Fukushima worst case scenario: can someone explain it???

[Heronblade]

Well the worst-case immediate scenario has already hit me: lack of Japanese food imports. I'm not talking seafood here, I'm talking everything. From Japanese curry to wasabi. Asian groceries simply aren't buying them anymore, mostly because people aren't going to buy it when they've heard that magical trigger word 'radiation.' Maybe these products are being produced in the affected region I don't know but Japan is a big fucking place, surely they don't focus all of their food industry around Fukushima.

Yeah, that's just paranoia.

Japan sticks their food industry wherever they can, after all, they have a lot of people to feed and not much arable land. There probably is some of it near the plant in question. However, everything close enough to the plant to be effected has been shut down. They would have to be idiots not to have secured any food that might have been affected as a top priority. Of course, I do have a major bone to pick concerning whoever approved the incredibly flawed design of that plant in the first place, so maybe I shouldn't be giving their leadership's common sense too much credit.

 

[spartan231490]

Ive heard it described as chernobyl times 85 and that in the worst case scenario the entire northern hemisphere would be forced to evacuate. So what exactly happens here? I assume that japan would be screwed but what about the us? china russia? what is life like in the us after that? is there life in the us after that or would we be leaving this huge mass of land forever? would we even be able to evacuate and leave in time and would it matter?

The reasoning is that the leaking radioactive material will start circulating in the ocean and spread uncontrollably not just through the water, but also through the food chain of the oceans. Whether or not that is an accurate assertion is not something I, or likely just about anyone, is qualified to say for sure. However, based on what I do know thanks to years of university science education and quite a bit of independent research, I am willing to make a few educated guesses. Worse than Chernobyl? Probably, it wasn't contained as quickly and an indeterminate amount of radioactive material leaked into the already polluted ocean, and that will cause god knows how much damage to sea-life as time goes on. 85 times worse than Chernobyl? That's probably a bit of stretch. There's a lot of Ocean, and a lot of Ocean life, and life can adapt to levels of radiation, so I doubt it will be anything terribly severe. It might interfere with the availability of sea-food but it would have required a massive amount of radioactive material to cause a significant disruption.

I'm not a nuclear physicist, or an Oceanic ecologist, but that's my take. Take it as you will.

 

[rednose1]

I don't think it's worse than Chernobyl. Chernobyl was just the perfect storm of human arrogance (bad designs aside, they had to disable safety features designed to prevent the very test they were wanting to do.Even with all the major design flaws, it would've been fine had they not decided to run an idiotic test, one which other plants refused to do because it was unsafe.)

I read a bit of the first site you posted, and it's clear it's sensationalist writing. The paragraph that made me laugh the most:
But if TEPCO doesn?t have its shit together, like many people feel they don?t, the rods could touch one another or break during the removal process, exposing the radioactive material to air ? the likelihood of which is considered high by some. In that case, sparks fly, things start to blow up and radiation takes to the air like a flock of desperate birds released from a cage. Only these aren?t pigeons; they?re radioactive, cancer-causing, death birds.

Yea, that's not professional reporting, that's what you'd find on a blog. Also, asking a Professor of Sociology about a fuel rod transfer? Why the hell ask him?

Chernobyl was bad, very very bad (the wild boars in Germany are even now considered unsafe to eat because of Chernobyl)
Fukushima is also bad, but unless Japan flips it nut and moves the fuel by loading them into rockets to detonate in the upper atmosphere, we'll be fine.

 

[Do4600]

Ive heard it described as chernobyl times 85 and that in the worst case scenario the entire northern hemisphere would be forced to evacuate. So what exactly happens here?

Either the media is intentionally lying, or they are asked the wrong kind of experts.

You'll notice that Japan happens to be the same nation that 2 nuclear devices were used on. The nation that built them was also in the northern hemisphere also had the 3 mile island accident, and tested quite a few above ground weapons, to use on another northern hemisphere nation that tested its own weapons and had a nasty accident of their own.

Fukushima is going to massive be worse than all that? No. Flat out that is bullshit, worst kind of scaremongering.

well heres my links:http://www.ryot.org/one-wrong-move-at-fukushima-could-unleash-a-nuclear-disaster-equivalent-to-85-chernobyls/388813

http://truth-out.org/news/item/19073-risky-repair-of-fukushima-could-spill-15000-times-the-radiation-of-hiroshima-create-85-chernobyls

If what your saying is true how is it bullshit? I mean they want this cleanup to work so that the public doesnt crucify every money making nuclear reactor out there.(as opposed I think to just pouring concrete over the whole thing Im really not sure just worried)

but yeah super worried here at 6.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, wrong, incorrect, false, impossible, just plain not true!

You could probably take every estimate every news source has published about the dangers of radiation in the past 40 years and reduce them by about 10,000%...and you'd still be wildly over-estimating the danger. The public is woefully under educated about radiation so it's easy to scare them with it, makes them tune in more, or read their bullshit web-pages.

This is a quick and dirty chart for reference, this was published a month or so after the initial damage at Fukushima :http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Notice that the extra dose of radiation to Tokyo a few weeks after the incident is 9.75 times less than the dosage of radiation the potassium in your blood exposes you to in a year. The potassium in YOUR BLOOD, gives you 9.75 TIMES the radiation that Tokyo received in about three weeks. Then you would have to multiply that radiation from the plant by 154 times per year before you would reach the lowest dose known to increase the chances of cancer over a lifetime, OVER A LIFETIME. Then you would have to multiply that number by 20 to reach moderate radiation poisoning, or from the original 640 μSv per year extra, you would have to multiply that by 3,125 times before you would get moderate radiation poisoning.

In short...they are sooooooooo full of shit. Yes the waste water is dangerous but you'd have to swim in it for a couple hours for it to kill you. If all of it got dumped into the ocean the worst case is that it would concentrate in plants and animals in the local vicinity and you'd have to increase the safety standards on fish from the area for twenty years or so, also if water is desalinated from the area it would need to be treated and monitored. The rest would dilute and cease to be a problem after five years or so. Honestly, humans can handle way more radiation than we give ourselves credit for, case in point; nuclear power plants are regulated so strictly that they are required to put out less radiation per year than coal power plants.

 

[Sniperexpert]

What the OP heard is absolute and utter bull****! Nuclear power and it's waste if managed correct has the benefits of virtually no Co2,more efficent fuel usage than oil,gas or coal, isn't dependent on consistent wind or water levels in fact Russian nuclear icebreaker 50 Let Pobedy (which translates to 50 Years of Victory in English) uses ONE POUND of Uranium at full power a day vs over 100 TONS of fuel oil.Seems pretty efficent to me.

 

[QuadFish]

I'd love to talk to any of the writers who do these scaremonger articles and ask them to explain what a gamma ray is. It's got to the point where I don't trust anything unless it comes from a proper nuclear expert, because 99% of the population seems to know nothing about nuclear science beyond "green" and "makes explosions and cancer". Common knowledge on it is so bad, the day the first commercial fusion reactor is built there'll be a protest from everyone scared it'll turn into a bomb (even though A, non-weapons-grade enriched nuclear fuels don't cause detonations and B, fusion and fission are almost completely different even though they're both nuclear).

 

[Yopaz]

Nope. Impossible. Can. Not. Happen.

I wasn't really serious about that part actually being possible. It was directed more at how easy it is to make up frightening facts in order to sell papers or make people click articles and when it doesn't happen they can hide behind the fact that they never said it was plausible or likely that it would happen.

And yes, media generating fear based on their lack of knowledge on the subject is directly causing shortage of iodide supplements. I can't blame the people who bought them, but I do blame the media for scaring people who doesn't know any better.

 

[Product Placement]

in the worst case scenario the entire northern hemisphere would be forced to evacuate.

For the record, the entire northern hemisphere includes North America, Europe, a decent chunk of Africa and all of Asia. About 90% of all humans live in these places.

Yes, 90%. That's roughly 6.4 billion.

If an article is seriously suggesting that if shit really hit the fan, all of that has to be evacuated to... South Africa, Australia and Brazil (yeah, I know there are other countries but these are the largest ones), I'm pretty sure that other countries with more nuclear experience would be stepping in to intervene, since they'd have a vested interest in not being turned into a radioactive waste dump.

So, simply put, it sounds to me like more of the classic fear-mongering used to hook people to staying on their channel/reading their paper/visiting their sites for future updates.

 

[hermes]

Was Fukushima a tragedy? Yes
Is it comparable to Chernobyl? No.

Seriously, comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl is like comparing a bullet with a ballistic missile

 

[Product Placement]

Was Fukushima a tragedy? Yes
Is it comparable to Chernobyl? No.

To be fair, Fukushima is graded level 7 on the INES scale, which is the highest grade you can get. Only Chernobyl has gotten that rank before, so it's something that the two incidents have in common.

And while Chernobyl certainly did release a heck of allot more of nuclear material into the atmosphere, Fukushima is still releasing allot of waste into the pacific ocean which is why they're working on removing those rods. It was also a serious enough of an event that they considered evacuating Tokyo, at one point.