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Fukushima and Chernobyl Side-by-Side
gbrumfiel writes "It's now been six months since an earthquake and tsunami sparked a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. New data from the Japanese government is now allowing a closer comparison of the fallout from the disaster with the Chernobyl. In terms of Cs-137, the contaminant of greatest concern, Fukushima appears to be about a fifth as bad as Chernobyl. Nature News has a Google Earth mash-up that lets you see the two accidents together. Nature also reports that chaos and bureaucracy are slowing efforts to research the crisis." (Note: There's plenty left for Linux users in the accompanying text, but the Google Earth plug-in is for Windows and Mac OS X only.)
The Stackexchange Skeptics web-site has a relatively thorough and well cited wiki, Is Japan's nuclear disaster "on par" with Chernobyl), that compares the two disasters using a number of objective metrics.
It seems fairly apparent based on that wiki that while Fukushima is a serious nuclear event, it is a fraction of the calamity that Chernobyl was, using the available objective data.
In my opinion, after a initial period of secrecy, the Soviet Union did a lot better job with openness and communication on Chernobyl than the Japanese Government / TEPCO is doing with Fukushima.
That should say something to the Japanese Government, but I fear it will not.
The problem I have with Fukushima is that the only criticisms of the safety mechanisms of the plant referred to two things: namely the lack of tsunami protection and the how people dealt with the aftermath. Otherwise it was stressed that Japan is a modern country with state-of-the-art technology. But those were literally the least of the problems. The whole Japanese coast in the area had tsunami protection after the devastating tsunamis of 1933 and 1896 ... which was overwhelmed, wiping a dozen towns off the coast. Either you criticize all of Japan in that regard, or none of it. And the way people are dealing with the aftermath is of much less concern than they dealt with safety before the accident.
... which is obviously very limited if you have fixed installations dependent on sea water.
In fact, Fukushima Daiichi could be found on the third last position in a world wide safety ranking of nuclear power plants in 2010. (Mostly concerned with on-site radioactivity that was pretty high due to leaks.) It lacked emergency generators (13 generators for 6 reactors - I've seen 12 generators in place for one reactor. At least 4 per reactor is common). It lacked redundancy in those generators. They were all the same kind of sea-water cooled diesel generators. And because of the latter, they lacked protection against common cause failure, which demands that you distribute emergency equipment over as wide an area as possible
It also lacked filtered containment vents. Those filters can filter out at least 99% of the Caesium and Iodine (I remember a figure of 99.99% but don't know if it was Cs-137 or I-131). It's somewhat expensive (although just a fraction of the cost of the whole plant), but was adopted in Europe in the 1980ies. Further, safety protocols didn't take account of the finding that the Mark I containment didn't properly seal in a test at a prototype plant at a pressure of about 70 bar. (In emergencies it is supposed to be tight up to 72 bar, but regular testing is only done up to 62 bar.) Which was what allowed the massive quantities of hydrogen to get into the buildings in the first place.
Finally, because hydrogen getting into the buildings couldn't be ruled out in 100% of the cases during simulations, at least European plants were equipped with passive autocatalytic recombiners in all closed rooms of the reactor building. Those are catalytic converters that burn hydrogen with oxygen in the air before it can reach concentrations in the buildings, where it can ignite and either burn or (as we've seen) explode. Those are pretty cheap (about $5 mio per reactor bulding) and were installed in the 1990ies.
None of what happened was a surprise to anyone who dug out the freely available descriptions and research on the safety of the Mark I containment after the earthquake. But of course, that is something that the media couldn't be bothered with. Because they are "reporters" and as such doing research or actually understanding what they are reporting is clearly beneath them. All that reporters are there for, is to "report" (that is: parrot) the statements of politicians and whatever "experts" they feel will give them the answers they want.
Overall, the containments used in Fukushima are a great demonstration of what engineers of the 1960ies could do. They did a remarkable job in preventing a major disaster like Chernobyl. But it also shows what happens when you ignore all further developments. There were flaws in the models of what happens during a meltdown that became obvious only years or decades after the development of those containments. In engineering on the one hand and in radiology on the other - namely, that the dangers of I-131 were under-appreciated until about that time. (Exposure limits were cut down to about one thousands of the previous limits some time in the late 1960ies.)
But given the way reporting was and is being done, nothing of that will ever be known to a wide audience - because it doesn't square with the scare
Sir –
With all due respect, your comments are not helpful.
The link you refer to does not shed any new light on the situation. In particular, it gives a "new estimate" of approximately 15,0000 terabecquerels being released from Fukushima between April and May. The wiki cites 770,000 terabecquerels since the explosion in March, 2011. The reference you have provided is significantly narrower temporal scope than that referred to in the wiki of significantly lower quantum (i.e. is not a "new estimate" of any merit). Please, in future, at least give a reference that advances your point.
Your point is unstated, but I speculate to be something like: the Fukushima disaster will be bigger than we estimated when we look back on it in the future. Alternatively, perhaps you're simply suggesting that we should do nothing because the data will never be good enough. In either case, I find it hard to imagine that in the future we'll be able to improve on the measurements that were taken back in March-July of 2011.
Second, I'm not sure what alternative you propose to "available objective data". Perhaps you forgot to elaborate on why TEPCO is relevant. The references from the wiki do not seem to source data from TEPCO, if that is what you were alluding to.
While you may think comparisons at this point are done by the "clueless", I believe such a conclusion is wrong for at least two reasons. First, the comparison puts into a useful context the information we have. Second, for posterity we shall have the opportunity to illuminate our errors. That the information we have is difficult to quantify or of questionable quality may certainly be an issue, but it requires a brazen or nihilistic cynicism to dismiss it as useless and those who use it as "clueless".
I respectfully suggest as well that you may have missed the point of wikis such as the one linked. It is a community driven publishing system that can be updated at will in response to new information. In this particular case, the wiki also clearly states that this article is about a current event and the article may change in response to new information. Thus, a criticism seeming to be that the data is incomplete or incorrect is not really a relevant consideration, since the wiki was designed with the ability to incorporate that new data as it becomes available (and if better data does not become available, we are no worse off). The wiki provides us with not just the ability to make the comparison with what we know today, but to update the comparison with what we may know tomorrow. It is preferable to work with something today that'll give us structure and historical reference in the future rather than nothing at all.
All to say, your criticism is unclear, your citation is not useful, your conclusions are misguided. I'll say nothing of the tone I perceive and language you use, other than to suggest you may have issues with attitude and maturity, though that is speculative.
As you may infer, it took much more effort to address your concerns than it probably did for you to crack them off. Perhaps you should consider the consequences of your comments before you make such a post. You've added nothing to the discussion, you needlessly distract from useful conclusions and valuable efforts with misinformation, and you've wasted my time writing a constructive response. You could do us all a favour next time, and refrain from posting in such poor form.
I think you're an anti-nuclear power shill.
Here you claim to work for the NRC (suspiciously no mention of supposed house ownership in Japan) http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2359418&cid=36960274
Here you claim to own a house near Fukushima. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2418782&cid=37340946
This time it is an apartmnet owned by a friend. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2418782&cid=37340482