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I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear senti

• 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.
    • Trombone12 11y ago
      Coal is the most common in the US and honestly you should have stopped relying on it several decades ago. But of course, you got the nukes so you needn't bother with paying for your share of the climate change damages.
      • simoncion 11y ago
        Trust me, if could wave a wand and make people behave rationally and largely in the long-term interests of the human race, I would. :)
      • ArtDev 11y ago
        In the Northwestern US we get most of our power from hydropower and wind. Coal has a massive human cost in human health that makes it absurdly expensive overall. Personally, I would like to see and end to coal and nuclear power.
        • 13thLetter 11y ago
          Why would you like to see an end to nuclear power?
• orik 11y ago
  You are seeing a sentiment that isn't there. The author doesn't take a political stance on Nuclear Power. He's just documenting the contamination zone. He talks briefly about how the disaster could have been avoided if the plant was designed better. He gives factual and statistical information about how the residents don't want to return there. This is a primary source that offers an first-hand account of the Fukushima disaster and it's aftermath. The author is an authority on Fukushima contamination zone because he's been there and seen it with his own eyes, and has chosen to share that with us. Just because Arkadiusz Podniesińki doesn't straight out say "I support continued investment in nuclear power" doesn't necessarily mean he's against investment in nuclear power. I think it's counter-productive to lambast an article like this because it doesn't fit into how you perceive the world. I think it's important to have an open mind and to be able to listen to what other people have to say. We should be encouraging people to make more pieces like this. I know I'm going to be sharing this article.
  • speleding 11y ago
    Are you really not sensing an anti-nuclear sentiment? For example, take this paragraph where he talks about Chernobyl? "Silence, lack of cries, laughter, tears and only the wind answers... Have we learnt anything since then?" I would say the framing of that question makes his stance pretty clear.
    • josh2600 11y ago
      I don't know if I agree with you. For example, it's entirely possible he's talking about not building active reactors in lieu of passive ones...
    • jscheel 11y ago
      I felt a bit of that sentiment, but it didn't seem ham-handed. If you are interested in reading about nuclear accidents and the things we can learn from them, I highly suggest Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20820098-atomic-accidents https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20820098-atomic-accident...). He's pro-nuclear, but acknowledges that there are still things to learn about safe containment. His focus is mainly, and rightly, on the unrelenting power of steam, and how a reactor going prompt critical can tear down even the strongest safety mechanisms when it causes a huge spike in pressure.
• fridek 11y ago
  It is interesting to read that burning coal actually produces more radioactive waste than a nuclear plant [1], only because there are loads and loads of it, and there are usually very few regulations involved. Some say that coal is not the only alternative and it can be processed in a safer manner, but this is wishful thinking. Renewable sources involve a costly manufacturing process that is not necessarily green [2] and there is still no good, scalable solution for a cloudy, not-windy day. And don't get me started on hydro power and how we have at best no idea about the long-term environment impact of it. Then add to it the way politics works and that dirty coal works just fine for your common Joe, as long as it's burned elsewhere. Nuclear power scale well, can be safe when done properly, and if nothing literally explodes is the cleanest option out there. Compare the victims of coal mining accidents alone with those of nuclear disasters [3] - and those do not include the air pollution victims. [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disasters_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...
  • 13years 11y ago
    Burning coal does not produce more radioactive waste. It is just that under normal operating conditions more is released into the atmosphere from burning coal. However, if there is an accident, then you are talking orders of magnitude more radiation in a nuclear accident. http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410 http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410
    • fridek 11y ago
      Ah, so it's one of those moments when there are contradicting studies and without getting a PhD on the subject one can't have a meaningful opinion. I just wish there was a good way of settling such situations.
      • 13years 11y ago
• inatreecrown 11y ago
  Get the facts straight: Fukushima is human failure. In the accident the neccecary cooling could not be supplied. As a result, people will die of cancer from the radiation. The tsunami is not human failure, and to say that living by the sea is human failure is another discussion completely.
  • DangerousPie 11y ago
    I disagree. You seem to suggest that the fact that Fukushima was not adequately prepared for this tsunami was human failure, presumably because they should have expected such a tsunami to occur. If this is the case, then you can just as well argue that it was human failure that the towns in the affected areas flooded because of the tsunami. After all, if they expected such a tsunami to occur they could/should have built higher levees. The way I see it, the deaths resulting from the Fukushima accident were just as much (or as little) caused by human failure as most of the other deaths related to the tsunami.
    • inatreecrown 11y ago
      Do you prefer to live by the sea or by the nuclear plant?
      • masklinn 11y ago
        ¿por qué no los todos?
      • mikekchar 11y ago
        Ha ha! I live by both!
    • mackwic 11y ago
      > You seem to suggest that the fact that Fukushima was not adequately prepared for this tsunami was human failure, presumably because they should have expected such a tsunami to occur. For your information, in France where we use nuclear energy a lot, we look for the most catastrophic events of the last 100 years to see how we protect our infrastructure. The Japanese looked for the last 50, but there were a tsunami of similar height 85 years ago. Also the local authority of nuclear security has made a few reports were they recommended to increase the height of the seawalls. Several times. Never followed. And last but not least, the accident could have been prevented, but has been badly handled. With Japanese hiding information, not cooperating with trained international nuclear-firefighters, and minimizing the scale of the incident until the last minute. This is the biggest mistake of all, compromising lives, resources, ocean and earth... How is it not a human failure ?
• InclinedPlane 11y ago
  In ten years there will still be thinkpieces and photo essays about the disaster of fukushima while the tianjin disaster will end up as a footnote. Despite one being clearly an exclusively human caused disaster and causing a much vaster loss of life. But fire and explosions we are much more familiar, even comfortable, with as causes of death and injury than creepy, invisible, insidious radiation.
  • sjwright 11y ago
    Or look at Banqiao Dam. What you ask, you've never heard of it? That was a form of electricity production that catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people. Fukushima was a flea bite by comparison. Fear of nuclear energy is irrational.
    • wiz21 11y ago
      100% agree. Look at : - asbestos - car exhaust pollution all of those are so silent, so invisible and kill or hurt so many more people.
  • xigency 11y ago
    I think you and many other posters or readers are missing the point of this photo editorial. This isn't the disaster olympics. There are people who still live here, and thousands of people who used to live here who were largely farmers and forced to find new homes. The reason this will be discussed 10 years from now is because there will still be people actively affected 10 years from now. And probably just papers from Tohoku anyway. And finally, the reason you don't hear issues from China being discussed all that often is because of their national policy and attitudes.
• wisty 11y ago
  IIRC, it's a legacy of the cold war. The game theory strategists realised that any use of nuclear weapons would either escalate, or end up in a massive defeat. You can start with a tactical nuke wiping out troops, it will escalate to larger nukes wiping out ships, and eventually you're dropping very large nukes on population centers. Mutually Assured Destruction was the only solution. (Or peace, but let's be realistic). The Russians may have gotten away with MAD, without any need for propaganda, but the US is a democracy. To convince the population that MAD was acceptable, they had to create a situation in which any use of nuclear weapons such a horrible crime that it warranted the complete obliteration of the country that dealt the first blow. In order to make nuclear war (even limited, tactical use) a horrible crime, they made a very big deal out of the effects. (Yes, it's not nice to wipe out battleships and troop formations, but not unprecedented in a war). Which meant they emphasised how bad radiation and fallout can be. Also, radiation is just naturally a bit spooky, as are many carcinogens (especially ones you don't choose to expose yourself to). The fact that they might kill you 30 years after the event doesn't sit well with a lot of people.
  • etangent 11y ago
    I am pro-nuclear, but the above comment is incredibly, maddeningly stupid. It's so amazingly stupid that I don't know where to begin. The hidden assumption that there was an actual alternative to MAD? That the USG used radiation fear-mongering to shove MAD down our throats? That the USSR didn't use propaganda? That radiation isn't a big deal? That radiation only stays around for 30 years (a common mistake is to assume that half-life, which can indeed be something like 30years, equals how long radioisotopes will stay in the environment, which is completely bollocks)? The most horrible thing about that comment is that it was written by someone intelligent enough to compose a sentence, yet stupid enough to reach to the conclusions she did.
    • benihana 11y ago
      Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• brc 11y ago
  And that's before you compare death/injury per Mw produced. On that measure Solar power is more dangerous than nuclear given how many people die falling off roofs while installing or maintaining solar panels.
  • xg15 11y ago
    Really! And if you look at the illness/milliwatt scale, you can see that even the human metabolism itself is more dangerous than nuclear power. The fears are clearly overblown!
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Well, even if that was so, it only goes to show how much effort went to make large-scale nuclear power generation very, very safe.
  • notahacker 11y ago
    I'm assuming this stat stems from the famous blog article which rejected even the most conservative and widely-accepted Chernobyl death estimates and then calculated solar deaths based on the (unsupported) assumption that 1 in 6 roofing casualties were the result of installing solar panels...
    • throwawayaway 11y ago
      > http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener... "The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous." So he uses 50 deaths for his calculations. "1/6th of the 9 million roofing job accidents would be about 50 deaths from installing 1.5 million roofs if other countries had similar to US safety. The amount of roof installations is increasing as a percentage. 4 TWh from roofs PV. So 12.5 deaths per TWh from solar roof installations. Assuming 15 years as the average functional life or time until major maintenance or upgrade is required. The average yearly deaths from rooftop solar is 0.83/TWh." How did I miss that! Incredible.
• mariusz79 11y ago
  yeah, it's very safe.. you have areas of land where people won't be able to live for thousands of years.. and you have hundreds of these "safe" power plants all over the world.. in addition to that we have to store the waste from these "safe" plants for few millennia, and hope that after our civilization is gone, it won't destroy the life on this planet.
  • sp332 11y ago
    The uranium used in reactors is refined from ore that's already sitting in the ground. No matter how bad an accident there is, it won't threaten "life on this planet" because if you spread it all around, it will be very dilute again.
    • mariusz79 11y ago
      It's not about uranium but about plutonium .
  • Turing_Machine 11y ago
    "you have areas of land where people won't be able to live for thousands of years.." Where are these areas? Can you name a few of them? " in addition to that we have to store the waste from these "safe" plants for few millennia" Nope. After a couple of hundred years it's no more radioactive than the ore from which it came. Long half-life = less radioactive. By definition.
    • mariusz79 11y ago
      How about Chernobyl exclusion zone? "Ukrainian officials estimate the area will not be safe for human life again for another 20,000 years" [1] "The time frame in question when dealing with radioactive waste ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years" [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusion_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_management_of_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...
• coldtea 11y ago
  >Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. That's if we believe the official accounts, who have been found lying on several occasions on this very matter. >For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there are over a hundred created by the earthquake itself. So? You can't prevent an earthquake (at best you can just build more resilient houses), but you can always not build nuclear reactors. >You know what kills more people per year than nuclear plants? Everything. Same goes for lots of things which we nethertheless don't tolerate. Like serial killers.
• pjc50 11y ago
  The problem which nuclear disasters have that almost all other disasters don't is the permanence of danger over such a large area. There have been plenty of large-scale chemical or industrial disasters - everything from Bhopal to Tianjing to Agent Orange to Deepwater Horizon - but they have the common property that the smoke clears and it's possible to neutralise, disperse or otherwise clean up the mess. Whereas Chernobyl and Fukushima are going to have exclusion zones that must remain covered for our entire lifetimes.
  • danharaj 11y ago
    Then again, humans have also done things like contaminate our soil with arsenic, and the effects exist to this day and will persist for a very long time.
  • saalweachter 11y ago
    Underground coal fires like the one under Centralia, PA -- which has forced a similar evacuation -- also last hundreds of years. Sea level rise will last thousands. The destruction of aquifers in central California -- when too much water is pumped out, the porous layers compress, and will no longer hold water in the future -- I don't even know if there's a process by which that will heal. The loss of diversity of ocean and land life, you're probably looking at millions of years for new speciation to fill the emptied niches. Ocean acidification, also another long wait.
• kazinator 11y ago
  > The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers Yes, freedom will do that to people: get them to go wherever they want, take pictures of whatever they want and focus on whatever topic they want in their own web page. > Yet coverage is warped in the opposite direction. Some guy's blog with travel pictures isn't "coverage". Journalistic standards do not apply. He probably went elsewhere in Japan too and took other pictures. Those are off topic for the web page which is about the Fukushima site. Maybe he has other pages about other topics (in Japan or elsewhere).
• ifdefdebug 11y ago
  People overcame the tragedies created by the earthquake disaster. They grieved their dead and rebuilt their towns. Now life is going on - outside the Fukushima area. The Fukushima disaster is not going away anytime soon. About 100,000 people lost everything, no rebuilding in sight. Former house owners are still living in containers. Radioactive water is entering the environment since then. In 30 years, maybe someone will compare cancer statistics in that geographic area before and after the disaster. I doubt that figure of 150 deaths will hold then. So it's perfectly normal to cover the Fukushima event as an ongoing disaster today. The earthquake and the tsunami are history. Nothing absurd about that.
  • OscarCunningham 11y ago
    >I doubt that figure of 150 deaths will hold then. Why?
    • xigency 11y ago
      It's certainly different if you know one of those people.
• xigency 11y ago
  This article isn't about the tsunami. If it were, it would probably be called 'Sendai', not 'Fukushima'. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. It's an incredibly callous attitude to tell people not to care about something. I know people who live there (Fukushima and Koriyama) and I can and will continue to care about them.
• hristov 11y ago
  You do not know how many deaths there have been or will be from Fukushima. Every government always under-reports deaths from nuclear exposure. Saying it is the safest energy technology in existence is a dangerous lie. Solar is safer. Wind is safer. Even natural gas is safer.
• foofoo55 11y ago
  As with his Chernobyl interest, I believe he's focusing on how a nuclear disaster causes seemingly permanent loss of human habitat. This includes emotional upheaval, lost personal identity, and lost way of life, as well as the loss of future places of dwelling. In that focus, I believe he does a good job.
• adamsea 11y ago
  The disaster was man-made due to TEPCO's negligence in planning for predictable contingencies and due to their post-disaster behavior. This is from the Wikipedia article on the Japananese investigation into the disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Diet_of_Japan_Fukushima_Nuclear_Accident_Independent_Investigation_Commission#Commission_findings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Diet_of_Japan_Fukushi... Here's the main part: The nuclear incident "cannot be regarded as a natural disaster," the NAIIC panel's chairman, Tokyo University professor emeritus Kiyoshi Kurokawa, wrote in the inquiry report. "It was a profoundly man-made disaster -- that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response."[3] "Governments, regulatory authorities and Tokyo Electric Power [TEPCO] lacked a sense of responsibility to protect people's lives and society," the Diet's Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission said. "They effectively betrayed the nation's right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly 'man-made'," it said.[4] The nuclear incident was the result of poor earthquake-safety planning and faulty post-tsunami communication.[10] As a result of collusion between the facility's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), regulators and the Japanese government the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant unfolded as a "man-made disaster".[6] The report attributed the cause of the failings to Japan's culture of "reflexive obedience", noted that there was no separation between atomic regulation and promotion and described a Japan in which nuclear power became "an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society."[6] TEPCO, regulators and the government "failed to correctly develop the most basic safety requirements -- such as assessing the probability of damage, preparing for containing collateral damage from such a disaster, and developing evacuation plans," the NAIIC said. According to the report the lack of training and knowledge of the TEPCO workers at the facility reduced the effectiveness of the response to the situation at a critical time following the quake and tsunami. As the crisis escalated, TEPCO, the regulators, government agencies and the prime minister's office were ineffective in "preventing or limiting the consequential damage" at Fukushima Daiichi.