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Endoscopic Exam of Fukushima Reactor
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald: "Radiation-blurred images taken inside one of Japan's tsunami-hit nuclear reactors show steam, unidentified parts and rusty metal surfaces scarred by 10 months of exposure to heat and humidity. The photos — the first inside-look since the disaster — showed none of the reactor's melted fuel or its cooling water but confirmed stable temperatures and showed no major ruptures caused by the earthquake last March, said Junichi Matsumoto, spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company." Here's a video.
Der Spiegel has some video, the commentary is all in German, but at least it's better than still pictures...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Putting any statement from one of the clowns from Tepco is just one step UNDER reporting a batboy headlinefrom weekly world news. Those guys are professionnal liers with ENORMOUS interest in asserting that no damage was done by the quake and all was fault of what they claim was a highly unprobably strong tsunami. If any rpoof arise from damage by the quake it would compromise all safety claims made toward japanese nuclear program.
In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite. Japanese requirements for seismic safety at that site were that it should be capable of withstanding an earthquake of about 7.75. The earthquake which hit the nuclear power plant was a 9. The best outcome for TEPCO in this scenario would be to simply be able to say "we met all safety requirements, but the quake was massively larger than anyone expected and so now we're doing everything we can to help". Instead, the plant actually withstood the quake and, what's more, actually shut itself down automatically during the quake. What happened next is what screws TEPCO (rightfully so).
As for those claiming that nuclear is safe because even with this accident everything is fine... just read a little more about all the food and radiation scandals going on. And realise that it's not over yet... For the comparison with Chernobyl... at least the Russian evacuated cities and got the plant under cocoon in less than 9 month, here the japanese are still in denial and only accept to acknowledge problems when they are cought red faced. Seriously, read a little more with carefull distance and neutrality on the topic from a wider panel of sources including ex-skf blog and fukushima diary...
Two people who were working at the nuclear power plant actually received more radiation than the "lowest one-year dose clearly linked to higher cancer risk" (http://xkcd.com/radiation/). Modeling and estimates say that between 100 and 1000 will have a somewhat shortened lifespan as a result of this disaster, but those are quite likely erring on the very high side considering that actual measurements of radiation in plants and soil within the exclusion zone have thus far been much lower than what existing models would suggest should be there. Most of what's actually been observed has been stuff that's very difficult for humans or animals to really get exposed to unless they're sitting there eating fist-fulls of dirt (due to the fact that the radioactive materials in question bond strongly to the stuff in the soil and thus aren't readily absorbed by plants of animals in normal contact with said soil).
This was a 40 year old power plant with known safety issues that neither the owners or the regulators took seriously. It was a 40 year old plant that got hit by an earthquake nobody involved in safety for the plant saw coming. It was a 40 year old plant that survived all of that and was only finally brought down by terrible design issues that led to small explosions and a fairly small release of radiation that may or may not result in a small number of people with slightly shorter lifespans. If that's the worst you've got against nuclear power plants, you should be dropping to your knees and praising Jesus for giving us the intellect to harness the power of the atom.
Coal kills thousands of people every year in mining accidents, plant accidents (mostly fires and explosions), and due to radiation exposure and heavy metal contamination of ground water from all the waste products. Hydro power plants have killed tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands in single accidents. Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year. If all you people have are Three Mile Island (where nobody died and nobody received any significant radiation exposure) and Fukushima (where nobody died and two people received enough
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure for more. The average estimate for the one you mention is actually 171,000, according to Wikipedia, plus it left some eleven million people homeless.
Put another way, that one hydroelectric incident killed more people than all the nuclear accidents in human history, and some of the higher estimates for that incident (as high as 230,000) actually exceed the official estimate for total deaths for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the immediate deaths from Chernobyl combined.
The big difference between nuclear power and hydro power in terms of safety is that it is always possible to avoid the danger in the latter case. Just don't build within a couple hundred miles downstream of one.... (On the other hand, I suppose you could make the same argument about living downwind from a nuke plant....)
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Actually, the gp is totally relevant when discussing nuclear safety.
Otherwise you can just through some numbers around and say LOOK NUCLEAR ... BAD without any point of reference.
If you want to discuss nuclear safety, you must have a reference point, which should be the safety of other power generating sources.
If you want a car analogy, more people die each year on France's roads than in plane crashes in the whole world in the same timeframe (3000 for french road accidents, +=1200 for aviation accidents). But if you believe the media, planes are far more dangerous.
Also, if your lutins page is anything approaching an exhaustive list of nuclear accidents of the last 50 years, that's pretty good going (especially since people dying in a plane crash carrying nuclear weapons is counted as fatalities, even though the weapons were unscathed and not involved). No one would even attempt to do such a listing for coal since it would take too much time (and yes, I know that this is an US list).
Hyperbole much?
I don't know where you get the bit about a third of Japan's rice being grown in Fukushima province. A lot of the rice eaten in Japan is imported, for one thing. For another thing the major part of the contamination from the Fukushima reactors was deposited in mountainous terrain to the north-west of the plant. Nearly all rice-growing in Japan is done on coastal flatlands such as the Kansai region, a looong way from Fukushima.
The tsunami smashed a lot of agricultural areas along the Tohoku coast, polluting them with salt, building debris, fuel oil etc. and they will need several years remediation before crops can be grown there again. This is basically the same situation for the agricultural areas contaminated with fallout although decontamination there might be easier as less soil needs removing and treating.
As for radioactivity levels, I do hope you are aware that seafood swims in radioactivity? Seawater has about 10Bq/litre of radioactivity due to the presence of potassium-40 (K-40). A rough BOTE calculation says there are 50 million tonnes of this radioactive isotope in the world's oceans continuously emitting beta particles and gamma rays. The few kilogrammes of cesium-134 and -137 deposited in the sea by the Fukushima explosions are a spit in the bucket by comparison. The short half-lives (2 years and 30 years) of the cesium isotopes means their radioactivity will diminish in a short timescale -- the amount of cesium and strontium fallout deposited in the Pacific during the H-bomb tests in the 1950s has already decayed significantly, for example. Conversely K-40 has a half-life of over a billion years meaning it will be a threat to life until the Sun goes into its red giant phase.
The FDA already recommends limits on eating seafood. This is due to the high levels of mercury found in fish like tuna. Unlike radiation this cumulative toxin never decays and more is being added every year to the seas, due in part to coal-burning power stations. Attempts are being made by the EPA to reduce the US contribution to this ongoing natural disaster from the current level of 50 tonnes a year at the smokestack but the coal industry is pushing back on this, not surprisingly. In comparison guess how much mercury the nuclear power industry adds to the seas each year? Yep, you you're right. A big fat zero.