There was also partial melting of the core at Three Mile Island. The containment structure is designed to, well, contain the fuel and the radiation even if the core melts completely. Chernobyl lacked a proper containment vessel, which as we saw was an extremely bad idea.

If you study that XKCD chart I posted earlier, you can see that Chernobyl was several orders of magnitude worse than either Fukushima Daiichi or Three Mile Island.

Parker Says:

IMO the problems at the Daiichi reactors merely demonstrate the relative safety of nuclear energy.

Exactly! This was a pair of conjoined natural disaster scenarios exceeding the design parameters of a 60’s-era reactor, and the only deaths remotely attributable to the plant issues is 1 worker who accidentally got crushed by machinery, and several elderly patients in a hospital that got abandoned by their caregivers. Not a single one of those deaths were directly from the radiation leaks themselves.

Newer generations of plants are even safer.

I really wish news organizations would gain and provide some perspective on this (yeah, I know, laugh all you want at that, but I’m serious: I really wish they would). It is indeed a disaster, it does indeed have future ramifications, but on the other hand, it is not a Chernobyl or something that would prevent people from returning to the area in the near future. Unless there was a leak of the actual core fuel material and the subsequent long-lived fission reaction products (like cesium, strontium, etc.), then there’s nothing that can’t be cleaned up.

I hate to sound like some Greenpeace lunatic, but frankly, coal and oil fired power plants have killed more people in the course of normal operation than nuclear plants have during disasters. Those have done so through everything from mining disasters to creating air pollution and skewing the death rate for asthmatics and other people with respiratory problems. The only people to die directly from radiation during a nuke accident were the engineers and firefighters at Chernobyl, and that design was horrid compared to even Fukushima, let alone new generations of reactors.

It’s driving me nuts, but society keeps on overstating the risks of nuclear plants. I feel like tearing my hair out sometimes at it.

If I’m understanding the folks I’m talking to correctly, ‘critical’ is actually a laymans term, so it’s used loosely. When I said it, I was using the dominant definition, which is merely a self-sustaining reaction (with “supercritical” referring to an accelerating reaction, but none of them actually referring to the mass going “BOOM!”).

An engineering student told me that nuke engineers are actually more specific: They use a measurement called “K”. K is the ratio between neutrons released in one “generation” of fission and neutrons released in the subsequent generation that’s touched off by that first fission event. When K is less than 1, the reaction is slowing down; the fissionable material is experiencing fewer and fewer instances of actual fission. This is when the fuel mass is “subcritical”. When K is more or less equal to 1, it is self sustaining, and laymen can call that “critical”. When it K > 1, that is “supercritical”. When K is way, way the heck above 1, it’s accelerating greatly, possibly out of control. I’m not certain what K value is considered an actual nuclear explosion, but I do believe there are factors above and beyond mere fission rate that determines whether something actually explodes or merely gets super, super hot. That’s actually a good question to pose to those students and one engineer I was referring to earlier. I’ll ask them.

I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with them being virtually the only ones talking.

I’d think this would be a great opportunity for level-headed newspapers and news networks to say: (a) no, there is no crisis, and stop pretending there is; (b) the safety mechanisms actually worked, in spite of being pushed past their design limits, and we can be proud of that and grateful for it; (c) here are the details and stats, to demonstrate that we’re not sellouts to some vested interest or other; and (d) our honorable opponents are trying to get rich by scaring you to death.

Is there money to be made with that message? I’d think there is. Who will step up and start making it?

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

And you completely dodge the issue of what their honorable conduct should be — to report what’s going on as accurately as possible.

Rubbish, the media acted like a bunch of people set on selling shedloads of newspapers. Like they always do. Capitalism at its worst.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

I printed it out and put it up on the wall at work. It compares radiation dosages from a variety of sources. It’s pretty new because it mentions Fukushima in a couple of places.

One amusing fact is that Americans who left Japan and flew back to the U.S. got a higher radiation dose from the plane flight than they would have gotten if they had stayed put.

However, we can be confident that in the weeks and months ahead swarms of fish with 3 tails and a few kittens with 2 heads will be discovered and spawn a thousand cover up conspiracy theories.