Comment 60973

By Pxtl (registered) - website | Posted March 15, 2011 at 10:18:41

The nuclear reactors have maintained containment in spite of a disaster that killed over 10,000 people and destroyed entire cities. The primary containment is designed to withstand a full meltdown - according to experts, the reason they avoid a full meltdown is to ease clean-up and as a precaution. Two separate oil refineries burst into flames (the one at Chiba is still burning) and I imagine have had a far worse health impact than those plants.

I'm constantly disappointed how few news reporters are including millisieverts/millirems figures in their reports of venting and exposure. That's like reporting on a heat wave without mentioning the temperature, or a snowfall without reporting the height. For example, the "radioactive cloud" the USS Reagan went through exposed them to less radiation than you get from a single X-ray.

The workers have been exposed to comparatively high levels of radiation. Reports are conflicting, but some saying the peak radiation at the plant was 8mSv per hour, and some saying the exposure for workers at the peak was 0.5mSv per hour. 8mSv is about the same as what you get from a CT scan. All the numbers being bandied about so far have been far below the amounts that have been proven to cause any ill effect.

Obviously there are safety lessons to be learned from this mess, but when you compare this backdrop against the massive catastrophe that's covering Japan, it seems like nuclear safety has been a success story.

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