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Comment by hexane360 | Hacker News Reader

"At Chernobyl, the Soviets simply entombed the charred reactor in concrete after the deadly 1986 accident. But Japan has pledged to dismantle the Fukushima plant and decontaminate the surrounding countryside, which was home to about 160,000 people who were evacuated after accident."

How much of this decision is simply about space? Russia is the largest country by area, with 21 people per square mile, while Japan is much smaller, with 873 people per square mile. If you compare GDP/area the difference is even greater.

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Chernobyl is still in Ukrane (near the boarder with Belarus) and not Russia (yet). At the time it was part of the Soviet Union, but Ukraine has always been a bread basket of Central Europe.

Fundamentally, Chernobyl is a much larger (order of magnitude) event with 6 tons of radioactive material burned and released. Frankly, for all the coverage Fukushima gets, it's amazing that you rarely hear about the associated tsunami and the damage it caused... 22k direct casualties with 2.5k still missing, 230k people still displaced in 2015 with ~400k structures destroyed.

"yet" +++

> 230k people still displaced in 2015

The displacement is mostly due to radioactive contamination still being high in several zones around Fukushima.

The tsunami was a huge catastrophe but it's over. There is no breaking news to get coverage.

Fukushima on the other hand is an ongoing disaster producing news from time to time which, naturally, get coverage.

No, they are separate. Only 100k people are still displaced by Fukushima covering an area of over 400km2.

http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclea...

Sendai is some 50km away from Fukushima and the population center is well outside the evacuation area. Tamura and Minamisoma are the only cities within it.

The tsunami destroyed 400k structures and decimated Sendai, which (note that the figures in the linked article are in 10s of people and structures as indicated at the top of the figures). Some 300k people and 100k homes were within the inundation, ~25% of the local population.

http://tohokugeo.jp/articles/e-contents16.html

In the Fukushima evacuation area the majority of the surface is less than 4x background radition ~1uSv/hr. In discussing an ongoing disaster please look at this video:

https://youtu.be/G_0rQ9hnP84?t=477

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Contamination_dropping_...

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

This badly understates the Chernobyl response. They did remove the heavily contaminated surface soil from the immediate vicinity and clean up the rest of the site so they could continue to operate the remaining reactors. They built the Shelter Object ("sarcophagus"), instead of just pouring concrete all over the site, so that they could continue to monitor and inspect. And earlier this year, they at last covered the Shelter Object with the long-delayed New Safe Confinement, which includes cranes and other robotics intended to dismantle and decontaminate both the Shelter and the ruins of the reactor.

It's certainly true that the Soviets, and after them Belarus and Ukraine, did/do use the "just leave it alone" strategy for part of their Chernobyl response. But it's by no means the whole story.

The scale of the New Safe Confinement is stunning. Here’s a 2min video of it being moved into place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7aMcKinrWY

Thank you for sharing this. I had read about it when they were still building it and marvelled at the scale and ambition of the project. That structure is so large it apparently has its own weather system inside.

You can also marvel at it from satellite photos:

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3896400,30.0936300,707m/data...

I'm possibly nitpicking here, but Chernobyl is not in Russia.

Not but it was in the USSR at the time which many people incorrectly equate with Russia today. To me it's almost ok to say "Russia" when talking about things back then. So long as you don't say Chernobyl is in Russia today.

You're probably not Ukrainian, then. Or Belarussian or Georgian or Lithuanian or Latvian or...

It's almost like people from different countries have different names for other nations. Language is weird like that.

Ukraine and Russia were practically in a shooting war a few years ago. It's about as "ok" as walking around your Californian office calling people "Confederates"... if the civil war happened in 2014.

Don't insult people with ignorance.

This one is also an exaggregation. Russian government supported anti-government forces in East Ukraine, so they could fight against their own enemy. Russian profit in it is destabilized buffer between RF and NATO expansion (driven by purely military ambitions of the force external to conflict). I had few discussions with eastern ukrainians. All of them hate western Ukraine (mutually ofc) and said it was always like that. Absolute evil-izing of russians is a big mass-media program in Ukraine, not the other way round. It is not very succesful though, because both nations are heavily mixed.

I’m not appreciating the situation, but let’s not fall into Evil Axis delusions.

Eh... your example is pretty far from reality, especially considering California was never part of the CSA. Ukraine was part of the USSR, and was part of the USSR when the meltdown happened.

If you want a better analogy, it's like referring to Massachusetts as England when discussing colonial America. Semi-accurate at the time, main difference being Massachusetts was part of the British Empire along with England, but was not actually owned by England itself. The fact that there was a long and bloody war that followed between the two doesn't change that mostly-accurate history.

Yes, Ukraine wasn't part of Russia. But it was part of the USSR, which split into several countries, the most powerful and influential of them being Russia. It's a colloquialism just as much as it is an inaccurate statement.

Apropos England, you'd better not go to Scotland and refer to it as "England" either... people will be justifiably mad at you. And those two countries are currently united.

For you it might be ok but for us who lived in the USSR it is an insult. Just a heads up, you can get into a bar fight anywhere in Eastern Europe referring to these countries as Russia.

160k is around 0.15% of Japan's population, and there's plenty of space for them to move to since the countryside is rapidly depopulating. Of course, it's not quite that easy to forcibly migrate people in practice...

You gonna move their jobs as well? There is a reason why they were living at the area at the first place.

Moving jobs to the countryside does not sound like a bad idea TBF. I want to move to a small town and be able to take a bike to work (and I prefer a workplace, remote working doesn't work for me), but all of the employers are in the big city so I'm forced to sit in traffic for over an hour both ways every day.

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