The Panic Over Fukushima

An anonymous reader points out an article in the Wall Street Journal about how irrational fear of nuclear reactors made people worry much more about last year's incident at Fukushima than they should have. Quoting: "Denver has particularly high natural radioactivity. It comes primarily from radioactive radon gas, emitted from tiny concentrations of uranium found in local granite. If you live there, you get, on average, an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year (on top of the .62 rem that the average American absorbs annually from various sources). A rem is the unit of measure used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue. ... Now consider the most famous victim of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Two workers at the reactor were killed by the tsunami, which is believed to have been 50 feet high at the site. But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?"

Comments

Re:I'm still blown away

[Anne_Nonymous]

If that is awesome, what is this?

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. Coal plants on average emit more radiation per kWh than nuclear plants. Including all the disasters of the past few decades.

People suck at dealing with low probabilities of very high magnitude. Which is why we're so scared of terrorists we can't leave our homes...except to get in a two ton killing machine to which tens of thousands die per year in the US alone.

Not a good comparison

[todfm]

While the Fukushima disaster may have increased the background radiation by a small amount, this isn't the end of the story on radiation exposure from that event. Fukushima also released radioactive particles that, when inhaled or ingested by humans, will expose their tissues to ionizing radiation for the rest of their lives. This is why you can't compare the exposure from events like international flights, which are distributed across your entire body and are transient in nature, to the total effects of a nuclear disaster. Some of the exposures from Fukushima were and will be much more than tolerable, transient increases in the background radiation a la living in Denver. For many people, the hot particles they inhaled or ingested will stay with them forever and will lead to significant cell damage and cancer.

Re:it made Exxon happy

[bmo]

Incidents like Chernobyl happened due to cheap building and cheaper maintenance;

No, Chernobyl happened because they completely botched an experiment in one of the worst reactor designs going - a graphite reactor known as the RBMK design. The Russians got the Latvians to finally shut theirs down like a year or two ago. Graphite reactors are *old* and basically unsafe if you do anything outside the design envelope. They will reliably produce heat for your boilers, but don't fuck with them.

You should read the wikipedia page on the accident. It's pretty thorough and one of the better pages in wikipedia.

--
BMO

PS: How old are graphite reactors? They go as far back as the Chicago Pile-1 in 1942. Nobody designs graphite reactors anymore because the hot graphite has a nasty habit of catching fire when exposed to oxygen, as in the case of Chernobyl.

Re:Wrong scare

[garyebickford]

The father of one of my co-workers has spent essentially the entire time since a week after the tsunami, in Japan assisting with the planning and execution of the clean-up. As has been recently exposed in the media, he has been saying all along that things were and are much worse than TEPCO, the government and the Japanese media have been saying, that the response and cleanup efforts have been pathetically bad, and that the exposure for many people and the surrounding area has been much worse than have been let out.

Among other things that have been publicized recently, it's been discovered that TEPCO executives had been instructing their workers to either not wear their radiation monitor badges or to cover them (with lead? I dunno, don't recall) to reduce the workers' apparent exposure.

I've also read that an area of some hundred square miles may remain uninhabitable for decades if not centuries. Sorry, don't recall where - it was a couple of months ago.

Re:Propaganda

[MacDork]

According to wikipedia 1 Sivert == 100 rem. 0.1rem would be 0.001 Sivert or 1 mSv. According to a quick google there were hotspots = 5.82 microsiverts per hour. That's about 51 mSv per year or an increase of 5.1rem.

Where is he measuring this 0.1 rem increase? On Japan's south island?

Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable

[Man On Pink Corner]

What, do I look like a librarian? It's the glasses, right?

Operational power reactors, worldwide: Approximately 430

Research reactors: Approximately 250

Ship/submarine reactors: Approximately 180

Formerly operational but decommissioned commercial and research reactors: Approximately 350

Total # of scary asploded nucular reactors I can think of offhand: 3
(including Three Mile Island which resulted in negligible radiation leakage and no deaths)

Source: Yahoo Answers and associated links to world-nuclear.org

Re:Wrong scare

[cgaertner]

The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission disagrees with your assessment - this is what the chairman has to say in the official report:

Message from the Chairman

THE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI of March 11, 2011 were natural disasters of a magnitude
that shocked the entire world. Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent
accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural
disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster – that could and should have been foreseen
and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response.
How could such an accident occur in Japan, a nation that takes such great pride in its global
reputation for excellence in engineering and technology? This Commission believes the
Japanese people – and the global community – deserve a full, honest and transparent answer
to this question.

Our report catalogues a multitude of errors and willful negligence that left the Fukushima
plant unprepared for the events of March 11. And it examines serious deficiencies in the
response to the accident by TEPCO, regulators and the government.

For all the extensive detail it provides, what this report cannot fully convey – especially to
a global audience – is the mindset that supported the negligence behind this disaster.
What must be admitted – very painfully – is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.”
Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture:
our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with
the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.

Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident,
the result may well have been the same.

Following the 1970s “oil shocks,” Japan accelerated the development of nuclear power in
an effort to achieve national energy security. As such, it was embraced as a policy goal by
government and business alike, and pursued with the same single-minded determination
that drove Japan’s postwar economic miracle.

With such a powerful mandate, nuclear power became an unstoppable force, immune to
scrutiny by civil society. Its regulation was entrusted to the same government bureaucracy
responsible for its promotion. At a time when Japan’s self-confidence was soaring, a tightly
knit elite with enormous financial resources had diminishing regard for anything ‘not
invented here.’

This conceit was reinforced by the collective mindset of Japanese bureaucracy, by which
the first duty of any individual bureaucrat is to defend the interests of his organization.
Carried to an extreme, this led bureaucrats to put organizational interests ahead of their
paramount duty to protect public safety.

Only by grasping this mindset can one understand how Japan’s nuclear industry managed
to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; and how
it became accepted practice to resist regulatory pressure and cover up small-scale accidents.
It was this mindset that led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.
This report singles out numerous individuals and organizations for harsh criticism, but the
goal is not—and should not be—to lay blame. The goal must be to learn from this disaster,
and reflect deeply on its fundamental causes, in order to ensure that it is never repeated.
Many of the lessons relate to policies and procedures, but the most important is one upon
which each and every Japanese citizen should reflect very deeply.

The consequences of negligence at Fukushima stand out as catastrophic, but the mindset
that supported it can be found across Japan

Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"!

[symbolset]

A typical sample from this area would be well below 1%. Even in the shadow of Chernobyl five years after, the rate was only about 5%.

Re:I'm still blown away

[abirdman]

The problems with the plant were not caused by the earthquake or the tsunami, they were caused by the electricity going out. It was not the freak failure of some madly over-spec'ed equipment, it was the simple failure to anticipate a lack of electrical service to power the pumps that were supposed to cool the plant. Once cooling failed, the accidents just happened randomly -- the roofs blowing off two reactors from hydrogen build-up, and various cracks and leaks caused, or highlighted, by pumping sea water through the plants for emergency cooling. Basically, once the power went off, none of their emergency response protocols were relevant.

This confirms (for me, at least) Amory Lovins' assertion that the US will never build another nuclear plant because there's no way it will ever be cost effective, even when most of the liability risk is assumed by the government. This WSJ article is snake oil being sold by some would-be investors (or sellers of investments).