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:"Re-Opens"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully, enough of the populace here in Britain will become more educated on the topic, and be able to make a rational decision. And hey, even if you don't want it, please, for the love of whatever, base it on scientific knowledge, and not the hysteria saying that you don't want those naughty neutrons in your backyard.
Long-term exclusion zone? (Score:2, Insightful)
So the really big question is how long the primary evacuation zone is going to be left open. At this point it looks like it won't be that terribly long, maybe 50 years or so. However, Japan's history of negative attitudes about nuclear power (for quite understandable reasons) makes it likely that the zone will stay for longer than necessary. Even when we people are let in, it is likely that few people will actively want to return for a while. Since Japan is so small and has such population density issues this could have a much more disproportionate than Chernobyl did on the USSR even though that was by many metrics a much worse accident.
However, none of this is a good reason to be that fearful of nuclear power. It still seems clear that nuclear power is far safer and more reliable than most other forms of power including coal, gas and oil. By number of deaths per a terrawatt hour nuclear power is one of the safest. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html [nextbigfuture.com]. Nuclear power simply seems worse because radioactivity is so scary and because when disasters occur they are rare and spectacular rather than routine. To see how irrational the various anti-nuke fears are one needs to only look at how groups like Greenpeace protest anything remotely nuclear such as fusion power even though it shares none of the risks of fission power. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance/ [greenpeace.org].
Re:"Re-Opens"? (Score:4, Insightful)
My suspicion is in terms of overall "land area rendered unusable for it's previous purpose" nuclear power is fairly low down the scale but it would be nice to actually see the comparison with other accidents
You don't need accidents. Hydroelectric, solar and wind power all render a larger area uninhabitable when they are working normally, than the Fukushima accident did, per MW.
Numbers from Solandri: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2439490&cid=37474650 [slashdot.org]
Re:Re-opens? Those towns were never closed. (Score:5, Insightful)
After the March 11th quake, most if not all the villagers around there evacuated the area at first. It is my understanding some returned a couple of months after the event. A friend of ours decided to stay at her house nearby and has done so ever since.
Myself and my wife and son stayed at our house after the March 11th quake (apart from the night of that incident because a sizeable fissure had appeared on the ground at the rear of my house and we didn't know if it was safe to stay there after consultation with a local fireman, so we stayed overnight at the local community centre).
Since then, I have visited Miyakoji town and the mountain house, with my Geiger counter, and have taken measurements there, and at those locations the levels are around 0.5 uSv/hr - some spots much higher (1.2 uSv/hr), some much lower, depending on what the wind was doing the days after the nuclear plant accident.
People do want to move back to their homes there, I know that much. The various Municipal governments are making or are currently already implementing decontamination plans - at first removing top-soil from schools and government buildings and then presumably from other areas after that. Water supplies in Miyakoji are most often supplied via deep water wells (the water has always been extremely high quality there), and from what I've read, because of this, water supplies should be safe from contamination because any radioactive material will have been filtered out by tens of meters of soil layers above the water extraction point, and by the time any caesium etc. reaches that level, the radioactivity will have gone down to background or safe levels anyway.
I have a map of radiation levels on my personal website, which clearly shows that the radiation plume was mostly blown away from that area towards the north north-west and which agrees with the measurements I personally have taken around where I live and around Tamura.
Lastly, I want people to remember that there has been more widespread devastation, disruption, and death from the magnitude 9 quake and subsequent tsunamis, than there has been even from the nuclear disaster (and I just know someone's going to play the "but what about future deaths from radiation exposure which haven't and can't be counted yet" card - my answer to them is there still will have been more widespread devastation, disruption, and death from the magnitude 9 quake and subsequent tsunamis, than there has been even from the nuclear disaster").