You heap the crimes of Stalin in with the behavior of the Soviets re Chernobyl. I made clear in my response that I was isolated Soviet nuke response and saying that the Japanese seem to be intent in following in their footsteps - this is not over yet and the Japanese (TEPCO and GOV) have been withholding info from the citizens thus far.
Do you know WHY TEPCO officials apologized, with tears in their eyes, for not ‘sharing’ information? You realize that the Japanese had their SPEEDI projections but decided not tell the public? That the Japanese most likely knew that the cores had melted down months before they admitted it? That if they didn’t know the cores were melted down then there really is no excuse for them not requesting backup generators? You know that TEPCO requested to abandon the four reactors completely - let them go completely out of control - in mid march? That TEPCO grants daily interviews between senior officials and favored news outlets but only allows assistants to meet with ‘outside’ news reporters once per week? That the government just issued a statement saying that hospitals were prohibited from assessing the health of people living near Fukushima without consent from the Ministry of Health because it would place a ‘burden’ on the residents? You realize that the government and TEPCO release information on isolated isotopes sporadically so that the true radioactivity load in any one area cannot be calculated? That Japan is testing 1 plot of 1 farm associated with a city or town and then declaring the entire farm production of that town as proven safe?
Yes I am familiar with Soviets - I worked with them and I’ve read up on them - they told me about conscripts risking being shot in the back to get away from being forced into working to clean up Chernobyl. I was horrified.
“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. “
No - not true. They worked hard to get robots onto the roof to do the cleaning there but the electronics could not take the radiation. There’s video that describes one robot hurling itself into the reactor - out of control from radiation. Watching what the Soviets did - forcing men to run across the roof and pick up radioactive graphite with their hands was about the worst thing I’ve witnessed in a loongggg time. Until I heard that TEPCO asked to abandon melting nukes (and spent fuel ponds) with 40 times the amount of fuel in them compared with Chernobyl. What that would do to their people and their country?
The Soviets didn’t say ‘let’s get out of here!’ and leave Chernobyl to burn itself out like TEPCO wanted to do. Do you realize how much more fuel is at Fukushima compared with Chernobyl? And that the Japanese plan will allow Fukushima to send radiation into the air for months if not years? How much they’ll dump in the ocean? They are hoping things will be ok when it hits the water table?
And Fukushima was built in an earthquake zone despite warnings from scientists who warned of the likelihood of tsunami’s exceeding design spec? No - the Soviet reactor disaster was a series of bad management decision - as was the decision to build on fault zones in tsunami areas.
The Soviets told their people not to worry until they realized they would die unless evacuated. They lied and told them they could come back. That appears to be what the exclusion zone people face. The Japanese have made sure that children still go to school with contaminated playgrounds and eat Fukushima food and drink the water and milk - without testing the effects on the people.
I’m glad the Japanese are not living in an impoverished communist regime like the Soviets were when the disaster happened - but their relative freedom, education, wealth, technology, and armed with hindsight of Chernobyl should have guided their decisions to place their reactors in locations not on top of faults or in tsunami zones and to handle preparing the populace in advance regarding what actions to take in the event of nuke emergencies as well as acting on behalf of Japanese citizens once the crisis unfolded.
The worlds largest reactor is in Japan and it shut down with a 5.4 earthquake because it’s on a fault zone. The breeder reactor crew in Japan that didn’t have a section on how to manage fuel so the plant suffered an incident and the manager committed suicide? These are management decisions. And they happen to take place in a culture that requires conformity when that feature is damaging their response to the world’s worst nuke disaster. And it is not over yet.
The ‘conspiracy takes so many people’ comment you made doesn’t really apply here because the culture has melded conformity and politics. The gov tells the schools to remain open because it’s safe, the schools chide the parents for worrying about their children eating Fukushima produce and playing on a contaminated playground, the citizens gather playground dirt and deliver it to the gov. offials. The gov says Tokyo is free of hazardous levels of radiation, the people form their own monitoring network then independent scientist detect hot spots in many locations in Tokyo and then, the gov. announces it will test in Tokyo. None of the news outlets with whom TEPCO has a massive budget even asks if TEPCO is testing for plutonium. When, finally, an outsider reporter does ask he is firmly told ‘no - we are not testing for Plutonium’ and then the next day TEPCO announces it’s testing for plutonium.
The Japanese gov will continue to withhold information as long as it can - this worked partially for the Soviets because apologists still claim few people were killed by radiation because the Soviets made it illegal to report death by irradiation for the first 3 years after Chernobyl.
Yes - I see similarities - not of gulags and ‘Young Pioneers’ but of withholding what is known, denying the truth and letting it trickle out months later while telling their people that this is not going to be the lifelong problem it is going to be for them. They propose to cleanup this mess by January ‘12? On what basis? No one has ever cleaned up a single melt down before but they are going to cleanup three and address the crumbling spent fuel pool at number 4? How bad might Japan’s decisions be for the world? Well, this well regarded scientists think it might be mighty mighty bad:
‘As Dr. Michio Kaku, a world renowned CUNY theoretical physicist pointed out on CNN March 18, 2011, Chernobyl involved one reactor and only 57.6 Tons of the reactor core went into the atmosphere. In dramatic contrast, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster immediately involved six reactors and a whopping IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN Agency) documented 2,800 Tons of highly radioactive old reactor cores.”
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/28/fukushima-how-many-chernobyls-is-it/
To me, the crimes of the Soviets are a spectrum that starts with Lenin and the October Revolution and run clear through the early 90’s. Stalin is but one chapter, a particularly savage chapter, in the Soviet system.
People in the US in the 80’s were silly (or stupid) enough to think that Ol’ Splotch-Top was a new kind of leader, kinder, gentler, cuddlier sort of communist. Well, ask the people of Afghanistan about that. It wasn’t because the Soviets were doing an imitation of a Fuller Brush salesman that we backed the Muj in Afghanistan and started the mess that has sort of boomeranged on us in Osama bin Laden.
As for the robots: No effort seems to have been made to determine what the level of radiation was on the roof project. None. The level of ionizing radiation required to make electronics (ie, solid state electronics) malfunction is huge. No one seemed to want to honestly put 2+2 together and say “Golly, that’s sorta like 4, huh?” or “Golly, it takes one hell of a lot of ionizing radiation to make solid state electronics malfunction... so let’s get some equipment up here and *measure it*.”
As I said, no effort was made. Any engineer worth his beer would have said “Hmmm. Golly, why has more than one robot or remote operated device failed here? Can someone get me a reading on the actual, you know, *level* of ionizing radiation here?” No, instead, let’s go call up the reservists, have them make lead-sheet suits to feel better about it, and send them marching out there.
In hindsight, some people reckon the radiation levels on the roof project was in excess of 2 C/kg. Well, golly... in light of charge levels like that, little wonder the electronics malfunctioned. The solution to that is to not use electronics. Duuuuuh. I’m a EE, and if you give me that sort of operating environment (which would require measuring the radiation levels first), I’d say “Don’t call me, go talk to that MechE over there, and ask around to start getting a whole lot of hydraulic hoses, valves and pumps” - stuff that wouldn’t be affected by that level of ionizing radiation. All that was needed was to take some readings before throwing up one’s hands in disgust and puzzlement as to why the electronics were malfunctioning. If they’d taken said readings, they’d have known that sending men out there was even more absurd.
The Soviets called up 10,000 miners (not members of the Army, but miners - who were given no choices in the matter) to dig a tunnel under the mess, to allow them to install a cooling plant. After the miners worked like sled dogs... the Soviets didn’t install the cooling plant. Instead, they put some concrete into the chamber below the reactor core. Examples like this abound in the Chernobyl story. Utterly feckless, bureaucratic, totalitarian incompetence was the order of the day.
The entombment over Chernobyl wasn’t fully closed for years. They had holes of 1 to 10 square meters in the structure; it was never built to be air or water tight. It was a fast-n-dirty operation, more evidence of a management and political team that had no clue what they were doing. They dumped in sand, boron, lead (what a winning idea there...) on top of the fire.
It still isn’t “sealed,” and the structure actually needs to be replaced. No one appears interested in paying for it, least of all the Ukraine or Russia. Fortunately, just as in TMI and other reactor core meltdowns, the much-ballyhoo’ed meltdown to China (or where ever is on the other side of the globe) never happened. In all instances, the core melted, slumped only so far (in Chernobyl’s case, into the floor below) and it cooled and sat there. Radioactive as all hell, sure, but a China Syndrome? Nope.
Compared to Chernobyl, so far the Japanese have been an order of magnitude less inept. Citing “reactors with 40 times more fuel” is like comparing apples and oranges. A two-stage weapon has far less fuel in it than a power reactor. I’d rather have a faulty power reactor next door than a faulty weapon in storage next door for obvious reasons.
Have the Japanese got a mess on their hands? Of course they do. I’ve said before and I’ll say again, that I think the cleanup costs on this could run as high as $300B. But these constant cynical calls of “they lie!” are getting just a little silly. They’ve got a complicated, highly dynamic situation on their hands, and the clowns in the media have the math and physics IQ of a fluffy rabbit. Add to this the tendency for the lesser technical talents to rise in management, and there’s plenty of potential for mis-statement and false data in the press.
When I look back on the footage of actual work on Chernobyl and then I look at TEPCO’s recent status reports:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110617e4.pdf
There’s simply no comparison. Anyone who thinks there is is simply full of crap. NISA is warning TEPCO when they have two (count them, *two*) workers with detected exposures above 250 mSv. Tens of thousands of Chernobyl guys have *no* idea how much exposure they got. The Soviets never thought to do measurements. The workers didn’t have proper respirators until late in the game, they didn’t have proper dosimeters, monitoring equipment, etc. The Soviets just blundered their way through the whole thing with brute force.
The IAEA report (now available as of 07 June) makes for interesting reading. I suggest you go read it.