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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."
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.
Fission isn't unsafe. Gross neglect and building reactors in areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen is unsafe.
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.
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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.
"areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen"
That describes the entire nation of Japan pretty much. The earthquake and tsunami of 2011 isn't even the biggest natural disaster in Japan in the last hundred years, the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 killed more than 100,000 people in Tokyo. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 killed about 5,000. The Japanese write books with titles like "Japan sinks!" and make animes like "Tokyo Magnitude 8.0" but they love their country even if it is actively trying to kill them.
Next time you've got a half-day in Tokyo go over to the Metropolitan Towers, the city's local government building near Shinjiku. There's a free observation gallery you can visit on the 36th floor and on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji to the south-west. That's an active volcano, by the way, less than 100km from where 30-odd million people live and work. It's at the corner of three active tectonic plates, the source of the 1923 earthquake I mentioned.
As for "areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen" why do people live in the Mississippi valley with its killer tornadoes (550 dead in 2011 alone)? Do Americans like taking risks that much?
Not unsafe? The likelyhood of failure is higher than you think! Trying to contain the atomic dragon is a fools errand. The story dosent end with safe operation, even if that was possible? The waste products are still a major unsafe factor! Radioactive metals contain much more power than you realize. Not unsafe, tell that to the people affected by ionizing radiation, everyone on earth has an increased risk of cancer due to the atomic age! Don't be fooled by lack of published data linking it up! Radiation in your body from fusion isotopes are detectable! No where on the planet remains unaffected.
All of humanities activities carry with them a certain degree of danger. The more energy involved, the more dangerous they become. A significant amount of effort must be placed in decreasing those dangers, but there will always be danger.
Unless you plan to give up your computer, car, mass transit, pretty much all mass produced goods, and go back to an egrarian lifestyle, you will have to deal with industrial accidents. Engineers are pretty good at preventing known types of accidents from re-occuring, but the unknown will always cause bad things to happen. Claiming that Nuclear is worse than the alternatives just betrays your own ignorance. Indeed, we had all been largely ignorant of fossil fuels consequences for decades, but the use of Oil, Gas and Coal may have had far more dire consequences for the future of humanity than all of the radiation disasters put together. The liklihood that something else, we have been doing since the dawn of the industrial revolution, will be the death of us all is greater than the chance that nuclear will be our downfall.
In the end, so called "renewable" resources may be our best bet, but they are not sufficient for our needs currently, and may never be, and who knows what genie those technologies have bottled up for the future.
In the far distant future, mankind will have solved universe spanning power production using some technology we cant comprehend yet. In 1000 years, who knows what breakthrough power generation system we will use, but holding our breath waiting for a breakthrough will overwhelmingly likely end with all of us sitting in the dark. In 500 years, we most likely won't be using fossil fuels anymore because we probably wont have any more to use), and I'd give long odds that if we still have a global economy by that time, the underpinnings will be a fission or fusion power grid. Nothing else has the where-with-all to produce the power we have come to demand.
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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.)
The U.S. is going away from fusion.
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Apparently, all the familiar sorts of electrical generation and fueling compounds come with an environmental cost.
Pick your poison: mine coal, crude oil and gas, harness the splitting of the atom, invest in wind and solar collection, damn mighty rivers... there is a documented downside to every way we generate power.
The dottie armchair nuclear scientist in me would argue new nuclear technologies are being kept on the shelf using FUD-like tactics while several of the finite energy options are being used up. This is happening despite the fact that the renewables aren't ready yet to sustain a reliable grid.
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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.
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That 600 was NOT cancer deaths. Note from your link:
And
Note that "radioactivity-casued cancers" are NOT included in that description, mostly because there hasn't been time for such things to manifest, much less for people to die of them.
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Also, cold weather caused the Challenger to explode.
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Nuclear power, the safest, cleanest efficient way to produce energy known to man.