Fukushima 8 years on – photo essay
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Perhaps the government - many successive governments - could have changed zoning, building code etc so that the disaster would have been smaller, but the nuclear element of the "whole disaster" is just a minor component.
If you consider the tsunami "the whole disaster", yes; but if we restrict the issue to the nuclear accident, the Japanese government carries a lot of responsibility. Fukushima, iirc, was an aging and creaking reactor in a somewhat dangerous location, which should have been decommissioned a long time ago. When disaster struck, official reactions were very opaque to begin with - not as bad as the Soviet ones in Chernobyl but definitely not as open as they should have been. Raising radiation thresholds, as mentioned in the article, was particularly egregious; regardless of whether it may or may not be scientifically correct, it's not the right thing to do after something like this, because the optics are (rightly) damning.
So yeah, if the Japanese government had done the right thing by closing down Fukushima 10 years before the tsunami, the city would not have died as it did. That is "the whole disaster" for the area.
I might be reading this too literally, but if it is scientifically justifiable to raise the radiation thresholds, why not do it?
"The government should make decisions based on science" is a little controversial in some less-reputable quarters, but generally speaking it is a good idea. "Optics" do not take precedence when there is a risk of people are being kicked out of their homes or suffering economic losses for unscientific reasons.
The duty of care should follow clear priorities: health first, property second. If your priority is really to care for people's health, it's better to be on the safer side, and follow the stricter approach you have on the table. By all means raise thresholds 10 years later "because studies", but not shortly after the accident - regardless of scientific truth, it smacks of interested carelessness while handling people's health. IIRC, people had already been mostly evacuated by that point anyway, it just felt like an attempt to save money and troubles by pushing them back in their homes.
Besides, by ignoring optics, they achieved the opposite effect: people distrusted the advice and are still not going back, years after. The government likely lost their trust for ever.
I don't speak Japanese, so there are obviously some assumptions I'm making, but ...
If there are thresholds then those thresholds are being used to stop people selling products or as guidance for things like the evacuation and exclusion zones. If they are not in line with the current best knowledge, then people will be losing their livelihoods and being ejected from their homes and barred from returning for no reason. That is a crisis and should certainly prompt immediate action.
Your complaint seems to be that they should have toughed it out with inappropriate regulation because that would instill a sense of confidence in government.
(1) That is unfair to the people they displaced.
(2) I have no way of checking how the Japanese feel about their government, but at some point we can't be that pessimistic about the public's ability to deal with reality. The truth has intrinsic value and should be supported by regulation.
If a law, regulation or standard is inappropriate the government should change it promptly. If the population are being superstitious, maybe work on improving the education system. Spread some knowledge.
That regulation had in been in place for quite some time, clearly for a reason. To suddenly relax it in the middle of a crisis where such regulation could save lives at the expense of property, it's just not the right thing to do.
> (1) That is unfair to the people they displaced.
Are you being provocative on purpose? People had already been displaced and did not go back when they raised thresholds. The change was, in all likelihood, an attempt at making "little people" go about their lives so as to reduce the inconvenience on central government. After all, the worse it could happen was that cancer rates would go up in a few years, which someone else could deal with. That is unfair.
> At some point we can't be that pessimistic about the public's ability to deal with reality.
As proven by facts, you'll be optimistic at your peril. Good leadership (and hence government) is about empathy as much as it is about truth. This goes double if you've only just attempted to minimize and downplay a catastrophe, as TEPCO and Japanese authorities did right after the tsunami. How can you ask people to trust you in matters that advantage you more than them, when you've only just lied to them?
> If the population are being superstitious
Detecting corruption is not "superstition". This comment is downright callous towards people who lost their livelihood because of greed and incompetence by TEPCO and the Japanese government.
You can rebuild houses, you can re-grow crop, but you can't clean up nuclear waste effectively. (3 Miles Island took 14 years and $1b, there are radioactive boars roaming the forests of Bavaria, hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl)
When doing so, they took an airplane, where the radiation levels are even higher (though of course only for just a few hours, but certainly everyone who flies is exposed to the risk of cancer, and for those who get a cancer, it's also not a minor component).
Risks of radioactivity are blown out of all proportion when dicsussing application of nuclear power.
Doesn't mean you want to be living next to a nuclear power plant. And it gives no comfort to people who have their health significantly affected because of the actions or inactions of nuclear power plant operators and governments.
And you are speculating on reasons of your countrymen you probably have no clue about. Did you talk to any of them ?
Bear in mind over 15000 people died from the earthquake and tsunami
[1] https://www.irsn.fr/EN/publications/thematic-safety/fukushim...
Until years later, oh wait, it did.
Governments everywhere have a long track record at taking action to mitigate their responsibility, not to actually take care of the population. When your life is on the line, it's sane to doubt.
If there was evidence that radiation from Chernobyl was causing a problem at a scale beyond what you'd expect of any large industrial project someone would have spotted it by now. Instead the numbers seem to be being revised downwards and the damage turns out to be mitigatable as more evidence comes in.
I don't.
I assume incompetence and selfishness.
Also I've now read enough history to have a good overview on how people in charge deal with crisis. They are human, they have an agenda, and most of the time, the agenda is not the in favor of the ones they are ruling.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons%C3%A9quences_de_la_catast...
That said, if memory serves me correct, they should have ensured proper backup power a long time before the tsunami, so a timely shutdown and following cooldown could happen without problems.
- the plant had designs flaws and shortcuts taken that worsened the effect of the tsunami
- government media (NHK) heavily downplayed the issue while the reactor was melting, independent journalists got shutdown, actual information only leaked through anonymous sources
- even after the anonymous info was proven true, there were still active campaigns to downplay the events and just put a seal on any further information leak
- contaminated soil and debris got shipped around the country with vibrant "solidarity above all" chants to shutdown critics
- media campaign were launched to eat Fukushima fruits and vegetable
- yakuza got involved in sourcing the contractors that do the cleanup
- health damage is/was massively downplayed to remove any institutional responsibility
I know a lot of that is just "business as usual", but if we're asking if former residents of Fukushima are wrong to distrust the government, I think there's a lot to take into account.
I'm just going to pick this one thing because I was in Japan at the time and watched the NHK broadcasts. The thing I have always found frustrating is that I believe the information reported by the western media was wrong.
At the time NHK (and every channel, actually) literally turned their entire schedule into detailed descriptions of what was going on at Fukushima. In fact, advertising on the commercial channels was dominated by AC Japan [1] because it was considered unseemly to advertise during these presentations.
Specifically I remember seeing models showing how the reactors worked and I remember TEPCO officials saying, "The data is consistent with a meltdown, but we can not confirm that at this time". This was somehow, incredibly, reported as "There has not been a meltdown" by the western media.
I kept telling expats in the area that the information they were getting in Western media was wrong, but nobody would listen to me. Everyone I spoke to in Japanese understood extremely well what the situation was. Everyone I spoke to in English was panicking because the information they were getting was absolutely wonky.
I eventually looked into it and almost all of the reports for the western media was coming from a group of reporters working for Reuters. I do not believe they are Reuters staff, but were working on contract. These reports were picked up by everybody and published without changes.
I wish I'd made better notes because now so long after the fact, it's hard to show what happened. However, if you go into the old revisions on Wikipedia, you can see for yourself. At the time, the page was being updated several times a day with links to new articles being written. Check the bylines on those articles and you will see that they are all written by the same people.
The IAEA used to have a page with all of the statements from TEPCO (in Japanese). You could, at the time, cross reference those with the news releases out of Reuters and show that the Reuters news releases were incorrect. I have not been able to find that page for about 5 years now, which is really frustrating.
It will probably seem incredibly implausible to you, as I know you are very confident of what you are saying. However, I think if you actually talk to most Japanese people, they do not doubt the government with respect to the way Fukushima was handled the way you say they do. Or at least that is my experience.
I thought I clearly remembered rumours of meltdown being publicly denied, and some sources are in line with that: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-fukushima/20171226/1756...
Now there was a lot of reporting, and I wouldn't be surprised if some Tepco employees would be more frank and bring more information. I followed the official news only for the first week or two, and switched to different sources afterward so it might have been another tone as well after that.
PS: about the oversee reporting, the most I was hearing of were France and US news, and they were so clearly biased, some to extreme alarmism, and some were completely damage controlling the impact on their internal nuclear policy. I am with you on the general impression that the info was of very low quality all over the board internationally, while Japanese research groups had very clear and explicit reports day by day, week by week on what is going on and where.
The disaster caused by the Tsunami killed 15 000 people. Yeah, by all accounts you should be a lot more worried by the sea than nuclear.
https://phys.org/news/2014-06-smartphone-detector-app-positi...
eg
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rdklein.ra...
Is the radiation that scary? My understanding it that it is comparable to living in an area with lead in the water or eating a high-mercury diet of fish.
You can just do random spot checks and get plenty of data. One walk in a 10x background radiation park isn't going to do you any harm.
If anyone's curious about why this is set up for a ceremony and was left like this (that is, why the timing was so coincidental), it's because the earthquake occurred on the afternoon of March 11, which was a public school graduation day around Japan.
Graduations occur in the morning, with students leaving soon after, so no ceremony would have been interrupted. In the afternoon, teachers generally start unwinding and slowly cleaning up the gym, so the earthquake would have taken place then and that explains why the graduation ceremony decorations and a few chairs/tarps are still out.
How about these pictures from April 2019 instead? https://tokuhain.arukikata.co.jp/fukushima/2019/04/post_169....
That's a very serious claim to make especially considering the author is a professional photographer. I don't see any indication these are stolen, it's just the same subject matter[1]. Maybe you shouldn't run around slandering people without offering proof?
[1] Here are some of the photos credited to James Galbraith https://blurp.co.uk/overseas/eerie-pictures-show-the-desolat...
Did you write this on the photographer's web site?
The photographer has visited Fukushima on several occasions, you can see that on the rest of his site, and he appears himself on some of the earlier pictures.
"The efforts of thousands of workers and billions of dollars spent on decontaminating the contaminated areas are beginning to bear fruit."
This is hardly fearmongering.
Also from the article:
"That is why it’s important to document the consequences of a nuclear disaster. Many of the devastated, abandoned and contaminated buildings and interiors I have photographed no longer exist. They have been cleaned and restored or demolished. This is obviously right and necessary. My task, however, is different. I want to preserve as many testaments to the nuclear disaster and human tragedy as possible. Despite eight years having passed, there is still a huge number here, particularly in the red zones — the most radioactive ones that are still closed and where residents are not allowed to return. Although I could be wrong, there is no indication they ever will. Let them serve as a warning to future generation so they do not forget what the careless handling of nuclear energy can lead to."
This seems very right and proper. The author does not criticize nuclear energy as such. His aim was to "document the consequences", he has done so diligently and without "fearmongering". I am actually pro nuclear energy, but if you object to this - you are unreasonably complacent.
By reading these two sources I can get both sides of the story and see the arguments for and against.
This is how debates usually work.
A tangent, but this mindset of "there are always two valid sides at the extremes and we need to present both" is said to be a huge burden on the reporting about politics in the US, it makes the most extreme viewpoints visible and supported the rise of the fascists in the GOP. I agree.
Dismissing anything as "propaganda" gets us nowhere.
For what it's worth, I smelled what's up right when he talked about chernobyl right below the The Shocking Truth subheadline. The way the deaths are calculated is highly disputed, and he does not reflect that properly, instead presenting the pro-nuclear viewpoint as truth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927377 links an article that covers that in a way more balanced way.
I (temporarily) removed it because I claimed the referenced article only talked about cancer death rates instead of cancer rates. That was a mistake on my part.
It's too black and white to see a controversial debate in "true" vs "false" statements. I mean "vaccines may have serious side effects" is not a false statement, however if it's the only statement it omits other also true statements such as "measles may cause serious complications" and the numbers / statistics comparing the two.
The argument is that the disasters typically demonstrate that even when things go horribly wrong nuclear is still better than business as usual (once considered in an appropariate global context). Business as usual is basically a disaster every year, when compared to nuclear.
The economic costs of mining coal/petroleum alone are catastrophic if there was a way to avoid it (eg, by mining uranium instead, which requires a fraction of the effort). Extraction is a huge waste of time and resources assuming that there is a way to avoid doing it. All the personpower and capital could be deployed to doing other things if it wasn't being used to dig big holes.
In fact, residents of Colorado, where radiation is higher because of high concentrations of uranium in the ground, enjoy some of the lowest cancer rates in the U.S.
It links to https://coloradosun.com/2019/02/04/colorado-skin-cancer-rate... titled Colorado has the highest per-capita rate of skin cancer, thanks to sunshine and high elevation, which does not mention Uranium at all. The article does mention a low percentage of people diagnosed with cancer, and a death rate declining faster than average. However, this gets attributed to factors like low obesity and smoking rates and above-average health care coverage. If that's accurate, the article doesn't really allow us to come to any conclusions regarding background radiation effects on cancer rates except that they are less impactful than smoking...
The source is saying that they have one of the lowest cancer rates and that the effects are all non-radiation based.
Shellenberger didn't provide a reference for Colorado having high background rates - but it does seem to be correct [0].
[0] mtnweekly.com/mountain-lifestyle/health/radiation-levels-in-colorado-highest-in-world
No one talks about how TMI almost breached it's containment. And never talk about how down river from TMI is Chesapeake Bay.
In addition, there are two major aspects one must take into account. First, some power generation methods kill people during normal operation (coal pollution kills millions as a matter of course), no disasters required. Second, the already improbable sequence of events that led to the meltdown of the RBMK reactor at Chernobyl is simply not possible in current nuclear power plants (even in the few remaining RBMK reactors still operating upgrades have fixed the issue).
Whatever you think of nuclear energy, the fact of the matter is we need power generation facilities and there is no such thing as perfect safety. Nuclear power should be evaluated in the context of the options we realistically have, not against some unattainable ideal of perfect, infallible safety. There are reasonable economic and technical arguments against nuclear power. Chernobyl isn't one of them.
It shocks me that so many (loud) proponents of nuclear power plants are still around - especially on HN. I wish you all would have lived in Europe at the time of Chernobyl.
"Electricity produced from natural gas has the lowest risk of the 11 technologies (five conventional, six non-conventional) It is a factor of about two lower than the next highest, nuclear power Third is a non-conventional system, ocean thermal, which can convert the temperature differences of ocean layers into electricity. Most other non-conventional systems have far higher risk. However, the highest of all are coal and oil, with risk about 400 times that of natural gas."
I get the feeling that this study from the 70s doesn't have all the facts that are relevant today.
I think the three coal-powered thermal plants within the city limits of Chisinau did (and are still doing) way more damage than Chernobyl ever did.
No one is advocating for coal here. It's terrible.
That is exactly what is happening. Japan is building new coal plants to make up for the lost capacity from nuclear.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/bucking-global-trend...
Had the exposed 100s of tons of stored-in-the-air waste fuel rods lost their cooling water, they might have melted into huge blobs of uncontrollable, unquenchable masses, throwing uncountable curies of radiation into the atmosphere. We all were very -lucky- that they didn't. And it was nothing but luck. Luck is not inherent.
The problem is when these dice are rolled, every living organism on the planet has to live with the outcome. Some call that an acceptable risk. Sounds crazy to me.
The reason is because humans don't think very well at the large scale, and tend to obsess over the small.
In this case, there are massive positives to nuclear and people focus in very hard on the literally-happened-twice-with-pre-CAD-designs accidents. These accidents are bad, but pale into insignificance compared to the good that these nuclear plants have done. And Fukushima was in the context of a disaster that was outside design spec, so it arguably does represent a significant improvement over Chernobyl. The design specs for nuclear plants have been continuously tightened, so I doubt it would have been possible with a modern design.
Everything about the Fukushima disaster suggests that the response has been a bit paranoid. Objectively speaking, the evacuation was overzealous and according to the comments here today the Japanese government decided that the standards around what was acceptable background radiation were too unreasonable so wound them back.
Compare Fukushima to global warming (which I am occasionally assured is an civilization level threat). The civilisation level threat is business as usual, the nuclear solution is a Fukushima-city level threat. Governments routinely sign up for risks that are more likely and more expensive than Fukushima; albeit more spread out in time. Given what the environmentalists are saying about Global Warming it is clearly the case that everyone who could should have switched to nuclear power back in the 90s.
Even now, when it is starting to look more obvious that solar is the path we will choose, it is still a pretty reasonable suggestion that the environmental costs of mining, producing and installing the solar panels will outweigh the damage done by a nuclear disaster, just in a less concentrated fashion. Given that the Chinese have demonstrated how quickly a new city can be built the argument in favor of solar is - ironically - mainly economic rather than environmental.