Tepco releases badly altered image of Fukushima Unit 4

http://enenews.com/tepco-releases-badly-altered-image-unit-4-photo

by stfu • 14 years ago

62 47 14 years ago

enenews.com

marze• 14 years ago

That is about the most shoddy photoshop job by a $10B corporation ever.

Anyone have any ideas what was in that corner they might want to hide?

kgtm• 14 years ago

I was able to find a video [1] of the building, with that area visible to some extent. You can see it at various points, like at 3:43. I'm not sure of its significance though.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX59-ZBO3mo

achamayou2• 14 years ago

Looks like a door/access of some kind.

Edit: There was some kind of entrance tunnel connecting there : http://exposingthetruth.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/fuku...

Still not clear why they'd shop that.

Edit 2: this article has more details : http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js...

It's the entrance of the tunnel from which fuel is normally loaded.

shill• 14 years ago

This looks like the work of Microsoft Paint to me.

lignuist• 14 years ago

We should not accept, that a company that can kill us all just with a little mistake, lies to us notoriously.

ars2• 14 years ago

Kill us all? Exaggerate much? Even if they tried they couldn't kill all that many people.

And lots of companies can cause massive deaths. Dam operators for example.

achamayou2• 14 years ago

TEPCO owns and operates quite a few dams : http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/challenge/energy/hydro/p-plants-e....

jtokoph• 14 years ago

Maybe they made that area blatantly obviously shopped in order to direct attention from more important, well shopped areas of the photo.

ars2• 14 years ago

You're very good at conspiracy theories.

stretchwithme• 14 years ago

Perhaps the photo is designed to distract from other better shopped photos at better hidden accidents in better hidden countries.

rishonik• 14 years ago

This picture proves the existence of a conspiracy.

cabirum2• 14 years ago

Maybe they just removed some company's logo? Bad public image and stuff..

Instead of covering it with a black rectangle, they stamped it with a similar color, some people went all conspiracy.

stephengillie• 14 years ago

If it were a light grey rectangle, sure. But this looks like someone scrawled on it with mspaint.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

Pretty odd place to put a logo.

maxerickson2• 14 years ago

It looks like there is just a hole in the wall there:

http://photo.tepco.co.jp/library/120120_2/120120_10.jpg http://photo.tepco.co.jp/library/20120810_01/120810_01.jpg

(The damage lines up pretty well across those photos)

Doesn't really explain why they masked it out though.

cabirum2• 14 years ago

It could be anything, like a pile of garbage with a coca-cola vending machine on top of it, or just a piece of equipment.

Or, like in a video posted in this thread, an unsuitable writing on the wall, there seem to be a lot of them: http://i.imgur.com/0QL7a.png (similar size btw)

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

A more interesting question is why they did their photoshopping in MS Paint.

scarmig• 14 years ago

I don't know how this makes me feel.

Should I be upset, because a company aims to purposely lie to the public?

Should I be happy, because any sufficiently large organization will inevitably make stupid mistakes like this one?

Or should I be terrified, because it's likely that better-done versions of shit like this is done by supposedly trustworthy corporations and governments every day?

jayfuerstenberg• 14 years ago

If everything were okay TEPCO would have a lot to brag about and its image would only go up.

It's no wonder so many rank and file TEPCO employees are resigning of late. http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/tepco-worke...

I bet they know more than the general public does too.

yk• 14 years ago

What could they possibly want to hide in a photo that already shows the wreckage of a nuclear power plant?

maxerickson2• 14 years ago

The most likely thing, to me, is some piece of equipment that they agreed not to publicize.

So one way of looking at it is that they chose to release the rest of the photo.

niels_olson3• 14 years ago

> some piece of equipment that they agreed not to publicize

exactly

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4471850

akldfgj2• 14 years ago

There are more appropriate and ethical ways to redact a photo -- like a black rectangle or a watermark "REDACTED" over the photoshopped areas.

hristov• 14 years ago

There can always be worse wreckage. For example, there could be something leaking.

jsmcgd2• 14 years ago

Looking at the homepage of enenews.com, it looks like the website has a pretty strong bias. I wouldn't put much stock in this photo, in fact I doubt Tepco doctored this image themselves.

dbaupp• 14 years ago

The original is hosted on Tepco's website[1] and Google-translating the article[2] suggests that it is purported to be an actual photo.

[1] http://photo.tepco.co.jp/library/20120830_03/120830_28.jpg [2]: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&u=...

jsmcgd2• 14 years ago

Fair enough. Still, it doesn't look like enenews is the place to go, to get balanced, objective reporting.

pmb• 14 years ago

They can't even lie competently. Where are the organizations competent to run a nuclear power station? Because nuclear power, done right and engineered well, is the one of the safest and best sources of energy. Tepco is criminally* incompetent, however, and this makes it hard to make a case for nuclear power when their gross incompetence is stinking up the joint.

* Have any Tepco execs been charged? They should be...

podperson5• 14 years ago

"Because nuclear power, done right and engineered well, is the one of the safest and best sources of energy."

Here's the thing: most human endeavors are going to be done wrong and engineered poorly at some point. If I run a slipshod coal-fired plant I can give cancer to a bunch of people and blow up a town, but I'm not going to threaten the food production of an entire country and possibly an ocean.

Warren Buffett has famously said (I paraphrase) that he only invests in companies that will do OK even if managed by complete idiots for ten years because most companies will be managed by idiots for extended periods of time.

Basically, you want to move to Theory, because that's where nuclear power plants are a great way to generate power.

Tuna-Fish• 14 years ago

Here's the thing: Even a completely perfectly managed coal plant does more damage over it's operational lifetime than the nightmare scenario at Fukushima.

Yes, the damage done by the coal plant is more diffuse. But it is not less than the damage done by Fukushima to the ocean and to eastern japan. Coal plants worldwide kill half a million people per year from direct effects, and a lot more from indirect ones.

Also, the nightmare scenario at nuke plants is commonly overstated. Fukushima did not, and cannot, threaten the entire food suppy of Japan. If all it's radioactive isotopes were evenly laid out on all of its fields, the concentrations would be small enough that eating the food would be bad for you, but no worse than breathing the air full of SO4 and NOx found in places where coal plants are run badly (like china).

copperweaver• 14 years ago

Looking at older images of reactor #4, there should be a hole in the wall were the altered area of the photo is. In older images, there is what looks like a truck entrance, that extended out from the reactor building, and this has since been removed. Perhaps Tepco did not want people to see a gaping hole in the side of building.... you can see the truck bay that is no longer there in this photo.. http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/pict12.jpg

niels_olson3• 14 years ago

Hi, I'm a physician who deployed as part of the US military response, specifically, I was in the contingency planning cell. Assuming there is a hole in the wall, which is a curtain wall, not a containment wall, then it leads to work areas around and outside the base of the reactor containment vessel. The presumed hole is above the wet well and may or may not be on the side facing the containment pool.

If it is on the side of the containment pool, the wet well may not be covered by a floor (I have seen conflicting schematics on this). However, Unit 4's primary issues were with their spent rod pool. If that is involved, there are two concrete decks between the bottom of the pool and the space exposed by presumed hole.

So, my guess is the wet well may be exposed by that hole in the curtain wall, and may or may not have any damage, but the wet well is definitely failed in Unit 2, and I can see where they wouldn't want people whooping and hollering about wet wells. I'm sure the insides of that are a complete mess at this point. Even if this was a normal construction site, it would be a complete mess at this point.

I see others have mentioned there may be a truck access tunnel at this spot. Perhaps, but I'm unclear as to the orientation of the 4 sides, and that seems a bit irrelevant to the reactor.

Meanwhile, the NRC daily updates petered out long ago. I'm not planning any trips to Fukushima any time soon.

Update: here is a great presentation we got from Areva. Glad to see it's available to the public:

https://wikispooks.com/w/images/5/5d/Fukushima-areva.pdf

curtis• 14 years ago

One thing to keep in mind is that Unit 4 was de-fueled at the time of the accident. The explosion was caused by hydrogen leaking over from Unit 3. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disas... and look for "Reactor 4").

bradleyland• 14 years ago

Ok, so assuming all that is true, why obscure the hole?

I can still recall during my sentiment during the unfolding of the Fukushima incident. The whole time, I kept reassuring everyone to keep calm and not assume the worst because the information coming out of TEPCO indicated that the reactor was "OK". Heh, boy did that turn out to be a mistake.

So, what we have here is a situation where TEPCO has dropped a nuclear bomb on their credibility. Normally, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that all these are perfectly plausible explanations worth considering, but after the way they handled the incident as it was occurring, I'm not inclined to believe anything not seen or verified by my own eyes or trusted third-parties.

A doctored image coming from TEPCO gives us every reason to be alarmed. Given their past behavior, it's a good indication that something is amiss.

niels_olson3• 14 years ago

> something is amiss

I'm not arguing that point. All I'm saying is, whatever is going on, I don't think I'm going to get called back over for contingency operations. The joint task force never disbanded, we're all theoretically still on call for this. As far as TEPCO's relationship with the Japanese people, that is a situation for them to resolve internally. My brother's wife is from Ibaraki prefecture (between Tokyo and Fukushima). He plans to make a career of law in Japan. But I seriously doubt we will see any new catastrophic developments or American tax dollars spent on the problem.

columbo• 14 years ago

Whoever edited this image had ZERO experience with image editing. I think that's an interesting point to consider. It isn't that the person was bad, the person was _untrained_.

A bad graphic designer, say someone who dabbled in photoshop over high school and has no real artistic talent, would have done a better job.

I feel that is an important point because (getting rather tinfoil-hatlike) it leads me to believe the person that took the picture, or a very small circle of individuals, decided to alter the photo. This wasn't a big group-think decision, this was a few people who felt they couldn't talk to anyone else about this, not even pay someone $100 to do a semi-decent job out of fear of the originals turning up in the wrong hands...

or maybe it was just a timestamp embedded on the picture and they didn't want it shown. Who knows.

Tepco releases badly altered image of Fukushima Unit 4

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