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Geography alone makes Fukushima less bad for human health. Beyond the immediate vicinity, most of Fukushima's contamination is going into the Pacific. We have
by ef4 10y ago
Geography alone makes Fukushima less bad for human health.
Beyond the immediate vicinity, most of Fukushima's contamination is going into the Pacific. We have very good data on how diluted that radiation is once it gets to places people actually live, and the answer is "extremely diluted". The prevailing weather all moves to the east, directly out to sea.
Whereas Chernobyl spread its contamination across a populated continent.
If you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much better than the Pacific ocean. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like Bikini Atoll.
- bigbugbag 10y agoIf you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much worse than the upper atmosphere. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like high altitude atmosphere (launched from the pacific ocean). Safety may have played a role but AFAIK these nukes were exploded in this part of the world mostly because it was remote enough from the countries doing the testing. After a few decades of dumping radioactive waste in oceans, we came back from the belief that dumping radioactive waste in the ocean is mostly harmless and a ban on this practice was put up in 1993.