To prevent further leaks, a giant concrete sarcophagus was rapidly constructed over the disaster site. This cleanup operation took , people, and more or less bankrupted and ended the Soviet Union.
Now consider what would happen in the case that several or of these types of disasters occurred simultaneously. There simply isn't enough resources people, machinery and economic available to stop the disaster. So we could very roughly imagine each reactor burning off most of its inventory producing a disaster an order of magnitude worse than Chernobyl. However, on the plus side, Chernobyl, being a rather old and crappy design, didn't have any major containment systems designed to prevent massive release.
They simply never considered it at the time. But reactors constructed since have been severely regulated and safety systems improved. Still not fail-proof, obviously, since Fukushima suffered simultaneous meltdowns. The amount of radiation released is highly debated, with estimates from no radiation related deaths, just a few cancers, to the entire north pacific being annihilated. What is known, is that enough radiation was released to merit widescale topsoil removal, and that the reactors are continuing to leak contaminants into the sea even today.
It's important to note that Fukushima is an on-going disaster, and should be treated as such. Six years after the initial events it is still very unclear what has happened, where the fuel is, what condition it is in, and how much of it has escaped. No efforts to actually fix the meltdowns has taken place yet. The Japanese government have done very well to recover from the associated tsunami, which killed ,, destroyed so many homes and infrastructure, and was obviously a much worse disaster.
It is very interesting to note that the same government has not been able to clean up the Fukushima situation in any meaningful way. The site still leaks, they don't know what happened to the fuel, and they have taken no real plan to fix the cores. For reasons both technical and political, the cleanup is likely to drag out for decades, so the total radiation release may yet be counted higher than Chernobyl.
If they cannot make any progress on cleaning up one disaster site, despite 6 years and tens of thousands of workers, I think its reasonable to assume that there will be an even poorer response to a multiple-site disaster scenario.
A modern malfunctioning reactor might not violently burn off all its radiation to the atmosphere, but it may just continue to slowly leak and pollute indefinitely, with even wealthy and high-tech governments like Japan being totally unable to stop it.
Should many reactors be damaged and pushed into disaster situations, I think the governments will be totally overwhelmed and unable to respond, and the reactors will simply burn and melt uncontrollably until they eventually burn themselves out, producing far worse radiological disasters than we've seen with Chernobyl and Fukushima. The released radiation will contaminate crops, soil and water pretty much everywhere, entering the foodchain, and hanging around for tens of thousands of years.
It's likely civilization will continue in some form, but I expect a large degree of mutations, non-viable births, massive increases in cancer and leukemia, with a worst-case scenario involving the total collapse of the food chain due to some critical component dying out, and triggering a mass extinction event.
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Learn more. What would happen if all nuclear reactors had meltdowns? Asked 4 years, 10 months ago. Active 4 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 31k times. Improve this question.
Community Bot 1. StrangerHopeful StrangerHopeful 2, 2 2 gold badges 15 15 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges. Apparently they are healthier than their neighbors who stayed in the cities they were evacuated to, though of course that could be a selection effect.
Also, there is no actual evidence of problems caused by Fukushima, just fearmongering. Honestly, if it was a simple meltdown, there would be few problems. Blowing it up on the other hand, that would be a very big problem indeed. Show 1 more comment.
Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Fukushima was only so bad because of the catastrophic damage to various backup systems emergency diesels flooded and wouldn't start, portable pumps couldn't be brought in because a gaping chasm opened in the access road to the reactors and the surrounding terrain turned to mud, not making this up. Without a 40 foot tsunami, I think this is more like Three Mile Island. Yes, I agree, safety features today are significantly more advanced than they used to be, and nothing short of incredibly bad luck, or very deliberate tampering and dropping a nuke on it counts as "tampering" would cause that sort of disaster.
Conflate it by times, and people would wish they'd stayed in bed that morning. The problem is that there is a great deal of exaggeration in the public's idea of radiation - the "Omigawd, it's radioactive!
We're all gonna DIE! But contrast the idea that the Chernobyl exclusion zone according to the OP "will not be safe for humans for another 20, years" with the fact that people are living there now, and have been since shortly after the accident. Show 4 more comments. You are commenting using your Twitter account.
You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Email Address:. The unpublished notebooks of J.
Skip to content. Posted on August 15, by J. Share this:. Like this: Like Loading About J. Korhonen as himself View all posts by J. Bookmark the permalink. Mika says:. August 15, at But if the canisters start leaking after a years, what about people of AD? Korhonen says:. August 16, at October 8, at No matter: the maximum dose is still about two bananas. What would be the effects of the leak to humans or to the environment?
The new leak is the first to be given an INES rating since the original disaster. Initially classified as a level one "Incident" , it has been upgraded to level three "Serious Incident" , pending confirmation by the UN nuclear agency. A The upgrade to level 3 "Serious Incident" means the event involves the release of "a few thousand terabecquerels of activity into an area not expected by design which requires corrective action," or one resulting in radiation rates of "greater than one sievert per hour in an operating area," according to the INES user's manual.
A terabecquerel is 1 trillion becquerels, defined as the radioactive decay of one nucleus per second; a sievert is a unit of biological radiation dose equivalent to about 50, front view chest X-rays. Immediately after the June meltdown, scientists measured that 5, to 15, terabecquerels of radioactive material was reaching the ocean. The biggest threat at that time was from the radionuclide cesium. But for leaks that enter the ground, the radionuclides strontium and tritium pose more of a threat, because cesium is absorbed by the soil while the other two are not.
The damaged plant is still leaking about tons of water containing these radionuclides into the ocean every day, Japanese government officials say. An additional tons have leaked into the ground from the latest storage tank leak. Ever since the disaster, scientists have been measuring levels of radioactivity in fish and other sea life. Several species of fish caught off the coast of Fukushima in and had cesium levels that exceeded Japan's regulatory limit for seafood, but the overall cesium levels of ocean life have dropped since the fall of , U.
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