Amazing Photos Released 4 Years After Japan's Nuclear Disaster

originally posted by: StoutBroux

originally posted by: tiredoflooking
A Polish Journalist has released an amazing eye opening photo essay of some parts of the exclusion zone surrounding the Fukushima Nuclear plant. He is unable to gain access to the most contaminated areas yet, but the pictures are eye opening. It appears frozen in time with many pics of earth quake and tsunami damage as well. It remains to be seen how Japan plans to dispose of everything left in these zones including what looks like acres of " highly contaminated soil" stacked many levels high in some sort of plastic like bags. Is Japan doing enough to stop the spread of nuclear waste in you ATSer's opinions?

www.dailymail.co.uk... erness.html?ito=social-facebook

Maybe they were buying TV's made in Japan. I know I got my 1st flat screen just a couple years ago. My other TV's lasted longer. The older they were, the longer they lasted. Each new TV last less years. Kind of like everything else.

They might not dispose of it because they don't have any place to do so. Unless they plan on loading barges up and sinking them somewhere, which I hope they don't.

Yes WHERE it will all go is the question. The article that accompanies the pics says the government plans to dispose of the contaminated soil, but the evacuated residents are skeptical of this claim.

I *think* the photo of the TV dump might really have been an old TV dump...if they had really taken all things out of houses from the "hot" zones there would be a heck of a lot more stuff than is in these pictures. The photographer does say that he was unable to enter the zones closest to the reactor, only persons with a specific purpose like cleaning are granted access. I believe that the pictures of the soil bags is in the most damaged zone, taken by a drone it says.

a reply to: carewemust

In actual fact, plants and trees will grow in abundance, albeit with some mutations in their gene codes, but metals and alloys can have their properties drastically changed by exposure to radiation. They can blister, swell, crack, or become more prone to accelerated rusting.

In the case of cars, that could mean that everything from the engine to the body work, from the brakes to the exhaust manifold, could be compromised beyond use, or worse, look just fine to the naked eye. If someone tried to turn that engine over, it could explode right off the bat, or the vehicle might hold together just long enough to have a catastrophic failure while in motion.

Micro fissures, changes in the molecular structure of metals, render equipment, vehicles, and the like which have been abandoned close to the reactor and in the exclusion zone, as too risky to try and recover with the intention of making normal use of them. Most of those things will likely be used as research material in the future, more than anything else.

that picture of the "cars on the road" is staged.
look at the cars, they are facing different directions. I don`t know much about japan but I`m pretty sure that`s not how they drive.
a car is facing this direction---> and the one in front of it is facing front to front towards it.some of the cars have the back ends facing each other.
I don`t know what that is a picture of but it`s not a road.
maybe it`s a dumping ground where they towed some of the cars that were in the exclusion zone.

a reply to: Tardacus

It does seem like they must have been towed there you are right. It cannot be that everyone just ran from their cars while out driving as the caption suggests. I had not even noticed the peculiar configuration, thanks for pointing that out!

a reply to: Tardacus
A staged Photo? by whom ? and why? do you know how long it takes grass to grow that high, I mean that is some incredible preplanning in a no go zone for what effect exactly?

Cars are a valuable asset to most people ( and one of the ones pictured was quite valuable ), so leaving cars to rot means something has made them lose any value to humans ( especially most Japanese whom are VERY resource conscious ), by local consensus...

"leave the cars behind" does not imply people got out and ran from their cars in situ ( from either tsunami or invisible insensible radiation emission ), it merely spotlights the fact that objects that normally have a very high value to most human being's measures of the quality of life have been deemed not worth recovering .

And Chernobyl had plenty of vegetative life that thrived due to the lack of predators that were reduced due to higher radiation counts...well that and it is well known that radiation exposure often causes 'trauma' ( super fast) growth and gigantism is numerous plants, but if one wants to go live their I bet property is dirt cheap.

The bags of contaminated soil are obviously so dangerous, they must remain on the site. It is probably the best place for them presently, until they can figure out how to dispose of them. Burial in probably not an option as it may find ground water.

I wonder if some people throw caution to the wind and pillage things that are valuable. There is so much there.
I hope security is tight enough to prevent something "hot" showing up on Ebay...

a reply to: charlyv

I was wondering the same thing, about looting. Seems like they have a pretty strictly guarded containment area, I wonder about the drones pics of the waste bags. I wonder if that drone belonged to the photography group or if it was government issued from Japan.

There is no easy way to get rid of the soil, I say they should blast it into space...nuclear toxic waste along with a lot of the other garbage we need to not put in this planet's soil. I know it would probably be way too cost prohibitive but really, how can we put a price on the wellness of this planet?

a reply to: tiredoflooking

If it were ever economical to do, and obviously absolutely fail-safe some day, I always thought that launching our extremely dangerous nuclear waste into the Sun would be the way we would handle this problem. It is a balance of risk, as how much can we store before it becomes toxic to the overall planet .vs. the fallout from a failed launch.

We are going to have to deal with this soon enough, if the other problems we have created on the orb don't take us out first.

If there's so much radiation still going into the ocean, why not just dump the bags of soil in there as well? Can't make much difference at this point.

Not to make light of this, but the author must be a fan of The Walking Dead, judging by how many times he referenced it. .

a reply to: tiredoflooking

These guys are brilliant. Let's store the contaminated soil right next to the ocean from whence the Tsunami originated. What could possibly go wrong with storing soil in water?

a reply to: carewemust

How is it that plants, grass, flowers grow, but the cars are not safe to drive away?

Everything was dusted with radioactive contamination; soil, plants, roads, houses, everything. The plants absorb the "nutrients' from the soil through their roots. They are as contaminated as everything else. Just that people aren't going to get in them and drive them away, spreading contamination everywhere they go from tires, wheel wells, chassis.

Hey it'll be alright, just vacuum it out and visit the carwash. Then the filter bag from the vacuum goes into a garbage truck and to the landfill while the carwash parking lot and drains in neighborhood start setting off detectors.

Let alone the one that drives the car, because you can't remove it all, its the size of atoms. He and the family go for a ride, roll down the windows, stirring it up inside and from under the car, leaving it everywhere they go. Then one day, they go to the hospital with cancer.

Best to just "abandon in place".

Image of abandoned equipment near Chernobyl

a reply to: cosmania

What if they discovered a way that Salt water can tone down the contamination?
Then they could handle the bags for disposal easier by selling them
to a small country over run by monsanto crops

Sell em icky dirt for the icky seeds?

---

Yup most are correct with it's fake
Can't get in to the deeper areas
they cleared that area out so people can't see the truth

Robot Army

/sarcasm

a reply to: tiredoflooking

I would think the white spots on the coats were from fall out from the rain afterwards. Looks very similar to skin damage on Japanese fisherman caught in unexpected fall out clouds from experiments at Bikini Atoll back in the 50's or 60's.

Exactly. Alpha emitters have short decay paths that affect a small region around them…

Cows stand outside all day, receiving the highest number of particles of fallout. They also eat the grass at their feet and drink water from troughs. Guess what their meat looks like?

We find buried cities in Egypt and in Guatemala, and think to ourselves ......why would they abandon this...... In the future, say ten thousand years, what is left of the world will have these mysterious intact remains and archeological finds all over. If man still exists.... otherwise it remains a mystery for aliens to try to solve.


They are essentially lost to civilization, far into the future, eons.

a reply to: butcherguy

Certain plants and insects can stand high amounts. Most higher orders of animals die off first.

Called Bio-accumulation, higher up the food chain more concentrated are any toxins in the environment.

I was thinking If that was in the U.S. the scavengers would be pulling the better parts off those cars. The meth heads wouldn't let a little radiation get in the way of their next fix.

a reply to: tiredoflooking

wildlife there is flourishing without problems and those that stayed in the region do not have much higher incidence of cancer than is normally recorded. I wonder if this is conspiracy, or if the horrible damage we are all meant to believe is the conspiracy.

Whomever is saying that is mistaken or misleading. Horrible damage isn't reaqdilyevident, the spread of radioactivity and mutations increase over time.

Mutant Pine trees…

originally posted by: gspat
Those cracks in the pasture grounds seem a bit off to me... why wouldn't they be covered over by plants, like everything else, by now?

Seeds sprout in top soil, below ground there isn't enough nutrients. Evetually they will erode and disappear. Just like major landslides take time to harbor new life.

Image

Regarding sending the bad stuff into space:

From a post in the original Fukushima Mega Thread:

Dumb idea #2: Send the nuke waste into space! Yeeehaw, let aliens deal with it.

Do you have any idea how much nuke fuel weighs? 1(ONE) typical spent fuel cask weighs 151tonnes. Do you know what kinda ummmmmph (thrust) you need to send 151 tons into space? The more weight you are sending up the more fuel you need to send it up, the more fuel you are carrying the more weight you have. At a certain point, you reach negative returns... you can't carry enough fuel to reach escape velocity. For comparison, the usual max payload for the space shuttle including crew and toothpaste was about 23 tonnes. Now look at this little fact:

With 134 missions, and the total cost of US$192 billion (in 2010 dollars), this gives approximately $1.5 billion per launch over the life of the program.

Now that includes Nasa's buildings, paperclips and janitors, but most of the cost of a launch is the fuel. FUEL. Now, given your payload, assuming you could even reach escape velocity, which you couldn't, you would need approx 8x the thrust/cost etc. Now, that's just for ONE CASK. 12 billion $$ for one cask. Annnd.... what if the space vehicle does a Columbia on it's way up?....Hmmm. Wa Wa Wa... flush.

Not a good idea with current technology.