Japan Re-Opens Some Towns Near Fukushima 178
JSBiff writes "Bloomberg, among others, is reporting that the Japanese government has partially lifted the Fukushima evacuation order, allowing residents to return to five towns previously in the evacuation zone. Additionally, a key milestone has been reached in achieving a full 'cold shutdown' of the damaged reactors — the temperature of all three reactors has dropped below 100 deg. C. It's a shame these people were unable to return home for six months. For people who lived closer to the plant, they might never be allowed to return home. Now, the question is: will residents actually want to return, other than to maybe retrieve stuff they left behind?"
"Re-Opens"? (Score:5, Informative)
Having read the article, it seems the summary is completely inaccurate, as the five towns in question were not evacuated. The government is just lifting a "be prepared for evacuation" warning.
Re:"Re-Opens"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Re-Opens"? (Score:3, Informative)
Now, the question is: will residents actually want to return, other than to maybe retrieve stuff they left behind?
Some of the residents of Pripyat and other town inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone have returned to their homes, against the wishes of the Ukrainian government, as unless you're eating food grown from the soil there (or regularly bathing in groundwater) the health dangers are minimal. And that was a for worse incident than in Fukushima, albeit one where many decay products have already decayed, and the majority of the remaining danger is from heavy metal poisoning.
Re:the part the proponents miss (Score:4, Informative)
Such disasters can render areas uninhabitable for thousands of years.
The isotope responsible for almost all of the long term contamination is Cs-137, with a half life of about 30 years. So every century, the activity level drops by a factor of 10. IIRC, the most heavily contaminated area discovered (very close to the reactors) was giving a dose rate of 500 mSv/yr, so even that should be down to below background levels in 3 centuries, with most of the currently excluded area safe long before then.
Now, that's still a heck of a long time - but it's not the thousands of years you mention, and it means that large scale use of nuclear power for centuries will not result in ever-increasing amounts of land lost due to contamination from accidents.
It's worth noting for comparison that hydroelectric power is appalling for rendering large areas uninhabitable, even when it works as planned.
Re:the part the proponents miss (Score:5, Informative)
It's not being ignored. It's accounted for.
1) The vast majority of the region around Chernobyl will probably be safe within a few hundred years. The area immediately around Fukushima will probably be considered contaminated for 50-100 years. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were continuously inhabited, with very little to no negative effect on post-bombing residents. This is nuclear science 101. If radioactive isotopes are extremely dangerous, that means they have short half-lives, and thus are only around for hours or days. If contaminants last for thousands of years as you allude, that means they have long half-lives, and thus are not very radioactive nor dangerous enough to render the area uninhabitable.
It's the radioactive contaminants with medium half-lives which are most dangerous. Their half-lives are long for them to stick around for years/decades, but short enough that they're still dangerously radioactive. These typically have half-lives of 10-30 years, meaning their contamination will only last a few decades to a century. Very few, rare isotopes match your criteria of long half-lives but high radioactivity (it happens when the decay chain of a long half-life isotope results in a bunch of short half-life isotopes in quick succession).
2) As I outlined in the previous Fukushima topic [slashdot.org], hydro and wind render more land area uninhabitable per MWh of energy generated than nuclear. Solar technically only renders the land shaded rather than uninhabitable, but if the panels/reflectors are installed on the ground, then it's uninhabitable. And unlike nuclear which only renders land uninhabitable when there's an accident, the renewable technologies render land uninhabitable as a consequence of their normal operation.
If, as you state, you wish to minimize the "chunks of earth removed from human habitation for many generations," nuclear is the power source which has the smallest footprint per unit of energy generated.
Re-opens? Those towns were never closed. (Score:5, Informative)
I talk to a lot of people here, and everyone seems to say the same thing. "It sucks, but what can we do?" People don't know what is and isn't safe. Different government agencies give different, and more often than not, contradictory reports. People aren't necessarily afraid of the radiation. They're afraid because they don't know what to believe. They don't evac because one report says they're safe, but then they think they should because another one says they're not.
Talking to people here about the alternatives to nuclear power, and what is feasible, I find that they all seem to agree. They'd like to see it go away, but they understand that there's only one way to get rid of it right now, and that would put Japan back in the stone age. Having said that, it seems that the market for household solar panels has increased dramatically for those who have houses and can afford it, but the majority of people here live in apartment buildings or condos. With most people living in the cities, they know there's no way they're going to get rid of nuclear power anytime soon, unless some magical new energy source appears that can produce enough power for everyone while taking up very little land.
Re:"Re-Opens"? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not that the alternatives are so much better; it's more that nuclear issues are located around and easily directly attributed to the nuclear plant. All those deaths from air pollution caused by burning coal are generally not directly linked to that coal fired power plant 20 km away.