[nickpp]

Anybody knows why they are completely cleaning up that plant instead of just cordoning it off and marking it as "deadly land, nobody allowed in". You know, an exclusion zone like Chernobyl.

Is land that expensive in Japan? Or is it some sort of ambition to prove they can repair that fuckup? O maybe there is a lot of money to be made in a cleanup operation?

[cedilla]

We're talking about highly toxic soil here. Soil doesn't stay where it is, it moves with water and wind. You have to fix it, somehow. Just putting a bit of warning tape around it doesn't cut it.

This isn't a theoretical point, either, wild mushrooms are still unsafe to eat in some parts of central Europe, almost four decades after Tchernobyl.

The whole Fukushima disaster is another lesson in the prevention paradox. We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government and TEPCO expended to keep them that low.

[panick21_]

No its not actually highly toxic and not actually very dangerous at all. A false level of danger has been assigned to radiation and its risk, mostly because of bad science in the 1970s.

This mushrooms are still unsafe stuff is mostly a myth. What's correct is that these mushrooms still measure over the arbitrary level set government regulation during the height of panic about nuclear.

> We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government

Actually much of those efforts have actually killed and hurt more people then it saved. Creating a panic and evacuating a major city because of some unfounded unscientific assessment of the danger.

I'm sure all the money spent on cleaning the grass has saved millions of people. The reality is that many of those efforts are political show making, security theater, like the TSA.

I'm sure there are some reasonable measures as well, but much of it is vastly overblown in terms of actual effects it would have.

See in Tschernobyl where very little was done, and people in the exclusion zone (where there is more radiation then in Japan) are totally fine.

[hadlock]

I can read all the science about how nuclear material in the soil is safe, but also I can't in good conscience let my toddler roll around in it and put it in her mouth. You need 100% buy in from parents who will be raising their children there.

Japan has removed the top ~8 inches of topsoil from the affected areas around fukashima, I think that is really impressive, but even then I would never allow my family to move there for any reason.

That said, I'm generally in favor of nuclear. I just don't want my kid rolling around in contaminated soil.

[wahern]

> I just don't want my kid rolling around in contaminated soil.

Ignorance is bliss. Contaminated soils abound across the industrialized world, it's just that most people have no idea.

Moreover, there's legitimate pressure to keep it that way as people irrationally freak out when they learn something is "contaminated". It turns out that often times the best way to promote soil remediation is to turn a blind eye (at least to some extent) as once contamination is publicly identified costs soar as the public begins demanding ever more onerous mandates, causing people to stop voluntarily remediating, which is why lead thresholds are set considerably lower than for other similarly problematic but less common contaminants.

Just this past week we called up the city environmental health inspector to ask him to check out some painting work being done at a house whose yard abuts our own. We've done it before as we have two young children. The inspector is very nice and accommodating, and there's basically zero risk of anyone getting fined or handed any stop-work order. He simply nudges the painters to take the barest of safety measures, e.g. simple tarping (even if amateurish), to minimize leaded paint flake dispersal. And what more can you reasonably ask? Turning every house scraping job into a super fund site would just be ridiculous, yet if the law treated lead the same way it treated nuclear, that's exactly what would be demanded.

[MichaelCollins]

> Ignorance is bliss. Contaminated soils abound across the industrialized world, it's just that most people have no idea.

Absolutely right. And most of the industrial contaminates are a lot harder to detect than radiation. Even utterly minuscule amounts of radioactive isotopes are almost trivial to detect.

[Schroedingersat]

> Contaminated soils abound across the industrialized world, it's just that most people have no idea.

Like all the radon and the heavy metals in the ground, water, and dust in Niger and Kazakhstan?

[fomine3]

> Soil doesn't stay where it is, it moves with water and wind. You have to fix it, somehow.

If (enough) so, it is spread across the globe so it become negligible. Those lands are highly polluted so it can't be live.