> It leveled a huge stretch of coast, but didn't make it uninhabitable.
This is not actually true, because it deleted around 120 km² of habitable land (https://www.forbes.com/sites/oshadavidson/2011/04/29/japan-e...). Engineering just to reclaim that land continues to this day and has already cost trillions of Yen. The damage the tsunami did to other structures and people (without literally sinking the ground into the sea) were much more expensive than that.
> I remember not being able to buy milk in Europe (Switzerland and Germany) in the 1980s because of Chernobyl. The increase in radioactivity in milk was orders of magnitude, due to fallout from Cesium 134 and 137 as well as isotopes of strontium and plutonium.
Circling back to the easy to measure part, dividing most numbers by something close to zero tends to turn out big, the ratio says fairly little about whether that's dangerous (https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/accident-management/emergen... "To date, there is no evidence that the reactor accident has caused adverse health effects due to radiation in Germany"). I'm also fairly certain neither strontium nor plutonium particles (plural) made it that far.
This is not actually true, because it deleted around 120 km² of habitable land (https://www.forbes.com/sites/oshadavidson/2011/04/29/japan-e...). Engineering just to reclaim that land continues to this day and has already cost trillions of Yen. The damage the tsunami did to other structures and people (without literally sinking the ground into the sea) were much more expensive than that.
> I remember not being able to buy milk in Europe (Switzerland and Germany) in the 1980s because of Chernobyl. The increase in radioactivity in milk was orders of magnitude, due to fallout from Cesium 134 and 137 as well as isotopes of strontium and plutonium.
Circling back to the easy to measure part, dividing most numbers by something close to zero tends to turn out big, the ratio says fairly little about whether that's dangerous (https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/accident-management/emergen... "To date, there is no evidence that the reactor accident has caused adverse health effects due to radiation in Germany"). I'm also fairly certain neither strontium nor plutonium particles (plural) made it that far.