{"id":33786,"date":"2018-04-27T06:05:41","date_gmt":"2018-04-27T11:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33786"},"modified":"2018-04-27T06:08:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-27T11:08:24","slug":"move-over-chernobyl-fukushima-is-now-officially-the-worst-nuclear-power-disaster-in-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33786","title":{"rendered":"Move Over Chernobyl, Fukushima is Now Officially the Worst Nuclear Power Disaster in History"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Move Over Chernobyl, Fukushima is Now Officially the Worst Nuclear Power Disaster in History<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the \u201csecond worst\u201d nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima are estimated to be between 5.6 and 8.1 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Professor Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the report\u2019s Fukushima section, told London\u2019s Channel 4 News then, \u201cAlmost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has estimated that about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the updated 2016 TORCH Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels.[1]<\/a>(A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. The \u201cpeta-becquerel\u201d is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels.)<\/p>\n

Chernobyl\u2019s reactor No. 4 in Ukraine suffered several explosions, blew apart and burned for 40 days, sending clouds of radioactive materials high into the atmosphere, and spreading fallout across the whole of the Northern Hemisphere \u2014 depositing cesium-137 in Minnesota\u2019s milk.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

The likelihood of similar or worse reactor disasters was estimated by James Asselstine of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), who testified to Congress in 1986:\u00a0\u201cWe can expect to see a core meltdown accident within the next 20 years, and it \u2026 could result in off-site releases of radiation \u2026 as large as or larger than the releases \u2026 at Chernobyl.[3]\u00a0<\/a>Fukushima-Daiichi came 25 years later.<\/p>\n

Contamination of soil, vegetation and water is so widespread in Japan that evacuating all the at-risk populations could collapse the economy, much as Chernobyl did to the former Soviet Union. For this reason, the Japanese government standard for decontaminating soil there is far less stringent than the standard used in Ukraine after Chernobyl.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Move Over Chernobyl, Fukushima is Now Officially the Worst Nuclear Power Disaster in History Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0 The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the \u201csecond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[4448,5493,340,19950,452,12087,579,580],"class_list":["post-33786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-chernobyl","tag-counterpunch","tag-fukushima","tag-fukushima-daiichi","tag-japan","tag-john-laforge","tag-nuclear-power","tag-nuclear-radiation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33786"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33790,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33786\/revisions\/33790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}