21–30 of 112 posts
GE was never named directly, but wikipedia says it was their design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power...
I love AJE, but I'm regularly surprised over the amount of balls AJE reporters have in making value judgements on the fly. For instance: Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US? Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his polit…
I think the story is deeper than one company who gave $269,000 however.
"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant." Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist: http://janettesherman.com/ Joseph Mangano is the di…
If Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US , you gotta wonder what was the effect in Japan. Did they bother to check?
Either way, though, that seems surprising to me that there'd be a 35% increase in infant mortality.
"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant." Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist: http://janettesherman.com/ Joseph Mangano is the di…
If Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US , you gotta wonder what was the effect in Japan. Did they bother to check?
One of the most frequent complaints that comes up is the lack of safety mechanisms built into the reactor. Sure, they could have done a better job (the fact that electricity is needed for a cool-down is particularly disturbing) - but really, /all/ industrial mechanisms are going to start to experience a significant problems when hit by a historically significant earthquake. Sure, the engineers should have expected earthquakes (and they did - this is Japan, after all), but it's unreasonable to expect them to be prepared for a 9.0, just as it's unreasonable to expect them to be prepared for a direct meteor strike.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was shocked at the immediate "this is not a problem" reaction by many people -- particularly here at Hacker News.
Just think of it as a natural counterweight to all the people who equate meltdown with a nuclear explosion.
"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant." "The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise…
And, frankly, even then it seems very early to draw a conclusive connection to Fukushima. Correlation != causation.
They're not.
Uranium isotopes have a half-life of billions of years, so whatever radioactivity they emit is spread out over a very long time. Overall, uranium is toxic in the same way that lead is toxic, and the chemical toxicity is probably worse than the radiotoxicity. Even in a completely melted reactor core, uranium dioxide is relativly stable and won't be quickly transported into the environment.
The isotopes of concern are primarily of Iodine and Cesium. Radioiodine from the accident has almost completely decayed, although Cesium isotopes may still be hazardous in heavily contaminated areas for years.
Currently there seem to be "hotspots" at considerable distances from the plant where doses on the ground are in a range that's at the edge of what nuclear power workers are permitted to get (but rarely do.) There's no proof that radiation at that level is harmful, but no proof that it's completely safe to have that exposure for your lifetime either.
Now, it's also BS to say that the threat from spent nuclear fuel that's been sitting around for 10 years is as high as the threat from an active core or one that's been sitting around for three months -- it just isn't; radioactivity decays and heat generation goes down, so it's really unfair to count the number of "cores" worth of danger here.
That said, I wouldn't blame people for mistrusting Japanese government, industry and even society. Japan has been the world's leader in nuclear accidents for the past 20 years, and it's often said that they're not completely honest about industrial accidents in general (such as in the auto industry.)
Nuclear safety requires a person who's disciplined and (for the most part) follows orders but who also has a strong individual sense of right and wrong and won't follow a bad order. America's nuclear navy works hard to cultivate this ethos, but I'm not sure if it's easy to cultivate this in Japan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was shocked at the immediate "this is not a problem" reaction by many people -- particularly here at Hacker News.
Just think of it as a natural counterweight to all the people who equate meltdown with a nuclear explosion.
This was done in the 50s and 60s in the USA - the large number of above-ground nuclear tests put material in the air, which was detectable in teeth from children living at that time.
(link may be biased against nuclear but contains overview of the study): http://www.radiation.org/projects/tooth_fairy.html