I wonder if that had been the case if the wind had blown in another direction at the time, towards Tokyo, instead of mostly the open sea.
I also think it's difficult to come to conclusions in seeing this in an isolated way. Everything was in chaos and much destroyed because of the tsunami, surely that delayed communications, and assessment of the 'real' situation?
Sometimes when I read about the history of all that, and all the talking about, I get the feeling like the commentariat views this like a clean room laboratory exercise. Like in a model, this happened, what to do now?
Chaotic reality doesn't work like that.
But it would have caused panic and that wouldn't have been good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ronald_Reagan#2011_deploym...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(LHD-2)#2011
Some searching for 'Fukushima US-NAVY cancer' will bring up endless stuff from all sorts of sites.
The thing is, regardless of the sites reputations, there is a signal that those ships took a large dose, because some of their sailors claim their sudden leukemia was caused by that.
I don't know. Can one call that psychosomatic? Did they sniff too much JP-7 instead?
IMO that signal is too strong to be disregarded.
Well, not really. Some of the early damage might have been prevented by this (at the cost of destroying the reactors), but Fukushima really had no way to reliably cool their reactors without auxiliary power. Once that was gone, there was going to be serious trouble, and likely destruction of some of the reactors.
From what I remember of the Fukushima accident, one of the quick remedies they could have started with immediately is pump sea water in as a coolant. The management didn't want to do that, because sea water corrodes equipment and makes it more expensive to restore afterwards.
This is a natural thing for management to say -- they're sitting there in Tokyo not fully experiencing the severity of the problem.
The problem is that Japanese culture puts an emphasis on obeying your superiors, so it took a long time until people disregarded those orders and started cooling with sea water anyway. That sort of obedience culture is not really compatible with systems designed to suffer rare but potentially catastrophic failures.