I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author <i>completely ignored</i> those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there are over a hundred created by the earthquake itself. Yet coverage is warped in the opposite direction. It's absurd.<p>I think Scott Alexander put it best. Before starting Slate Star Codex, he had this to say about Fukushima and nuclear power[1]:<p>> You know what kills more people per year than nuclear plants?<p>> <i>Everything.</i><p>...<p>> When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly.<p>Nuclear power is far from perfect, but it is the safest energy technology in existence. Curtailing it creates more suffering and death, but in a diffuse way that can't be photographed or humanized.<p>1. <a href="http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html" rel="nofollow">http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html</a>
> The disaster could have been forseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster.<p>It's always easy to say that with hindsight. Remind me, how frequent are Magnitude 9 earthquakes resulting in massive Tsunami?<p>Of course you can plan for everything, but there's always something that occurs you did not think of. The good thing is, we learn from previous mistakes and plan better accordingly next time.<p>> Have we learnt anything since then?<p>Nice punchline to finish your article, nihilist-like, but completely nonsensical. Of course we have learnt a lot since Chernobyl, and designed subsequent plants to be much more safe based on what happened there.
As much of a tragedy this was, this is still nothing compared to the damage coal is doing to our society. I live in a coal mining town that also has a coal-fueled power and heating plant - the number of people who suffer in some way due to this is also huge. People get lung disease due to coal dust. In winter, everything is literally covered in soot - snow is blackish, with dark dots on everything. Pretty much every house was damaged in some way by the mine - most had their walls split at least once. There are lakes around the city which are contaminated with mining water - salty solution pumped from the mine - it's prohibited to swim in it or grow any produce near it. And there's plenty of places like that in the entire country.<p>I'm surprised that the author still calls nuclear energy dangerous, especially since he comes from the same country I do. Coal did much more damage to us, and not having a single nuclear power plant in the whole country is really damaging to our environment.
As a citizen, I'm still pretty much open to this is-nuclear-good-or-bad debate here. The biggest problem in Japan though is that people don't openly talk about this issue because of the embarrassment or fear of confronting others (Japanese people are notoriously bad at public discussion). It's such a divisive issue. As a result, the entire topic is avoided and kinda invisible. People are resigned and feeling that no one can change the situation (which is a pretty common feeling among the Japanese).<p>Sometimes I wonder if we, as a nation, really deserves a better future if so many people are simply giving up struggling. Sorry for a negative comment.
One angle I don't see often see mentioned: if you look carefully, you'll note that many of the buildings, furnishings, signs etc look a lot older than 2011. This is largely because Fukushima (and almost all of rural Japan along with it) has been severely depressed economically ever since the Bubble burst around 1989, so what you're seeing dates mostly back to the 1980s.<p>For comparison, here's a trip report from hot spring resort a few hours of north of Tokyo that looks almost as apocalyptic, but has been ravaged by nothing other than economics.<p><a href="https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/" rel="nofollow">https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/</a>
One thing that grabs my attention is that the radiation levels in the contaminated zones are much lower than I thought they'd be. For context, the limit for a radiation worker in the US is 50 mSv. Obviously, I guess it depends on the radioactive isotopes released and what kind of radiation they release, but I'm still impressed.
Being Japanese, that picture of blackboard in abandoned school 1/3 of the way through the post alone almost made me cry.<p>Single picture tells more stories than thousand words.<p>4 years since it happened, almost no major Japanese media talks about Fukushima any more, so please share this to anywhere so it gets more attentions.
Great photographs. Especially the cars in the grass starting to be overgrown are a 'great' and instant classic post apocalyptic image. Makes you think about the costs of our 'innovations' in general too. This is the wasteland of nuclear energy gone wrong, but there are other wastelands like this one, albeit figuratively speaking.
isn't all that packed up debris just waiting another tsunami or other natural disaster to spread it? Seems awfully close to the ocean considering how the last disaster occurred.<p>So many of the scenes reminded me of the recent Godzilla movie, amazing to see so much of a recent bustling environment abandoned, returning to nature. The number of spider webs in the supermarket is remarkable, I assume the rotting food stores brought insects which in turn made for a good feeding ground for spiders
"Seven years ago I ended my first documentary on Chernobyl with these words:<p>„An immense experience, not comparable to anything else. Silence, lack of cries, laughter, tears and only the wind answers. Prypiat is a huge lesson for our generation.”<p>Have we learnt anything since then?"<p>That makes one think.
Have also a look here: <a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Freportage.wdr.de%2Ffukushima&edit-text=&act=url" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...</a>
> As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster.<p>Isn't there a difference between causing and preventing?
a huge dump site near the ocean [1] doesn't look like the best idea.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima/#attachment_9454" rel="nofollow">http://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima/#attachment_9454</a>
With a few minor and cheap design modifications, the Fukushima disaster could have been prevented. The nuke industry could learn a lot from the aviation industry about making unsafe things safe. The details are different, but the principles are the same.
Great article. I think this is an issue that always deserves more serious attention.<p>I also think it's admirable for someone to do this kind of research, take pictures, and write about the experience for the purpose of educating others.
Many great photos of this and other locations. Got intrigued in this site looking at photos and essays for quite a while. I appreciate seeing photos from less-visited areas.
The worst case scenario for a nuclear plant accident is millions of casualties and the long-term contamination of major population centers. 152 of the world's 211 nuclear power plants have more than 1 million people residing within 75 km. A plant in India has 16 million living within that radius. Fallout could be dispersed over an area thousands of miles wide.<p>The worst case scenario for an accident at a solar power plant or a wind farm - nothing like that.<p>Today's nuclear power plants are inherently unsafe. Most that are in operation depend on active cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. If these cooling systems are interrupted for any reason (e.g.: power failure, loss of coolant, pump breakdown, loss of pressure control, control rod failure, backup power source failure, control systems failure, natural disaster, attack, etc.) - even for a short period of time - then the fissile material will likely overheat the reactor and result in a core meltdown.<p>Sheer luck prevented a catastrophe in the case of the 2006 electrical failure at the Forsmark plant in Sweden. Two of the four backup power systems failed to activate [1].<p>Switching the emtire world's energy consumption over to safe, renewable energy sources would only take 20 years and cost $100 trillion (money which would be spent anyway on non-renewable energy infrastructure) [2]. There is no need to continue building unsafe coal and nuclear plants.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad11...</a>