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Fukushima's Fallout Worse Than Thought
gbrumfiel writes "A new study posted for open peer-review suggests that the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi released far more radiation than the Japanese government initially estimated. The study [PDF] uses global radioisotope and meteorological data to calculate the size of the release from the plant. Nature News reports that, contrary to official claims, the model shows that fuel being stored in a pool at unit 4 released a significant amount of cesium-137, a long-lived contaminant that has spread across the countryside. It also says that some Xenon-133 may have been released early on in the accident, suggesting that the plant was already damaged before it was hit by a tsunami. Overall, it estimates that Fukushima released about twice as much cesium-137 as the government claims and half as much as Chernobyl."
See, once again we see proof of what happens when government gets in the way with all their environmental regulations, regulations, inspections, etc. If this company had just been left to the free market, clearly they would have made a better effort to maintain their reactors and improve safety features. Once we abolish the EPA, NRC, Dept. of Energy, etc. we won't have to worry about something like this happening in the U.S.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm going to be 100km away from that plant next year with my whole family. If, over the course of the few weeks holiday I become your radioactive giant IT guy / overlord. I expect you all to welcome me.
I'm not too sure what I'll do with all your base; but thems will belongs to us.
I'll also use my power to right wrongs.
Because packing up and shipping radioactive material is far cheaper then having it sit in a pool of water next to where it was extracted right? Companies always do the correct and far more expensive thing.
I dont know about japan, but in the US regulators make them keep the fuel because congress cant get their shit together to open up the storage facility.
You have the power to change government.
How do you change a company that you're not directly doing business with, like a nuclear power company? I don't buy anything from Goldman Sachs, so how do I affect them?
The market model is incomplete.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have read reports about child labour during the industrial revolution in the area my father came from (the north-east of the Netherlands), before it was abolished. Twelve hour working days, seven days a week, of hard, dangerous work for kids who should be at school, in factories run by people who said they were giving kids enough time to play by giving them one or two 15 minute breaks per day. When I was a kid in the 1960s factories in the area still dumped their waste in nearby canals, one of which ran in front of my grandmother's house. It was covered with a thick, dirty-white layer of foam which smelled like a kitchen sink that hasn't been cleaned for months. My father remembered how boys would set the canal on fire when he was young.
These things weren't stopped by market forces. These things were stopped by goverment regulations, but not until inspections became effective. You just have to look outside of the western world, at the oil mess in the Niger delta, the way batteries and ship wrecks are processed in India, to understand that without a stable goverment and regulations that are being enforced conditions similar to those during the industrial revolution still occur. Western companies behave reasonably well in western countries because they have to.
If you abolish regulations and inspections what you get is not responsible corporations, you get a world where greed is far more important than your salary, your working conditions, your kids' schooling. I don't believe for a moment the west is immune to falling back. It's human nature.
That's incorrect. Once you've piled up enough risk that an accident would end your career (which is what you care about, not the company), then you don't expend more money on avoiding additional risk. This "all in" behavior is not only painfully obvious, it's also empirically demonstrable. It's the same mechanism that renders harsher punishment for extraordinary crimes moot.
The market will at best work to deflect the risk, not avoid it. Without oversight, these risks would be ignored completely, because their magnitude makes them career killers no matter what you do.
Thanks in part to the Robert's Court, if I had a hundreds of million dollars to support politicians, I have the same power over our government as Wall Street and the Koch brothers.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Since part of my job is risk management, allow me to explain how this game works. It's very unethical and very inhuman, so if you have a tender stomach, you might want to stop reading now.
Risk management is about assessing and evaluating risk, then taking measures... or not taking measures. What matters is money. How much does it cost to mitigate or neutralize the risk? How likely is the incident going to happen? How much will it cost if it happens?
An alert reader will notice that there's nothing about the effect of an incident in that question. What about the environmental damage, the damage to human life, the long term effect? How about making an area inhabitable for centuries? All that is summed up under "how much does the incident cost".
And here's where government comes into play and how government dictates just what a company will do with the risk. If they act as they do far too often today, by not holding a company accountable for their actions, the sensible thing for a company is to carry the risk. Or rather, ignore it, since it will be carried by government and population. Again, the sensible thing to do from a risk assessment point is to simply forgo any and all safety and security measures beyond what's necessary to protect the company assets. Unless of course you may expect a bailout if your plant gets too hot to operate, then even that doesn't matter anymore.
Companies do not care about safety beyond what is necessary to protect their assets. They would rather install a full blown security camera and tripwire system to keep you from stealing a single pencil than to invest a hundred bucks to change their smoke filters to keep their chimney from blowing a few metric tons of SOx into the surroundings unless you force them to.
And remember when trying to "force" a company that fines are nothing but a risk assessment factor. If it's cheaper to pay the fine than to heed the law, fines will be paid. If risk, fine and expenses are high enough, creating a shell daughter company that will carry the risk and be promptly sunk in case of an incident is also an option.
Laws are, to a company, just part of their risk management and cost calculation. Unless it's cheaper to follow the law than to break it, it will be ignored.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As a Professional in Risk Analysis and Management of various tangible and intangible assets, the person or people controlling the purse strings never see the risk right in front of them. I fight on a daily basis to try to keep my clients informed of the clusterfuck hovering above them and it's hard work, if it wasn't for regulation I'd be out of a job because most companies wouldn't give a shit and not just because of trying to keep expenses low but because they're idiots. I spend so much time covering my ass and ensuring that everything I do or say is properly noted and recorded to ensure they don't blame me when the shit hits the fan that it makes up most of my overhead. The market will solve the problem by killing itself and anything around it in the process and it's not just because of greed, it's because people are idiots. The people in charge of these things in the corporate structure are usually just idiots and the people writing the regulation are usually just lazy or living in academic fantasy land or are in no way, shape or form divorced from conflicts of interest.
That is not free market economics. That is fascism/socialism for the rich. People who want free markets are 100% against bailouts, or they don't know what they are talking about.
Nonsense.
Bankruptcyt==> company changes its name, moves corporate headquarters, sheds all liability - continues as before. Previous corporate shell abandoned. Public gets finger.
It's been an energy and mining and manufacturing industry strategy since the 19th century.
You are welcome on my lawn.
OK, I'm thinking. I'm thinking "regulatory capture", and "political action committees", and "unlimited campaign contributions". Yep, got it.
OK, that can't actually happen in our current reality. Because the nuclear power plants are owned by the same companies that own the government, and they are permitted, nay, encouraged to write legislation to prevent this. You try to stop this, and all you'll get is a horse's head in your bed and an IRS audit.
I sure do. The government enlists private corporations to build and run nuclear power plants by using taxpayer dollars (since nuclear fission plants are not economically viable in a free market, but the government wants them for war and science purposes) and the private corporations purchase legislation that allows them to obviate risk. It's all very, very clear.
In a well regulated free market, terrestrial fission plants would not exist, because there aren't enough customers willing to pay for the decommissioning costs they would have to charge up front. In a laissez-faire market, of course, the plants would never be decommissioned, because there's no profit in it. The people who built them would just design them to fail after they died, and in the absence of regulation that would work... for them.
Good grief yes. Deregulators drive me crazy. As if regulations didn't exist precisely because someone screwed up big enough to make us say: 'ok, now we have to regulate that so we don't have someone do that again.' As soon as you deregulate, you get 'that' again, whatever that was.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
And the population density around Fukushima is far greater than that around Chernobyl . . .
How about this. If even the creator of the model "cautions that the resulting model is far from perfect," perhaps we, as a community, should heed the warning that there is still quite a lot of uncertainty on how much fallout there may actually be and this uncertainty might last for quite a while.
With so much uncertainty, does it really make sense to downplay? For instance, when someone relatively near to the event asks how to measure for contamination, does the community really have enough strong data to ridicule that individual? Even as the experts say that "ongoing ground surveys are the only way to truly establish the public-health risk?"
What do you lose if your downplaying is wrong compared to those actually within close proximity of the event?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!