Maybe my memory of the event is faulty or maybe the concerns were exaggerated at the time, but I'm fairly sure at least one of the buildings exploded due to hydrogen build up. Which isn't reassuring when it happens to a building housing radioactive material. Particularly when the safety measures were demonstrably insufficient.
Sure it's easy to conclude things may have been safe in hindsight, but you can't base decisions on hindsight.
Similarly I've never heard anyone argue that we shouldn't take such stringent safety measures around unexploded ordnance, even though I've never heard of any occasion where evacuating the surrounding area was necessary in hindsight.
Exactly. In hindsight, it's clear it wasn't going to turn into a radiation release worse than Chernobyl. But at the time of the evacuation, not enough was known. With so many unknowns, it would be incredibly irresponsible not to evacuate.
I think blaming the evacuation is wrong. You have look deeper, at the reason that an evacuation was necessary in the first place.
Have you tracked the WHO assessments of the impact of Chernobyl?
It turns out that there as well, the non-radiation effects (evacuation, psychological stress, etc.) far outweighed the radiation effects.
> reason that an evacuation was necessary
Apart from a core that was certainly necessary: hysteria, fueled by the mass media and an unscientific/unproven and almost certainly wrong model of the health risks of radiation exposure.
"I'm fairly sure at least one of the buildings exploded due to hydrogen build up"
There were four explosions. The no. 1 and 3 buildings exploded quite visibly and video of both events is readily available. The no. 2 reactor suppression pool exploded and damaged the suppression pool. The no. 4 reactor also experienced an explosion; this event was initially believed to be related to the no. 4 spent fuel pool, but was later attributed to accumulated hydrogen from the no. 3 reactor.
It’s a little more complicated, but you’re basically right. The hydrogen buildup happened when they tried to prevent a meltdown by continually pumping water through the reactors, because the earthquake could have cracked the secondary concrete containment, allowing molten core materials to “China syndrome” their way into the groundwater.
As far as I know several cores melted down anyway, and there’s no conclusive evidence that the molten cores escaped secondary containment.
It would be a stretch to say that trying to prevent meltdowns was a bad decision in this case. Ironically though, pumping so much seawater through the reactors probably led to a much greater release of radiation into the spent fuel pools, which as I recall have been leaking that heavy (and impure) water into the ground and ocean.
The point is that you evacuate people Temporarorily maybe, but not for YEARS. After the situation was under control most inhabitants should have been allowed and encouraged to return.
Interestingly, they planned to lift the evacuation order like 5 years ago for a large part of the zone. But the local government asked to postpone it by 4 years so that there is time to rebuild the infrastructure, which was completely washed away by tsunami. Regardless of all the nuclear stuff, people would've been living in absolutely terrible conditions with no electricity, water, transport, convenience stores, schools, hospitals and so on. And now they have all of this, but people are still slow to return. There's a lot of interesting stuff being built in the area though (J-Village, etc), so maybe they will eventually.
Well, I can only tell what I saw with my own eyes. I went to a town named Tomioka last year to see the newly reopened train station. I think it's about 10 km from Dai-ichi plant. The evacuation order was lifted in March 2017. Anyway, the area around the station, which used to be the downtown, was completely washed away. After cleanup it's now just a giant parking lot as far as eyes can see, except for a few post-tsunami buildings. I walked uphill and there were also many heavily damaged buildings. Even if you can't see the damage, flooding often makes the entire building unsafe due to mold growth or whatever. Some areas might not have been damaged much, but like I said, they depended on infrastructure in the destroyed areas, which is only now being restored.
According to the Ministry of the Environment, radiation levels on the road peak at 14.7 microsieverts per hour, and average 3.5 microsieverts per hour. Officials conducted a test in which a car was driven at a speed of 40 kilometers per hour for about 42 kilometers through the no-entry zone, including the opened stretch between Futaba and Tomioka. It recorded a radiation level of 1.2 microsieverts, and very little radioactive material stuck to the car. Based on the results, the government gave the OK to reopen the 14-kilometer stretch, but only to automobiles, not bikes or pedestrians
Though even in areas that have had evacuation orders lifted, residents have been (understandably) reluctant to return:
Well maybe, but then the part that should be criticised is not the evacuation itself but the recovery efforts.
Indeed it looks like the recovery is not going as well as it could. However it's a bit weird to phrase it as if they are at fault for even evacuating in the first place.
Seriously hope those guys have a business model. Love that site for keeping everything from important political tweets to ripping paywalled articles...
The question shouldn't be "Did the evacuation raise the death toll given the mostly successful containment we now known happened"? It should instead be "Did the evacuation raise the death toll given the expected death toll values informed by the probability estimates of disaster available at the time"?
It's also possible that the aftermath of the actual evacuation wasn't well handled; stating that "[the evacuation] reaped a terrible toll in depression, joblessness and alcoholism among the 63,000 people who were displaced beyond the prefecture" also give information about how much of that would still be present for the counterfactual in which people didn't leave but stayed to suffer the after-effects of the tsunami damage.
First...the containment wasn't particularly successful, things were botched at every level. And still the radiation exposure was at worst minimal.
Also, I don't see how comparing "what did we expect/fear" with "what actually happened" is an out-of-bounds question. Quite the contrary, it should be the question to ask, particularly when it comes to formulating future policy. After all, that's how we got aviation accidents down to levels that aren't statistically significant.
> Fukushima prompted a global turn away from nuclear power and correspondingly higher carbon emissions in countries such as Germany and Japan.
That is certainly true, but at the same time it also caused increased investments in regenerative power, which the article doesn't mention at all. So from what I know, the article looks kinda one-eyed to me.
The reactions to this information are quite interesting.
The evacuation 63,000 people is now known to have resulted in 2,202 deaths, cost $74 billion and still displaces 34,000 people seven years later. All for the benefit of a potential life expectancy extension a “few days” from avoidance of radiation and no known deaths prevented.
Yet somehow most people still think it was the right decision. This seems like some kind of congnitive blind spot.
This is really said, but what choice did they have other than to evacuate?
Several months following the disaster, people of Japan were extremely skeptical of how their government handled the situation. The task of convincing people to stay put would've been insurmountable and would've been viewed as gross negligence.
"In retrospect, the evacuation looks excessive. Less clear is whether those in charge at the time could have acted any other way."
I like the idea of real-time monitoring and info that was suggested. Evacuate temporarily until cooling is back in place and then put sensors around measuring dose rate that you can look at online: "At the current dose rate, a conservative radiation/health model suggests you will die 2.3 days earlier then if you stayed gone."
It'd be a bit complex because some people evacuated to places where the natural dose rate is higher than where their contaminated home was.
FTA:
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"The first thing to realise is that relocation is probably going to be a bad idea," he says, suggesting that nuclear companies start providing real-time health information on the risks of living around their plants. “This is what your loss of life expectancy is from the current level of contamination,” he says. If people realise it would only be a few days, they can make an informed decision to stay.
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The biggest problem is that we really don't know all that much about how it would affect people. Data from Chernobyl if anything demonstrates that our estimates have continuously overestimated the danger, and have continued doing so as the estimates of harm from Chernobyl has kept being adjusted downwards.
But that's complicated by the lack of extensive screening of the few people who remained in the exclusion zone, and unusual shift patterns for chose who continued to work at the Chernobyl reactors after the accident (the other reactors continued to operate for years).
Everything is indicating it's not as dangerous as we used to think, but we don't really know what that means precisely in terms of larger scale more sustained exposure.
Surely life expectancy is an average across a population. So that some people may die much earlier whilst the majority live to an old age. I would rather know the specifics of what may kill me, and decide from that.
I mean you will die 3 days earlier basically means that from a pool of like 1000 people one will die 3000 days earlier because of cancer.
which is really not a good way to die.
There is a lot of good content I come across on FT. I never post it because I figure it won’t be able to amass enough traction as there’s a paywall.
I’ve been happy paying for FT (it’s not cheap!) but I like the idea that more than half of FT’s revenue comes from subscribership than advertising (heard this on I believe an AlphaChat podcast).
So it’s interesting seeing my two primary news channels intersect (FT / HN), and I wonder what other news sources people read that aren’t accelerant-enabled (i.e. they’re paywalled).
FT subscriber here too. Wish there was a way to share articles too. Because I always use the app and am not signed in, it's annoying to come across FT articles and not be able to read it.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was directly funded by TEPCO or some other "thinktank" that fears new contracts might be cancelled.
If there's one thing the Japanese would do different in hindsight, it would not be ignoring a massive explosion of a reactor containment building.
It would be never building that power plant.
The disaster, even ignoring the deaths and long-term effects on the population, will cost over $100 Billion to the Japanese. That's some pretty fucking expensive electricity they got. And the source is still FT, I guess before they got bought.
It’s kinda sad how the nuclear industry has captured the Silicon Valley environment movement too.
At the height of the peak oil panic it kind of made sense, in a “contrarian thinking” way. Oil was getting more expensive, renewables weren’t price competitive and what other option was there?
But that was 10 years ago, and things change.
Fracking got us past that first peak oil problem, and cheap solar/wind/batteries has killed any chance the nuclear power industry had of ever growing again. But still they keep trying...
My counter argument these days is easy. Solar+batteries is down to ~6c/kWh with zero subsidies, and can be built in ~6 months. Beat that, nuclear power.
Now if they get fusion working, I’ll be very excited.
>At the height of the peak oil panic it kind of made sense, in a “contrarian thinking” way.
I think you are underestimating how good of an option nuclear was. Going full nuclear [0] would have mitigated the single greatest environmental crisis in human history. Now we will be stuck with the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere while we were waiting for renewables to become practical.
But, its too late to fix that now. For purely economic reasons, nuclear doesn't make sense anymore; let alone the environmental and NIMBY reasons.
[0] To the extent practical. A 100% nuclear grid was likely never practical because nuclear isn't good for peaker plants.
It would have have avoided most of the worst damages of climate change if we'd migrated to it in the 50s and 60s. Of course, even nuclear advocates say those old reactors are unsafe.
>...even nuclear advocates say those old reactors are unsafe.
No, this is not what people are saying. Those plants from the 50s and 60s have proven to be far safer ways of generating electricity than any alternative. Even today those plants are still safer than rooftop solar or wind and orders of magnitude safer than coal etc. What people have been saying is that new designs are safer than previous designs - passive emergency cooling systems, etc.
Given the political environment in the US, there will likely be little role for nuclear power for at least the next few decades. Instead it will likely be China which builds/deploys nuclear power.
But most of that cost is the battery. Pure solar (which is location dependent) is under 5c/kWh, in Germany[1]. I'd imagine somewhere like Arizona it would be under half that.
Exactly. I would also fully support fusion or fusion/fission hybrids, which promice to burn up all waste and operate in a deeply subcritical state, meaning no meltdowns or explosions, ever. It's disappointing how little research funding these technologies get.
However, until the time comes, literally all other energy sources are cheaper, cleaner and safer in the long run over fission.
Sure it's easy to conclude things may have been safe in hindsight, but you can't base decisions on hindsight.
Similarly I've never heard anyone argue that we shouldn't take such stringent safety measures around unexploded ordnance, even though I've never heard of any occasion where evacuating the surrounding area was necessary in hindsight.