Fukushima: 1,600 Dead From Evacuation Stress 178
seven of five writes: The NYT reports that radiation-related hysteria and mistakes have cost the lives of nearly 1,600 Japanese since the Fukushima disaster. The panic to evacuate, not the radiation itself, led to poor choices such as moving hospital intensive care patients from hospitals to emergency quarters. The government's perception of radiation exposure risk, rather than the actual risk itself, may have caused far more harm than it prevented.
Another Win For the Anti-Nuclear Guys (Score:4, Insightful)
So fearmongering by the anti-nuclear body has lead to more deaths. Those guys are really doing a great job of increasing carbon emissions, increasing energy prices, increasing deaths due to continued use of coal fired power states, and now increasing deaths thanks to the fear of nuclear power that they've been spreading for years.
The reaction to Fukushima was totally overblown, and the media made it sound like a global catastrophe when in reality it was a minor incident that was primarily caused by continued use of a reactor that should have been retired. Had it been replaced by a newer reactor, as it should have been, the whole incident would never have happened, but then that's another example of how the anti-nuclear guys are endangering lives by not allowing newer reactors to be built.
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I doubt anyone in Japan would have wanted to be within 1000km of Fukushima and understandably so
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Which effects? Seriously. I learned in school (back during the nuclear-holocaust nonsense) that nuclear bombs would make the world uninhabitable for millennia and more. Still, a mere weeks after the bombs fell on these two cities living there posed no risk to anyone (except from the fact that significant parts of the infrastructure was gone). Radiation risks after a nuclear bomb are negligible. Unless you were exposed when the bomb exploded.
Re:Another Win For the Anti-Nuclear Guys (Score:4, Insightful)
99.99999999% of Americans were completely unaffected by 911. So it must not have made any impact on the nations consciousness or changed any policies, right?
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I know a person whose husband died in the due to the building he was in being hit by a plane and then falling down. They were certainly affected, as was the husband himself (though for a shorter time I guess).
So that's two people, there were 285 million Americans at the time, so that's 70x the number of people you claim were affected. And I'm pretty sure that one man wasn't the only person to have died in those events.
Do you really have such a terrible understanding of simple multiplication and numbers, not
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I understand some people would rather engage in willfully obtuse pedantry to ignore the (obvious) point being made. Buy some pot, buy some prunes, and learn to relax.
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Other than your apparent lack of understanding of scale, was there a point?
A majority of Americans were affected. At the very least their television programming was interrupted for minutely updates. The 2% of Americans that lived in NYC had their normal daily routines interrupted. Flights were grounded for a few days, affecting yet more Americans.
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Not even close.
You could say the same for the Caitlyn Jenner transition. Whoop de do.
And then then went back to work.
Which was due to the decision to ground airplanes, not due to the attacks on the WTC. A decision that didn't apply to plan
Re:Another Win For the Anti-Nuclear Guys (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/ne... [japantimes.co.jp]
Around 90 percent of those who died of indirect causes were aged 66 or older, according to Reconstruction Agency statistics published in September.
Unlike those caused by collapsed buildings or tsunami, indirect deaths are determined by municipal panels by examining links between the disaster and the cause of death. This occurs when a relative of a deceased files a request.
Causes of indirect deaths include physical and mental stress stemming from long stays at shelters, a lack of initial care as a result of hospitals being disabled by the disaster, and suicides.
Many of these deaths happened well after the evacuation. So effectively all deaths of the elderly displaced are blamed on Fukushima. It appears there is extra compensation if you can attribute a death to Fukushima.
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Looked at in this way, the 'hysteria death toll' from Fukushima was far higher still in the US. At the time I had California relatives calling me to see if my state had secret stockpiles of KI pills that they could draw on after their desperate drives from pharmacy to pharmacy had come up empty. I'm wondering how the number of people who actually moved away from the coasts of the three pacific states, with the usual number of deaths in a migration, compared with the evacuations at the plants. Then you have
Re:Another Misattribution (Score:2)
There is an entire superset of psychology dedicated to understanding these choices. If it were as simple as one side winning the propaganda war, it would be a course in marketing.
This is complex stuff. Start here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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Your argument seems to be "IF they did things right, the accident wouldn't happen". But the anti-nuclear groups point out that humans historically fuck things up such that relying on the existence of rational behavior is a mistake.
That being said, ALL energy sources have downsides and risks. Nuclear power risk/harm is not necessarily greater than the alternatives. Thus, "mix it up" seems the more rational approach as no one mistake or side-effect dominates, and they each work better under different conditio
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How is it not greater? Dr. Evil could use his Alan Parson's Project [youtu.be] to blow up every dam on the planet, and while the loss of live would be tragic, it wouldn't still be effecting the Earth hundreds of years from now. As opposed to a nuclear meltdown, or an earthquake rupturing a waste containment center.
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This is a good read:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl... [pitt.edu]
It is written about the American experience, but I would expect most of it to apply to Japan too. Not the anecdotes, obviously, but the tactics the watermelons (both protestors and regulators, sadly) use appear to be nearly universal.
Re:Another Win For the Anti-Nuclear Guys (Score:4, Informative)
"The building of a new reactor was not delayed by Greenpeace, champ"
This is true. The Green movement has none of the power in Japan that it does in the US and Europe, which accounts for a large fraction of Japan's economic strength since the Seventies, when our own building of industry and infrastructure was stifled by Greenpeace and its even more radical ilk. When I lived in Tokyo during this period, there was an annual antinuclear rally that drew perhaps a hundred people, in a city of over 30 million.
After Fukushima, foreign Greens and their pet journalists swarmed in to fire up a mass movement like the ones in Western countries. Their rallies drew big crowds at first, during the initial "How bad is this going to get?" period, largely by capitalizing in a newfound mistrust of government that flared up after the disaster - in which, remember, the nuclear accident was only a sidebar to the deaths of 16,000 people. As time went on, the initial fears subsided and the antinuclear rallies are back to drawing mostly flies, as before. Today, after a series of extra safety checks, the reactors are being started up again.
The Fukushima issue in Japan revolves around, "How did our reputation for long-term planning fail so spectacularly in Tohoku ('Northeast', their term for the disaster as a whole). Seacoast towns had ancient markers detailing the exact place where historical tsunamis had reached, ignored in the postwar rush for coastal development. After the grid failure prevented Fukushima from maintaining core coolant circulation after shutdown, the crew went to Plan B, which was to hook up fire trucks to maintain the circulation. But, whoopsie, the plumbing connections didn't match. These are the sort of screwups that turn an inconvenience into a meltdown. But because there is no anti-technology movement in Japan, they will figure out how to do better next time.
Re:Another Win For the Anti-Nuclear Guys (Score:4, Insightful)
If the Green movement had the power in the U.S. that nuke fans thought it did, all coal and nuclear power in the country would have been replaced with solar panels. In the Carter Administration.
Greens didn't tell the Japanese that TEPCO was a habitual, corner cutting liar that put their employees and surrounding region at risk. TEPCO did that through their corruption and hubris.
Standard nuke fan storyline: if you oppose nuclear power, you're a luddite! Reality: you can be fascinated by the technology, but realize that nuclear power is the most expensive technology ever invented by man.
Let's pretend that the IAEA isn't as incestuous with the industry it's supposed to oversee as Treasury is with Goldman Sachs [nytimes.com], and that there will never be a nuclear meltdown again, anywhere. Nuclear power is still completely unjustifiable, as no plant rolls the full cost of it's construction, operation, security, maintenance into the rates it charges much less storing the waste for hundreds of years.
Nuclear power == corporate pork and fluffing Tom Swift fanboys.
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all coal and nuclear power in the country would have been replaced with solar panels. In the Carter Administration
Yes, and the US would have been a third world country with 50 million people in it, and the discussion about a fence between Mexico and the US would have been a topic in Mexican elections, not US elections.
realize that nuclear power is the most expensive technology ever invented by man
...and also the cleanest and safest way to create the required amount of electricity.
no plant rolls the full cost of it's construction
Who does? Does prices of coal-produced electricity include the price of fixing climate gas problems? If it did, could anyone afford it?
much less storing the waste for hundreds of years
This is only a problem because religious fruitcakes claim that the scientifically soun
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Red herrings are red.
Then you must be thinking of wind and solar, not nuclear, as the former wont be causing problem for people living a thousand years from now. The canard about "baseline power" is also addressed with tech
Fossil fuels (Score:2)
Reality: you can be fascinated by the technology, but realize that nuclear power is the most expensive technology ever invented by man.
Of course if plants burning fossil fuels (Coal, Gaz, etc.) don't need to be held accountable for the countless respiratory disease that they cause by pumping out tons of pollution [youtu.be] in the atmosphere.
(and that's just the direct effect of putting shit into people's lung by polluting the air. I'm not even starting on the impact on global warming/climate change).
much less storing the waste for hundreds of years.
yup, let's panic about a couple of tons of radioactive waste.
it's so much better instead to rely on a method that constantly dumps countless tons of shi
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A couple? How many tons are generated from a single nuclear plant? How much will be generated if coal plants are replaced with nuclear power plants, rather than other forms of power generation.
And that's still ignoring the time scale. How enthused would you be if you had to deal with radioactive waste left by Charlemange? [wikipedia.org]
The
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But that's just more of the if-you-oppose-nuclear-power-you're-a-crazy-hippie-luddite caricaturing I was talking about. You're going to have a hard time finding an environmentalist that wouldn't trade all the damage done by mining coal and
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The NSDAP had that name in 1920, well before Hitler took over, and Hitler was not one to confuse things by changing names or propaganda. As initially founded, it had nationalist and socialist wings, and Hitler eliminated the socialists in the early 1930s. Hitler's rise to power depended heavily on Goering developing good relations with major industrialists, which is not consistent with socialism. It also depended heavily on anti-Communist propaganda, and (after his early involvement in Bavaria's brief p
And yet (Score:5, Insightful)
The government's perception of radiation exposure risk, rather than the actual risk itself, may have caused far more harm than it prevented.
And yet, Tepco downplayed and lied about the actual risk, and the amount of radioactive material released, literally at every turn. That is, literally everything Tepco said about it was a lie, and it was actually more and higher than they said literally every time. Perhaps the public loses confidence in official reports when they are all lies?
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And yet, the report says, and I quote:
"No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation — a point confirmed last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise."
Seems to me Fukushima was a government failure in emergency management more than anything else.
Re: And yet (Score:2)
wait, so the stories about the men who went inside to stop the reactor, facing certain death, were complete fabricated?
The media just took Wrath of Khan and substituted the nouns?
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wait, so the stories about the men who went inside to stop the reactor, facing certain death, were complete fabricated?
Yes, Achievement Unlocked! You can now get your daily news from Comedy Central instead of Slashdot.
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I honestly don't know about Johnson, but I've often seen guys of his age involved in science such as him to be quite pro-nuclear: quite enough for most to not be particularly thorough when it comes to researching positive outlooks. That brings me to the IAEA which is the source cited and has been criticised a lot for its very positive stance about nuclear power.
Last of all, when talking about Fu
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Because, of course, both the IAEA and George Johnson are completely unbiased when it comes to nuclear power...
I honestly don't know about Johnson, but I've often seen guys of his age involved in science such as him to be quite pro-nuclear: quite enough for most to not be particularly thorough when it comes to researching positive outlooks.
I also see that it is very easy to get confused about what the scientific community actually believes about something. Especially if you are not a scientist and already have a bias. The reason is that science is very open and even fringe opinions are tolerated. So if you are looking for a confirmation for a something you believe in you can always find some study in an obscure journal which seems to confirm your idea. For science, this is not a problem because scientists are usually able to judge by themselv
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I love articles like this. They are sooo funny. Take a look at the illustration picture. You saw the same type of imagery with another "investigative report". Here the TV crew got dressed up like that and took a TEPCO representative with them who declined the "protective gear". They claimed he did so only to safe the face of TEPCO 'cause, you know, everybody knows we can't enter Fukushima with this type of protective gear.
Except, this is for protection against dust, not radiation. Same as is used in a slaug
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How else could they have coped with it? The situation was uncertain, an evacuation was required. The deaths mostly came because once displaced the refugees lacked adequate housing, communities, jobs and medical support.
The only way to mitigate that would be to build a spare city for people living near nuclear plants to move in to, and then pump vast amounts of cash in to jump start its economy and replace all the stuff people lost. Even then, you can't replace heirlooms, personal items and pets. The things
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It's easy to see how the Japanese could over react.
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Even if TEPCO had been more honest, the reality is that no one knew how bad it was going to be. They lost the ability to monitor the reactors and had to assume the worst. It could easily have resulted in far more material being ejected into the atmosphere and surrounding area. Evacuation was the only option.
The evacuation was an inevitable consequence of the accident. The accident killed 1600 people so far.
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TFA is actually pretty well written and avoids playing the blame game like you are. It simply points out that inadequate consideration was given to the consequences of an evacuation. That is, the evacuation was done because it was assumed there was a high risk to not evacuating, but nearly zero risk to evacuating. That turned out not to be the case. And that in the future, evacuations shouldn't be assum
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The prudent, conservative, thing to do was to recommend people with pre-puberty children and pregnant women move out of the area. The rest should have stayed put.
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Thousands have died from Chernobyl, and many tens of thousands more had serious health consequences. Given that things seemed to be bad and that there was no way to know how bad or if the problem could be contained an evacuation was the only reasonable course of action.
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Thousands have died from Chernobyl
This is pure fantasy with no basis in reality. We simply have no idea how many deaths Chernobyl may or may not have caused. The number is unknowable but probably somewhere between 0 and 4000. We also do not know how many people suffered health consequences.
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Tepco downplayed and lied about the actual risk
And how many lives did that save by reducing stress on the population?
It will have increased stress on the population, because they were always waiting for the news to get worse. They revised their estimate of radiation release about eight times.
IMO, Tepco should be lauded as heros
Your opinion is that global ecological criminals should be lauded as heroes? Your opinion is quite worthless.
Humans Can't be Trusted with Nuclear Power (Score:2, Insightful)
In *every* nuclear disaster, the *first* reaction of the people in charge is to lie:
1 - Chernobyl. Lies.
2 - Three Mile Island. More lies.
3 - Fukushima. More lies.
And before someone says this is an issue with private companies running nuclear facilities, remember that the initial Chernobyl denial and coverups happened under the control of a communist government, so it swings both ways.
What about the tsunami? (Score:4, Informative)
It looks like the nuclear accident steals the show but one must not forget that the earthquake and tsunami themselves that killed at least 15000 people and rendered many others homeless. So I am not sure how they got to 1600 deaths but how did they differentiate cases that were caused by the radiation-related evacuation and cases where the direct effect of the earthquake and tsunami was the cause.
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Over 9000! (Score:2)
The level of wankery in that comment just blew up the meter.
Wh (Score:2)
What about you don't start comments in the subject line, kid?
y?
Same issue with Hurricane Evacuations (Score:4, Insightful)
Evertime there is a Hurricane Evacuation you get a couple dozen that die from car accidents or falling off ladders boarding up their houses to prevent looting, etc. That is one of the reasons politicians are wary of calling evacuations unless really needed.
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Evertime there is a Hurricane Evacuation you get a couple dozen that die from car accidents or falling off ladders boarding up their houses to prevent looting, etc. That is one of the reasons politicians are wary of calling evacuations unless really needed.
And yet politicians also seem lined up to cheer for security "theatre" at airports, when it can result in similar indirect deaths and injuries.
What am I talking about? Despite the common fear of flying and airplane accidents, car accidents are MUCH, MUCH more common to result in death or serious injury. Some studies have indicated that people choosing to travel by car rather than plane in the months after 9/11 may have resulted in the deaths of over a thousand more people [ssrn.com].
I know a number of people who
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The ultimate nightmare scenario for the National Weather Service: a confirmed rain-wrapped EF0 tornado that touches down in Miami or Fort Lauderdale at 4pm & is clearly heading towards I-95. If they say nothing, the tornado is unlikely to kill anyone, because everyone will be driving slowly due to the torrential rain anyway. On the other hand, if they send out a warning that a tornado is about to cross I-95, some idiot is almost **guaranteed** to abandon his car, attempt to cross 4-6 lanes of traffic, a
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Politicians don't care about a few people dying in random accidents.
They care about lots of voters being grumpy because they were told to leave and were inconvenienced by it and then it turned out there was no actual need to leave since the Hurricane wasn't as bad as predicted for their location. And that it makes them look silly to some voters.
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Sorry but I barely trust US statistics I certainly don't trust one from Communist Dictatorships. Did you know North Korea has the happiest people on earth? The dear leader said so himself!
Oh Give Me a Break. (Score:2)
I hate to sound callous... (Score:3)
...but the coal industry in the States kills about 24,000 people per year - and that's just the respiratory stuff, it doesn't even attempt to find out what all the mercury that winds up in the fish is doing to people.
So sorry if it sounds callous to say, "actually, it doesn't matter whether you're arguing over zero deaths, one, ten or a hundred"...but as long as every single article about nuclear issues doesn't start and end with that 24,000 deaths per year (hundreds of thousands worldwide, though China is the really staggering toll), then all of those articles are callous.
Honestly, if 65 people per day were dying of a disease, would it be callous to say "look, the cure only kills about a hundred people in a whole year, fuck those people, deploy the cure". Maybe it would, but with a good:bad ratio of 240:1, it's the kind of callousness we all sign off on when it comes to anything else.
It's actually funny (black humour) to read those super-long posts attempting to prove this or that about the ultimate death toll...but the numbers don't even rise to the 1600 at issue for the evacuation, much less the respiratory deaths from fossil alternatives, much less the whole atmospheric chemistry issue. It's like the bar being set for nuclear is that it must be perfect..."way, way better" is not good enough...
"radiation-related hysteria" ??? (Score:2)
It was Japan. The only hysteria was in the behaviour of the Western media trying to milk the story. "Hysteria" in Japan only seems to exist in low budget monster movies.
The Other Victims. (Score:4, Insightful)
The devastation from the earthquake and tsunami was massive, but all those victims get ignored because of the focus on Fukushima. 60 minutes did a Fukushima documentary, and didn't even find 30 seconds to acknowledged those countless tragedies.
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You'll find that the after-effects of the bombs in Japan were quite limited. Even with dispersal of radioactive material, we find that Japan consistently has lower cancer rates than the rest of the world.
Beneficial Biological Effects of Miso with Reference to Radiation Injury, Cancer and Hypertension [nih.gov]
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Re:Unintended consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear power has been a disaster and widespread adoption of clean, renewable energy can't come soon enough.
Bullshit.
There have been multiple individual coal mining accidents that have killed more people than the entire nuclear industry has ever killed. Millions of people are estimated to die prematurely every year from pollution-caused heart and lung disease, and coal is one of the main culprits.
Every decision ever made to invest in nuclear instead of coal has been a life saving decision. The same could be said of investment in wind an solar in places where they can partially replace coal, but wind and solar will need to be paired with energy storage or long-range low-loss power distribution. Until we have either a cheap scalable energy storage technology or superconducting power distribution wind and solar will never replace coal.
And don't get me started on hydroelectrical dams. Dam breaches have killed more people than we could ever hope to kill with flawed nuclear reactor designs if we tried on purpose.
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And don't get me started on hydroelectrical dams. Dam breaches have killed more people than we could ever hope to kill with flawed nuclear reactor designs if we tried on purpose.
You don't do dam breaches justice. They have caused the single biggest deathtoll [wikipedia.org] for any industrial disaster to date.
And if you're going to run the Chinese government's line of "natural disaster" then I've got a hydroelectric dam to sell you.
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As you say, bullshit. Why is it that nuke fans push the false dichotomy of coal, even when replying to a post talking about clean, renewable energy?
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The waste issue is as much a political thing as a technological thing. Storing radioactive waste for thousands of years is really silly to begin with. If the waste is still radioactive, then there's still energy that can be extracted. If waste could be reprocessed and reacted again until it had a half life of say a hundred years, then waste would simply not be an issue that it is today. And the main reason we aren't reprocessing waste is political, with fears of plutonium bomb production.
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I do think that nuclear is dead, because it takes government money to build it and because you don't win elections by subsidizing something that most people are scared of. Yes, nuclear is significantly more expensive than coal and slightly more expensive than gas and it takes 10-15 years to get a new nuclear plant online, which is longer than for any other power source. No sane capitalist would let any of his money anywhere near that investment unless the government promised to provide lots of subsidies.
Wit
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It's been solvable with technology from the 70's - or even the 1870's - and still be cheaper than either coal or nuclear, if all of the latter's costs are counted rather than externalized. You even mentioned part of the solution:
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Fukishima was a once-in-a-thousand years disaster.
And yet the time from when the Fukushima plant was commissioned to the tsunami that caused significant damage to the plant was 40 years. What bad fortune!
We (humans, presumably) are terrible at making predictions. The book The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb investigates this idea in detail. Incidentally, he made a pantload of money on Wall Street by betting against the conventional narrative that economists are good at quantifying risk.
Incidentally, you may have noticed extreme weather events are becoming more
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So the real two groups of people are Republicans and those who are ignoring proven science.
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Coal – U.S. 15,000
Hydro 1,400
Solar (rooftop) 440
Nuclear – global average 90
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Burning the people would be more efficient. Check your numbers/units.
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Interesting, but those numbers are deaths per PWh, not per kWh. That means that a 500MW US coal burner and its associated mining kills 0,0075 people per hour, or roughly one person per week.
Imagine the outrage if your average 1000MW nuclear reactor and its associated uranium mining killed two people per week! The president and congress would race to be the first to propose an outright ban on nuclear power.
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Re:Oh No! (Score:4, Informative)
This is going to be an unpopular post. But the premise of the article - that the accident itself caused/will cause no deaths, only overreaction - is simply not true. And their "proof by ghost reference" doesn't help things any.
Here's proof by actual reference [sciencedirect.com].
Estimates not good enough? Let's try actual measurements [nih.gov] of thyroid cancer in children:
They do note that there's a risk of screening effects, but given the correlation between rates and distance from the plant, they believe that the outbreak is real and needs further study
What did I mean earlier by "proof by ghost reference"? Their first two links just go to NYT search pages that aren't fruitful in backing up anything they claim. The third link takes some work but you can dig out the actual report in question. The NYT article describes it thusly:
The actual report says:
Okay, so we do expect more cancer in them - the sample size however is low enough (174 people) that it's hard to prove statistical significance. But wait, this too is an indirect reference - what does its source [unscear.org] say? Just a second, but first let's cite one more thing from the IAEA report the NYT article cites (a WHO study):
But back to the UNSCEAR report: here's its section on cancer risks that the IAEA claim cited by the Times was based on:
Re:Oh No! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/P... [iaea.org]
Based on our experience with other exposure cases, the estimates of negative radio logical health impacts are always much higher than what we observe in reality. There are two reasons. One is that the models for estimating health effects are conservative, and two is because the estimated exposures are conservative (they assume higher doses to account for uncertainty.). I have no problem with conservative estimation, just as long as they are used correctly. So, yes, statistical deaths are real deaths, statistical illnesses are real illnesses, and thankfully we'll not likely see any from the radio logical effects of Fukushima.
Interestingly, a tidbit is that the children thyroid exposure at Chernobyl was 1000 times that of a child in the Fukushima district. From what I can find, there is still no observed statistical increase in negative health effects associated with those exposures at Chernobyl. But I want to be clear I have not researched that thoroughly.
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"Interestingly, a tidbit is that the children thyroid exposure at Chernobyl was 1000 times that of a child in the Fukushima district."
And a major exacerbating factor at Chernobyl was the crappy Soviet diet. If a cloud of radioactive iodine blows past Russian peasants, their bodies applaud "Yippee! Iodine at last!" not being able to distinguish it from the stable isotope. But when the same thing happens on the Japanese seacoast, the iodine-sated bodies of people with a fishy diet have no particular interest
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The IAEA report on Fukushima is quite clear that no statistical increase in deaths is likely to be observed. Not for adults, children, or offspring.
This may be true, but it is rather irrelevant statement. Additional cancers causes by Fukushima are extremely hard to detect statistically because there are many people who get cancer anyway. For sake of argument, let's just assume Fukushima caused (or will cause) the death 100 people. This would not be detectable at all. Your argument is basically: Because we cannot detect it, it is not there or irrelevant. This is obviously nonsense. 100 dead people are very well a problem. Just be cause we don't "see" s
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If you cherry-pick your sources as you obviously do, you will always confirm you ideas by finding articles like this, but it will usually be one published in a journal with no reputation at all. Both dose-response and Health-Phys are such journals operated by societies with an obvious bias. Dose-response is the journal by the dose-reponse society, formerly known as Hormesis Society which is a collection of "scientists" who think that a little bit of pollution is actually good for you. Needless to say, they
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My point is that you should acquire a bit of scientific literacy yourself, which includes being able to evaluate the quality of information based on its source. Then we can have a serious discussion. Ofcourse, if all you aim for are the cheers of the uncritical pro-nuclear crowd on slashdot, this is not necessary.
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I know. The problem is that the pro-nuclear slashdotters already think they know what is right and what is wrong before even seriously looking at the scientific literature, just because the "low doses of radiation are harmless", "LNT has been debunked", "there have been only 50 deaths from chernobyl", etc.. myths just fit so well with their prejudices. I believe myself that the radiation risks of nuclear power are quite manageable with good engineering and regulatory oversight, but as a professional scienti
Re:Oh No! (Score:5, Insightful)
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They are the foremost experts on promoting nuclear energy. It's part of their charter for goodness sake.
Yes, it is, and they are good at it.
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They are the foremost experts on promoting nuclear energy. It's part of their charter for goodness sake.
Err no, they are the foremost expert on MANAGING nuclear energy. Actually if you were to abolish the IAEA Nuclear would suddenly lose much of the overhead that makes it so expensive to build a plant in the first place.
But by all means ignore people who actually know track and manage the nuclear industry and go back to reading infowars.
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They promote safe, peaceful use of nuclear materials and technology. That is done by being accurate. The best promotion for nuclear is safety, the worst is non-safety. It would do more damage to project few health effects then realize many, than the opposite.
Bu
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You're comparing the IAEA to the Federal Reserve as if that was a good thing?
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Nope. Quite the opposite. Self-regulation in incestuous, revolving-door industries is a joke by definition.
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And yet they listed to what their scientists and experts say. The foremost experts in their field, the ones who write the above reports, and they are presented as verbatim.
Are you arguing against the presentation or the data?
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As long as they don't interfere with profit margins, no different than how Enron and Worldcom "listened" to their accountants, and for the same reasons.
Re: Oh No! (Score:2)
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North American Society of Homeopaths is an (presumably) an interest group.
International Atomic Energy Agency is a regulatory and study organization, backed by UN.
Spot the difference?
It's a valid viewpoint to be sceptical as to the neutrality or effectiveness of regulatory organizations, but the intent and background is clearly different here.
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Not one bit.
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Just in case you missed it:
From the very first line of the IAEA's Wikipedia entry:
See that? "Promote"?
Look at the membership of the IAEA. Do you see anything that sticks out? Maybe the fact that each and every member is a politician?
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Here is a list of the past heads of the IAEA.
"No politicians"? You didn't really look, did you?
Here is a list of the Secretaries General of the IAEA, in chronological order:
1) W. Sterling Cole, former Republican member of the US House of Representatives.
2) Sigvard Eklund, "Starting in 1950, Eklund was the deputy to the managing director of AB Atomenergi. He was also the director of the reactor development division at
Re:Oh No! (Score:5, Informative)
By repeated layers of watering down, the story has changed from what the research (even their own sources) says - that yes, the accident will be causing many cases of fatal cancers, but we can't prove which ones are due to radiation - into a general sense of "nobody's going to get sick from this accident" in the article.
I think you're interpenetration is a bit off. The story has not changed, and the IAEA report is very good at showing us all of the important considerations and explaining how they apply in the case of Fukushima. It is a matter of taking generic statistical modeling and taking real world factors into account, not a matter of watering things down. The risks from exposures received are extremely small, the at risk population is small, the real world sampling confirms assumptions are conservative, and therefore there is going to be no observable increase statistically.
The report absolutely does not say "nobody's going to get sick from this accident", as you imply. It is worded quite appropriately and clearly that observable statistical impacts are not likely to be found.
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So far, the death toll from the earthquake, tsunami and evacuation is over 4500, and over 130,000 people are still displaced, and deaths among the displaced that wouldn't have happened at home will continue. I'm sure there will also be some increase in cancer rates, but our collective fear of the nuclear boogieman is obviously what people want to talk about here instead of the actual disaster.
Humanity's sense of "risk of harm" when comparing low-risk events is really bad.. We seem to obsess over the risk
Re:Oh No! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, all zero of them have been fully counted.
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An ex-colleague of mine,
You were fired for your poor communication skills? Drop the monospace text, snowflake. Nobody wants to respond to your comment even if the content is correct, because up yours too. And up yours is what you're saying when you set monospace text, which is harder to read. HTH, HAND! dbag.
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Funny, then, that you respond. Like the crook in "Fargo" who, fed up with his fellow crook, is blabbering all the time about being silent.
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No one is responding to the content of your post. That's the lesson here.
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Imagine the media fallout if those 1,600 people were killed by radiation.
Imagine a world where sometimes, people just stuck to the facts.
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Imagine the media fallout if those 1,600 people were killed by radiation.
Imagine a world where sometimes, people just stuck to the facts.
To be fair, the GP used the magic word "media". In my not so humble cynical experience, while people may be able to stick to facts, that is not something very likely to happen to the media.
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