Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Prosecutors Request Prison Time For Executives (npr.org) 138
Long-time Slashdot reader reporter shared this article from NPR:
The former chairman and two vice presidents of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. should spend five years in prison over the 2011 flooding and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japanese prosecutors say, accusing the executives of failing to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe. Prosecutors say the TEPCO executives didn't do enough to protect the nuclear plant, despite being told in 2002 that the Fukushima facility was vulnerable to a tsunami....
"It was easy to safeguard the plant against tsunami, but they kept operating the plant heedlessly," prosecutors said on Wednesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. "That led to the deaths of many people." Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78; former Vice President Ichiro Takekuro, 72; and former Vice President Sakae Muto, 68, face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury....
All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.
"It was easy to safeguard the plant against tsunami, but they kept operating the plant heedlessly," prosecutors said on Wednesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. "That led to the deaths of many people." Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78; former Vice President Ichiro Takekuro, 72; and former Vice President Sakae Muto, 68, face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury....
All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.
No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami (Score:5, Insightful)
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The needed emergency electricity generators that had to work got place at a low point.
The plans go back to the 1960's.
Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami (Score:5, Interesting)
You skipped the fact that there's another nuclear plant in the same region of Japan that came through okay because their backup generators were placed up on higher ground.
I don't know enough about the social situation in Japan to pin blame (was it TEPCO, was it the regulatory body?) but off hand I don't have any objections to going after management on this one, and I'm pretty strongly pro-nuclear.
If there's no penalty for a screw-up of this magnitude, then what's the incentive to keep management from rolling the dice again?
Re: No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami (Score:2)
I have lived in Japan for 16 years and it was TEPCO. They were told long before that the plant needed higher dikes to protect it and they ignored the warning. The most galling part is that the plant was operating on a special extension - it should have been decommissioned in January of that year.
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Then wouldn't the officials who approved the extension be just as criminally liable as the executives of TEPCO?
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If there's no penalty for a screw-up of this magnitude, then what's the incentive to keep management from rolling the dice again?
There could be a law that creates a Nuclear Court, which guarantees that Nuclear management will forego the dice and just screw us over intentionally.
Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time I read Atlas Shrugged. It seemed so poorly written, as the political and industrial leaders seemed like such simple caricatures. But more and more I see examples of exactly those behaviors in real life.
Rand's cartoonishly incompetent industrial leaders would blame failures of heavy industry on the weather. "No one could have predicted that storm! We're doing all we can after the fact." Left unsaid was that bad storms (or in this case tsunamis) are certain to happen eventually, and it's your job to be ready for them.
And here we see it in real life, with these guys defending themselves with "no one could have predicted that specific tsunami, all we could do was manage the disaster afterwards". You know, when you start sounding like a villain from an Ayn Rand novel, maybe you should hire different lawyers, as it's hard to do worse than that.
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Except for Rand the corporate owners were not villains. The government trying to regulate and protect the citizens was the villain as well as anyone with social consciousness.
Rand glorified the dog eat dog capitalism. She was too naive to think that people can raise upon merit.
Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami (Score:5, Informative)
Except for Rand the corporate owners were not villains. The government trying to regulate and protect the citizens was the villain as well as anyone with social consciousness.
Rand glorified the dog eat dog capitalism. She was too naive to think that people can raise upon merit.
If you're going to criticize, at least read the Cliff Notes, so that you can do better than being completely wrong about the work you're complaining about. Plenty of stuff to criticize in the actual books she actually wrote, without just making stuff up.
The premise of Atlas Shrugged was that there are very few competent CEOs, heads of R&D, operations managers, etc, in a sea of incompetence, and if those rare competent leaders were suddenly out of the picture, the whole economy would collapse.
To be fair the book is still nonsense (Score:2)
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The irony being the harsher penalties, induce perverse incentives to NEVER REPORT...
Good thing it's only nuclear contamination, and just 1 blowup can affect the whole globe, right?
Good thing nuclear is so cheap to clean up..
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Our Republican friends have been looking like Ayn Rand villains for years now. Take a look at Enron again some time.
Enron is a great example of of the villains in Ayn Rand's books. Create a mishmash of laws bought by a special interest to constrain the free market and then blame deregulation when it fails. What better way was there to fleece the investor owned utilities?
How long have the Democrats controlled the California legislature? Let's blame the Republicans anyway although honestly I would not expect any better of them and there is plenty of blame to tar both sides.
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How long have the Democrats controlled the California legislature? Let's blame the Republicans anyway although honestly I would not expect any better of them and there is plenty of blame to tar both sides.
I'm not sure how many on Enron's corporate board were Republicans, but they controlled the prices by restricting energy supply. They had control of the power market in California by purchasing all power wholesale, then transmitting it out of state to create an in-state shortage. That's because California's market was partially deregulated, only partially. Consumer-level prices were capped, so price didn't affect demand in any way. The wholesale market was deregulated, so wholesalers could buy up power and c
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Without looking, I would say "a lot": Enron donated money to the Republican party during the rise of the Bush Jr. regime.
A lot of the gyrations with putting The Governator in office looked an awful lot like making sure that no one went after the money Enron has stolen from California. There were s
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Nobody has been harmed by Fukushima radiation (not even the case where they 'legally' attributed a death with no medical basis
ahem [bbc.co.uk]
Japan has announced for the first time that a worker at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant died after suffering radiation exposure.
The man, who was in his 50s, died from lung cancer that was diagnosed in 2016.
Japan's government had previously agreed that radiation caused illness in four workers but this is the first acknowledged death.
Funny definition of "nobody" you have there.
Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami (Score:5, Insightful)
Claiming that "nobody" was affected by the radiation would be hard to prove, even if you excluded the workers at the plant-- on the other hand, there was an intense amount of alarmism surrounding the Fukushima incident, and that has essentially turned out to be completely wrong. Democracy Now was running "worse than Chernobyl" headlines; for years afterwards I was tyring to convince people in the SF Bay Area that they really and truly weren't going to die because of leakage in Japan...
What did kill people at Fukushima was an evacutation panic. If you're anti-nuclear, you think "well of course, nuclear is inherently scary!", if you're pro-nuclear, you wonder why no one ever holds the anti-nuclear side accountable for their fear-mongering...
Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami (Score:4, Insightful)
If an electrical fault from a faulty appliance burns your house down (but nobody dies because you got out in time), your focus would be on how you don't have a house anymore, not on how nobody died. If your friend kept telling you "But nobody died!, so no big deal!", and ignored your house, you'd want to punch him in the face.
It's just very, very suspicious that all the pro-nuclear people want to talk about is how nobody died in Fukushima, but never seem to mention the 30,000 people who lost their house, business, not to mention the billions of dollars it cost.
You seem to be focusing in on all the initial over-reaction to the incident, but want to ignore the real problems here. I don't think having to abandon little chunks of the planet for 100 years when one of these things melts is really a good outcome for nuclear power. I'm not terribly comforted by how it wasn't as bad as people's worst imaginations.
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It's not about that. Merkel shut down all nuclear power stations in Germany, throwing the country back to the 19th century if you measure the amount of coal that is burned there now, because of the Fukushima 'nuclear disaster.' The disaster was the tsunami, not the power plant melting down. So Merkel's decision was based on gut feelings, not facts, and one of the stupidest things she did.
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ORLY?
How come Germany burns less coal now than twenty years ago?
Dumbass.
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Last I looked it was "warmer winters"-- not all energy is electrical energy, much of the coal they burn is for heating.
If you're worried about global warming, you do not shut down clean, functioning energy sources. Full stop.
Unfortunately, Jerry Brown over in CA decided to repeat the greens mistake in Germany, and we may lose the Diablo-Canyon plant. here...
But never waste a crisis, right?
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So, you're of the opinion that the alarmism about nuclear power-- whe arguably killed 10s of thousands-- is no big deal, because it's all to avert the greater
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If you ignore NPR's sloppy reporting of environmental issues and go find a less inept news source, you'll find that the TEPCO executives are on trial for "Professional Negligence", not murder or manslaughter. Even the Guardian -- not known for its objective reporting on climate and environment -- gets that right. The financial damage done by the loss of six reactors runs to many billions of dollars. (Two of the reactors are undamaged and a third is probably repairable. But the site is a mess and restart
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Nobody has been harmed by Fukushima radiation (not even the case where they 'legally' attributed a death with no medical basis
ahem [bbc.co.uk]
Japan has announced for the first time that a worker at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant died after suffering radiation exposure.
The man, who was in his 50s, died from lung cancer that was diagnosed in 2016.
Japan's government had previously agreed that radiation caused illness in four workers but this is the first acknowledged death.
Funny definition of "nobody" you have there.
Or the dead people they found in the generator room.
But the nucKooks will just move the goalposts to preserve their "No one"
Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami (Score:4, Insightful)
If you had an even rudimentary understanding of radiation risk and the types of cancers and the typical onset patterns, you'd know that this cancer was almost certainlyl not from Fukushima radiation. There are plenty of articles that explain how this was just some lawyers and politicians following a liability rule, and there were no medical professionals who made this attribution. In fact there are no doctors at all that attribute this to Fukushima radiation.
Basically, the law says anyone who worked at Fukushima and gets cancer, they will attribute it to the plant no matter what.
The foremost expert in field has explicitly explained why this was not based on science.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/06/top-scientist-says-japans-decision-to-financially-reward-fukushima-worker-is-not-based-on-science/#2d6ba6e56a55
But the public is easily misled, as are the media lemmings who copy en-masse without any thought. You can be one of them if you choose.
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fuck off you god damn paid troll
Having reason to question a pushed narrative is not being "a paid troll."
It's About Time. (Score:4, Informative)
The entire Fukushima Disaster was more a disaster because it was entirely preventable. Whether is is malfeasance or nonfeasance it is plainly criminal because it is quite plainly negligence. For anyone with any doubts please refer to The official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission. [nirs.org]
This is an ongoing disaster, the destroyed reactors are still in an earthquake and flood prone area. TEPCO has proven itself completely corrupt, incompetent and incapable. It is in the interests of all Pacific nations to resolve and this issue demands an international response to control and contain it. It is clearly worse than Chernobyl.
I hope TEPCO's board rots in jail.
Errors in thinking often occur. (Score:3)
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The problem is, coal has been killing millions of people a year by spewing out radiation and other pollution. And yet human psychology says it's better to kill millions intentionally with coal rather than risk killing thousands by accident with nuclear. Accidents scare us more because we assign fault to them, perhaps. We can accept any number of routine matter-of-course cost-of-doing-business deaths, but we
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Of course, Fukushima, TMI, and Chernobyl combined didn't kill thousands. More like hundreds.
Of those, ONE (1) was killed by Fukushima. He died this past year.
TMI didn't kill anyone.
Chernobyl killed a couple hundred firefighters (and if Chernobyl were non-nuclear, it would probably have killed the same number of firefighters....).
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The problem is, coal has been killing millions of people a year by spewing out radiation and other pollution. And yet human psychology says it's better to kill millions intentionally with coal rather than risk killing thousands by accident with nuclear. Accidents scare us more because we assign fault to them, perhaps. We can accept any number of routine matter-of-course cost-of-doing-business deaths, but we cannot abide a single dramatic accidental death.
Can you give me the citations showing that millions of people have been killed by coal?
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http://theconversation.com/the-other-reason-to-shift-away-from-coal-air-pollution-that-kills-thousands-every-year-78874
Thousands, amirite? Coal sucks big time. But when we exaggerate, it gives detractors a weapon.
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http://groundwork.org.za/archi... [groundwork.org.za]
I don't support coal in the least. It is filthy, hazardous to health, and it's mining effects are ruinous. The sooner we leave it in the ground, the better.
But I am still waiting for the millions number.
You must place trust SOMEWHERE (Score:3, Interesting)
The desire to find someone to blame and punish them severely is human nature, but the reality is that we need to be able to trust in order to operate at all. One of the issues of making a senior manager responsible for certain issues to the point of criminal liability is that it may become impossible to get anyone to accept the responsibility if they aren't able to show that they acted reasonably in response to the information they had when making the iffy decision. Given that there is ALWAYS a trade off be
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"The desire to find someone to blame and punish them severely is human nature"
I think that's in a large part cultural and it's the desire to resolve problems that's human nature.
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The desire to find someone to blame and punish them severely is human nature, but the reality is that we need to be able to trust in order to operate at all.
The reality is that humans are not trustworthy enough for us to use nuclear power, which is unnecessary anyway.
Re:It's About Time. (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire Fukushima Disaster was more a disaster because it was entirely preventable. Whether is is malfeasance or nonfeasance it is plainly criminal because it is quite plainly negligence.
This disaster illustrates the fatal flaw of nuclear power generation.
It isn't the plants themselves. A nuc plant can be made pretty safe. The problem is humans.
Everything that happened in Fukushima was preventable. From the siting to the design to the seawalls to the back-up system.
But we have deadlines, finances, hubris, corruption and stupidity.
My research on the disaster included a "how could this have been avoided" section. After noting the freely available historical and physical evidence was ignored, it was clear that the site beside the ocean was one of the worst siting options. Further it was possible to come up with a much better site in a few minutes. Along a river, above the historic Tsunami height lines, and therefore much safer.
Why this didn't happen, why seawalls were built that were a dead lock to be overwashed was not the fault of nuclear power, but the results of humans being in charge of it. And it is foolish to think that all nuc plants except Chernobyl and Fukushima or TMI have non-corrupt humans involved.
It all comes to a shitload of energy packed in a small space. With not only kaboom aspects, but using poisonous materials that will take a long time to mitigate if it does go kaboom.
Nuc power can be made safe. History shows us that it is impossible to make humans safe.
Re:It's About Time. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think the seawalls were the ultimate problem.
I think the ultimate problem was the siting of the backup generators. Had they been positioned higher, and continued to operate, the meltdown would have been avoided. They actually put some of the backup generators in a basement. This was an issue that was known about well before the disaster. There was no deadline issue involved in moving the generators to a safer location.
Perhaps it's time to stop blaming the disaster on technical issues and blame greed instead. That's why it is right that some people should go to jail.
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I don't think the seawalls were the ultimate problem.
I think the ultimate problem was the siting of the backup generators. Had they been positioned higher, and continued to operate, the meltdown would have been avoided. They actually put some of the backup generators in a basement. This was an issue that was known about well before the disaster.
Yes - the overtopping of the sea walls allowed salt water to ingress to the emergency generators. But the walls were overtopped by 14 meter waves. The seawalls were 10 meters in height. The big problem was that the area was historically known for bigger waves.
To make matters weirder, the site was originally on a 35 meter bluff, but they scalped 25 meters off it so they could rest the reactor on bedrock.
The generator placement was definitely bad, but if they had not scalped the mountain, and raised the s
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Related, they didn't bother to pre-arrange for emergency backup generators with compatible hookups and didn't have anyone available who could work around that. On the greed side, they delayed using sea water to cool the reactors because they were still irrationally hoping they could get away from the problem cheap.
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The seawalls were critical because even after the emergency pumps were lost it was still possible to save the reactors using mobile pumps. They were available and working on site, but failed to cool the reactors because the water they pumped in was diverted to storage tanks.
The damage from the tsunami had broken the monitoring system that could have told staff that the valve diverting the water was in the wrong position. No-one could get near it to physically check due to damage.
Thus if the seawall had been
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I'm not sure TMI should even be counted. It was scary, but in the end it didn't kill anyone or even release significant radiation. For that matter much of the panic was a result of the unfortunate timing with the release of "The China Syndrome" and the media being anxious to connect the two.
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I'm not sure TMI should even be counted. It was scary, but in the end it didn't kill anyone or even release significant radiation. For that matter much of the panic was a result of the unfortunate timing with the release of "The China Syndrome" and the media being anxious to connect the two.
Cannot argue with that. TMI isn't in the same league.
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Not the Tepco board only. For any public corpiration that makes profit all the stockholders should also go in prison.
No.... stockholders are definitely immune to personal liability for the actions of the corporation whose stock they own (other than the value of the stock can become worthless). The board and management of the corporation have the duty to ensure that actions of the corporation are compliant with the law.
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Ah, but you can't stop there. You gotta go after anybody who buys their products from them directly, or anybody in their stock portfolio, or pays taxes to a government that protects their copyrights and patents and international trade agreements. Yes, that means you!
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And that needs to change. Stockholder must become personally and solidary liable to the actions of the corporations the own stock of.
Only owning bonds should not lead to personal liability.
Yeah, good job completely destroying the economy. And sending plenty of old grandmas to jail who didn't know they had any stock in their retirement fund. And plenty of others going to jail when someone on the board committed fraud that stockholders couldn't have known about. What a winner of an idea!
Re: It's About Time. (Score:2, Informative)
The reactor design is fine. The backup systems were a total failure. The generators were installed too low are flooded. Power lines to the grid were washed away. Emergency procedures also required the shutdown of the only remaining source of power to keep the reactors cool, the reactors themselves.
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For any public corpiration that makes profit all the stockholders should also go in prison.
You'll need quite large prisons, then. And even larger if you throw also those stockholders who own stocks through funds, too.
Of course, I personally don't see why someone who owns, say 10 stocks of Amazon out the outlaying 487 million, should go to prison when they finally crack it down, but this is a free country, you are free to believe whatever you want no matter how boneheaded it is.
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The idea is right though, it's a matter of where the cutoff might lay.
CEO says "we can only make 1 billion this year. The measures we could take to make 1.1 billion would be unethical and probably illegal". Major shareholders say "get us that 1.1 billion or we'll replace you with someone who will someone who will".. Why aren't those major shareholders on the hook when the company takes those questionable measures and people die?
Perhaps the punishment should be proportional. Let's say the corporation is foun
Five years (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd be ok with that, provided it was in a psychiatric ward to deal with their obviously disturbed minds and to rehabilitate them to the point where they were fit to live in society.
There were plenty of predictions of the tsunami, when it was likely, how severe it was likely to be, etc. TEPCO chose to ignore those, because they were expensive, and to go with considerably cheaper predictions of a much smaller, more frequent, event. You can prove anything, if you constrict the type and date range of the evidence sufficiently. Particularly if you can make it show what is convenient for you.
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I'd be ok with that, provided it was in a psychiatric ward to deal with their obviously disturbed minds and to rehabilitate them to the point where they were fit to live in society.
That's how we should treat everyone, though. As long as we're treating anyone the other way, these guys "deserve" it more than most of the people we've got in prison now.
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There were plenty of predictions of the tsunami, when it was likely, how severe it was likely to be, etc. TEPCO chose to ignore those, because they were expensive, and to go with considerably cheaper predictions of a much smaller, more frequent, event.
Yup - human hubris.
And of course, disasters seldom have one single cause. But this one had one huge glaring red flag 5-alarm problem. The site.
In the true nature of human interaction, I suspect that someone made a real killing off the siting decision.
No excuses for bad engineering (Score:3)
All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.
Duh, they could not have predicted THAT particular event, BUT Tsunami's are a known and foreseeable natural event, so
they definitely could have predicted that there would be the possibility of one or more tsunami's in general (over long periods of time),
and when installing and operating a nuclear plant: you have a duty to ensure that radioactive material created and stored in/about
your plant creates does not endanger the survivors after a foreseeable natural event.
So if a particular Tsunami strength and size would not be guaranteed to kill everyone within 100 miles of your plant: your plant had better not be a threat to the public within 100 miles during/after that tsunami.
The only regret is that they waited until AFTER the event to arrest them.
There should be 3rd party reviews and audits of overall power plant designs and operations, and the capability of charging executives for crimes,
mandating jail time and/or plant shutdowns BEFORE a catastrophic tsunami, etc, actually occurs..
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If it can’t be operated safely then it needs to be shut down. If upgrading for safe operation is not economically viable, all the more incentive to shutter it. This isn’t rocket science.
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I live a few miles from a nuclear plant on the East Coast. It's entirely possible that a tsunami could hit this area (likely spawned off the African coast). It's also possible that a large hurricane could hit. We have also had earthquakes. Any of which might take out the power plant. It already operates on razor thin margins. Should they spend millions to protect against these natural disasters? Where will the money come from? Increase power costs and put the population under even more financial stress? Should the federal government give out a bunch of free money to fix it?
You should to a little tsunami research. Tsunamis can hit just about anywhere, but the chance of a large tsunami hitting any particular spot varies widely over short distances. It is dependent on shoreline shape, depth and profile of sea floor near the shore, and distance from potential sources. If you worry about a particular plant, you should look up its exact location, elevation, then find a tsunami study that details that exact piece of shoreline. Or, you can live in fear and ignorance if that pleases y
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I thought nuclear was the future and was so much cheaper to produce?
That's true of Nuclear in principle; However, the implementation of the nuclear plant needs to be right to avoid creating hazards.
It calls for further engineering research work to produce "inherently safe" reactor designs based on Thorium / Molten Salt Reactor Technology (MSR) such as the LfTR [wikipedia.org]
First: at the very minimum -- Old plant designs such as those in use at Fukushima should be permanently decommissioned and 100% of plants using
Tsunami prone coastline (Score:1)
How is it difficult to predict tsunamis on a coastline with a history of multiple tsunamis? The same goes for earthquakes. They designed the plant to handle 7.0 despite having measured more powerful earthquakes at the very same location. The professional negligence seems to be due to not only discarding historical data, but also discarding engineering warnings presented to them even before the powerplant opened.
5 years seems like nothing compared to the predictable damage they caused. It was all about money
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Re:"The deaths of so many people" (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it fascinating how people, when confronted by those silly things called "facts," respond with non-sequiturs.
The actual Fukushima death toll is still zero, no matter how much you hate capitalism.
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You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.
Then perhaps you'd be so good as to post a source link for your "news." Every article and news site I've read since the disaster says the death toll directly attributable to the meltdown is zero, precisely as the GP stated.
Should you present evidence from a reliable, unbiased source then I'm more than willing to accept it as fact. However, until then, all the "news" available on the accident refutes your assertion.
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Every article and news site I've read since the disaster says the death toll directly attributable to the meltdown is zero, precisely as the GP stated. ...
That was at the time of the meltdown.
We are now 3 or 4 years later
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And yet, three or four years later, the death toll due to radiation is...wait, let me check again...yup, still zero. Care to try again?
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Ah ... you are still out of the loop?
Three or four clean up workers died ... and obviously no one knows how many actually died from inhaling radioactive material as no one makes statistics about it, because: it can not be attributed to the cause.
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The actual Fukushima death toll is still zero, no matter how much you hate capitalism.
You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.
You and I both know that he's going to come up with some wild thing like "Well - people who were hiding in caves at the time - not one of them was even affected, much less killed!"
Also bizzare how some pro nucs have taken to claiming that having evidence based concerns are somehow anti-capitalist. Especially with extensive Guvmint subsidies and the Price Anderson act just to allow them to exist, Nuc plants are the very embodiment of socialism.
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The actual Fukushima death toll is still zero, no matter how much you hate capitalism.
You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.
You and I both know that he's going to come up with some wild thing like "Well - people who were hiding in caves at the time - not one of them was even affected, much less killed!"
Also bizzare how some pro nucs have taken to claiming that having evidence based concerns are somehow anti-capitalist. Especially with extensive Guvmint subsidies and the Price Anderson act just to allow them to exist, Nuc plants are the very embodiment of socialism.
The number is either 0 or 1 depending on who you believe. While tragic, its not the huge numbers that many predicted.
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The actual Fukushima death toll is still zero, no matter how much you hate capitalism.
You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.
You and I both know that he's going to come up with some wild thing like "Well - people who were hiding in caves at the time - not one of them was even affected, much less killed!"
Also bizzare how some pro nucs have taken to claiming that having evidence based concerns are somehow anti-capitalist. Especially with extensive Guvmint subsidies and the Price Anderson act just to allow them to exist, Nuc plants are the very embodiment of socialism.
The number is either 0 or 1 depending on who you believe. While tragic, its not the huge numbers that many predicted.
For the level of proof I accept, I have no idea how the numbers were obtained. Were any deaths related to radiation or were they just part of the mechanics of the unfolding events?
And proving beyond doubt that any death is the result of exposure to radiation is difficult other than obvious massive exposure at the time of the accident. The kind that leads to near instant pathology.
But is nuclear power generation going to take strategy from the tobacco industry? Quibble over deaths provable beyond doubt
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The proponents need to own the sins of the industry. Otherwise they'll just be cranks, squealing how everyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid. When in fact, as Shakespeare said it so well - "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more - it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Ok, so every other way we make power needs to do the same. Hydro is responsible for every broken dam in history. Coal for all the black lung. Oil for all the wars in the Middle East. Wind for everyone who has fallen off of a windmill. Solar for everyone who fell off a roof and broken their necks while installing panels. Every source of power kills people sometimes. We can even chart the deaths per kilowatt and guess what? Nuclear still has the least. Your goal of 0 deaths is naive at best. At wors
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The proponents need to own the sins of the industry. Otherwise they'll just be cranks, squealing how everyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid. When in fact, as Shakespeare said it so well - "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more - it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Ok, so every other way we make power needs to do the same. Hydro is responsible for every broken dam in history. Coal for all the black lung. Oil for all the wars in the Middle East. Wind for everyone who has fallen off of a windmill. Solar for everyone who fell off a roof and broken their necks while installing panels. Every source of power kills people sometimes. We can even chart the deaths per kilowatt and guess what? Nuclear still has the least. Your goal of 0 deaths is naive at best.
Wait....what? Where on earth did you ever pull that out of anything I wrote? Any industrial process is going to have death now and then. U have those charts bro? Even just fixating on deaths is only telling a small part of the picture.
But enough of the silly stats. Flying the space shuttle might have remarkably different safety stories depending on total miles travelled and deaths per launch.
Nuclear accidents have this problem of messing up the locality, and cleanup costs that end up with simply abando
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I find it fascinating that you assume I am in the US, or a US citizen. Which I am not.
Everyone is pretty fascinated this morning. That's fascinating in itself.
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Yeah, why try to harden or put in safeguards at any facility, because fuck it, it's an act of god. The executives didn't directly kill anyone, it was the flying debris and deadly chemical cloud, and a warning was in fact issued.
They were just following orders.
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At the time there was no choice but to evacuate. There was no way of knowing how bad it would get, and in the end it proved to be necessary anyway.
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Several workers have died during the cleanup of the power stations.
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Several people died due to a tsunami as well. Both of these are independent of a nuclear incident. Lumping them together serves only to further political causes. Separating them however allows people to be truly held accountable and correct actions and mitigations to be devised in the future.
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And yes, the goalposts start moving again. We were not talking about deaths caused by renewable power, we were talking about deaths from the Fukushima incident.
All sources of power cause deaths. Anything that cause be used for power can be used to kill people. Plus, accidents happen, period. The question is which power source and how many deaths for how much power. One issue with nuclear has always been the fear of a high casualty event which has never materialized. The question of 0 or 1 death from an old PWR designed plant run so poorly in the face of a huge natural disaster is pretty amazing right? That's the point. Not that it is OK, but when everything
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So far the humanity has been lucky. But luck is most certainly not an inherent trait of nuclear power plants. Especially given that all these power stations that did have an accident - yes, the one in Chernobyl as well - were sold as completely safe when built.
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According to the WHO and Japanese gouvernment, the direct death toll of the Fukushima disaster was: Zero. https://ourworldindata.org/wha... [ourworldindata.org]
The indirect results from radiation related issues and evacuation stress was not zero, but I find it hard to argue that the executives are directly responsible for the deaths of so many people. The tsunami itself caused tremendous devastation and evacuation was a given, with or without the nuclear plant there.
Don't even wonder why the general citizenry doesn't trust the pro-nuc clan. You are the personification of why.
Do a little research as to exactly why there was no other outcome but catastrophic failure for the Fukushima site.
All human decisions that from a safety, standpoint are inexplicable outside of straightforward explanation that there was corruption involved.
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According to the WHO and Japanese gouvernment, the direct death toll of the Fukushima disaster was: Zero. https://ourworldindata.org/wha... [ourworldindata.org]
The indirect results from radiation related issues and evacuation stress was not zero, but I find it hard to argue that the executives are directly responsible for the deaths of so many people. The tsunami itself caused tremendous devastation and evacuation was a given, with or without the nuclear plant there.
Don't even wonder why the general citizenry doesn't trust the pro-nuc clan. You are the personification of why.
Do a little research as to exactly why there was no other outcome but catastrophic failure for the Fukushima site.
All human decisions that from a safety, standpoint are inexplicable outside of straightforward explanation that there was corruption involved.
The GP did provide a link which backed up his assertions. You provided insults. Just saying...
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Are you seriously that stupid or are you trolling for the anti-Nike side? Itâ(TM)s fucking incredible the level of reality and logic disconnect in your statement.
You still illustrate exactly why people think that nuc people ar as trustable as Jerry Sandusky around ten year old boys. Allow me to explain.
You (apparently) and many of the pro nuc crowd meet every criticism be calling the person who has the nerve to question any aspect as stupid, detached form reality, and illogical. When in fact, I am not anti-nuc. I consider you the enemy from within. The pro nuc person who systematically destroys the credibility by acting like a smug asshole. When in fact, all you o
HA HA! OH WOW. (Score:2)
If I ever go on a shooting rampage I hope you're a member of the jury. I'll just have my attorney explain to the court that *I* didn't kill anyone, it was the bullets from the gun that I fired.
"The number of people who died at the hands of gumpish was: Zero. The indirect results from bullet-related issues and blood loss was not zero, but I find it hard to argue that the gunman is directly responsible for the deaths of so many people."
In the US (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, if senior management of companies must be responsible for failures, then senior management in Government must be responsible for not protecting our borders as specified in the Constitution.
Deliberately letting in criminals and terrorists because they don't want to fund the defense of the border should be punishable by prison time. Sounds good to me.
After all, we have only been talking about this in earnest for decades.
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Deliberately voting to the white house a known and well established narcissist, psychopath, compulsive liar, scammer, con-man and child molester for the sole purpose of pissing off half the U.S. population and wilfully destabelizing society and risking plunging it into chaos should be considered an act of treason punishable by prison time.
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Deliberately voting to the white house a known and well established narcissist, psychopath, compulsive liar, scammer, con-man and child molester for the sole purpose of pissing off half the U.S. population and wilfully destabelizing society and risking plunging it into chaos should be considered an act of treason punishable by prison time.
Everyone realizes that the only viable solution to all of these problems that you and everyone else bring up *IS* Prison. So the US is working as quickly as it can to turn the US into a prison.
I bet when that gets done, you'll still be unhappy.
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Remember that slavery was not abolished in the USA and still exists legally -- in prisons.
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a known and well established narcissist, psychopath, compulsive liar, scammer, con-man and child molester
Wow! You do realize you just described pretty much every politician in office, right? If we held all elected officials to this standard, Washington would be a ghost town!
Not a bad idea, actually.
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When Obama was campaining, his words were about unity, solidarity, and hope. Whether he was sincere or not is irrelevant; people believed him, and by voting for him, they sincerely tought, naively, stupidely maybe, but still sincerely, that they were doing good.
When Trump was campaining, his words were all about fear, anger, and hate. Unless they didn't live at any moment anywhere on planet Earth during the past 50 or so years, they knew exactly what kind of man he was. When they voted for him, they deliber
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It is kind of funny to see a super power pissing their pants trembling in terror before a couple of thousands refugees.
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But what's really happening is congrespeople not wanting to flush 5 billion dollars down the toilet on a plan that only works in the imagination of a small child.
Send me $200,000 and I will visualize a safe border every day for the next 5 years. You want a safe border, don't you? $200,000 is quite a bargain compared to $5 billion!
Could not have predicted the obvious (Score:3, Funny)
There's only a few centuries of Japanese paintings depicting massive waves, affecting Japan. It's not like the word "tsunami" is Japanese, so why should they anticipate such a remote, unfamiliar event?
The Japanese people have no experience with nuclear disasters or big waves, and this was completely unforeseeable.
This is the right move (Score:2)
What made a minor accident into a major crisis was purely the fault of bonehead management. After a current-generation reactor is scrammed because of an impending disaster, all you have to do to avoid a meltdown is keep coolant circulating through it for long enough to remove heat of decay. Even in a regional disaster that destroys the power grid, there are ways of doing this that should be prearranged, like hooking up fire trucks to the coolant system. But when they tried exactly this at Fukushima, nobody