Photographer captures the ruin of Fukushima's exclusion zone

Thanks for sharing that. Even though I found it only took 10 minutes on StreetView to see some of those areas look different today than depicted in those photos, I'm glad someone wrote an article to further debunk it. Hopefully all previous commenters will see it.

I think people are taking issue with the disrespect shown to the Japanese culture, not the legal prohibition of entering a restricted area. My Japanese friends are very upset with these, I guess if you believe anything is open game to photograph, regardless of who is harmed, supporting work like this is ok.

What a doofy, scare-mongering comment. What illnesses? You mean from radiation? Do you have any data whatever about epidemiology related to this event? Is this how you react to the R word?

Kodachromeguy Scaremongering REALLY?! This was a giant nuclear meltdown, you can easily compare it to the chernobyl the only difference in radiation levels is one place blew up the other did not but the radiation levels are HUGE.

Do you think EVERYONE being transported away was because of a minor leak? No. It was because "leave or effing get killed by radiation"

And the R word? You mean Radiation? Or did you have a more difficult word you could not spell? Perhaps you should educate yourself on various radiations, rays & nuclear energy.

"His ignorance is going to be his slow and painful death."

A slow and painful death is a small price to pay for 15 minutes of fame.

Yeah, in most cases, the mask was probably just a precautionary feature and not necessary - but it's good to be prepared.

At this point, many areas in the Chernobyl exclusion zone are safe - but you want protective gear and a Geiger counter in case you wind up wandering towards one of the bad areas (such as one basement in Pripyat IIRC)- the radiation spread is very uneven.

Also compared to Chernobyl, the actual levels of radiation in the area are far less - if I recall correctly most of the radioactive isotopes released leaked into the ocean or had a short half-life, and the remaining ones are only dangerous if ingested/breathed in, which the mask handles.

Hey Dick, this is a website about photography, those are photographs, zip it.

It's supposed to be (or used to be ?) a quality digital photography dedicated website, not a trash bin for any brat to post his snapshots, zip it Junk !

No harm done but DPR as a website with a wide audience should be cautious posting such. These collection of photos, though intriguing, is not far from selfies from stunt people at dangerous places, such as at a peak of a building or at the edges of cranes/towers.

Adventure ? You're probably kidding, my dear QuarterToDoom !

The real challenge would have been to take these pictures among the Haïti's disaster ruins ! The "artist" would have had to show us how well he was able to run as fast as Ussain Bolt in order to not end chopped in little cubes by local Tontons Macoute.

Where is no risk, there is no adventure and as the people loving this photo-serie like to say "there was no radiation risk at all". So, what's the point ?

P.S: as for DPR, it's supposed to be a digital photo tools oriented site, therefore no surprise people here are naturally proned to discuss about the performances of a given camera or another. Photo taking oriented sites are plenty, but I highly doubt this very serie would be there too well received.

Right, Marty ! And this trend has a well known name: HUBRIS (or "Me-Myself-and-I before and above anything and anybody").

Excuse-me Under The Sun to disagree with you. There have been hundreds of cases of lootings during the 2011 double disaster. There were some rapes too, and a lot, a lot of cons, scams and misappropriations of subsidies by individuals as well as companies. In 2016, proofs on the web have largely been erased by the japanese government who even paid a "communication company" to monitor "bad mouth comments" (which basically was the cover to bury as deep as possible the real bad news).

I have some links in stock about that very topic that are all inactive now, wonder why. A little video about that "no looting in Japan" humbug:
_ https://youtu.be/1rwl8G5xFhk

Note: according to an article published by the Yomiuri Shimbun, on the 15th of july 2011, just stores and individual belongings stolen were estimated to a wooping 684 millions of yens. As for banks, misappropriations and scams, I don't have figures but it was scandalously huge.

I think that potential looting is one of the reasons that people don't leave disaster areas when they are warned. I got that idea from living in a developing nation where volcanic eruptions, floods, landslides, etc. were fairly common. I saw people fail to evacuate when warned time and again.

It's one thing to leave everything behind when you have insurance, money in the bank, and a decent job. It's another when you lack those things. Your T.V. set might be the most important thing in the world to you. In that case, even when the family leaves, one person stays behind to watch the stuff.

I'll bet that a decent number of people didn't evacuate New Orleans before Katrina because they didn't want to be seen abandoning their houses and leaving their stuff behind rather than out of imprudence.

Williamj, remember I qualified my observation with "The Japanese I saw" which was on the people I saw in the several shelters I have visited and served. As for your claim, its very plausible, anything can happen in times of crisis but it does not change the fact the people, especially the victims, I encountered in those shelters kept their discipline and dignity. Something I don't see often in disaster areas, and I have been to quite a number of them.

Getting sick, how? You mean from the short exposure to radiation? This is at sea level. You get more exposure in Bolivia, Tibet, etc., from solar radiation.

The radiation levels are low and pose no real danger. Maybe read up on the issue instead of posting nonsense.

"Remember we have not done it. He has."

Huh? How the heck did this get editors pick? So I'm supposed to respect a burglar because he has stolen stuff and I haven't? FFS...

No, he was looking for publicity. Which he got. The story he is telling is not documentary, it is fabricated. Nothing wrong with that. However, it's a real shame because he had an opportunity to do some real documentary work for the short time he was there, but instead decided to use his time setting up his tripod so he can take trite selfies.

Not to mention illegal. The "no trespassing" rules are there as much to protect the belongings and property of the people who were forced to evacuate as it about the radiation. He hope he meets up with the full extent of Japanese law.

I'm sure that Japan will deny him entry into Japan. Hopefully forever.

These images are very different from those shot @ Chernobyl, these are in bad taste, Japanese friends were very upset as they seem to be highly self promotional of the photog, and not sensitive to the site. I have followed several blogs of correspondents going into the site, often with residents who were displaced, those cases were poignant and sensitive to the site, and were very powerful. These pics are none of these, particularly to the Japanese sensitivity to the events and aftermath.

wow next level move trying to censor photography.

yep, censoring pics, like those of a 'tog who breaks into a morgue, and takes selfies with the dead bodies and posts them online, lets celebrate their fantastic photo skilz, their slick whit, their shameless illegal self promotion and single minded selfishness, yeah, Great! wOOt! - NOT

craig66 There is no way that you can be accurate about the number of deaths from radiation. How could you possibly know? Cancer does not come with little labels saying what caused it. If you require a label, then using your logic I could say, "Number of lung cancer deaths caused by smoking in the history of humankind: 0" because there has never been a case of cancer, ever, which had a little label on it saying that smoking was the cause. It always could have been something else.

There are good risk models that have been developed over decades of study and research. The average lifetime excess radiation exposure to the population of Fukushima is actually very small. You would get a higher dose by spending just two years in Cornwall in the UK or Denver in the US. Overstating the risk does a great disservice to the people of Fukushima .

What I wrote above comes from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) 2013 report on the Fukushima Accident.

As for smoking - according to Dr Robert Gale, smoking a packet of cigarettes a day is much more of the risk than that incurred by even the most highly exposed workers at the plant. Dr Gale was asked by the Soviet Union to coordinate the medical response at Chernobyl, coordinated the response to the Goiania accident in Brazil and went to Japan at the request of the Japanese Government to coordinate the medical response if needed. The experts's expert.

Yes, lets nominate @craig66 to take a stroll through the Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors, since you know, there have been no deaths from radiation, it's perfectly safe. Not a single person died from the Chernobyl meltdown, or from radiation exposure in Japan after the two atomic bombs, nope, didn't happen. I'm ignorant of the exposure from Fukushima so can't make a comment on that.

From Wikipeida - "The Chernobyl disaster was the worst nuclear power plant accident in history in terms of cost and casualties.[1] It is one of only two classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011.[2] The struggle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles.[3] During the accident itself, 31 people died, and long-term effects such as cancers are still being investigated[4]."

I'm not sure that you, or the United Nations, or anybody else can know with certainty what the exposure would be. Epidemiological studies, especially over long periods of time, are notoriously difficult to conduct. You have to consider every factor in somebody's life, including diet, exposure to other risk factors, movement in and out of the zone, etc.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Fukushima added no more radiation to the environment than would be added from the sun. That's a very great risk! Solar radiation is harmful, and we take steps to protect ourselves from it. Where I live, in Arizona, standing out in the sun without protection, 365 days a year, would be tantamount to suicide, especially over the long term. But that would be the case in Fukushima, because residents there could not protect themselves from the accident's radiation with sunscreen. And their exposure would be 24 hours a day, not only 12 hours of daylight.

As to O.P.'s comment that this is the "future" with nuclear energy, it is actually the present. In the U.S., there is no repository for high-level waste from civilian reactors. All waste is stored on site. The most likely scenario is that is will never be moved, especially with concerns about terrorism. So large areas of land, where reactors exist at present, have already been sacrificed and will be uninhabitable for the forseeable future. And people want more of that. Incredible. And that's without even discussing the possibility of an accident.

Coal is very damaging to the environment as well, but there are other alternatives, including conservation. The U.S. is 5% of the world's population, but uses 25% of the world's energy. That energy use could be halved, and we would still lead an excellent lifestyle. We don't need nuclear power just because it's unthinkable to some people to turn the lights off in Vegas at night.

Those are the stats for the Fuki disaster. While it is an ecological disaster, the actual release of radiation is relatively well quantified, and plugging that into the well known formulae that we have developed over the years for radiation exposure, the expected number of deaths from radiation from Fuki is slightly more than 0, and far less than 1.

You can argue with the science, which many people choose to do, but there are better things to argue against, like whether CFCs destroy the ozone layer, whether tetraethyl lead is a poison for humans, whether man plays a role in climate change, etc.

You know I'm in full support of nuclear power but when guys like graig66 come along and completely play down the dangers like a modern day Louis Slotin it gets me up. Sure we're exposed to a ton of radiation and even mundane things like a Banana can increase our dose (hell most of our bones are radioactive). But were talking stuff like cesium and plutonium which were released in large quantities by these reactors (and probably still are). This has eneded up in the food chain and there are plenty people close to the area at risk (babies are at a 10 to 20 fold risk because there cells still have much division to go) and we'll only see their deaths in the decades to come (and we won't know for certain what causes their cancer). I'm sure Femi and others who worked on the first nuclear reactor just coincendentally got cancer too. Then there Bikini Island still not safe to live after more than 50 years and countless clean up programs. We need that fear of nuclear or it will be a disaster.

This is a good example of just how expensive nuclear power can be. Marketed originally as clean, cheap power because: marketing. When things go wrong they go very, very wrong. And then, what to do with the waste? What to do, what to do....

I think that if you compare the damages caused by oil released by oil-tankers and all other fossil fuel damages with the damages caused by nuclear accidents you would have a better perspective. By the way an average nuclear power plant produces, if I recall correctly, only between 1 and 2 cubic meters of radioactive waste in an year of energy production, far less than fossil fuels, and it's not freely released on the environment. Sure we should work on improvement of alternative power sources and decrease on power consumption (both reducing the power usage and increasing efficiencies), but all in all between the non-renewable sources nuclear is the cleanest for the environment, even considering those accidents...

Not to mention the coal miners who have died or are slowly dying from black lung—or the thousands killed in accidents over the years. And all the other havoc caused by transporting and burning coal.
Humans are a scourge. The real answer is to stop population growth and bring it down to a sustainable level.

yeah because every nuclear plant is situated in an earthquake zone and will have a historic tsunami hit it. knucklehead.

who knows how many die from cancer and other diseases from coal and other fuels. But I'm 95% confident that number is higher than deaths from nuclear power.

Nuclear power is one of the cleaniest, most efficient and safest type of power plants. Much better than coal or solar (for now). The fukushima disaster was just that, a freak chain reaction disaster.

@junk. Most of Japans nuclear reactors are in earthquake zones and a risk of Tsunamis. Japan restarted some in August 2015 and latest estimates are that another such earthquake and Tsunami could take place near one of them in the next 50 years (30% chance). You're right that coal probably does kill more on average (there are more coal plants) but the disasters start to add up and we effectively never get that land back so we can only have so many before its a problem.

Of note - I can't find the source at the moment, but there was one study that indicated that there was a coal plant in China that put out more radioactive material into the air per year than the entirety of the Chernobyl disaster due to uranium content in the coal it was burning. Never mind all of the other unambiguously toxic crap there.

The deaths per terawatt-hour of nuclear is far less than any other energy source we have. Even wind is more dangerous (low energy output + fall hazard for workers = it's actually more dangerous than nuclear!) if you look at the stats.

That said, nuclear needs to be respected. We need to stop putting old clunkers into service life extension, and replacing plants with modernized designs with 40+ years of safety lessons learned. Calling nuclear dangerous (compared to any other energy source when you look at the actual statistics) is like saying modern highways are dangerous because of Ford Pintos getting rear-ended.

Easy to complain but a lot harder to find realistic / cost effective solutions.
Not opening Yucca mountain (thanks to Harry Reid mostly) is a disaster.

Also, as far as waste goes - we had a lot of promising technologies that had development killed by politicians.

The Integral Fast Reactor was designed with a reprocessing plant integrated into the facility. The nature of the reactor and the reprocessing technology was such that, if it had been developed, if I recall correctly it could have supplied 100% of the US energy budget for a century using 1990s waste stockpiles alone - if not that, it was QUITE a lot of power generation using only our current waste. In addition, the remaining waste would only remain "hot" for 200-300 years, as the reactor would burn the transuranics that cause so many problems with current LWR waste.

How accurate is the 0 deaths In Fukushima considering there is basically an information blackout by the Japanese government. Also Im curious on the long term health and ecological consequences of this event.

The light water reactor designs used in most of the world are derivatives of a design intended for use only on nuclear submarines. The design was never intended to optimize energy extraction for a large land-based plant. The waste materials are highly radioactive. Even worse, only about 1/2 of 1% of the nuclear energy from the fuel is even extracted.

The IFRs (including the molten salt variety, which will likely be the go-forward consensus approach among various countries) turns nuclear fuel and nuclear waste into "almost" safe waste (safe enough to hold in your hand for a short period of time). I can't remember the %s, but the efficiency is supposed to be around 300x what light water reactors do. I think the range for the IFRs run from about 500MW to about 1.5GW.

Every existing light water reactor should have an IFR added to it to "burn up" all the waste left over from the light water reactor.

Bob, I used to live in Washington (the state), and our community was quite active with the concerns about Hanford, which is an ecological disaster in slow motion. I do not discount any of the fears and concerns related to nuclear waste, mismanagement, etc.

I would invite you to do some research on the concept of the Integral Fast Reactor. You might be surprised and shocked (but probably not) to hear that our congress cut funding for the program years ago, despite the fact that it was proving to be quite a success, able to turn nuclear waste into near-harmless by-product. Planting one or more IFRs within the existing nuclear power facilities that exist could provide a very safe means to dispose of our existing nuclear waste in a relatively safe manner (far safer than running the existing light water reactors!)

We are running reactors with 65+ year old designs. Use common sense, but don't close your eyes to the dramatic improvements that are possible.

Uhhh... huh? I think his point is that there are people living 'normally' in areas with higher background radiation (not UV from the sun, more like radon gas from decay of heavy elements in the earth) than Fukushima, not that radiation isn't "bad" for you.

bobbarber:
You seem to have a seriously flawed understanding of how radiation works. Solar radiation is a completely different thing from radiation from radioactivity, natural or human-made. Background radioactive radiation is way less dangerous than that of excessive sunbathing, they are not even in the same ballpark. Even if you multiply a typical background radiation level by 100 (e.g. from 0.08 µsV/h (microsieverts per hour) to 10µsV/h), you'd still be safer than if you smoked a few cigarettes a month (yes, a month, not a day).

When I visited Chernobyl and Pripyat in 2008, I got less cumulative radiactive radiation during my 9-hour stay there than I got from the 2-hour flight from Helsinki to Kyiv. Surely there's nothing to worry about such levels. Then again, I must point out that there _are_ hot spots there that are best left alone, and I didn't go specifically looking for them.

Anyway, I recommend you learn a bit of radioactive radiation before spouting nonsense.

And to add:
"Natural background radiation is harmful, including radiation from the sun" doesn't make any sense as a sentence as solar radiation is _not_ a part of background radiation.

Fortunately, it is easy to Google what the term means:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation

Life/living is dangerous, unless you plan to wrap yourself in aluminum foil and hide in your basement. You surely realize you are being hit by radiation right NOW, but you just have learned to accept it. There are surely safer places to live - do you plan to move to the very very safest place?

Its more the danger from ingesting or inhaling radioative materials in the area like cesium or even plutonium thats the reason for the evacuation. There are also hot spots within where the background radiation level becomes too high. Also people traveling from and to the area would help spread the radioactive material. There would also be some bioaccumulation problems (Like I would stay away from mushrooms). So sure people would be able to live there and be fine but there would be some unlucky ones that wouldn't (most likely children) so you can't let people stay there.

Are you on drugs?

No, it's Hillary who is anonymously cruising every single sites and forums on the web, looking for the slimmest opportunity to say something unpleasant before signing "Donald Trump".

Pathetic !

I found the images boring and predictable too, especially the "selfies".