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3 Years Later: A Fukushima Worker's Eyewitness Story
Lasrick writes "Tuesday, March 11 is the 3rd anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. In this article, a worker at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station gives his eyewitness account of what happened there in the immediate wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami that caused three of the station's reactor cores to melt."
The witness, says the story, "was promised anonymity as a condition of providing his account."
cause hearing about it every fucking day distorts the age of the event
Is fusion the answer to all our energy problems? Is it practical at all and will it be cleaner / safer than fission ?
I'm assuming you were high on some crappy fake weed and jacking off in the mirror as you wrote this post.
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o yea, fuck beta
Almost like this story has a half-life of some insane number of years...
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
excerpted from the forthcoming book The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Disaster: Investigating the Myth and the Reality, written by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident
But it must be true, because you read it on the Internet.
When the power went out things got difficult, communication became harder, the plant was already badly damaged. The tsunami made things a lot worse, and general confusion prevented people taking effective action. On paper it was a recoverable situation that should have been safely dealt with, in practice human nature doesn't cope well with this kind of crisis.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Almost 20,000 people died because they lived close to the ocean.
A few dozen people might wind up with cancer someday because Japan uses nuclear power.
The obvious conclusion? Nuclear power is bad and should be eliminated immediately.
At least none in the designated evacuation buildings deemed to be safe and high enough, where hundreds upon hundreds of people died. Where are the eyewitness reports of how those were crushed? (Oh right.) Where are the accusations of mayors and emergency planners who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people?
One thing is for sure. You don't care about people. You don't care about their lives, as was made abundantly clear on wikipedia. You don't care about what people lost. Some 400.000 people lost everything, in many cases even friends and relatives, not to mention everything in their households. Documents, photos, clothes. Their homes? That goes without saying. And that's the problem.
I wanted to make the suggestion that everyone of the 100,000 or so people affected by the nuclear accident be paid half a million dollars. A family of four would get $2,000,000. Enough to start a new life. The problem is not the cost. $50bn is about a year's worth of coal, oil and gas being imported to replace nuclear power in Japan. The problem is the other 400,000 who will rightfully say that their losses were so much worse, that they should easily be entitled to get even more money.
Yes, it's a terrible accident and an avoidable one as well. It has been known since 1966 (p.50) that the Mark I BWR containment is unable to withstand a meltdown under any conditions, because it is too small. In case of a meltdown you either vent the containment in a controlled manner, or it leaks uncontrolled. Japan only saw the need to install filtered containment vents in any of its nuclear power plants in 2013 ... they must have had a problem in one of their nuclear plants or something. Strangely enough, neither Germany or France needed that kind of reminder to get to that point. They did it a quarter of a century before that. (And yes, it was after Chernobyl. But it's not like the Japanese never heard about that one.)
ONE: On the safety of certain technologies
I once learned buildings must actually be planned to fall by themselves... in a controlled way. Were a building to be made absolutely resistant to catastrophe, no one would know what would happen if a catastrophe big enough happens. Instead, it is planned to break at anticipated points, allowing for a safer evacuation.
Can something like a nuclear reactor ever be made so as to be called 100% safe? I guess not. Yesterday it was an earthquake (of all things!), but there's lots and lots of stories about far more insidious ways a building could crumble, or pipes rust or even a broom fall over a lever -- not to mention action by ill-intended groups.
But the problem is that it can be made 100% safe as a matter of fact... for the first few years. Then people will gladly sign and approve the contruction of these monstrosities. After N-1 years, it's obvious things changed and nobody else feels safe, but trying to close the monster is met even with accusations of radicalism... which leads us to...
TWO: On the impaired workings of organizational decision processes
Yoshida - probably disregarded as insubordinate, yet may have avoided a recator explosion by refusing orders.
Snowden - hated on the USA, considered a hero for the rest of the world for risking his personal life to make a better world.
Petrov - decided to trust human beings and not missile detection equipment, preventing unnecessay retaliation and saving lots of lives.
Without the insight of these and many other anonymous heroes, organizations would certainly lead us to grave decision errors -- as is the case with innocent people put to death after due process. Except that, in certain cases, it's not a person, it's a city, a country or even the entire world. Failing with a single person is something to regret for life; that our social devices create unnecessary disaster and even wars -- that's a stain which affects the entire species, not just the directly involved.
It's hard to make someone who failed admit his error; for organizations, it could prove entirely impossible. On the contrary, certain organizations develop methodical approaches to minimise discussion or to lead it to dead-ends... forum pollution, damage control and many other tactics are used.
Nowadays it's all a political struggle. When confronted with the impossibility to make organizations work as intended, interested parties create new organizations (starting e.g. as action groups or syndicates) to somehow fight -- figuratively or literally -- the first ones. This in turn creates new opportunities for organization misbehaviour, as that is akin to vigilante justice. We need find/invent new ways to monitor, control and deal with organizations, preferably in a way that is more transparent and less politically charged.
The U.S. is going away from fusion.
I come here for the love
>> A few dozen people might wind up with cancer someday because Japan uses nuclear power.
Nope. The first years it was close to 600 in the direct vincinity:
https://nuclearhistory.wordpre...
The number is not considering the widespread ingestion of contaminated agricultural produce, and is exponential over the years (or at least over the firt 300 years)
On the long run, Fukushima takes more lives than the tsunami. Much more.
aaaaaaa
I followed the disaster as it happened on twitter and the news, and like everyone was shocked by the deaths. I find that the criticism of the workers and TEPCO who were put in the most awful of circumstances was disingenuous. How many organizations would have done better? Put yourself in the place of one of the workers on site; power is out, your family may be dead, the water has risen and swept away most of the town, and the reactors around you have cracked in the earthquake. You have no communication, you may be about to be radiated. Many of the workers were evacuated only to be sent back in. What bravery.
We never appreciate the people who face death and do their job.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
The article offers no insight that I didn't know three years ago. I live 90 miles from the Fukushima plant and I've posted several times about what that time was like, as it was happening, from Japan.
No one is living (or dying) in school gymnasiums, as someone above said.
Also, cold weather caused the Challenger to explode.
Anybody want a peanut?
The Japanese government and Tepco will do their damnedest to root out/discredit this guy who they will label a traitor. The last thing they want are other people writing the narrative.
The article doesn't worth reading beyond this paragraph:
"Ultimately, Yoshida would make headlines when he famously disobeyed instructions from TEPCO headquarters to stop using seawater to cool the reactors. Though he was later reprimanded, his disregard for corporate instructions was possibly the only reason that the reactor cores did not explode."
Obviously, the author doesn't know what he is talking about. A nuclear reactor doesn't explode. It melts. Some hydrogen gas may explode, however it has nothing to do with a nuclear explosion.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Whoops, I said it on Slashdot. What astounds me is the number of supposedly smart people who have their heads in the sand, and use the intellectual powers to rationalize away their profound fears that this Fukushima accident was a deadly mistake and is indicative of the stupidity of the whole idea that highly radioactive materials, and tons and tons of it, can be stored safely, indefinitely, and without any consequence to the health of the planet. You smart people sure are dumb
Spoiler Alert: The Titanic sunk because it filled with water.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Flip a coin...heads they would have done better, tails worse. If the coin lands on its edge they would do exactly the same.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
But did you account for....the California house wife who dies of stress related to the idea that radiation from Japan got into her organic cow milk soy blend?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Great graphics from the Fukushima Poster Project
http://matome.naver.jp/odai/2136643079347629501