The price in terms of deaths was low thankfully, but not because the released material was not dangerous, but because they have done an unprecedented cleaning project. 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. Hundreds of people died during the evacuation, but if they had not been evacuated that death toll of one would have been higher too. Also, cancer can show up years/decades later, and linking it to radiation exposure might not be easy. Basically the dying with vs from covid discussion :).
This entire cleanup project is estimated to cost in the high three digit range of USD billions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...
Nuclear is safe if done right, but the Fukushima accident was definitely a big catastrophy, even if the death toll wasn't large.
Because overly cautious governments told them so.
The fact that they were not safe is disputed. There are claim that there was some over-reaction and that the evacuation was actually counter-productive.
And a really gossip comment comes from JDM car lovers that have gone to Fukushima and show abandoned cars with again unsafe radiation levels.
It is not easy to react to a possible nuclear disaster after a heavy earthquake anyways.
This was the great trick the environmental movement bulled, they made so much panic about radiation that acceptable amounts were lowered to absurd levels. This was all based on suds-science. If this science were even remotely true, people in Denver would by dying of cancer at incredible rates.
There are also lots of places that have more radiation because sand beaches (historically associated with healing sands). People living in that region for 100s of years should also suffer from higher cancer rates and don't.
There are still people in Germany flipping out about the fact that some mushrooms have 'unsafe levels of radiation' and yet lots of people eat them and it has no effect what so ever.
that is quite logical, scientific and consistent with approaches taken in relation to other biological hazards.
Radiation has two types of dangers, chronic and acute. Our understanding of what levels of radiation cause acute damage is pretty limited and not very precise since we simply don't have that much data. However, I highly doubt that anything close to those levels of radiation were measured anywhere outside the reactor complex.
In terms of chronic danger, the official stance is that there is no safe amount of radiation exposure and the general principle in managing exposure is ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable). Lifetime cancer risk is cumulative so higher levels just add to that cumulative risk faster.
Thus there isn't really a clear "level of acceptable impact" but rather, we set arbitrary levels to to to limit that cumulative addition of cancer risk. Like with many things, that risk is a price you pay for other things that are important to you, like flying, living in denver, or getting xrays.
Spending a billion dollars to avoid a radiation caused cancer death is a very poor use of resources given you could save a hundred lives with other causes of death with that amount.
We learn and we improve for next time.
By comparison almost all superfund sites would have been dealt with for a tiny fraction of the cost and effort, assuming a similarly prompt response.
Not everything can be calculated so coldly! The gov absolutely has a responsibility to help people in an actual extreme situation like this versus the theoretical saving of people in future normal situations.
Even to this day, Fukushima-ken agricultural producers can't compete fairly on their quality, due to the lingering stigma with a half-life longer than any detectable isotope.
These lasting effects of hysteria are vastly worse for the health, prosperity, and wellbeing of the region than the actual becquerels released 11 years ago.
Out of 300k people 1,400 died over the span of 6 months [1]. Assume everyone lives to 100 and a uniform age distribution (both of these are actually generous: life expectancy is lower and age distribution skewed older in Japan), and 1500 people dying in 6 months is exactly on the mark for old age deaths. Even more telling, actually try and click on the link to the primary source in Mainichi Shimbun and it 404s.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fukushima-evacuation-has-...
That is nonsense. Most of that cleaning prevents nothing. Its mostly political posturing to show that they are doing something.
> Hundreds of people died during the evacuation
Evacuations that were mostly unnecessary.
With that said, I think even this old PWR design has actually proven itself to be extremely safe as it effectively prevented Chernobyl-style scenario during such rare and catastrophic event.
I mean, 3 reactors literally exploded, 3 cores melted and… pretty much nothing happened.
But it would be great to see new molten-salt fast reactor designs to gain traction, as they would be even safer, 95% more fuel efficient, not require water for cooling, and produce far less waste.
“According to MoltexFLEX, the cost of electricity generated by the FLEX reactor is comparable to that of wind, at just GBP40 (USD44) per MWh. This is achieved through a unique, patented system which uses two molten salts: one acting as a fuel, whilst the other circulates as a coolant. This allows the heat from the reactor to be extracted through natural convection, without the need for pumps.”
“Once online, the FLEX reactor can be operated with the same skills and equipment used in a fossil fuel plant. The reactor has no moving parts and is fuelled for 20 years at a time, meaning that there is very little operator input and very low ongoing costs.”
“MoltexFLEX estimates it would take just 24 months to build a 500 MW power plant. The company plans to have its first reactor operational by 2029.”
“The SSR-W is a molten salt reactor that uses nuclear waste as fuel. The company aims to deploy its first such reactor at the Point Lepreau site in New Brunswick by the early 2030s.”
However, when I said costs, I meant it more literally. Aside from the obvious cost of relocating all of those people, cleanup efforts, and so forth, it's also only fair to include the psychological toll as well. It certainly didn't help atop the massive tragedy that was already sweeping away lives and homes.
Sure :) I probably came across as a bit argumentative.
I also meant to add that this was caused by a natural disaster as well, unlike Chernobyl. So nuclear is arguably even safer.
Again, drawing a parallel with fossil fuels - when a hurricane strikes the Gulf of Mexico and causes some sort of oil slick and kills wildlife, it barely hits the news.
Also, whilst writing this, I wondered what the fossil fuel toll was for the Japanese tsunami, and the Boxing Day one, for that matter. It's not something that seems to have concerned people despite the sheer number of cars, bikes, lorries etc. that contained oil, and were destroyed. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind. Oil refineries on the Asian coasts must have been hit. What happened there?
I guess my rambling point is, we really need to compare nuclear to fossil fuels, like-for-like.
And "we", in particular the media, don't do that, because it's hard work to tally up a distributed fossil fuel infrastructure versus one big nuclear power station that was very visibly destroyed.
Fukushima was an ancient nuclear plant, WAY over its projected lifetime.
And still we only got one direct death.
Check out the radiation map of Japan: https://jciv.iidj.net/map/
Look up where the evacuation zone is and the pre evacuation population numbers.
Then plug those numbers into the linear no threshold model (which is thought to overestimate risk).
I'm away from my computer for the holidays, but when I did the numbers you're looking at QALY losses an order of magnitude lower than that caused by the loss of home.
In general people (govs included) drastically overreact to radiation deaths. It makes no sense to spend a billion dollars to avoid one nuclear accident death when you can spend a billion dollars to avoid 100 prostate cancer deaths. Its literally not worth doing the remaining cleanup by any metric.
It seems like while the official cleanup is done, actually repopulating fukushima and living there is a different matter.
It's pretty much impossible to get an exact pulse on how many people died indirectly as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster evacuation specifically who would've lived if it were not for that. Particularly because most of the deaths attributed to the disaster were elderly to begin with.
Not trying to downplay the cost of human life, it's really terrible when preventable scenarios or mistakes lead to any cost. With that having been said, there are sometimes going to be events where evacuations are necessary, and some of them we can't prevent. No doubt there were many thousands of deaths unrelated to Fukushima Daiichi due to the massive earthquake and tsunami.
I believe it is estimated that around 1,000-2,000 people died as part of the evacuation efforts, but I am not sure what a good source is, so take that with a grain of salt. If you want to go really deep, it'd be wise to consider the burden that it may have caused psychologically too, but that's even harder to exactly ascertain, especially since it is likely nothing compared to what happened as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.
If the point of this is to compare safety though, factoring this in still would place nuclear fission power plants very low in terms of how much cost of human life they cause overall.
And yet, despite that, it is in fact possible to make nuclear fission power plants survive this kind of disaster, and especially possible to prevent the meltdown that eventually occurred; Fukushima Daiichi is not the only fission plant in Japan, and not the closest to the epicenter of the disaster either. I think it's fair to say given the evidence that the problems that need to be solved with regards to Fukushima Daiichi are the systemic issues that led to the inadequate safety measures and the unfortunate decisions made leading up to the meltdown. Whether the issues be operational complacency, corruption, etc.
It'd be nice to have a way to simply be robust to those issues, but in the end it's always going to be dangerous to human life if the people in charge of decisions that could endanger human life are not adequately responsible. That would still be the case in absence of nuclear power, natural disasters, evacuations, etc.
I'd be getting my family the flying f outta there. Not logically deducing outcomes and risk factors on HN.
Hindsight is 20 20...
E.g. due to propaganda, people thought that Covid is 100x as deadly as it actually is (people estimated on average that infection fatality rate was 10%, when in reality it’s ~ 0.1%)
Applies both to Fukushima and Covid response.
The gas supply shortages in the eastern states of Australia arose precisely because of a lack of local supply mandate and price capping baked into the original licenses.
Western Australia has such things and had no shortages.
The inevitable result (in the West) was a transnational being limited in its ability to price gouge in a global supply crisis.
For example, were they granted a legal monopoly?
Err, by "they" do you mean Apache, BHP, BP, Chevron, KufPec, Mitsubishi Motors, Mitsui & Co, Quadrant Energy, Santos, Shell and Woodside Energy ?
(ie Australian LNG producers)
and by "legal monopoloy" do you mean "A market structure characterized by a single seller" ?
The Australian government is bringing in a price cap of $12 per gigajoule (well above historical gas prices, and well above long-term contract prices for Australian LNG in Japan) for domestic customers.
Whatever the merits of this action, it’s a very very very long way from “nationalising the sector”. The Western Australian gas industry (on the other side of the country on a completely separate grid) has long had a regulation mandating a minimum proportion of WA’s gas must be sold to domestic customers, meaning local gas prices there are unaffected by the global shifts in prices. Heck, that bastion of capitalism, the United States of America, completely banned the export of natural gas and oil until 2015.
https://www.upstreamonline.com/lng/shells-prelude-flng-facil...
Especially compared to the 19.700 deaths the tsunami took all in all.
But it is still not so simple. There are long term effects of radiation, many people likely will get cancer sooner and the whole mess is still not cleaned up.
And here where I live in germany, it is still advised against regulary eating mushrooms from the wood, because of one incident that took place 36 years ago.
But yes, the coal plants around here contributed worse, so I also believe it is wiser to not replace fission with coal.
Why do we allow smoking but are scared of low dose radiations?
Because smoking is not mandatory for everyone, but a individual choice and you can sue people, whose smoking effects other people.
Radiation effects everyone.
And no one is scared of low dose radiation, but it is a symptom of what can happen.
Chernobyl was just one incident. Going 100% nuclear and with people still being people, this would mean more accidents, more radiation, more cancer.
So do emissions and by-products of mining, coal burning, battery tech. To a much higher extent if I may add.
Where did you get this from?
One of the nice things about nuclear is that you can literally Google radiation maps from various time period, plug that in to demographic maps and plug those numbers into the radiation->excess death models.
Turns out, lightning is something you should be worrying about more than living 10 miles from Fukishima.
To be honest?
Not from deep research, but just from the known fact, that radiation increases cancer risk and that at Fukoshima was lots of radiation released.
"One of the nice things about nuclear is that you can literally Google radiation maps from various time period"
And there are different types of radiation. Some not so bad as background, or standing next to it, but very dangerous when eaten. I do not know when going in the forest and I do not want to walk around with a geiger counter. They still do not disclose how much wild boar meat has to be thrown away regulary in germany because of chernobyl.
And if the data in Japan does not show an increase, well then it is either all good (because most was washed into the sea) - or maybe not correct data. I don't know about the japanese government, but here in the east block after chernobyl, there was never a official problem in the first place. And the japanese government hopefully is better than the stalinists were, but bending the truth to save face, is a known motive there as well.
And the thing is, like I said, I am not anti nuclear. But solar panels and wind turbines simply do not have this problem ever.
Note that Fukushima isn't a "true" island, though some think it might come from a block of land isolated by rivers.
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.
Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth
By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'
Rooftop solar needs to be installed on roofs and there are also fatalities.
Hydroelectric dams can fail and there can be thousands of fatalities.
Pretty much every method of energy generation needs mine-sourced minerals, where mining has fatalities.
Literally everything humans build need mining. And nuclear needs less mining then literally every other form of energy.
Uranium mining is mostly not open pit and has very little impact on people or society. Also the quantities need are vanishingly small.
In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough.
Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Also blaming all old people dying on the nuclear stuff is just nonsense.
The quantity of Uranium is also much larger than you're making out. A 1kw system backed by diurnal storage with lithium batteries would use about the same amount of lithium as the nuclear reactor uses in uranium. The mines are also lower impact per unit output.
Solar uses smaller quantities of everything else involved from chromium to copper to zirconium to cadmium to indium to steel or sand. The only holdout is silver, and the gap for that is getting narrower by the month.
Wind uses more concrete and more steel but less of everything else.
> In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough.
This is just a flat out lie. But I'm glad we agree. Let's just stop uranium mining overnight, and we can see your nuclear utopia emerge.
> Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Scientists who all objected to the report that took their research out of context.
Actually one of the newest trend in architecture are large scale buildings made from (fire-proof!) wood
> Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Yeah and 600,000 people worked as liquidators.
I think a lot of those arguments (in fact on both sides) are overly nitpicky and based on niche facts making reasonable discussions next to impossible.
Nuclear seems this simplistic choice where the risk is shifted to somewhere where nobody can see it. Nobody knows about missing Core catchers, failure modes or insurance.
That said, new Nuclear plants are actually more expensive (LCOE) than other Energy forms with the exception of on-demand Gas
Oh go join Greenpeace already.
I really get fatigued seeing people bash oil and gas as if it has zero value. The human population wouldn't have hit 8 billion but for natgas feedstock for nitrogen* fertilizer. People would still be heating their homes with dried animal feces and wood but for propane. We'd still be hunting whales but for kerosene. And damn sure, the ability to enjoy a high quality of life with a relatively modest cost would be all but impossible but for the myriad of uses for petroleum products in general.
But you didn't feel the need to point any of that out, and instead parroted the tired, cliched stance of a stereotypical progressive.
I'm only finding US statistics for the "extracting" part, and that looks like about 1000 dead in just the USA, just with regard to oil and gas extraction, in the last decade.
But, given your style and the newness of your account, I find it very hard to trust that you're really "just curious", rather than using the phrase to create rhetorical affect.
In fact we should consume even more, its totally fine, we just need to do it with nuclear breeder plants. Energy isn't practically limited.
In terms of total resource in vs energy out nuclear is fantastic. And if we actually made some series advances it would be insanely so.
If you see gas and oil as an improvement to w/p/w, why can't nuclear be an improvement on oil gas?
They compared fatalities between two energy sources. What do the relative benefits of those two sources have to do with their fatality rate?
Funny, because it's Greenpeace who is against nuclear power and thus pro-fossil fuels.
The economic cost, however, is huge.
> My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future
Why is this a cynical take? What's so bad about that about Japan wanting to secure their energy supply?
Also USD 82 billion and counting. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193#:~:text=Around%2....
Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. *One*.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change. Which likely numbers thousands if not tens of thousands of people per day.
> Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical.
My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future because of the two elephants in the room - China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. China might one day blockage Japan. Then again it might not. Ukraine might never have been invaded. Taiwan, might not get invaded.