The quick onslaught of the "it couldn't possibly be a meltdown" message in the mainstream media and the "MIT professor says" emails/webpages, etc all smacked of a propaganda campaign to me. All the while the fuel rods were sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the reactor... and probably leaking through into the ground.
Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the catastrophe than a conspiracy to suppress information, but the forcefulness of the response was striking.
I heard a great (and probably apocryphal) anecdote on the radio a few weeks after -- "After three mile island, the Russians came to the US, performed a detailed analysis, and concluded 'we can't have a three mile island'. Instead, they had a Chernobyl. The Japanese went to Russia, did an analysis, and said 'we can't possibly have a Chernobyl', and instead had their own meltdown. Now we're hearing how modern reactors couldn't possibly have a meltdown like any of three so far."
I would expect a scientist or engineer to react in the absence of good information to say something like: "Is this the worst disaster ever? I don't know, it depends."
At least the person assuming that the sky is falling is reacting out of fear. The technical person assuming that all is well is reacting out of hubris.
Where are the "this is not a problem" people? I dont' recall a single person claiming the failure at the plant wasn't a problem. As I recall it, there was a "this is not Chernobyl" camp.
There were both. The HN (and "MIT") response was particularly disturbing to me. You couldn't question the official reports of "everything is fine and under control" around here without getting completely slammed, belittled, berated, downvoted, etc.
And yet now we know that the total radiation release was probably as much or more than Chernobyl.
What I said at the very beginning of this disaster.. If there's one thing everyone should know by now about nuclear reactor emergencies - it's that the authorities never tell the truth in the beginning, through ignorance or otherwise. We have an admittedly small sample of such accidents, but I'm sticking with it.
> And yet now we know that the total radiation release was probably as much or more than Chernobyl.
We do? Evidence, please.
For what I think is the conventional view, see e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13050228 which indicates more than 10x more radiation release from Chernobyl. That was a couple of months ago; has the situation changed drastically since then?
(On 2011-04-12, when the incident was reclassified at IAEA level 7, a TEPCO spokesman made some comment about the Fukushima disaster having released more radiation than the Chernobyl one. I'm pretty sure that was simply not true.)
I think the "MIT" response was basically correct and remains so despite scaremongering like that linked to here. The Fukushima plant was hit by an enormous natural disaster; yes, the results were very bad, but they were very much smaller in both human and economic terms than those of the earthquake+tsunami itself and so far the known death toll (due to radiation as opposed to, e.g., things falling on people's heads) from the damage to the nuclear reactors is ... zero.
That doesn't mean the damage isn't a problem, it doesn't even mean it's not a disaster. It does, however, mean this: A large, aging nuclear facility was struck by a huge natural disaster, much worse than it was ever designed for (which was, yes, a Bad Thing) -- and the result, so far at least, has not involved death or disease on a large scale.
If that's as bad as the downside of nuclear power gets, it's looking pretty good.
(What's the downside of the alternative? Well, imagine that the Fukushima reactors hadn't been built and that the energy they provided had come from coal-fired power stations instead. Generating energy from coal costs about 15 deaths per TWh in the US, according to http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...; Japan is probably similar. The Fukushima plant produced a bit less than 880 TWh of energy over its lifetime. That's about 13,000 deaths. Even with the disaster, there's no way that the Fukushima plant has caused anything near to that many.)
I grew up maybe a 10 minute drive from TMI. You wouldn't believe the number of times I heard crap like that. You don't hear it often in discussion venues like this, but try asking people like your mothers friends, or your friends moms... Just about any "layman" of a nonscientific persuasion.
"I grew up maybe a 10 minute drive from TMI. You wouldn't believe the number of times I heard crap like that"... although with three ears I do hear more than most.
I was too. Sure, there was plenty of uninformed media coverage jumping to conclusions. As I said at the time, though, the "this is not a problem" camp was equally premature -- and came across as cavalier to the tens of thousands of people in Japan who had to evacuate.
Denial is a totally natural and incredibly powerful human reaction to uncontrollable tragedy. People who are "more logical than others" are actually no less prone to this than anyone else, they just use a different mechanism to fuel their denial.
Except it's not a total meltdown. The last reports I've seen suggest it may be a partial meltdown that is still fairly well contained.
And people did not say it could not melt down. They claimed that even if it did, it would not be a Cherynobl like event. The claim was that the reactor design includes some form of containment in the event of a meltdown. Unless I'm missing some new news, all these claims have held.
Your comment bothers me for another reason. The above comments are based on the claims of the engineers who built the reactors. I don't think any of the commenters here have actually designed the nuclear reactors in question.
In other words, you are criticizing people for accepting the experts analysis as being unreasonable. Meanwhile, on what do you base your obvious opinion to the contrary? What analysis have you done? Why should anyone value your input?
It's not just a pro-nuclear bias. It's techno-utopianism and scientism.
The ideology is that science and technology can cure humanity of all its problems, if only they were not so small-minded and ignorant to reject it.
There's also a strong identification between science and technology and their proponents' core identities, so that fundamental questioning of some of their benefits is seen as personally threatening.
Of course, it's more likely that it was a lot of people not willing to believe the scope of the catastrophe than a conspiracy to suppress information, but the forcefulness of the response was striking.
I heard a great (and probably apocryphal) anecdote on the radio a few weeks after -- "After three mile island, the Russians came to the US, performed a detailed analysis, and concluded 'we can't have a three mile island'. Instead, they had a Chernobyl. The Japanese went to Russia, did an analysis, and said 'we can't possibly have a Chernobyl', and instead had their own meltdown. Now we're hearing how modern reactors couldn't possibly have a meltdown like any of three so far."