The author doesn't take a political stance on Nuclear Power. He's just documenting the contamination zone. He talks briefly about how the disaster could have been avoided if the plant was designed better. He gives factual and statistical information about how the residents don't want to return there.

This is a primary source that offers an first-hand account of the Fukushima disaster and it's aftermath. The author is an authority on Fukushima contamination zone because he's been there and seen it with his own eyes, and has chosen to share that with us.

Just because Arkadiusz Podniesińki doesn't straight out say "I support continued investment in nuclear power" doesn't necessarily mean he's against investment in nuclear power.

I think it's counter-productive to lambast an article like this because it doesn't fit into how you perceive the world. I think it's important to have an open mind and to be able to listen to what other people have to say.

We should be encouraging people to make more pieces like this. I know I'm going to be sharing this article.

"Silence, lack of cries, laughter, tears and only the wind answers... Have we learnt anything since then?"

I would say the framing of that question makes his stance pretty clear.

it means the same thing as ham-fisted, more or less.

For example, it's entirely possible he's talking about not building active reactors in lieu of passive ones...

I'd say his stance is pretty nuanced and more to do with the care taken by people when designing and operating nuclear technology than being anti nuclear technology.

Well, yes and no:

"TEPCO, that operated the station, had been warned their seawall was insufficient to withstand a powerful tsunami, but the seawall height was not raised in response." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...

I agree with your general sentiment, but I would say that humans are the biggest threat in nuclear power.

edit - also, if you design for tsunami, the two-punch scenario is your design brief.

"...I could assess the effects of the power station failure and understand the scale of the tragedy, especially the tragedy of the evacuated residents, in a better way. This was a way of drawing my own conclusions without being influenced by any media sensation, government propaganda, or nuclear lobbyists who are trying to play down the effects of the disaster..."

Some say that coal is not the only alternative and it can be processed in a safer manner, but this is wishful thinking. Renewable sources involve a costly manufacturing process that is not necessarily green [2] and there is still no good, scalable solution for a cloudy, not-windy day. And don't get me started on hydro power and how we have at best no idea about the long-term environment impact of it. Then add to it the way politics works and that dirty coal works just fine for your common Joe, as long as it's burned elsewhere.

Nuclear power scale well, can be safe when done properly, and if nothing literally explodes is the cleanest option out there. Compare the victims of coal mining accidents alone with those of nuclear disasters [3] - and those do not include the air pollution victims.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...

However, if there is an accident, then you are talking orders of magnitude more radiation in a nuclear accident. http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410

See the editor's note in the original Scientific American article. It simply confirms the statements made by CEJournal.

The game theory strategists realised that any use of nuclear weapons would either escalate, or end up in a massive defeat. You can start with a tactical nuke wiping out troops, it will escalate to larger nukes wiping out ships, and eventually you're dropping very large nukes on population centers.

Mutually Assured Destruction was the only solution. (Or peace, but let's be realistic).

The Russians may have gotten away with MAD, without any need for propaganda, but the US is a democracy. To convince the population that MAD was acceptable, they had to create a situation in which any use of nuclear weapons such a horrible crime that it warranted the complete obliteration of the country that dealt the first blow.

In order to make nuclear war (even limited, tactical use) a horrible crime, they made a very big deal out of the effects. (Yes, it's not nice to wipe out battleships and troop formations, but not unprecedented in a war). Which meant they emphasised how bad radiation and fallout can be.

Also, radiation is just naturally a bit spooky, as are many carcinogens (especially ones you don't choose to expose yourself to). The fact that they might kill you 30 years after the event doesn't sit well with a lot of people.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You seem to suggest that the fact that Fukushima was not adequately prepared for this tsunami was human failure, presumably because they should have expected such a tsunami to occur.

If this is the case, then you can just as well argue that it was human failure that the towns in the affected areas flooded because of the tsunami. After all, if they expected such a tsunami to occur they could/should have built higher levees.

The way I see it, the deaths resulting from the Fukushima accident were just as much (or as little) caused by human failure as most of the other deaths related to the tsunami.

For your information, in France where we use nuclear energy a lot, we look for the most catastrophic events of the last 100 years to see how we protect our infrastructure.

The Japanese looked for the last 50, but there were a tsunami of similar height 85 years ago.

Also the local authority of nuclear security has made a few reports were they recommended to increase the height of the seawalls. Several times. Never followed.

And last but not least, the accident could have been prevented, but has been badly handled. With Japanese hiding information, not cooperating with trained international nuclear-firefighters, and minimizing the scale of the incident until the last minute. This is the biggest mistake of all, compromising lives, resources, ocean and earth...

How is it not a human failure ?

What is interesting is that there was actually a city that raised the sea walls to 16 meters in the area. The mayor of that city was actually sent to jail because it was a scam to siphon money to his brother in law who was in construction. I don't remember the details because it was on a TV program that I watched about a year ago, but unfortunately the mayor in question died a couple of years before the tsunami and never lived to see that his actions actually saved the city.

Speaking of the seawall height, there were, indeed, studies done that showed that under certain circumstances 15-18 meter high tsunamis could be generated in that area. This was disregarded. "Why", you ask.

Let me explain. I live by the sea in Japan. I can go to the sea side and climb up on the sea wall. It is 5 meters above sea level. I can walk along it all practically all the way to Tokyo (200 km away). The only places where it doesn't exist is where there are natural cliffs (which are not as prevalent as you might imagine). Every little stream that empties into the ocean has a 5 meter high metal sea gate that can be closed in the event of a tsunami. Where I live there is one at least every km or so.

The sea walls in Japan are already a miracle of engineering. You want to make them 20m high? Around the entire country? This is an insane notion.

To be honest, I will take the risk. I don't want to live in a jail where the only place I can see the ocean is from on top of a mountain.

I live in Sagara, Shizuoka (now merged with Makinohara). It is the most dangerous place in Japan to live for earthquakes because of the imminent Tokai earthquake (50 years overdue, unless it actually happened in WWII when the place was already destroyed and nobody had the ability to measure the big earthquake that happened then). 5% of the population is likely to die by all predictions.

Which means 95% will live. Terrible tragedy, but not worse than surrounding yourself in a 20m high jail IMHO.

Now, there were many human failures regarding the Fukushima disaster (like not having the correct connectors to power the pumps externally). Sea walls is not one of them.

Do a google search for "tetrapod japan images" to see what the beaches around here already look like. The Japanese government is not trying to avoid money on reducing the damage of tsunami. It seems like there should be a simple solution, but there isn't.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapod_(structure)

I am not a nuclear engineer and I don't have enough background to really say what the answer is. My guess is that they are set up right next to the sea so that they can do exactly what they did in Fukushima -- pump sea water into the reactor.

Naturally higher ground is actually hard to find near the sea (because the mountains are usually set back by about a kilometre from the sea). Also, if you perch yourself on a cliff next to the sea, then you are at a more serious risk of landslides during the many 6-7 magnitude earthquakes we have in Japan each year. With artificially higher ground, I suspect you would be at even more risk.

The other main reason for not putting a nuclear reactor on high ground is that in the event of a containment breach, the contaminated water will run downhill (in indescriminate directions). The placement in low ground next to the ocean may be the best place, environmentally, in the case of a disaster.

Again, I'm only guessing, but I'm sure if you ask someone who is trained in the field they can give you better answers.

I'm hoping that Japan will transition away from nuclear reactors in the middle term. There is enough geothermal potential to provide base load (though protecting the environment with all the earthquakes we have here is not trivial in that case either). Since Fukushima, the amount of solar panels being installed in my area is insane, so I'm hopeful that things will improve over the next 50 years or so.

(Having said all that, Hamaoka power plant, which is just down the road from me, is perched up on top of a cliff overlooking the sea ;-) ).

To be honest, I have often wondered how the powerplant survived at all. I guess it was high enough up and that only the generators got clobbered, but I haven't looked into it in detail.

And then start ignoring them when it proves to expensive to consider them all. Or extend the lifetime of the plant beyond what is advisable, because shutting down a nuclear plant takes a long time and is as expensive as running one, but you don't get power out of it, so those in charge are very tempted to extend, extend, extend... like Fukushima.

The problem at Fukushima wasn't a short-term loss of coolant; it was the long-term lack of backup cooling after the tsunami hit (by which point the reactor had already been shut down for about 45 minutes), because of poor siting of the backup generators and switchgear. The operators couldn't do anything about that, no matter what they did.

Poor placement of backup systems is critical to process continuity, but in case of BWR mostly irrelevant to actual nuclear safety as long as you are willing to just write off the reactor (as you should) in case of major accident.

I'm not sure the last part is true; as I understand it, there was a significant risk of a containment breach if decay heat removal was insufficient--not from the reactor cores themselves, but from the spent fuel pools.

I agree with you, though, that any attempt to save the reactor itself was doomed to failure once the tsunami hit and the backup cooling was taken out, so any actions taken toward that end were misguided.

1) They don't factor in the value of "background" material and over-emphasize the foreground.

2) They feel that in a "natural" state, they are in control of their fate (Azimov had much to say on this one, and the ending of "I, Robot" is quite illuminating).

Fukushima did not go as well as it hypothetically could. And yes, the nuclear contamination is a disaster.

But let's look at what happened because Fukushima was there:

- electricity was supplied to drive the devices that informed the public about the earthquake risk and how to escape it.

- electricity was generated (prior to the loss of the plant's capacity) that drove the infrastructure that people relied upon to escape the tsunami wave

I think that the question of how the Fukushima prefecture would have fared sans plant is a reasonable question. Because the absence of the dangerous technologies we rely upon is not a state of safety; it's a state of nature, and we build devices to escape the pure state of nature because we know by experience it's inherently somewhat hostile to human life.

Future plants on coastlines should be built with the lessons learned from Fukushima's failure-mode in mind. Saying Fukushima itself was a failure is actually a larger step than it appears. How many lives were saved prior to and leading up to the tsunami by the power the plant generated?

While I am not an expert,- this is evident from what I read about on the Fukushima topic in the past written by other investigators. From what I remember, the lost cooling capacity caused by overwhelmed backup system could have been prevented if the rushing water could not reach it. I think it was GE and whichever other participating bodies there at the time that made the engineering and budgeting decisions to design it that way. In an earthquake prone zone, with danger of tsunamis no less.

Thanks to Arkadiusz for posting what is an actual list of facts as they are today, not what is filtered by layers of communication and media relation.

The Fukushima disaster is not going away anytime soon. About 100,000 people lost everything, no rebuilding in sight. Former house owners are still living in containers.

Radioactive water is entering the environment since then. In 30 years, maybe someone will compare cancer statistics in that geographic area before and after the disaster. I doubt that figure of 150 deaths will hold then.

So it's perfectly normal to cover the Fukushima event as an ongoing disaster today. The earthquake and the tsunami are history. Nothing absurd about that.

Why?

Sea level rise will last thousands.

The destruction of aquifers in central California -- when too much water is pumped out, the porous layers compress, and will no longer hold water in the future -- I don't even know if there's a process by which that will heal.

The loss of diversity of ocean and land life, you're probably looking at millions of years for new speciation to fill the emptied niches.

Ocean acidification, also another long wait.

But fire and explosions we are much more familiar, even comfortable, with as causes of death and injury than creepy, invisible, insidious radiation.

Fukushima was a flea bite by comparison.

Fear of nuclear energy is irrational.

all of those are so silent, so invisible and kill or hurt so many more people.

The reason this will be discussed 10 years from now is because there will still be people actively affected 10 years from now. And probably just papers from Tohoku anyway.

And finally, the reason you don't hear issues from China being discussed all that often is because of their national policy and attitudes.

It's only relevant if you weigh two options against each other. So comparing coal to nuclear is kind of valid, except that coal is not the only alternative to nuclear power. Also, if you really want to nitpick, then you'd also have to count the lives that could have been saved with the money that now goes into cleaning up Fukushima, and so on and so on.

Tsunami deaths are not an alternative to radiation deaths, so the comparison is bullshit.

Edit: I would like to reply to your comments, but HN doesn't let me post more comments atm. Fwiw, I don't think you are correct in claiming nobody campaigns against coal power. For a recent example, look at Elon Musks presentation of their battery. Also, remember global warming? I seem to remember a lot of articles about that, which tend to mention fossil fuels as culprits.

It is also true that

> When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly.

And yet, we don't hear people screaming to shut down coal power plants nationwide. We don't hear this, despite the fact that they are demonstrably more dangerous than nuclear power plants.

This is one of the reasons people are irked by folks who try to use Fukishima to claim that nuclear power generation is super-dangerous-mmkay.

I'm not going address your tsunami-deaths vs. radiation-deaths comment. A close and careful re-reading of ggreer's comment should help you to understand why.

But of course, you got the nukes so you needn't bother with paying for your share of the climate change damages.

Coal has a massive human cost in human health that makes it absurdly expensive overall.

Personally, I would like to see and end to coal and nuclear power.

But the nuclear power plant takes up to 2 days to startup. It's not sustainable for the daily life where consumption change every hour.

That's why there is the need for more agile power plant, where fuel, gas, and coal are suitable. Gas being the most agile but the less efficient, fuel and coal being used as the middle between gas and nuclear, depending of the price of each resource.

This is an engineering constraint before anything else.

Last I checked, the majority of the US's power comes from coal-fired power plants. If there was the political will and public understanding, we could likely replace pretty much all of that with nuclear plants, reserving coal-fired, or oil-fired (or pumped-storage hydro, or flywheel storage, or...) plants to meet peak power demands.

The European power grid is very tight and well-meshed, this is why we can let our nuclear power plant and sell electricity to Switzerland, Germany or Netherlands or buy it.

I guess it's not as well interconnected in the US, so that states can't easily lend power which disable the use of nuclear power plant for many states ?

I've -very recently- heard people making the claim that Texas has its own grid, but that's news to me. Maybe the situation in Texas is that they have all the power gen capacity that they need within the state, and are also hooked into the national grid. shrug

> I know heavy infrastructure like these often have a sound design respectively to their constraints (which can be absurd).

Anti-nuke hysteria is toxic to sound planning and design. :(

East, West and Texas.

https://sites.google.com/site/theuspowergrid/

It would makes sense.

> Obviously, throwing power across the whole damn continent is far less efficient than just throwing it across a state.

For now. With the future high-temperature supra-conductive cabling we will be able to do wonders of efficiency on large distance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7

Sure, the whole process of storing electricity is lossy. Thermodynamics guarantees it. But the point isn't to try and store enough generation capacity to meet our demand. You just need enough storage capacity to deal with the peaks.

There is of course the argument of "pumped storage isn't practical for meeting all of our peaking demands". Of course it isn't. Neither is nuclear suitable for meeting all of our baseline demands. They are both just tools available.

/me puts on pedant hat and mad engineer jacket:

Are you sure about this? The US is huge and has an enormous amount of uninhabited space. If we covered -say- the north-western quarter of Nevada in the best batteries available today, would that cover base and peaking power during slack production time for -say- the surrounding states?

/me removes pedant hat

(Do bear in mind that I feel both that anti-nuke hysteria is hugely damaging to the planning and deployment of new nuclear power plants in the US, and that it's fairly clear that of the currently available non-hydroelectric base-load generation tech, nuclear power is the only good option. [Though, solar power beamed down from orbit is a really intriguing idea.])

But if you're really convinced this problem is unsolvable, lets just do this: we'll generate enough power (with fission, or whatever you want) to meet peak demand all the time. As long as we're near the coast there is a convenient way to get rid of all that surplus energy: desalination plants. I can think of a few areas that would jump at this idea, like California. Even if you wind up with too much freshwater, just start dumping it back into the ocean. The salt is generally worthless and is dumped back into the ocean. This will actually help offset the fact that the oceans are desalinating due to the ice caps melting.

Electricity prices will go up as a result of this, but you'll be subsidizing the fact that the grid is now greener as a result.

Stopping to 0% is not needed in normal load variation, thanks to toaster usage patterns.

The surplus could be used to pump water up damns or charge batteries. Or even to just pull co2 out of the air to compensate for car emissions.

It could provide very cheap night power for electric car owners. Worst case we could just waste the energy.

Once you accept that co2 emissions are an existential threat to the world, small inefficiencies are a small cost.

All of the other alternatives cause more deaths. All of them. Dam disasters have been mentioned several times. Wind requires people working on high towers (and sometimes falling off). Solar electric uses extremely nasty semiconductor processes, and requires that people climb on roofs. Passive solar -- roofs again. Oil production and distribution is dangerous. Natural gas production and distribution is dangerous. Coal production and distribution is horrific (though not nearly as bad as it once was, it's still pretty bad).

Nuclear power has the lowest death rate per kWh generated of any energy production method known. By far.

http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

And I should say that Sustainable Energy is the best book on this topic you can find and that it's free online.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung#/media/File:Ene...

Nuclear plants are really good base-load plants. I guess that you can design a national power grid that's supplied largely by renewables, but I suspect that it's very hard and not cheap.

That also describes nuclear power.

2) As I understand it, the hard part of nuclear power isn't the engineering and construction; that's a solved problem. The hard part is fighting pervasive, irrational anti-nuclear-power sentiment.

Of course, one could argue that overly strict regulations (which may only exist because of public concerns) are the reason for these problems. But the reason for the safety of the existing reactors are these strict regulations, so I think loosening these rules is not a good idea.

So, the engineering and construction of the power plant is a solved problem. The political problem of what to do with the fission products is -sadly- not a solved problem in the US.

> All new plants have construction delays and cost overruns.

Cost overruns are -sadly- a symptom of our not-infrequently-nuts-as-shit federal bidding process. Construction delays are a symptom of our failure to enact a system similar to some other countries where -after a lengthy plan-scrutinization and public comment period- approved public works projects become law and are immune to construction delays due to public outrage, outcry, legal challenge, or general meddling.

None of that is unique to fission power plan construction. :)

I think you're confused. He means delays due to engineering/construction issues, not political issues. If you are claiming these do not exist, then you are out to lunch and not talking seriously.

Furthermore, politics is a factor in nuclear safety. Consider that the Fukushima plant life was extended beyond its advisable lifespan. This was almost certainly because the idea looked like the cheaper one at the time, since shutting down a nuclear plant is a lengthy and expensive process. Keeping it running is politically a very tempting option, and such human factors will dominate safety considerations long after anything has been "solved".

I'm not. ju-st is implying either that we don't know how to build power plant sized fission reactors, that we've never built and operated one successfully and safely for decades, or both.

All projects in the US have delays and cost overruns. I addressed this in my reply to his comment. That doesn't mean that the design and construction of the thing being constructed isn't a solved problem.

> Consider that the Fukushima plant life was extended beyond its ["advisable"] lifespan.

And yet:

> When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. [0]

Nuclear power is less dangerous than even solar power, hydroelectric power, or wind power!

> Rooftop solar power has a per terawatt death rate ten times worse than nuclear power because of - I kid you not - people falling off roofs when installing the panel. Hydroelectric power has a worse fatality rate because of dams bursting and flooding people. Even wind power has a worse fatality per terawatt rate - seventy three people have died in windmill related accidents. [0]

[0] http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html

Are you accounting for very-low-probability catastrophic scenarios? People are notoriously bad at that.

Is this the study that took all roof-related deaths as solar-panel-related?

Can you seriously not tell the difference between the danger of centuries-long contamination and waste that is dangerous for thousands of years, vs the very regular, understandable, and limited liability of everyday accidents?

Are you a part of the nuclear lobby?

Do you like to waste money?

Because ju-st stated "I think the engineering and construction [of fission reactors] is not a solved problem" [0]. This is untrue. We have well-tested fission reactor designs and know how to put them together. This is a solved problem.

> Is this the study that took all roof-related deaths as solar-panel-related?

I can't parse this. Would you be so kind as to restate the question? :)

I'm not sure why the fact that a nuclear plant (that's been -as you say- running past its optimal design life) that

* Got hit with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded

* Then got hit immediately after by a twenty foot high tsunami

* Then exploded

* Then melted down

kills fewer people than a single average coal-fired power plant [1] kills every year as a part of normal operation, fails to significantly increase the cancer risk of the majority of on-site containment workers, and fails to create centuries-long contamination [2] fails to make you question your assumptions about the failure modes of these power generation devices.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259794

[1] According to http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_01.html , there were 300 such coal plants in the US in 2013. :)

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/04/fukushima-rice_n_64... Four-and-a-half years is far less than 100 or 200 or 500. :)

Is this the study that took all roof-related deaths as solar-panel-related = Is this the study that assumed that all roof falls were due to installation of solar panels

> Then exploded Then melted down

Um, am I supposed to exclude nuclear explosions from the list of risks of a nuclear reactor?

Not sure why you keep talking about coal. You think I want coal?

I don't know what study that is but it doesn't appear to be this one. Scott Alexander's blog post links to [0], which takes a completely reasonable approach to calculating the number of deaths due to solar panel installation. Search for "Falls are the leading cause of fatalities in the construction industry." and read on from there.

> Designing reactors is not the problem. Running them safely and building and decommissioning them efficiently is.

There have been two accidents that caused serious damage of any kind in nuclear power generation's 61 year history, [1] Fukushima and Chernobyl. As I mentioned before, Fukushima was hit by the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, and a twenty-foot tsunami, and has managed to only maybe kill two people (those guys died of blood loss, rather than radiation poisoning), and might contribute to ~150 cancer deaths as the years go by. This puts Fukushima's worst-case death rate at ~3.75 deaths per year.

What's more, -as I linked upthread- the area is now producing food that's 100% safe to eat. We're a substantial way down the road to recovering from the second largest disaster in nuclear power's history and it only took four years.

An absurdly pessimistic estimate of all deaths and potential deaths due to increased cancer risk related to fission power plant operation over the past 61 years puts the number at ~4,500. Even though this is a silly and inappropriate metric, that's ~73 deaths per year. If we look at deaths in just the US, choking on one's own food is an order of magnitude more hazardous than that.

> ...am I supposed to exclude nuclear explosions from the list of risks of a nuclear reactor?

Yes.

No power generation reactor has ever undergone a nuclear explosion. No currently operating power generation reactor, nor any such reactor that would be approved for construction can undergo a nuclear explosion. What's more, modern reactor designs (that is, reactor designs a fair bit newer than those at Fukushima) fail-safe in any conditions, short of deliberate sabotage by super-strong, radiation-proof superheroes that are able to enter the reactor vessel while it's in operation and intelligently tamper with the fuel rods contained within.

Not even Chernobyl underwent a nuclear explosion. [2] The explosion at Chernobyl was its steam piping exploding due to overpressure. The Chernobyl reactor was housed in an unhardened structure [4] that was more suited to storing goods and foodstuffs than containing fires and explosions. The steam explosion wrecked the containment structure, allowing the smoke from the flaming irradiated carbon control rods to escape into the surrounding countryside.

> You think I want coal?

I -charitably- think that you want safe power generation. I don't see why you're spending so much time and effort on combating something that has -worst case- over 61 years killed 15% of the the people power generation with coal-fired plants kills just in the US every single year.

Fight the big fights first: Decommission fossil-fuel-powered power plants. Dramatically increase the standards for hydroelectric dam design, construction, and maintenance. Institute programs that ensure that all workers who work at dangerously high elevations are properly secured against falls. Design and deploy helper bots to recognize and deliver aid to those who are choking on their own food.

Once all that's done, move on to shutting down something that's less hazardous than crossing the road or eating one's dinner.

[0] http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

[1] This is the first commercial power generation fission reactor. It ran from mid 1954 until mid 2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obninsk_Nuclear_Power_Plant

[2] Even though a undergraduate-level physics student can design a bomb capable of undergoing a nuclear explosion, it requires deliberate effort to design and precise engineering to make such a thing. [3] You cannot turn a fission reactor into a nuclear bomb, unless you remove its fuel rods and use those to make a bomb. But then, we're talking about fission reactor safety, not the general safety of fissile materials.

[3] Note that a bomb that undergoes a nuclear explosion is very different from a "dirty bomb". A dirty bomb is made by wrapping conventional explosives with radioactive material. The explosives are used to spread the material around as far as is possible. No nuclear explosion takes place.

[4] This was widely regarded as a bad idea at the time. No power generation reactor in operation today is housed in an unhardened structure.

On that measure Solar power is more dangerous than nuclear given how many people die falling off roofs while installing or maintaining solar panels.

"The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

So he uses 50 deaths for his calculations.

"1/6th of the 9 million roofing job accidents would be about 50 deaths from installing 1.5 million roofs if other countries had similar to US safety. The amount of roof installations is increasing as a percentage. 4 TWh from roofs PV. So 12.5 deaths per TWh from solar roof installations. Assuming 15 years as the average functional life or time until major maintenance or upgrade is required. The average yearly deaths from rooftop solar is 0.83/TWh."

How did I miss that! Incredible.

Saying it is the safest energy technology in existence is a dangerous lie. Solar is safer. Wind is safer. Even natural gas is safer.

That's if we believe the official accounts, who have been found lying on several occasions on this very matter.

>For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there are over a hundred created by the earthquake itself.

So? You can't prevent an earthquake (at best you can just build more resilient houses), but you can always not build nuclear reactors.

>You know what kills more people per year than nuclear plants? Everything.

Same goes for lots of things which we nethertheless don't tolerate. Like serial killers.

  The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Diet_of_Japan_Fukushi...

Here's the main part: The nuclear incident "cannot be regarded as a natural disaster," the NAIIC panel's chairman, Tokyo University professor emeritus Kiyoshi Kurokawa, wrote in the inquiry report. "It was a profoundly man-made disaster -- that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response."[3] "Governments, regulatory authorities and Tokyo Electric Power [TEPCO] lacked a sense of responsibility to protect people's lives and society," the Diet's Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission said. "They effectively betrayed the nation's right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly 'man-made'," it said.[4]

The nuclear incident was the result of poor earthquake-safety planning and faulty post-tsunami communication.[10] As a result of collusion between the facility's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), regulators and the Japanese government the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant unfolded as a "man-made disaster".[6] The report attributed the cause of the failings to Japan's culture of "reflexive obedience", noted that there was no separation between atomic regulation and promotion and described a Japan in which nuclear power became "an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society."[6] TEPCO, regulators and the government "failed to correctly develop the most basic safety requirements -- such as assessing the probability of damage, preparing for containing collateral damage from such a disaster, and developing evacuation plans," the NAIIC said. According to the report the lack of training and knowledge of the TEPCO workers at the facility reduced the effectiveness of the response to the situation at a critical time following the quake and tsunami. As the crisis escalated, TEPCO, the regulators, government agencies and the prime minister's office were ineffective in "preventing or limiting the consequential damage" at Fukushima Daiichi.

Where are these areas? Can you name a few of them?

" in addition to that we have to store the waste from these "safe" plants for few millennia"

Nope. After a couple of hundred years it's no more radioactive than the ore from which it came.

Long half-life = less radioactive. By definition.

"The time frame in question when dealing with radioactive waste ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years" [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...

"The time frame in question when dealing with radioactive waste ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years"

As I noted below, a long half-life implies less radiation, by definition. "Infinite half-life" = "not radioactive at all".

Anyone who tries to use a long half-life as a scare tactic is either lacking in knowledge or selling something.

The source given in the Wiki article is Time: Disasters that Shook the World. Not exactly a scholarly work. It is also the apparent source of this falsehood in the Wiki article: "Even today, radiation levels are so high that the workers responsible for rebuilding the sarcophagus are only allowed to work five hours a day for one month before taking 15 days of rest." According to the article on the exclusion zone itself[1] and the source for said article[2], "More than 3,000 workers manage the Zone, living in Chernobyl town during 4-day and 15-day shifts." Furthermore, the article on the Reactor 4 sarcophagus contains a picture[3] of those same workers less than 200m from Reactor 4 with no protective gear. If radiation levels in the zone were that high they would be fully geared up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone#Popul... [2] http://www.afterchernobyl.com/ [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Chernoby...

Yes, freedom will do that to people: get them to go wherever they want, take pictures of whatever they want and focus on whatever topic they want in their own web page.

> Yet coverage is warped in the opposite direction.

Some guy's blog with travel pictures isn't "coverage". Journalistic standards do not apply.

He probably went elsewhere in Japan too and took other pictures. Those are off topic for the web page which is about the Fukushima site. Maybe he has other pages about other topics (in Japan or elsewhere).