Apr 092011
A video journey towards Fukushima:
[youtube yp9iJ3pPuL8]
They encounter a number of dogs… some are slipping into skittishness and look like they’ll soon be wild; a bulldog looks just thrilled to see them. I wonder if they picked the feller up.
And if that wasn’t depressing enough…
Man stranded in empty Japanese town since tsunami
Short form: some journalists go off the beaten path into an area of the evacuation zone that has been abandoned and un-searched since the tsunami, and find a 75-year-old man living in his largely intact house. Hasn’t seen anyone since the quake. Running out of food and water. Doesn’t know what happened to his wife. “She was here, but now she’s gone.”
6 Responses to “Japan After People”
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He would probably find Cormac McCarthy an optimist.
At least Hashima island gets the occasional adventure tourists as the folks at weirdworm.com did. You know, maybe the Japanese would be better off to move to Detroit and bring new life there. People with no infrastructure go to where there is infrastructure but no people. Just rename it Sailor’s Haven, with Japan’s flooded plains reverting back to plains filled with Cherry Blossoms, even as Hilo “abandoned the low-lying bayfront areas (Waiākea peninsula) and along its bay.”
According to wiki these lands, “previously populated, were rededicated as parks and memorials” to the tsunami there.
Perhaps it is for the best.
I think it’s worth mentioning that even at the maximum dose rate experienced by the occupants of the car (11.1μSv/hour, d=1.8 km) they would have had to sit there for over four thousand hours ( ±187.6 days) in order to reach the maximum yearly exposure for radiation workers established by the U.S. NRC of 50,000 μSv.
And that is discounting the fact that the radioactivity in the area continues to decay at a rate of 90% per sevenfold increase in time since emission began. By day 200 (assuming no further release of radioactive material) the dose rate in the area will be insignificant.
Actually, they got an order of magnitude hotter… 112 μSv/hour, at about the 11:35 mark. That would give ’em 446 hours (18.6 days). Interestingly, the radiation levels were climbing *fast* right then. My guess would be a cloud, or maybe a chunk of debris.
Thanks for the correction. I obviously missed that part of the video. 112 μSv/hour is certainly more than you’d like, but as you point out it would take more than two weeks of constant exposure at that dose rate to put you over the NRC annual dose… which is itself far below the health-effect threshold.
And yeah, it’s unlikely that the whole area was at that dose rate. As you no doubt know, radioactive materials released into the environment — whether from bomb explosions or industrial accidents — are never spread uniformly over the contamination zone. Wind action, drainage, and other effects act to concentrate the radioactive material in certain areas — “hot spots”. Cleaning up such hot spots is one of the primary mitigation activities in cases such as this.
I keep wondering if that poor guy thought that the reason no one came to find him was that there weren’t any people left, and it was all over.
Tokyo Electric released some video of the actual tsunami wave hitting the powerplant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ3IgHQuCBM&feature=player_embedded
Mighty big waves going clean up to the reactor buildings.
The article mentioned that the feller has spent his days listening to a battery powered radio. So he knew that people were out there… and probably suspected that nobody was going to come for him due to the radiation.