The 1mSv per year is the max the employees at the dump/recycling plant can be exposed to, so leeching more than that into public water systems seems impossible unless I'm missing something. This comes mainly from solid scale deposits removed from the closed loop systems.
Average employees in German plants seemed to get around 3 mSv/yr on their table.

At Fukushima, According to TEPCO records, the average workers’ effective dose over the first 19 months after the accident was about 12 mSv. About 35% of the workforce received total doses of more than 10 mSv over that period, while 0.7% of the workforce received doses of more than 100 mSv.
The 10mSv was the estimated average exposure for those who evacuated immediately, not the area. Because iodine 131 has a half life of 8 days, the local exposure levels dropped rapidly, but because caesium-137 has a half life of 30 years, contaminated areas will be "hot" for quite a while, and are still off limits as I understand it.

Sort of...., most of the area surrounding Chernobyl is just above background levels after major decontamination including removal of all soil, but many areas closer to the plant are still being measured at well above safe levels to this day, and unapproachable, while others may be visited only with monitoring equipment, dose meters, and only for short times. It's not back to background levels everywhere, with measurements up to 336uSv/hr recorded in enclosed areas and abandoned recovery equipment (the claw used to dig at the reactor for instance)....no where near that low at the plant itself. Places like the nearby cemetery which couldn't have the contamination removed still measure higher than maximum occupational limits for adults working with radioactive material. The radiation levels in the worst-hit areas of the reactor building, including the control room, have been estimated at 300Sv/hr, (300,000mSv/hr) providing a fatal dose in just over a minute.
http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-levels/

Don't get me wrong, I support nuclear power. I just don't believe in pretending it's "safe". That's how Chernobyl happened....overconfidence and irresponsibility. If we consider it unacceptably disastrous if it goes wrong, we might design plants that can't go wrong...The tech exists.

@SDGundamX

I don't think this can compare. First: no one got off with murder. If anything, Western Europe is extremely harsh on its law enforcement officers, which doesn't help them want to protect the community, especially when the latter seems to loathe them so much. The Duggan case was nothing but an alibi for the majority of these looters.

Second, any person who thinks that they are entitled to loot from the livelihood of their neighbours, or burn their homes, has a serious problem, especially if they find the "well-other-people-are-doing-it" excuse acceptable. I fully understand the concept of mob mentality, and it seems it is because our society is such a lenient and dismissive "parent" that these youths fall prey to it. Why do these spoiled brats think it's okay to let of steam in such a destructive manner? Because they know they can get away with it, and that people will bend logic and common sense over backwards in order to find excuses for them. The government and society does have some responsibility, only not necessarily what people are accusing it of. A loving parent will care for its children, and that includes punishing them when they do wrong, not going all "you poor baby" on them. Kids need to learn that civil rights cannot be separated from civil responsibilities.

You make an excellent point in this comment by comparing with Japan: what is it that they have that makes them pull together instead of riot and pillage? A sense of community, and respect for authority. I'm not for blind respect, mind you, and the Japanese have good reason to be distrustful of the government's treatment of the Tepco scandal (amongst other things), but that certainly didn't keep them from helping each other.

Rapid meltdown in No.1 reactor: Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, says most of the fuel rods in the No.1 reactor had dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel within 16 hours of the earthquake on March 11th.

TEPCO to change reactor cool down method: TEPCO also says the gauges at the No.2 and 3 reactors might not be showing the actual water levels and that both reactors are likely to have undergone meltdowns.

>> ^MaxWilder:

Note this video is from Mar 16, 2011.
While still a terrible disaster, it is being ranked behind Chernobyl in terms of magnitude.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents


I've been seeing posts on reddit about meltdowns in 3 or 4 of the cores. A full on china syndrome in the 1st reactor. There's radioactive sludge in a city outside of the 20km exclusion zone. http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/hebf2/fukushima_nuclear_core_meltdown_confirmed/

At this point there's so much bullshit here that I have to put on my fucking hazmat suit.

At this point, just arguing about how it is or is not like Chernobyl is a bunch of bullshit. It just muddies the fucking waters so much that no one knows what the fucking truth is.

People are saying it melted right after the quake, people are saying it melted sometime after the quake, people are saying it could be in a runaway state right now.

In short, I wouldn't trust jack shit the government of Japan says, or TEPCO (They have a monetary interest in making things sound less dangerous).

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/2011/prn201106.html

I'm terribly late to the party, but I can't resist commenting here. This is a wonderful post with loads of great ideas and comments. I'll go bullet style like all the cool kids are doing.

* Taxation of individuals, and more to the point enforcement of individual tax laws, comes down to prioritization. Morally, it may feel better to want the IRS to tackle the super rich, but financially, it is in fact more beneficial to audit those less capable of evasion. If the IRS can spend $5k to get $10k from several individuals, that is fiscally more useful than spending millions going after one individual that can indefinitely avoid settling up. Corporations, on the other hand, are another matter entirely. Corporations are given the rights of citizens, like free speech, due process, etc., but are not expected to fulfill the same obligations in terms of taxes, being honest with law enforcement, being eligible for military service, voting, etc. That's a whole other can of worms opened up by the SCOTUS back in the 1800s. The answer lies in removing the citizen like rights of corporations, but that's not going to happen in our lifetimes.

* Welfare serves the dual purpose of helping those who have been screwed over by circumstance and those who have been screwed over by the system. It is something that the vast majority of right wingers will claim is better served by private charities, which are invariably faith based. Even AA is a religious organization. And every person that subscribes to a faith of one sort or another will tell you that nearly all charities are faith based. You know why? Because its virtually impossible to get non-profit status and wide recognition for an organization unless it is faith based. That historical/cultural bias is reason enough for me to justify a secular/communal charity system.

* Conventional nuclear power is great, assuming it is done safely. That's the problem, though - is it economically viable to maintain conventional nuclear power plants safely? None of the arguments I've seen on either side of the issue really deal with that aspect. It basically comes down to a matter of risk management, which TEPCO clearly failed at. Implementing conventional nuclear power safely requires a really absurd amount capital, but it may be economically smart at a large enough scale. Figuring out the economics of safe nuclear power is way above my pay grade. Ultimately, I believe it is something humans are quite capable of doing, but is there enough political will to do it properly?

* Free markets are awesome! Don't confuse free markets with capitalist bullying, though. A free market assumes that everyone in the market has the same information as everyone else. That's the only way it can actually be free. As soon as one party manipulates the information available to others, the market is no longer free. That applies to everything from snake oil remedies to irresponsible mortgages. A free market doesn't mean a market free of regulation, it means one in which everyone has equal access to the marketplace, producers and consumers alike.

* Small government, or even no government, is ideal because ideally everyone thinks like you do, and has exactly the same minimal requirements that you have. In the real world, the needs of individuals in very large social groups are immensely varied. You may live your whole life without ever needing the services of a fire department. You may not ever need to protect yourself from a psychopathic killer. Hell, you may run your own website from your home and never do more than walk your kids along a deer path to a private school near you. But you are a part of a society. Your kids' teacher may live 50 miles away and need to travel along paved roads to get to that wonderful school. The web of internetworked computers upon which your income relies was first conceived by people working at public institutions. The smallpox vaccination you got as a kid was developed by a tax funded group of doctors. The nuclear power that you want to support would never have been possible without vast amounts of federal funding. Bureaucratic and corruption waste is not unique to government, and any properly organized system can minimize waste. It's not the idea of government, but its implementation that makes it wasteful. Corporations are no more immune to that waste than any other collective. It's true that waste is easier to identify and possibly eliminate in smaller systems, but very large organizational systems are required for big results like space travel, vaccinations, and imperial domination.

* Do not confuse religion with spirituality. Religion is about dogma and social control. Spirituality is about one's connection with the universe. If your neighbor believes in a grey bearded man in the sky that created everything 6000 years ago, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with his desire to eliminate the teaching of evolution from public schools. He may use the former to justify the latter, but the two are not really connected. If someone comes to your door offering a deeper connection with the universe around you through Jesus, you can listen politely, tell them that you are already plugged in, or whatever. If someone comes to your door to tell you that you and your family need to behave in a certain way, you can tell them to fuck off with a quite clear conscience.

I don't think any of these ideas are young or old, but it does take some time to refine them into something coherent. I'm 41 and I barely know what coherent or consistent means. One last thing to remember is that you are not who you were 10 years ago, or even 10 seconds ago. Every moment fresh water flows over the fall - it might look the same, but the rocks are never touched twice. (oh - now I'm just getting pretentious)

There are lots of articles, but this one is also good. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/At-Fukushima-gensets-were-underground/articleshow/7741036.cms

"heat in the cores even after shutdown, sufficient to boil off 300 tonnes of water every day"

"Analysis emerging now shows that there were 13 diesel generators installed in a below-ground bunker near the seawall protecting the nuclear plant from the ocean. The diesel fuel was reportedly stored in tanks built on the sea front to facilitate easy unloading from ships."


This backup generator design has to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, next to leaving like six reactors worth of spent fuel rods sitting in an open pool on top of a nuclear reactor.

So basically this place was designed to only have 8 hours of battery power... Clearly the reactors were going to melt down. I'm really surprised there was no emergency water tanks built into the system anywhere. Now I understand why TEPCO told the PM on Monday that they were done, and they were leaving and it was a suicide mission to stay. Remember when they said all the workers left. That was when they told the govt it is hopeless.