

Tepco releases badly altered image of Fukushima Unit 4 - stfu
http://enenews.com/tepco-releases-badly-altered-image-unit-4-photo

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niels_olson
Hi, I'm a physician who deployed as part of the US military response,
specifically, I was in the contingency planning cell. Assuming there is a hole
in the wall, which is a curtain wall, not a containment wall, then it leads to
work areas around and outside the base of the reactor containment vessel. The
presumed hole is above the wet well and may or may not be on the side facing
the containment pool.

If it is on the side of the containment pool, the wet well may not be covered
by a floor (I have seen conflicting schematics on this). However, Unit 4's
primary issues were with their spent rod pool. If that is involved, there are
two concrete decks between the bottom of the pool and the space exposed by
presumed hole.

So, my guess is the wet well may be exposed by that hole in the curtain wall,
and may or may not have any damage, but the wet well is definitely failed in
Unit 2, and I can see where they wouldn't want people whooping and hollering
about wet wells. I'm sure the insides of that are a complete mess at this
point. Even if this was a normal construction site, it would be a complete
mess at this point.

I see others have mentioned there may be a truck access tunnel at this spot.
Perhaps, but I'm unclear as to the orientation of the 4 sides, and that seems
a bit irrelevant to the reactor.

Meanwhile, the NRC daily updates petered out long ago. I'm not planning any
trips to Fukushima any time soon.

Update: here is a great presentation we got from Areva. Glad to see it's
available to the public:

<https://wikispooks.com/w/images/5/5d/Fukushima-areva.pdf>

~~~
bradleyland
Ok, so assuming all that is true, why obscure the hole?

I can still recall during my sentiment during the unfolding of the Fukushima
incident. The whole time, I kept reassuring everyone to keep calm and not
assume the worst because the information coming out of TEPCO indicated that
the reactor was "OK". Heh, boy did that turn out to be a mistake.

So, what we have here is a situation where TEPCO has dropped a nuclear bomb on
their credibility. Normally, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and assume
that all these are perfectly plausible explanations worth considering, but
after the way they handled the incident as it was occurring, I'm not inclined
to believe anything not seen or verified by my own eyes or trusted third-
parties.

A doctored image coming from TEPCO gives us every reason to be alarmed. Given
their past behavior, it's a good indication that something is amiss.

~~~
niels_olson
> something is amiss

I'm not arguing that point. All I'm saying is, whatever is going on, I don't
think I'm going to get called back over for contingency operations. The joint
task force never disbanded, we're all theoretically still on call for this. As
far as TEPCO's relationship with the Japanese people, that is a situation for
them to resolve internally. My brother's wife is from Ibaraki prefecture
(between Tokyo and Fukushima). He plans to make a career of law in Japan. But
I seriously doubt we will see any new catastrophic developments or American
tax dollars spent on the problem.

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scarmig
I don't know how this makes me feel.

Should I be upset, because a company aims to purposely lie to the public?

Should I be happy, because any sufficiently large organization will inevitably
make stupid mistakes like this one?

Or should I be terrified, because it's likely that better-done versions of
shit like this is done by supposedly trustworthy corporations and governments
every day?

~~~
jayfuerstenberg
If everything were okay TEPCO would have a lot to brag about and its image
would only go up.

It's no wonder so many rank and file TEPCO employees are resigning of late.
[http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/tepco-
worke...](http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/tepco-workers-
quitting-due-to-threats-sense-of-despair)

I bet they know more than the general public does too.

------
jtokoph
Maybe they made that area blatantly obviously shopped in order to direct
attention from more important, well shopped areas of the photo.

~~~
ars
You're very good at conspiracy theories.

~~~
stretchwithme
Perhaps the photo is designed to distract from other better shopped photos at
better hidden accidents in better hidden countries.

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pmb
They can't even lie competently. Where are the organizations competent to run
a nuclear power station? Because nuclear power, done right and engineered
well, is the one of the safest and best sources of energy. Tepco is
criminally* incompetent, however, and this makes it hard to make a case for
nuclear power when their gross incompetence is stinking up the joint.

* Have any Tepco execs been charged? They should be...

~~~
podperson
"Because nuclear power, done right and engineered well, is the one of the
safest and best sources of energy."

Here's the thing: most human endeavors are going to be done wrong and
engineered poorly at some point. If I run a slipshod coal-fired plant I can
give cancer to a bunch of people and blow up a town, but I'm not going to
threaten the food production of an entire country and possibly an ocean.

Warren Buffett has famously said (I paraphrase) that he only invests in
companies that will do OK even if managed by complete idiots for ten years
because most companies will be managed by idiots for extended periods of time.

Basically, you want to move to Theory, because that's where nuclear power
plants are a great way to generate power.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Here's the thing: Even a completely perfectly managed coal plant does more
damage over it's operational lifetime than the nightmare scenario at
Fukushima.

Yes, the damage done by the coal plant is more diffuse. But it is not less
than the damage done by Fukushima to the ocean and to eastern japan. Coal
plants worldwide kill half a million people per year from direct effects, and
a lot more from indirect ones.

Also, the nightmare scenario at nuke plants is commonly overstated. Fukushima
did not, and cannot, threaten the entire food suppy of Japan. If all it's
radioactive isotopes were evenly laid out on all of its fields, the
concentrations would be small enough that eating the food would be bad for
you, but no worse than breathing the air full of SO4 and NOx found in places
where coal plants are run badly (like china).

~~~
konstruktor
With coal, the danger is roughly where the profit is. You use cheap coal
power? Please have your increased risk of respiratory disease that comes with
it. One can make policy based on those risks, and given a democracy, people
can choose.

With nuclear power, you have a low probability of a very catastrophic event
with consequences that aren't local. In a very simplified scenario, 50
countries can carelessly operate a nuclear power plant each, and only one of
them blows up. However, the wind carries the fallout to another country that
never used nuclear power. The people who get cancer, whose soil is irradiated,
never saw any benefit from nuclear power, and they never had a chance to stop
the plant being built, because it was outside their jurisdiction.

So please, could we finally stop comparing Black Swan-type events with non-
local consequences to managable, local risks?

~~~
JoshTriplett
Coal is not a "manageable, local risk"; coal causes problems with probability
~1.

Also, the average coal power plant produces more radioactive waste than a
nuclear power plant.

The real problem: people fail statistics. People can easily observe a nuclear
plant when it shows up on the news, and assign a disproportionately high risk
to it. The ongoing damage of coal plants doesn't make the news, because it
falls under "day-to-day operation" rather than "disaster".

~~~
wonnage
Nuclear plant failure statistics are meaningless as a measure of safety. You
are pointing to the nonoccurrence of a rare event as evidence of its rarity.

Even if coal plants cause more damage to the world, failures are local and
manageable. When your nuclear plant fails catastrophically, as they have at
Chernobyl and now Fukushima, you can't point to "but this is a six-sigma
event!" as an excuse. Given this risk, fission plants have been neither
economically nor environmentally preferable enough to displace other ways of
generating electricity.

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cabirum
Maybe they just removed some company's logo? Bad public image and stuff..

Instead of covering it with a black rectangle, they stamped it with a similar
color, some people went all conspiracy.

~~~
mcantelon
Pretty odd place to put a logo.

~~~
maxerickson
It looks like there is just a hole in the wall there:

<http://photo.tepco.co.jp/library/120120_2/120120_10.jpg>
<http://photo.tepco.co.jp/library/20120810_01/120810_01.jpg>

(The damage lines up pretty well across those photos)

Doesn't really explain why they masked it out though.

------
copperweaver
Looking at older images of reactor #4, there should be a hole in the wall were
the altered area of the photo is. In older images, there is what looks like a
truck entrance, that extended out from the reactor building, and this has
since been removed. Perhaps Tepco did not want people to see a gaping hole in
the side of building.... you can see the truck bay that is no longer there in
this photo.. <http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/pict12.jpg>

------
marze
That is about the most shoddy photoshop job by a $10B corporation ever.

Anyone have any ideas what was in that corner they might want to hide?

~~~
kgtm
I was able to find a video [1] of the building, with that area visible to some
extent. You can see it at various points, like at 3:43. I'm not sure of its
significance though.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX59-ZBO3mo>

~~~
achamayou
Looks like a door/access of some kind.

Edit: There was some kind of entrance tunnel connecting there :
[http://exposingthetruth.info/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/fuku...](http://exposingthetruth.info/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/fukushima_4.jpg)

Still not clear why they'd shop that.

Edit 2: this article has more details :
[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgen4.fr%2F2012%2F09%2Ftepco-
camouflage.html&act=url)

It's the entrance of the tunnel from which fuel is normally loaded.

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WiseWeasel
A more interesting question is why they did their photoshopping in MS Paint.

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columbo
Whoever edited this image had ZERO experience with image editing. I think
that's an interesting point to consider. It isn't that the person was bad, the
person was _untrained_.

A bad graphic designer, say someone who dabbled in photoshop over high school
and has no real artistic talent, would have done a better job.

I feel that is an important point because (getting rather tinfoil-hatlike) it
leads me to believe the person that took the picture, or a very small circle
of individuals, decided to alter the photo. This wasn't a big group-think
decision, this was a few people who felt they couldn't talk to anyone else
about this, not even pay someone $100 to do a semi-decent job out of fear of
the originals turning up in the wrong hands...

or maybe it was just a timestamp embedded on the picture and they didn't want
it shown. Who knows.

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lignuist
We should not accept, that a company that can kill us all just with a little
mistake, lies to us notoriously.

~~~
ars
Kill us all? Exaggerate much? Even if they tried they couldn't kill all that
many people.

And lots of companies can cause massive deaths. Dam operators for example.

~~~
achamayou
TEPCO owns and operates quite a few dams :
[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/challenge/energy/hydro/p-plants-e....](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/challenge/energy/hydro/p-plants-e.html)

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jsmcgd
Looking at the homepage of enenews.com, it looks like the website has a pretty
strong bias. I wouldn't put much stock in this photo, in fact I doubt Tepco
doctored this image themselves.

~~~
dbaupp
The original is hosted on Tepco's website[1] and Google-translating the
article[2] suggests that it is purported to be an actual photo.

[1]: <http://photo.tepco.co.jp/library/20120830_03/120830_28.jpg> [2]:
[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&u=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fphoto.tepco.co.jp%2Fdate%2F2012%2F201208-j%2F120830-03j.html)

~~~
jsmcgd
Fair enough. Still, it doesn't look like enenews is the place to go, to get
balanced, objective reporting.

~~~
mjcohenw
I would trust them more than Tepco.

------
yk
What could they possibly want to hide in a photo that already shows the
wreckage of a nuclear power plant?

~~~
maxerickson
The most likely thing, to me, is some piece of equipment that they agreed not
to publicize.

So one way of looking at it is that they chose to release the rest of the
photo.

~~~
niels_olson
> some piece of equipment that they agreed not to publicize

exactly

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4471850>

