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What happened? How stable is the reactor situation? Did significant radiation get leaked into the ocean or not? Give me the details goons
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Apr 15, 2015 21:14
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 12:53 |
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I can only speak from my own personal experiences. The earthquake and subsequent tremors busted up the reactors so they couldn't work properly. Radiation leaked, the whole county had to be evacuated, it's all very well documented. My friend was on her third year teaching and living in Fukushima, about 20 km from the epicenter. She had been initially told by the prefectural government to keep the windows closed, and fill a bathtub with water. She ignored all her friends back home begging her to come back like all the other foreigners had the good sense of doing, and dug in her heels because she loved her school and host family (admirable, but not the time, Sera, not the time). She stayed for another year, and makes smug remarks every year around the time of the event about how she's still fine and healthy. Meanwhile kids are testing off the charts with elevated thyroid issues. You ask her if there's significant radiation, she'll say no. You ask my old college professor who lived in Nagsasaki with his Japanese wife and their three kids, who uprooted his family to his original town in London, he'll say yes.
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Apr 16, 2015 01:11
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a significant amount of radiation was released (and likely is still being released) into the environment. You better hope that the solution to pollution is dilution, because otherwise we're hosed. Your best bet is to avoid eating fish farmed from the pacific for the next 20 years.
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Apr 16, 2015 04:44
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Those dipshits built their reactor too close to sea level, and did not have an adequate tsunami wall to keep the backup generators dry when the tidal wave hit. What's more, Japan has two different grids, and they were only plugged into one of them, so that when that link was severed they lost their backup power from the grid. When you shut a reactor down the fuel keeps producing decay heat, so you need an alternate source of power available to pump water through the fuel just to keep it cool (eventually you don't need this any more but that takes months after shutdown). It was obvious that they had underbuilt the wall because another power plant nearby had a better wall built at the demand of its engineer and it stayed dry. http://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-didn%E2%80%99t-melt-down-311 When you don't keep the fuel cool, the decay heat eventually gets intense enough to melt through the steel vessel that holds it, and this is called a meltdown. This has happened to some degree in a few of the Fukushima units, but the hardest hit one has completely lost its fuel. It is probably working its way through the lower levels of the concrete building that houses the reactor. The owners of the plant have sent a robot in to try to find this leaked fuel but the robot broke down. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/13/fukushima-robot-stalls-reactor-abandoned The radiation that was leaking out into the ocean in the months after the disaster was actually coming from the spent fuel pool, which is where they place used fuel in water to cool it down enough that they can package it up for cold storage. These are apparently pretty close to sea level and they developed small cracks letting the cooling water out into the surrounding environment. If you don't live in the immediate area around Fukushima, this probably won't affect you. The ocean is a very loving big place. Don't gorge on fish from the pacific and you will be fine. wilfredmerriweathr fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 13:07
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You sound kind of biased, without particularly strong reason. Radiation was a bigger deal within 20-30km of the reactor, but the rest of Fukushima prefecture wasn't really affected.
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Apr 16, 2015 13:37
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One of the interesting things that came about after Fukushima is Safecast, a project to build cheap radiation detectors and crowdsource radiation maps. The project started, in part, over the frustration that folks living in Fukushima weren't getting straight answers from Tepco or the national government about how much radiation had leaked, and in particular, exactly what areas were unsafe. Once the project got underway, it was very well received with quite a level of local participation and support from the local government. Without equipment in the field, nobody really knew what was going on, and with equipment everyone could know. Quite an amazing accomplishment, albeit in the context of a horrible disaster.
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Apr 16, 2015 16:09
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I can only speak from my experience living in Fukushima but there are plenty of places in the prefecture where it is fine in terms of radiation levels. We have radiation monitors at every school and all municipal buildings and there are free counters you can get from city hall if you're so inclined. They test fish that they catch and all the vegetables they grow before selling so in general you can get a good idea of the radiation you're receiving. I don't know anything about the reactor but I've been here close to three years and haven't heard of any students or teachers being diagnosed with cancer or anything. Lingering psychological issues are the real problem here, that and a lack of proper housing since the tsunami hit (Minamisoma). At any rate, Aizu is certainly still beautiful and further in around Fukushima/Koriyama the radiation levels weren't affected to my knowledge.
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Apr 17, 2015 04:00
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adorai posted:a significant amount of radiation was released (and likely is still being released) into the environment. You better hope that the solution to pollution is dilution, because otherwise we're hosed. Your best bet is to avoid eating fish farmed from the pacific for the next 20 years.
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Apr 18, 2015 22:00
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 12:53 |
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It is a severe issue and an environmental disaster, but it's not the end of the world.
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Apr 19, 2015 00:01
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