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Comment by angdis | Hacker News Reader

I fail to see _any_ evidence of "overreaction" except for the usual chatter on the blogosphere.

Is the author of the article saying that the area around the reactor should not have been evacuated? Who is he accusing of "overreaction" except for some anonymous (and inconsequential) internet map-maker?

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The German government, for one.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/germany-nuclear-id...

Many of the german reactors were meant to have been shut down a long time ago. The "conservatives" prolonged the uptime. The germany chancellor will be talking with the lobby about measures, how backwards is that.

It's called a lifetime extension. When you build something expensive, you make a conservative estimation for how long it will be operational at minimum, so you can write off your investment in a responsible fashion. Then, at the end of that period, you see if your plant can keep working in a safe and profitable manner, and if it can (gasp) you let it. Of course the "greens" (scare-quotes, since, after all, we're both adults) are against this kind of, hmm, we could call it "re-cycling".

They are because the vast majority of "but"s related to this event are about how this reactor is 50 year old technology and how it's been running for 40 years so it's somewhat excusable that it melts. Since 40 years is a standard reactor life[1] and many countries pursue life extensions on their reactors it is _not_ exceptional that of the roughly 450 active reactors in the world the majority of them is not up to the latest greatest tech standard or safety measure because it's expensive to keep up with all the upgrades and it's even more expensive when you just spent 10 years and $7B building a modern nuclear reactor[2]. So if it's ok to extend the life of a plant to 50 or 60 years as some would want then they need to upgrade them to latest standards.

[1]:http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2007/npp_extension.html

[2]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor

I don't care is it melts, I care if it's going to leak significant amounts of nasty stuff to the environment(1) - which WOULD be inexcusable, and which would prompt me to seriously reconsider my support of nuclear power.

I'm not opposed to everyone running old reactors taking a step back saying "uh uh, could this happen to us?" - I'm opposed to the hand waving assertion that when the initial lifetime runs out, you're supposed to just scrap the thing.

1: (Those events may or may not be the same. Apparently the third containment is designed to hold a melted core indefinitely, but there are reports of containment breach - however it's unclear which level of containments we're talking about)

In my view, there has been a lot of fretting from US-based HN folks and others about jet stream fallout, etc. There are reports of runs on iodine on the west coast, e.g. [1]. All of that is woefully premature given the information at hand. The danger in Japan is real; in the US, not yet.

Assessing risk from radiation is tricky: people are exposed every day and don't realize it. Bananas are radioactive; so are granite countertops. It's highly likely that you'll get more exposure on your next cross-country flight than from any fallout from this disaster.

[1] http://blogs.aljazeera.net/live/asia/japans-nuclear-emergenc...

I believe the problem here is a bit tricky and fundamentally a lack of trust in the government. The reason why Japanese are not panicking yet is because they trust their government and themselves to cooperate and help each other.

In US this is a bit different and trust in Japanese government, with an history for downplaying problems or just keeping them secret, is lacking.

The reasoning would be that the Japanese government, in order to prevent general panic, will downplay the problems, until it's too late, just to reassure its citizen that they are dealing with it. In the US many believe that things are already worse than what they're being told and would rather be ready to react immediately after something changes rather than be caught in the middle of the rage if something should go wrong later. A similar pattern is what happened for Chernobyl, although the political situation there was very very different.

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