Good reasons for worry
by digby
There are lots of people giving sage advice about the possibilities of a nuclear disaster arising from the Japanese earthquake. I’m not a nuclear scientist or and engineer, so I don’t know anything more than the average dummy watching all this from afar. But I do know two things.
The first is that the Japanese government and the power company have reason to withhold information. The country is in deep crisis and they do not want to cause panic especially when services are so stretched that they are unlikely to be able to respond as efficiently they normally would to a nuclear disaster. The fact that they are going to the trouble of evacuating people in large numbers in this already catastrophic environment actually argues for the fact that they are quite seriously worried. It may be standard SOP, but it’s not as if those resources aren’t desperately needed elsewhere.
So, this isn’t business as usual. They are very concerned. It’s not insane for average people to be concerned as well.
Second is this from Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones:
The question that arises out of the Japanese situation … is what happens when the actual earthquake exceeds the predicted risk. It’s become clear that the Fukushima reactors were not built to withstand a 9.0-magnitude quake, but rather were built on the expectation that a 7.9 was the maximum the plant would experience. The paper also touts Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power station as a case study in success, noting that it withstood a 2007 earthquake that was about three times stronger than it was designed to. But the paper also states, rather importantly, that “the Richter scale alone does not capture the dangers or risks posed by specific quakes.” This seems to be the real problem in Japan. The emergency situations affecting at least four nuclear power plants in the country seem to be more related to the their ability to withstand multiple disasters—an earthquake, tsunami, and the failure of both primary and back-up power—not just an earthquake alone.
This is one of those one-in-a-million situations that humans are rarely fully prepared for. It’s certainly possible that they will be able to contain this and that everything will go perfectly from here on in. We hope more than anything that it will. But it’s not being foolish or hysterical to be concerned about this. We are dealing with an unusual and difficult confluence of events.
It would be nice if everyone could keep an open mind — and that includes the scientists and pseudo-scientists who feel it’s necessary to browbeat people who are worried about this. Obviously, there’s no reason to assume the worst either. We just have to wait and see what happens.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is updating about the situation frequently at this link. This is their latest:
“While the authorities continue playing down the possibility of a breach of the primary containment at these reactors, I remain concerned.”
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