A man who saves forgotten cats in Fukushima's nuclear zone | Hacker News Reader

A man who saves forgotten cats in Fukushima's nuclear zone

reuters.com

76 pointsbillyharris36 comments

This is a "hidden anti-nuclear agenda" article. I see these types of article used to decry my nation often, so I identify them easily.

There is absolutely nothing newsworthy here. But it keeps the Fukushima incident fresh in people's memory. It also shows "the hidden victims", i.e. the cute cats. Then the human victim, detained by the big bad government for helping free wild animals. All bad, bad, bad... This piece is designed to associate the word Fukishuma, already associated with the nuclear industry, with bad things.

With the amount of these kinds of posts/articles we're getting, I'm starting to wonder if there's someone who has a serious financial motive for spreading them.. kinda like how the sugar industry or the tobacco industry was doing back in the day.

Doesn't seem out of character for the coal industry either, just saying...

The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...

Nobody should be surprised that losses of this magnitude are fresh in our minds, only 10 years later.

Chernobyl and Fukushima were massive disasters with long-term consequences. Exclusion zones were created. Many families lost their homes forever. Animals were abandoned and died. Should we minimize these problems or pretend they didn't happen?

What is the estimate for cleanup of the damage done by other energy sources?

Namely, how can we remove CO2 from the atmosphere and resequester the CO2 already released? How much will that cost?

This is heading down false dichotomy territory.

I can drive for miles and not see a single solar panel. I will be open to talking about nuclear when the US is full of solar panels and wind turbines.

I assume you live somewhere sunny and/or windy?

This is like a Murakami story

>On Feb. 25, Kato was arrested on suspicion of freeing wild boar caught in traps set up by Japan’s government in November. At time this article was published, he was still being detained for questioning.

Publication date is 3 March. Anyone know what are the time limits in Japan on police detention “for questioning”?

23 days.

It is quite cold in that part of the world in February and early March.

I am worried that with no one to feed the cats or put fuel in their heater, they will suffer or die before he is able to get out of jail and back to caring for them. :(

Fuck the police.

> Yumiko Konishi, a vet from Tokyo who helps Kato, said local volunteers were caring for the cats on his property, but at least one had died since he was detained.

It sounds like they are being cared for if that's a relief.

Although there is habeas corpus in Japan, seems that they have their own ways of avoiding it and detaining people for lengthy periods.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2018/04/01/issues/jap...

https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

What's the problem with hidro + solar + wind? Why do people here insist so much and engage in flamewars being pro nuclear?

I wonder if the safety concerns of nuclear power are understated. Whenever nuclear power safety is brought up, Chernobyl and 3 mile island are hand-waved away because we know what caused them and won't do them again.

But there is always another stupid way to manage nuclear power. For example, not providing sufficient protection from Tsunamis in a country prone to them.

Included in safety should be the economic cost of having a city ruined and its inhabitants displaced - that loss of wealth means increased stress and less money to spend on healthy habits. (But conversely, the benefit of lower power costs should be recorded on the credit side of the ledger.)

It's probably all moot, since Thorium reactors appear to be fundamentally safe.

The Fukushima exclusion zone has a 30 km radius, where half of the circle is land area.

The Fukushima reactor meltdowns happened because active cooling failed, after both electric power and emergency generators failed becaused of the flooding from the tsunami.

These reactors were of a very old 1960s design that depended on active cooling to avoid melting down. This is not the case with newer reactors utilizing passive safety features, based on things such as gravity (to pull the fuel rods out in case of power failure).

Still: There were zero deaths caused by radiation during this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

I wouldn‘t be surprised if certain states would even face a gravity outage at some point

That does seem to be the unscientific position of your country, unfortunately.

Please stop burning coal.

> emergency generators failed becaused of the flooding from the tsunami.

Exactly. Putting emergency generators below ground when the Tsunami levees were already insufficient was a boneheaded error that could have been fixed any year between the end of construction and 2011. That's 40 years of ignoring a problem a 10 year old would point out.

They believed the wall was sufficient for possible tsunamis. It wasn't.

Having a reactor design with a passive safety feature involving the fuel rods would have avoided this meltdown, and many other extreme cases that could possibly occur in the future.

Sure, but I'm also confident this level of incompetence (not exclusive to Japan) can find ways to defeat new designs (for example, improper installation of the design).

I think increased productization/de-fragmentation of the nuclear plant industry will make things so much safer.

Instead of building 2-5 of each reactor design, build thousands. Sort of like with passenger aircraft. Makes things cheaper and so much more idiot-proof.

This is also business as usual which is why we need to end nuclear as soon as possible. It's not like Fukushima was the only reactor with a large incident either.

It likely have been politically difficult to admit that a crucial safety feature won’t work/couldn’t have worked in the form it is/was built

> Still: There were zero deaths caused by radiation during this incident

That's an official attribution. The amount of radiation sent into the ocean was measurable worldwide. This number is decidedly not 0, in a realistic sense. I don't see the rationale behind pretending this isn't as bad as it is in any community.

https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...

https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...

I guess you knew what was coming but still:

The realistic alternative (coal power) is way worse. So many more deaths. Just with ongoing operations, no accidents.

The alternative is natural gas these days.

Please tell that to Japan (Coal: 33% of electricity) and Germany (Coal: 29% of electricity). Numbers from 2019.

> I guess you knew what was coming but still

I'm not sure what this is a reference to.

I was pointing out a discrepancy about the accuracy of the article, not the relative safety of power generation methods.

The Fukushima incident is still dwarfed by the tsunami itself.

I downvoted you, but I did it less because of what you said and more because of the broader context. You said:

> I wonder if the safety concerns of nuclear power are understated.

Possibly, but this implies (or will be understood as) doubt as to how safe nuclear power is. The counterpoint is that it doesn't matter how safe it is, but how much safer (or less safe) it is than other methods of power generation.

Opponents usually say "nuclear power is dangerous, look at Chernobyl!" while conveniently ignoring the thousands of people with cancer and respiratory problems prevalent around (and caused by) coal factories.

You doubted me for wondering? Ok.

My comment was rather extensive and I feel it explained my point rather well. Nowhere did it say that I doubted you, so I'm going to be charitable and guess that you just didn't really read it.

I'll be charitable and assume you're having a bad day. Both in terms of not understanding what you wrote and feeling the need to be rude about something so insignificant.

> I wonder if the safety concerns of nuclear power are understated.

It depends on who you're talking to. People who are against nuclear power tend to wildly overstate the risk, and people who are strongly in support of nuclear power (like myself) likely understate the risks, which are obviously non-zero, even if they're lower than the alternatives.

That's a sign that an unproductive discussion is going on, but it's very very common.

Speak for yourself. Many others have done the maths decades ago and realized that nuclear is the least bad option.

In my case: 1992.

The biggest issue with nuclear power isn’t the acute risks of radiation from meltdown, in my opinion, but more the management of the waste which will remain radioactive and highly dangerous for millennia.

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