Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638.html

by lewispb • 15 years ago

138 101 15 years ago

english.aljazeera.net

curtis• 15 years ago

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 the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.

I don't know why anyone should take this article seriously. Here's the thing about radiation: We can measure it directly. And scientists have certainly been able to measure radioactivity here in the U.S. that must be a consequence of Fukushima. But here's the thing: those radioactive effects -- here in the U.S. -- are very, very small.

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

Indeed. Berkeley's nuclear engineering department has been running one of the better monitoring programs:

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling

nobody_nowhere• 15 years ago

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 catastrophe than a conspiracy to suppress information, but the forcefulness of the response was striking.

I heard a great (and probably apocryphal) anecdote on the radio a few weeks after -- "After three mile island, the Russians came to the US, performed a detailed analysis, and concluded 'we can't have a three mile island'. Instead, they had a Chernobyl. The Japanese went to Russia, did an analysis, and said 'we can't possibly have a Chernobyl', and instead had their own meltdown. Now we're hearing how modern reactors couldn't possibly have a meltdown like any of three so far."

Duff4• 15 years ago

I was shocked at the immediate "this is not a problem" reaction by many people -- particularly here at Hacker News.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

Just think of it as a natural counterweight to all the people who equate meltdown with a nuclear explosion.

jdp234• 15 years ago

I was too. Sure, there was plenty of uninformed media coverage jumping to conclusions. As I said at the time, though, the "this is not a problem" camp was equally premature -- and came across as cavalier to the tens of thousands of people in Japan who had to evacuate.

ahoyhere2• 15 years ago

Denial is a totally natural and incredibly powerful human reaction to uncontrollable tragedy. People who are "more logical than others" are actually no less prone to this than anyone else, they just use a different mechanism to fuel their denial.

codeup• 15 years ago

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

dolvlo• 15 years ago

It's not so much pro-nuclear as it is pro-"scientific progress".

gnosis• 15 years ago

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.

nevinera2• 15 years ago

>Now we're hearing how modern reactors couldn't possibly have a meltdown like any of three so far.

No responsible nuclear engineer would make a claim like that.

tensor2• 15 years ago

Except it's not a total meltdown. The last reports I've seen suggest it may be a partial meltdown that is still fairly well contained.

And people did not say it could not melt down. They claimed that even if it did, it would not be a Cherynobl like event. The claim was that the reactor design includes some form of containment in the event of a meltdown. Unless I'm missing some new news, all these claims have held.

Your comment bothers me for another reason. The above comments are based on the claims of the engineers who built the reactors. I don't think any of the commenters here have actually designed the nuclear reactors in question.

In other words, you are criticizing people for accepting the experts analysis as being unreasonable. Meanwhile, on what do you base your obvious opinion to the contrary? What analysis have you done? Why should anyone value your input?

bluedanieru• 15 years ago

Correct on all counts.

Ixiaus• 15 years ago

Fukushima is a disaster, yes, but this article (particularly the little subsection blaming the USA) is full of appeals to emotion.

dreamux• 15 years ago

"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes,"

As an Engineer I call bullshit on this.

Duff4• 15 years ago

Around the time of the disaster there were stories about a GE engineer who resigned in protest in 1970 over this particular model of reactor.

If I recall correctly, the engineering team's concerns about fail-safes in the event of a loss of electrical power were overruled or dismissed.

tsotha• 15 years ago

The potential problems resulting from loss of electrical power were and are well understood. What happened in Fukushima wasn't a flaw in the reactor design - it was a flaw in the design of the power station.

irons2• 15 years ago

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

marshray7• 15 years ago

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

RandallBrown• 15 years ago

Yeah, this is when I stopped taking the article seriously. The reactors handled the earthquake just fine. It was the tsunami wiping out all the backups that screwed it up.

natural219• 15 years ago

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 political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

code_duck2• 15 years ago

On the flip side, I'm regularly impressed by how the US media almost never questions, mentions or takes note any of the money and power connections which influence US politics so heavily.

I think the story is deeper than one company who gave $269,000 however.

tkahn6• 15 years ago

The solution is to find higher quality news outlets. NPR and PBS come to mind.

tomkarlo• 15 years ago

That paragraph would never get past most decent editors. It's one thing to cite those influences if you have actual evidence that Barack Obama is somehow suppressing those alarms. In the absence of that, this portion is total tin-hat crap.

They might as well write: "Did you know that every day drunk drivers kill hundreds of Americans? Did you know that the president drinks?"

webXL• 15 years ago

Love is a little strong don't you think?

I'm tired of people looking at one dataset in order to attribute sinister motives to a group of people. I bet I can find $269K worth of campaign donations to Obama's campaigns from groups opposed to Exelon's interests. Would Exelon donate money to Obama independent of that fact? I don't know, you don't know, and AJE doesn't know. So why make that judgement other than to sensationalize the story? And they're not the only ones!

BTW, GE's Immelt is on another important commission. So, these appointments are for sale, in effect. Apparently, that's how you win elections these days.

Spyro72• 15 years ago

"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 director of the "Radiation and Public Health Project":

http://www.radiation.org/

They are not exactly disinterested parties, and it is fair to say that their article would never be published in a peer reviewed journal:

http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

Side Note: This is not the most scientific graph in the world, but (in the event of another panicked radiation article) it is always worth linking to the xkcd graph on radiation:

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

nandemo3• 15 years ago

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?

glhaynes• 15 years ago

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 infant mortality.

srl2• 15 years ago

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 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.

jdp234• 15 years ago

Isn't this the kind of argument that Paul Graham charcterizes as "ad hominem" and usually gets voted down on Hacker News?

Don't get me wrong, personally I think it's very valid to bring up and important to keep in mind while reading their article. But it seems like a double standard to me.

dexen• 15 years ago

Zed Shaw (yes, that Zed) has a good text on `ad hominem' and similar in this blog post: http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1293530004.html

and the relevant HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2045120

jeffreymcmanus• 15 years ago

Paying attention to the credibility of a source is not even in the same universe as an ad hominem attack.

walexander2• 15 years ago

Sometimes people tend to throw around logical fallacies a bit too much.

In the legal system it's perfectly acceptable to bring up such an ad hominem argument: motive.

No one should be convicted on motive alone, however it does frame the interpretation of facts in a certain way.

In this particular case we have a seemingly sensationalist article, along with some suspect data collection, and then a large jump from correlation -> causation about nuclear fallout. Once it is seen that the authors have a vested interest in damning nuclear power, it's much easier to draw conclusions about what's going on or to increase scrutiny considering the impartial nature of the researchers.

ahoyhere2• 15 years ago

Motive is incredibly important. Saying someone has a reason to be biased is not ad hominem. Saying they're a fucking hippie is.

lutorm2• 15 years ago

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 which is strongest: If you are biased one way or another, you probably will put more effort into finding facts that support your view. That doesn't mean that those facts are wrong or that you are being disingenuous, just that you have acquired a self-reinforced, biased view of the world. And then you may of course also be selectively reporting those facts known to you, which is more dishonest.

But saying this argument is like pointing out "motive" in a trial seems like a stretch. Motive would usually include financial or other similar types of gain. If saying things you believe are right makes you liable to a charge of having motive to lying just because you have an opinion, then you can't trust anyone except completely ignorant people, which is not a step forward.

Spyro72• 15 years ago

"While the idea that Fukushima would be responsible for a 35% increase in infant mortality anywhere in the U.S. strains ones credulity"

Credulity doesn't factor into it. I found their "article" to be insulting in its lack of statistical rigor. If you have not read it, then you should read it.

They compare two averages - each taken over a completely different length of time. They do not even make the smallest attempt to control for any external factors. Finally, they look at some dates and assume direct causation.

This doesn't even make it to my credulity. It stops short of it, landing somewhere between disgust and amusement.

"her being anti-nuclear is not proof of her being wrong"

No, but her shabby statistical methodology does nothing to help her cause.

Perhaps I should have put the link to their article first before I introduced their backgrounds.

"It's not like MIT nuclear scientists are \"disinterested parties\", either."

No, but they are in an entirely different realm when it comes to the rigorousness of their methodology.

It is all well and good to have an opinion one way or another, but I do not think that we should pretend that there is any equivalence between the MIT nuclear scientists and Dr Sherman.

If you want to see intelligent debate on the merits of nuclear power, may I make the following recommendation:

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/681

(Note: It is not entirely obvious, but you can navigate between the phases of the debate by click the dates on the "latest updates bar".)

"There are two competing effects at work here, and it's hard to say which is strongest: If you are biased one way or another, you probably will put more effort into finding facts that support your view. That doesn't mean that those facts are wrong"

Are we talking about facts or opinions? Facts, by definition, are true. With that definition in mind, facts can not be "wrong".

I should hope that if someone is making an argument they go through whatever efforts needed to find and report the facts that support their case.

"just that you have acquired a self-reinforced, biased view of the world."

If you see two sides in a debate and both sides have strong, compelling arguments then it is the responsibility of you, the individual, to make your own choice.

However, just because someone favors a certain perspective on an issue does not mean that their viewpoint should be discarded because they are "biased".

Bias is not as simple of a concept as you make it out to be. Any issue worthy of intelligent debate and discussion is likely to be extremely nuanced.

There will be an interaction between the nuances of a complex issue and the personal values that people place on certain things.

In other words, it is possible for more than one group of people to be "right" on a certain issue. However, I think that the key point to remember here is that building an argument based on facts is a prerequisite to correctness.

"But saying this argument is like pointing out \"motive\" in a trial seems like a stretch. Motive would usually include financial or other similar types of gain. If saying things you believe are right makes you liable to a charge of having motive to lying just because you have an opinion, then you can't trust anyone except completely ignorant people, which is not a step forward."

Actually, I completely agree with you here. I read the comment describing my initial argument as "motive", but you would figure that in order to have a motive someone had to have committed a crime.

Maybe this is a good explanation. I suppose that from my perspective their "article" was a "crime against statistics", and having elected myself judge, jury, and executioner all that I needed to do is come up with their motivation.

I probably should have made my perspective a little more clear in my original post, but I was trying to be succinct. Unfortunately, in my quest for succinctness, I created a post that may be construed as suboptimal.

hugh3• 15 years ago

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 decide it's not worth my time.

If a respected professor of physics claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine then I'll probably take some time to actually investigate it and figure out exactly why it's wrong. If it's some random dude off the street I'll dismiss it without consideration because... well, who has time?

klenwell• 15 years ago

"The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster."

I tried to source this on Google. I can't find the article by Sherman and Mangano, but found this discussion:

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550

It appears the authors cited by AJE were using CDC data. Someone posts the infant death numbers at the Berkeley link. The numbers are very small with a lot of deviation. And it's not clear that they're even being measured against total number of births.

I've heard a lot of praise for AJE's reporting and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that TEPCO and the Japanese government were continuing to understate the risk, but this article seems shoddy and sensationalistic.

jrwoodruff• 15 years ago

I was very surprised to see statistics like that so soon after it happened. Typically reliable statistics for data like infant mortality are not available until awhile (read: a year) after the event.

And, frankly, even then it seems very early to draw a conclusive connection to Fukushima. Correlation != causation.

thegohmer• 15 years ago

Here's the link to the article that was published on Progressive Radio Network. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/health-headlines/2011...

atabor• 15 years ago

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=are-babie...

This person thinks they provide a distorted picture. Probably a good pass using all west coast cities and a more complete time span would be the best indicator.

Shenglong• 15 years ago

One disaster, and people forget the half century of prosperity that nuclear power brought. Worse, the general public is going to see Fusion (fingers crossed) in the same way as fission just because it's also "nuclear power". I'm disheartened.

mattdeboard• 15 years ago

Uh, yeah, I mean, these are human being we're talking about. We can't even get people to accept evolutionary theory. I won't hold my breath waiting for people to be even-handed and partake in critical thought about the vagaries of nuclear power.

berntb2• 15 years ago

In addition to the other criticism.

From the article: TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

Is there a reference supporting this? I've only seen values for Fukushima radiation as a fraction of Chernobyl (and if I remember correctly, not as bad isotopes)?

A while ago, I got multiple comments modded to -10, for questioning the trustworthiness of Al Jazeera. The web site is not connected to the tv channel?

(For the record: I don't really know about al J. I distrust most media, except NY Times/Washington Post/BBC as long as they don't write about advertisers.)

3am• 15 years ago

With zero effort, I found this for you:

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110413005584.htm<b...;

"Junichi Matsumoto, acting head of Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Nuclear Power & Plant Siting Division, acknowledged the seriousness of the Fukushima accident at a press conference Tuesday. 'Although the details of the [Chernobyl and Fukushima] accidents are different, from the standpoint of how much radiation has been released, [Fukushima] is equal to or more serious than Chernobyl.'"

That was just a citation in the Wikipedia page for the incident.

smackfu• 15 years ago

I still have doubts about that claim. Didn't Chernobyl release clouds of radioactive fallout over Europe?

berntb2• 15 years ago

You might want to read what you google. :-)

That was from Apr. 14, when they didn't really have that much of a clue -- and different sources in that article said different things.

Edit: But sure, I asked for "a reference". Maybe I should have asked for "a reference that is more than a claim by some company man (not a researcher in a paper etc), with an unknown agenda"... :-)

nitrogen• 15 years ago

Could they be referring to the INES disaster scale, on which Fukushima rates equal to Chernobyl?

Also, the direct release of radiation from the reactor is significantly less serious than the release of certain radioisotopes. If they're only comparing absolute radiation levels, and (hypothetically) most of Chernobyl's was in radioactive cesium, while most of Fukushima's was in alpha/beta/gamma particles or short-lived radioactive oxygen/nitrogen/etc., then the comparison is not very useful.

nl• 15 years ago

I'm not a big fan of the automatic approval many on HN give to nuclear power, and I agree that we haven't heard the last of Fukushima.

But this article is bullshit. There is no conceivable mechanism for it to have occurred, and no pattern in other cases of nuclear exposure.

sudonim• 15 years ago

From the article, it seems as though experts are saying the design of the reactors by GE didn't take into account that Japan has earthquakes.

GE was never named directly, but wikipedia says it was their design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power...

marshray7• 15 years ago

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.

nathanb• 15 years ago

I believe the main problem wasn't the damage to the plants so much as the loss of power and unreliability of backup power, a known and critical flaw in an earthquake-prone area.

yena• 15 years ago

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.

PaulHoule2• 15 years ago

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, 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.

dhyasama• 15 years ago

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.

nasmorn• 15 years ago

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.

marshray7• 15 years ago

Overall, uranium is toxic in the same way that lead is toxic, and the chemical toxicity is probably worse than the radiotoxicity.

You know darn well we're not talking about "overall uranium".

We're talking about very hot uranium and plutonium directly from the cores of active nuclear reactors and the entire spectrum of elements and isotopes that get produced when you take that core, rods, and support structure and melt it out through the bottom of a containment vessel onto a concrete foundation that wasn't designed as a core catcher. Mix in seawater, steam, hydrogen explosions and gord knows what else and you have a reaction that is insufficiently modeled.

What we do know is that a large area of land is not being occupied in Japan due to contamination. The Japanese have very expensive land, know a thing or two about radioactive contamination, and are not exactly known for exaggerating the impact of industrial accidents.

shareme2• 15 years ago

no you are not! the isotopes from uranium and plutonium fuel rod use and miss use only!

shareme2• 15 years ago

put another way most USA houses have a percentage of soil containing uranium..yet only less than 0.1% require any meaningful radon gas decontamination work..

the fuel rods when not used only give off so many isotopes per hour. the problem here is the rods in melted state are not cooled off to non active yet, hence the use of water and other materials to bring their activity down.

Confusion• 15 years ago

The uranium in that reactor isn't different from overall uranium, except that it's concentrated and its composition differs from what naturally occurs. However, that's over there. Uranium would be dangerous to US citizens if the uranium was in the US. It isn't. And so far, not even the worst doomsayers that actually know their stuff have worried about uranium or plutonium. That's just not the stuff you care about after a nuclear meltdown. You care about the other isotopes that were produced and that are much more easily carried outside and are easily used to compose other molecules that can spread further.

Secondly, what on earth is 'hot uranium'? If you are speaking about the temperature: it certainly isn't hot anymore by the time it reaches the US. If you are speaking about it's radioactivity, you're wrong: individual uranium atoms from that reactor, once escaped, do not behave differently than naturally occurring uranium atoms.

As for your other fears: it's perfectly well known what radioactive isotopes controlled and uncontrolled fission processes can produce. That's why they've been monitoring for things like cesium, iodine and basically every radioactive isotopes that exists: the number is rather limited). No significant levels of the stuff have been seen in the US.

gojomo• 15 years ago

Radioiodine from the accident has almost completely decayed

Given that the accident isn't over – fission is continuing without the normal containment – isn't more radioiodine being created, and at risk of further wide release, every day?

PaulHoule2• 15 years ago

There is no more criticality and no more fission than natural spontaneous decay.

Other kinds of radioactive decay continue to release heat in the fuel, which could drive material transfer, but the production of radioiodine is long over.

patrickgzill• 15 years ago

It will be interesting to see if, in a few years, dentists and doctors start collecting baby teeth, which can then be analyzed for uptake of radioactive materials into bone.

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

krschultz• 15 years ago

This article really lowers my opinion of Al Jazeera english.

iskander• 15 years ago

I read/watch AJ English most days and I've found that their on-the-ground reporting is excellent but they also publish a lot of marginal rubbish.

walexander2• 15 years ago

"'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.

Natsu• 15 years ago

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.

sesqu• 15 years ago

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.

nevinera2• 15 years ago

No it's not. The long-term environmental impact from fukushima is far smaller than that from the BP oil leak last year. The extra radiation being received by people who live a mile from the site is on par with eating two bananas every day.

The impact isn't nothing; this is a significant catastrophe. But that article is sensational bullshit.

fleitz2• 15 years ago

What exactly are "hot" particles that can't be measured with a Geiger counter? I assume they are talking about radioactive particles and not particles with increased temperature. This article sounds like pseudo science to me.

guscost• 15 years ago

If our best scientific assessments are based on absurdly low-confidence ancillary statistics like these, doesn't that automatically suggest that we shouldn't decide anything based on the results?

Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

Related Stories