Fukushima Risks Explained

Here is a slide show that gives an excellent presentation of the radiation risk from the Japanese reactor meltdown and the fires in the uncovered stored spent fuel...



Click on "View on Slideshare" to get a window that lets you rescale the slides to whatever size you desire.

And here is a useful radiation dosage chart.

And the following is meant to put some fear into you...



I believe that nuclear reactors can be safe, but you have to engineer the safety into it. (I was a software safety engineer years ago.) But you only get safety if you take it seriously and do the necessary safety analysis before the design and do safety audits during construction and during operation. So fear isn't the right message.

The lesson to be learned is to build in safety. The problem at Fukushima was that they didn't take the "worst case" seriously enough. My obvious question: why build a reactor at sea level when you know you can have a tsunami? Without the tsunami, Fukushima would have been a story of safe shutdown after suffering an earthquake beyond the design limits for the reactor.

Update 2011mar21 Here is a slide show from the IAEA quantifying the amount of radiation.

Technical Briefing on the Radiological Situation in Japan, Renate Czarwinski, 18th March 2011

View more presentations from IAEA.