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Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

• curtis 15y ago
  In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant. The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster. I don't know why anyone should take this article seriously. Here's the thing about radiation: We can measure it directly. And scientists have certainly been able to measure radioactivity here in the U.S. that must be a consequence of Fukushima. But here's the thing: those radioactive effects -- here in the U.S. -- are very, very small.
  • SkyMarshal 15y ago
    Indeed. Berkeley's nuclear engineering department has been running one of the better monitoring programs: http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling
  • john231 15y ago
    yeah according to who. And what level is small. Can you be more specific exactly to what a small level of radiation is. And thirdly who the hell do you think you are pontificating your so called confident guesses on topics in which you have absolutely no knowledge of. Seriously, what is your IQ because someone who would write vague generalisations as acute concise facts are clearly delusional in many realms of the human psyche. You are clearly one of them.
• nobody_nowhere 15y ago
  The quick onslaught of the "it couldn't possibly be a meltdown" message in the mainstream media and the "MIT professor says" emails/webpages, etc all smacked of a propaganda campaign to me. All the while the fuel rods were sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the reactor... and probably leaking through into the ground. Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the catastrophe than a conspiracy to suppress information, but the forcefulness of the response was striking. I heard a great (and probably apocryphal) anecdote on the radio a few weeks after -- "After three mile island, the Russians came to the US, performed a detailed analysis, and concluded 'we can't have a three mile island'. Instead, they had a Chernobyl. The Japanese went to Russia, did an analysis, and said 'we can't possibly have a Chernobyl', and instead had their own meltdown. Now we're hearing how modern reactors couldn't possibly have a meltdown like any of three so far."
  • Duff 15y ago
    I was shocked at the immediate "this is not a problem" reaction by many people -- particularly here at Hacker News.
    • jdp23 15y ago
      I was too. Sure, there was plenty of uninformed media coverage jumping to conclusions. As I said at the time, though, the "this is not a problem" camp was equally premature -- and came across as cavalier to the tens of thousands of people in Japan who had to evacuate.
    • deleted 15y ago
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    • burgerbrain 15y ago
      Just think of it as a natural counterweight to all the people who equate meltdown with a nuclear explosion.
      • pohl 15y ago
        Where are such people? From my perspective, you're suggesting a natural counterweight to nobody.
        • tensor 15y ago
          Where are the "this is not a problem" people? I dont' recall a single person claiming the failure at the plant wasn't a problem. As I recall it, there was a "this is not Chernobyl" camp.
          • swaits 15y ago
            There were both. The HN (and "MIT") response was particularly disturbing to me. You couldn't question the official reports of "everything is fine and under control" around here without getting completely slammed, belittled, berated, downvoted, etc. And yet now we know that the total radiation release was probably as much or more than Chernobyl. What I said at the very beginning of this disaster.. If there's one thing everyone should know by now about nuclear reactor emergencies - it's that the authorities never tell the truth in the beginning, through ignorance or otherwise. We have an admittedly small sample of such accidents, but I'm sticking with it.
• Ixiaus 15y ago
  Fukushima is a disaster, yes, but this article (particularly the little subsection blaming the USA) is full of appeals to emotion.
• dreamux 15y ago
  "Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes," As an Engineer I call bullshit on this.
  • Duff 15y ago
    Around the time of the disaster there were stories about a GE engineer who resigned in protest in 1970 over this particular model of reactor. If I recall correctly, the engineering team's concerns about fail-safes in the event of a loss of electrical power were overruled or dismissed.
    • tsotha 15y ago
      The potential problems resulting from loss of electrical power were and are well understood. What happened in Fukushima wasn't a flaw in the reactor design - it was a flaw in the design of the power station.
      • Duff 15y ago
        It's a flaw in the system. A system built around a reactor with known risks if electrical supplies are interrupted. This is a region of a country where tectonic activity is significant enough that seaside villages are cutoff from the sea by 15 foot reinforced walls. A reactor with the failure characteristics of the Fukushima reactors sound like the wrong tool for the job to me.
  • irons 15y ago
    Who capitalizes "engineer"? Aside from realtors, maybe.
    • marshray 15y ago
      Those who pay thousands of dollars a year for their professional license.
      • 15y ago
• natural219 15y ago
  I love AJE, but I'm regularly surprised over the amount of balls AJE reporters have in making value judgements on the fly. For instance: Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US? Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.
  • code_duck 15y ago
    On the flip side, I'm regularly impressed by how the US media almost never questions, mentions or takes note any of the money and power connections which influence US politics so heavily. I think the story is deeper than one company who gave $269,000 however.
    • tkahn6 15y ago
      The solution is to find higher quality news outlets. NPR and PBS come to mind.
      • code_duck 15y ago
        While they, along with the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and a few other magazines are better than average, they still don't question things in the way I'd like. There's still plenty things that seem to be unspeakable in their journalism.
  • tomkarlo 15y ago
    That paragraph would never get past most decent editors. It's one thing to cite those influences if you have actual evidence that Barack Obama is somehow suppressing those alarms. In the absence of that, this portion is total tin-hat crap. They might as well write: "Did you know that every day drunk drivers kill hundreds of Americans? Did you know that the president drinks?"
  • webXL 15y ago
• Spyro7 15y ago
  "In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant." Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist: http://janettesherman.com/ http://janettesherman.com/ Joseph Mangano is the director of the "Radiation and Public Health Project": http://www.radiation.org/ http://www.radiation.org/ They are not exactly disinterested parties, and it is fair to say that their article would never be published in a peer reviewed journal: http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html Side Note: This is not the most scientific graph in the world, but (in the event of another panicked radiation article) it is always worth linking to the xkcd graph on radiation: http://xkcd.com/radiation/ http://xkcd.com/radiation/
  • nandemo 15y ago
    If Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US, you gotta wonder what was the effect in Japan. Did they bother to check?
    • glhaynes 15y ago
      But it's not at all proven that "Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US", is it? It seems sort of unlikely that no one would have noticed a tremendous spike in the amount of environmental radiation (such as would presumably be necessary to cause such an increase in infant mortality) in these northwestern US cities. Either way, though, that seems surprising to me that there'd be a 35% increase in infant mortality.
      • nandemo 15y ago
        > But it's not at all proven that "Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US", is it? I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear, but that's my point, it's so implausible. US is very far from Japan, so if there was a 35% spike there then the researchers' first reaction should have been to check the corresponding stats for Japan. If they didn't it smacks of intellectual dishonesty.
• klenwell 15y ago
  "In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant." "The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster." I tried to source this on Google. I can't find the article by Sherman and Mangano, but found this discussion: http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550 http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550 It appears the authors cited by AJE were using CDC data. Someone posts the infant death numbers at the Berkeley link. The numbers are very small with a lot of deviation. And it's not clear that they're even being measured against total number of births. I've heard a lot of praise for AJE's reporting and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that TEPCO and the Japanese government were continuing to understate the risk, but this article seems shoddy and sensationalistic.
  • deleted 15y ago
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  • jrwoodruff 15y ago
    I was very surprised to see statistics like that so soon after it happened. Typically reliable statistics for data like infant mortality are not available until awhile (read: a year) after the event. And, frankly, even then it seems very early to draw a conclusive connection to Fukushima. Correlation != causation.
    • NoItAll 15y ago
      jr, mom says to get off the computer and stop bothering people.
  • oelewapperke 15y ago
    So there was a lot of infant mortality on a location where (a) a magnitude 9 earthquake occurred (b) a tsunami passed (c) all electricity (including that of hospitals) failed for a LONG period (ie. too much to cover with diesel generators) - and hours later - (d) radiation levels slightly increased, well within safety tolerances OMG ! the nuclear plantz ! Their killin` da babies !
• Shenglong 15y ago
  One disaster, and people forget the half century of prosperity that nuclear power brought. Worse, the general public is going to see Fusion (fingers crossed) in the same way as fission just because it's also "nuclear power". I'm disheartened.
  • mattdeboard 15y ago
    Uh, yeah, I mean, these are human being we're talking about. We can't even get people to accept evolutionary theory. I won't hold my breath waiting for people to be even-handed and partake in critical thought about the vagaries of nuclear power.
• berntb 15y ago
  In addition to the other criticism. From the article: TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record. Is there a reference supporting this? I've only seen values for Fukushima radiation as a fraction of Chernobyl (and if I remember correctly, not as bad isotopes)? A while ago, I got multiple comments modded to -10, for questioning the trustworthiness of Al Jazeera. The web site is not connected to the tv channel? (For the record: I don't really know about al J. I distrust most media, except NY Times/Washington Post/BBC as long as they don't write about advertisers.)
  • 3am 15y ago
    With zero effort, I found this for you: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110413005584.htm<br/&#62 http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110413005584.htm<b...; "Junichi Matsumoto, acting head of Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Nuclear Power & Plant Siting Division, acknowledged the seriousness of the Fukushima accident at a press conference Tuesday. 'Although the details of the [Chernobyl and Fukushima] accidents are different, from the standpoint of how much radiation has been released, [Fukushima] is equal to or more serious than Chernobyl.'" That was just a citation in the Wikipedia page for the incident.
    • berntb 15y ago
      You might want to read what you google. :-) That was from Apr. 14, when they didn't really have that much of a clue -- and different sources in that article said different things. Edit: But sure, I asked for "a reference". Maybe I should have asked for "a reference that is more than a claim by some company man (not a researcher in a paper etc), with an unknown agenda"... :-)
    • smackfu 15y ago
      I still have doubts about that claim. Didn't Chernobyl release clouds of radioactive fallout over Europe?
    • nitrogen 15y ago
      Could they be referring to the INES disaster scale, on which Fukushima rates equal to Chernobyl? Also, the direct release of radiation from the reactor is significantly less serious than the release of certain radioisotopes. If they're only comparing absolute radiation levels, and (hypothetically) most of Chernobyl's was in radioactive cesium, while most of Fukushima's was in alpha/beta/gamma particles or short-lived radioactive oxygen/nitrogen/etc., then the comparison is not very useful.
• nl 15y ago
  I'm not a big fan of the automatic approval many on HN give to nuclear power, and I agree that we haven't heard the last of Fukushima. But this article is bullshit. There is no conceivable mechanism for it to have occurred, and no pattern in other cases of nuclear exposure.
• sudonim 15y ago
  From the article, it seems as though experts are saying the design of the reactors by GE didn't take into account that Japan has earthquakes. GE was never named directly, but wikipedia says it was their design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power...
  • marshray 15y ago
    AFAICT the plants reacted to and withstood the earthquakes fairly well. The tsunami on the other hand...well I guess nuke plants and 14 meter high walls of water don't mix.
    • nathanb 15y ago
      I believe the main problem wasn't the damage to the plants so much as the loss of power and unreliability of backup power, a known and critical flaw in an earthquake-prone area.
      • marshray 15y ago
        The term "plant" includes all the surrounding equipment. Batteries, backup generators, fuel reserves, etc. My understanding is that if a functioning subset of generators had survived they could have powered the cooling pumps and the problem would have just been keeping them refueled. You can truck-in or airlift-in fuel quicky, so this would have been a very manageable problem in the short and medium terms, much more so than repairing long spans of downed electrical distribution lines.
    • yena 15y ago
      Actually we don't know that, since most of the reactor building in inaccessible. Also, the latest info from Tepco says that they lost coolant before the tsunami struck, which suggest major earthquake damage. However, if the tsunami hadn't been this severe and they had kept power, perhaps they could have brought the situation under control.
      • 15y ago
• PaulHoule 15y ago
  There's a lot of nonsense in that article. First of all, they keep repeating the words Plutonium and Uranium (particularly "enriched Uranium") and try to suggest that these are the major threats from the accident. They're not. Uranium isotopes have a half-life of billions of years, so whatever radioactivity they emit is spread out over a very long time. Overall, uranium is toxic in the same way that lead is toxic, and the chemical toxicity is probably worse than the radiotoxicity. Even in a completely melted reactor core, uranium dioxide is relativly stable and won't be quickly transported into the environment. The isotopes of concern are primarily of Iodine and Cesium. Radioiodine from the accident has almost completely decayed, although Cesium isotopes may still be hazardous in heavily contaminated areas for years. Currently there seem to be "hotspots" at considerable distances from the plant where doses on the ground are in a range that's at the edge of what nuclear power workers are permitted to get (but rarely do.) There's no proof that radiation at that level is harmful, but no proof that it's completely safe to have that exposure for your lifetime either. Now, it's also BS to say that the threat from spent nuclear fuel that's been sitting around for 10 years is as high as the threat from an active core or one that's been sitting around for three months -- it just isn't; radioactivity decays and heat generation goes down, so it's really unfair to count the number of "cores" worth of danger here. That said, I wouldn't blame people for mistrusting Japanese government, industry and even society. Japan has been the world's leader in nuclear accidents for the past 20 years, and it's often said that they're not completely honest about industrial accidents in general (such as in the auto industry.) Nuclear safety requires a person who's disciplined and (for the most part) follows orders but who also has a strong individual sense of right and wrong and won't follow a bad order. America's nuclear navy works hard to cultivate this ethos, but I'm not sure if it's easy to cultivate this in Japan.
  • dhyasama 15y ago
    That last bit reminds me of a Malcolm Gladwell story. I think it was Korea Air that had a terrible safety record and a consultant was brought in to figure it out. Turns out Korean culture strongly discourages questioning your superiors, even in the face of obvious error. Pilots were making mistakes and co-pilots wouldn't correct them.
• patrickgzill 15y ago
  It will be interesting to see if, in a few years, dentists and doctors start collecting baby teeth, which can then be analyzed for uptake of radioactive materials into bone. This was done in the 50s and 60s in the USA - the large number of above-ground nuclear tests put material in the air, which was detectable in teeth from children living at that time. (link may be biased against nuclear but contains overview of the study): http://www.radiation.org/projects/tooth_fairy.html http://www.radiation.org/projects/tooth_fairy.html
• krschultz 15y ago
  This article really lowers my opinion of Al Jazeera english.
  • iskander 15y ago
    I read/watch AJ English most days and I've found that their on-the-ground reporting is excellent but they also publish a lot of marginal rubbish.
• walexander 15y ago
  "'Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,' Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera" OK, after reading the first sentence, I was already suspicious of this article. Quick tab back to HN comments seems to confirm it. Thanks for saving my time, HN.
  • Natsu 15y ago
    I have to wonder why he ranked it above Bhopal, Deepwater Horizon, or even Chernobyl. Chernobyl had burning graphite and a fully exposed core. There were also lots of people dying of radiation sickness. Thankfully, none of the plant workers appear to have died from that, though they have more reason to fear overexposure than anyone.
    • sesqu 15y ago
      Interestingly, a documentary I saw on the on-site group studying Chernobyl mentioned that most of the group died prematurely, but not of radiation sickness or cancer. They died of heart failures and stress-induced health problems. A long time afterwards, some of the survivors saw non-terminal cell damage related problems.
• nevinera 15y ago
  No it's not. The long-term environmental impact from fukushima is far smaller than that from the BP oil leak last year. The extra radiation being received by people who live a mile from the site is on par with eating two bananas every day. The impact isn't nothing; this is a significant catastrophe. But that article is sensational bullshit.
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• fleitz 15y ago
  What exactly are "hot" particles that can't be measured with a Geiger counter? I assume they are talking about radioactive particles and not particles with increased temperature. This article sounds like pseudo science to me.
• guscost 15y ago
  If our best scientific assessments are based on absurdly low-confidence ancillary statistics like these, doesn't that automatically suggest that we shouldn't decide anything based on the results?
• john231 15y ago
  i wouldn't doubt it. If i had my options, i would move to South America to avoid the fall out. Hmm, why did bush buy thousands of acres of land in Paraguay 10 years ago? that is interesting isn't it. I don't trust anybody or anyone, here or anywhere. I don't trust anyone of you here. That means ignorant fools, pompous preachers, or corrupted demoralized counter intelligence scabs. I'll follow my own intuition, under my own volition. And I think it is time that others do the same.