err…underreported…not avoided. Where is the radioactive water going? Japanese eat a lot of fish…lots of seaweed, drink a lot of fresh water, etc…
As yet noone can turn this thing off. They might never be able to turn this thing off. 50 years, 100 years, …10,000 years my Emperor!
The other nuclear plants …just waiting for the next quake.
Canuck
1622
Sounds like a good idea-after all, fallout can’t cross borders.
Why are you coming to Japan? To teach?
AlanQ
1623
Not really, there is a scale for nuclear accidents. Officially reactors 1, 2 and 3 are all ranked 5. Unofficially, the USA, France and Finland (not exactly an anti-nuclear bunch) have ranked the accident a 6, making it the second worst civilian nuclear accident of all time.
And even if it is “only” the third or fourth worst disaster, it still doesn’t make comparisons to Chernobyl “silly” per se- it simply depends on comparison.
Sarkus
1625
They really don’t have much of a choice, though. Where do you put millions of gallons of lightly or moderately contaminated water when you need to keep dumping water in to keep from a more serious failure?
Yeah, that’s why whenever I see someone use “clean up” and “nuclear” in the same sentence, I laugh at the absurdity of it all.
You’re new to this thread and it doesn’t seem like you read everything that was posted earlier. This isn’t new information.
My thoughts on the event scale are that it is mostly useless. It’s not a Richter-like scale or a scale that has any kind of objectivity whatsoever. It’s simply a cobbled together tool for bureaucratic work.
A much better scale would be how many people got sick or died as a direct result of the release of radiation. In Windscale and Mayak that’s a quantifiable number in the hundreds or thousands, with Fukushima Diiachi, it’s a handful.
I don’t mean to belittle the Fukushima disaster, and I understand that the main stream media is only going to refer to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and not anything more obscure yet more appropriate, but if the comparison is made then it needs stating that it’s not a fair comparison, every time Chernobyl is mentioned as comparison. Your mention of Fukushima as the “second worst” is exactly the kind of misleading and uninformative statement that responsible journalist and people in the know should not be making.
AlanQ
1629
I don’t think you understand the meaning of the word comparison to be quite honest.
This was the post I was responding to:
And my point remains that such a comparison may or may not be stupid, depending on what that comparison actually is.
We can quibble about exactly how serious Fukishima is, but the point is that there is nothing per se stupid about comparing different nuclear accidents.
Speaking of scales, are you familiar with one they call “time”? Because it is extremely relevant here. The people who died from Windscale didn’t keel over a month after they were exposed… more like 5-20 years after.
Are you saying Fukushima is the equivalent or close to equivalent of what happened at Windscale?
Nope. I’m saying that in terms of deaths it will cause I don’t know if it is, and neither do you. The fact that there aren’t 240 people dead from Fukushima right now is useless information. The people Windscale killed got sick and died years after the event and the Fukushima crisis is not only very recent… it isn’t even a controlled situation yet.
Easily.
I have a couple of issues with the logic you’re using. One, you entirely want to discount the Event Scale and judge the entire event by loss of life. Japan’s 8.9 earthquake killed maybe 10-15k people. Haiti’s earthquake was 7.0 and killed 300,000. Which earthquake was more powerful? We’re talking about the event itself, not the impact. If it happened in the middle of the Sahara Desert with no one around for miles, did it melt down any less?
Furthermore, you’re comparing long-term (decades) deaths at Windscale with short-term deaths (days) at Fukushima. And if you want to compare it to Kyshtym, you’d then have to account for the difference in safety protocols and the reactions of the respective governments.
It’s probably nothing, but a member of the state radiological monitoring team is wandering about the cafeteria here, scanning all the food with a little device.
If the guy is in a full radsuit and if the slow clicks the device is making just turned into a steady buzz when he pointed at your lunch, then yes be concerned.
They might be tracking a bulk shipment they later found contaminated out to the end users perhaps? Otherwise, shouldn’t they be checking wholesalers and suppliers rather than walking round cafeterias? A public(?) check like that sounds like they want to spread the fear rather than deal with this rationally.
But you are expecting hundreds to acquire severe medical effects from Fukushima? Based on what?
Sarkus
1637
I don’t think he’s saying that. Rather, the dispute here is really about how you measure these events. The international scale is based mostly on how much radioactive material is dispersed and how big an area is affected beyond the short-term, and it’s pretty vague in what differentiates the levels. On the other hand, others want to look at this in terms of human death toll. And as CCZ points out, its way too early for us to know if that will be significant or not. And since its so early, comparing it to Windscale or Chernobyl, where large numbers of people died or suffered long-term health impacts, is misleading.
No radsuit. Just a dude with a hat and a vest and a little digital thingamabob.
Incidentally, Chrome doesn’t redline thingamabob, so apparently it’s a real word now.
I agree. Actually it’s so misleading that one could call it a stupid comparison.
Maybe you should mail the IAEA about how they’re being stupid!
