elbows
Well-Known Member
Your notion of what facts are is a bit weird but never mind. If you are so keen on comparisons to Chernobyl, then I really wish you would answer my question about what Chernobyl means to you, what were the simple Chernobyl facts that you would like to see a Fukushima equivalent of?
Chernobyl involved one reactor suffering a very large explosion and some subsequent fires, and a lot of mess with bits of the graphite core lying around the immediate site, and lots of very bad substances went into the air very quickly, and plenty got high in the air so they could spread far. After a few weeks they managed to stop loads of stuff from escaping. In the meantime quite a lot of responders died from radiation sickness, and we saw how quite a large area is still evacuated to this day, and we see that various amounts of radioactive substances ended up in a number of different countries, and had implications for health, farming and food.
Fukushima involved numerous reactors and fuel pools, and is a far more complicated set of events. There is still loads of information missing about the state of some of the reactors and exactly what happened, and we cannot know the whole story because the story is still playing out. The data about contamination in various places seems to suggest that not as much nasty stuff has been released as was the case with Chernobyl, but since stuff is still escaping to this day how can we give a final estimate? There may yet be some twists in the tale of one or more reactors or fuel pools that makes a difference to the story of the contamination. There may be stuff we havent been told yet or that they have not found out yet.
To me Fukushima is worse in terms of the number of different things that went wrong, and how far they may still be away from getting some sort of control of things. And worse because of how Japan is so densely populated in places, and how reliant they are on nuclear, and the other nightmares they are dealing with due to the tsunami. The emergency response to Fukushima may eventually be judged to have been worse than Chernobyl too. A cartoon version of nuclear rescue would certainly have been able to do something to prevent some of these explosions and pool problems happening after power was lost, and we might think that in real life a better job could have been done too, as it does look like they had an opportunity not to lose control of things and didnt act in time, but its a bit early to judge.
So make no mistake, for all my attention to detail and unwillingness to talk about health affects in certain terms, in my book Fukushima is the worst nuclear power incident we have seen, simply because of the number of different things that have gone wrong. But I cant say thats the case if Im just talking about the health affects. I also think it has far more implications for the future than Chernobyl did, because of the number of reactors with similar designs that operate today, the stuff about how earthquake & tsunami risks are judged, our tendency to have been extending life of old reactors, and some rather large implications for storage of spent fuel.
Purely in terms of interesting new revelations about nuclear power that people may not have been aware of before this event, and assuming that they were already aware that things can go wrong and that radiation leaks are very bad indeed, its the issue of how long both the fuel in the reactors and the spent fuel in pools requires careful cooling that Fukushima should be illuminating to people.
