many here and other places said it would be just fine....I said when it happened it would be here tomorrow, tomorrow is here and it will be here tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.....this one scares me...still poisoning the ocean for sure, atmosphere? People are affected in large numbers, yet nothing in our media. Really very quiet on this worldwide. Makes a person wonder just what the fuck is the real deal with this poison pill affecting many....

Neville Shute's imagining of the end of the world by nuclear radiation.

As best as I remember the book, at the end of it, our hero and his wife/girlfriend/whatever are sitting on a beach in Australia,
facing sure certainty that destruction is racing towards them, they have just a little bit of time left,
and the reader cannot help but ask..
"what do you do, what do you feel, what goes thru your mind at a time like this?"

and now I know....you just go in with life, as best you can, because between climate change and Fukushima, there is nothing the average person can really do at the moment that will change the outcome in the near future.

isn't it?

The only thing we can do is to be kind to those around us and to keep our equilibrium.

With Fukashima there's no technology that can stop it which means there is nothing anyone can do about it. With Climate change we have the possibility to seek the technology and a chance to turn it around on a long term basis. But it's not something common humankind can do on their own, it takes the power of all nations.

...outrage to go unchecked...

As long as Japan cannot contain this mess and it looks like they're not even trying very hard, it is NOT a Japan only problem...

And I understand that some here say that the effects are minimal and there is nothing to be concerned with, but with all due respect, I have a zero tolerance towards anything that even remotely affects my environment...

I repeat... this is NOT a Japan only problem.. I hope the best minds in the world are considering solutions to this mess...

Tell me more.

If even a tenth of what he predicted in the months after Fukushima melted down had come true, Japan would be burying their dead with bulldozers by now.

...of labor statistics, there 16,680 nuclear engineers employed in the United States alone.

I spend a lot of time reading papers written by professors of nuclear engineering working at major national labs, major academic institutions with nuclear engineering departments like, um, MIT, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech...etc...etc...people at the Ph.D. level.

The people who founded the nuclear engineering field were Nobel Laureates.

I can't recall a single case other than the one individual you cite who claims that the failure of the reactors at Fukushima is the worst industrial accident of all time.

Not one.

Zero.

I'm sure if we polled the 16,680 working nuclear engineers in this country that there would only be a few who bought this obviously insane representation, given that the Alpha Piper oil platform explosion incinerated 167 people nearly instantaneously and the Horizon Deepwater explosion incinerated 8 people immediately and contaminated the entire Gulf of Mexico with some very well known and clearly understood carcinogenic petroleum products.

I suspect that among the 16,680 working nuclear engineers we wouldn't find 10 who would agree with Mr. Gunderson's statement, and the ten - if we could find them - we would find would not actually have worked at a reactor site for many decades, but instead would represent malcontent marginal employees with an axe to grind and a healthy dollop of paranoia.

Mr. Gunderson's Wikipedia page indicates that he hasn't held a nuclear engineering job since the 1990's other than promoting dangerous and fallacious paranoia that um, kills people since nuclear energy saves lives that would otherwise be among the 7 million people who die each year from air pollution.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

In any case, a degree in nuclear engineering does not qualify one as an epidemiologist, and probably the most qualified people to adjudge what the "worst industrial accident" of all time is would be the kind of people who wrote this paper on risk factors and mortality, an international consortium of epidemiologists, medical professionals and statisticians.

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

It's very clear from even a cursory reading of this important and widely cited paper, that one of the worst industrial disasters of all time is the normal operations of coal, gas, oil and biomass energy plants and residential use.

I suspect the reason that you "thought" Mr. Gunderson had credibility is because he is the only one among a tiny subset of the 16,680 nuclear engineers in this country who validated your own anti-nuclear paranoia.

If you were actually interested in knowing something about nuclear energy, you could find many tens of thousands of references written at a very high level on the subject. I happen to know this since I've done it myself, stirring myself out of my very, very, very, very stupid anti-nuclear bias after Chernobyl blew up.

For more than 30 years I've been reading technical and non-technical papers on nuclear energy at a very detailed level, tens of thousands of them probably.

The reason I was inspired to do this was because I thought, having bought into rote anti-nuclear stupidity that when the reactor exploded at Chernobyl that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people would die.

That didn't happen.

It led me to question the "experts" who I thought had credibility - the blockheads at the Union of Concerned "Scientists" for instance - who I believed before the reactor exploded. Once I set out on this course, I recognized that nuclear energy is the last best hope of the human race, and I, um, changed my mind and realized that to expiate for my sins I needed to promote nuclear energy.

Contemplating the Terrorist Who Strikes the Indian Point Nuclear Station.

What is depressing here is the number of people who jumped right on this nonsense statement here. They're clueless.

Anyone, and I do mean any one who thinks that Mr. Gunderson has credibility has clearly zero knowledge of nuclear technology and is simply promoting his grotesque ignorance, and again, it is grotesque inasmuch as accepting it kills people.

Anyone who spreads this kind of crap is doing a disservice to humanity.

That catches the entire anti-nuke lunatic fringe.

...deaths from air pollution in the last ten years by several orders of magnitude.

Why, it's completely depopulated all of Asia!!!!!

The existence of Japan is actually a fraud perpetuated by the grand nuclear conspiracy that is trying to kill everyone by the end of the week.

Now let's get serious.

The fact that tens of millions of people will die because people circulate garbage may not be the greatest industrial disaster of all time, but it is the greatest moral disaster of all time.

Nuclear energy saves lives, and the lives that are lost because nuclear energy is not used are all lost because of stupidity, gullibility, ignorance, fear and superstition.