12 hours needed for people within 30-km (18 mile) radius of nuclear plants to evacuate: study

[kristopher]

12 hours needed for people within 30-km radius of nuclear plants to evacuate: study

At least 12 hours would be needed for everyone living within a radius of 30 kilometers from nuclear power plants in Japan to evacuate in the event of a nuclear accident, according to research results conducted by a private group.

In cases where the use of evacuation routes is limited to national highways due to complex disasters such as earthquakes, people within a radius of 30 kilometers from the Tokai No. 2 Power Station in Ibaraki Prefecture would need five days and a half to complete their evacuation. Those people living near the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station in Shizuoka Prefecture would likely need about six days to move out of the 30-kilometer zone, the research findings show.

The research, conducted by "Kankyo Keizai Kenkyujo" (research institute on environmental economics), is apparently the first analysis covering all of the nuclear power plants in Japan. The research results highlight the fact that it is almost impossible for all of the residents near a nuclear power station to evacuate fast enough to avoid radiation exposure in the event of an accident in which radioactive substances are released into the atmosphere.

....

The research was conducted on municipalities that lie within a radius of 30 kilometers from nuclear power plants and are required to prepare emergency evacuation plans under the government's guidelines for responses to nuclear disasters. The research was also based on the assumption that 30 percent of registered buses and 50 percent of registered privately-owned cars in each of those municipalities would be used for evacuation.

The study was also based on the assumption that all of the residents in a given area would start moving simultaneously to evacuate...

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20140114p2a00m0na010000c.html

[Journeyman]

1. I suspect the gasoline stations would run out of fuel before everyone got away. . .

Realistically, how long would supplies last if half the cars in a given major metropolitan area were to suddenly try to gas up at the same time. Not very long, I suspect, even if the majority were just wanting to "top off" before they set out for parts unknown.

[madokie]

3. Considering most fuel tanks at the stations are measured in a few thousands gallons at best

and only a few in numbers I'd say that there wouldn't be enough gas to get anywhere all the people out.

Nuclear is and was the stupidest scheme to boil water that was ever conceived. Too much baggage, too f*ing dangerous

[Fumesucker]

2. It would take just as long to evacuate people within 18 miles of a wind farm or solar array

[caraher]

4. ????

And the reason for such an evacuation would be... what?

[Fumesucker]

5. Hurricanes, tornadoes, solar flares

Don't feel bad, you're not the only one who doesn't get my sensauma.

[kristopher]

6. It wasn't clear because there are so many ALEC-like attacks on renewables here

And although I took it as humor because of the far-out nature of some of those antirenewable claims, I could have easily gone the other way.

[Fumesucker]

7. You and I have interacted before, not that frequently though

I'm interested in quite a bit of the stuff you post, I appreciate your efforts in this although I might not always agree.

It's my misfortune to have been raised by an umpteenth degree black belt in sarcasm, between genetic proclivity and early training sometimes I really just can't help myself.

[GliderGuider]

8. The same thing happens during hurricane evacs. Remember Rita?

Mass evacuations for any reason are a nightmare. As climate chaos begins to roll, we will need far better evac planning.

[kristopher]

9. The problems aren't really the same.

A nuclear meltdown isn't nearly as predictable as a hurricane, nor do they happen as frequently. Then we have to factor in the warnings for hurricanes turn aside as the last minute.

People tend to stay planted when warned of an approaching hurricane. Do you suppose they'll get any comparable warning in the event of a massive release of radiation? Or will the nuclear plant be more likely to try to hide the problem until it simply can't be hidden any longer?

[GliderGuider]

10. The human behavior is pretty much identical.

They stay put in either case until the catastrophe is upon them. In the case of a hurricane it's our psychology that freezes us in place. In the case of a radiological accident they don't know of the problem and stay in place until the warning comes. In both cases the result is that the full manifestation of the crisis is followed by an immediate large-scale exodus.

From a logistical point of view the situations are identical. From a political point of view perhaps they are not, but that is a distinction without a difference to the family in an out-of-fuel station wagon stranded with no water in the midst of a million other vehicles.

[kristopher]

11. I don't agree

When the hurricane hits they can't evacuate. Prior to that the build up is gradual.

[GliderGuider]

12. So what do you think happened with Rita?

[kristopher]

13. What do you think happened with Rita?

We are dealing with two different types of event scenarios - one is sudden and no warning, the other builds gradually to a crescendo. There are similarities, but there are crucial differences also.
Deal with it.

[GliderGuider]

14. They didn't move until the storm was almost on them, then they stampeded.

You said, "People tend to stay planted when warned of an approaching hurricane." Which means you get the same effect on the evac routes as in a nuclear accident - nothing at all, then a sudden, massive surge of people.

How is a warning that people ignore that much different from no warning at all? (Think of climate change responses here...)

[kristopher]

15. Because with a hurricane you hit the point BEFORE the hurricane where it is better to stay put.

Disaster planning and management was part of my duty for years. You might think these two things are similar, but when it gets down to planning how you mobilize the people for evacuation and the way the evac is executed, you are going to use two plans that are substantially different.

But hey, whatever. Keep trying your best to put lipstick on that nuclear pig.

[GliderGuider]

17. Ah, now I get what you meant.

You said, "People tend to stay planted when warned of an approaching hurricane." I took that to mean that you thought people tended to ignore the warnings until the danger was obvious, and then flee. Which they do. But I now think you mean that people tend to "shelter in place" for hurricanes. Some do, but a lot flee. With Rita, the fact that it was just after Katrina caused people to take the warnings seriously and they got the fuck out of Dodge, en masse.

I still think that for those who take hurricane evac warnings seriously, the mobility issue is identical to a nuke blowing a gasket.

When have I supported nuclear power recently, boyo? Or are you reading chicken guts again?

[dbackjon]

16. Well, since there has never been a full nuclear meltdown in the US

With release of any dangerous levels of radiation,
but we get hurricanes most every year...


I am more concerned about the lightly regulated railroads, pipelines etc in this country.

[kristopher]

18. According to nuclear industry safety stats there shouldn't have been any meltdowns anywhere

And yet the list is growing rapidly along with the average age of the nuclear fleet.

You might want to stretch your mind and allow consideration of more than one source of potential danger.

This informs the subject.

The Frequency Fallacy

A second illegitimate defense of BSC is through the frequency fallacy, confusing core-melt-relative-frequency data with subjective probabilities. Yet ‘probability’ can mean: (i) ‘classical probability;’ (ii) ‘relative frequency;’ or (iii) ‘subjective probability,’ not all of which are applicable to nuclear-core-melt assessment.

Classical probability (i) is illustrated by card games in which the deck contains a fixed number of cards, for example 52. The probability of an event (e) thus equals the number of possible favorable outcomes (f) divided by the total number of possible outcomes (n): P(e)?=?f/n. Provided the deck of cards is fair, each card has an equal chance of being picked, and the probability (i) of picking an ace?=?4/52. Thus, (i) assumes that all possible outcomes are equally likely and that we know n—neither of which is the case regarding nuclear-accident outcomes.

Relative-frequency probability (ii) is often used for cases where the number of outcomes (n) is so great that all typically cannot be observed, as in the probability (ii) that current 5-year-olds will contract cancer. We cannot observe all 5-year-olds throughout their lifetimes, but can reliably predict cancer probability for random, typical 5-year-olds, if we observe a large-enough, long-enough sample. Thus, if we observed 1000 5-year-olds over their lifetimes, if samples were representative and large enough, and if we observed 350 cancer deaths, we could say this cancer probability was roughly P(e)?=?35.0% (350/1000). We cannot predict with certainty, however, unless we know the frequency of all relevant events—whether lifetime cancers or total nuclear-core melts. Given that preceding core-melt lists include all occurrences (consistent with the three caveats), those lists suggest an almost-certain, core-melt probability (ii)?=?core melts/total reactors?=?26/442?=?roughly a 6% probability (ii)—roughly a 1 in 16 chance of core melt—which is hardly a low probability.

Subjective probability (iii) relies only on what people think particular probabilities are. The odds people get when they bet at racetracks are subjective probabilities because if the probabilities were objective, smart players would always win.?Obviously (iii) does not provide reliable nuclear-core-melt probabilities because it is based not on facts, but on what people think about facts. Nuclear proponents think the facts are one way, and opponents think they are another. Both cannot always be correct. Since (iii) is subjective and could be inconsistent, and because (i) would require knowing n and knowing a falsehood (that all reactor outcomes were equally likely), (ii) appears most relevant to nuclear-core-melt assessment.

As preceding sections revealed, however, typical atomic-energy advocates use (iii) not (ii) to assess core-melt probabilities, such as when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said core-melt accidents, for all 104 US reactors, would only occur once every 1000 years. Instead, the NRC should have made predictions based on government inspections, independent analyses, and accident-frequency data, not ‘on [subjective-probability] data submitted by plant owners’ (Broder et al., 2011, p. D1). The NRC predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) also has a long history of making BSC based on (iii). AEC said the probability of a US nuclear core meltdown is 1 in 17,000 per reactor year (AEC, 1957; Mulvihill et al., 1965).

Even universities erroneously use subjective probabilities (iii), not frequencies (ii), to assess nuclear-core-melt likelihood, particularly when pro-nuclear-government agencies fund their studies. For instance, although the classic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-authored, government-funded, reactor-safety study had frequency data for various nuclear accidents that already had occurred after decades of US-operating experience, it did not use them; instead the MIT authors used subjective, pro-nuclear assumptions and conjectures about these accident probabilities (Rasmussen, 1975). When independent, university mathematicians compared US nuclear-accident-frequency data, reported from operating experience, with MIT guesses (iii), they discovered that all ‘guesses’ were far too low, by several orders of magnitude. None of the nuclear-accident-frequency data, based on reactor-operating experience, was within the theoretical, 90% confidence interval of the MIT ‘guesses.’Yet there is only a subjective probability of 10% that any of these true (frequency-based) probability values (for different types of reactor accidents) should fall outside this 90% interval. The conclusion? University mathematicians said that MIT assessors were guilty of a massive ‘overconfidence’ bias toward nuclear safety, a typical flaw in most industry-government-funded, nuclear-risk analyses (Cooke, 1982).

This fallacious substitution of subjective probabilities (iii)—for nuclear-core-melt frequencies (ii)—has at least two interesting parallels, namely...

From the journal
Ethics, Policy & Environment

Fukushima, Flawed Epistemology, and Black-Swan Events
Dr Kristin Shrader-Frechette

The full discussion is available for download here
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21550085.2011.605851

[dbackjon]

19. Yet there haven't been any. You can scare all you want

Doesn't change REALITY

[kristopher]

20. Scare? I'm laying out data that has been distorted and hidden by the nuclear village.

If you find it frightening, it isn't on me. From the same article we have a list of the core melt events that have occurred. With more than 100 reactors operating in the US, this is knowledge that any rational, science based person should be aware of.

As the preceding list of 26 nuclear core melts reveals, scientists interested in epistemically legitimate probability claims ought not use highly stipulative definitions of ‘core melt’—that prescribe using data only for ‘major’ core melts or only for civilian-owned reactors.

Open access article available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21550085.2011.605851