You might brush up on the very poor history of nuclear reactors. You've downplayed the fallout significantly, the toll on human lives, wildlife, and the direct and indirect economic impacts, and the bigger implications of how unsafe nuclear power is.
My nuclear history is clearly less sensationalized than yours.
Chernobyl was hours or perhaps minutes from melting thru the underground core, hitting ground water, and detonating.
Again, a nuclear reactor isn't a nuclear bomb. I'm not sure what anti-nuclear group got this into your head, but that's not how it works. The core at Chernobyl was full of water and graphite. It was the graphite that caught fire after the water boiled off. The molten core, like the molten core at Fukushima, would have been cooled by the ground water if it managed to get that far, it would not trigger a thermonuclear blast, that's not how bombs work and that's not how this works. You are betraying your lack of knowledge on this subject here. The worst case scenario is that the temperature differential would have been enough to trigger a steam explosion (which is not a thermonuclear blast) which would have further damaged the plant, making the event more difficult to contain and likely would have prevented the remainder of the plant from operating after the fact.
An interesting thing from early on after the disaster was that water from rain would make its way down to the molten core material deposits and trigger brief little fission events, which would in turn release some radiation, which they were measuring for (which is how they determined this was happening). This was one of the drivers for the rapid construction of the containment tomb around the unit (which has since been upgraded). The corium was so hard that when they tried to get a sample, they actually had to shoot it with a rifle to break a chunk off. Now, decades later, as the latent water that was in those corium deposits has been evaporated, the consistency is more like sand, they easily come apart. There's still one room that's highly radioactive that they can't access and are currently working on getting a robot that will be used to extract this material as part of the decommissioning process.
Had it done so, it would have impacted millions of square miles in a nuclear blast.
No, it wouldn't have. That's sensationalist nonsense.
Russia's coverup has concealed the true numbers of dead, low estimate being 5000 and high estimate being 90,000.
The Soviet Union hampered early investigative efforts, however, It was eventually investigated extensively by the UN and their report released in 2005. The 90,000 death figure is from Greenpeace, which explains a lot here. That said, even if we use the Greenpeace figure, that's still much lower than the Chinese Banqiao dam failure.
The entire region was evacuated and remains so today, 35 years later.
Yes, a rather extensive area around Prypiat and the surrounding communities was contaminated and evacuated, and the exclusion zone remains. That in no way supports the rest of the above nonsense however. This is the result of the plant lacking secondary containment, which is highlighted by the difference between this event and Fukushima, where the contamination there was mostly contained to the plant.
Despite that, the remaining three units at Chernobyl continued to operate until the early 2000's and it forced Russia to upgrade the remaining RBMK's, many of which are still in operation, to have secondary containment.
The economic cost is measured to be $700,000,000,000.
The oft-cited $700 billion figure includes $235 billion for the loss of the Belarus nuclear power program as well as the lost output from Unit 4 over several decades. Do you think it fair to include those here? As an anti-nuke you should be celebrating both those things and heralding them as achievements, no?
"Thriving" is a interesting term. I guess if you didn't die immediately or die from exposure in the following weeks, or die from cancer in the coming months/years, or if you were wildlife or pets that didn't die immediately or get abandoned, and immediately shot and killed. I recently watched the Chernobyl HBO series and it's well done and allegedly quite close to reality.
Yes, animals are presently thriving in the exclusion zone. I'll remind you that this TV show is not a documentary, despite them getting most details of the event itself right.
There are more wolves in the Chernobyl exclusion zone than in Yellowstone National Park.
allthatsinteresting.com
Russia had a previous one in 1957 in Kyshtym, concealed from the world for decades. The Wikipedia entry states, "Environmental concerns were secondary during the early development stage. Initially Mayak was dumping high-level radioactive waste into a nearby river, which flowed to the river
Ob, flowing farther downstream to the
Arctic Ocean. All six
reactors were on Lake Kyzyltash and used an open-cycle cooling system, discharging contaminated water directly back into the lake.
[4] When Lake Kyzyltash quickly became contaminated,
Lake Karachay was used for open-air storage, keeping the contamination a slight distance from the reactors but soon making Lake Karachay the "most-
polluted spot on Earth"...
The disaster was the second worst nuclear incident (by radioactivity released) after the
Chernobyl disaster. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the
International Nuclear Event Scale (INES),
[1] making it the third highest on the INES (which ranks by population impact), behind Chernobyl (evacuated 335,000 people) and the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (evacuated 154,000 people) which are both Level 7 on the INES. At least twenty-two villages were exposed to radiation from the Kyshtym disaster, with a total population of around 10,000 people evacuated. Some were evacuated after a week, but it took almost two years for evacuations to occur at other sites.
[2] The disaster spread
hot particles over more than 52,000 square kilometres (20,000 sq mi), where at least 270,000 people lived.
[3] Since Chelyabinsk-40 (later renamed Chelyabinsk-65 until 1994) was not marked on maps, the disaster was named after
Kyshtym, the nearest known town....
...The true number of fatalities remains uncertain because
radiation-induced cancer is clinically indistinguishable from any other cancer, and its incidence rate can be measured only through epidemiological studies. One book claims that "in 1992, a study conducted by the Institute of Biophysics at the former Soviet Health Ministry in Chelyabinsk found that 8,015 people had died within the preceding 32 years as a result of the accident"...."
en.wikipedia.org
While that whole saga is incredibly tragic, that's not a "disaster" in the same sense as what transpired at Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island or Banqiao where engineering or design issues or just plain old human error resulted in an unexpected failure and, in some cases, like Chernobyl and in particular Banqiao, extensive loss of life. This was deliberate mishandling/careless science, just like much of the contamination from early nuclear arms development in the United States and the continued pollution of huge areas in China right now:
Hidden in an unknown corner of China is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.
www.bbc.com
That has absolutely nothing to do with modern nuclear power.
A modern reactor in a 1st world nation, Fukishima was an epic disaster on many levels. While not directly killing anyone, it's linked to higher rates of cancer, poisoned aquatic life including the seafood, and the economic costs are staggering numbers. Current news articles state the plants are still leaking 300 tons of contaminated water into the ocean, PER DAY. Economic cost has been hundreds of billions of dollars.
A few things:
- The GE reactors at Fukushima are not "modern", they are actually older than the units at Chernobyl (1967 vs 1972) as is the design (BWR-3: 1965, RBMK-1000: 1968), the difference is that they had secondary containment, which the Soviets skimped on because the RBMK was supposed to be a fast and cheap way to generate electricity and produce weapons-grade plutonium.
- Correct, it didn't directly kill anyone, so I'm glad you are acknowledging that point.
- It's not linked to higher rates of cancer:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32963211/
- It's not linked to poisoned aquatic life or seafood and Japan actually decreased the allowed concentration of caesium in food by 5x (from 500 to 100Bq/kg) after the incident:
https://oceana.org/blog/worried-abo...d-turns-out-bananas-are-more-radioactive-fish
- Yes, the economic costs are staggering, which is somewhat ironic, as it was the economic cost of increasing the seawall height and relocating the emergency generators that Tepco was trying to avoid, and ultimately is what allowed the meltdowns to occur.
- No, the plants aren't leaking 300 tons of contaminated water into the ocean. Immediately after the incident, yes, there was some struggling with trying to contain the leaking water, but that's been long since stopped. They've been capturing and processing all the water, which is why they have massive stores of it onsite that only presently have tritium in them, which they will be releasing. If you scroll down to "Managing contaminated water" in this extensive document:
https://world-nuclear.org/informati...ety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident.aspx
You'll see:
By the end of June 2011, Tepco had installed 109 concrete panels to seal the water intakes of units 1-4, preventing contaminated water leaking to the harbour. From mid-June some treatment with zeolite of seawater at 30 m3/hr was being undertaken near the water intakes for units 2&3, inside submerged barriers installed in April. From October, a steel water shield wall was built on the sea frontage of units 1-4. It extends about one kilometre, and down to an impermeable layer beneath two permeable strata which potentially leak contaminated groundwater to the sea. The inner harbour area which has some contamination is about 30 ha in area. The government in September 2013 said: “At present, statistically-significant increase of radioactive concentration in the sea outside the port of the Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi NPS has not been detected.” And also: “The results of monitoring of seawater in Japan are constantly below the standard of 10 Bq/L” (the WHO standard for Cs-137 in drinking water). In 2012 the Japanese standard for caesium in food supply was dropped from 500 to 100 Bq/kg. In July-August 2014 only 0.6% of fish caught offshore from the plant exceeded this lower level, compared with 53% in the months immediately following the accident.
Tepco built a new wastewater treatment facility to treat contaminated water. The company used both US proprietary adsorption and French conventional technologies in the new 1200 m3/day treatment plant. A supplementary and simpler SARRY (simplified active water retrieve and recovery system) plant to remove caesium using Japanese technology and made by Toshiba and The Shaw Group was installed and commissioned in August 2011. These plants reduce caesium from about 55 MBq/L to 5.5 kBq/L – about ten times better than designed. Desalination is necessary on account of the seawater earlier used for cooling, and the 1200 m3/day desalination plant produces 480 m3 of clean water while 720 m3 goes to storage. A steady increase in volume of the stored water (about 400 m3/d net) is due to groundwater finding its way into parts of the plant and needing removal and treatment.
The USA narrowly averted a total meltdown (which could cause a nuclear explosion) in 1979 at Three Mile Island, and has had a couple of other disasters.
TMI would have been somewhat similar to Fukushima, but smaller had it become a full meltdown as it was only one unit. Again, you don't get a "nuclear explosion", power plants aren't bombs and don't in any way operate on the same principle. There would be the potential for a steam or hydrogen explosion, but these are relatively small (Fukushima experienced a hydrogen explosion) and result in only minimal releases if not fully contained (depending on reactor design).
There have been some 30 total disasters, and you can read all about them.
By contrast, while oil accidents do occur the worst one on record is probably the BP Deepwater Horizon which killed few people in the explosion, and devastated the marine wildlife and economy. The cleanup for that has been $30 billion plus about $65 billion in lawsuit claim settlements. That's a lot less than Japan and Russia's cleanup costs...
There have been two major disasters (Chernobyl, Fukushima). TMI was a minor event and the mishandling of nuclear materials be it for weapons purposes or power gen in its infancy in the Soviet Union don't fall into the same category. The amount of nuclear weapons testing the US has performed is staggering, as is the amount of contamination that has produced, but that's not powergen, that's not the same industry and we don't get to conveniently conflate the two just because we don't like the word "nuclear".
The loss of life from fossil fuels is far more spread out and measured, as
@PandaBear noted, as a perpetual and cumulative series of events such as coal miners dying from black lung, people getting cancer from air pollution...etc. There's not one or two "gotcha" events that are on the scale of something like Chernobyl, but that doesn't make it any less severe. There's no sweet solace from dying from lung cancer due to black lung rather than the same thing working clean-up at Chernobyl.
As I said earlier, the nuclear industry is the ONLY industry completely responsible for its entire waste stream.
