38 ms·

Fukushima

404 points by JoshGlazebrook 11y ago

ablation 11y ago
Absolutley fascinating. Great reporting - I don't want to say an "enjoyable" read, but certainly very engaging and interesting.
- dennisnedry 11y ago
  Agreed, there's a morbid curiosity behind ghost towns due to nuclear disasters.
mkesper 11y ago
Have also a look here: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Freportage.wdr.de%2Ffukushima&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...
ekianjo 11y ago
> The disaster could have been forseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster. It's always easy to say that with hindsight. Remind me, how frequent are Magnitude 9 earthquakes resulting in massive Tsunami? Of course you can plan for everything, but there's always something that occurs you did not think of. The good thing is, we learn from previous mistakes and plan better accordingly next time. > Have we learnt anything since then? Nice punchline to finish your article, nihilist-like, but completely nonsensical. Of course we have learnt a lot since Chernobyl, and designed subsequent plants to be much more safe based on what happened there.
- mixedbit 11y ago
  Don Norman, the author of "The Design of Everyday Things", writes that in most cases when the fault is attributed to human operator, it is actually a design error.
  - richmarr 11y ago
    In the case of Chernobyl the accident wasn't attributed to a human operator. The safeguards built into the reactor had been disabled to perform an experiment to test a potential new safety feature.
    - pdkl95 11y ago
      That "new safety feature" was a foolish attempt to patch the terrible design of the reactor. (see my other post) Everything about that situation was terrible: the badly design reactor, the laughably-bad "safety feature" try wanted to use as a workaround, the untrained operators that were ordered to run the test, and the Soviet politics that caused the foolish rush to complete the test. All of these factors "caused" the disaster. The combination of these failures created a situation that was far more dangerous than a single design problem or human error.
- Swizec 11y ago
  > Of course we have learnt a lot since Chernobyl, and designed subsequent plants to be much more safe based on what happened there. Unfortunately the anti-nuclear movement won and we are unable to build those safe subsequent plants because of political pressures. Half of nuclear reactors in the US, and likely the world, are over 30 years old.[1] They are licensed for 40 years [2], but can apply for a 20 year extension [2]. The last new reactor came online in 1996, and the next one is likely to come online this year. The Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986, 29 years ago. It will be at least another 10 years, 30 being likelier, before all those things we learned become entirely useful. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/15/news/economy/nuclear_plants_us/ http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/15/news/economy/nuclear_plants_... [2] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=228&t=21 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=228&t=21
  - guscost 11y ago
    If I had to pick one outlandish conspiracy theory to believe, it would be that the Chernobyl disaster was not an accident. It seems unlikely that someone could accidentally engineer a reactor as ludicrously unsafe as Chernobyl, at the time it was built. And you couldn't plan a better PR move to turn people against nuclear power. Guess which large-ish economy is built on petrochemical exports? But I'm ignoring Hanlon's Razor, of course.
  - dfox 11y ago
    From purely technical standpoint, there is essentially nothing that you can learn from Chernobyl that wasn't known in 1986, and all that essentially boils down to "don't do that".
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > Chernobyl The RBMC design was always known to be an absolutely terrible idea because it's use of graphite as a moderator that required active cooling, creating an inherently unsafe positive void coefficient[1]. In fact, this was such a problem that there was concern before the disaster that the ~60 seconds the emergency diesel pumps would require before they could pump enough coolant would not be fast enough to protect the reactor if the main electric pumps failed. The "test" that was being conducted at the time of the disaster (and was the direct cause of the reactor going prompt-critical) was a shockingly foolish attempt to let the momentum of the electrical turbines (without any input steam) continue to power the pumps and keep the coolant flowing for a few seconds to fill that gap in time while the diesel pumps got up to speed[1]. Chernobyl was never a sane design, and no other power plant design - before or after - has such a blatant disregard for safety. Unfortunately, Soviet politics and the desire to keep their nuclear weapons program secret kept these problems from reaching the people with the power to do anything about it. > designed subsequent plants to be much more safe Absolutely. We had safer designs decades ago (and even better ideas[2] today), but upgrading to these safer designs has been hindered at every step by radiophobic activists and "not in my backyard" politics. So we're stuck with minor revisions (if any) to reactors designs from the 50s-70s. If the general public viewed the computer industry like they perceive the nuclear industry, the average person would know vaguely that the discovery of the transistor was probably very useful, while being concerned that computers took up far too much space and burned out vacuum tubes far to often. [1] http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html [2] http://thoriumremix.com/th/ http://thoriumremix.com/th/
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > Absolutely. We had safer designs decades ago (and even better ideas[2] today), but upgrading to these safer designs has been hindered at every step by radiophobic activists and "not in my backyard" politics. So we're stuck with minor revisions (if any) to reactors designs from the 50s-70s. There are still countries investing in nuclear energy, like China, and I suppose these new reactors are made to the latest norms of safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
treenyc 11y ago
"Have we learnt anything since then?" I'm very curious to hear from those who are knowledge in the area.
- fridek 11y ago
  I'm not an expert, but the Fukushima's core problem was an older design based on active cooling, that requires continuous water input and thus electricity to run the water pumps. Current work is concentrated mostly on making nuclear plant as passive as possible, resulting in graceful shutdown in the event of supporting equipment failure. This involves finding a coolant that behaves predictably and nicely when various subsystems go down (water does not). Additional reading: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/423307/newer-nuclear-reactors-might-not-have-failed-in-japan/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/423307/newer-nuclear-re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
- VLM 11y ago
  Who's this "we"? The general public and politicians have learned absolutely positively nothing. The engineers could talk your ear off if you're willing to listen, about solutions that will never be permitted to be applied. I mean seriously, looking at the disasters we've had, pragmatically noting the engineers have not been given free reign to fix existing plants or build newer safer plants, at least in the west, there is no way anything short of space alien invasion could shake "us" into action. For example, you build a plant designed for thirty years of operation, invent a safer way to do things twenty years after the old plant is built, then operate the old plant unchanged for fifty years for financial or environmental protest reasons. Then act all confused around year fifty when something blows up that was a known and fixed problem thirty years ago but can't ever be implemented. There are numerous source code / programming analogies relating to sunk cost fallacies and political footballs and the like. Its not just the engineering department. From a pragmatic crisis management standpoint some CYA civilian cultures should not be permitted to operate reactors. Military combat crews universally have more effective crisis management techniques than even the best civilians teams, even cross culturally. To say implementing this management shakeup would be tricky would be an understatement, however "we" do know that some cultures just can't operate a plant without civilian CYA-ing themselves and their neighbors quite literally to death. Civilians in high positions are trained by the system to prioritize protecting themselves personally from future court cases over accomplishing the overall mission of not melting down the plant ... the plant will take care of itself, at least it always has so far, and prioritizing themselves is how civilians rise to positions of power ... put them in charge of a crisis and it melts down and everyone dies ... somewhat more gung ho military personnel will do things like dump raw seawater into a sub reactor to prevent a meltdown, even if it results in a guaranteed economic kill of the reactor, even if they have to improvise. If you grab the tiger by the tail you will get eaten if you text message blamestorm over who's responsible and who wrote what proper procedure instead of holding on tight to the tail. You can't just engineer safety into something and call it done, anymore than you can checkbox security into a web application and call it done.
mosselman 11y ago
Great photographs. Especially the cars in the grass starting to be overgrown are a 'great' and instant classic post apocalyptic image. Makes you think about the costs of our 'innovations' in general too. This is the wasteland of nuclear energy gone wrong, but there are other wastelands like this one, albeit figuratively speaking.
- deleted 11y ago
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h_o 11y ago
Those cobwebs in the supermarket are something else! (close to the end)
- facepalm 11y ago
  Where there's radioactivity, there are monster spiders...
h_o 11y ago
Those cobwebs in the supermarket are something else! (close to the end)
gambiting 11y ago
As much of a tragedy this was, this is still nothing compared to the damage coal is doing to our society. I live in a coal mining town that also has a coal-fueled power and heating plant - the number of people who suffer in some way due to this is also huge. People get lung disease due to coal dust. In winter, everything is literally covered in soot - snow is blackish, with dark dots on everything. Pretty much every house was damaged in some way by the mine - most had their walls split at least once. There are lakes around the city which are contaminated with mining water - salty solution pumped from the mine - it's prohibited to swim in it or grow any produce near it. And there's plenty of places like that in the entire country. I'm surprised that the author still calls nuclear energy dangerous, especially since he comes from the same country I do. Coal did much more damage to us, and not having a single nuclear power plant in the whole country is really damaging to our environment.
- facepalm 11y ago
  You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way. I leave the judgement up to you, just wanted to point out some confirmation bias in your convictions.
  - simonh 11y ago
    > ...You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power... There is no such assumption in that post. It's just a comparison of the the content of the article to a relevant example from personal experience.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way. I suppose the GP is implicitly taking into the account following facts: - there are no other energy sources that are a) green, and b) can scale up fast enough to replace fossil fuels for base load; - we're running out of fossil fuels; - there is no "option to use less energy", not under capitalism and probably not even within human nauture - that is, unless you're suddenly capable of solving coordination problems on a global scale (i.e. you're a god). It's really frustrating. We have a very good way to generate tons of energy, that's clean, safe and scalable, and we're not using it because people's perceptions of safety and danger are completely backwards (and politicians listen to that).
struct 11y ago
One thing that grabs my attention is that the radiation levels in the contaminated zones are much lower than I thought they'd be. For context, the limit for a radiation worker in the US is 50 mSv. Obviously, I guess it depends on the radioactive isotopes released and what kind of radiation they release, but I'm still impressed.
- ptaipale 11y ago
  Another funny anecdote about Fukushima was that people evacuated the area of elevated radiation and left Japan to what was "home", for instance in the case of my countrymen, Finland. The end result: they left an area of lesser radiation to an area where there is more radiation (the natural background radiation here is higher than the elevated levels were in Japan). And when doing so, they took an airplane where the in-flight radiation levels are even higher.
  - gggmaster 11y ago
    Maybe there are other things to concern about, such as a discredited government, peer pressure, etc.
    - ptaipale 11y ago
      Of course. And media hype, particularly social media rumors, combined with scientific illiteracy.
- tptacek 11y ago
  That's the limit per year. The figures you're seeing in this article are per hour. It's not immediately lethal, but it's drastically elevated.
  - OscarCunningham 11y ago
    The figures are mSv/year or µSv/hour, i.e. harmless.
gabriele 11y ago
a huge dump site near the ocean [1] doesn't look like the best idea. [1] http://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima/#attachment_9454 http://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima/#attachment_9454
chinathrow 11y ago
"Seven years ago I ended my first documentary on Chernobyl with these words: „An immense experience, not comparable to anything else. Silence, lack of cries, laughter, tears and only the wind answers. Prypiat is a huge lesson for our generation.” Have we learnt anything since then?" That makes one think.
- fridek 11y ago
  We have learnt to not put reactors on top of the water tanks, and to not shutdown all safety systems to see if the plant explodes.
  - gus_massa 11y ago
    I agree. I'd like to add: don't use graphite as a moderator, because it can burn in case of a fire. Chernobyl had many known design problems ever before it exploded. It's misleading to imply that it was consider a good design before. There is a comment with more details from pdkl95 >> Chernobyl > The RBMC design was always known to be an absolutely terrible idea because it's use of graphite as a moderator that required active cooling, creating an inherently unsafe positive void coefficient[1]. Read the complete comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10257459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10257459
ggreer 11y ago
I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there are over a hundred created by the earthquake itself. Yet coverage is warped in the opposite direction. It's absurd. I think Scott Alexander put it best. Before starting Slate Star Codex, he had this to say about Fukushima and nuclear power[1]: > You know what kills more people per year than nuclear plants? > Everything. ... > When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. Nuclear power is far from perfect, but it is the safest energy technology in existence. Curtailing it creates more suffering and death, but in a diffuse way that can't be photographed or humanized. 1. http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html
- facepalm 11y ago
  You are just creating straw mean to support your own belief. Comparing to other causes of death is hardly relevant. It's only relevant if you weigh two options against each other. So comparing coal to nuclear is kind of valid, except that coal is not the only alternative to nuclear power. Also, if you really want to nitpick, then you'd also have to count the lives that could have been saved with the money that now goes into cleaning up Fukushima, and so on and so on. Tsunami deaths are not an alternative to radiation deaths, so the comparison is bullshit. Edit: I would like to reply to your comments, but HN doesn't let me post more comments atm. Fwiw, I don't think you are correct in claiming nobody campaigns against coal power. For a recent example, look at Elon Musks presentation of their battery. Also, remember global warming? I seem to remember a lot of articles about that, which tend to mention fossil fuels as culprits.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    While it is true that coal is not the only non-nuclear power generation mechanism, it is -by far- the most common in the US. It is also true that > When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. And yet, we don't hear people screaming to shut down coal power plants nationwide. We don't hear this, despite the fact that they are demonstrably more dangerous than nuclear power plants. This is one of the reasons people are irked by folks who try to use Fukishima to claim that nuclear power generation is super-dangerous-mmkay. I'm not going address your tsunami-deaths vs. radiation-deaths comment. A close and careful re-reading of ggreer's comment should help you to understand why.
Shivetya 11y ago
isn't all that packed up debris just waiting another tsunami or other natural disaster to spread it? Seems awfully close to the ocean considering how the last disaster occurred. So many of the scenes reminded me of the recent Godzilla movie, amazing to see so much of a recent bustling environment abandoned, returning to nature. The number of spider webs in the supermarket is remarkable, I assume the rotting food stores brought insects which in turn made for a good feeding ground for spiders
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kenesom1 11y ago
The worst case scenario for a nuclear plant accident is millions of casualties and the long-term contamination of major population centers. 152 of the world's 211 nuclear power plants have more than 1 million people residing within 75 km. A plant in India has 16 million living within that radius. Fallout could be dispersed over an area thousands of miles wide. The worst case scenario for an accident at a solar power plant or a wind farm - nothing like that. Today's nuclear power plants are inherently unsafe. Most that are in operation depend on active cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. If these cooling systems are interrupted for any reason (e.g.: power failure, loss of coolant, pump breakdown, loss of pressure control, control rod failure, backup power source failure, control systems failure, natural disaster, attack, etc.) - even for a short period of time - then the fissile material will likely overheat the reactor and result in a core meltdown. Sheer luck prevented a catastrophe in the case of the 2006 electrical failure at the Forsmark plant in Sweden. Two of the four backup power systems failed to activate [1]. Switching the emtire world's energy consumption over to safe, renewable energy sources would only take 20 years and cost $100 trillion (money which would be spent anyway on non-renewable energy infrastructure) [2]. There is no need to continue building unsafe coal and nuclear plants. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... [2] http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad11...
- rwmj 11y ago
  Making solar panels produces no pollution whatsoever? Will redirecting 100$ trillion of world output to a big make-work project produce no side-effects or drop in development levels at all?
  - kenesom1 11y ago
    Photovoltaic panels are not used in solar thermal plants. The money is not diverted from other needs - it's spent on renewable infrastructure instead of non-renewable infrastructure.
- JibberMeTimbers 11y ago
Kiro 11y ago
> As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster. Isn't there a difference between causing and preventing?
tobltobs 11y ago
Nuclear power is not only safe, it makes the world an even safer place. Look at the number of car accidents in the fukushima area, close to zero.
jpatokal 11y ago
One angle I don't see often see mentioned: if you look carefully, you'll note that many of the buildings, furnishings, signs etc look a lot older than 2011. This is largely because Fukushima (and almost all of rural Japan along with it) has been severely depressed economically ever since the Bubble burst around 1989, so what you're seeing dates mostly back to the 1980s. For comparison, here's a trip report from hot spring resort a few hours of north of Tokyo that looks almost as apocalyptic, but has been ravaged by nothing other than economics. https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/ https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/
euske 11y ago
As a citizen, I'm still pretty much open to this is-nuclear-good-or-bad debate here. The biggest problem in Japan though is that people don't openly talk about this issue because of the embarrassment or fear of confronting others (Japanese people are notoriously bad at public discussion). It's such a divisive issue. As a result, the entire topic is avoided and kinda invisible. People are resigned and feeling that no one can change the situation (which is a pretty common feeling among the Japanese). Sometimes I wonder if we, as a nation, really deserves a better future if so many people are simply giving up struggling. Sorry for a negative comment.
rmatz 11y ago
Being Japanese, that picture of blackboard in abandoned school 1/3 of the way through the post alone almost made me cry. Single picture tells more stories than thousand words. 4 years since it happened, almost no major Japanese media talks about Fukushima any more, so please share this to anywhere so it gets more attentions.
- nemo44x 11y ago
  I'm not Japanese (but have visited) and I agree - the blackboard photo was heart breaking and beautiful all at once. I hope that piece gets preserved somehow.
- zemotion 11y ago
  I visited Minamisoma last year, just viewing the damages from the outside was heartbreaking, seeing these images of interiors is so incredibly difficult, had me close to tears too.
- xigency 11y ago
  I can't speak much for the small towns in the immediate vicinity of the reactor, but living in Aizu directly after the disaster, life goes on in places like Fukushima市 and Koriyama and Iwaki, with a really positive attitude, too.
coldtea 11y ago
It's a classic spin -- trying to blind people concerned with nuclear plants in their area etc, by using science selectively.
- tptacek 11y ago
  It's impolite to accuse people on an HN thread of being deceptive. It also doesn't add anything to thread itself, so why bother?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >It's impolite to accuse people on an HN thread of being deceptive. It's impolite to do it everywhere. However, just like people "being rude" happens, people being deceptive also happens in HN as well as in "real life" -- in which case it's not longer impolite to call them on it. But that's just theoritical. In this case I never accused anybody in particular, heck, I didn't even mention anybody. I said it's a deceptive tactic. I'm not sure what you mean "it also doesn't add anything to the thread itself". Identifying a deceptive argument doesn't add to a thread? You might argue that I'm wrong in my identification of it as deceptive, but I don't see how you can say it doesn't add anything (in case it's true).
    - tptacek 11y ago
      All I see you doing here is doubling down on your accusation that 'fridek is being deceptive. That's bizarre, given their actual comment. It's as if you read something you didn't like, and decided that the only way it could have appeared before you is dishonesty. No: some people just don't agree with you. You have no cause to call anyone a liar, and doing so is uncivil. Please stop!
      - coldtea 11y ago
        Obviously something being spin doesn't mean somebody repeating it is deceptive or dishonest. Just some of them, and mostly those that originated it. Others merely repeat it uncritically. Obviously again, Fridek, which I never mentioned at all, not even hinted at him, because I was answering my direct parent, can very much believe what he wrote. >It's as if you read something you didn't like, and decided that the only way it could have appeared before you is dishonesty. Actually it's like what I said is pretty clear, and you go out of your way to find some hidden attack beyond my words. What I said of the thing said is that it's a classic spin. Not that the one who said it on HN is a spinster or doesn't believe what he said, or is deceptive or anything. If I'm right (and I think one can objectively say the argument is indeed misleading), then whether people who retell it believe it or not is orthogonal, as it doesn't make it any less spin.
xigency 11y ago
Great article. I think this is an issue that always deserves more serious attention. I also think it's admirable for someone to do this kind of research, take pictures, and write about the experience for the purpose of educating others.
WalterBright 11y ago
With a few minor and cheap design modifications, the Fukushima disaster could have been prevented. The nuke industry could learn a lot from the aviation industry about making unsafe things safe. The details are different, but the principles are the same.
- curtis 11y ago
  Even in the very safe world of commercial aviation, aircraft crash much more frequently than nuclear reactors melt down. That slows down the rate of institutional learning. Of course commercial aviation has killed far more people than the nuclear power industry, anyway. Addendum: I should say that I actually agree with you, I just wanted to point out that the dynamics of the two industries are quite different.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    The principle behind airliner design is no single failure can cause the loss of the airliner. This principle was not applied to Fukushima's design nor the Deepwater Horizon's design. For example, the backup generators could have been protected from the seawater inundation rather easily.
kup0 11y ago
Many great photos of this and other locations. Got intrigued in this site looking at photos and essays for quite a while. I appreciate seeing photos from less-visited areas.

404 points by JoshGlazebrook 11y ago

Absolutley fascinating. Great reporting - I don't want to say an "enjoyable" read, but certainly very engaging and interesting.

dennisnedry 11y ago
Agreed, there's a morbid curiosity behind ghost towns due to nuclear disasters.

mkesper 11y ago

Have also a look here: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Freportage.wdr.de%2Ffukushima&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...

ekianjo 11y ago

> The disaster could have been forseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster. It's always easy to say that with hindsight. Remind me, how frequent are Magnitude 9 earthquakes resulting in massive Tsunami? Of course you can plan for everything, but there's always something that occurs you did not think of. The good thing is, we learn from previous mistakes and plan better accordingly next time. > Have we learnt anything since then? Nice punchline to finish your article, nihilist-like, but completely nonsensical. Of course we have learnt a lot since Chernobyl, and designed subsequent plants to be much more safe based on what happened there.

mixedbit 11y ago
Don Norman, the author of "The Design of Everyday Things", writes that in most cases when the fault is attributed to human operator, it is actually a design error.
- richmarr 11y ago
  In the case of Chernobyl the accident wasn't attributed to a human operator. The safeguards built into the reactor had been disabled to perform an experiment to test a potential new safety feature.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    That "new safety feature" was a foolish attempt to patch the terrible design of the reactor. (see my other post) Everything about that situation was terrible: the badly design reactor, the laughably-bad "safety feature" try wanted to use as a workaround, the untrained operators that were ordered to run the test, and the Soviet politics that caused the foolish rush to complete the test. All of these factors "caused" the disaster. The combination of these failures created a situation that was far more dangerous than a single design problem or human error.
Swizec 11y ago
> Of course we have learnt a lot since Chernobyl, and designed subsequent plants to be much more safe based on what happened there. Unfortunately the anti-nuclear movement won and we are unable to build those safe subsequent plants because of political pressures. Half of nuclear reactors in the US, and likely the world, are over 30 years old.[1] They are licensed for 40 years [2], but can apply for a 20 year extension [2]. The last new reactor came online in 1996, and the next one is likely to come online this year. The Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986, 29 years ago. It will be at least another 10 years, 30 being likelier, before all those things we learned become entirely useful. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/15/news/economy/nuclear_plants_us/ http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/15/news/economy/nuclear_plants_... [2] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=228&t=21 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=228&t=21
- guscost 11y ago
  If I had to pick one outlandish conspiracy theory to believe, it would be that the Chernobyl disaster was not an accident. It seems unlikely that someone could accidentally engineer a reactor as ludicrously unsafe as Chernobyl, at the time it was built. And you couldn't plan a better PR move to turn people against nuclear power. Guess which large-ish economy is built on petrochemical exports? But I'm ignoring Hanlon's Razor, of course.
- dfox 11y ago
  From purely technical standpoint, there is essentially nothing that you can learn from Chernobyl that wasn't known in 1986, and all that essentially boils down to "don't do that".
pdkl95 11y ago
> Chernobyl The RBMC design was always known to be an absolutely terrible idea because it's use of graphite as a moderator that required active cooling, creating an inherently unsafe positive void coefficient[1]. In fact, this was such a problem that there was concern before the disaster that the ~60 seconds the emergency diesel pumps would require before they could pump enough coolant would not be fast enough to protect the reactor if the main electric pumps failed. The "test" that was being conducted at the time of the disaster (and was the direct cause of the reactor going prompt-critical) was a shockingly foolish attempt to let the momentum of the electrical turbines (without any input steam) continue to power the pumps and keep the coolant flowing for a few seconds to fill that gap in time while the diesel pumps got up to speed[1]. Chernobyl was never a sane design, and no other power plant design - before or after - has such a blatant disregard for safety. Unfortunately, Soviet politics and the desire to keep their nuclear weapons program secret kept these problems from reaching the people with the power to do anything about it. > designed subsequent plants to be much more safe Absolutely. We had safer designs decades ago (and even better ideas[2] today), but upgrading to these safer designs has been hindered at every step by radiophobic activists and "not in my backyard" politics. So we're stuck with minor revisions (if any) to reactors designs from the 50s-70s. If the general public viewed the computer industry like they perceive the nuclear industry, the average person would know vaguely that the discovery of the transistor was probably very useful, while being concerned that computers took up far too much space and burned out vacuum tubes far to often. [1] http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html [2] http://thoriumremix.com/th/ http://thoriumremix.com/th/
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > Absolutely. We had safer designs decades ago (and even better ideas[2] today), but upgrading to these safer designs has been hindered at every step by radiophobic activists and "not in my backyard" politics. So we're stuck with minor revisions (if any) to reactors designs from the 50s-70s. There are still countries investing in nuclear energy, like China, and I suppose these new reactors are made to the latest norms of safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

treenyc 11y ago

"Have we learnt anything since then?" I'm very curious to hear from those who are knowledge in the area.

fridek 11y ago
I'm not an expert, but the Fukushima's core problem was an older design based on active cooling, that requires continuous water input and thus electricity to run the water pumps. Current work is concentrated mostly on making nuclear plant as passive as possible, resulting in graceful shutdown in the event of supporting equipment failure. This involves finding a coolant that behaves predictably and nicely when various subsystems go down (water does not). Additional reading: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/423307/newer-nuclear-reactors-might-not-have-failed-in-japan/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/423307/newer-nuclear-re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
VLM 11y ago
Who's this "we"? The general public and politicians have learned absolutely positively nothing. The engineers could talk your ear off if you're willing to listen, about solutions that will never be permitted to be applied. I mean seriously, looking at the disasters we've had, pragmatically noting the engineers have not been given free reign to fix existing plants or build newer safer plants, at least in the west, there is no way anything short of space alien invasion could shake "us" into action. For example, you build a plant designed for thirty years of operation, invent a safer way to do things twenty years after the old plant is built, then operate the old plant unchanged for fifty years for financial or environmental protest reasons. Then act all confused around year fifty when something blows up that was a known and fixed problem thirty years ago but can't ever be implemented. There are numerous source code / programming analogies relating to sunk cost fallacies and political footballs and the like. Its not just the engineering department. From a pragmatic crisis management standpoint some CYA civilian cultures should not be permitted to operate reactors. Military combat crews universally have more effective crisis management techniques than even the best civilians teams, even cross culturally. To say implementing this management shakeup would be tricky would be an understatement, however "we" do know that some cultures just can't operate a plant without civilian CYA-ing themselves and their neighbors quite literally to death. Civilians in high positions are trained by the system to prioritize protecting themselves personally from future court cases over accomplishing the overall mission of not melting down the plant ... the plant will take care of itself, at least it always has so far, and prioritizing themselves is how civilians rise to positions of power ... put them in charge of a crisis and it melts down and everyone dies ... somewhat more gung ho military personnel will do things like dump raw seawater into a sub reactor to prevent a meltdown, even if it results in a guaranteed economic kill of the reactor, even if they have to improvise. If you grab the tiger by the tail you will get eaten if you text message blamestorm over who's responsible and who wrote what proper procedure instead of holding on tight to the tail. You can't just engineer safety into something and call it done, anymore than you can checkbox security into a web application and call it done.

mosselman 11y ago

Great photographs. Especially the cars in the grass starting to be overgrown are a 'great' and instant classic post apocalyptic image. Makes you think about the costs of our 'innovations' in general too. This is the wasteland of nuclear energy gone wrong, but there are other wastelands like this one, albeit figuratively speaking.

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h_o 11y ago

Those cobwebs in the supermarket are something else! (close to the end)

facepalm 11y ago
Where there's radioactivity, there are monster spiders...

h_o 11y ago

Those cobwebs in the supermarket are something else! (close to the end)

gambiting 11y ago

As much of a tragedy this was, this is still nothing compared to the damage coal is doing to our society. I live in a coal mining town that also has a coal-fueled power and heating plant - the number of people who suffer in some way due to this is also huge. People get lung disease due to coal dust. In winter, everything is literally covered in soot - snow is blackish, with dark dots on everything. Pretty much every house was damaged in some way by the mine - most had their walls split at least once. There are lakes around the city which are contaminated with mining water - salty solution pumped from the mine - it's prohibited to swim in it or grow any produce near it. And there's plenty of places like that in the entire country. I'm surprised that the author still calls nuclear energy dangerous, especially since he comes from the same country I do. Coal did much more damage to us, and not having a single nuclear power plant in the whole country is really damaging to our environment.

facepalm 11y ago
You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way. I leave the judgement up to you, just wanted to point out some confirmation bias in your convictions.
- simonh 11y ago
  > ...You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power... There is no such assumption in that post. It's just a comparison of the the content of the article to a relevant example from personal experience.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way. I suppose the GP is implicitly taking into the account following facts: - there are no other energy sources that are a) green, and b) can scale up fast enough to replace fossil fuels for base load; - we're running out of fossil fuels; - there is no "option to use less energy", not under capitalism and probably not even within human nauture - that is, unless you're suddenly capable of solving coordination problems on a global scale (i.e. you're a god). It's really frustrating. We have a very good way to generate tons of energy, that's clean, safe and scalable, and we're not using it because people's perceptions of safety and danger are completely backwards (and politicians listen to that).

struct 11y ago

One thing that grabs my attention is that the radiation levels in the contaminated zones are much lower than I thought they'd be. For context, the limit for a radiation worker in the US is 50 mSv. Obviously, I guess it depends on the radioactive isotopes released and what kind of radiation they release, but I'm still impressed.

ptaipale 11y ago
Another funny anecdote about Fukushima was that people evacuated the area of elevated radiation and left Japan to what was "home", for instance in the case of my countrymen, Finland. The end result: they left an area of lesser radiation to an area where there is more radiation (the natural background radiation here is higher than the elevated levels were in Japan). And when doing so, they took an airplane where the in-flight radiation levels are even higher.
- gggmaster 11y ago
  Maybe there are other things to concern about, such as a discredited government, peer pressure, etc.
  - ptaipale 11y ago
    Of course. And media hype, particularly social media rumors, combined with scientific illiteracy.
tptacek 11y ago
That's the limit per year. The figures you're seeing in this article are per hour. It's not immediately lethal, but it's drastically elevated.
- OscarCunningham 11y ago
  The figures are mSv/year or µSv/hour, i.e. harmless.

gabriele 11y ago

a huge dump site near the ocean [1] doesn't look like the best idea. [1] http://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima/#attachment_9454 http://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima/#attachment_9454

chinathrow 11y ago

"Seven years ago I ended my first documentary on Chernobyl with these words: „An immense experience, not comparable to anything else. Silence, lack of cries, laughter, tears and only the wind answers. Prypiat is a huge lesson for our generation.” Have we learnt anything since then?" That makes one think.

fridek 11y ago
We have learnt to not put reactors on top of the water tanks, and to not shutdown all safety systems to see if the plant explodes.
- gus_massa 11y ago
  I agree. I'd like to add: don't use graphite as a moderator, because it can burn in case of a fire. Chernobyl had many known design problems ever before it exploded. It's misleading to imply that it was consider a good design before. There is a comment with more details from pdkl95 >> Chernobyl > The RBMC design was always known to be an absolutely terrible idea because it's use of graphite as a moderator that required active cooling, creating an inherently unsafe positive void coefficient[1]. Read the complete comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10257459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10257459

ggreer 11y ago

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there are over a hundred created by the earthquake itself. Yet coverage is warped in the opposite direction. It's absurd. I think Scott Alexander put it best. Before starting Slate Star Codex, he had this to say about Fukushima and nuclear power[1]: > You know what kills more people per year than nuclear plants? > Everything. ... > When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. Nuclear power is far from perfect, but it is the safest energy technology in existence. Curtailing it creates more suffering and death, but in a diffuse way that can't be photographed or humanized. 1. http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html

facepalm 11y ago
You are just creating straw mean to support your own belief. Comparing to other causes of death is hardly relevant. It's only relevant if you weigh two options against each other. So comparing coal to nuclear is kind of valid, except that coal is not the only alternative to nuclear power. Also, if you really want to nitpick, then you'd also have to count the lives that could have been saved with the money that now goes into cleaning up Fukushima, and so on and so on. Tsunami deaths are not an alternative to radiation deaths, so the comparison is bullshit. Edit: I would like to reply to your comments, but HN doesn't let me post more comments atm. Fwiw, I don't think you are correct in claiming nobody campaigns against coal power. For a recent example, look at Elon Musks presentation of their battery. Also, remember global warming? I seem to remember a lot of articles about that, which tend to mention fossil fuels as culprits.
- simoncion 11y ago
  While it is true that coal is not the only non-nuclear power generation mechanism, it is -by far- the most common in the US. It is also true that > When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. And yet, we don't hear people screaming to shut down coal power plants nationwide. We don't hear this, despite the fact that they are demonstrably more dangerous than nuclear power plants. This is one of the reasons people are irked by folks who try to use Fukishima to claim that nuclear power generation is super-dangerous-mmkay. I'm not going address your tsunami-deaths vs. radiation-deaths comment. A close and careful re-reading of ggreer's comment should help you to understand why.

Shivetya 11y ago

isn't all that packed up debris just waiting another tsunami or other natural disaster to spread it? Seems awfully close to the ocean considering how the last disaster occurred. So many of the scenes reminded me of the recent Godzilla movie, amazing to see so much of a recent bustling environment abandoned, returning to nature. The number of spider webs in the supermarket is remarkable, I assume the rotting food stores brought insects which in turn made for a good feeding ground for spiders

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kenesom1 11y ago

The worst case scenario for a nuclear plant accident is millions of casualties and the long-term contamination of major population centers. 152 of the world's 211 nuclear power plants have more than 1 million people residing within 75 km. A plant in India has 16 million living within that radius. Fallout could be dispersed over an area thousands of miles wide. The worst case scenario for an accident at a solar power plant or a wind farm - nothing like that. Today's nuclear power plants are inherently unsafe. Most that are in operation depend on active cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. If these cooling systems are interrupted for any reason (e.g.: power failure, loss of coolant, pump breakdown, loss of pressure control, control rod failure, backup power source failure, control systems failure, natural disaster, attack, etc.) - even for a short period of time - then the fissile material will likely overheat the reactor and result in a core meltdown. Sheer luck prevented a catastrophe in the case of the 2006 electrical failure at the Forsmark plant in Sweden. Two of the four backup power systems failed to activate [1]. Switching the emtire world's energy consumption over to safe, renewable energy sources would only take 20 years and cost $100 trillion (money which would be spent anyway on non-renewable energy infrastructure) [2]. There is no need to continue building unsafe coal and nuclear plants. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... [2] http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad11...

rwmj 11y ago
Making solar panels produces no pollution whatsoever? Will redirecting 100$ trillion of world output to a big make-work project produce no side-effects or drop in development levels at all?
- kenesom1 11y ago
  Photovoltaic panels are not used in solar thermal plants. The money is not diverted from other needs - it's spent on renewable infrastructure instead of non-renewable infrastructure.
JibberMeTimbers 11y ago

Kiro 11y ago

> As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster. Isn't there a difference between causing and preventing?

tobltobs 11y ago

Nuclear power is not only safe, it makes the world an even safer place. Look at the number of car accidents in the fukushima area, close to zero.

jpatokal 11y ago

One angle I don't see often see mentioned: if you look carefully, you'll note that many of the buildings, furnishings, signs etc look a lot older than 2011. This is largely because Fukushima (and almost all of rural Japan along with it) has been severely depressed economically ever since the Bubble burst around 1989, so what you're seeing dates mostly back to the 1980s. For comparison, here's a trip report from hot spring resort a few hours of north of Tokyo that looks almost as apocalyptic, but has been ravaged by nothing other than economics. https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/ https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/

euske 11y ago

As a citizen, I'm still pretty much open to this is-nuclear-good-or-bad debate here. The biggest problem in Japan though is that people don't openly talk about this issue because of the embarrassment or fear of confronting others (Japanese people are notoriously bad at public discussion). It's such a divisive issue. As a result, the entire topic is avoided and kinda invisible. People are resigned and feeling that no one can change the situation (which is a pretty common feeling among the Japanese). Sometimes I wonder if we, as a nation, really deserves a better future if so many people are simply giving up struggling. Sorry for a negative comment.

rmatz 11y ago

Being Japanese, that picture of blackboard in abandoned school 1/3 of the way through the post alone almost made me cry. Single picture tells more stories than thousand words. 4 years since it happened, almost no major Japanese media talks about Fukushima any more, so please share this to anywhere so it gets more attentions.

nemo44x 11y ago
I'm not Japanese (but have visited) and I agree - the blackboard photo was heart breaking and beautiful all at once. I hope that piece gets preserved somehow.
zemotion 11y ago
I visited Minamisoma last year, just viewing the damages from the outside was heartbreaking, seeing these images of interiors is so incredibly difficult, had me close to tears too.
xigency 11y ago
I can't speak much for the small towns in the immediate vicinity of the reactor, but living in Aizu directly after the disaster, life goes on in places like Fukushima市 and Koriyama and Iwaki, with a really positive attitude, too.

coldtea 11y ago

It's a classic spin -- trying to blind people concerned with nuclear plants in their area etc, by using science selectively.

tptacek 11y ago
It's impolite to accuse people on an HN thread of being deceptive. It also doesn't add anything to thread itself, so why bother?
- coldtea 11y ago
  >It's impolite to accuse people on an HN thread of being deceptive. It's impolite to do it everywhere. However, just like people "being rude" happens, people being deceptive also happens in HN as well as in "real life" -- in which case it's not longer impolite to call them on it. But that's just theoritical. In this case I never accused anybody in particular, heck, I didn't even mention anybody. I said it's a deceptive tactic. I'm not sure what you mean "it also doesn't add anything to the thread itself". Identifying a deceptive argument doesn't add to a thread? You might argue that I'm wrong in my identification of it as deceptive, but I don't see how you can say it doesn't add anything (in case it's true).
  - tptacek 11y ago
    All I see you doing here is doubling down on your accusation that 'fridek is being deceptive. That's bizarre, given their actual comment. It's as if you read something you didn't like, and decided that the only way it could have appeared before you is dishonesty. No: some people just don't agree with you. You have no cause to call anyone a liar, and doing so is uncivil. Please stop!
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Obviously something being spin doesn't mean somebody repeating it is deceptive or dishonest. Just some of them, and mostly those that originated it. Others merely repeat it uncritically. Obviously again, Fridek, which I never mentioned at all, not even hinted at him, because I was answering my direct parent, can very much believe what he wrote. >It's as if you read something you didn't like, and decided that the only way it could have appeared before you is dishonesty. Actually it's like what I said is pretty clear, and you go out of your way to find some hidden attack beyond my words. What I said of the thing said is that it's a classic spin. Not that the one who said it on HN is a spinster or doesn't believe what he said, or is deceptive or anything. If I'm right (and I think one can objectively say the argument is indeed misleading), then whether people who retell it believe it or not is orthogonal, as it doesn't make it any less spin.

xigency 11y ago

Great article. I think this is an issue that always deserves more serious attention. I also think it's admirable for someone to do this kind of research, take pictures, and write about the experience for the purpose of educating others.

WalterBright 11y ago

With a few minor and cheap design modifications, the Fukushima disaster could have been prevented. The nuke industry could learn a lot from the aviation industry about making unsafe things safe. The details are different, but the principles are the same.

curtis 11y ago
Even in the very safe world of commercial aviation, aircraft crash much more frequently than nuclear reactors melt down. That slows down the rate of institutional learning. Of course commercial aviation has killed far more people than the nuclear power industry, anyway. Addendum: I should say that I actually agree with you, I just wanted to point out that the dynamics of the two industries are quite different.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  The principle behind airliner design is no single failure can cause the loss of the airliner. This principle was not applied to Fukushima's design nor the Deepwater Horizon's design. For example, the backup generators could have been protected from the seawater inundation rather easily.

kup0 11y ago

Many great photos of this and other locations. Got intrigued in this site looking at photos and essays for quite a while. I appreciate seeing photos from less-visited areas.