Fukushima nuclear disaster: did the evacuation raise the death toll?
ft.com
ft.com
Sure it's easy to conclude things may have been safe in hindsight, but you can't base decisions on hindsight.
Similarly I've never heard anyone argue that we shouldn't take such stringent safety measures around unexploded ordnance, even though I've never heard of any occasion where evacuating the surrounding area was necessary in hindsight.
I think blaming the evacuation is wrong. You have look deeper, at the reason that an evacuation was necessary in the first place.
Have you tracked the WHO assessments of the impact of Chernobyl?
It turns out that there as well, the non-radiation effects (evacuation, psychological stress, etc.) far outweighed the radiation effects.
> reason that an evacuation was necessary
Apart from a core that was certainly necessary: hysteria, fueled by the mass media and an unscientific/unproven and almost certainly wrong model of the health risks of radiation exposure.
There were four explosions. The no. 1 and 3 buildings exploded quite visibly and video of both events is readily available. The no. 2 reactor suppression pool exploded and damaged the suppression pool. The no. 4 reactor also experienced an explosion; this event was initially believed to be related to the no. 4 spent fuel pool, but was later attributed to accumulated hydrogen from the no. 3 reactor.
As far as I know several cores melted down anyway, and there’s no conclusive evidence that the molten cores escaped secondary containment.
It would be a stretch to say that trying to prevent meltdowns was a bad decision in this case. Ironically though, pumping so much seawater through the reactors probably led to a much greater release of radiation into the spent fuel pools, which as I recall have been leaking that heavy (and impure) water into the ground and ocean.
http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the_earthquake_and_the_nuclea...
According to the Ministry of the Environment, radiation levels on the road peak at 14.7 microsieverts per hour, and average 3.5 microsieverts per hour. Officials conducted a test in which a car was driven at a speed of 40 kilometers per hour for about 42 kilometers through the no-entry zone, including the opened stretch between Futaba and Tomioka. It recorded a radiation level of 1.2 microsieverts, and very little radioactive material stuck to the car. Based on the results, the government gave the OK to reopen the 14-kilometer stretch, but only to automobiles, not bikes or pedestrians
Though even in areas that have had evacuation orders lifted, residents have been (understandably) reluctant to return:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2125805-a-nuclear-ghost...
Indeed it looks like the recovery is not going as well as it could. However it's a bit weird to phrase it as if they are at fault for even evacuating in the first place.
Thing is, can we ask medical personal to stay? It causes a cascade of hard questions.
It's also possible that the aftermath of the actual evacuation wasn't well handled; stating that "[the evacuation] reaped a terrible toll in depression, joblessness and alcoholism among the 63,000 people who were displaced beyond the prefecture" also give information about how much of that would still be present for the counterfactual in which people didn't leave but stayed to suffer the after-effects of the tsunami damage.
Also, I don't see how comparing "what did we expect/fear" with "what actually happened" is an out-of-bounds question. Quite the contrary, it should be the question to ask, particularly when it comes to formulating future policy. After all, that's how we got aviation accidents down to levels that aren't statistically significant.
That is certainly true, but at the same time it also caused increased investments in regenerative power, which the article doesn't mention at all. So from what I know, the article looks kinda one-eyed to me.
The evacuation 63,000 people is now known to have resulted in 2,202 deaths, cost $74 billion and still displaces 34,000 people seven years later. All for the benefit of a potential life expectancy extension a “few days” from avoidance of radiation and no known deaths prevented.
Yet somehow most people still think it was the right decision. This seems like some kind of congnitive blind spot.
Several months following the disaster, people of Japan were extremely skeptical of how their government handled the situation. The task of convincing people to stay put would've been insurmountable and would've been viewed as gross negligence.
"In retrospect, the evacuation looks excessive. Less clear is whether those in charge at the time could have acted any other way."
It'd be a bit complex because some people evacuated to places where the natural dose rate is higher than where their contaminated home was.
FTA: --- "The first thing to realise is that relocation is probably going to be a bad idea," he says, suggesting that nuclear companies start providing real-time health information on the risks of living around their plants. “This is what your loss of life expectancy is from the current level of contamination,” he says. If people realise it would only be a few days, they can make an informed decision to stay. ---
But that's complicated by the lack of extensive screening of the few people who remained in the exclusion zone, and unusual shift patterns for chose who continued to work at the Chernobyl reactors after the accident (the other reactors continued to operate for years).
Everything is indicating it's not as dangerous as we used to think, but we don't really know what that means precisely in terms of larger scale more sustained exposure.
I mean you will die 3 days earlier basically means that from a pool of like 1000 people one will die 3000 days earlier because of cancer. which is really not a good way to die.
I’ve been happy paying for FT (it’s not cheap!) but I like the idea that more than half of FT’s revenue comes from subscribership than advertising (heard this on I believe an AlphaChat podcast).
So it’s interesting seeing my two primary news channels intersect (FT / HN), and I wonder what other news sources people read that aren’t accelerant-enabled (i.e. they’re paywalled).
Thousands of people displaced? Oh, that’s just an overreaction...
If there's one thing the Japanese would do different in hindsight, it would not be ignoring a massive explosion of a reactor containment building.
It would be never building that power plant.
The disaster, even ignoring the deaths and long-term effects on the population, will cost over $100 Billion to the Japanese. That's some pretty fucking expensive electricity they got. And the source is still FT, I guess before they got bought.
https://www.ft.com/content/97c88560-e05b-11e5-8d9b-e88a2a889...
It’s kinda sad how the nuclear industry has captured the Silicon Valley environment movement too.
At the height of the peak oil panic it kind of made sense, in a “contrarian thinking” way. Oil was getting more expensive, renewables weren’t price competitive and what other option was there?
But that was 10 years ago, and things change.
Fracking got us past that first peak oil problem, and cheap solar/wind/batteries has killed any chance the nuclear power industry had of ever growing again. But still they keep trying...
My counter argument these days is easy. Solar+batteries is down to ~6c/kWh with zero subsidies, and can be built in ~6 months. Beat that, nuclear power.
Now if they get fusion working, I’ll be very excited.
I think you are underestimating how good of an option nuclear was. Going full nuclear [0] would have mitigated the single greatest environmental crisis in human history. Now we will be stuck with the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere while we were waiting for renewables to become practical.
But, its too late to fix that now. For purely economic reasons, nuclear doesn't make sense anymore; let alone the environmental and NIMBY reasons.
[0] To the extent practical. A 100% nuclear grid was likely never practical because nuclear isn't good for peaker plants.
No, this is not what people are saying. Those plants from the 50s and 60s have proven to be far safer ways of generating electricity than any alternative. Even today those plants are still safer than rooftop solar or wind and orders of magnitude safer than coal etc. What people have been saying is that new designs are safer than previous designs - passive emergency cooling systems, etc.
Given the political environment in the US, there will likely be little role for nuclear power for at least the next few decades. Instead it will likely be China which builds/deploys nuclear power.
Is this 6¢/kWh figure for any region, or the middle of the Arizonan desert?
But most of that cost is the battery. Pure solar (which is location dependent) is under 5c/kWh, in Germany[1]. I'd imagine somewhere like Arizona it would be under half that.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/auctions-bring-german-s...
We do have access to one pretty good fusion reactor though of course...
I’m not familiar with the hybrid systems - do you have a link on those?