Fukushima: It's much worse than you think • Hacker News Board

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#101

Post by john231 » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 5:18 AM UTC

curtis wrote: post #2

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, a…

yeah according to who.

And what level is small. Can you be more specific exactly to what a small level of radiation is.

And thirdly who the hell do you think you are pontificating your so called confident guesses on topics in which you have absolutely no knowledge of. Seriously, what is your IQ because someone who would write vague generalisations as acute concise facts are clearly delusional in many realms of the human psyche. You are clearly one of them.

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#102

Post by thisrod » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 5:43 AM UTC

srl wrote: post #24

nandemo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's too easy, with all this talk about nuclear meltdown and the world's worst industrial disaster (really?), to loose the following nugget of context: Japan just got hit by the fifth largest earthquake since 1900. They have bigger problems - at least in the short term - than radiation. One of the most frequent complaints that comes up is the lack of safety mechanisms built into the reactor. Sure, they could…

The reactor did surivive the earthquake. It failed because of an Engineering 101 level mistake:

"But sir - the question only said to shut down the power plant. It didn't mention doing without electricity!"

I'm surprised by both those things.

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#103

Post by danssig » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:12 AM UTC

hugh3 wrote: post #84

lutorm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the idea that Fukushima would be responsible for a 35% increase in infant mortality anywhere in the U.S. strains ones credulity, her being anti-nuclear is not proof of her being wrong. It's not like MIT nuclear scientists are "disinterested parties", either. Pretty much everyone who's knowledgeable about nuclear power has a stake either way. There are two competing effects at work here, and it's hard to say whi…

While the idea that Fukushima would be responsible for a 35% increase in infant mortality anywhere in the U.S. strains ones credulity, her being anti-nuclear is not proof of her being wrong Ehh, no, but... While ad hominem makes for lousy arguments, when we're dealing with a claim that's already completely freaking implausible , knowing that it comes from an unreliable source is generally enough for me personally to…

What you say is true for practicality. But ad hominem is still invalid. You are ignoring the other persons argument (as a means of saving time), not countering it.

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#104

Post by nasmorn » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 10:47 AM UTC

dhyasama wrote: post #49

PaulHoule wrote: post #27

There's a lot of nonsense in that article. First of all, they keep repeating the words Plutonium and Uranium (particularly "enriched Uranium") and try to suggest that these are the major threats from the accident. 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, an…

That last bit reminds me of a Malcolm Gladwell story. I think it was Korea Air that had a terrible safety record and a consultant was brought in to figure it out. Turns out Korean culture strongly discourages questioning your superiors, even in the face of obvious error. Pilots were making mistakes and co-pilots wouldn't correct them.

I once read a story about a Korean aircraft hitting a mountain where the blackbox recorded the last minutes. They copilot and engineer (used to have those too) would only speak up a few seconds before impact. Before that they would only make vague mentions of being off course. It seemed and still seems unbelievable that someone chooses death over telling a superior that he is wrong.

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#105

Post by marshray » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 3:07 PM UTC

yena wrote: post #90

marshray wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT the plants reacted to and withstood the earthquakes fairly well. The tsunami on the other hand...well I guess nuke plants and 14 meter high walls of water don't mix.

Actually we don't know that, since most of the reactor building in inaccessible. Also, the latest info from Tepco says that they lost coolant before the tsunami struck, which suggest major earthquake damage. However, if the tsunami hadn't been this severe and they had kept power, perhaps they could have brought the situation under control.

Wow, nice of them to admit that now. Seems pretty important. Do you have a link perchance?

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#106

Post by dugorama » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 4:51 PM UTC

nandemo wrote: post #72

glhaynes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not at all proven that "Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US", is it? It seems sort of unlikely that no one would have noticed a tremendous spike in the amount of environmental radiation (such as would presumably be necessary to cause such an increase in infant mortality) in these northwestern US cities. Either way, though, that seems surprising to me that there'd be a 35% increase in i…

> But it's not at all proven that "Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US", is it? I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear, but that's my point, it's so implausible. US is very far from Japan, so if there was a 35% spike there then the researchers' first reaction should have been to check the corresponding stats for Japan. If they didn't it smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

by the way, it's not a 35% spike in infant mortality, which would be immediately noticed by every pediatrician in the world. it is reportedly a 35% spike in still births - defined as a non-live birth (not even a single breath taken) after gestational age of 20 weeks. Since these only occur 3 in 1,000 birth events in the US to begin with, an individual OB/GYN would never notice a 35% spike (which would increase the rate to 4/1000). This is the kind of thing only dedicated epidemiologist who are studying it intensely could ever notice in real time. The CDC won't even catch up with such a hard-to-measure spike until their next reporting cycle - several years from now.

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#107

Post by dugorama » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 4:54 PM UTC

srl wrote: post #46

danielharan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what definition of unreasonable? Would you build a plant that could only handle a 100 year earthquake, but not a 1000 year one? You'd give your children and grandchildren a 1/10 chance of catastrophe... in exchange for what, supposedly cheaper power?

They have a 1/10 chance of catastrophe whether or not I build the plant. A 1000 year earthquake is going to cause much bigger problems then a nuclear meltdown. Would you construct a house that could withstand the sun going nova? Again, not that the engineers didn't screw up. But the fact that a nuclear power plant got destroyed by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake should come as a surprise to nobody, and should not reflect…

sure it does (reflect poorly on nukes in general). It means we now understand there is no possibility that they can be safely built. Unless you're okay with gradually radiating the entire planet or at least rendering little pieces of it permanently uninhabitable with each natural disaster. Chernobyl = 5% of Europe's farmland lost forever. Fukushima = 50% of the world's tuna spawning grounds permanently irradiated. I like to eat, how about you? How many more of these will you tolerate so your HD TV can have "instant on" capabiilty?

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#108

Post by gnosis » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 6:28 PM UTC

codeup wrote: post #11

nobody_nowhere wrote: post #3

The quick onslaught of the "it couldn't possibly be a meltdown" message in the mainstream media and the "MIT professor says" emails/webpages, etc all smacked of a propaganda campaign to me. All the while the fuel rods were sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the reactor... and probably leaking through into the ground. Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the cat…

The first reactions to Fukushima on HN and the downvotes of your inconvenient comment show the massive pro-nuclear bias of many users here.

It's not just a pro-nuclear bias. It's techno-utopianism and scientism.

The ideology is that science and technology can cure humanity of all its problems, if only they were not so small-minded and ignorant to reject it.

There's also a strong identification between science and technology and their proponents' core identities, so that fundamental questioning of some of their benefits is seen as personally threatening.

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#109

Post by irons » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 2:55 AM UTC

marshray wrote: post #29

irons wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who capitalizes "engineer"? Aside from realtors, maybe.

Those who pay thousands of dollars a year for their professional license.

How do you distinguish the professionally licensed from the merely pompous? I'm surprised the professionally licensed would wish to run the risk.

Re: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

#110

Post by sesqu » Sat, Jun 18, 2011, 2:34 PM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #55

walexander wrote: post #38

"'Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,' Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera" OK, after reading the first sentence, I was already suspicious of this article. Quick tab back to HN comments seems to confirm it. Thanks for saving my time, HN.

I have to wonder why he ranked it above Bhopal, Deepwater Horizon, or even Chernobyl. Chernobyl had burning graphite and a fully exposed core. There were also lots of people dying of radiation sickness. Thankfully, none of the plant workers appear to have died from that, though they have more reason to fear overexposure than anyone.

Interestingly, a documentary I saw on the on-site group studying Chernobyl mentioned that most of the group died prematurely, but not of radiation sickness or cancer. They died of heart failures and stress-induced health problems.

A long time afterwards, some of the survivors saw non-terminal cell damage related problems.