Why the Fukushima disaster is worse than Chernobyl

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/why-the-fukushima-disaster-is-worse-than-chernobyl-2345542.html

Japan has been slow to admit the scale of the meltdown. But now the truth is coming out. David McNeill reports from Soma City

Monday, 29 August 2011

Yoshio Ichida is recalling the worst day of his 53 years: 11 March, when the sea swallowed up his home and killed his friends. The Fukushima fisherman was in the bath when the huge quake hit and barely made it to the open sea in his boat in the 40 minutes before the 15-metre tsunami that followed. When he got back to port, his neighbourhood and nearly everything else was gone. "Nobody can remember anything like this," he says.

Now living in a refugee centre in the ruined coastal city of Soma, Mr Ichida has mourned the 100 local fishermen killed in the disaster and is trying to rebuild his life with his colleagues. Every morning, they arrive at the ruined fisheries co-operative building in Soma port and prepare for work. Then they stare out at the irradiated sea, and wait. "Some day we know we'll be allowed to fish again. We all want to believe that."

This nation has recovered from worse natural – and manmade – catastrophes. But it is the triple meltdown and its aftermath at the Fukushima nuclear power plant 40km down the coast from Soma that has elevated Japan into unknown, and unknowable, terrain. Across the northeast, millions of people are living with its consequences and searching for a consensus on a safe radiation level that does not exist. Experts give bewilderingly different assessments of its dangers.

[FourScore]

1. k/r n/t

[FBaggins]

2. Incredible failures of logic

It's hard to believe that the author is dumb enough to actually thing it's valid... but the only alternative is intentional dishonesty.


Oh yes... let's compare the amount of cesium released at Fukushima to the Little Boy bomb and say how many thousands of times worse this is. As if cesium were a significant part of why the bomb killed people. Reactors make lots of cesium as a normal part of operations (and it's the most significant portion of what they release when they fail badly)... nuclear bombs don't make much at all. Why not compare the amount of plutonium released? Or the number of people with a 1Sv+ dose?

Or how about the economic comparison where they "score" the entire earthquake/tsunami cost to Fukushima (even though it's a comparatively small fraction of the cost)? If you want to compare the impact of the earthquake to Chernobyl... yep, it's bigger. But they don't want to do that.

It's like the earlier "Fukushima is worse then Chernobyl" comparisons that focused not on total radioactive releases, but on the release to the oceans... while ignoring the fact that Fukushima is on the ocean while Chernobyl is hundreds of miles away. Chernobyl spread 20-50 times as much danger over people. Does that really not matter?

Or how about the "safety" comparison? Why are they looking at the declared safety limit on one disaster to the other rather than actual doses of radiation??? Hundreds of people received a higher dose at Chernobyl than the highest reported dose at Fukushima and many tens of thousands received a higher dose than all but a handful of people actuall working at Fukushima. We're going on six months since the incident and nobody has died due to radiation or even had radiation sickness. But this point after Chernobyl there were scores of people dead. How on Earth do you compare "safety" while ignoring those things and focusing on some arbitrary limit that doesn't have anything to do with what actually happened?

The sad thing is that in order to tell this lie they have to play down the worst nuclear power disaster in history... all to scare people into doing what they want (and lining their own pockets of course).

[NNN0LHI]

3. Do you recall any Canadian MP's advising constituents it was risky to drink milk 6 months ...

... after the Chernobyl accident? I can't recall anything like that occurring back then.

Don


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1835009

[FBaggins]

5. The answer to the underlying question is yes.

The Canadian MP is a nut if she thinks that there ever was a radiological Fukushima risk in drinking milk in Canada... let alone that there's one today. I can't speak to whether or not Canada elected nuts in the 1980s.

I don't have a Canadian link, but here's the one for some regular milk testing taking place in California. http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/2174

But yes, there was significantly more (and more lasting) concern over radiation from Chernobyl six months after the event. In some parts of Europe there remains a concern 25 years later. There wasn't enough in Canada (in either case) to make a comparison,

[Overseas]

4. K&R. Triple meltdown is the bottom line for me.

This is such a serious accident that is still developing into unknown territory.