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Japan Widens Evacuation Zone Around Fukushima
mdsolar writes "Japan has started the first evacuations of homes outside a government exclusion zone after the earthquake and tsunami crippled one of the country's nuclear power plants. 5100 people are being relocated to public housing, hotels and other facilities in nearby cities."
As long as they make sure that no one leaves their pet lizard behind. The last thing we need is a irradiated mutated lizard from Japan running around!
Oh shit! What about all the moths that are flying around!?
If the Japanese can't do this shit safely, then who can?
Hey, this is Slashdot, nukes can do no wrong! Clearly this must be propaganda from the bleeding heart eviro-nuts who don't hold the same opinions as me!
Much of this is TEPCO's fault, and specifically the fault of their CEO, Masataka Shimizu. A few weeks after the hydrogen explosions, it came out that the CEO had ruled that only he could authorize any release of radioactive material, including venting hydrogen to the atmosphere to avoid an explosion.
When that decision needed to be made, the CEO was not present when wanted. When the earthquake occurred, he happened to be in another part of Japan and had trouble getting to TEPCO HQ. But there was no backup plan if the CEO was unavailable. Nobody took over and made the decision. (In the US, policy is that the on-site plant manager can make that decision.)
The CEO wasn't seen in public for weeks after the disaster. He was rumored to have fled the country, that he'd committed suicide, or that he was in a hospital. The Prime Minister of Japan personally went over to TEPCO headquarters to demand answers and action. Even that didn't help, and his office had to directly take over management of the disaster.
Masataka Shimizu is still CEO of TEPCO.
Japan used to have a tradition of seppuku in such situations.
I was born during the chernobyl incident. Like all people from the mid 1980s, I of course developed super powers. Fighting off the soviets..that was easy. But now do we have to prepare to fight the JDF Otaku Division? I dont like beating people who are 5' tall and wearing an Ultraman costume, But ill do it if I have to. Anything to keep the Invisible Civil War from spreading...but man...they have tentacle monsters! Thats no fun for anyone.
you call this 'weather'? part of the delay of the completion of our eternal reward system is that the angel of death has run into political & spiritual challenges, whilst attempting to depopulate southern hillary. the hillarians seem to have advance warning of the upcoming divinically inspired 'visits' this time, & have decided to resolve the matter without consulting any fictional deities. the hymenical council reports that the zeus weapon is being fired helter skelter now, & the war of terror vs.more bigger terror is going as planned. our rulers are even more safe & more than comfortable than ever before, so our future looks fake, like the weather, & our pretense of limitless power.
disarm. feed the billions of starving children. read the teepeeleaks etchings, please. merciless monday approaches fast. hang on to your healing intentions.
With each accident, building new facilities gets more difficult. We have many existing plants that are of older designs, that are much more susceptible to failure than modern designs. This leads to our current situation of using these old plants way past their design life. This keeps plants from being replaced by modern designs that are multiple times less prone to meltdown. Irrational fear is compounding the problem of old nuke plants, making future problems more likely.
homer simpson
Why, just last year, 38 people died in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Big_Branch_Mine_disaster . And these are direct immediate deaths.
If you count deaths caused by 'black lung' disease, cancers and other coal-related deaths, you'll be counting in hundreds of thousands pretty soon.
Things are worse than people realise. Units 1 and 2 are both leaking water from the pressure vessel and containment vessel. Also, the quake craked the site foundations. So the contaminated water is seeping into the groundwater.
http://fairewinds.com/content/fukushima-groundwater-contamination-worst-nuclear-history
They have found highly radioactive sludge in several sewage treatment plants. http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110513p2a00m0na019000c.html
Patience, friend, the catastrophe you seek will occur. The closest man's creations have come to achieving longevity measurable in geologic time is our creation of fissionable material. Those poisons will outlive the pyramids.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
"Release probable, but not known completely at this time"
Except for the measurable isotopes blowing ashore in the western U.S.
Yeah, not completely known. To some of us.
"Low levels of radiation has been picked up by detectors in Hawaii, Alaska, British Columbia, California, Russia, and Charlottesville, Virginia."
Of course, last month's newspapers could have had it all wrong.
"So seriously, lets stop the fear mongering, four accidents of significance and only one - due to a terribly stupid design - resulted in actual threats to the public. Nuclear power is safe, and if people would just take the time to actually understand it they would know it."
Take your time, Pal.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I am not an "engineer", so I have fear.
You know better, I bow to your knowledge.
Can I subscribe to your newsletter?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
You mention irrational fear, and that reminds me of General Electric's early mastery in the field of scientifically engineering breakage to control costs and sell replacement products. The fact that GE builds so many of our impending nuclear "accidents" is one of my chief worries.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I wonder if the next logical step will follow the Chernobyl pattern.
After the Chernobyl disaster, a common effort by all soviet republic to give relief to victims of the disaster resulted in building a new city from scratch. Slavutych is the city of people from the Chernobyl zone. Employees of the power plant, veterans of liquidation of the disaster, foresters, guards and scientists maintaining the zone of exclusion live in a city 50km from Pripyat, and these currently employed in the zone are going the 60km to work by a train every morning. The town, population 25,000 is divided into 8 districts, each with unique style and character given by a chosen soviet republic that lead building it. The design was specifically intended to give people new hope, a consolation and compensation for what they lost. The plan mostly worked: the standard of living is one of best in Ukraine, and there is outstanding number of children in the town, making its average age the lowest in the country.
Now I wonder how would the counterpart in Japan look like, if Japan chooses a similar solution. A modern town built in a year or less from scratch, designed with keeping spirits up in mind, done by the Japaneese may be very interesting...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Everybody calm down, if you knew anything about nuclear power you'd know that it's only a worst-case scenario to... oh wait, we've had all the worst cases happen already. But don't worry, it's safer than you think!!1one!
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
Nicely said. I thought the discussion would be more about the eventual shape of the exclusion zone and how evacuations might be better handled but your post is very sharp.
What about the Strontium-90?
According to the Wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield, table "medium-lived fission products", the yield of Sr-90 should be a bit less than the amount of Cs-137 and the half-life also comparable (28 years vs 30 years).
It's chemically similar to Calcium and Magnesium which we need to live and build our bones and teeth from. We are exposed to the calcium in our bones all our life, from within our body, and our bones protect our bone marrow from irradiation.
Now imagine that a child grows up incorporating a tiny little bit of Sr-90 instead of Ca-40 in her shoulderblade (say it comes from Fukushima prefecture milk). I say imagine because I don't have a clear idea what the risk is and how it depends on diet.
Now imagine that this child develops leukemia. What are the odds that the bit of Sr-90 in her shoulderblade caused it, that it sickened her marrow? I don't know but I don't think it's negligible.
Yet, almost all the reports on the IAEA page (http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html) only mention I-131 and Cs-137. So where dd the Sr-90 go to???? it is only mentioned in the 13 april report.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
All but a tiny fraction of the iodine-131 has decayed away. The cores no longer need constant active cooling. The danger of a major event is very very minimal. Radiation levels are low on site. Off site, most of the area is within normal background levels. A few isolated areas are slightly above.
The evacuation zone should have been reduced weeks ago, but now, for no apparent reason, they are widening it?
It's a simple case of the politics of fear and ignorance. "Oh the children! Save the children! The horrible invisible radiation!"
So how many have died as a direct effect of the radiation from Fukushima? Zero? That's right, zero! Geez, horrible, isn't it?
Go ahead and bang the drum of arrogance and chutzpah since you know so much more than anyone else on the planet. I don't have complete omniscience to address your overweening omnipotence, all I had to go on was your apparent mis-statement regarding whether there had been any known release, which in retrospect you've chosen to qualify as non-health threatening. That is just a quantitative issue, if your colleagues had killed a tenth of Japan's population, we'd probably still be surviving here. My point is that there is going to be a long future for your crumbling infrastructure to threaten my health and if your education didn't teach you about your ignorance then you should think a little harder. As far as me pretending I know everything, Fuck You. You're the one who appears to know it all. Mere mortals such as myself only know what is alleged by our news media and what other seemingly credible sources we can find. My old Gieger counter is not sensitive enough to detect the emissions that have been blown my way, should I wait until I hear clicking before I start to worry?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
"General Electric's early mastery in the field of scientifically engineering breakage to control costs and sell replacement products"
Might want to talk to RCA about being first. They made their early consumer products in various flawed ways to sell parts and monetize the repair business thereby making money on both ends of their product lines. Then Sony came in with highly reliable, well built products and wiped them. Unfortunately now they all suck.
And, I suppose, the thought has never crossed your mind that your wife's cancer could be the result of fallout from earlier nuclear tests and/or accidents? Our technology level does not allow us to confirm such things, and yet you only associate the technology positively? I used to think the same way until I was forced to flee my home of 6 years for the safety of my family.
Do yourself and the world a favor. Change your perspective before being forced to by unfortunate events.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Here's the radiation information from the NNSA and Department of Energy which have cooperated with Japanese authorities on overflights and ground measurements. Slide 6 shows the Cesium levels which are probably the most relevant mid-term. Expect them to adjust the exclusion zone to cover anything green and up (and Iitate is right in the middle), although this being Japan they might just exchange the top soil of the outlying islands. I do wonder what they're gonna do in the 300,000-600,000 Bq/m^3 areas.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
> That is just a quantitative issue
Right, quantity matters with ionizing radiation. Too much is bad for you, low amounts are not in the immediate, cumulative amounts can cause cancer, etc. Some studies assert that a certain amount is necessary for life to exist. I'm not going to speak to that, but too much is the issue and so far that has not occured.
> if your colleagues had killed a tenth of Japan's population
My colleagues? I don't work in nuclear power, they are not my colleagues. I think you have me confused with someone else.
> My point is that there is going to be a long future for your crumbling infrastructure to threaten my health and if your
> education didn't teach you about your ignorance then you should think a little harder.
My crumbling infrastructure? Again, I think you have me confused with someone else, its not mine.
> Fuck You.
And we're done here.
Python
It seems that the quake itself damaged the #1 reactor, well before the tsunami took out the power system:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110515p2g00m0dm007000c.html
thegodmovie.com - watch it
So when nuclear bombs explode during the fight for the last gallons of oil, then that will be what? Business as usual?
Seriously, get some perspective. There are 10,000 nuclear, ready to go at a moments notice to destroy the world. And you worried about an attack on a nuclear power plant? Sabotage? The thing is built, like a nuclear power plant!
As I keep saying, nuclear power will be continued to be used by humans. That will be either in form of weapons to fight over fossil fuels, or as a form of energy that replaces fossil fuels. Pick one.
PS. With non-fossil-fuel economy, no one would care about Middle East. There wouldn't be wars over it, costing TRILLIONS of dollars, if there were no oil there. These are the costs associated with oil. I'd rather have a few Fukushimas as a learning process than millions dead or displaced because of oil.
You can't conveniently "outsource" collateral damage with nuclear power, like people like to do with fossil fuels. And that is another reason I support it.
Okay, you caught me, I don't really know about the actual management decisions and the engineering implementation here, just talkin' outa my ass I guess. Back in the sixties, I repaired televisions and RCA was pretty crap stuff, but suddenly (in the early seventies, IIRC) GE came out with some absolute, unrepairable shit. Stuff that was lucky to make it out of the warranty, unbelievable badness. We quickly learned to jack up the estimates for GE repairs to keep people from actually fixing them. If we found out on the phone it was a GE we'd refer them to the shyster shop in town, that we normally would not recommend. When we did have to do a repair, it was always pretty bad to work on, crumbling apart as we opened it up &c., and then we'd usually eat shit when it came back with some unrelated problem that we'd end up fixing because of the coincident timing. They thinned out the gauge of the chassis steel, the circuit boards got thinner, the components got spindly and poor, It was pretty amazing, actually. As you said, Sony came along and ate their lunch with nice, stout chassis, (and beautiful plywood), and good components. We hardly ever saw Mitsubishis, but as I recall, they seemed even nicer. In the olden days we'd recommend Curtis Mathes, then in the seventies we'd say "Sony, no baloney",or if money was no object, Mitsubishi. We had an antique GE reactor down the road, makin' isotopes, and I used to worry a lot about that place. Another thing I noticed was the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory that i talked to would all parrot the exact same nonsense about how their work was good for world peace. I don't recall the script now, but it was like they went to brainwashing camp and took the propaganda straight out of a manual, not some reasoned conclusion from independent thought or research. I like electricity as much as anyone, it's pretty keen what we can do with it, but I think I'd rather wear fur and hunt my food with a bow and arrow than trust our corporate leaders to build "safe, clean" nuclear generators. As long as the "Wonderful one hoss shay" is our model for manufacturing practice, then I don't think a college-indoctrinated engineer is qualified to design something as critical and dangerous as a nuclear water boiler. YMMV.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Japan does not have any "Medicare" or any discernable "Health Care" program on the local or national level.
Having 30 million residents exposed to heavy transuranic elements which confers debillitating genetic damage which is transfered to offspring, and mostly untreatable will force the Government of Nippon to cull those already in temporary shelters and certainly those new inductees soon to arrive.
The current "refuge shelters" will by necessity become death camps, like in Germany in the 1940s (at that time to ride Germany of the Roma populations).
Given the severity of the release of heavy transuranic elements, at least 150 million will be culled over the next 5 years.
This will be Nippon's Final Solution to the Earthquake, Tsunami and TEPCO debacle.
They can do this safely, for this reason we are only listening to news about Fukushima Daiichi, Onagawa NPS and despite being far closer to the epicenter didn't had any significant trouble. Tokai 2 NPS wasn't damaged by the tsunami either.In fact, the replica at 07/April/2011 was the one that damaged the external power lines to Onagawa, but still they had one working from 5. The main trouble for Fukushima is that the top brass at TEPCO didn't bothered to invest a few million dollars in tsunami countermeasures even when they know that the power plant was designed to withstand tsunamis bellow the ones recorded in the area. They didn't even put bullet proof doors at entrances of controlled buildings. But, if the regulators have done their job then they would have been forced to do it. Now, for saving a few millions TEPCO lost the second most important power plant for the company and lost billions.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
The techo-weenie nuclear Pollyanna crowd spent months of comments on Slashdot telling everyone who questioned TEPCO and questioned the scope of the disaster that everything was just peachy good, we need more nukes and how anyone that wrote about a bad outcome was incompetent, scaremongering, ignorant
or all 3.
Editors please analyze the comments to find if there are paid mouthpieces pushing the nuclear industry view on Slashdot. The misinformation and lies from the
Pollyanna crowd is so persistent it is cult like or paid advertising.
JAIF has published in 13/may/2011 a map of the radiation surveys by MEXT and US's DOE, with the radiation lecture in air 1m above ground, cesium 137 deposition in soil and marine contamination readings:
http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_1305269890P.pdf
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110514e10.pdf
They haven't detected anything in the deep well from the power plant since 3 weeks at least. The most worrying contaminant released, cesium 137, has been detected mostly in soil northwest; and will be a cause of concern depending of how is accumulated by living beings. They have detected it in tea leaves, but still is unknown if it comes from rain/air or it was absorbed from soil
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Does this not mean the emissions will be bigger now?
Do you think that the same company who downplayed this huge disaster to the point of putting people at risk-- NOW during a big important disaster -- that they even maintained the plant within its designs? Those emergency generators probably didn't even function anyhow and they just lucked out that they could blame it on the water.... There are probably plenty of other things as well that were mismanaged, under reported, and covered up BEFORE THE DISASTER when the dishonesty was less important!
I wouldn't be shocked if they figure out tomorrow some of the leaked waste was being dumped there before the disaster... but rather than be seen as pure evil, they'll opt for just incompetence.
Here in the USA there are plenty of plants who only power up the generators for minutes (not days) with no load -- if at all -- and they could easily break down when they are needed. Actually, I read about 2 plants in the USA where a) the generators weren't run for many years and b) generators were not realistically tested.
The design is quite stupid as well, storing all that waste so close to the plant just to save money... Those flaws have nothing to do with technology and the same factors behind those "mistakes" are the SAME factors that exist today in modern projects. Actually, its likely a modern plant would have more foolish design errors simply because the level of corruption and cost cutting today is worse than it was back when these old plants were designed.
I would expect the examples of the previous accidents (every few decades) would provide more loophole planning for the legal advisers than design corrections.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Unless the sheeple with their panties in the twist will continue running around scared that nuclear power is baaaaad. It's these people because of whom the old plants are still in operation instead of being replaced with newer, safer ones.
Illogical.
While you learnt nothing from the example of TMI others did. By sheer luck and early good planning (which was discarded for the portions built later) it was the best sort of accident to have - one that was enough to scare an industry out of dangerous complacency for over a decade but not severe enough to kill anyone. It's lesson is that nasty stuff can happen unless you take care. Just because you've missed that lesson doesn't mean the rest of us have not.
Chenobyl woke everyone up again. Elements of this recent disaster have shown that portions of the industry were drifting off to sleep at the wheel again.
Naturapath Ebonics aside with "toxics" let's consider the radioactivity issue which involves a bit of contact with reality.
Consider what coal is. It's compressed plant matter. It's pretty well all carbon. Now where the fuck is the radioactive material with a half life of more than 6000 years (carbon14) going to be in that? The answer is in the impurities, which are pretty well all sand. Now if 10% of the coal doesn't burn it's not paticularly good coal but still usable - so you've got 10% that used to be sand. Thus that coal is going to have about 1/10 per tons of any sort of impurity that is in the sand. If it's sand with radioactive elements you end up with coal that is 1/10 as radioactive sand. The end point of this is that is you take around 220,000 tons of the most radioactive coal Oak Ridge Labs could find and concentrate the radioactive material you get the equivalent of one banana dose.
Coal kills a lot of real people in plenty of real ways without indulging this fantasy from a failed nuclear PR campaign designed to make people take radioactive waste less seriously.
I am hoping you have merely been conned by a lying weasel on this issue instead of being one yourself.
Hey guys there is a lot of really great housing that has opened up in Japan. Why don't you all move right in.
Did you ever hear the joke of the Geek that found a talking frog?
Or how about the one where a beautiful woman rides up to a geek on a bicycle?
If you knew even a tiny bit about nuclear power from what you could pick up from the press you would already know the answer for that one before asking it. Since even before the 1970s there has been a push towards reactor designs that would not catastrophicly fail upon the loss of coolant. TMI made that even more important and pushed it into the mainstream. The reactors we are talking about are old and did fail after the loss of some coolant.
That's assuming you are really asking about how to prevent earthquate and tsunami damage from leading to catastrophic reactor problems. Your actual question is yet another example of somebody pretending to be incredibly stupid (why pretend I know how to stop earthquakes?) to push an argument instead of relying on the argument instead. There is a lot of such bullshit about now - do they teach that moronic argument tactic in school these days or something? The only polite response to such fake stupidity is to assume that those who use it were actually intelligent enough to survive to the age where they can write and try to work out what line they are pushing with such fake stupity.
I'm sorry, but he's trying to tell me that the Fukushima disaster was caused by the nuclear industry "falling asleep at the wheel again" which makes absolutely no sense because you can't prevent an earthquake.
Of course they cannot prevent earthquakes and I really so not understand why you are pretending to be so stupid. While you cannot command the rain to stop it is still within your power to carry an umbrella.
What the earthquake did was make the cooling system fail. What can be done and has been done in some other reactors is to minimise the concequences of a complete cooling system failure so that the accident is far better contained.