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I completely agree with you. On western style reactors I think we should be removing a lot of unnecessary safe guards and educate the public on what actually ha
by ScotterC 14y ago
I completely agree with you. On western style reactors I think we should be removing a lot of unnecessary safe guards and educate the public on what actually happens in the case of a western designed, pressurized water reactor meltdown. What happens is practically nothing but fear and panic. Chernobyl was a very dangerous design. Fukushima was not.
No one died from radiation exposure from fukushimas meltdown and no one was going to die. Radiation exposure is very hard for the public and even educated people to understand. Releases of radioactive materials from a meltdown like Fukushima are barely above normal radioactive background noise and simply will not cause the devastation people believe it will. The most recent numbers I saw were that in the next 20 years, 4 out of every 100,000 in the area around Fukushima were likely to contract a form of cancer when as it was 40,000 out of every 100,000 were already going to get some form of cancer.
This modeling is also based on the Linear No Threshold (LNT) theorem which is patently wrong. Aside: LNT states that if 100% of people die at a high radiation exposure then, linearly, at 1% of that exposure, 1% of people will die. This is false. It is equivalent to saying that since 100 out of 100 people die from falling from 100ft up then at least 1 out of a 100 people will die from falling from 1ft.
Radiation is just not the monster it's made out to be.
What happens in a meltdown in a pressurized water reactor is the fuel turns to a solid mass with enough decay heat that it's still hot. It ruins the plant, yes. It's a economic loss, yes. But as far as I'm concerned, if it's not dispersed into the atmosphere then it's not an issue and it won't be dispersed into the atmosphere because it won't light on fire. Not in a design like Fukushima or three mile island.
- willyt 14y agoRegarding your last paragraph, there was and possibly is still a risk that the spent rods stored in the cooling ponds at Fukushima could overheat and catch fire. They only just managed to pump enough seawater over them to prevent this happening.
- knb 14y agoYour post is so wrong that it is almost trolling. Just some counterexamples. The Fukushima Mark-1 reactors are of very dangerous design, and that is well-known. (For example their containment is perforated at key positions, by design) Ambient radioactivity is so high in central Japan that it should definitely be considered a hazard (just search on Youtube for Japanese people filming themselves walking around with Geiger counters and measuring the signal, e.g Youtube user "Chanbukimi"). Government ignores it or plays it down. Exremely radioactive "radiotrophic funghus" (see Wikipedia) is everywhere in the Fukushima area and even in Tokyo. Cancer risks by long-term low-dose radioactive exposure are even higher than estimated by the models promoted by governmental regulatory bodies. Risks are higher for children and women in particular, and simple back of the envelope calculations can show this convincingly (to me, that is). The whole food chain in Japan is messed up for the foreseeable future, and this holds for Pacific seafood as well. Young Tuna fish catched in the San Diego area are slightly radioactive, although these fish are so young that they could not have stayed in radioactive seawater near Japan for more than a couple of months, and they are still contaminated. There is much more contamination to come as the radioactivity spreads just by natural mass transfer processes (water cycle, carbon cycle). I for one am very pessimistic.
- nitrogen 14y agoI will be first in line to eat any fish with evidence of radioactivity from Fukushima that still meets legal limits on radioactivity in food.