
Fukushima disaster: Robot finds possible melted nuclear fuel - louthy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-40696303
======
roenxi
It is great to see this issue (which is a pet one of mine) given fair context.
I'm really glad to see someone juxtaposing:

\- "...the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl..."

\- "More than 18,500 people were killed ... when an earthquake triggered the
massive tsunami ..."

\- "No-one died directly in the Fukushima disaster."

Not that it isn't a disaster; just that the disaster, in context, wasn't the
biggest deal that day.

~~~
mistersquid
18,500 dead for a single weather event is a disaster by any measure.

Additionally the 2011 Fukushima reactor failure is the worst nuclear accident
since Chernobyl which means it is the second (or third) worst nuclear accident
in history. [0]

What do you mean by "the disaster, in context, wasn't the biggest deal that
day"?

I'm not trolling. I honestly cannot understand what you are trying to
communicate.

Are you diminishing the magnitude of the disaster? If so, you haven't yet
presented anything to warrant the designification of the tsunami and
subsequent Fukushima reactor failure.

[0] [http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-
accidents/...](http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-
accidents/history-nuclear-accidents#.WXSqD8aZMUE)

EDIT: Add link and parenthetical "(or third)".

~~~
roenxi
No worries. I see two separate disasters here, both linked. The first an
absolutely devastating weather event that killed more people than live in my
home town in it's entirety + caused massive damage, and secondly the Fukushima
nuclear disaster (which seems to be treated separately in many cases, which
the article is about and which my comment was directed at).

In my experience, many people & journalists hold Fukushima up as a really bad
disaster. I'm trying to communicate that I don't think that Fukushima was a
disaster that warranted international coverage - the weather was.

At an international scale, I don't think Fukushima is much worse than a near
miss. I would be really interested to get an expert academic order of
magnitude on how many people died in the evacuation due to the Fukushima
disaster vs. the theoretical number of deaths if they had evacuated more
slowly (say over 12 months). It frustrates me that the cost-benefits of the
evacuation aren't a more prominent point of discussion.

EDIT: Just for fun; I can't pretend I know anything about radiation or what
the Japanese are up to; but on wiki I see things like "absolute increase in
the risk of cancer(of all types) during their lifetime, of approximately 1%
due to the accident" [1], " Life expectancy of the evacuees dropped from 65 to
58 years ... because of depression, alcoholism, and suicide" [2]. I'd like to
know who I can turn to for an honest rundown of the risks, because the
radiation doesn't seem that terrible.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties#WHO_Report)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_reaction_to_Fukushima...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_reaction_to_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Long-
term_effects)

~~~
new299
From wikipedia:

"but 34 people died as a result of the evacuation" [1].

I'm not sure I can agree that Fukushima isn't an internationally noteworthy
incident. It's even one that really requires long term monitoring of radiation
levels (locally only of course).

Many mistakes were made in the handling of the Fukushima reactor and accident.
Radiation accidents have the potential of be massive disasters. It's important
to learn from Fukushima, and not just treat it as an "acceptable cost".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties)

~~~
tptacek
I don't think they said it wasn't noteworthy.

~~~
acjohnson55
Didn't they thought?

 _I 'm trying to communicate that I don't think that Fukushima was a disaster
that warranted international coverage - the weather was._

I guess you could draw a distinction between the terminology each post used,
but it reads the same to me.

------
ameesdotme
I'm interested in how this robot "survived" the radiation levels that many
previous robots did not [1]. I know little to nothing about radiation
hardening, but this seems like an almost impossible task, considering it being
exposed to more than 530 sieverts per hour [2], which is the highest radiation
level ever recorded.

[1] [http://gizmodo.com/excessive-radiation-inside-fukushima-
frie...](http://gizmodo.com/excessive-radiation-inside-fukushima-fries-clean-
up-rob-1792217866)

[2] [https://www.sciencealert.com/radiation-levels-in-the-
fukushi...](https://www.sciencealert.com/radiation-levels-in-the-fukushima-
reactor-have-started-unexpectedly-climbing)

~~~
wereHamster
Water absorbs radiation really well. [https://what-
if.xkcd.com/29/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)

------
CydeWeys
It's amazing to me that we're six years in now and essentially no progress has
been made on cleanup beyond simple containment and mitigation. I suppose
Chernobyl isn't particularly any different in that regard either.

~~~
mistersquid
In March, the NYT published an article discussing the accumulation of
contaminated water from the failed Fukushima reactor. [0]

At the time of writing, 400 tons per day of contaminated water were being
collected and officials were concerned that storage for the water might run
out.

Alarmingly, one possible contingency was to dilute the collected contaminated
water and dump it in the ocean.

Excerpted from the article:

    
    
      > But the decontamination filters cannot remove all the
      > radioactive material. So for now, all this water is being
      > stored in 1,000 gray, blue and white tanks on the grounds.
      > The tanks already hold 962,000 tons of contaminated water,
      > and Tokyo Electric is installing more tanks. It is also
      > trying to slow the flow of groundwater through the reactors
      > by building an underground ice wall.
      > 
      > Within a few years, though, and no one is sure exactly when,
      > the plant may run out of room to store the contaminated
      > water. “We cannot continue to build tanks forever,” said
      > Shigenori Hata, an official at the Ministry of Economy,
      > Trade and Industry.
      > 
      > The authorities are debating whether it might be acceptable,
      > given the relatively low radioactive levels in the water, to
      > dilute the contaminated water and then dump it into the
      > ocean. But local fishermen are vehemently opposed. Many
      > people still do not trust Tokyo Electric because of its
      > bungled response to the disaster, the worst nuclear accident
      > since Chernobyl.
    

[0]
[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-
with-japans-nuclear-waste-six-years-after-disaster.html)

~~~
tptacek
My understanding, which is limited, is that it's not as alarming as it sounds.
The water is "contaminated" with tritium (really, the water is composed in
part of tritium), which has low bioavailability. Much more importantly,
however big a number "962,000 tons" sounds like, the ocean is vast, on a whole
different scale from anything amount of water humans can manipulate directly.

If the liquid was radioactive sludge that would could settle at the seafloor
or clump up and ride the top of the waves like an oil slick, dumping it would
be untenable. But tritiated water is literally just water; it will quickly
dilute back down to the ambient radioactivity of the ocean.

I'm not saying I approve of them dumping HTO into the ocean; I'm just saying
it may not be as terrible as it sounds.

~~~
CydeWeys
The half-life of tritium is also only 12.3 years. So you're not creating a
permanent problem by dumping it, and the longer you leave it sitting around in
tanks, the less the problem is when you do dump it somewhere.

~~~
djsumdog
Tritium is rare enough that it seems like they'd be better off trying to
harvest it than dump it. You can't extract tritium form water like you can
deuterium since tritium is rare in nature. Typically you need a breeder
reactor (like Watts Bar Nuclear) where you bombard lithium in order to
generate tritium.

~~~
CydeWeys
I don't think there's some huge unmet industrial demand for tritium, though,
and even if there were, it'd probably be more cost-effective to simply breed
it out using an existing reactor in controlled circumstances than to try to
distill it from millions of tonnes of radioactive wastewater.

And unlike helium, it's not worth stockpiling tritium now if you don't have
immediate uses for it, as it decays in storage.

------
andy_ppp
Have there been independent assessments of sea food safety in Japan? Not that
I don't absolutely trust the government on this...

EDIT: Linked at the bottom of the article - [http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-
asia-39140871/checking-radi...](http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-
asia-39140871/checking-radiation-levels-in-the-fukushima-area)

Also from that video: [https://blog.safecast.org](https://blog.safecast.org)

~~~
acidburnNSA
This was studied far from Japan but fish off the Oregon coast have certainly
remained safe to eat.

[https://whatisnuclear.com/resources/fish_from_fukushima.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/resources/fish_from_fukushima.html)

