Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "The Forgotten Victims of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster" video.

  1. I feel a lot for those people, perhaps more than I have the right to... I'm not japanese, don't have family there though quite possibly some of my ancestors where from the region. I do have family in other parts of the country though. But it's good to put some balance to the story so that it doesn't get overly dramaticized, which I think is as disrespectful, if not more disrespectful than ignoring what happened. First let's talk about the area affected. Even though international press, this documentary, and multiple other places call it "Fukushima disaster", it is far more accurate to call it Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Why? Because like half-shown on the highly stylized map, the affected area occupies a 20km radius in the 3rd largest prefecture in Japan, which is Fukushima, that has over 13000 square km of area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Prefecture Some people might not know this, but the capital of Fukushima prefecture, which is also called Fukushima, wasn't affected much as it's inland in the north of the prefecture some almost 80km away from the plant. This of course doesn't make it less serious or less grave for the people affected, but the affected area is probably smaller than most people imagine. The plant is located in between two towns, which were condemned and access blocked off - Futaba, which had a population of around 7000 before the disaster, and Ookuma, which had a populatio of around 12000 before the disaster. The evacuation was chaotic, and people were spread out... but if you consider how many people were still saved, how prepared japanese society is overall facing such situations, and the magnitude of the disaster itself... I'm not sure it'd have been done better in any other country in the world. Also good to note that most people in the video deathcount are not from the power plant disaster, but from the tsunami event after the earthquake. No one died there immediately after the plant meltdown, but there are deaths related after it, and it's expected lots of people involving cleanup teams, plant workers and whatnot will have health problems related to radiation at some point. I've also heard that cleanup efforts, remediation, compensation of affected people among other stuff are... exemplary and unique in the world, given the magnitude of the disaster. Again, this is not to diminish it or to make it sound less serious, but in another country, this could've been exponentially worse. Second, about nuclear power plants in Japan and the disaster itself. As explained in the video, this was a man made disaster due to corruption, mismanagement, eggregious misreporting of inspections, and then of course, the nature part with the magnitude of the earthquake and tsunami that came before it. Perfect storm scenario. If I remember correctly, when details emerged about this catastrophe, there were calls from inspectors and investigators years before that urgent repair and urgent maintenance was needed, which would've prevented the worst. Obviously, if I was japanese I'd be angry and worried too. Not only Japan is located on very unstable grounds, several of other nuclear plants in Japan are also not exactly in the safest of places given this precedent, climate is changing for the worst, there will be probably further instabilities there, and ideally a country like Japan should not run on nuclear plants at all - at least fission based ones that can go critical in that way. Daiichi is also one of those old plants with designs from the 60s-70s running on pressurized hot water vapor, the worst type to go critical. But the thing is, Japan doesn't run on nuclear by choice. They don't have land or conditions for most alternatives, they already import a whole ton of power at very high costs (which is why the nuclear plants went back online), and Japan has actually been researching a whole ton of other power generation technologies for a long time to see if it's not feasible to replace with something else. So far, nothing came out that could generate power close to nuclear outputs, not by far unfortunately. They have researched and tried stuff like wave motion generators, geothermal, plus a bunch of other stuff... it's a really difficult situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan Hydroelectric power? Japan has them. But due to it's landscape and configuration, this is limited to small plants that cannot generate much power... so it's like almost 1200 plants to cover less than 7% of demand, at high costs. They actually stopped building these plants because it just didn't make economic sense. Wind is hard because there are no good places with constant wind to build (though there is some promise for offshore wind farms), solar is a growing trend but still at less than 4%, geothermal and wave power could contribute but they are not expected to generate a whole lot. Nuclear once generated 30% of Japan's entire consumption, and there were projects before the disaster to ramp that up to 40%. The rest of that equation comes from imported oil and gas which is not only unstable, but also very expensive. So you see, it's just not as simple as let's shut down all plants and replace them all for alternatives. Japan is a country that is in recession, despite it's position among developed countries, for over a decade now. The government and population probably cannot afford to live in an import power economy. It has some of the fastest aging populations and one of the biggest public debt. The position is very fragile. If you shut down all nuclear plants, compensate that with imported power, and start building low wield alternative now to replace them... that money will have to come from somewhere, and that will be from a working class that is already overworked and paying for an aging population and a stagnant economy. So the grimm, cold and sad math of this is that shutting those plants down could potentially have a negative impact worse than risking another disaster. It's actually kind of a miracle that Japan sustained all the recent drastic changes as well as it did... a culture that is incredibly resilient to catastrophes probably plays a big part on that. I personally visited Japan back in 2008, and again this year in 2018. If I didn't know about the disaster, I would never have guessed that something this big happened in between my visits. It's kinda like how the country is in recession for so long, and how the country is in unstable grounds - you go there, it just doesn't show. But anyways, I wrote too much already... I hope these people affected will end up with the best outcomes possible, and may they find a way to lead better lives not constantly shadowed by what happened.
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