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:Long-term exclusion zone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Holy crap, that greenpeace press release reads like something scribbled on a napkin by someone half-drunk (of half-asleep). I guess it must be really bad there if even their PR {person|department} can't polish the turd...
Re:the part the proponents miss (Score:4, Interesting)
Such disasters can render areas uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Don't you need a mechanism by which this would occur first? Cesium 137, for example, has a half-life of around 30 years. in a thousand years, it'll have halved about 30 times which is over a billion reduction in concentration. A lot of the other stuff that made up the radiation leakage from Fukushima has half-lives in the tens of days, they already are considerably reduced.
OTOH, plutonium 239, if it was put into the environment, would have a half-life of 24,000 years. If any land around Fukushima is uninhabitable because of that isotope, then a few thousand years won't dent it much.
So what's the isotope that's going to keep Fukushima uninhabitable for thousands of years? Also how big is this uninhabitable area? Sounds like the worst affected areas are only a portion of the current exclusion zone.
My point for bringing this up is the hyperbole that surrounds the Fukushima accident and clean up. We need to cut through that and realistically figure out what happened.
It isn't the direct deaths that are the problem, it is the long term impacts to the environment that remove chunks of the earth from human habitation for many generations.
Humans do other things with land than just live on it. This sounds to me ideal for industry and, of course, more nuclear reactors. If they have another meltdown, then it won't matter as much due to the exclusion zone around the Fukushima site.