Let's look at what happened at Fukushima:
1) Massive earthquake 2) Massive tsunami 3) Devastating fire 4) Complete loss of power to all control circuitry
An extreme worst-case scenario if there ever was one, and yet no one died.
Yet.
EDIT: Don't mistake; I'm (conditionally) very pro-nuclear power. But the fallout (pun not intended) from Fukushima is far from over, so to be all, "Welp, dodged that one" is a little disingenuous.
For one thing, the Soviet Union dumped all of their scrapped reactors into the ocean whole. For decades.
Yet if you pulled out a Geiger counter outside of the plant itself, the reading you'd get is less than what you'd see in a typical hot springs bath, the national leisure in Japan.
To be sure there is a difference between relaxing in a high-rad bath for an hour or two, now and then, and living in one 24/7. The latter probably wouldn't be very healthy, either. But our knee-jerk response to anything involving the word "radiation" some times does more damage (economic, etc.) than the radiation itself.
The longest half life for radioactive oxygen is 2 minutes.
Tritium (from hydrogen) has a half life of 12 years, and is harmless externally. Internally it's dangerous but has a half life of only 1 to 2 weeks, so the danger is very limited.
Mitigating the risk even more, tritium is rarely made by reactors (i.e. made in very small quantities), they prefer to make deuterium, which is not radioactive.
You may not be wearing a suit for the immediate radiation level (which may or may not fluctuate), or not even for most things you touch accidentally, but rather for the freak speck of dirt or whatever that is actually contaminated, can make you sick or travel outside the perimeter on the bottom of your boots.
So registering a low radiation level outside the plant does not mean the area is safer than a hot spring.
If the nuclear power industry were a guy (for the sake of pronouns) and we say that he was born in 1954 with the launch of the USS Nautilus, then he would have been 13 when Fukushima was built. We wouldn't even let him drive a car under adult supervision. Today he's 61 and about to retire.
It's important to clarify that it's not just the wear and tear on the equipment that's the problem so much as the fact that the nuclear power industry has learned a thing or two about safety in between "age 13" and "age 61," yet the high-level safety of a design gets more or less frozen in before construction starts.
EDIT: 59->61 because I can't subtract.
EDIT2: Retirement age is 62, not 60. I plead youth, plus the fact that if I did keep a countdown it would be depressing to bump it every time they bump the official retirement age.
How many times have they bumped it?
The Social Security early retirement age is 62, and it has never been bumped since being instituted in the 1930s.
the Social Security full retirement age is 67 -- it was originally 65 and in 1983 was bumped different amounts based on year of birth, so that it became 67 for everyone born 1960 and later, stayed 65 for everyone born 1937 and earlier, and was somewhere in between for everyone else.
No matter how old you are, you would never had to bump the countdown you were keeping if it was to the early retirement age, and if you can plead youth with any credibility, you would never have had to bump it if you were keeping a countdown to the full retirement age, either.
And while nobody died (yet), that's not the problem... the problem is that so many resources had to be invested just to ensure nobody was hurt that makes the prospect of building more nuclear reactors in similar positions scary.
IMHO nuclear reactors should be built to deal with problems of the magnitude of an earthquake or a tsunami as a base line. Fukushima was built with this in mind, I'm sure, but it's hardly a worst-case scenario.... Worst-case would be something like a direct hit from a comet when all the engineers who know how to run it are already dead.
EDIT: It's also that we should be designing these things to run in 100+ years when equipment is failing, the disasters could be an order of magnitude worse than expected, etc.
No power generation source is built to handle a 9.0 earthquake as a baseline, especially not hydroelectric plants.
Not really.
And no, spreading FUD like "Eludium P-38 has a half-life of umpteen bazillion years" doesn't actually make it more dangerous. "Longer half-life" = "less radioactive". By definition.
Here's the worst dam disaster on record:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
There are some parallels with Fukushima; in general most of the dam disasters you can find quickly are kicked off or exacerbated by concurrent natural disasters and/or poor maintenance.
I'll grant you that as a force multiplier for disaster, nuclear has more potential than e.g. hydroelectric. But both can be deadly: you can die of thyroid cancer or by drowning, either way, you're dead; your home could be uninhabitable or just washed away, either way, you're homeless.
Before the evacuation Chernobyl had a population of 14,000.[2]
All dam sites are uninhabitable.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl
(2) Your argument about this being the worst case doesn't hold either. This is not nearly the worst case. I can think of many worse cases, such as a well educated and trained terrorist getting a job in a reactor.
In fact what happened in Fukushima is not particularly unlikely. What happened was something to be expected for a type of reactor that was built to last 40 years and was installed in an earthquake zone.
The relationship between radiation exposure and increased cancer risk is well understood.
A statistically insignificant number may die from cancer in the future.
Compared to the risks assumed in everyday life, it is a trivial number.
Think I'm being alarmist? The Japanese PM at the time of the crisis has publicly stated that he was seriously considering having to evacuate Tokyo. [1],[2],[3]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/japan-considere...
[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/revealed-secret...
[3] http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/japans-former-pm-...
Nonsense.
"Think I'm being alarmist?"
Yes.
> The 400-page report, due to be released later this week, also describes a darkening mood at the prime minister’s residence as a series of hydrogen explosions rocked the plant on March 14 and 15. It says Mr. Kan and other officials began discussing a worst-case outcome if workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated. This would have allowed the plant to spiral out of control, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns.
> The report quotes the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yukio Edano, as having warned that such a “demonic chain reaction” of plant meltdowns could result in the evacuation of Tokyo, 150 miles to the south.
> “We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,” Mr. Edano is quoted as saying, naming two other nuclear plants. “If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”
The Japanese PM. The Chief Cabinet Secretary. A team of 30 university professors, lawyers and journalists who interviewed more than 300 people, including top nuclear regulators and government officials in preparing a 400 page report. All support what I said. Yet you dismiss it as 'nonsense' and 'alarmism'. Please tell me why I should not instead dismiss you as being an apologist for the legacy uranium powered nuclear industry, stuck in a mindset of denialism.
You must be trolling, dude.
I'll wait.
There weren't any.
Was that so hard?
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/03/10/401156/Deaths-tied-t...
> An extreme worst-case scenario if there ever was one, and yet no one died.
I don't know that it was extreme. If the earthquake was a significant risk, and the tsunami was a likely result of the earthquake, the rest is no surprise.
Does anyone know how likely the earthquake and following tsunami were?
So, yeah, pretty extreme.
Edit:
Try throwing a 9.0 at, say, Hoover Dam (or worse, the Three Gorges Dam in China) and see what happens.
Hint: the death toll won't be zero.
There are about 360 million people living downstream of the Three Gorges Dam.