After Fukushima: faces from Japan's tsunami tragedy, five years on the government's roadmap for the Fukushima cleanup, which envisions.
Table of contents
- Yujiro Taniyama (Author of Fukushima 3/11 & Japan's Government. WHY IT SUCKS)
- All Things Nuclear
- Fukushima and the Crisis of Democracy: Interview with Murakami Tatsuya 福島と民主主義の危機 村上達也氏に聞く
When I first became mayor, I did not understand why there were inns in the middle of nowhere, but then I gradually came to understand. Nuclear dependency has created a kind of distorted structure in the local community. Indeed, we have a lot of inns everywhere in this town. They are all for the plant workers, and the inn owners can make a decent living off of it. The nuclear power company has a contract with these inns, so the owners do not have to do anything to attract customers. They can do good business without any effort.
It is called dependency not only financially but also mentally. We have a lot of babies, but business owners have no interest in them, even though I suggested that they target young families. I can imagine you must have dealt with a lot of criticism when you began advocating for the new town concept. I do not personally remember having heard much criticism, but I am sure there were complaints about what I was advocating, and also there were people who were hoping that I would lose the next election.
Anyway, I am skeptical that under the influence of the nuclear industry we will succeed in cultivating other businesses independently. Construction companies and machine processing companies are fine as long as they keep ties with the nuclear power industry. In other words, they are no longer competitive. Futaba town 6 in Fukushima, which was once a declining town, was also trapped in a vicious cycle by continuing to build reactors in exchange for substantial subsidies from housing nuclear power plants.
Futaba had once struggled financially so badly that it was designated for fiscal consolidation. When the town reached the brink of bankruptcy, it again turned to Tokyo Electric for financial help and approved a plan to build two new reactors, No. When the town began to recover, the Fukushima disaster occurred, and the evacuation of the entire community followed. Idogawa was working desperately to bring nuclear plants to the town. But now he has become a vocal critic of nuclear power. He himself was forced to evacuate to Saitama and has not been able to return.
Although some of them might have been hoping that I would lose the following election, I did not really experience protests or personal attacks. Most of the residents I dealt with at that time were very supportive of me, although I am sure behind my back there were a lot of people who fiercely opposed what I was standing for. I also got a lot of support and encouragement from former or retired employees at Hitachi Ltd. You mentioned earlier that issues of nuclear power plants often divide a town.
Yes, they were divided in half. They are not the majority yet, but I would say about half of the council members oppose nuclear power now. I can say the same thing about the residents. About half of them are anti-nuclear while the other half supports it. What made you decide to run for office?
Yujiro Taniyama (Author of Fukushima 3/11 & Japan's Government. WHY IT SUCKS)
Is it because you had visions for the town? One reason why I began thinking of running for office was that in the decentralization promotion committee issued the second recommendation. It stated the basic concept of autonomy for local governments by giving administrative authority and responsibility as well as legislative power to local government. I knew that the era of political decentralization and shifting power from the long-standing centralized government to local government would be coming. This hope eventually made me enter politics. Of course, I wanted to change the way the local government had been operating here.
I had been observing that local governments always turned to prefectural government, and prefectures turned to national authority. Simply speaking, a prefecture is nothing but a national government agency, but local governments all turn to it. All local officials thought about was how to get things done through petitioning the central government. Instead, I wanted to get townspeople involved in the process of creating their own community by putting them in charge.
I found it very rewarding to lead, and I also wanted to change the way the local office would operate by staffing it with new officials. That was my ideal. Actually I did not have that vision yet.
All Things Nuclear
Then we had the JCO accident within two years after I took office. While struggling to find a way to pull our town together and recover from the accident, I decided to turn to the city of Minamata 7 for help. I visited there and met the mayor and residents. They taught me a lot. In those days, people just believed that the only way to develop local towns was by getting help from the central government or bringing large corporations to the area, but I learned from Minamata that we rather need to break away from the old mindset focusing on economic growth and development and create a sustainable society, focusing on and paying more attention to protecting the environment and respecting human beings.
In that sense, Minamata was my starting point. It is almost ironic how history is repeating itself. A similar set of problems to what Minamata had suffered arose after the Fukushima accident. It means that lessons learned from Minamata need to be applied in order to deal with the situations people in the larger Fukushima area are facing now. I also see that if we keep depending on Abenomics, local towns and cities will decline rapidly.
I thought about this at the time of the Koizumi administration This is how Prime Minister Koizumi thinks. Why are you living in such a remote mountain or on an isolated island? It costs too much to support you, so move out from there. I will give you three or four hundred thousand dollars so that you can live in a city. If you stay in such remote areas, we have to fly a helicopter to get you to a hospital when you get sick. It costs the government too much money. Cut off, cut off. That exactly happened with the merger of cities and villages. It was the Great Heisei Mergers. He wanted to get rid of them, claiming it would greatly improve economic efficiency for the country.
And the trend has been accelerated by Abenomics now. I was impressed with your keen insight. It is said that nuclear energy policies were implemented as a national policy, but it is not clear who actually decided this. It is true that the government has been in charge of its promotion, but I have to wonder how much the opinions and feelings of residents or local governments that house nuclear reactors have been taken into consideration under the name of national policy. I indeed thought it explained well the true nature of national policy.
The term is self-explanatory; in other words, it is a policy adopted by the government. I believe nuclear energy policy alone is referred to as a national policy nowadays. National policies implies mobilization of the whole country; that is the premise.
In that sense, national policies mean that people are forced to make sacrifices for their country. Even though it is an era of decentralization of power, some people in local areas regard nuclear energy as a national policy and dismiss their opponents as people who are against national policies.
Even some of the local government chief officers, especially ones hosting nuclear power plants, say they are hesitant about speaking out against or even making decisions on nuclear power themselves, because they are national policies. It seems to me all they are doing is avoiding their responsibility.
Saying that it is something the government decides, they keep silent about whether or not nuclear plants should be reactivated. The central government also tries to silence local governments in the name of national policy. This is how national policy works. According to it, the government matters most, not the citizens. I think the mass media should really expose the fact that nuclear energy policies are anti-democratic. I heard that it is commonly accepted in Japan to treat the Fukushima nuclear accident as a natural disaster. People say that this kind of large earthquake does not occur often, maybe only once every thousand years, so there was nothing we could have done to prevent the disaster, and we should just move on.
It is actually dangerous to think that way. They say only once every thousand years, but that means it may happen every thousand years. It seems to me that it is very high frequency. So I told them that the Japan Trench is lying right in front of us within kilometers off the coast, and asked them if this posed a safety concern to us, considering what had happened at Sumatra Island. They are employees at a nuclear power plant who are in charge of earthquake resistance Although it is said that earthquakes like that may happen every thousand years, they are happening more frequently.
For some reason, someone made this theory based on the Jogan Earthquake of the year Anyway, the claim that it only happens once every thousand years is just deception. Even if it were true, we should not think that there is nothing we could do. We build nuclear reactors on the earth and in nature. It means that we should expect that something unpredictable and beyond human ability might happen. They might also blame the tsunami for the Fukushima disaster, but how can they say that after building nuclear reactors on an earthquake-prone archipelago?
I believe that once an accident happens with nuclear power, there is no going back.
This should be the scientific spirit. That is what is called the scientific spirit, I think. What about the prevalence of cover-ups? What do you think of this tendency among elites in Japanese society? This has something to do with the widely shared elite mentality. You see it from how military officers acted and treated people during pre-war and wartime Japan. It is also true that they were driven to act this way for self-protection.
I wonder how many citizens have been abandoned in the past. There were Japanese civilian settlers who the Japanese government dispatched to what was then Manchuria. In the end, many of them, including children, were abandoned after the war. The Japanese Army heard about the Soviet Red Army crossing the Manchurian border, but did not let the settlers know about it. Millions of Japanese civilians were abandoned. In fact, things like that happened not only in Manchuria but also on Saipan where Japanese civilians, who had lived on the island, were forced to fight against American soldiers.
Worse than that was the battle of Okinawa. The Japanese military used civilians in Okinawa as a shield for the defense of the mainland and sacrificed their lives. Then it launched preparations for the final decisive battle, where the one hundred million people of the Japanese empire were expected to fight as one. This explains the reality of Japanese elites. As for Fukushima, they tried to hide information from residents in Fukushima. Elites from the Fukushima Prefectural Government did the same thing. They did not hesitate to put residents in danger in order to protect their organization.
We see such people in big corporations as well. The commitment to the greater good that Japanese elites value means, in the end, abandoning or discarding citizens. They are also protecting themselves. Sure, their only purpose is to protect themselves including their social status and their organization. If you were to speak up, you would need to prepare for the consequences.
We can say the same thing about the nuclear industry in Japan. A pyramid of power has been established in which graduates of Tokyo University reign at the top. All they care about is how they are treated in the organization and society, just as government officials do.
Let me ask you about the Constitution, in particular your view of the importance of individual freedom and human dignity. The Abe administration has been questioning its value and validity. And I think this issue is deeply interconnected with the way the administration deals with the disasters caused by the Fukushima power plant explosions. During our education, we learned about the Constitution superficially. Freedom of speech or academic freedom was an object to memorize.
But understanding it from a historical perspective is crucial. For example, Articles 31 to 40 explicitly forbid abuse by the police and state authorities. We need to think about why these articles were written so explicitly. It is because there had been a series of laws designed to suppress dissent in pre-war Japan, such as the Public Order and Police Law of and the Public Security Preservation Law of Under these laws, human rights were suppressed and brutally crushed by the full power of authority. For example, Article 33 states that no one shall be apprehended without an arrest warrant issued by a competent judicial officer.
Article 35 includes the right of protection against unusual searches and seizures, and the right to remain silent is guaranteed by Article I also realized the importance of Article 13 while holding public office and dealing with social welfare policies and services. It states that all people shall be respected as individuals. As you know, the Liberal Democratic Party has criticized individualism, saying that it has introduced the idea of selfishness to Japanese society and families and destroyed unity, but I realized while I was in office how crucial it is to look at every single person individually for purposes of social welfare and services.
Recently I came across an article written by the late Hisada Eisei. He was a Constitutional scholar at Hokkaido University of Education who was deployed to Luzon in the Philippines during World War II, although he tried to flee the battlefield and never engaged in combat. In his book he describes how emotional he became when he saw Article 9 aboard the repatriation ship, and he claims that Article 13 is the fundamental principle of the Japanese Constitution: Epidemic of fear Dennis Normile; Science; 4 Mar paywalled.
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster -- Thyroid screening program Wikipedia. Detectable but not hazardous: Wikipedia article on Chris Busby. Is Fukushima's nuclear nightmare over? No matter what BBC says: Sherman; International Journal of Health Services; The Ideology of Fear: Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Wikipedia Five Years Later, Cutting Through the Fukushima Myths Andrew Karam; Popular Mechanics; 11 Mar Radiation expert Andrew Karam, who covered the disaster for Popular Mechanics in and later traveled to study the site, explains everything you need to know about Fukushima's legacy and danger five years later.
March 11, was a day of unimaginable tragedy in northern Japan, a tragedy exacerbated by the reactor meltdowns and release of contamination. But the nuclear part of this horrible day was, if the longest-lasting, certainly the least lethal event. Yet it's the part that still engenders so much fear.
Because Rod demonstrated a hypocricy in the manner that he moderates the site that I found indictative of low character. I think he is probably made out of the same kind of clay that you and DV8 have exposed yourself as being molded from. You just provided a perfect example of what I was talking about by posting four raving comments in a row. In my humble opinion, the administrators of this website would be perfectly within their rights to permanently ban your IP address. They have been patient enough with your trolling. Japan — Freelance journalists face discrimination on Fukushima plant visit Wed, 23 May Only two Japanese freelances will be included among 40 accredited to the third media visit on 26 May to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, badly damaged by the March earthquake and tsunami.
Although some photographers and camera operators will be present, neither of the two freelances will be allowed to use still cameras or video equipment. One of them, Hatakeyama Michiyoshi, told Reporters Without Borders that a quota of four video journalists and four photographers had been set for the visit but the two who were not affiliated to news organizations would not be allowed to take any equipment. The right of access to information, which is meant to be guaranteed by clause 21 of the constitution, applies to all those who work in the media and to citizen journalists, not a select few.
We urge the government to halt such discriminatory restrictions and to allow more freelance journalists to take part in the visit on 26 May. During the second media visit to the site in February this year, for foreign journalists not included in the first visit, the organizers insisted on checking video images before they were broadcast.
Gee, I wonder, does Yakuza supply the spokespeople too? The charges pertain to labor dispatches from May to the end of July last year.
The labor dispatch laws forbid dispatching workers to construction sites. I have seen NO evidence presented here on this thread that is convincing that TEPCO does not continue to be the primary source of information about the status of the plant and the ongoing repairs. But, uh, you can always resort to ad hominem. After all, some of you are just so good at it! DV82XL — Looking at the sheer volume of his posts and the majority of their content, it appears that POA is mostly talking to himself, which is rather disturbing psychologically.
News reports are notoriously incorrect in a fluid situation such as the Fukushima accident especially considering the damage the tsunami caused to the basic infrastructure. Additionally most reporters were back in Tokyo at the time not at the Fukushima site. Physical location of the reporters compared to the location of the crisis will dictate the quality and accuracy of their news reports.
That is why the IAEA timeline supported by information from TEPCO are considered a good document of record now, not news reports from that time usually written by reporters who have little background in nuclear energy. IAEA has had time to go back and review the records, the data, and interview people to determine what events transpired in what order. That is why every industry that suffers a major accident does a root cause analysis once the initial crisis has been contained: To determine the sequence of events in order to determine what went wrong and when, to train current and future operators, engineers, etc.
Also it was widely reported there was internal fighting within the Japanese government about who was in control of the situation and who was in control of flow of information. So using news reports dated during the crisis, that quote anonymous Japanese officials, do not carry much weight now that we have more accurate timelines from IAEA and other organizations.
Yes there was an explosion but that was due to the hydrogen buildup as the ANS report linked below discusses. The report also discusses the fact that many observers thought the fuel pool was uncovered but that later to be proven an incorrect assumption. However the accident team responded as if the fuel pool was slowly losing water which still appears to be the correct decision in the face of inadequate monitoring equipment.
In other words, in the moment of the crisis it appears the accident response team made the conservative choice and kept putting water into the fuel pool. However as later data proved, the fuel pool was never in danger of being uncovered. It was strictly the hydrogen explosion which was caused by backflow from Unit 3 that made it appear as if the water from Unit 4 fuel pool was evaporating.
Finally this entire discussion about whether or not Unit 4 fuel pool caught fire or not during the first days of the accident is not germane to the current discussion raised by Alvarez and Gundersen. The thing is most reading this thread see straight through you and realize that you are no threat to nuclear energy. Anyone else can clearly see that your pathetic attempts to try and control the frame of the debate, your refusal to state your position clearly, your attempts to sweep away whole classes of arguments, and your bursts of childish anger underline the fact you have nothing of worth to contribute, and you are nobody of note in the antinuclear debate.
Reread the last few posts, and it is obvious who I was referring to. The Kyodo news agency has a very useful update on the status, as of Tuesday evening in Japan, of each of the six reactors at the Fukushima No. And theres plenty more where that came from, Bill. They can hide some of them, but not all of them. Lumma, I realize it is late into this discussion but as one of the collaborators of the original article I wanted to discuss some of the issues you bring to the table.
There are two main themes to discuss about your post. The first is the communications angle and the second response will deal with the technical issues you discuss. I agree a response to articles such as those published by Mr. Gundersen are always a challenge. Will the response be seen as a knee jerk reaction or is it a measured response to charges that are technically incorrect? That was a primary question asked by all who participated with this article. First on the issue of the intended audience: This is not the first article I have assisted with over the past few months dealing with technically incorrect information about nuclear plant issues and probably will not be the last.
That being said, the comments I supply while the articles are in development are more along the lines of how to reach those who are on the fence about nuclear power in addition to supplying technical information from my own nuclear background. My opinion is that people who follow Mr. Gundersen with an almost religious like devotion will never be convinced and any attempt to do so directly is an ineffective effort as indicated by the poster, Richard, below.
He, like others, apparently believe that anyone who supports nuclear power are committing crimes against humanity. They are convinced the world will end because we are trying to harness the power of the atom which is a situation beyond their realm of experience and is analogous, in their view, to trying to play God with forces within the universe that we mere mortals have no business doing.
So any attempts to convince that specific, relatively small audience nuclear power is relatively safe compared to other power generation technologies will always be a herculean effort. However there are still the facts of the technically incorrect charges presented by Alvarez and the greater number of people in the middle who are not religiously devoted to an anti-nuclear position that are hearing those charges over and over. So, back the question of how to respond to technically incorrect articles that raise the fear level of the general public unnecessarily?
Engineers working in the nuclear field have learned several communications lessons from the Chernobyl and TMI incidents. The first lesson is that plant management and the politicians will more likely mangle the technical message due to incomplete information, broken communications channels due to the crisis itself, or even worse; the message is mangled for their own short term agendas as has been shown to be the case time and time again in many industries not just nuclear.
This subject of technical communications problems during a crisis situation is not strictly a nuclear issue as the communications and PR surrounding the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico proved. The second lesson engineers learned or should be learning is that silence in the face of factually incorrect charges from the anti-nuclear crowd will allow those charges to grow and take a life of their own. For example the charge leveled by Dr. Caldicott that a million people supposedly have died or will die due to Chernobyl.
That is figure is ludicrous, based on disproven research, and even resulted in the NYAS pulling their support of the original report. However due to silence at the time from people directly working on those issues, that charge from Calidcott now affects the public debate about nuclear power even after George Monbiot, a former non-nuclear supporter, called her claims into question. Her disproven claims have now become part of the urban myths and legends surrounding nuclear power that will take years to straighten out. Trust is the central issue.
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Trust has always been and always will be the central issue. Who will the public trust at times like this? Not much trust can be built up if the one group who should be supplying clear explanations are either unable or not willing. Additionally engineers and technical managers are not known for their ability to discuss technical issues with non-technically trained people.
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has made a living from this very fact. Blogs and other new forms of media allow not only anti-nuclear groups but also pro-nuclear groups access to forums that were never available in the past. This article was written as a direct response to technically incorrect spent fuel pool failure mechanisms laid out by the core anti-nuclear group of Alvarez, Gundersen and Caldicott. The goal of this article, and the recent articles on the SCE steam generator issues, was to put information into the public realm that previously has not been available to the general public.
Are engineers and technologists that support nuclear power going to fail getting a clear message out to the public every now and then? The answer is yes of course. We have 30 years of FUD to overcome in addition to a culturally induced mindset of not speaking to the public about nuclear power and nuclear power issues.
But is better to try to communicate using the new forms of media in my opinion then to sit back and let silence rule the day. Silence during a communications challenge such as that presented by the Fukushima issues is similar to a vacuum. The vacuum will get filled by something and it is better if those of us who support nuclear power and are willing to use new media forums work to get a technically correct message out. Coming late to this discussion but there are some issues with the link you provided and the statement you believe came from that link. In everything I have seen about the events of Fukushima not once have I ever seen the Japanese make an official announcement that the fuel pools burned.
So I was intrigued to see an official statement was made from the Japanese to the IAEA concerning the burning of Unit 4 spent fuel pond but curious that the entry you provided did not state a date even though it provided a time. However both Internet Explorer and Google locked up when I clicked the link. That usually means something is not quite right with the link itself. In fact Google came back with an error message stating there were too many redirects which indicates the link is not directly from IAEA.
But in the interest of research, I went one step further and googled the sentence you provided. Imagine my compete lack of surprise when I found out my google search did not direct me to any official IAEA documents but instead to several blogs where anti-nuclear commentary was prominently displayed.
I was surprised to see though that this very blog entry was high on that list. So my search indicates to me that Google search engine could not find anything on the public IAEA site. However still in the interest of really digging into the source of any possible confusion about the issue of Unit 4 burning, I went to the IAEA site itself and searched the Fukushima running log which is linked below to see what was actually said.
Fukushima Nuclear Accident Update 16 March , Japanese authorities have informed the IAEA that a fire in the reactor building of Unit 4 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was visually observed at Now I can see how the phrase spent fuel pond at Unit 4 can be confused with the phrase reactor building of Unit 4 but the two statements are different. There are various things that could start on fire in the reactor building under the right conditions but there is little that can start on fire in an Olympic sized swimming pool.
So to conclude, several observations can be made from my research activity.
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The first is that there is another public document I did not see in my google search which if that is the case then please provide a more direct link to the IAEA document in question. This document should back up your original claim that the Japanese stated that Unit 4 spent fuel pool was indeed on fire and they formally notified the IAEA of that fact.
The second explanation is that a simple misunderstanding of physical layout of Unit 4 building occurred by others who are reporting this in their blogs. In which case those that do not understand how this style of nuclear power plant is laid out need to spend some time on studying the layout before making decisions about what is really going on inside or relying on individuals with a known anti-nuclear agenda. The third possibility is that IAEA information from their running log as shown in the link above was knowingly twisted to suit an agenda and then passed along by others unknowingly around the internet.
I hope this is not the case since that would indicate a core group of anti-nuclear people who believe twisting facts to raise public fear is an acceptable way to debate the issues of nuclear power. I just found out that Mr. Again with no evidence, no calculation, no nothing … How can a so-called expert say these and get away with it without any repercussion to his professional career? Anyone at the Assembly, please bring this UP!!
The other Will says he never heard of Unit 4 burning. I think these Fuku1live show smoke from Unit 4 and usually where there is smoke…there is fire. The Day the Buildings Disappeared see the first and last 30 seconds: Then the next hour: Nukers are morally vacant. There is no way to justify leaving toxic poison for future generations to deal with.
Disgusting and not worthy of being called human. Again with no evidence, no calculation, no nothing. So I guess it will be Unit 1 after this? Alvarez once mentioned Unit 7, and there is no such a thing. How can a so-called expert say these and get away with it without any repercussion to his professional career?
You can even elucidate your own position in any coherent way. In the end you are nothing more than what your name describes you as: The key point here is — is radiation uniquely dangerous. It is not even vary dangerous compared to other forms of energy production. It is kept scary by the news media. Their major advertisers sell more fuel when Nuclear is shut down. Hum, a large portion of the cost of Fukushima is the replacement cost of the fuel used to generate electricity.
Yes, you are exactly correct. That the slightly higher capital cost for Nuclear — why are you quoting and numbers for coal plants, I quoted a cost in Indiana last year? The plant in Indiana is nearly dollars a MW. I was working on quoting a small bio-fuels plant and we estimated that the simple small plant would be MW. The cost of coal plants is rapidly rising. Your contention that the cost of Fukushima is rising is mainly based on the constantly assumption — the real point of contention — that Nuclear is somehow much more dangerous than other forms of energy production.
If the standard for radiation protection was as high as reasonably safe, the people in the land surrounding Fukushima would already be back home. Excuse me but radiation is NOT that dangerous. Reasonable standards that would keep people healthy, would lower the construction costs and lower the cost of any future accident.
Congrats, you guys, you have really done your compatriots proud here. You are right James, POA is nothing but hot air and sophistry, transparent to anyone that sees how he twists and prevaricates to avoid real engagement. Sigh, again, POA is just a super-troll getting his jollies off yanking strings. Heres a article I found with a quick search. I looked at other articles, and they seemed to lean towards advocacy, or demonization. This particular article seemed pretty straightforward and matter of fact….
Fuel costs for nuclear plants are a minor proportion of total generating costs, though capital costs are greater than those for coal-fired plants and much greater than those for gas-fired plants. The units are expected to be in commercial operation in and Regarding bare plant costs, some recent figures apparently for overnight capital cost or Engineering, Procurement and Construction — EPC — cost quoted from reputable sources but not necessarily comparable are:.
Soaring prices for materials like this nickel mined in Norilsk, Russia, have helped drive up construction costs for energy plants. General Electric called in reporters yesterday for a briefing on a nuclear plant it is trying to sell in partnership with Hitachi, a plant it said can be built faster than before, operated reliably and have a vanishingly small chance of an accident. But what will it cost? After some hemming and hawing, company executives gave figures by the standard industry metric, dollars per kilowatt of capacity, but in a huge range: The uncertainty is not just in nuclear plants, he said; coal plant prices are now similarly unstable.
As talk of building new power plants rises sharply, so does the cost. A new fleet of coal-fired power plants and a revival of nuclear construction after three decades are both looking tougher lately. Well, granted this was a quick search, and there is a huge volume of essays, reports, and opinions to draw from. But there seems to be a huge difference between the start up costs of an NPP and a coal fired plant. If one could be convinced that an NPP would be safe, the higher price of construction would certainly be OK with me, as I am no fan of coal fired power generation.
But the assurances of safety, so far, from the nuclear industry have proven to be empty. It is not unreasonable to expect this disaster to cost far more than the actual costs of constructing an NPP, many times over. And, after all, we were assured by the industry that a disaster on this scale was highly unlikely, if not impossible. A MW coal plant in Indian will cost Duke energy 3.
I am a bit confused by the above paragraph. I see no projected cost for an NPP, from which to draw a comparison. I find it difficult to imagine that an NPP with more than one or two reactors could be built for 3. But I have never researched the alleged costs of constructing a domestic NPP, so I am simply punting. And, when failures and accidents occur, such as at Fukushima , require expenditures far exceeding their potential for profitability. If the argument is changing from safety to economics, I would be glad to take that up.
Government Loan guarantees are not subsidies — they are repaid. They are needed because the largest financial risk is the potential for a government agency or entity at some level to simply cancel the project after billions have been invested. Loan guarantees reduce that risk. There is really no other risk to this investment. The construction of NPPs compares very well with the construction of any other type of new power plant.
By the way, do you really think your elitist, pompous, and condescending spit has earned you the right to make demands of me? I have provided plenty of links and commentary on this thread to buttress my arguments and assertions. Yet, when queried, you and Wayne have provided next to nothing, except spittle and drool. And when reasonable requests were made for you or he to provide collaboration for your assertions, or basic poll protocols for a highly suspect poll, you have been unable to do so.
Apparently, this simple premise has managed to elude capture by your self-proffessed intellectual superiority. And require huge government subsidies to cover the costs of construction. I support nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is one of the great scientific discoveries of the past century and represents a valuable piece of intellectual capital to be passed on to future generations.
Nuclear energy is a nearly carbon-free electricity generation source and benefits from a large and diversified fuel resource base. Nuclear power plants are extremely competitive in nearly all market conditions as they have very low sensitivity to fuel costs. In my opinion the nuclear case is sound.
Long-term resources exist; current technology is mature and enjoys excellent records in terms of safety and environmental protection; future technologies focusing on efficient use of fuel resources and minimization of waste production are under development; and competitiveness with fossil fuel for base-load electricity generation is real.
Such strengths support the idea that nuclear energy should make the most significant contribution to a sustainable energy future and the security of energy supplies and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in a cost-effective manner. Are you saying that it did not survive? Are you saying that the amount of materials released has hurt, harmed or killed anyone?
Are you saying that the extent of the effect of the earthquake on the Nuclear power plants was greater than the effect of the earthquake on other areas? I will answer my own question — about 20, from water, about 0 from radiation. Which do I fear more? What in the world does any failure moral or technical on the part of TEPCO have to do with that simple fact? The plain statement is that the pools which survived have been shored up. You are questioning what exactly? That they have been shored up? Or that this shoring is adequate?
Fukushima and the Crisis of Democracy: Interview with Murakami Tatsuya 福島と民主主義の危機 村上達也氏に聞く
What authority would you trust to tell you that this has been done correctly? Try providing me a link to any record of IAEA inspections of the repairs to SFP 4, or to the methodology used in the poll you were intitially cheerleading for. Perhaps this will clear your head a bit. I have to agree with you. I hear constantly from my friends who live in Asia Pacific how concerned they are. In other words, the PR battle is far lost and POA is raising fair questions about how we are responding. The engineer who was worried that the dangers were being minimized missed the whole point!
I am a lay person who has studied the background science enough to know that radiation is just NOT that dangerous. Rather than fighting over LNT we need to keep giving reasonable comparisons. Like how many hours of Sunlight are the same damage as the levels of radiation currently found outside the bounds of the Fukushima plants. That is a lie, as anyone who has conscientiously read this thread can surely ascertain.
I have singled out ONE poll as having no apparent avenue through which to check the methodology. If you are so sure of the credibility of this poll, your recourse would be to simply link us to the poll data and the methodology used to compile the data. You are, I assume, unable to do so, so you start weaving straw. Point of fact, I linked to a poll that even you cited, which did, in fact, provide us with the methodology through which it compiled its data. These strawmen points of contention you keep drooling forth with are ridiculous as a result of their transparency.
You are, in fact, opening a distinct and clear window into your own level of credibility with these kinds of disingenuous assertions. Telling, seeing as how when prodded for collaboration of their assertions about the condition of SFP 4, this kind of trash talk is all they can come up with. Apparently the common sense exhibited by Mr. Read this thread carefully, folks. Then, ask yourself who has conducted themselves in a manner warranting respect.
All — As for the general complaint that I am not arguing with POA on the facts, but attacking him personally, the reason for this is that POA reacts to any attempt at reasoned debate by trying to sweep whole classes of arguments away without dealing with them. Look at the way he dismissively rejects the results from just about every major polling firm in the U.
When every avenue of rational discourse has been closed by this sort of sophistry on is left with few options other than to question the sincerity of the individual, and question what is motivating them. The polls that I linked to and there are others, like the Eurobarometer surveys consistently show that public support for nuclear energy is far from being totally rejected by an overwhelming majority.
Therefore I reject the idea that people like POA are representative of any majority. Most people that do not support nuclear energy do not because of less hysterical objections, or because they are misinformed. In general this large group is amenable to listening to reasoned argument and they should not be ignored while we fight the likes of POA. You can choose to be suspicious if you like. No one has claimed there was no effect, or that the safety system would lead to no effect at all in the case of a magnitude 9 earthquake and a 40 foot tsunami.
Was was claimed was that the public would not be harmed. That assertion is true. Your statement that pollution was spread over a wide area is a way of exaggerating the effect of that pollution. The only concern the public has is if they will receive a dangerous exposure to radiation. That concern is well met. They will NOT receive a dangerous exposure. I use the word dangerous in this sense — a measurable effect that actually causes measurable harm. That side avoids venues where their statements can be challenged by people who know the facts. One of the most pertinent facts is that the levels of radiation outside the plant fall within the range of normal background radiation around the world.
There is simply not enough material to do any harm. Apparently, I underestimated the amount of popcorn needed for this show. This guy or gal is like the Energizer Bunny with a shovel — he keeps on digging and digging and digging himself deeper and deeper. I guess some people just have too much time on their hands. POA — Just so that you know that your efforts are not in vain, rest assured that your comments here will be one of the first things that I will point fence-sitters to so that they can get a good idea of the tone on either side of the ongoing conversation about nuclear power.
Your hysterical rants provide a perfect example of the uninformed, emotional, irrational raving that is so often encountered from the anti-nuclear side. Your entire argument here seems to be one big appeal to ignorance, which some of us find hilarious. I remember the wording because it was so nasty and I had never seen such behavior before on that blog. I saw the post before it was deleted.
So, there are other ways to be aware of the wording of deleted posts. Having a memory is one. No, I am not Rod Adams. You see dishonesty in my screen name only because of the dishonesty in yourself. It has perverted your worldview and filled you with prejudice. Again, perhaps pity is the best response.
As for DV8, one wonders at your choice to ignore the treatment he dished out to a woman that had neither attacked nor criticized him. As I said above, your indignation is an example of gross hypocricy. I care not what you have to say. And good God man, whats with your monicker? Are you too dense to understand how such a handle immediately sows distrust? And it is the commentors such as DV8 that introduced the extremely adversarial tone of the commentary and instituted the ad hominem. The internet makes it easy to call out. It is a mean, nasty, personal thing to say that indicates some desire for harm to come to another individual, and that is pretty despicable.
I have been reading Atomic Insights for a long time and Rod Adams is generally a very patient and tolerant host, and having posts deleted by him really takes some doing. It really is too bad, Mr. I was going to grasp at that thread and attempt to find some common ground, but I think that ship has sailed. I asked if he was credentialed in structural engineering, and you answered the question. Still, with extensive searching, I can find no references to outside inspections being conducted by agencies other than TEPCO, with the exception of Mr.
Walters, seem to be basing their assertions on the results of these alleged inspections. OK, well, show me the meat, because I certainly am unable to locate it with extensive web searching. Legislator Ikko Nakatsuka is credentialed, I assume, in structural engineering?
Ikko Nakatuka has an engineering degree from Kyoto University, one of the finest engineering schools in Japan. IMO those are reasonably strong credentials, certainly moreso than a US politician with a law degree playing for publicity to his political base. Heres an interesting twist. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. The steps Tepco has taken look fine, Mr. Nakatsuka said—as far as they go. Nakatsuka stayed determinedly away from making big-picture conclusions.
How do you expect people to react to the obnoxious spew offered up by those such as DV8? Nor do I state that it does. I simply request that, when assertions are made based on information provided by sources other than TEPCO, we are shown some collaboration for that assertion, and are directed to that collaboration. I simply would like to see for myself the reports of these inspections, because I can find no evidence, on the IAEA website, that they ever took place. You know, this is another example.
You had several posts deleted because you responded to another poster with an outburst of profanity and what seemed like simple hatred. Behaving in this manner often results in retaliation, sometimes using similar tactics. And then you play the victim card and complain about others attacking you, when your entire posting style is nothing more than attacks on persons and their chosen profession.
The first is that you simply like hurting others and attacking them personally. I know that happens often on the internet and there are many websites where this is the coin of the realm. But this and the others you have recently posted on are not those. The second possibility is that it is simply the way you are, perhaps the manner in which you were raised, or your life experiences have molded you into the kind of person who does such things.
In that case, perhaps pity is the best response, because there is nothing anyone here can do to change that. In that case, you can do something. And that is, exercise your free will and simply choose not to be that way. If you really want to contribute to a discussion here in a meaningful way, make your points in a more receptive manner, and perhaps learn and educate in the process, then adopt a less hostile and controntational style.
Simply look at an issue with a less emotional viewpoint. Make rational arguments in a manner that lends itself to calm discussion. Most of all, lose that huge chip on your shoulder. Keep in mind who the majority of your audience is here. This is not an anti-nuclear blog. It is not a public news comment thread. There are educated people here who have dealt with misinformation and falsehoods spread among the public for a large part of their working lives. We are not going to allow just one side of the story to be told, as it so often is in the mainstream press.
We are going to call out liars and charlatans in a way the media never would. Given that, posters who come in with a nasty, hostile, sardonic attitude will likely encounter some pushback. Ah, a commentor that recognizes the difference between good science and bad PR. And when you refuse to recognize the known past deceptions and corruptions of the industry, both here and abroad, you become a co-conspirator of sorts.
Wayne strongly objected to Mondy morning quarterbacking.