Fukushima Apocalypse

It's an interview with an anti-nuke activist. Nothing but care nonsense. She's a "fallout researcher" who founded "Nuked radio." This isn;t the Atomic Energy Commission or the World Heath Organization. She's talking about bioaccumulation and other very bad things...that have so far cause zero deaths, no icnidence of cancer, and are not expected to cause any statistically identifiable deviation in cancer incidence from the rest of the population, and that is from the WHO.For all the scaremongering, she completely ignores what has actually happened so far:from wiki:

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There were no deaths caused by radiation exposure, while approximately 18,500 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami. Future cancer deaths from accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima are predicted to be extremely low to none.[145]

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Following the power station accident, two Stanford University professors, Mark Z. Jacobson and his colleague John Ten Hoeve, suggest that according to the linear no-threshold model (LNT model) the accident is most likely to cause an eventual total of 130 cancer deaths.[14] Radiation epidemiologist Roy Shore contends that estimating health effects in a population from the LNT model "is not wise because of the uncertainties".[146] The LNT model did not accurately model casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima or Nagasaki; it greatly overestimated the casualties. Evidence that the LNT model is a gross distortion of damage from radiation has existed since 1946, and was suppressed by Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller in favour of assertions that no amount of radiation is safe.[147][148][149]

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In 2013 (two years after the incident), the World Health Organization indicated that the residents of the area who were evacuated were exposed to so little radiation that radiation induced health impacts are likely to be below detectable levels.[150] The health risks in the WHO assessment attributable to the Fukushima radiation release were calculated by largely applying the conservative Linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure, a model that assumes even the smallest amount of radiation exposure will cause a negative health effect.[151]

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The WHO calculations using this model determined that the most at risk group, infants, who were in the most affected area, would experience an absolute increase in the risk of cancer (of all types) during their lifetime, of approximately 1% due to the accident. With the lifetime risk increase for thyroid cancer, due to the accident, for a female infant, in the most affected radiation location, being estimated to be one half of one percent[0.5%].[13][152] Cancer risks for the unborn child are considered to be similar to those in 1 year old infants.[153]

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The estimated risk of cancer to people who were children and adults during the Fukushima accident, in the most affected area, was determined to be lower again when compared to the most at risk group - infants.[154] A thyroid ultrasound screening programme is currently[2013] ongoing in the entire Fukushima prefecture, this screening programme is, due to the screening effect, likely to lead to an increase in the incidence of thyroid disease due to early detection of non-symptomatic disease cases.[155] About one-third of people[~30%] in industrialized nations are presently diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes, radiation exposure can increase ones cancer risk, with the cancers that arise being indistinguishable from cancers resulting from other causes.[156]

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No increase is expected in the incidence of congenital or developmental abnormalities, including cognitive impairment attributable to within the womb radiation exposure.[157] As no radiation induced inherited effects/heritable effects, nor teratogenic effects, have ever been definitely demonstrated in humans who experienced levels of radiation exposure comparable to those encountered following the accident, with large studies on the health of children conceived by cancer survivors who received radiotherapy that resulted in comparable levels of exposure, and studies on the children of the Hibakusha, who likewise experienced similar levels, not detecting an increase in inherited disease or congenital abnormalities.[158] No increase in these effects are therefore expected in or around the Fukushima power plants.

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This is a major red flag that the speaker is a quack. All of the world governments, all of the scientists involved in the WHO, the International Nuclear Energy Commission, all of these people who exist simply to identify the very sort of emergency she's talking about have been ignoring the problem, but miraculously she realizes the true danger! It's no different from the 9/11 conspiracy theorists.And weather reporters?! Really? Meteorologists might be useful if there were actually airborne fallout as from an air-detonated nuclear weapon, but this is just absurd.Nuclear power is the safest method of power generation per unit of power generated by far. Fukushima has caused zero deaths. Zero. None. Nada. Not a single solitary person has died.Are there potential hazards in continuing the cleanup? Of course.But this statement? If Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't render half of Japan uninhabitable, how precisely would Fukushima accomplish such a feat?

It's interesting, then, that despite all that you've mentioned, nuclear power still causes the fewest deaths per unit of power generated across all alternatives, including solar, wind, hydroelectric, coal, oil, gas, and so on."Jellyfish" is an irrelevant aside; the cause of the problem in this case is that cooling water intake pipes are clogged. Any number of things can clog a pipe.But what's the end result? The power plant shut down. Because it was being monitored, and because there were adequate safety measures in place to recognize the problem and react to it.I'll also note that no terrorist has ever managed to involve a nuclear power plant or anything related to nuclear power in any terrorist act, despite your claim of vulnerability. Harmfully radioactive material is more readily available in major hospitals than nuclear power plants, and yet we still don't see "dirty bombs."Nuclear powerplants, even outdated designs, include multiple redundant safeties. You'll note that Fukushima, arguably the worst nuclear disaster in recent memory (since Chernobyl, at least, so depending on your definition of "recent"), was the result of an earthquake followed by a tsunami. That's literally the absolute worst-case scenario anyone could envision for a nuclear power plant to endure short of an actual Godzilla attack...and yet not a single person has died or is expected to die due to the ensuing failures.Please do remember that the Fukushima plant didn't just up and melt down under normal operating conditions due to poor oversight or human error or "greed." It failed because it got hit by an earthquake and then a tsunami. An oil-fired plant would have caused an environmental disaster in those circumstances. A hydroelectric dam would likely have broken and caused its own massive devastation.There are arguments to be made regarding nuclear power, dronester. It's not perfect, and it can be better, with modern technology and engineering that learns from previous mistakes.But a string of claims that amount to little better than suggestive lies are not a way to make such arguments.

Im not, actually. The root cause of the Fukushima failure was an earthquake followed by a tsunami. If the earthquake and tsunami had not hit, the Fukushima disaster would not have happened.There were engineering improvements that could have been made to prevent the disaster even with the earthquake and tsunami, but that doesn't change the fact that the disaster was due to a one-two punch of natural disasters.The largest single issue was the location of the backup generators (you could also make the argument that the issue was the need for active cooling requiring generators in the first place, and that would be fine, I'm just sticking to the simplest solutions). They kept them in the basement, below sea level, and would obviously be at risk in the case of flooding, like what you see in a tsunami. Moving the generators to an upper level, high above sea level, would have kept the coolant pumps working despite the earthquake and tsunami, and the chain reaction (pun intended) of failures would not have occurred in the first place.There were other issues at Fukushima, and Tepco has not proven worthy of strong confidence, but those issues were primarily tangential, or at worst they made the cleanup worse - the root cause was not Tepco. The root cause was an earthquake, followed by a tsunami. Even with design changes, there would still be a chance of failure under those conditions. Sometimes they are. Not always.But the issue isn't just nuclear power, in a vacuum. The issue is nuclear power relative to alternatives. You could similarly say that "hydroelectric power plants shouldn't be built near populous zones." Or the same for gas power plants. Or even gas transport lines. Or oil pipelines, some of which would service oil power plants. These are also extremely hazardous, and it's disingenuous on the border of lying to say that nuclear plants shouldn't be built near populous zones. It leads the reader to multiple false conclusions.It's actually safer from the actual data to live closer to a nuclear power plant than it is to live near a gas plant, or a hydro plant. "Fewest deaths per unit of power generated" means something, you know.But there are also reasons for selecting locations for power plants, nuclear included. One reason is personnel - you need people to be able to get to the power plant to keep it running safely. Other reasons are technical - longer transmission lines mean higher requirements in maintenance and lower efficiency through the resistance of the lines. And sometimes you need to provide power for an awful lot of people, and you have very little space available. SOmetimes they are. Indeed they shouldn't be placed on highly active faults. But neither should literally any other form of power generation. An earthquake can more easily cause an oil spill from a pipeline or an oil plant than it can cause a nuclear disaster. Again, your statement is so misleading in and of itself as to border on lying. It leads the reader to multiple false conclusions. Tsunami risk areas constitute all coastlines. Tsunamis that can actually cause reasonable chances of damage are also extremely rare. This is why you've only heard of one nuclear disaster related to a tsunami, despite the fact that many nuclear plants are built on the coast so that they can have easy access to coolant water. They absolutely are. The article you mentioned at the start of this conversion, in fact, regarding a shutdown due to jellyfish clogging a coolant intake pipe, demonstrates exactly what you're saying is lacking here, dronester. Failures in regulation and monitoring are the extremely rare exception, and here you are making a statement that very clearly makes it sound like they are the rule. Once again you're leading the reader to make factually incorrect conclusions with your misleading statements. They have multiple redundant backups. The fact that, in one case, the safety backups weren't adequate to overcome an earthquake followed by a tsunami is not an inherent flaw in nuclear power generation or policy. At best one could argue (and I would argue exactly this) that we should begin upgrading our powerplants, up to and including retiring old ones in favor of newer ones engineered to incorporate solutions to the shortcomings we've seen over the past decades with older plants. Things like passive cooling systems and passive shutdown procedures, so that disasters or even human errors could only ever cause the plant to shut itself down safely.You;re again making it sound like nuclear power is inherently unsafe, at least in its current state. While I'd agree that we could do better, it's still dishonest, because nuclear power has the absolute best safety record of any power generation technology, including wind and solar, per unit of power generated. Your words again lead the reader to draw false conclusions. I can agree in principle. But let's be realistic - everything is operated with known design flaws. There is no such thing as a perfect design. I'd agree that governments and utilities can do better to improve designs, between retrofitting existing reactors and replacing old with new, but economically that's just not always feasible, and many of the design flaws are only apparent in a statistically unlikely scenario - like being hit with an earthquake, followed by a tsunami. The pools were ferrocrete - steel-reinforced concrete. That's essentially de very definition of "reinforced." There's just only so much you can do to reinforce a structure to be able to deal with an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, followed by a coolant failure, which allowed a buildup of hydrogen to start creating explosions inside the reinforced but already-weakened structures.This isn't a comic book. We can't just build stuff out of adamantium and call it unbreakable.A better solution would be reprocessing spent fuel rods to generate still more power and reducing waste, as well as making what waste remains radioactive for a shorter period of time. See France for a very successful example. This might as well just be a lie, outright. There has never, not once, ever, been a case where terrorists were able to retrieve nuclear material from a nuclear power plant. Hospitals have radioisotopes that are just as dangerous under less security (and in a form more easily carried and smuggled), and yet we haven't seen any dirty bombs. What isn't, exactly? I'm not even sure what you mean here - "greed" is not some magic force that makes nuclear power plants melt down. If you mean orders from above to keep a plant operating and ignoring maintenance requirements or cutting inspections or whatnot, this is not a problem in the overall case of nuclear power generation. If it is, I'd like to see your evidence for it.Bear in mind, nuclear power retains the absolute best record in terms of deaths caused per unit of power generated across all alternative power sources. That sort of record is absolutely the result of adequate safety backups, adequate oversight, adequate regulation, adequate maintenance, adequate engineering, and so on. That sort of record doesn't just appear from thin air.

The only answer I'm aware of is, ironically, the regulatory structure. It takes a lot of red tape to get a nuclear power plant approved - the cost is in the billions. An entirely new design with a new fuel cycle might be even more difficult, and businesses might find it to be risky.Then there are folks like dronester, who argue so strongly against nuclear power in general that we tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater. That's just my best guess.But I'm with you - I'd be all on board for a Thorium fuel cycle. And I believe you're talking about a molten salt design, which is passively cooled and passively temperature-regulated and passively shuts down in case of an emergency, which is all great.Thorium also has a longer usable fuel cycle than Uranium, so we can get more power out of it on top of its increased abundance, and the waste material after reprocessing is both minimal and only radioactive for a relatively short time (if I remember correctly, hundreds of years, not thousands or millions).