Six Years On, Fukushima's Cleanup Looks Harder Than Ever

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603842/six-years-on-fukushimas-cleanup-looks-harder-than-ever/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Six Years On, Fukushima’s Cleanup Looks Harder Than Ever[/font]

[font size=4]And the safety concerns embodied by the disaster still plague the nuclear industry.[/font]

by Jamie Condliffe March 10, 2017

[font size=3]It’s been six years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident—and the cleanup operations at the abandoned plant are beginning to look as dire as the prospects of the nuclear industry as a whole.

When an earthquake and tsunami sent the plant into meltdown on March 11, 2011, thousands of locals were evacuated—and yet, amazingly, no deaths were recorded as a result of radioactive fallout. But the resulting cleanup operation looked to be a formidable task, expected to take decades.

Sadly, years later, it’s not going well, and it looks set to be a far harder task than initially anticipated. This year, radiation levels in one of the containment vessels of the plant’s reactors reached their highest level since the incident occurred in 2011. The conditions would, apparently, kill a human in under a minute.

It had been hoped that a series of specially designed robots would be able to help survey and fix up problems at the site. But two different robots have now been lost to severe conditions in that rector when used to investigate it.

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[CrispyQ]

1. Oh man.

At the end of this month, locals who left their homes will gradually start to return to the region that surrounds Fukushima, as Japan lifts evacuation orders on nearby towns. Many are concerned about the risks of radiation, but face losing housing subsidies if they refuse to move back. And when they do return they’ll also have to face up to wild boars that have taken up residence since humans moved away.

[Dale Neiburg]

2. And apparently the wild boars are radioactive!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028774640

[CrispyQ]

3. Good grief. It reads like a B-rated sci-fi film. -nt

[NNadir]

4. Much more difficult, one supposes, than cleaning up the atmosphere.

If we spend a trillion dollars cleaning up Fukushima to satisfy the scientific illiteracy of every scientifically illiterate nutcase who insists that every atom of cesium - 137 is a death sentence, how many lives will be saved by that trillion dollars?

As many as if we gave a shit about the 2 billion people on this planet who have no access to sanitation, and spent two hundred million dollars on sewage treatment plants where there are none?

The planet is dying from dangerous fossil fuel waste while bourgeois idiots sit on their asses worrying about Fukushima.

We're infinitely more worried about two fucking robots than we are in the 800 people who die every damned hour from air pollution.

If there is anyone left to write the environmental history of these times, they will marvel about the stupidity of these times.

One can show by appeal to the Bateman equation, and the power level of all the reactors on earth, roughly 30 exajoules of primary energy per year, that if all the cesium 137 now accumulated in all the reactors now operating on earth, that it would not match the potassium-40 that decayed in the earth's oceans this year.

But we're very, very, very, very, very concerned about cleaning up Fukushima's reactors but nothing else. How ethical of us, to declare that any imagined death from radiation at any time in history is more important than seven million deaths from air pollution every damned year

[NickB79]

5. This article implies there was a radiation spike. There was not.

The reason they recorded record-high radiation levels was because they hadnt managed to get a robot in that containment vessel until now.