If that nuclear facility starts to burn and there is nothing to cool it down. Is there a possability that most of northern japan and the area around Tokyo to be inhabitable? Even Tokyo maybe?
if this happens, will Japan go from having a great economy to being weaker an maybe even many will abandon the country because of the great spread of radioactivity?
hey but i heard in news about some wind thing. i cant totally recall it but they said that the direction of wind is towards the ocean so even if radiations leak most of them would go towards the ocean and wouldn’t harm anyone.
but i was wondering why cant some team with those special suits go and repair the nuclear plants before any inauspicious thing happens?
some wind thing…(sorry had to laugh)
yes i heard the same about the wind direction, but that will only last as long as the wind itself, and i dont think those suits will withstand the heat thats coming from those rods do you.
while searching about fukushima i found an interesting wiki page about the incident, it shows the reactor status summary as of the 19th
find it here
to have a Tschernobyle like impact at least one reactor has to melt and explode
producing a high amount of radioactive particles and then the winds have to blow more
across Japan to engulf it in the fallout.
The atomic suites do not prevent radioactive rays to penetrate them and thus are
not really any protection against them.
to have a Tschernobyle like impact at least one reactor has to melt and explode
producing a high amount of radioactive particles and then the winds have to blow more
across Japan to engulf it in the fallout.
This could maybe happen if there comes another earthquake soon. There seems to be a lot of activity with the continental plates around Japan. Maybe there is more coming soon…which could maybe make the situation worse in the nuclear facilities leading to one of them melting down. Since Japan is a very tiny mass of land but with a high density of people, it would spread fast and affect many.
In worst case scenario, it could contaminate much of northern Japan and lead to mass emigration? O.o
OMG! thats doesn’t sounds good. i hope japan doesn’t become 2nd Chernobyl. 
maybe japan should send a team for some suicide mission to repair the reactor. wow cooling reactor with sea water is a nice idea.
hey but i was wondering how can reactor function without electricity? doesn’t it needs slow moving neutrons and all that stuff?
are nuclear reactors also chain reactions like free radical mechanisms?
Don’t blow things out of proportion, folks (no pun on nuclear detonations intended ;))
Even in Chernobyl the exclusion zone is only (… I hate that word) 30km. This sounds a lot, but this involved a completely exposed reactor core with the graphite moderating enclosures burning ferociously in their exposed state for several days.
There is no doubt that the current situation is incredibly serious, but my interpretation of events is that there is a lot of sensationalism and misinformation going on from both sides. Lets just hope that the Japanese culture of striving for efficiency and performance is evident in their dealing with this crisis. Japan is not the closed and paranoid society in which the Chernobyl catastrophe occurred.
@mohd.itqan: The way nuclear reactors work is they create heat by fission. This heat is extracted in various ways by different reactor types and used to power steam turbines that generate electricity. In some reactor types (eg. UK gas cooled reactors) the exact same turbines used in coal powered power stations can be used. Electricity is not necessary to generate the heat from reactors. Simply put enough reactive material together and it will sustain a critical (self-sustaining) reaction and generate heat. The higher the purity of the nuclear fuel, the less volume of the fuel is needed to achieve criticality.
I also once saw the end of a TV show about how 30 years after the Chernobyl meltdown, plant and animal life is slowly starting to claw its way back into the area surrounding the reactor, so even such a meltdown cannot create a large zone totally devoid of life for even a 30 year period (which in the next decades will see plant and animal life take over the abandoned settlement that is a very popular photo reference to that disaster).
I remember when tjernobyl happened people all over europe felt it’s effect. The radius may be 30 km. But I remember news of cancer in many parts of Europe. And sick chichens etc…Japan is so small a complete meltdown would affect many.
Fukushima can´t really become a second Chernobyl - and for that matter Tokyo no second Prypiat.
Although Fukushima uses Plutonium and Uranium which makes it more hazardous there are 2 significant differences.
Chernobyl was running full power when the “incident” happened, Fukushima was already inactive and cooling down due to the Tsunami warning… Chernobyl: 100% power - Fukushima: 3% power and still cooling down.
Chernobyl had old Graphite control rods, which where troched like dry wood when the cooling failed so the core went out of control, “modern” reactors have cadmium also Fukushima IIRC, so once the control rods are inserted the fission is much more controlable even with failed cooling.
So all in all, there shouldn´t be too much Caesium-137 leaking even if the worst case happens.
And to be blunt, nothing better could happen then the C137 spreading over half the earth by wind. Better to have the small amount of C137 from Fukushima radiating over half the world than having the same amount radiating only in Japan.
I rather have 1 Isotope hitting me with radiation than having one japanese child have to put up with a few thousand Isotopes.
Chances are slim it will damage my cells.
i totally agree and think the same way. 
:yes:
The fallout of Tschernobyle can be felt till today in Europe thus I would not limit it to the 30 KM radius.
However I must somewhat agree with the sensationalism in the media.
Compare the fear spread by the media because of 9/11 and the fact that the US is the only country
in the world still living in a post terrorist attack fear to the fact how many people die each year in the
US through the high amount of violence and crime here.
Here are just some rough numbers from 2009.
Year 2009
Population 307,006,550
Total Violent 10,639,369
Murder 15,241
Forcible Rape 89,000
Aggravated assault 806,843
Burglary 2,196,971
So whats more serious? The extremists our governments produced in a different country or the criminals in our own country
who are not Islamic terrorists?
This feels even more as the media is more following political leadership and wishes.
I am not sure if you noticed it but it took the media roughly 5 days to start educating the population about the fact that further cooling is required after the plant was scrammed and also to continue cooling depleted fuel rots because of the continuous fission.
This is not even a real difficult subject matter to explain but I noticed how many people on the internet posted comments about
that they do not understand the problem of overheating when the controller rods were inserted.
Just said in a convo to a mate:
The chemical toxicity of plutonium is the main cause of concern in mox (mixed oxide) reactor leaks. Like Fukushima 3. It depends on the exposure as to how long death occurs. I’ve been lookin up nuclear accidents and accidental exposure usually results in death in 24 hours at doses of 30 sieverts. Those doses happened almost instantly (less than 200ms), but the highest radiation reported from Fukushima is 400 milisieverts per hour. To absorb 30 sieverts, you would need a really big spliff and to fall asleep next to the reactor for about 70 hours
Well after Tschernobyle the cancer rate even down in Crete spiked.
I would not downplay the issue of long term exposure.
A small but constant build-up is / can be harmful as well.
Absolutely. I in no way mean to downplay the dangers of nuclear energy. Personally, I feel it is a dead end power source with very little merit when the long term disposal aspects are taken into account. All I’m trying to do is counter some of the uneducated, sensationalist media reports and urban myths regarding the effects of radiation. 
Oh I see,
don’t do that - because that would hurt the businesses which sell all this anti fallout products
I also would not hype it too much - Nuclear power is great - I love our sun ;D
Although no doubt, nuclear fission is not the answer, never was. Well, nuclear fusion might be.
Cancer still is somewhat of an enigma. It is easy to link it with Chernobyl you can´t actually proof it, neither disproof.
Might as well be radio signals. WiFi. Maybe the shifting earth gravity. Maybe something in the sun´s radiation changed and causes cancer (besides skin cancer). The glow in the dark colors… radioactive.
I recently had a Lymphoma. As suddenly as I got it, after the biopsy, it just vanished. No traces of anything anymore. And medicine has no idea why I got it, nor why it dissapeared. Speculation. I most certainly don´t blame Chernobyl - would be easy though to blame something graspable rather than to believe in randomness or utter chaos.
<exaggerated mindfood>
Personally I blame a unhealthy industrialized lifestyle along with genetic degeneration for all cancers - I don´t believe in a single cause.
Face it, our altruism, one of the core essences that makes us human, causes the most problems. For instance years back people would just have died of things like bad vision… fell down a cliff or been eaten by a wild animal. Who really knows how many illnesses are inherited. We breed flaws and medicine fights to fix it before it kills us all.
</exaggerated mindfood>
+1
Nuclear, unfortunately, is a dirty word, all because of fission reactors and bombs etc, which is a pity with fusion right around the corner. Lets hope that people start to know that not all nuclear power is bad.
And Im almost even pro fission, in some ways. Its a necessary evil at the moment it seems.
But so are all the fossil fuels…
Also, I dont think the average person understands statistics at all, they must have skipped it in school or just not understood it, or must just be too close minded in general…
Think of all the hundreds of fission plants around the world at the moment, and only a handful of incidents over the decades they’ve been around. It doesn’t make it right or any less dangerous, but it puts some realistic perspective on it all.
We only hear the negatives.
We never hear about the power plants which are working fine, every day, without issue, for years on end.
What’s a disscussion of radiation without xkcd’s radiation chart:
I’ve thought about visualizing it in blender, it’d be pretty easy with arrays. I think it’s pretty cool anyway.
It seems like there has been a cover up. News doesn’t hype it up to the contrary, the situation in the nuclear facilities are worse. It seems like several citizens quite far away from the nuclear plant has now died of radiation sickness. Even people who are about to leave the country has experienced vomiting and radiation sickness…oh my. The media isn’t reporting on much…the reason the japanese didn’t allow foreign people to help them is because of the severe situation.
Some reports are saying this isn’t a mere 5 on seriousness. But close to Tchernobil…-_-