Fukushima Photo Essay: a Drone's Eye View 66
Hallie Siegel (2973169) writes "Here's stunning photos and incredible interactive aerial maps of the devastation, cleanup and reconstruction effort in the region around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Adam Klaptocz of Drone Adventures in collaboration with Taichi Furuhashi, researcher at the Center for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tokyo show the current state of the region."
Re:The Long Road Home (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine telling a child that he or she can never return home to Tomioka because it has been turned into a storage facility for radioactive soil from other regions. Imagine the psychological devastation.
How is that different from any other of the numerous locations that no longer exist either due to economic collapse, or development? I lived in a few places as a kid, none of which exist today. One suburb is now a shopping centre, another demolished to make a forest, and yet another a derelict small town with no economy, soon to be wiped off the map.
What do you do with a parking lot full of radioactive topsoil?
Move it to secure long term storage with lots of signs warning of danger. None of your FUD is really any great concern. Since 7 million people died this year from air pollution mainly from coal power stations, we'll probably do the same thing we do about that, ie not much, but certainly not get all scared about it.
Re:Just to be clear (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to be clear here: the devastation is all due to the tsunami, not to the reactor failure. Foreign media seem to often forget or ignore that the disaster was the earthquake and tsunami. That's what killed almost 20k people dead and destroyed the homes of many hundreds of thousands of people.
It seems to me that the root of the Fukushima disaster was the decision to build a nuclear power plant in a place where there was even the remotest chance of Tsunami damage. The government of a country whose history is littered with Tsunami disasters [wikipedia.org] should have known better. The design basis for tsunamis at Fukushima was 5.7 meters, it should have been: "Don't build a nuclear plant within 20-30km of the coast and even then put it on high ground" and keep in mind that this restriction does not account for earthquakes although the Fukushima plant survived a magnitude 7.7 quake rather well so at least in that regard it was better designed..
Re:The Long Road Home (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine telling a child that he or she can never return home to Tomioka because
Because what? It's one of:
* A nucler storage facility
* A windfarm
* A biomass farm
* Over a massive underground coal fire
* Astonishingly contaminated from mine tailings
* Buried under a massive slide of mine tailings which killed the child
* Overrun by an ash mudslide
* Dug up to get at tar sands
* etc
Energy usage is big, really big. This means that large areas of land will get put completely out of use. The end.
Magic nukular doesn't make it any more scary, but please WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN????!11!111omg!11onelevenONE11! OMG!!!
Nuclear is basically no worse than anything else for putting land out of action.
If you really want to think of the children, think how bad it will be for them to lose a parent. If you atually cared for the children rather than pushing your own agenda, you'd choose the power generation method least likely to render them parentless. That's nuclear which is better than all others in this regard by about an order of magnitude.