Foreign Correspondent: Into the Zone- Fukushima, Japan

[nationalize the fed]

Foreign Correspondent
ABC Australia
Broadcast: 24/05/2016
Reporter: Mark Willacy
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2015/s4465417.htm

...But there’s a grotesqueness here. Houses which rang with the sounds of life and laughter are being swallowed by weeds and vines; inside they are choked by cobwebs and dust.

This is the countryside of Fukushima. Five years after the nuclear meltdown, it remains full of radiation, and virtually empty of people...


"There was a risk that half or all of Japan could have been destroyed. So in a way the accident took us to the brink of destruction." – Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan

...Willacy was one of the first journalists on the scene after the double headed tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011, and has reported on it extensively since. Now he has been invited on a tour of the plant courtesy of the operator TEPCO.

What’s happening? They don’t want to go any further .– Willacy with TEPCO guides as levels spike on the radiation meter

What Willacy discovers is truly unsettling.


Piles of black bags containing contaminated topsoil

The task of neutralising and retrieving hundreds of tonnes of melted nuclear fuel turns out to be far greater than previously thought. So too might be the eventual cost, as well as the time that will be required to remedy the site –that is, if it can ever be fully remedied...snip
MORE: http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2015/s4465417.htm

"There has never been an accident at a nuclear plant like the one at Fukushima where three reactors had meltdowns. We are currently working on a timetable to decommission the reactors over the next 30 to 40 years. "

Must See TV that won't make it on to the US Airwaves. Especially for Nuclear Energy supporters.

[NNadir]

1. Really? Seven million people die each year from nuclear power?

Last edited Wed Jun 1, 2016, 03:24 AM - Edit history (1)

I would guess, that since 7 million people die each year from air pollution an argument by a correspondent that "it's become clkear nuclear power is more dangerous than other power sources" is definitive proof that one cannot be a journalist if one has passed second grade math.

Did the "foreign correspondent" die when he went "in the zone" or did he just get more stupid?

In more than half a century of operations, nuclear power hasn't killed as many people as will die in the next four hours from air pollution.

That there is any reporter on the planet who is so stupid as to make such an idiotic remark as "nuclear power is more dangerous than other power sources" shows exactly how stupid our culture has become. A foreign correspondent making such a report is the avatar of stupidity and ignorance.

Our planetary atmosphere is collapsing at the fastest rate ever observed, this while mindless assholes offer dreamy and ineffective trash thinking about stuff that's been failing to do a damn thing, like um, hydrogen cars, while demonizing inspidily, the world's largest - and safest - by far source of energy, nuclear energy.

We deserve what we are getting.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[truebrit71]

2. You are of course, correct. Fukushima is the gold standard when it comes to demonstrating...

....exactly how safe nuclear power is...

[NNadir]

3. Agreed. The loss of life was extremely low for the reactor. As the Nobel Laureate Burton...

...Richter argued even the failed reactor actually saved lives since air pollution kills so many people.

What is remarkable is not that the reactors failed, but that they failed with such a trivial loss of life, this after producing vast amounts of air pollution free energy.

Richter notes also that the fact that people lived in a coastal city and drowned during the earthquake and tsunami - a fact overlooked predictably by the morons who focus on the reactor - easily dwarfed the reactor failure in terms of damage and loss of life.

Energy Environ. Sci., 2012,5, 8758-8759

It would be interesting if dumb people who hate the world's largest source of climate change gas free energy - this at a time when the atmosphere is collapsing - gave a shit about energy disasters that kill vastly more people than the leaks at Fukushima: the Piper Alpha and Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosions come to mind.

But that was not to be. The ignorant have prevailed with their very, very, very, very selective attention. They believe that nuclear power and only nuclear power needs to be perfect, or tens of millions of people will need to die because they can't do simple comparisons. Nuclear power need not be perfect; it need not be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

Regrettably, much to the detriment of humanity, there are too many weak thinking people who don't get the last point. It borders on being a crime against humanity, since millions of people will die from air pollution and climate change as a result.

Have a nice day.

[truebrit71]

4. Of course there's always that pesky question about what to do with...

....the deadly by-products of this incredibly green and totally non-dangerous power generation method...

[NNadir]

5. Not really. First of all, they're not all that deadly, having killed no one. Fossil fuel...

...wastes kill millions of people each year, by contrast. There is, nor will there be, any way to contain them for eternity.

It would be interesting if someone who is concerned with so called "nuclear waste" could provide a case where the storage of used nuclear fuel has killed as many people as will die in the next two hours from air pollution. But they can't, since legitimate information on this score does not exist.

Unlike radioactive materials, dangerous fossil fuel wastes do not naturally decay, and will thus will be present for, um, eternity.

Some of these materials are very toxic metals like lead and mercury. Sometimes I think that the blank stupidity one sees these days on issues like politics and energy are related to the wide distribution of these neurotoxic dangerous fossil fuel wastes. This would be one possible explanation certainly, for anti-nuke stupidity.

The number of papers in the scientific literature - I've been studying them for more than three decades - detailing how to utilize used nuclear fuel number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It's a fairly straight forward issue to deal with them, were it not for public ignorance that avoids the realities clearly shown in the scientific literature.

Regrettably, however, people who have no scientific or engineering knowledge of any kind still circulate a scientifically illiterate myth that these valuable materials, the components of used nuclear fuel, are problematic.

They are not. Given that in more than half a century of commercial nuclear operations, their storage has resulted in such a low loss of life or damage to health, this should be obvious, but for reasons that are nothing, if not bizarre, somehow these easily verifiable facts are missed, thus resulting in tens of millions of deaths from the far more dangerous fossil fuel waste.

Have a nice day.

[truebrit71]

6. So I assume you'll be jumping on the phone and having them drop off all the spent rods...

...at your place then, yes?

[NNadir]

7. I couldn't care less where they go. I would be perfectly happy to have a nuclear fuel...

...reprocessing facility in my neighborhood, recognizing that this activity will contribute to the safety and well being of future generations.

But, as stated previously in this very pleasant conversation, I'm not a scientific illiterate spouting off rote mindless regurgitation of 50 year old myths, but am instead, a person who has a deep knowledge of nuclear fuels, their chemistry, their physics, and modes of treatment.

Regrettably there are people who have made the disastrous alternate choice to have natural gas, coal, and petroleum plants distributed all around the earth, where there are no NIMBY issues that can contain their highly toxic by products. Every living thing on this planet, humans included, is contaminated with dangerous fossil fuel waste, in many cases, at toxic levels. There are no places on this planet, even Antarctica where dangerous fossil fuel wastes cannot be detected at problematic levels.

I live in New Jersey, where about 50% of our electricity is provided by nuclear energy. I'm grateful for that fact, and I wish that all of the citizens here would be similarly grateful. It would be wonderful to have a reprocessing plant here to produce high quality jobs with highly educated and competent scientists and engineers employed in a highly productive enterprise in service to the human race. It doesn't get much better than that.

Regrettably, and as I noted previously, there's a great deal of stupidity in the world, which may be connected, as noted previously, with the neurotoxic metals that are just one constituent of experimentally deadly - as opposed to theoretically deadly - dangerous fossil fuel waste.

I'm really glad that we had this pleasant chat, but frankly, it's growing a little tiresome, so I'm afraid I'll have to leave it for a while.

[truebrit71]

8. I'm sure TEPCO will be thrilled, you know, because for some unimaginable reason...

....they've had difficulty offloading theirs. Would you also be fine having them water you're lawn with the water they've had to store as well? You'd be able to corner the market in four-leaf clovers too...

[NNadir]

9. Well, although dumb people couldn't care less, TEPCO's fuel didn't kill anyone whereas the fossil...

...fuel waste that replaced the nuclear plants while dumb guys insisted that we find out if nuclear energy was "safe," did.

All nuclear fuel is valuable, in particular, the fission products. If we had a fuel reprocessing plant in New Jersey, we could be synthesizing cesium titanosilicate in order to decompose ground level ozone - where we don't want ozone - by the same mechanism that it takes place in the upper atmosphere.

Ozone is just one highly toxic air pollutant that kills people of course, but radiation is the only sink for many other highly toxic compounds, so yes, it would be wonderful to have used nuclear fuel to save lives.

One of the things that people who hate science because they don't know any is that nuclear energy saves lives. The famous climate scientist Jim Hansen made an excellent quantitative analysis of how many lives were saved, despite ignorant people prattling on mindlessly about things like TEPCO and Fukushima, and came up with the number 1.8 million lives.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power

Of course, nuclear power saved these lives in an atmosphere of severe criticism from people with very selective attention, a rather toxic crowd, considering the death toll. Many more lives could have been saved had we resisted the efforts by the stupid to criticize the work of some of the finest minds of the 20th century, men like Fermi, Wigner, Seaborg, the pioneers of nuclear energy.

Three years ago, in the medical journal Lancet, a survey was made of the most prominent risk factors causing human death and mortality: A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010

The tables therein show that air pollution is a major killer of human beings, indoor air pollution being the third largest killer after high blood pressure and tobacco use, outdoor air pollution being the 9th largest killer after things like diabetes and alcoholism. Now I do realize that people who hate nuclear energy don't open science books, or journals or attend scientific meetings and lectures. In general they hate science, and don't know any. Nevertheless, were they to open the paper just cited, they would be challenged to find "nuclear energy operations" listed among the 67 most important risk factors. The paper gets to a pretty fine level, and includes things like "occupational exposure to cadmium" reported to have caused 555 deaths in 2010. But nuclear power doesn't make the cut.

Occupational exposure to benzene, a constituent of gasoline, is reported to have killed 2731 people, but nuclear power didn't make the cut.

Therefore one wonders what it is exactly that anti-nukes have up their butts that makes them into such paranoids and intellectual paralytics. Well one thing is that they are disinterested in epidemiology, and by extension, humanity. But whatever it is they have up their butts, it hardly justifies what they are putting into peoples lungs by the persistent insistence they have to share their ignorance with whomever will deign to endure it.

I often report these undeniable facts, often with reference to the two cited papers to which I've provided links, but many times what I get in response is insipid muttering about Fukushima and/or Chenobyl.

Apparently there are a lot of people who just can't think or do simple math. Given the death toll associated with this ignorance, it really is tragic.

It's been a pleasure. Have a nice day tomorrow.

[truebrit71]

10. So that's a yes then, for the totally non-dangerous, water to be delivered...

That's great news!

[truebrit71]

14. All Sanders supporters, or just the ones that blow holes in your pro-nuclear bullshit?

Sweeping generalization much?

[sylvanus]

11. My lovely fool of a brother

If you believe that building towers and facilities made of concrete, which creates tons of carbon, to use a constantly radioactive material with no known North American disposal area. To fucking boil water to spin turbines, is your answer to our, yours and mine, answer to our climate and energy problems. You need to go pet your dog, make a lovely cocktail, go outside and watch the sunset. Cause if the " miracle" of nuclear energy is your bag, your game has been run. (and those micro nuke reactors from the Navy Subs, yeh, cats like you and me. We ain't gonna see um.

[NNadir]

12. We're not brothers. I have no brotherhood with people unfamiliar with the contents of science...

...books.

Having spent the last thirty years in close study of nuclear technology in the primary scientific literature, I'm disinclined to be amused by childish platitudes that the issuer incorrectly conflates with wit.

Have a nice day tomorrow.