Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

It's a flaw in the system. A system built around a reactor with known risks if electrical supplies are interrupted.

This is a region of a country where tectonic activity is significant enough that seaside villages are cutoff from the sea by 15 foot reinforced walls.

A reactor with the failure characteristics of the Fukushima reactors sound like the wrong tool for the job to me.

Being anti-nuclear is not being anti scientific progress. And a scientific approach to this issue would have been to wait and judge the data, rather than claim that a melt down was impossible at the outset.

> And yet now we know that the total radiation release was probably as much or more than Chernobyl.

We do? Evidence, please.

For what I think is the conventional view, see e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13050228 which indicates more than 10x more radiation release from Chernobyl. That was a couple of months ago; has the situation changed drastically since then?

(On 2011-04-12, when the incident was reclassified at IAEA level 7, a TEPCO spokesman made some comment about the Fukushima disaster having released more radiation than the Chernobyl one. I'm pretty sure that was simply not true.)

I think the "MIT" response was basically correct and remains so despite scaremongering like that linked to here. The Fukushima plant was hit by an enormous natural disaster; yes, the results were very bad, but they were very much smaller in both human and economic terms than those of the earthquake+tsunami itself and so far the known death toll (due to radiation as opposed to, e.g., things falling on people's heads) from the damage to the nuclear reactors is ... zero.

That doesn't mean the damage isn't a problem, it doesn't even mean it's not a disaster. It does, however, mean this: A large, aging nuclear facility was struck by a huge natural disaster, much worse than it was ever designed for (which was, yes, a Bad Thing) -- and the result, so far at least, has not involved death or disease on a large scale.

If that's as bad as the downside of nuclear power gets, it's looking pretty good.

(What's the downside of the alternative? Well, imagine that the Fukushima reactors hadn't been built and that the energy they provided had come from coal-fired power stations instead. Generating energy from coal costs about 15 deaths per TWh in the US, according to http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...; Japan is probably similar. The Fukushima plant produced a bit less than 880 TWh of energy over its lifetime. That's about 13,000 deaths. Even with the disaster, there's no way that the Fukushima plant has caused anything near to that many.)

It's absolutely an ad hominem and a logical fallacy. The study itself is given. We can evaluate it without any knowledge whatsoever of the authors. The only time such a claim is not an ad hominem is when the target of the ad hominem is arguing from authority rather than from facts.

Not ad hominem: "I'm a godlike scientist and I'm certain X is true. Trust me." -> "No, he's a poopie head. Don't trust him."

In this case, the only reason we believe the speaker is because we believe him to be a godlike scientist. If he is not, we have little reason to believe him.

Ad hominem: "Here is a study. The methodology and data are available. It claims X." -> "Don't trust him, he's a poopie head."

In this case, the poopie-headed nature of the speaker is irrelevant. His methodology is either valid or invalid. The ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy in this case.

i wouldn't doubt it. If i had my options, i would move to South America to avoid the fall out. Hmm, why did bush buy thousands of acres of land in Paraguay 10 years ago? that is interesting isn't it.

I don't trust anybody or anyone, here or anywhere. I don't trust anyone of you here. That means ignorant fools, pompous preachers, or corrupted demoralized counter intelligence scabs.

I'll follow my own intuition, under my own volition. And I think it is time that others do the same.