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Originally Posted by Shadowex3
No, sorry, I don't know what you're reading but Fukushima is not remotely on par with Chernobyl in any way shape or form. In fact that comparison is SO absurd it is LITERALLY the equivalent of comparing a spill in the oil aisle at pep boys to the gulf oil spill. In chernobyl the reactor itself exploded and turned into a gigantic open-air geyser of radioactive material and massive numbers of people were sent in with negligible protection and knowledge of radiation hazards (if any at all) in a typical soviet "men are disposable" style solution.
Fukushima is, if anything, ENCOURAGING because it shows that even an ancient active-safety reactor that was scheduled to be decommissioned can stand up to not only one to an earthquake so absurdly powerful it moved the whole damn planet four inches off axis and their entire country eight feet to the side but also having a mass of water on par with the great lakes thrown at you at a couple hundred miles per hour and STILL not go full chernobyl and present a genuine threat to the surrounding public.
If that were a modern passive-safety reactor you could've just walked away from it and let the reaction die on its own. The problem isn't nuclear power, it's that we habitually underbuild and underregulate power plants and then once they ARE built every time an inspection comes up we just relax regulations rather than fix any problems and we never bother to retire old plants or upgrade to better and more safe reactor designs. We just throw it at the lowest bidder and then pretend it's not our problem when the thing crumbles from mistreatment over decades.
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Both disasters received the highest level 7 rating for nuclear disasters. The Ocean contamination of Fukushima is already higher than Chernobyl. If it's not already worse the potential is defiently there due to the fact that there is no end in sight of getting this thing under control.
Also this:
Costs rise in 'worst industrial disaster'
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Gundersen, a senior former nuclear industry executive in the United States.
"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Gundersen asserts. "We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl ... The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up." [1]
The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the operator of the crippled plant, now grudgingly acknowledge that their timeline for bringing the situation under control, by the end of the year, "may be" unrealistic. They also acknowledge that Fukushima has "probably" released more radiation than Chernobyl. Both have come under strong criticism in the past for withholding information and releasing overly optimistic estimates.
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The US media seems to be portraying this as a 'nothing to see here, move along'.
There also seems to be a correlation between this disaster and the 35% increased infant mortality rate seen along the west coast.