Fukushima and Chernobyl Side-by-Side 284
gbrumfiel writes "It's now been six months since an earthquake and tsunami sparked a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. New data from the Japanese government is now allowing a closer comparison of the fallout from the disaster with the Chernobyl. In terms of Cs-137, the contaminant of greatest concern, Fukushima appears to be about a fifth as bad as Chernobyl. Nature News has a Google Earth mash-up that lets you see the two accidents together. Nature also reports that chaos and bureaucracy are slowing efforts to research the crisis." (Note: There's plenty left for Linux users in the accompanying text, but the Google Earth plug-in is for Windows and Mac OS X only.)
Re:Accuracy in the article. Wow (Score:2, Informative)
Well, are you sure enough you can trust the Japanese government?
Time and time again, the Japanese government has proved that it will distort or hide facts just to suppress public fear and outrage,
It has constantly been downplaying the consequences and denying facts.
I live in Japan approx. 200 miles from that plant.
Daily we still experience the consequences of a failing burocracy that was more interested in getting luxury dinners and gifts from the electric companies rather than demanding safe power plants.
It's easy for you to say that 'it wasn't so bad after all' because you're probably not living here. I can't drink a glass of water from the tap, use tapwater for cooking, have my kids play outside because the soil is too contaminated, don't know what I can eat because farmers/fishermen only care about making money and give a sh*t about safety. You don't see the radiation anyway so screw the customers. If they get cancer within 10 years, nobody can prove it.
Only when independent organizations measure products in labs, suddenly all hell breaks loose because stuff is exceeding even the ridiculous new standards.
If you were to take those products to Europe, all trade would be suspended immediately.
Besides amounts of radioactive material, also the landscape plays a role. Japan has much mountains so a lot of the stuff bumps into the mountains and came all down with the rain. In Chernobyl, the material was able to spread over a much wider area due to a lack of a lot of mountains. But you probably didn't know that up until this day some areas in Scotland are too poluted for keeping cattle.
Very funny when the government just raised all health strandards so high that most issues just could not be labelled as problematic. Everybody is hiding behind the goverments standards or is just acting as if they are stupid. (we-didn't-know-that).
The soil round our house is 30 times as radioactive as before. No matter if you remove it, after it rains, radiation levels are up again within no time.
Our drinkwater is slightly radioactive but since the health levels were raised 20 times, you can't complain with the water company because they insist level are below the government limits. The problem is that you hear 2 weeks afterwards that levels were too high for consumption.
Rice, vegetables, fish, everything is slightly contaminated but farmers keep on trying to ship their stuff because all they are interested in is making money.
Large departmentstores check their products but all the goods that come in through secondary channels are unchecked.
Officials from the farmers association JA look at vegetables with absolutely unsuitable radioactive measurement equipment and all conclude that it is absolutely safe.
And don't be surprised that the figures will be disputed by other organisations. In the first days after the tsunami, the government tried to cover everything up and for weeks was claiming everything was allright and no meltdown could have taken place. They have all melted down and up until this day, the plants are leaking radiation in the air because they are still not covered in anyway. So what didn't disperse during the initial explosion or leaked in to the sea through cracks, is still bit by bit leaking into the air.
Should have been much less (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, Fukushima Daiichi could be found on the third last position in a world wide safety ranking of nuclear power plants in 2010. (Mostly concerned with on-site radioactivity that was pretty high due to leaks.) It lacked emergency generators (13 generators for 6 reactors - I've seen 12 generators in place for one reactor. At least 4 per reactor is common). It lacked redundancy in those generators. They were all the same kind of sea-water cooled diesel generators. And because of the latter, they lacked protection against common cause failure, which demands that you distribute emergency equipment over as wide an area as possible
It also lacked filtered containment vents. Those filters can filter out at least 99% of the Caesium and Iodine (I remember a figure of 99.99% but don't know if it was Cs-137 or I-131). It's somewhat expensive (although just a fraction of the cost of the whole plant), but was adopted in Europe in the 1980ies. Further, safety protocols didn't take account of the finding that the Mark I containment didn't properly seal in a test at a prototype plant at a pressure of about 70 bar. (In emergencies it is supposed to be tight up to 72 bar, but regular testing is only done up to 62 bar.) Which was what allowed the massive quantities of hydrogen to get into the buildings in the first place.
Finally, because hydrogen getting into the buildings couldn't be ruled out in 100% of the cases during simulations, at least European plants were equipped with passive autocatalytic recombiners in all closed rooms of the reactor building. Those are catalytic converters that burn hydrogen with oxygen in the air before it can reach concentrations in the buildings, where it can ignite and either burn or (as we've seen) explode. Those are pretty cheap (about $5 mio per reactor bulding) and were installed in the 1990ies.
None of what happened was a surprise to anyone who dug out the freely available descriptions and research on the safety of the Mark I containment after the earthquake. But of course, that is something that the media couldn't be bothered with. Because they are "reporters" and as such doing research or actually understanding what they are reporting is clearly beneath them. All that reporters are there for, is to "report" (that is: parrot) the statements of politicians and whatever "experts" they feel will give them the answers they want.
Overall, the containments used in Fukushima are a great demonstration of what engineers of the 1960ies could do. They did a remarkable job in preventing a major disaster like Chernobyl. But it also shows what happens when you ignore all further developments. There were flaws in the models of what happens during a meltdown that became obvious only years or decades after the development of those containments. In engineering on the one hand and in radiology on the other - namely, that the dangers of I-131 were under-appreciated until about that time. (Exposure limits were cut down to about one thousands of the previous limits some time in the late 1960ies.)
But given the way reporting was and is being done, nothing of that will ever be known to a wide audience - because it doesn't square with the scare
Mod parent up! (Score:4, Informative)
I think, in the end, the USSR did not feel like it needed to play PR games with the public. The government already had complete control, so they had no reason to lie at a certain point. However, PR is everything for the nuclear lobby in Japan, which may be the most powerful group in the country (remember, Japan is not just the #1 exporter of nuclear reactors, they are the ONLY exporter). Any little fact that gets denied, delayed, or manipulated results in either additional profit made or saved. Accordingly, I do not consider the reports coming out of Japan as facts, just measuring points for where the tip of the iceberg is.
Check with Safecast.org (Score:2, Informative)
Safecast.org (http://blog.safecast.org/) is a global radiation (etc) monitoring/reporting project that all Slashdotters should be aware of and support. They designed, built and deployed radiation monitors in Japan, USA, etc. Their mapping system records, uploads and displays tracks of drives around Japan (USA, etc) with results of the geotagged measurements appearing on the map. Their blog provides a good bit of information on the system and various drives. Additionally there are some great photo essays by Sean Bonner, etc linked on the site.
Fukushima is 3-5 times WORSE than Chernobyl (Score:0, Informative)
Well, since Fukushima is still fuming and building #4 might collapse with the next tremor, sending God knows how much radioactivity into the atmostphere and ocean, it's a bit premature to be making such a comparison. There are at least three reactors which have gone into complete melt-through with evidence that some fuel may be squirming around in the ground under the building. This is far from finished.
Watch Helen Caldicott. She says that Fukushima may be 3-5 times WORSE than Chernobyl. I trust her a lot more than I do the Japanese government or Tepco, both of which have been lying and underestimating radiation release from the beginning. We've had a long time to learn the truth about Chernobyl. The history of nuclear accidents is it takes a long time to learn the truth.
Here's the link for the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQzXRZ3R_w4
Remember that Fukushima had plutonium fuel in #3 ... which EXPLODED. Chernobyl didn't have plutonium fuel.
And for better news about Fukushima than you get on Slashdot, go to http://japancrisis.nodes.org ( a module ).
There is a lot going on over there and they need the world's help. Millions of Japanese need to evacuate!
Pay attention, please!
Steve Moyer
http://steve.nodes.org