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Fukushima nuclear disaster: did the evacuation raise the death toll?

59 points by curtis 9y ago

dfee 9y ago
There is a lot of good content I come across on FT. I never post it because I figure it won’t be able to amass enough traction as there’s a paywall. I’ve been happy paying for FT (it’s not cheap!) but I like the idea that more than half of FT’s revenue comes from subscribership than advertising (heard this on I believe an AlphaChat podcast). So it’s interesting seeing my two primary news channels intersect (FT / HN), and I wonder what other news sources people read that aren’t accelerant-enabled (i.e. they’re paywalled).
- lyonlim 9y ago
  FT subscriber here too. Wish there was a way to share articles too. Because I always use the app and am not signed in, it's annoying to come across FT articles and not be able to read it.
swatkat 9y ago
https://archive.is/20180311091756/https://www.ft.com/content/000f864e-22ba-11e8-add1-0e8958b189ea https://archive.is/20180311091756/https://www.ft.com/content...
- jwilk 9y ago
  ↑ use this link to bypass paywall
  - drefanzor 9y ago
    thanks
- piracykills 9y ago
  Seriously hope those guys have a business model. Love that site for keeping everything from important political tweets to ripping paywalled articles...
jwilk 9y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770609
contravariant 9y ago
Maybe my memory of the event is faulty or maybe the concerns were exaggerated at the time, but I'm fairly sure at least one of the buildings exploded due to hydrogen build up. Which isn't reassuring when it happens to a building housing radioactive material. Particularly when the safety measures were demonstrably insufficient. Sure it's easy to conclude things may have been safe in hindsight, but you can't base decisions on hindsight. Similarly I've never heard anyone argue that we shouldn't take such stringent safety measures around unexploded ordnance, even though I've never heard of any occasion where evacuating the surrounding area was necessary in hindsight.
- russdill 9y ago
  Exactly. In hindsight, it's clear it wasn't going to turn into a radiation release worse than Chernobyl. But at the time of the evacuation, not enough was known. With so many unknowns, it would be incredibly irresponsible not to evacuate. I think blaming the evacuation is wrong. You have look deeper, at the reason that an evacuation was necessary in the first place.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    > worse than Chernobyl Have you tracked the WHO assessments of the impact of Chernobyl? It turns out that there as well, the non-radiation effects (evacuation, psychological stress, etc.) far outweighed the radiation effects. > reason that an evacuation was necessary Apart from a core that was certainly necessary: hysteria, fueled by the mass media and an unscientific/unproven and almost certainly wrong model of the health risks of radiation exposure.
- guscost 9y ago
  It’s a little more complicated, but you’re basically right. The hydrogen buildup happened when they tried to prevent a meltdown by continually pumping water through the reactors, because the earthquake could have cracked the secondary concrete containment, allowing molten core materials to “China syndrome” their way into the groundwater. As far as I know several cores melted down anyway, and there’s no conclusive evidence that the molten cores escaped secondary containment. It would be a stretch to say that trying to prevent meltdowns was a bad decision in this case. Ironically though, pumping so much seawater through the reactors probably led to a much greater release of radiation into the spent fuel pools, which as I recall have been leaking that heavy (and impure) water into the ground and ocean.
JepZ 9y ago
> Fukushima prompted a global turn away from nuclear power and correspondingly higher carbon emissions in countries such as Germany and Japan. That is certainly true, but at the same time it also caused increased investments in regenerative power, which the article doesn't mention at all. So from what I know, the article looks kinda one-eyed to me.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Japan went back into full gas and coal electricity generation so it cant get any worse than that.
pcurve 9y ago
This is really said, but what choice did they have other than to evacuate? Several months following the disaster, people of Japan were extremely skeptical of how their government handled the situation. The task of convincing people to stay put would've been insurmountable and would've been viewed as gross negligence. "In retrospect, the evacuation looks excessive. Less clear is whether those in charge at the time could have acted any other way."
- acidburnNSA 9y ago
  I like the idea of real-time monitoring and info that was suggested. Evacuate temporarily until cooling is back in place and then put sensors around measuring dose rate that you can look at online: "At the current dose rate, a conservative radiation/health model suggests you will die 2.3 days earlier then if you stayed gone." It'd be a bit complex because some people evacuated to places where the natural dose rate is higher than where their contaminated home was. FTA: --- "The first thing to realise is that relocation is probably going to be a bad idea," he says, suggesting that nuclear companies start providing real-time health information on the risks of living around their plants. “This is what your loss of life expectancy is from the current level of contamination,” he says. If people realise it would only be a few days, they can make an informed decision to stay. ---
  - 7952 9y ago
    Surely life expectancy is an average across a population. So that some people may die much earlier whilst the majority live to an old age. I would rather know the specifics of what may kill me, and decide from that.
    - merb 9y ago
      Yeah that's what I tought as well. I mean you will die 3 days earlier basically means that from a pool of like 1000 people one will die 3000 days earlier because of cancer. which is really not a good way to die.
  - vidarh 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nl 9y ago
It’s kinda amusing to see the pro-nuclear lobby putting out these submarine pieces to try to make it seem like Fukushima wasn’t that bad. Thousands of people displaced? Oh, that’s just an overreaction...
- John_KZ 9y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if this was directly funded by TEPCO or some other "thinktank" that fears new contracts might be cancelled. If there's one thing the Japanese would do different in hindsight, it would not be ignoring a massive explosion of a reactor containment building. It would be never building that power plant. The disaster, even ignoring the deaths and long-term effects on the population, will cost over $100 Billion to the Japanese. That's some pretty fucking expensive electricity they got. And the source is still FT, I guess before they got bought. https://www.ft.com/content/97c88560-e05b-11e5-8d9b-e88a2a889797 https://www.ft.com/content/97c88560-e05b-11e5-8d9b-e88a2a889...
  - nl 9y ago
    Yeah. It’s kinda sad how the nuclear industry has captured the Silicon Valley environment movement too. At the height of the peak oil panic it kind of made sense, in a “contrarian thinking” way. Oil was getting more expensive, renewables weren’t price competitive and what other option was there? But that was 10 years ago, and things change. Fracking got us past that first peak oil problem, and cheap solar/wind/batteries has killed any chance the nuclear power industry had of ever growing again. But still they keep trying... My counter argument these days is easy. Solar+batteries is down to ~6c/kWh with zero subsidies, and can be built in ~6 months. Beat that, nuclear power. Now if they get fusion working, I’ll be very excited.
    - John_KZ 9y ago
      Exactly. I would also fully support fusion or fusion/fission hybrids, which promice to burn up all waste and operate in a deeply subcritical state, meaning no meltdowns or explosions, ever. It's disappointing how little research funding these technologies get. However, until the time comes, literally all other energy sources are cheaper, cleaner and safer in the long run over fission.
elgenie 9y ago
The question shouldn't be "Did the evacuation raise the death toll given the mostly successful containment we now known happened"? It should instead be "Did the evacuation raise the death toll given the expected death toll values informed by the probability estimates of disaster available at the time"? It's also possible that the aftermath of the actual evacuation wasn't well handled; stating that "[the evacuation] reaped a terrible toll in depression, joblessness and alcoholism among the 63,000 people who were displaced beyond the prefecture" also give information about how much of that would still be present for the counterfactual in which people didn't leave but stayed to suffer the after-effects of the tsunami damage.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  First...the containment wasn't particularly successful, things were botched at every level. And still the radiation exposure was at worst minimal. Also, I don't see how comparing "what did we expect/fear" with "what actually happened" is an out-of-bounds question. Quite the contrary, it should be the question to ask, particularly when it comes to formulating future policy. After all, that's how we got aviation accidents down to levels that aren't statistically significant.
cornholio 9y ago
Non paywalled copy: http://archive.today/DYd3k http://archive.today/DYd3k
sn41 9y ago
Has a counterxample to Betteridge's law of headlines been found?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
spikels 9y ago
The reactions to this information are quite interesting. The evacuation 63,000 people is now known to have resulted in 2,202 deaths, cost $74 billion and still displaces 34,000 people seven years later. All for the benefit of a potential life expectancy extension a “few days” from avoidance of radiation and no known deaths prevented. Yet somehow most people still think it was the right decision. This seems like some kind of congnitive blind spot.
- secfirstmd 9y ago
  Similar to the increase in road deaths after 9/11 in the US because people were reluctant to fly.

59 points by curtis 9y ago

dfee 9y ago

There is a lot of good content I come across on FT. I never post it because I figure it won’t be able to amass enough traction as there’s a paywall. I’ve been happy paying for FT (it’s not cheap!) but I like the idea that more than half of FT’s revenue comes from subscribership than advertising (heard this on I believe an AlphaChat podcast). So it’s interesting seeing my two primary news channels intersect (FT / HN), and I wonder what other news sources people read that aren’t accelerant-enabled (i.e. they’re paywalled).

lyonlim 9y ago
FT subscriber here too. Wish there was a way to share articles too. Because I always use the app and am not signed in, it's annoying to come across FT articles and not be able to read it.

swatkat 9y ago

https://archive.is/20180311091756/https://www.ft.com/content/000f864e-22ba-11e8-add1-0e8958b189ea https://archive.is/20180311091756/https://www.ft.com/content...

jwilk 9y ago
↑ use this link to bypass paywall
- drefanzor 9y ago
  thanks
piracykills 9y ago
Seriously hope those guys have a business model. Love that site for keeping everything from important political tweets to ripping paywalled articles...

jwilk 9y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770609

contravariant 9y ago

Maybe my memory of the event is faulty or maybe the concerns were exaggerated at the time, but I'm fairly sure at least one of the buildings exploded due to hydrogen build up. Which isn't reassuring when it happens to a building housing radioactive material. Particularly when the safety measures were demonstrably insufficient. Sure it's easy to conclude things may have been safe in hindsight, but you can't base decisions on hindsight. Similarly I've never heard anyone argue that we shouldn't take such stringent safety measures around unexploded ordnance, even though I've never heard of any occasion where evacuating the surrounding area was necessary in hindsight.

russdill 9y ago
Exactly. In hindsight, it's clear it wasn't going to turn into a radiation release worse than Chernobyl. But at the time of the evacuation, not enough was known. With so many unknowns, it would be incredibly irresponsible not to evacuate. I think blaming the evacuation is wrong. You have look deeper, at the reason that an evacuation was necessary in the first place.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  > worse than Chernobyl Have you tracked the WHO assessments of the impact of Chernobyl? It turns out that there as well, the non-radiation effects (evacuation, psychological stress, etc.) far outweighed the radiation effects. > reason that an evacuation was necessary Apart from a core that was certainly necessary: hysteria, fueled by the mass media and an unscientific/unproven and almost certainly wrong model of the health risks of radiation exposure.
guscost 9y ago
It’s a little more complicated, but you’re basically right. The hydrogen buildup happened when they tried to prevent a meltdown by continually pumping water through the reactors, because the earthquake could have cracked the secondary concrete containment, allowing molten core materials to “China syndrome” their way into the groundwater. As far as I know several cores melted down anyway, and there’s no conclusive evidence that the molten cores escaped secondary containment. It would be a stretch to say that trying to prevent meltdowns was a bad decision in this case. Ironically though, pumping so much seawater through the reactors probably led to a much greater release of radiation into the spent fuel pools, which as I recall have been leaking that heavy (and impure) water into the ground and ocean.

JepZ 9y ago

> Fukushima prompted a global turn away from nuclear power and correspondingly higher carbon emissions in countries such as Germany and Japan. That is certainly true, but at the same time it also caused increased investments in regenerative power, which the article doesn't mention at all. So from what I know, the article looks kinda one-eyed to me.

ekianjo 9y ago
Japan went back into full gas and coal electricity generation so it cant get any worse than that.

pcurve 9y ago

This is really said, but what choice did they have other than to evacuate? Several months following the disaster, people of Japan were extremely skeptical of how their government handled the situation. The task of convincing people to stay put would've been insurmountable and would've been viewed as gross negligence. "In retrospect, the evacuation looks excessive. Less clear is whether those in charge at the time could have acted any other way."

acidburnNSA 9y ago
I like the idea of real-time monitoring and info that was suggested. Evacuate temporarily until cooling is back in place and then put sensors around measuring dose rate that you can look at online: "At the current dose rate, a conservative radiation/health model suggests you will die 2.3 days earlier then if you stayed gone." It'd be a bit complex because some people evacuated to places where the natural dose rate is higher than where their contaminated home was. FTA: --- "The first thing to realise is that relocation is probably going to be a bad idea," he says, suggesting that nuclear companies start providing real-time health information on the risks of living around their plants. “This is what your loss of life expectancy is from the current level of contamination,” he says. If people realise it would only be a few days, they can make an informed decision to stay. ---
- 7952 9y ago
  Surely life expectancy is an average across a population. So that some people may die much earlier whilst the majority live to an old age. I would rather know the specifics of what may kill me, and decide from that.
  - merb 9y ago
    Yeah that's what I tought as well. I mean you will die 3 days earlier basically means that from a pool of like 1000 people one will die 3000 days earlier because of cancer. which is really not a good way to die.
- vidarh 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nl 9y ago

It’s kinda amusing to see the pro-nuclear lobby putting out these submarine pieces to try to make it seem like Fukushima wasn’t that bad. Thousands of people displaced? Oh, that’s just an overreaction...

John_KZ 9y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this was directly funded by TEPCO or some other "thinktank" that fears new contracts might be cancelled. If there's one thing the Japanese would do different in hindsight, it would not be ignoring a massive explosion of a reactor containment building. It would be never building that power plant. The disaster, even ignoring the deaths and long-term effects on the population, will cost over $100 Billion to the Japanese. That's some pretty fucking expensive electricity they got. And the source is still FT, I guess before they got bought. https://www.ft.com/content/97c88560-e05b-11e5-8d9b-e88a2a889797 https://www.ft.com/content/97c88560-e05b-11e5-8d9b-e88a2a889...
- nl 9y ago
  Yeah. It’s kinda sad how the nuclear industry has captured the Silicon Valley environment movement too. At the height of the peak oil panic it kind of made sense, in a “contrarian thinking” way. Oil was getting more expensive, renewables weren’t price competitive and what other option was there? But that was 10 years ago, and things change. Fracking got us past that first peak oil problem, and cheap solar/wind/batteries has killed any chance the nuclear power industry had of ever growing again. But still they keep trying... My counter argument these days is easy. Solar+batteries is down to ~6c/kWh with zero subsidies, and can be built in ~6 months. Beat that, nuclear power. Now if they get fusion working, I’ll be very excited.
  - John_KZ 9y ago
    Exactly. I would also fully support fusion or fusion/fission hybrids, which promice to burn up all waste and operate in a deeply subcritical state, meaning no meltdowns or explosions, ever. It's disappointing how little research funding these technologies get. However, until the time comes, literally all other energy sources are cheaper, cleaner and safer in the long run over fission.

elgenie 9y ago

The question shouldn't be "Did the evacuation raise the death toll given the mostly successful containment we now known happened"? It should instead be "Did the evacuation raise the death toll given the expected death toll values informed by the probability estimates of disaster available at the time"? It's also possible that the aftermath of the actual evacuation wasn't well handled; stating that "[the evacuation] reaped a terrible toll in depression, joblessness and alcoholism among the 63,000 people who were displaced beyond the prefecture" also give information about how much of that would still be present for the counterfactual in which people didn't leave but stayed to suffer the after-effects of the tsunami damage.

mpweiher 9y ago
First...the containment wasn't particularly successful, things were botched at every level. And still the radiation exposure was at worst minimal. Also, I don't see how comparing "what did we expect/fear" with "what actually happened" is an out-of-bounds question. Quite the contrary, it should be the question to ask, particularly when it comes to formulating future policy. After all, that's how we got aviation accidents down to levels that aren't statistically significant.

cornholio 9y ago

Non paywalled copy: http://archive.today/DYd3k http://archive.today/DYd3k

sn41 9y ago

Has a counterxample to Betteridge's law of headlines been found?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

spikels 9y ago

The reactions to this information are quite interesting. The evacuation 63,000 people is now known to have resulted in 2,202 deaths, cost $74 billion and still displaces 34,000 people seven years later. All for the benefit of a potential life expectancy extension a “few days” from avoidance of radiation and no known deaths prevented. Yet somehow most people still think it was the right decision. This seems like some kind of congnitive blind spot.

secfirstmd 9y ago
Similar to the increase in road deaths after 9/11 in the US because people were reluctant to fly.