Ah...the last retreat of the apologist - ‘credentials’. I am not an engineer but because of sites like es-skf.blogspot.com and physicsforum etc. I know that the circumstances surrounding the disaster are different.
I was thinking after my last post that the Japanese performance re nuke response may really be worse than that of the Soviets because the Japanese had the Soviet example to study. The Soviets rued the fact that they tried to keep people calm instead of training them in advance how to respond in various reactor scenarios. They rued the fact that they told the nearby town that all was well while the reactor smoked until they did the math and figured out that the townspeople would all receive a lethal does in two weeks if not evacuated. With the history of Chernobyl, why did the Japanese resist enlarging the exclusion zone despite international calls to do so? Why have a SPEEDI warning system and then decide to withhold the information from citizens when something bad happens? Soviets tried to conceal the extent of the disaster and it didn’t work. The Japanese couldn’t possibly have examined the terrain sufficiently when they were assuring everyone that everything was under control. Even now, they engage in Kubuki theatre as if 3 core melt downs and instability of fuel pools is ‘under control’? The Soviets lost power and were dragged before the people in court where they were forced to admit to their lies re the disaster. Does Japan think that they can put a polyester cover over the public? Japan says Tokyo is not contaminated - foreign scientists test and find hotspots - now Japan will test.
According to Dr. Shunichi Yamashita, who’s at the Atomic Bomb Research Institute, pregnant women are safe from radioactive concerns and even 100mvert per year would be harmless to their fetus and
“Effects of radiation do not come to people that are happy… They come to people that are weak-spirited”
See, I think if he’s not telling the truth (women who have babies with birth defects related to this radiation contamination are ‘weak spirited’), the gov should step in and provide pregnant mothers with accurate information. Unless, of course the government condones this kind of misinformation.
I wouldn’t say a few weeks reading an internet blog is a good substitute for a 4-year college degree in engineering and a masters degree in nuclear physics.
Although maybe you are just that smart.
No, I want to find out if you have even a scintilla of mathematical background. Because your constant harping about theories of government conspiring to cover everything up is usually the hallmark of a liberal arts major.
OK, so you have some math background. And you therefore can understand the huge increase in complexity or force necessary to maintain a cover-up when, say, a dozen people know something their superiors don’t want revealed. In Japan, secrets don’t stay secret for very long post-WWII. TEPCO has a checkered past, to be certain, of some non-compliance with safety regs and reporting regs. I’ll grant that immediately. But that doesn’t even remotely rise to the level of mendacity and brutal repression of the truth present in the USSR. If you think they’re even remotely comparable, then you really need to learn a LOT more about the USSR. I’d suggest reading most anything written by Robert Conquest about the USSR. He’s big into numbers and the height, width and length of piles of bodies in the USSR.
To further illustrate the differences between the two situations, let me ask this: Did you know that there was a partial core meltdown in 1982 at Chernobyl? I didn’t (and neither did the rest of the world) until the mid-90’s.
Concealing cracks in cooling piping was a violation, to be certain. TEPCO sacked three execs over that. TEPCO employees pulled a huge boner of a safety no-no by mixing fuel in buckets (which would have had me moving out of the area rather smartly if I observed something like that). Two employees ultimately died as a result of their stupidity. That’s hardly a reflection on TEPCO, IMO. Guys used to die as a result something as mundane as not containing a split rim tire in a cage when they aired it up. Was that the fault of the tire industry? No. It was a well known issue, and if you took such a shortcut, you suffered from a fault of personal stupidity. Same for the two idiots who died at TEPCO as a result of their personal stupidity.
TEPCO and Japan don’t rise to the level of cover-up and mismanagement of Chernobyl. And that’s LONG before we get to the design and operational differences between the two situations.
Japan, since WWII, has been a pretty pacifist nation. The USSR... not quite so. Their government continued to quite happily keep tossing bodies on top of their historical pile of millions killed by the Soviet government in their sordid history. Telling me that the USSR is to be lauded, much less copied, in how they handled Chernobyl, flies in the face of evidence. They put that many people onto the job because they didn’t know what else to do, and the natural Soviet reaction, regardless of whether it is dealing with incompetence in military planning or reactor planning, is to throw bodies at the situation (literally). As Joe Stalin liked to say: A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. The USSR is filled with such statistics. Statistics like the number of Red Army soldiers who were simply ordered to grab hold of debris ejected from the reactor core onto the buildings’ roofs and chuck it back into the pit. The USSR couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to make a robotic bulldozer, so they just fell back on their tried-n-true mechanism of ordering men into perilous or fatal circumstances. I don’t see anyone at Fukushima *ordering* men to do anything remotely like that. Are there volunteers in both situations? Yes, absolutely. But at Chernobyl, rather than use robotics or remotely operated equipment, the Russians just did as they always have done.
Remember, Chernobyl was the result of human operator error - entirely. There was no attending extra-nuclear event that initiated the situation. The design of the reactor made it an unstable situation once the error was in motion, but the events that set Chernobyl into motion was not a 9-magnitude quake and attending tsunami. Chernobyl would not have happened on that day in ‘86 if someone decided to just sit on their ass on that particular day and not run a particular test scenario. You do realize that people were still working at Chernobyl until the late 90’s, right? That the other three reactors there were kept on-line and operating? That people were transiting the hot zone for 14-15 years to operate those plants to make electrical power for the Ukraine?
The operators at Fukushima have no such culpability. They had a lake’s worth of water dumped on their heads after they had scrammed the reactors (and therefore went to backup power) as a result of a quake. They followed protocol and procedures. The design failure that led to this turn of events was not planning for a tsunami of this magnitude. That’s it. How it has been handled since then, while not a model of brilliant master planning or luck, hasn’t been a case of brutal repression. Fukushima is missing that special brand of Soviet charm that made the USSR such a wonderful example of mass murder.
That to me is a huge difference in the handling of the two situations. At Chernobyl, the Soviets sent people to die to cover up (literally) the failures of idiots. At Chernobyl, the Soviets evacuated the area before telling the rest of the USSR or the world what was going on. Matter of fact, it was ONLY by external examination of radiation levels at a power plant in Sweden, with resulting international confrontation that the Soviets admitted *at all* that it had happened.
Neither TEPCO, nor Japan, ever made such a cover-up.
Now, as to why the Japanese resisted enlarging the exclusion zone? As far as I can see, this is a case of planning based on past operating experience, coupled with disaster response to the much larger, non-nuclear situation in the area. Enlarging the evac zone is a function of expected dose. They started with incomplete information, they still have incomplete information as to radiation levels and what isotopes they’re dealing with. They didn’t know how long it was going to take to get the situation under control, and they opted to err on the side of past experience of their own and other operators of similar reactors. As they get better estimates that it will take longer to contain the problems at the plants, they can see that the expected dose in the areas will go up before the situation is contained, and they widen the zone(s).
Basing evac plans on the Soviet experience at Chernobyl isn’t entirely rational, simply because the two situations aren’t remotely similar, and the Japanese military aren’t about to show up at people’s homes with an AK in hand, saying “Get on the bus, now.” The people surrounding Chernobyl effectively lost everything but the clothes on their backs. They were forced to leave it all behind. Tourists can go see this stuff now, since they’re opening the area to tourism, BTW.
At Chernobyl, the reactor had a positive temperature coefficient, and had a positive void coefficient, coupled with a reactor vessel there the lid was blown clean off. Chernobyl had pieces of flaming graphite flying into the air, along with chunks of fuel rods, et al. Any nuke-aware person could (and did) look at those designs and say “Boy, you’re making a deal with the Devil right there...” The pile was on fire, the plant was on fire. They had an explosion deep in the core that was the equivalent of tons of TNT. The worst possible scenarios of BWRs or PWR’s don’t reach the level of failure that was seen at Chernobyl.
There’s no fire at Fukushima, there’re dealing with a completely different situation, and their biggest problem is probably the spent fuel pool in #4, where they have no primary containment and there’s much less planning or experience in the nuke industry for dealing with that particular situation.
For all the problems they’re having at Fukushima, the number of deaths for ANY reason at those power plants still hasn’t approached the number of deaths we have in the US from coal mining accidents in a single year, every year. The flood, on the other hand... that death toll is now only officially 15K+. The local people, however, are contesting this:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/15/japan-death-toll-numbers-dont-add-up-tsunami-survi/
With that level of confusion (ie, that they don’t even know how many people they have dead from flooding), I’m supposed to expect that they have every little “i” dotted, every “t” crossed and everything cross-checked and verified WRT their handling of Fukushima? I don’t. Crap happens. There is no conspiracy there, just massive confusion with a veneer of incompetence on top.