couldn't find anything on that. ”
“Post-tsunami deaths due to stress, illness outnumber disaster toll in Fukushima,” Beverly Parungao, Japan Today, 24 February 2014

lupus_yonderboy: “ I personally am saying that a rational, actuarial approach using real-world data would have saved lives”
Cf. “Nuclear Disaster Evacuees' Untold Stories ”Tomorrow, NHK. This program will re-run on 28 March, but, naturally and as usual, is not available on demand.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:27 PM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


lupus_yonderboy: “I'll bet mortality was sharply up amongst the older community in the year after the disaster, though I couldn't find anything on that.”
I had two more links I meant to add here hiding in another window.

“Death toll grows in 3/11 aftermath,” Fukushima Minpo/The Japan Times, 15 March 2015
The number of nuclear evacuees dying from deteriorating health caused by refugee life is still growing even though four years have passed since the unprecedented calamity that struck on March 11, 2011.

As of March 4, the deaths of 1,867 people in Fukushima Prefecture had been recognized as related to the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, surpassing the 1,603 who are deemed to have been killed there directly by the quake and tsunami.

“Evacuees' solitary deaths increase since 2011 disasters in Japan,” Kyodo News Agency, 29 February 2016
The number of people who died alone in temporary housing in three Japanese prefectures hit hard by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disasters reached 188 at the end of last year, a Kyodo News tally showed Monday, highlighting difficulty for authorities to look after aged survivors.

The so-called solitary deaths only counted 16 in 2011 for the northeastern prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, according to the tally based on police data.

The number has been increasing annually, and authorities fear it may continue to rise. It has become harder to keep watch of all those in temporary housing as more such housing units are becoming unoccupied.
I swear I read an article or saw a news report about "evacuee sickness" but I can't remember the exact phrase used, so I can't find it now.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:59 PM on March 14, 2016 [4 favorites]


Blowing up (conventionally) a train car full of reactor grade uranium ironically makes it safer in terms of radiation danger, so long as you don't breathe in the dispersed uranium. Being more dispersed, the dose is lower. However, it does present a low hazard if ingested, because the radiation can get to your innards and cause cancer. It isn't likely unless the dose is high enough that you'd get heavy metal poisoning anyway because, unlike iodine, strontium, and a few other fission byproducts, your body excretes the stuff fairly quickly thanks to your kidneys doing what they do. Moreover, the long half life means that the dose of radiation you get is pretty low even if it is ingested. Plutonium is somewhat worse, but still not terribly dangerous. Both are quite heavy, so they don't travel very far or very quickly. It's the gaseous and water soluable stuff you have to worry about.

Just don't be next to it when the bomb hits the train car and you'll probably be fine. That isn't to say there is no danger, or that the mess shouldn't be cleaned up. It absolutely should, but you or your parents got a higher dose of problematic isotopes from the aboveground nuclear testing that went on through the 70s than you would from the bombing of a big pile of uranium.

Someone dropping a huge bomb on an operating nuclear reactor would be worse, but it would still only give a significant dose to people in the immediate area. At worst you're talking Chernobyl level contamination, but mainly in the vicinity of the reactor. Without the fire to loft the fission products high up in the air, you don't get the huge plume, so you're really looking at Fukushima scale damage. Thankfully, the containment building would still contain the vast majority of the radioactive stuff.

All that said, we absolutely should be replacing the 60s-design reactors with pebble bed, CANDU, or other designs that are built such that a meltdown is physically impossible. It would make out infrastructure more robust against negligence and war. The cleanup is a lot easier if the reaction byproducts are contained within the fuel pellets and aren't spread around the countryside. We also have a dire need for a long term waste repository. It's really too bad that the fear mongering has left us politically unable to make that happen, even though the danger (although still small) is many times greater with the on-site storage that we now use.

Until we get better at large-scale energy storage, base load electrical generation is absolutely necessary, and 60 years of experience (including all of the radiation releases from all commercial nuclear generation, both intentional and accidental) has proven that nuclear is better for human health than the other options. Coal plants have released many times more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants have, and that doesn't even get into particulates, carbon, and everything else they spew into the environment.
posted by wierdo at 8:01 PM on March 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


I suspect if people were still living in Iitate (which was heavily dosed by fallout) they would have significantly more than 8 months shaved off their lives.

Well, that's a statistical average figure, not a literal thing that happens to individual people. Low level radiation exposure is a stochastic risk. For most people, nothing happens. But there's a chance you get cancer. Increase the received dose, still for most people, nothing happens. No years off your life. Which sounds great! But a few more people than before get cancer, and it's not at all great if one of those people is you or someone you know.
posted by ctmf at 9:01 PM on March 14, 2016


On the actual day, one of my main thoughts was of the thread on the blue, and later on the grey. It was an absolutely terrifying day, and week, and months after. The outpouring of concern and support on this site was a palpable boon, and it's something I'm forever grateful for.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:49 PM on March 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


I'm sorry but I think blaming nuclear opposition for fukishima is comical. Opposition want responsible for the flotilla of negligence that resulted in the accident. I'm hardly anti nuclear, but the idea that if could have been cheaply, effectively updated but for those pesky protesters is untrue. Look at the debacle around current nuclear power plants; is simply not a remotely practical anymore. Concerns around storage and intermittency of renewables is mostly carbon industry FUD, nearly all the challenges can be met, with current technology, and are being met, and cheaper than nuclear, too.
posted by smoke at 11:29 PM on March 14, 2016 [6 favorites]


Mass adoption of Nuclear Power was our best option to avoid global warming, but we decided to stick with fossil fuels. The FUD surrounding nuclear power safety is equivalent to the FUD denying global warming. It's a shame that, as a species, we prefer denial to solutions.
posted by Drinky Die at 11:32 PM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


“Saga of lost Rikuzentakata tsunami boat forges pan-Pacific friendship,” Louise George Kittaka, The Japan Times, 13 March 2016

P.S. Amya Miller is the subject of the documentary I could be of help. She's an amazing person, and her story is worth watching.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:48 PM on March 14, 2016


Nobody is blaming the meltdown on nuclear protestors. The immediate blame lies on mother nature and our incomplete understanding of the mechanics of fault slippage off the coast of Japan. The engineers took what everyone thought was the worst case scenario as far as the possible size of an earthquake and tsunami and built a plant that would survive that plus some. TEPCO's negligence in the response was a secondary factor.

That said, those uncertainties (although 50 years of seismology had proven Japanese seismologists correct up to that point) are precisely why we should be building passively safe nuclear power plants. And no, the intermittency issue with wind and solar is not FUD, at least not until we spend trillions on a more extensively interconnected grid with the capability of shipping terawatts across the continent or we're all driving battery electric vehicles that double as housr-sized uninterruptible power supplies. (God help us if that happens, because we'll still be sacrificing more than 30,000 people a year in the US alone, countless person-years of time, and significant quality of life in cities on the altar of individual transport, but at least we will be spewing less carbon to do it)

What is FUD is the idea that we in the US are presently anywhere near having a high enough proportion of wind and solar for the intermittency issue to be a real problem. That does not mean that there does not come a point where it is an issue, though.
posted by wierdo at 3:12 AM on March 15, 2016


> The FUD surrounding nuclear power safety is equivalent to the FUD denying global warming. It's a shame that, as a species, we prefer denial to solutions.

:-o

Look. I'm very much against fossil fuels; indeed I consider that safe nuclear power is probably necessary if we are to not drown due to climate change.

I am an asthmatic, ffs! My opposition to fossil fuels is personal...

But when you make statements like that, you're spouting bullshit. You completely undermine the cause of safe nuclear power by arbitrarily dismissing people's very real concerns.

There have been numerous disasters involving nuclear power; but worse, each one of these accidents - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima - have revealed that the "dedicated" managers who we are relying on to keep us safe are in fact inept, bumbling idiots without any common sense, relying on mostly dedicated but uneven and very poorly trained workers.

To pretend that these never happened - to pretend that people are just stupid...

We're only lucky that none of these has gone up in a big conventional explosion, one that spews "hot" and chemically poisonous heavy materials over a wide area.

As I said above - I believe that safe nuclear power is quite possible, and even necessary - but in order to do it, we're going to need to completely revamp the engineering safety culture of the industry.

But that's going to be impossible if people like you are saying, "The only thing wrong with nuclear power is that all of you are idiots."
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:21 AM on March 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


> But a few more people than before get cancer

1500 people died in the evacuation, and as ob1quixote so well researched, a comparable number during the next year.

A cancer death is worse than, say, starving to death in a hospital or being dragged out of an old folk's home and dying in transit - but is it so much worse that killing thousands of people to save a few was a good trade-off?

I also think that, as I said above, from my rather limited knowledge of Japanese culture, that if you had asked people if they were willing to take a very small chance of a horrible death to save their community, that the vast majority of them would have happily said yes.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:30 AM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I didn't call anybody idiots or deny nuclear accidents can occur.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:46 PM on March 15, 2016


Opposition want responsible for the flotilla of negligence that resulted in the accident.

Opposition figures very heavily in the fact that the plant wasn't replaced many years ago.
posted by chimaera at 8:05 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Rebuilding a Region: Tōhoku Five Years Later from Nippon.com posted by ob1quixote at 11:00 PM on March 15, 2016


“Rikuzentakata: Five Years On,” Louise George Kittaka, GaijinPot, 17 March 2016
posted by ob1quixote at 1:12 AM on March 17, 2016


Opposition figures very heavily in the fact that the plant wasn't replaced many years ago.

Interesting. My expectation would have been that the company kept it going since they wanted to milk the last profit out of an already depreciated asset.
posted by biffa at 7:10 AM on March 17, 2016


Deutsche Welle In Focus: Coming Home - Japan

A ½-hour documentary from 2013 (in English) about Sambi Saito, a Japanese-German citizen, returning to Japan for a visit, which primarily discusses the consequences and aftermath of Fukushima; friends of Saito's parents lived near the plant but were traveling on the day.
posted by XMLicious at 7:28 AM on March 17, 2016


“The State of Recovery in Tōhoku’s Disaster-Stricken Areas,” Nippon.com, 07 March 2016
A look at current data on rebuilding efforts in Tōhoku and radiation monitoring and decontamination efforts in Fukushima Prefecture shows the extent of recovery five years after the Great East Japan Earthquake.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:24 PM on April 12, 2016


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