The Student Room Group
surely he's exaggerating :O ?!!
Reply 2
Original post by asmaamahamud
surely he's exaggerating :O ?!!


He could be.
Reply 3
I don't know about it posing a problem to this kind of extent, but my dad has a friend who lives in Japan, who seems to think that the levels of radiation are much higher than the Japanese government is claiming to the extent that they have decided not to have children and told my dad that he wouldn't recommend that we visit the country for a loooooong time...though I believe he has no authority to say this with or substantial evidence for it, so I dunno.

Though it wouldn't surprise me if he were right, it all seems very shady to me. I personally expect some pretty nasty side-effects of it to be coming into public knowledge; it can't have been anywhere near as clean and simple as it was made out (just to point out, I know it was horrific and has severly affected the lives of thousands of people), but it just seems to me that there has to be more to it.
Reply 4
I very much doubt it's anywhere as bad as made out in the article if it was just about every goverment in the world would be on at them both in the media and behind the scenes emergency meetingd would be called by the UN to get it fixed they wouldn't be so casual over a potential "extinction level event"
Reply 5
Original post by fishfan01
I don't know about it posing a problem to this kind of extent, but my dad has a friend who lives in Japan, who seems to think that the levels of radiation are much higher than the Japanese government is claiming to the extent that they have decided not to have children and told my dad that he wouldn't recommend that we visit the country for a loooooong time...though I believe he has no authority to say this with or substantial evidence for it, so I dunno.

Though it wouldn't surprise me if he were right, it all seems very shady to me. I personally expect some pretty nasty side-effects of it to be coming into public knowledge; it can't have been anywhere near as clean and simple as it was made out (just to point out, I know it was horrific and has severly affected the lives of thousands of people), but it just seems to me that there has to be more to it.


I recommend you don't visit Japan either. Because unless you go poking around in the exclusion zone surrounding the reactor, you'll receive more radiation from a return flight than you would by spending a couple of weeks on the ground.

And even if you do, two weeks in the exclusion zone is about equivalent to 10 flights.

I'd hate to be cabin crew.
(edited 11 years ago)
Reply 6
:eek3:

officially freaked out right now D:
no way it can be that bad...and people are worrying about the economy when potentially we could all end up extinct in the morning if another earthquake hits.?!
Reply 7
If you believe any of that you're crazier than a **house rat.
Reply 8
I dunno the media love to blow things out of proportion it's true, but it seems like a dangerous situation.

The Guardian pretty much agrees:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/07/japan-fukushima-nuclear-power-earthquakes
Reply 9


Imminent collapse of Reactor 4 could create a mass extinction event of both humans and animals


Original post by y3llo_w
:eek3:

officially freaked out right now D:
no way it can be that bad...and people are worrying about the economy when potentially we could all end up extinct in the morning if another earthquake hits.?!


Atomic warheads were until recently tested in the open atmosphere, producing much the same radioactive fission products as nuclear reactors with very little effect on humans and animals. This was due to the fact that they were typically tested in remote areas. As an analogy, to suggest that having Fukushima go would cause worldwide extinction, there are a few bricks missing from your building.

Chernobyl failed quite spectacularly in a way that could not have been much worse and less than 50 people died because of it.

Almost all of them were people who happened to be poking about inside the reactor to clean up in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.

However one thing I can agree with you about. Post Chernobyl and post Fukushima around 48000 people per year will die of radiation induced cancer. That's almost twice as many as those killed by the tsunami and 1000 times the death toll at Chernobyl. If you want to find the radiation source responsible for these deaths, go outside on one of the UK's rare cloud free days and look up.
(edited 11 years ago)
:undefined:itting at the top of [Reactor 4], in a pool that is cracked, leaking, and precarious even without an earthquake, are 1,565 fuel rods (give or take a few), some of them ‘fresh fuel’ that was ready to go into the reactor on the morning of March 11 when the earthquake and tsunami hit,” writes Consolo. If they are MOX fuel, containing six percent plutonium, one fuel rod has the potential to kill 2.89 billion people.


Presumably this is what they are basing their extinction argument on, which is frankly ridiculous.

Fat Man was the name of the Nagasaki bomb that contained 99% plutonium-239 and 1% plutonium-240. Probably enough plutonium with the 'potential' to obliterate the world's population several times over.

When it went off, only a fraction of that was lost in creating the nuclear reaction, the rest was vapourised and widely distributed in the atmosphere all over Japan, with the finer particles carried in the winds throughout the entire planet.

And surprisingly, it's effects had sod all impact outside Japan itself, and even then the fallout casualties were negligible compared to those from the immediate blast.
According to Christina Consolo, an award-winning biomedical photographer and host of Nuked Radio, Reactor 4 has remained in such bad shape that even a very small earthquake could quickly level the building, sending the fuel from more than 1,500 unused fuel rods into the environment.

lol... Because fuel rods are able to magically evaporate... :colonhash:
Well it is 2012...

Anyway, stupidity aside it won't be that bad. It has obviously been blown out of proportion, maybe by someone who is against nuclear power in an attempt at scaremongering.
Reply 13
The radiation levels are no doubt higher and worse than the government are claiming. I'd bet quite a lot on that. However this article is clearly taking the piss
Reply 14
The effects of these kind of things are extremely hard to measure. It's a terrible disaster, either way, and it does seems that "they" aren't really doing very much about it. Why has the whole site not been entombed yet? It's just sat there for a year while they twiddle their thumbs and release as much radioactive material into the air and ocean as they possibly can. Trolling the whole Earth, imo.
Original post by NB_ide
The effects of these kind of things are extremely hard to measure. It's a terrible disaster, either way, and it does seems that "they" aren't really doing very much about it. Why has the whole site not been entombed yet? It's just sat there for a year while they twiddle their thumbs and release as much radioactive material into the air and ocean as they possibly can. Trolling the whole Earth, imo.


Ironic how you mention trolling, really...
Reply 16
15,000+ people die in a tsunami and the world is terrified of something that has given a couple of plant workers a bit of radiation burn. :rolleyes:
My dad's been to quite a few of these conferences with work, he say's it is a massive over hype, the reason the people who go inside don't have kids is merely a safety precaution. He also says that Fukushima should be seen as a great success for nuclear power and how safe they are, as it was not built to withstand what it did, and the reactor still shut down...
Nice unbiased and reputable source you have there.

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