It will be horrendously expensive, but I would like to think that as smart as the Japanese are, they will come up with some creative solutions to mitigate the cost - and maybe ultimately it won't be as expensive as currently imagined. My parents told me that when they visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima 25 years ago that apart from the monuments they couldn't even tell where the bombs had been.
Interestingly the population of Japan peaked in 2008 and is now falling by about 70000 per year. This is accelerating, so it won't be as hard to find places for the displaced people. Returning the land to productive agriculture use may not be economic but with the addition of a bit of appropriate covering to shield off the worst of the contamination for a few hundred years, there are any number of non-agricultural industrial (manufacturing, chemical processing, refineries), military (bases, test ranges, spaceports), transport (airports, ports, roads, trains), recreational (parks, golf courses, race tracks) and even power generating (more reactors?) purposes that the exclusion zone could be useful for. It might also be fine for hydroponics and animal feed-lots that don't use anything from the ground (assuming water supplied from elsewhere), and maybe even forestry would be an option. On 2 April 2012 21:24, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > I wrote: > > >> The replacement cost of the equipment would be ~$692 billion, which is >> roughly how much the Fukushima disaster will cost. >> > > As Greenpeace pointed out, by coincidence this is roughly the cost of the > 2008 TARP bailout. Note however, that nearly all of the TARP money was > returned the U.S. government by the corporations and banks. Most of them > paid high interest rates on the loans, so they were anxious to return the > money. I think most of the money came back within two years. > > As of last year all but $19 billion of the TARP money was returned to > Uncle Sam. The remaining $19 billion will probably not be returned because > the companies went bankrupt. That's not good, but you cannot compare it to > a $650 billion dead loss. That is, to money spent cleaning up tens of > millions of tons of contaminated soil, building a giant sarcophagus for a > nuclear power plant, and compensating people for the loss of their houses > and livelihoods. Such activities contribute nothing to long-term prosperity > or happiness. It is like hiring hundreds of thousands of people to spend 20 > years digging holes in the ground every morning, and filling them in every > afternoon for no purpose. > > - Jed > >
