There was 1 disputed radiation/nuclear related death from Fukushima.
And mention of 2200 related to the (post-tsunami) evacuation.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_ac...
And mention of 2200 related to the (post-tsunami) evacuation.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_ac...
Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion.
I'm a fan of nuclear, but those are eye-watering numbers.
Is land that expensive in Japan? Or is it some sort of ambition to prove they can repair that fuckup? O maybe there is a lot of money to be made in a cleanup operation?
This isn't a theoretical point, either, wild mushrooms are still unsafe to eat in some parts of central Europe, almost four decades after Tchernobyl.
The whole Fukushima disaster is another lesson in the prevention paradox. We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government and TEPCO expended to keep them that low.
If (enough) so, it is spread across the globe so it become negligible. Those lands are highly polluted so it can't be live.
This mushrooms are still unsafe stuff is mostly a myth. What's correct is that these mushrooms still measure over the arbitrary level set government regulation during the height of panic about nuclear.
> We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government
Actually much of those efforts have actually killed and hurt more people then it saved. Creating a panic and evacuating a major city because of some unfounded unscientific assessment of the danger.
I'm sure all the money spent on cleaning the grass has saved millions of people. The reality is that many of those efforts are political show making, security theater, like the TSA.
I'm sure there are some reasonable measures as well, but much of it is vastly overblown in terms of actual effects it would have.
See in Tschernobyl where very little was done, and people in the exclusion zone (where there is more radiation then in Japan) are totally fine.
Japan has removed the top ~8 inches of topsoil from the affected areas around fukashima, I think that is really impressive, but even then I would never allow my family to move there for any reason.
That said, I'm generally in favor of nuclear. I just don't want my kid rolling around in contaminated soil.
Ignorance is bliss. Contaminated soils abound across the industrialized world, it's just that most people have no idea.
Moreover, there's legitimate pressure to keep it that way as people irrationally freak out when they learn something is "contaminated". It turns out that often times the best way to promote soil remediation is to turn a blind eye (at least to some extent) as once contamination is publicly identified costs soar as the public begins demanding ever more onerous mandates, causing people to stop voluntarily remediating, which is why lead thresholds are set considerably lower than for other similarly problematic but less common contaminants.
Just this past week we called up the city environmental health inspector to ask him to check out some painting work being done at a house whose yard abuts our own. We've done it before as we have two young children. The inspector is very nice and accommodating, and there's basically zero risk of anyone getting fined or handed any stop-work order. He simply nudges the painters to take the barest of safety measures, e.g. simple tarping (even if amateurish), to minimize leaded paint flake dispersal. And what more can you reasonably ask? Turning every house scraping job into a super fund site would just be ridiculous, yet if the law treated lead the same way it treated nuclear, that's exactly what would be demanded.
Absolutely right. And most of the industrial contaminates are a lot harder to detect than radiation. Even utterly minuscule amounts of radioactive isotopes are almost trivial to detect.
Like all the radon and the heavy metals in the ground, water, and dust in Niger and Kazakhstan?
The arguments break down into:
* Pretending that solar/wind isnt 5x cheaper per unit.
* Pretending that only pricey batteries rather than cheap pumped storage can accomodate its variability.
* Pretending that there is a geographical shortage of potential pumped storage locations.
* Pretending that you'd need weeks of power storage to get to 99% carbon free rather than hours.
* Pretending that nuclear power does load following rather than relying upon gas to fill in its gaps like solar and wind.
* Pretending that nuclear power always produces 100% stable power. France manages an average of 72%. Denmark has a wind farm that manages 68%.
The only context in which nuclear power is cost effective is if you are keeping rickety old plants running longer than their scheduled lifetime, which isnt safe OR if the government is using it to subsidize nuclear arsenals/subs/etc.
We're letting imaginary numbers dictate the future of humanity, "why did you let the world die, it was cheaper than fixing it" isn't a valid excuse}
And if you want to talk about number show much does it cost to the German healthcare system to take care of the hundred/thousands of people getting sick and dying because of coal pollution ?