Key graf: "Mr. Yoshida took a leave from Tokyo Electric in late 2011 after receiving a diagnosis of esophageal cancer. Experts have said his illness was not a result of radiation exposure from the accident, given how quickly it came on."
"Although stress can cause a number of physical health problems, the evidence that it can cause cancer is weak. Some studies have indicated a link between various psychological factors and an increased risk of developing cancer, but others have not."
Difficult to say. You can get cancer for tons of reasons - we don't know what kind of life he was living and so on, so it's kind of hard to say "most likely" in this kind of situation.
I want more nuclear power too, because I am sick of the ongoing setsuden power-conserving measures here in Tokyo.
But, having had the water in my apartment's shower tainted with cesium from Fukushima for weeks after the accident, and my local supermarket apologize for selling me beef with higher-than-legal cesium contamination, this kind of "rah rah! more nukes! less kooks!" boosterism is really annoying.
The second sentence of the only link you provide begins "Some scientists remain sceptical of this claim, as the findings of the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effect of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) differ from those of several other studies, including a recent (WHO) report..."
Furthermore, cancer is far from only problem mismanagement of nuclear power causes. Ask any of the tens of thousands of people who have been removed from their homes, many of them forever.
So I would fix your sentence like this: "We need [a] more [rational and realistic framework for managing the real and potentially catastrophic risks of] nuclear power, [along with functional regulatory oversight], and less nuclear scaremongering.
> Furthermore, cancer is far from only problem mismanagement of nuclear power causes. Ask any of the tens of thousands of people who have been removed from their homes, many of them forever.
Yeah, especially when the ambient radioactivity was lower than the natural radioactivity observed in many places around Japan. The evacuation should have been temporary only (a couple of days/weeks maybe) until matters were settled and the radioactivity levels confirmed. Moving them away from their homes forever was a huge mistake and certainly caused more deaths than any nuclear incident. Living in temporary accommodation, you lose your job, your earnings, you are far from everything, which means overall worse welfare than living in a not-really-as-much-as-the-media-says "contaminated" area.
People are way too scared of radioactivity - just because they don't understand it one bit and are constantly misinformed by media, green peace and other organizations which have vested interest in promoting other energies.
> Moving them away from their homes forever was a huge mistake and certainly caused more deaths than any nuclear incident. Living in temporary accommodation, you lose your job, your earnings, you are far from everything, which means overall worse welfare than living in a not-really-as-much-as-the-media-says "contaminated" area.
Many people were placed in newly erected villages of "temporary housing", and then left there. The housing is pretty good quality. But what little social provision there was has now been largely withdrawn.
It's a terrible indictment of the "Japanese model" of government provision: pour concrete, but ignore the people.
"UN scientists have concluded that the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster is unlikely to push up cancer rates in Japan. Some scientists remain sceptical of this claim, as the findings of the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effect of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) differ from those of several other studies, including a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report that predicted increased cancer risks among people living in areas with the highest radiation levels."
That's literally the first paragraph of the article you linked. Doesn't sound like there's consensus on the matter.
>We need more nuclear power and less nuclear scaremongering.
And why not more investment in solar power and renewable energy sources, instead of a potentially dangerous industry that produces extremely toxic waste, and can fuck everything around it in case of a terrorist attack, meltdown, etc?
Base load. Please look this up when talking about using renewable energy sources for our electricity. Without things like nuclear power, coal, and natural gas plants we cannot maintain a proper base load.
This is totally besides the fact that when you look at the break down of the environmental impact of all power sources, nuclear continues to be one of the greenest solutions.
Nuclear power is proven technology. Solar and renewable sources continue to ask for decades of research and funding to hope to be nearly as capable of providing as much power.
As an aside, having one does not exclude using / researching the other.
Certainly we can invest in renewable, but you'd also have to invest in energy storage in that case.
However toxic nuclear waste may be in its most compact form, that is a political issue, not an engineering one.
And the plant itself is hardly a problem in the scope of a terrorist attack, flying a plane into a skyscraper or disabling the brakes on a petroleum-filled train parked on a hill would be greater risks to public health for a given group of terrorists.
Someday we may even finally upgrade from 1950s and 60s designs that can meltdown, but even the rickety old reactors have not been public health disasters on a par with coal or hydro.
Nuclear civilian power stations are fairly incredibly well-protected post-9/11. One of Canada's nuclear power facilities has continually swept the various S.W.A.T. competitions they hold in North America for at least a couple of years now, and other facilities are similarly well-guarded.
But even if you managed to break in, you can't destroy the containment building with just the explosives you can carry on your person (it is, after all, designed to contain something much worse). Likewise you wouldn't be able to make it near the reactor complex itself as the radiation would kill the terrorists before they could get close enough to damage something.
The best case (for the terrorists) is trying to impeded reactor cooling from the control stations, but that takes a long time for actual damage to occur (time enough to preclude the damage in the first place), and even if you somehow managed to hold out for a whole day and let the reactor try to melt itself (at a rickety old facility without passive safety), you'd just get something like Three Mile Island, not Fukushima.
Perhaps you might try to fly a plane into the containment? But even that wouldn't cause a nuclear yield or anything close, especially with U.S. style containments. Steel-reinforced concrete simply eats planes for breakfast.
The story you linked comes from a description of a nuclear weapons production facility, and even that security lapse was not inherently more severe than breaking into something like a chemical production facility.
There's no magic fairies that kill 10,000 people just because you touched something labeled 'nuclear' after all, so even breaching into the facility wouldn't be a public health risk by itself.
Because fission produces massive amounts of energy compared to anything else. Solar is not cheap when you remove government subsidies. Its an economic choice as well.
Did you read the article or the headline? It makes very little sense that such an accident can have no effect on cancer risks. It may not raise the risk appreciably. Maybe the risk would be greater of Fukushima had been a coal fired plant(s) instead. But even people who know nothing about nuclear power can see the flaw in such a statement, and I think that sort of thing undermines any message that follows; which is unfortunate because you're right about us needing more nuclear power.
Why does it make very little sense? If the exposure was below the threshold dose at which radiation has been established to be carcinogenic it sounds like the most defensible position. The alternative is to say that anything can have an effect on cancer risks, which even if true in some pedantic sense isn't a useful way of looking at risk.
It's not like large-scale low-dose ionizing radiation is an unknown phenomenon: radiation exposure from the ground and sunlight vary widely, and we have very large data from chernobyl and 1950s above-ground nuclear testing.
The very idea that there is a threshold below which cancer risk is not appreciably affected is itself controversial.
In fact, even saying controversial would not be enough, most major health physics societies assume there is no such threshold and that any exposure increases risk. Only France's national society and (IIRC) one U.S. health physics society seem to be confident enough in the current research to stake out a claim that there is a threshold.
With all that said I personally lean towards the idea of a threshold-based response, though the no-threshold models are certainly easier to use for planning purposes (for which they've been used to assess risk for decades). Even if there is a threshold, that threshold may depend on length of previous exposure (acclimation) and may only be good for exposure within a certain time limit, both of which again make use within models more difficult (though not impossible).
Hormesis is actually conversial, but is not what I'm referring to.
Besides hormesis the other popular models seem to be LNT (linear response, no threshold) and LT (linear response, above a threshold).
LNT is used by most right now, mostly because it's the most conservative-possible model that fits the very-high-exposure data that we do have from atomic bomb survivors. It is the model which gives us ALARA and 'Man-REM' planning.
LT is more what I would lean towards given available studies of very-low-exposure, but that still leaves open the question of what that would actually mean for public health advice, radiation worksite planning, etc.
You'll have to explain me why it's OK to live in Colorado then where the natural levels of radioactivity are about 6 times higher than in other places in the country.
There's very clearly a threshold effect, just like in many natural phenomenons. Political nonsense is what is causing confusion, not the scientific basis. And most of the "science" trying to prove otherwise is based on too few numbers to be statistically significant. (the cases of reported leukemias, for example, is very often misleading when you look at the ACTUAL numbers and not just the percentages.)
If you use "no-threshold" for planning purpose then you can't technically live on Earth anywhere, since there's natural radioactivity all around us and cosmic rays as well through the atmosphere.
The regulatory limits for radiations are based on No Science whatsoever. Currently, at least. We know radiations kill with certainty at very high levels, there is no debate about that, but at low levels it's just a political issue more than anything else.
The fact that people can survive in those areas without noticeable increase in risk of cancer seems to lend credence to the idea that there is a threshold that one can become acclimated to. But it's still a politically sensitive topic, enough so that the experts still don't want to push away from the harbor of the current ALARA recommendations.
Yeah, and God Forbid we talk about the positive aspects of radiations - some level of radiation is actually beneficial to kill some bacteria in your bodies and reduce some types of ailments and cancers. This has been observed (but certainly NOT widely reported in the media for which Nuclear Energy is the Devil Incarnate) in several studies.
I agree. However parts of the nuclear industry would do the whole industry a great service if they cleaned themselves up. Up front honesty about mistakes and accidents might make a bad headline or 2, but it they look far worse when the retrospectascope is peering in after a big problem. A critical media and general population would (IMHO) be more accepting of accidents if major events (Fukishima being a big, unusual example) weren't followed by months of backtracking, half truths and lies.
I totally agree with you, but at the same time many countries force "top secret" level on all nuclear information to the public. It is certainly the case in France and probably elsewhere too, and there is as much responsibility on the government side that there is in the industry.
We need both total transparency and proper education on the risks/benefits of nuclear technology.
A study published this spring in the Open Journal of Pediatrics indicates that it may have increased congenital hyperthyroidism on the West Coast of the US, however.
>The ex-head of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant Masao Yoshida, 58, died at a Tokyo hospital of esophageal cancer on July 9, 2013. Doctors have maintained repeatedly that Yoshida’s illness has had nothing to do with exposure to high doses of radiation.
> [...]
> On November 28, 2011, Yoshida was admitted to hospital, where cancer was diagnosed.
It's fortunate that the article points out that the exposure does not correlate to the incident in the first place, but I get the feeling that the headline given here is link-bait at its worst.
As far as I can tell you, you cannot get cancer six months after being exposed to a high degree of radiation. You either die shortly after a large dose or something appears years if not decades later.
I just grabbed my radiobiology textbook off the shelf (Radiobiology for the Radiologist, for those keeping score). It claims that the latent period between radiation exposure and the appearance of a malignancy is years. The shortest is for leukemia, which averages 5-7 years. Solid tumors can take decades to appear.
This is certainly in line with the doctors' claims.
"Had he obeyed the order, the whole of north eastern Japan would possibly have been uninhabitable for decades, if not centuries."
I'm a bit confused by this. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with nuclear weapons, but people still live in these cities today. How does the radiation from a nuclear meltdown (like Chernobyl) differ from the fallout of a nuclear weapon like with Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Whilst a bomb will cause an area to become radioactive itself (through neutron bombardment) that is confined to the local area and I think tends to have short half-lives.
I may be completely ignorant as I'm not an authority on the subject, but I think it's the difference between the radioactive materials being exploded/vaporized vs shot into the atmosphere (without being vaporized/broken down) and distributed in the general area.
With the the A-bombs, the radiation that people suffered wasn't from the radioactive materials in the weapon itself, but the radiation from such a huge explosion.
With Chernobyl, the radioactive materials were sent into the air and settled around the vicinity, making many parts of it still very radioactive to this day.
Pretty much, but the largest factor was simply the sheer difference in scale between the A-bombs and the reactors at Chernobyl. With the A-bombs there was simply simply less fission fragments and other radioactive products to worry about due to there being far less nuclear fuel and surrounding material that could be irradiated and itself made radioactive.
Meltdowns have the potential to release far more radioactive material than an atomic bomb. The radioactive material tends to consist of isotopes with high nuclear decay rates. And the material tends to stick around longer, slowly poisoning the environment, as opposed to a bomb blast which quickly scatters the material into the atmosphere.
The fallout products of an atomic bomb generally have short half lives. Wikipedia has some interesting graphs comparing the radiation dose of a fission bomb and Chernobyl:
The headline of this article reminds me of this one article I saw a good while back that basically said "SOME DUDE WHO WORKED ON FUKUSHIMA HAS BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH CANCER!"
Then at the end of the (short) article it was mentioned that "oh, by the way, doctors are saying that it has nothing to do with Fukushima and he has been a chain smoker for decades. Never mind the blatant link baiting and scaremongering that was the entire rest of the article, it's just what sells!"
I'm having a hard time locating that article now, but maybe that's for the better. It's pretty sad how common stuff like this is when it comes to reporting on nuclear energy.
The courage of Japanese managers in the line of duty in situations like this is commendable. Similar examples were found during the Sarin gas bombings.
Was just reading about this the other night... During Britain's worst nuclear accident, reactor manager Tom Tuohy climbed on top of the burning reactor to examine it several times during the incident.
"Tom Tuohy then ordered everyone out of the reactor building except himself and the Fire Chief in order to shut off all cooling and ventilating air entering the reactor. Tuohy then climbed up several times and reported watching the flames leaping from the discharge face slowly dying away."
The time it takes for most cancers to develop far enough to be picked up by these sorts of diagnosis techniques is far, far longer than the few months which had elapsed between the Fukushima event and his diagnosis.
Is there any validity to the claim that people develop cancer independent of nuclear power plants? Absolutely. Cancer predates nuclear power by millennia.
If we see a wave of cancers among Fukushima workers, that would change matters, but as things stand now it seems much, much more likely that Mr Yoshida got sick for reasons that have nothing to do with the radiation.
I don't entirely discount the possibility of a cover-up, but grieving relatives who have somebody to blame are kind of hard to silence.
This makes for a observation for us all, that life is precious indeed, but at times we must trade that for the many other precious lives.
From a Administrative point of view, I would love to get a record of what methods, were used by him, to keep his men in line. Though I do have a Idea, what it would be, but actual facts would be more revealing.
From a Human point of view, I would call him a hero, and all his co-workers as well. And take an oath that if time would come for me to take a similar decision, i.e, to "STAY SO OTHERS CAN LIVE" I would in all probability take that.
From a Citizen point of view, I feel that, yes nuclear plants are very dangerous, it is to remember that the call of the hour is that I'm a entrepreneur, and the only way I can help make this all better is to do, what we do best: Innovate. And Search for more safer, better, alternate ways of mass electricity production.
He sounds like a hero for his actions after the failure at the plant (and I commend him and his team for this), but what about his leadership before which allowed the plant to get into such a situation?
I'm not saying it was his fault, I'm merely curious as to how such an important enterprise could be so ill equipped on so many levels.
Things like "how high do we build the levees around New Orleans" are inherently political. When it comes down to it, you pays your money and you takes your chances. You cannot know how high is high enough.
Taking over after that disaster was in itself an act of courage. Those old GE reactors just have ... "features" that are dangerous.
Speaking of knowing how high is high enough... Yanosuke Hirai was responsible for forcing a 46-foot wall to be built at a different powerplant. In Fukushima, the 19-foot wall didn't do much to stop the 43-foot tsunami[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/asia/masao-yoshida-n...
Key graf: "Mr. Yoshida took a leave from Tokyo Electric in late 2011 after receiving a diagnosis of esophageal cancer. Experts have said his illness was not a result of radiation exposure from the accident, given how quickly it came on."