TEPCO: 950 million becquerels of radioactive cesium per liter of water detected near No. 2 reactor

[FBaggins]

32. Maybe because there's much more to it than the contamination in this water?

I mean... "duh!" - the initial releases were millions/billions of times larger than the figures we're talking about here. The confusion you must be facing is that when you see... say... contamination in tuna of 5 bq/kg, you have an urge to pump that as something worth caring about (it isn't)... so if 5 Bq are a big deal... surely millions must be horrendous!

It wouldn't be a good idea to sink a well there and make it your source of drinking water, but it isn't a big deal otherwise.

And how can you write that Chernobyl was far worse?

Because it is...and it isn't even close. Raw estimates of radiation released were roughly ten times higher for Chernobyl and a far higher proportion of that release was of longer-lived radionuclides. A much higher proportion of Fukushima's release was noble gases and radioiodine (all of which is now long gone)... while Chernobyl released much larger amounts of materials that are still very much with us.

Added to all of that - the bulk of the Chernobyl release was over land while the bulk of the Fukushima release ended up in the ocean.

We could go on to talk about the differences in government response (not great in Japan... but MUCH better than Russia's response)... the differences in more tangible health impacts (radiation sickness and death)... but this isn't close enough to bother with more. Even though Chernobyl has had a quarter century of decay cutting into the contamination... the shorter half-lives of the Fukushima fallout probably put Chernobyl's current contamination at 50-100 times worse than Fukushima. Possibly more.

Which doesn't reduce the significance of Fukushima... it just highlights how truly bad Chernobyl was/is.


Here's what a person who would know wrote:

Sorry. I think you posed the wrong quote. All I see is Chris Busby... not "a person who would know". Even the lunatic fringe has ceased associating with this charlatan. And no... that's not an unfounded ad-hominem. It's literally what he is. A quack peddling a confidence scheme to the people of Japan for his own profit. He should be in jail... not in quotations labeled "person who would know".