Fukushima: It's much worse than you think
english.aljazeera.net
english.aljazeera.net
"The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster."
I tried to source this on Google. I can't find the article by Sherman and Mangano, but found this discussion:
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550
It appears the authors cited by AJE were using CDC data. Someone posts the infant death numbers at the Berkeley link. The numbers are very small with a lot of deviation. And it's not clear that they're even being measured against total number of births.
I've heard a lot of praise for AJE's reporting and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that TEPCO and the Japanese government were continuing to understate the risk, but this article seems shoddy and sensationalistic.
And, frankly, even then it seems very early to draw a conclusive connection to Fukushima. Correlation != causation.
This person thinks they provide a distorted picture. Probably a good pass using all west coast cities and a more complete time span would be the best indicator.
Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist:
Joseph Mangano is the director of the "Radiation and Public Health Project":
They are not exactly disinterested parties, and it is fair to say that their article would never be published in a peer reviewed journal:
http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html
Side Note: This is not the most scientific graph in the world, but (in the event of another panicked radiation article) it is always worth linking to the xkcd graph on radiation:
Either way, though, that seems surprising to me that there'd be a 35% increase in infant mortality.
I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear, but that's my point, it's so implausible. US is very far from Japan, so if there was a 35% spike there then the researchers' first reaction should have been to check the corresponding stats for Japan. If they didn't it smacks of intellectual dishonesty.
One of the most frequent complaints that comes up is the lack of safety mechanisms built into the reactor. Sure, they could have done a better job (the fact that electricity is needed for a cool-down is particularly disturbing) - but really, /all/ industrial mechanisms are going to start to experience a significant problems when hit by a historically significant earthquake. Sure, the engineers should have expected earthquakes (and they did - this is Japan, after all), but it's unreasonable to expect them to be prepared for a 9.0, just as it's unreasonable to expect them to be prepared for a direct meteor strike.
Would you build a plant that could only handle a 100 year earthquake, but not a 1000 year one? You'd give your children and grandchildren a 1/10 chance of catastrophe... in exchange for what, supposedly cheaper power?
Again, not that the engineers didn't screw up. But the fact that a nuclear power plant got destroyed by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake should come as a surprise to nobody, and should not reflect poorly on nuclear technology in general, any more than the fact that cars crash when driven by drunks should reflect poorly on motors.
"But sir - the question only said to shut down the power plant. It didn't mention doing without electricity!"
I'm surprised by both those things.
Don't get me wrong, personally I think it's very valid to bring up and important to keep in mind while reading their article. But it seems like a double standard to me.
and the relevant HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2045120
Even if it's Stalin saying "Murder is wrong, because kills someone", it doesn't matter that he himself was a mass murderer. It would make him a hypocrite, and a terrible person, but his logic still stands by himself.
On an unrelated note, I liked your (unintentional?) subtle humor of pointing out who wrote the article on ad hominem.
In the legal system it's perfectly acceptable to bring up such an ad hominem argument: motive.
No one should be convicted on motive alone, however it does frame the interpretation of facts in a certain way.
In this particular case we have a seemingly sensationalist article, along with some suspect data collection, and then a large jump from correlation -> causation about nuclear fallout. Once it is seen that the authors have a vested interest in damning nuclear power, it's much easier to draw conclusions about what's going on or to increase scrutiny considering the impartial nature of the researchers.
For example, if a senator wrote an article saying senators' salaries should be increased, one could respond:
Of course he would say that. He's a senator.
Not ad hominem: "I'm a godlike scientist and I'm certain X is true. Trust me." -> "No, he's a poopie head. Don't trust him."
In this case, the only reason we believe the speaker is because we believe him to be a godlike scientist. If he is not, we have little reason to believe him.
Ad hominem: "Here is a study. The methodology and data are available. It claims X." -> "Don't trust him, he's a poopie head."
In this case, the poopie-headed nature of the speaker is irrelevant. His methodology is either valid or invalid. The ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy in this case.
It's not like MIT nuclear scientists are "disinterested parties", either. Pretty much everyone who's knowledgeable about nuclear power has a stake either way.
There are two competing effects at work here, and it's hard to say which is strongest: If you are biased one way or another, you probably will put more effort into finding facts that support your view. That doesn't mean that those facts are wrong or that you are being disingenuous, just that you have acquired a self-reinforced, biased view of the world. And then you may of course also be selectively reporting those facts known to you, which is more dishonest.
But saying this argument is like pointing out "motive" in a trial seems like a stretch. Motive would usually include financial or other similar types of gain. If saying things you believe are right makes you liable to a charge of having motive to lying just because you have an opinion, then you can't trust anyone except completely ignorant people, which is not a step forward.
Credulity doesn't factor into it. I found their "article" to be insulting in its lack of statistical rigor. If you have not read it, then you should read it.
They compare two averages - each taken over a completely different length of time. They do not even make the smallest attempt to control for any external factors. Finally, they look at some dates and assume direct causation.
This doesn't even make it to my credulity. It stops short of it, landing somewhere between disgust and amusement.
"her being anti-nuclear is not proof of her being wrong"
No, but her shabby statistical methodology does nothing to help her cause.
Perhaps I should have put the link to their article first before I introduced their backgrounds.
"It's not like MIT nuclear scientists are \"disinterested parties\", either."
No, but they are in an entirely different realm when it comes to the rigorousness of their methodology.
It is all well and good to have an opinion one way or another, but I do not think that we should pretend that there is any equivalence between the MIT nuclear scientists and Dr Sherman.
If you want to see intelligent debate on the merits of nuclear power, may I make the following recommendation:
http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/681
(Note: It is not entirely obvious, but you can navigate between the phases of the debate by click the dates on the "latest updates bar".)
"There are two competing effects at work here, and it's hard to say which is strongest: If you are biased one way or another, you probably will put more effort into finding facts that support your view. That doesn't mean that those facts are wrong"
Are we talking about facts or opinions? Facts, by definition, are true. With that definition in mind, facts can not be "wrong".
I should hope that if someone is making an argument they go through whatever efforts needed to find and report the facts that support their case.
"just that you have acquired a self-reinforced, biased view of the world."
If you see two sides in a debate and both sides have strong, compelling arguments then it is the responsibility of you, the individual, to make your own choice.
However, just because someone favors a certain perspective on an issue does not mean that their viewpoint should be discarded because they are "biased".
Bias is not as simple of a concept as you make it out to be. Any issue worthy of intelligent debate and discussion is likely to be extremely nuanced.
There will be an interaction between the nuances of a complex issue and the personal values that people place on certain things.
In other words, it is possible for more than one group of people to be "right" on a certain issue. However, I think that the key point to remember here is that building an argument based on facts is a prerequisite to correctness.
"But saying this argument is like pointing out \"motive\" in a trial seems like a stretch. Motive would usually include financial or other similar types of gain. If saying things you believe are right makes you liable to a charge of having motive to lying just because you have an opinion, then you can't trust anyone except completely ignorant people, which is not a step forward."
Actually, I completely agree with you here. I read the comment describing my initial argument as "motive", but you would figure that in order to have a motive someone had to have committed a crime.
Maybe this is a good explanation. I suppose that from my perspective their "article" was a "crime against statistics", and having elected myself judge, jury, and executioner all that I needed to do is come up with their motivation.
I probably should have made my perspective a little more clear in my original post, but I was trying to be succinct. Unfortunately, in my quest for succinctness, I created a post that may be construed as suboptimal.
But regarding "facts": It is entirely possible to only know things that are true but still have an extremely biased view of the world, if those facts are a biased subsample of all possible facts. I work in astrophysics, and it happens all the time. We have such scant information that it's easy to draw all kinds of erroneous conclusions if you don't constantly keep in mind the potential facts we do not have because even if they were true we would have failed to acquire them.
Ehh, no, but...
While ad hominem makes for lousy arguments, when we're dealing with a claim that's already completely freaking implausible, knowing that it comes from an unreliable source is generally enough for me personally to decide it's not worth my time.
If a respected professor of physics claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine then I'll probably take some time to actually investigate it and figure out exactly why it's wrong. If it's some random dude off the street I'll dismiss it without consideration because... well, who has time?
The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.
I don't know why anyone should take this article seriously. Here's the thing about radiation: We can measure it directly. And scientists have certainly been able to measure radioactivity here in the U.S. that must be a consequence of Fukushima. But here's the thing: those radioactive effects -- here in the U.S. -- are very, very small.
They're not.
Uranium isotopes have a half-life of billions of years, so whatever radioactivity they emit is spread out over a very long time. Overall, uranium is toxic in the same way that lead is toxic, and the chemical toxicity is probably worse than the radiotoxicity. Even in a completely melted reactor core, uranium dioxide is relativly stable and won't be quickly transported into the environment.
The isotopes of concern are primarily of Iodine and Cesium. Radioiodine from the accident has almost completely decayed, although Cesium isotopes may still be hazardous in heavily contaminated areas for years.
Currently there seem to be "hotspots" at considerable distances from the plant where doses on the ground are in a range that's at the edge of what nuclear power workers are permitted to get (but rarely do.) There's no proof that radiation at that level is harmful, but no proof that it's completely safe to have that exposure for your lifetime either.
Now, it's also BS to say that the threat from spent nuclear fuel that's been sitting around for 10 years is as high as the threat from an active core or one that's been sitting around for three months -- it just isn't; radioactivity decays and heat generation goes down, so it's really unfair to count the number of "cores" worth of danger here.
That said, I wouldn't blame people for mistrusting Japanese government, industry and even society. Japan has been the world's leader in nuclear accidents for the past 20 years, and it's often said that they're not completely honest about industrial accidents in general (such as in the auto industry.)
Nuclear safety requires a person who's disciplined and (for the most part) follows orders but who also has a strong individual sense of right and wrong and won't follow a bad order. America's nuclear navy works hard to cultivate this ethos, but I'm not sure if it's easy to cultivate this in Japan.
You know darn well we're not talking about "overall uranium".
We're talking about very hot uranium and plutonium directly from the cores of active nuclear reactors and the entire spectrum of elements and isotopes that get produced when you take that core, rods, and support structure and melt it out through the bottom of a containment vessel onto a concrete foundation that wasn't designed as a core catcher. Mix in seawater, steam, hydrogen explosions and gord knows what else and you have a reaction that is insufficiently modeled.
What we do know is that a large area of land is not being occupied in Japan due to contamination. The Japanese have very expensive land, know a thing or two about radioactive contamination, and are not exactly known for exaggerating the impact of industrial accidents.
the fuel rods when not used only give off so many isotopes per hour. the problem here is the rods in melted state are not cooled off to non active yet, hence the use of water and other materials to bring their activity down.
Secondly, what on earth is 'hot uranium'? If you are speaking about the temperature: it certainly isn't hot anymore by the time it reaches the US. If you are speaking about it's radioactivity, you're wrong: individual uranium atoms from that reactor, once escaped, do not behave differently than naturally occurring uranium atoms.
As for your other fears: it's perfectly well known what radioactive isotopes controlled and uncontrolled fission processes can produce. That's why they've been monitoring for things like cesium, iodine and basically every radioactive isotopes that exists: the number is rather limited). No significant levels of the stuff have been seen in the US.
That can be a pretty serious categorical difference, particularly in the concentration.
However, that's over there. Uranium would be dangerous to US citizens if the uranium was in the US. It isn't.
Duh.
Did you even read what I wrote or are you pasting this from some talking points you got somewhere?
And so far, not even the worst doomsayers that actually know their stuff have worried about uranium or plutonium.
Which is not to say it's not a problem, only that you find some reason to dismiss the views you don't agree with.
That's just not the stuff you care about after a nuclear meltdown. You care about the other isotopes that were produced and that are much more easily carried outside and are easily used to compose other molecules that can spread further.
That must be why they're setting limits on the acceptable level of uranium in the rice then. To draw attention away from the things that are really dangerous. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-28/fukushima-may-ab... Riiight.
Secondly, what on earth is 'hot uranium'?
What I said was "very hot uranium and plutonium directly from the cores of active nuclear reactors and the entire spectrum of elements and isotopes that get produced when ...".
If you are speaking about the temperature: it certainly isn't hot anymore by the time it reaches the US. If you are speaking about it's radioactivity,
In this case, the term 'hot' captures temperature (in Celsius), reactivity (neutrons), and the health effects of radioactivity (Becquerels). It works on many levels.
you're wrong: individual uranium atoms from that reactor, once escaped, do not behave differently than naturally occurring uranium atoms.
You really seem to want me to be talking about specifically uranium atoms in fallout on the continental US. The vast majority of that article is about Japan with only a few sentences claiming some nonspecific particles could be detected in the US.
Is it that you know only this one counter argument, the one that natural and low-enriched uranium samples aren't wildly different in decay rates?
As for your other fears:
I'm not afraid, you're just making that up.
it's perfectly well known what radioactive isotopes controlled and uncontrolled fission processes can produce.
I don't think our knowledge of these meltdowns is anywhere close to "perfect", but note that I said "the entire spectrum of elements and isotopes...".
They don't know what temperatures were reached what state of matter the cores were in and for what time periods. The IAEA says there could have been recriticality, but they don't know for sure one way or the other.
That's why they've been monitoring for things like cesium, iodine and basically every radioactive isotopes that exists: the number is rather limited).
Do you think I've never heard of the periodic table or something?
Given that the accident isn't over – fission is continuing without the normal containment – isn't more radioiodine being created, and at risk of further wide release, every day?
Other kinds of radioactive decay continue to release heat in the fuel, which could drive material transfer, but the production of radioiodine is long over.
Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the catastrophe than a conspiracy to suppress information, but the forcefulness of the response was striking.
I heard a great (and probably apocryphal) anecdote on the radio a few weeks after -- "After three mile island, the Russians came to the US, performed a detailed analysis, and concluded 'we can't have a three mile island'. Instead, they had a Chernobyl. The Japanese went to Russia, did an analysis, and said 'we can't possibly have a Chernobyl', and instead had their own meltdown. Now we're hearing how modern reactors couldn't possibly have a meltdown like any of three so far."
And yet now we know that the total radiation release was probably as much or more than Chernobyl.
What I said at the very beginning of this disaster.. If there's one thing everyone should know by now about nuclear reactor emergencies - it's that the authorities never tell the truth in the beginning, through ignorance or otherwise. We have an admittedly small sample of such accidents, but I'm sticking with it.
We do? Evidence, please.
For what I think is the conventional view, see e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13050228 which indicates more than 10x more radiation release from Chernobyl. That was a couple of months ago; has the situation changed drastically since then?
(On 2011-04-12, when the incident was reclassified at IAEA level 7, a TEPCO spokesman made some comment about the Fukushima disaster having released more radiation than the Chernobyl one. I'm pretty sure that was simply not true.)
I think the "MIT" response was basically correct and remains so despite scaremongering like that linked to here. The Fukushima plant was hit by an enormous natural disaster; yes, the results were very bad, but they were very much smaller in both human and economic terms than those of the earthquake+tsunami itself and so far the known death toll (due to radiation as opposed to, e.g., things falling on people's heads) from the damage to the nuclear reactors is ... zero.
That doesn't mean the damage isn't a problem, it doesn't even mean it's not a disaster. It does, however, mean this: A large, aging nuclear facility was struck by a huge natural disaster, much worse than it was ever designed for (which was, yes, a Bad Thing) -- and the result, so far at least, has not involved death or disease on a large scale.
If that's as bad as the downside of nuclear power gets, it's looking pretty good.
(What's the downside of the alternative? Well, imagine that the Fukushima reactors hadn't been built and that the energy they provided had come from coal-fired power stations instead. Generating energy from coal costs about 15 deaths per TWh in the US, according to http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...; Japan is probably similar. The Fukushima plant produced a bit less than 880 TWh of energy over its lifetime. That's about 13,000 deaths. Even with the disaster, there's no way that the Fukushima plant has caused anything near to that many.)
I would expect a scientist or engineer to react in the absence of good information to say something like: "Is this the worst disaster ever? I don't know, it depends."
At least the person assuming that the sky is falling is reacting out of fear. The technical person assuming that all is well is reacting out of hubris.
The ideology is that science and technology can cure humanity of all its problems, if only they were not so small-minded and ignorant to reject it.
There's also a strong identification between science and technology and their proponents' core identities, so that fundamental questioning of some of their benefits is seen as personally threatening.
No responsible nuclear engineer would make a claim like that.
And people did not say it could not melt down. They claimed that even if it did, it would not be a Cherynobl like event. The claim was that the reactor design includes some form of containment in the event of a meltdown. Unless I'm missing some new news, all these claims have held.
Your comment bothers me for another reason. The above comments are based on the claims of the engineers who built the reactors. I don't think any of the commenters here have actually designed the nuclear reactors in question.
In other words, you are criticizing people for accepting the experts analysis as being unreasonable. Meanwhile, on what do you base your obvious opinion to the contrary? What analysis have you done? Why should anyone value your input?
Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?
Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.
I think the story is deeper than one company who gave $269,000 however.
They might as well write: "Did you know that every day drunk drivers kill hundreds of Americans? Did you know that the president drinks?"
I'm tired of people looking at one dataset in order to attribute sinister motives to a group of people. I bet I can find $269K worth of campaign donations to Obama's campaigns from groups opposed to Exelon's interests. Would Exelon donate money to Obama independent of that fact? I don't know, you don't know, and AJE doesn't know. So why make that judgement other than to sensationalize the story? And they're not the only ones!
BTW, GE's Immelt is on another important commission. So, these appointments are for sale, in effect. Apparently, that's how you win elections these days.
As an Engineer I call bullshit on this.
If I recall correctly, the engineering team's concerns about fail-safes in the event of a loss of electrical power were overruled or dismissed.
This is a region of a country where tectonic activity is significant enough that seaside villages are cutoff from the sea by 15 foot reinforced walls.
A reactor with the failure characteristics of the Fukushima reactors sound like the wrong tool for the job to me.
But this article is bullshit. There is no conceivable mechanism for it to have occurred, and no pattern in other cases of nuclear exposure.
OK, after reading the first sentence, I was already suspicious of this article. Quick tab back to HN comments seems to confirm it. Thanks for saving my time, HN.
Thankfully, none of the plant workers appear to have died from that, though they have more reason to fear overexposure than anyone.
A long time afterwards, some of the survivors saw non-terminal cell damage related problems.
This was done in the 50s and 60s in the USA - the large number of above-ground nuclear tests put material in the air, which was detectable in teeth from children living at that time.
(link may be biased against nuclear but contains overview of the study): http://www.radiation.org/projects/tooth_fairy.html
The impact isn't nothing; this is a significant catastrophe. But that article is sensational bullshit.
GE was never named directly, but wikipedia says it was their design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power...
My understanding is that if a functioning subset of generators had survived they could have powered the cooling pumps and the problem would have just been keeping them refueled. You can truck-in or airlift-in fuel quicky, so this would have been a very manageable problem in the short and medium terms, much more so than repairing long spans of downed electrical distribution lines.
From the article: TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.
Is there a reference supporting this? I've only seen values for Fukushima radiation as a fraction of Chernobyl (and if I remember correctly, not as bad isotopes)?
A while ago, I got multiple comments modded to -10, for questioning the trustworthiness of Al Jazeera. The web site is not connected to the tv channel?
(For the record: I don't really know about al J. I distrust most media, except NY Times/Washington Post/BBC as long as they don't write about advertisers.)
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110413005584.htm<b...;
"Junichi Matsumoto, acting head of Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Nuclear Power & Plant Siting Division, acknowledged the seriousness of the Fukushima accident at a press conference Tuesday. 'Although the details of the [Chernobyl and Fukushima] accidents are different, from the standpoint of how much radiation has been released, [Fukushima] is equal to or more serious than Chernobyl.'"
That was just a citation in the Wikipedia page for the incident.
That was from Apr. 14, when they didn't really have that much of a clue -- and different sources in that article said different things.
Edit: But sure, I asked for "a reference". Maybe I should have asked for "a reference that is more than a claim by some company man (not a researcher in a paper etc), with an unknown agenda"... :-)
Also, the direct release of radiation from the reactor is significantly less serious than the release of certain radioisotopes. If they're only comparing absolute radiation levels, and (hypothetically) most of Chernobyl's was in radioactive cesium, while most of Fukushima's was in alpha/beta/gamma particles or short-lived radioactive oxygen/nitrogen/etc., then the comparison is not very useful.