Sure, but there we're talking about people who had very prolonged exposure.

Apparently, Chernobyl, a nasty meltdown by all accounts, didn't result in the kind of widespread death/dismemberment/three-headed babies kind of thing that many feared.
[Reply]

We do that here in the USA also, if incase of a nucleur emergency dose limits are increased for essential employees.
[Reply]

I Work at the Hanford site, everything is so regulated around here you can't even sneeze without someone taking a survey.
[Reply]

A few people drank slightly-radioactive water in the 40's and 50's back when the feds didn't know what the hell they were doing, and a few people may have experienced a greater risk of cancer.

Well, ignoring the fact that nuclear technology and safety has advanced over the last half century, you don't really want to compare this to the health impact of burning fossil fuels (which are the only alternative for base load power, don't even bother mentioning solar/wind). I'm not even talking about dubious global warming numbers, just simple air pollution and coal mining.

The hilarious thing about it, is for all that we freak out about it, nuclear is safer than burning coal. The only reason to burn coal is because we can do it cheaper. It is different psychologically, because we can understand the concept of burning something for power, and we can picture and accept the risk of air pollution, but nuclear reactions seem like voodoo magic to us, so its scary.
[Reply]

Uhm, translations are still a bit unclear, but some are reporting that they've ordered Daiichi evacuated. If true, basically throwing the towel in...
[Reply]

Excerpts: The New York Times

First at Chernobyl, Burning Still Sign In to E-Mail This
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: April 26, 2006

Chernobyl still haunts, 20 years after that morning, April 26, 1986, when something went wrong in Reactor No. 4 and it exploded, sending a plume of debris and radioactive particles across the Soviet Union and eventually far beyond.

"What they described in newspapers and magazines — it was all rubbish," said Anatoly Rasskazov, the station photographer who was there that day.

"The ruins that I photographed from the ground and the upper part were retouched so it couldn't be seen that there was a ray coming from there, that everything was glowing," he said. "Just a ruin. So as not to get the public up in arms."

Twenty years later, the anniversary has occasioned new debate among those who have studied its consequences and those who have wielded the results as evidence of what a world in urgent search of energy should do with nuclear power.

A committee of United Nations agencies released a study last fall concluding that the effects were not as dire as first feared. It suggested that only 4,000 would, in the end, die from diseases caused by direct exposure to the radiation. Greenpeace, the environmental group, released its own response last week, saying Chernobyl would kill at least 90,000.

The true number may never be known, but the lasting impacts, physical and psychological, are evident in those who came to be known as liquidators. They were the hundreds of thousands of firefighters, pilots, soldiers, scientists and experts sent to contain the damage, to evacuate the citizenry and ultimately to encase the deadly ruin in a concrete sarcophagus whose stability appears precarious.

A photographer for The New York Times sought out 27 of them in Moscow, Kiev and Minsk, photographing them as they recounted their experiences at the time and in the turbulent years that followed. What they described sounded very much like war. At least 47 workers and liquidators died almost immediately. Hundreds, perhaps thousands have died since; the records are unclear. The rest endure as veterans, many as invalids, sickly and unappreciated, if not entirely unrecognized by newly independent countries that wish to put the worst of Soviet history behind them.

"Just like the Germans had come, this enemy had arrived," said Arkady Rokhlin, an engineer, who was 58 at the time and so old enough to remember that war. "And we had to defend ourselves."

And like war, it was disorienting. Fear and heroism mingled with bureaucratic chaos and surrealistic calm. "In a real war shells explode, bullets fly, bodies fall, blood flows," he said. And then he remembered the summer of '86 in the most poisoned place on earth: sun, birds, gardens "bulging with fruit."

"You couldn't possibly have imagined that all this was death."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/wo...chernobyl.html
[Reply]

That UN speculated number still has not proven out all these years later. The greenpeace study was debunked long ago as a crap study which relied exclusively on non-peer-reviewed papers.

Even if 4,000 proves out, thats not bad as an absolute worst-case scenario, given that this kind of a spectacular explosion is all but impossible today.

Even in Japan, given that they managed to hold out several days without a meltdown, if a meltdown does occur and the fuel melts out of the reactor, it will no longer likely be hot enough to burn out of the floor of the concrete container.
[Reply]

The biggest problem for me isn't the process of making nucleur power, it's what the **** do you do with the waste.

Take the Hanford site for instance, the underground storage tanks that held the waste from plutonium production are leaking and the waste is getting into the groundwater.

You can't really just go dig them things up and fix them.
[Reply]

CNN and NYT have both kind of half reluctantly confirmed this, like they don't really believe it's true. Here's the quote from the NYT blog:

"Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, is holding a news conference that is being broadcast live on Japanese television. Mr. Edano said radiation readings started rising rapidly Wednesday morning outside the front gate of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. "All the workers there have suspended their operations. We have urged them to evacuate, and they have," he said, according to a translation by NHK television."
[Reply]

On April 26, 2006, the New York Times published the story.

New York Times reporter Steven Lee Meyers said, "The true number may never be known, but the lasting impacts, physical and psychological, are evident in those who came to be known as liquidators."
[Reply]

Oh. ****
[Reply]

Yeah the expert on CNN said he hopes he just misinterpreted what they are saying, because it sounds like they are just walking away.
[Reply]

[Reply]

He's kind of bothering me. I'm not sure why you can expect these workers to stay and face certain illness or death, if things really have gotten so bad.


Reuters has reported that Japan might ask for direct US military support to cool the reactors.
[Reply]

If this was day one and there was any thought that the reactor could literally blow up near a major unevacuated city, some workers would still be there on a suicide mission if need be.

At this point, there's little to gain if the local radiation level has surged. You go out half a mile and its going to be next to nothing. The fuel has had several days to cool, so its not going to burn out of concrete containers that were built specifically to contain molten nuclear fuel.

There's really almost no risk to human life here at this point, so why would you ask some workers to potentially die to cool down some fuel a little quicker?
[Reply]