THE MEDIA DID NOT HYPE FUKUSHIMA
Posted by Evan Osnos
In the new PBS “Frontline” documentary, “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown,” a Japanese colonel named Shinji Iwakuma recalls a moment, shortly after the tsunami a year ago, when he was called in to try to prevent the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear-power station from blowing up. Iwakuma’s mission was to pump water onto the overheating nuclear fuel, and he was in a jeep pulling up to the base of a reactor when the building around the reactor exploded. “Lumps of concrete came ripping through the roof” of the jeep, he said. “Radioactive matter was leaking in through the bindings of our masks. Our dosimeters were beeping constantly.” The soldiers were wounded but somehow managed to get out of there fast enough to avoid serious doses of radiation. “We were lucky,” Iwakuma says. “Just lucky.”
Good fortune is not the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about Fukushima these days. But it is, in fact, one of the clearest—and most troubling—lessons to be drawn from the Fukushima story: plain old luck, along with a colossal dose of heroism and quick-thinking, prevented the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns from wounding Japan even more thoroughly than they did. That is the lesson that comes through in several new projects appearing in preparation for the first anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear disaster.
The “Frontline” documentary by the filmmaker...
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/03/the-media-did-not-hype-fukushima.html#ixzz1nzIi7glX
= new reply since forum marked as read
> How many Americans do you think recognize the name "Tohoku?"
> How many Americans do you think recognize the name Fukushima?
> The events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are just one result of an
> earthquake and tsunami which immediately caused > 15,000 deaths.
> If there is more recognition of Fukushima than Tōhoku, then I think
> "Fukushima Daiichi" was overhyped.
Succinct and precise. Thank you!
There was a large quantity of media attention of questionable quality early on, followed by a relative paucity of information of any kind once they got bored of the story. Pretty much the way the media tend to cover anything...
It's clear that the media have neither the expertise nor interest to cover such stories well. When the buildings were exploding I was watching CNN, and the best they could do at the time for an "expert" was Bill Nye (yes, the "Science Guy"
, was was saying crazy things like cesium is used in the reactors as a moderator...
...to those affected.
Hiding behind another misrepresentation doesn't change that; or are you saying that the point illustrated by my use of Limbaugh (identified as an "extreme example" is invalid?
As I wrote, "This time the hydrogen didn’t stay in the reactor."
In both cases, the hydrogen was a result of overheated zirconium encased fuel rods reacting with water.
A problem with the hydrogen bubble at Three Mile Island, which had nothing to do with an explosion, was the simple fact that it could displace water in the reactor, further exposing the core.
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/04/post-4.html
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The Thompsons aren't the only ones who have produced evidence that the radiation releases from TMI were much higher than the official estimates. Arnie Gundersen -- a nuclear engineer and former nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower -- has done his own analysis, which he shared for the first time at a symposium in Harrisburg last week.
"I think the numbers on the NRC's website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000," he said.
Exactly how much radiation was released is impossible to say, since onsite monitors immediately went off the scale after the explosion. But Gundersen points to an inside report by an NRC manager who himself estimated the release of about 36 million curies -- almost three times as much as the NRC's official estimate. Gundersen also notes that industry itself has acknowledged there was a total of 10 billion curies of radiation inside the reactor containment. Using the common estimate that a tenth of it escaped, that means as much as a billion curies could have been released to the environment.
Gundersen also offered compelling evidence based on pressure monitoring data from the plant that shortly before 2 p.m. on March 28, 1979 there was a hydrogen explosion inside the TMI containment building that could have released significant amounts of radiation to the environment. The NRC and industry to this day deny there was an explosion, instead referring to what happened as a "hydrogen burn." But Gundersen noted that affidavits from four reactor operators confirm that the plant manager was aware of a dramatic pressure spike after which the internal pressure dropped to outside pressure; he also noted that the control room shook and doors were blown off hinges. In addition, Gundersen reported that while Metropolitan Edison would have known about the pressure spike immediately from monitoring equipment, it didn't notify the NRC about what had happened until two days later.
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