What surprises me is the constant attention to Chernobyl (TV series, books, articles, games) and the almost complete silence about Fukushima.
Yet these are quite comparable accidents.
I wonder what the reason is?
Yet these are quite comparable accidents.
I wonder what the reason is?
In Fukushima four PWR type reactors (which is just a large metal pot) melted but stayed inside the containment vessels.
In Chernobyl, an RBMK reactor, which is a ginormous slab of graphite, exploded outwards and burned for ten days, releasing mind-boggling amounts of radioactive hot particles into the top layers of the atmosphere, thus contaminating the whole world.
Incomparable.
They were different kinds of disasters, but not incomparable in terms of the scope and reach of damage done to the environment. Chernobyl didn't have the situation of dumping incalculable amounts of radioactive water into the Pacific.
Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 are examples. They can get into the seafood chain and very much do increase cancer risks.
That is a very, very misinformed or misleading statement. Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 have half lives of around 30 years and do get into seafood. There are warnings given out often about radioactive contaminated seafood. That's why Fukushima's radioactive water dumping was such a problem and neighboring countries had issues with it.
Seafood can and does get radioactive contamination and this increases cancer risks in humans that consume it.
Different reactions, by different types of governments and politicians. Chernobyl was also seen as an European problem, thus numerous other nations and organizations were more significantly involved.
With Fukushima, the government and companies involved had greater control over the flow of allowed information and reporting. For instance, Korea was greatly concerned about Fukushima, but could do little to intervene or interfere with internal Japanese affairs.
It was 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in Henan province in Central China, which is still not much known in the West.
However it was still enough to make Germany shut down its working reactors.
These are not comparable accidents for a number of reasons, direct radiation deaths for one:
Chernobyl: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
The accident destroyed the Chernobyl 4 reactor, killing 30 operators and firemen within three months and several further deaths later. One person was killed immediately and a second died in hospital soon after as a result of injuries received. Another person is reported to have died at the time from a coronary thrombosisc. Acute radiation syndrome (ARS) was originally diagnosed in 237 people onsite and involved with the clean-up and it was later confirmed in 134 cases. Of these, 28 people died as a result of ARS within a few weeks of the accident.
There have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident, but over 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes as a preventative measure.
* --- EDIT: NHK is Japan's public service broadcaster!(??) See: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/tag/8/
for those tagged "Fukishima" (I think) .. they have had something new every three to six months since it happened (more doco's then, fewer now)
2. Most of that attention actually came years later from the former USSR itself, where Chernobyl was massively influential. It had a nationwide cleanup campaign. Along with the other two major contemporary disasters (Spitak earthquake and Ufa disaster) it brought massive political change. Free press in the USSR, questioning the competency of the party and the scientific/engineering communities, fears of future man-made disasters on chemical plants and other industrial facilities, massive charity campaigns in USSR, creation of disaster relief agencies in post-Soviet republics etc. Even the post-Soviet wave of pulp fiction is partially the result of Chernobyl. Fukushima didn't bring even 1/10 of that change to Japan.
> games
However this one is largely unrelated. STALKER SoC that popularized Chernobyl isn't actually about the Chernobyl disaster at all, it just uses the exclusion zone as a decoration, after pivoting from the original, much more ambitious concept during the development. They famously overpromised and underdelivered, and the interest was mostly there due to the community deciding to mod this jank into the game they've been promised. So it's mostly a coincidence and a result of a great marketing campaign by the original GSC.