Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

>>Radioactive contamination of [...] the oceans

Sigh... bad scare mongering.

How many percent has the background radiation in the Pacific ocean increased by Fukushima?

(Hint: radioactive water is very, very diluted after much less than one century. :-) )

At the same time, I see a near information blackout from other authorities. There just doesn't seem to be much good information on this one way or the other.

Radiation is very easy to detect. If there's a serious leak, people outside Japan could see it. Where is this data?

Whatever.

This is about human psychology, rather than reliability in the engineering sense. I truly believe it would lead to better safety, but not perfect safety.

The idea is that yes, all or most of the engineers involved in a nuclear accident of any significance would kill themselves. Not only would their knowledge be lost, their fellow nuclear engineers would carve their names on a black stone, bury it in the earth beneath their corrupted stain, and never mention them again. Their families would be rewarded only if they showed honor by staying to fight the nuclear corruption, and dying honorably when the disaster is contained.

This won't work perfectly, but it would let society as a whole live with the contradiction inherent in nuclear power: it sustains us, while running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation.

This is also pure thought experiment: what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster? I'm not willing to pay this price, and yet, I'm thoroughly familiar with the mass balance equations governing extractable energy and haven't a clue how to post-carbon without at least some nuclear.

1. Number of people who died, or will die, weighted by how they die -- painful slow death by internal organ cancers being pretty far up there on my chart.

2. Number of people who have traumatic long term health episodes, like cancer, that degrade their quality of life. Even if it isn't until much later.

3. Number of people who have to leave long-established hometown territory and give up their homes, to live in crappy housing (way better than an American FEMA trailer, but still sad) until they die.

4. Number of children who get thyroid cancer caused by radioactive contamination that would not have otherwise -- even though Japan has arguably the best health care system in the world, and virtually all of these kids will live. Still sucks to have cancer and surgery when you're 8.

5. Incidental casualties (including cleanup workers). The actual local Fukushima plant boss became something of a hero after telling Tokyo (as in Tokyo Electric Power Company) to fuck off and calling his own shots during the worst of it. He died of cancer[1] last year, and also had a brain hemorrhage last year, ostensibly none of which was related. But there were a lot of young workers that went in there and like, did manual labor. They might be alive, but a lot of them aren't all gonna be fine.

6. Degradation of the best food on earth. I read in a Seattle newspaper (I'm pretty sure) that effectively all tuna now commercially caught have higher levels of cesium than before Fukushima. First the mercury, now this? NO FUCK YUO!!

And here in Japan it's like spinach, potatoes, meat, fish... they can only test like 0.1% of it (which is bullshit but that is another post).

7. And, since I am me, my personal standard of how fucked it was accrues bonus points for: each of the 17 times I was forced to choose between not bathing or bathing in cesium water (we did Perrier sponge baths at first but then bottled water became too scarce to use other than for drinking), the 1 time my local supermarket (high-end rich-people supermarket btw) had to hand me a letter apologizing for selling me beef with illegally high cesium levels, and the 50 hours I spent roaming Tokyo in search of clean bottled water in the aftermath.

I just can't see any reality where Fukushima isn't worse than New Horizon, on balance. Not that New Horizon wasn't bad. It just wasn't one of the worst disasters since I have been alive, where Fukushima was.

[1]: ht NO tp NO NO SORRY ://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/09/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-masao-yoshida-dead-cancer_n_3568293.html

[2]: Man I really thought I was linking to NY Times, which I will now: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/asia/masao-yoshida-n...

At least that accidental huffington link explains why my computer had been audibly churning out all sorts of sad (but unrelated) human interest stories while I typed that post....