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Very cool. Japan doesn't have much of their own in terms of energy resources, so I applaud both the commitment to help our ally and the R&D in terms of new and
by amalgamated_inc 4y ago
Very cool. Japan doesn't have much of their own in terms of energy resources, so I applaud both the commitment to help our ally and the R&D in terms of new and especially SMR nuclear.
Japan is the perfect use-case for nuclear. Even when disaster strikes, they're extremely safe. Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoDidn’t that person actually die from cancer and not radiation per se? I understand that cancer can be caused by radiation, but that is actually treatable and not always fatal, whereas radiation poisoning is afaik fatal.
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoThis is correct, it is not 100% certain the cancer was caused/exacerbated by the radiation. But let's count it as a conservative 1 death. It was not acute radiation poisoning.
- jansan 4y ago[flagged]
- petre 4y agoMore like one confirmed radiation death and around 2000 because of the tsunami and the displacement.
- throw827474737 4y agoRadiation deaths? Lol guys, I get it, but please don't try to make a bigger fool out ouf you by ridiculing about a point noone ever made.. it is like someone would tell you that our lethargic sitting life styles makes us sick and you stand up and shout: "But noone died from sitting, while tons of people die from sports a lot!!!"
- foota 4y agoWhat?
- bfgoodrich 4y ago[dead]
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoHow much radioactive waste was dumped in the ocean?
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoI don't know, you tell me. Are you saying it was non-zero?
- acidburnNSA 4y agoFukushima dumped about 45 PBq of radioactive material into the ocean. For reference: Chernobyl did 85 PBq Global nuclear weapons testing: 400 PBq Natural Uranium-238: 37,000 PBq Natural Potassium-40: 15,000,000 PBq https://www.whoi.edu/multimedia/source-of-radioactivity-in-the-ocean/ https://www.whoi.edu/multimedia/source-of-radioactivity-in-t...
- rcme 4y agoNow divide each number by its area.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoThe ocean constantly churns, mixing these all together, so dividing by the constant area of the world oceans doesn't change this.
- bob29 4y agoExplain the trash islands
- thereddaikon 4y agoI dont think its accurate to equate floating trash and something dissolved in solution. Their behavior is likely to be very different.
- mortenjorck 4y ago
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. While I tend to agree with your point, there's also the couple hundred square miles and 165k people worth of exclusion zone as a side-effect. That's not small, but it's potentially something you can mitigate by picking sites carefully.
- asdff 4y agoIf the U.S. shared similar concern for environmental health a good portion of urban areas would be in exclusion zones from other sources of industrial contamination too. Instead we tolerate these people having elevated rates of diseases such as cancer or asthma and generally shortened lifespans, and let companies responsible go bankrupt with their executives absolved of all responsibilities while we spend time today scratching our head figuring out what to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund#/media/File:Superfund_sites.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund#/media/File:Superfun...
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoThat exclusion zone is mostly unnecessary. You can go there with a geiger counter and you'll find it's not much more radioactive than e.g. Utah. Most of the "measures" were completely irrational.
- Manuel_D 4y agoThe exclusion zone isn't unnecessary. It's gone. All exclusion zones have been remediated and reopened: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear-evacuation-order-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear... Nobody bothered to clean up Chernobyl because the whole town's existence was to support the plant and plant workers. With no plant, the city had no value and thus no incentive to spend money on remediation. By comparison, Japan showed us what occurs when places with value are contaminated: effort is made to clean them up. Half of the exclusion zone was reopened within 5 years, and the most intensely irradiated locations were cleaned up in just over a decade.
- floxy 4y ago>Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it. 19,759 according to the sources cited by the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami#Key_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoThanks for looking it up, I remembered "something ten thousand" but wasn't sure if it was just under or just over or just something with a ten :)
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoIt's been a while since I looked, but I think the claim here is that the evacuation of elderly and infirm people from the parts of the exclusion area that were otherwise not seriously affected by the tsunami resulted in a large loss of disability-adjusted life years.
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoYes, that's true. And that evacuation was based on irrational fear-mongering, completely unnecessary.
- ForOldHack 4y agoI'll have what he is having, in fact, Ill have a double. "Because of the plant’s location along the coast, much of the water washed into the Pacific, resulting in the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history. Additional airborne radioactive material from the explosions and fires at the plant fell onto the sea surface, where it too mixed into the water, as did subsequent leaks from tanks on the site holding treated water." This is from Woods Hole, you probably do not know or recognize their expertise. "the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history."
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoYes, and, as demonstrated in another post on here, way less than what's released naturally every day. Even the worst case just isn't very bad.
- PaulHoule 4y agoAnd it is is just a drop in the ocean when you consider the natural radioactivity from ⁴⁰K. It may be a local, time-bounded problem in the first few years after the accident in that certain isotopes may bio-concentrate and affect fishing and agriculture in that region. So far as the ocean as a whole goes I'd be more concerned about chunks of styrofoam.
- pkaye 4y agoUS also has gotten Eastern Europe and South Korea involved. https://emerging-europe.com/news/ukraine-joins-europes-list-of-smr-hopefuls/ https://emerging-europe.com/news/ukraine-joins-europes-list-...