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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.

Radiation risks from Fukushima were more enhanced near the plant, while the evacuation measures were crucial for its reduction. According to our estimations, 730–1700 excess cancer incidents are expected of which around 65% may be fatal, which are very close to what has been already published (see references therein).

Estimates not good enough? Let's try actual measurements of thyroid cancer in children:

Assuming two years for duration on detectable level of cytology until clinical level, incidence rate ratio was 26.98 (95% confidence interval, 14.12-48.61) in the nearest area, and in Fukushima city, it was 19.41 (95% confidence interval,?9.62-37.31), compared with the Japanese mean annual incidence among those aged 15-19 years from 1975 to 2008 (i.e., 5 per 1,000,000).

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:

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.

The actual report says:

The latency time for late radiation health effects can be decades, and therefore it is not possible to discount the potential occurrence of such effects among an exposed population by observations a few years after exposure ... Among the group of workers who received effective doses of 100 mSv or more, UNSCEAR concluded that “an increased risk of cancer would be expected in the future. However, any increased incidence of cancer in this group is expected to be indiscernible because of the difficulty of confirming such a small incidence against the normal statistical fluctuations in cancer incidence.”

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 say? Just a second, but first let's cite one more thing from the IAEA report the NYT article cites (a WHO study):

For leukaemia, the lifetime risks are predicted to increase by up to around 7% over baseline cancer rates in males exposed as infants; for breast cancer, the estimated lifetime risks increase by up to around 6% over baseline rates in females exposed as infants; for all solid cancers, the estimated lifetime risks increase by up to around 4% over baseline rates in females exposed as infants; and for thyroid cancer, the estimated lifetime risk increases by up to around 70% over baseline rates in females exposed as infants. These percentages represent estimated relative increases over the baseline rates and are not estimated absolute risks for developing such cancers”

But back to the UNSCEAR report: here's its section on cancer risks that the IAEA claim cited by the Times was based on:

40. For adults in Fukushima Prefecture, the Committee estimates average life

Sorry, I'm not gonna google von Hippel, Jacobson or other concern trolls/pressure group activists/outright quacks. I've already read enough stupid, flawed shit based on their work and of course, enough about the methodology they used. This methodology is questionable (that's the accepted scientific term for bullshit, right?).

http://www.unscear.org/docs/re...

A bit of light reading for those interested in the amount of conservative assumptions, posited improbable scenarios, rounding up and Fermi estimates necessary to claims of actual radiation-induced health consequences to the public.

Does coal have a high uranium concentration?

Instead of doing a thought experiment, various sources can be used to look up actual values (e.g. this has a collection of quote a few sources on different things). Typical soil is 0.3-10 ppm uranium+thorium. Typical coal is given as 0.2-12 ppm. So the original coal has closer to the same concentration as soil, and the resulting ash will concentrate that by a factor of 10. This isn't even getting into the extreme cases, where higher end of soil is about 100-200 ppm U+Th, while coal is being mined in places at 1000-2000 ppm U+Th.

The problem is you can't just think of these elements as little marbles that get evenly scattered everywhere, as chemistry is involved. There are processes observed in peat beds where acidic compounds fix uranium and thorium in ways that cause them to accumulate there to levels above average from other soil types. And in that regard:

Since the uranium prefers to stay at the bottom, the escaping fly ash has a reduced concentration compared to even that soil,

You can find plenty of articles and sources around discussing the amount of uranium and other elements in the fly ash, or fly ash vs. bottom ash, where chemistry matters more than just the notion heavy metal should fall. For example from USGS, where note that the proportions in fly ash are in reference to original coal mass, so multiply by 10 to get proportions in ash. The fly ash in that case actually ends up with proportionally more uranium than the bottom ash that gets the remainder. If it worked as you suggested, you could have used your same reasoning to argue that mercury shouldn't be an issue from coal plants, because it would end up in the bottom ash only. Except that not only can it end up a lot more in the fly ash than the bottom ash (depends on plant though), some of it is elemental mercury that is not easily removed by wet scrubbers so you see coal plants adding halogens or catalysts specifically to remove the elemental portion of mercury so that it can be removed better by scrubbers, even though the initial coal starts out with levels similar to soil.

Carbon-14 exposure is about 12 uSv a year, or in other words, about 0.4% of typical person's background exposure (a source although you can calculate it yourself with some effort). The reduction in C-14 is rather difficult to measure (also mentioned in that report) because of a bunch emitted by nuclear weapons testing, but estimates in the radiocarbon dating field, where it is known as the Seuss effect, give about 3% in the atmosphere, or 0.2% in the entire biosphere (the oceans are slow to respond to changes in C-14). So you're talking about a potential 0.012% change in background levels, of which only parts of that are due to coal and other power production.

Estimates of the amount of uranium, thorium, and daughter products (some of which are much harder to capture) can go down to about ~1 uSv/a exposure for those living in the vicinity of a power plant with modern scrubbers. This is still larger than the ~0.3-0.4 uSv/a difference in C-14 over some area, although both are quite small either way. The bigger effect comes from mining, whether coal, uranium, or other metals, which can release a lot of radium into water supplies and radon from the mines.

Yes, at first it does indeed sound odd. I tend to doubt they are measuring the same thing. The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation thinks the typical range of annual dose is:

inhalation (radon): 0.2-10 mSv
"external terrestrial": 0.3-1
ingestion: 0.2-1
cosmic radiation 0.3-1
total natural: 1-13

Public Health England thinks the "UK average annual radiation dose" is 2.7 mSv/y, just as you say. That probably corresponds to the "total natural" figure in the UNSCEAR tabulation. Presumably the measurement used in the Japan regulation corresponds to the delta above the "external natural" UNSCEAR tabulation, which is a different measurement.

That is my guess, anyway. BTW, the limit in the US is the same 1 mSv/y "from industrial ionizing radiation" as Japan used to be before Fukushima. After Fukushima, Japan changed their limit from 1 to 20. You be the judge on whether that change just "happened" to be justified after all kinds of figurative alarms suddenly went off based on the old limit, and also on whether either the 1 or 20 limit is a fair one, but they are the officially regulated limits.

Citations, please. Your numbers for Chernobyl are not reflected in the U.N. report.

I'm going to undo a bunch of mod points with this post, but I wanted to point out that the blog post you cite is flat out wrong.

I'd like to say that I'm for building more nuclear plants of 4th or later generation design and that even with the LNT model, the maximum number of deaths from Fukushima might be on the level of a single bus accident. That said, the blogpost is incredibly misleading. It took me a while to track down the original source that the post claims to cite from UNSCEAR and it's this paragraph:

In general, increases in the incidence of health effects in populations cannot be attributed reliably to chronic exposure to radiation at levels that are typical of the global average background levels of radiation. This is because of the uncertainties associated with the assessment of risks at low doses, the current absence of radiation-specific biomarkers for health effects and the insufficient statistical power of epidemiological studies. Therefore, the Scientific Committee does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels;

What they are saying in short is that the statistical uncertainty is strong enough at low levels of radiation doses WRT cancer risk is that it's not possible to tell whether the LNT model is true or not and THEREFOR it shouldn't be used to say "this many people will die from this much low level radiation". They aren't saying that LNT is wrong. They aren't saying that LNT is right. They are saying we don't know.

The quote from the report is from here. It's from the latest report to the general assembly, page 16.

OK, I've looked it up [warning: large pdf], which I don't think you have. Show me the evidence that the much worse Chernobyl accident caused, or is yet to cause, more than a few hundred deaths.

I said that my main sources are WHO and UNSCEAR, they are published on the web:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/us-japan-nuclear-health-idUSTRE7354H920110406

From the article: 'Asked what health consequences he expected from Fukushima, he said: "From what I know now, nothing, because levels are so low. In food, people are talking about levels which would give you one millisieverts per year, five millisieverts per year ... this is nothing where we would expect major health impacts."'

There is a UN investigation team tasked with long term health monitoring. It will be interesting to see what their findings are 10 or 20 years from now. This does not mean that there are no problems. There are problems to the environment and those problems will continue for quite a long time. This is going to be one messy and costly clean up.

A lot of people don't have a good handle on what level of (and especially what sorts of) radioactivity are likely to cause health problems. They often incorrectly assume that any level of radiation exposure will lead to a statistically significant number of cancers. Standards for radiation exposure are set incredibly low compared to the amount necessary to cause health effects. There is a misunderstanding that exceeding an exposure standard will lead to health problems.

Personally, I found it really helpful to read the collections of reports here: http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html These talk about the amount of radiation that came from Chernobyl, how people were exposed, the type of treatment they received and the long term health effects. It's kind of a hard read, but if you keep Wikipedia open in another tab, you can slowly make your way through it. Finally, information about radioactive contamination in Fukushima is available from the International Atomic Energy Agency at the UN http://www.iaea.org/ After you get a handle on the effects of what happened at Chernobyl you can compare it to Fukushima using real data.

Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan." But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos.

- Joker, The Dark Knight
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/quotes?qt0499831

The same applies to energy production. People die from oil wars, oil accidents, coal pollution, smog, etc. etc. but that is "normal". Nuclear pollution from Fukushima is not suppose to happen. Even if no one dies. Even if no one is in current significant danger.

How many dead in Iraq oil war? 100,000+? How many dead from the Japanese tsunami? 25,000+? How many dead in because of the tsunami causing flooding and meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi? 0. How many dead because of Chernobyl? Less than 100. Yet, what are people worried about...

PS. Ignore the number strewn around by Greenpeace by Chernobyl. They take entire population of the world, apply a wrong model to it (LNT) and then they calculate that 300,000 people *must have* died. By that model, in the US 95+% of all cancers is caused by the CT scanners. UNSCEAR actually did the real research and found out the reality - small variations in radiation do nothing.

Although those exposed as children and the emergency and recovery workers are at increased risk of radiation-induced effects, the vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences due to the radiation from the Chernobyl accident. For the most part, they were exposed to radiation levels comparable to or a few times higher than annual levels of natural background, and future exposures continue to slowly diminish as the radionuclides decay. Lives have been seriously disrupted by the Chernobyl accident, but from the radiological point of view, generally positive prospects for the future health of most individuals should prevail.

http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

If you dig into the actual study, it's 5k thyroid cancer cases, most easily treated and highly survivable. Not good, but not fatal either.

You do get an anticipated 4k extra cancer deaths from the highest exposed, and 5k from the population in general, but that's not 9k kids dying from thyroid cancer, like the UN News Center article suggests. Heck, the article itself suggest that the effects are hard to confirm due to smoking, drinking, and other pollution. Increase in cancer is expected at 3-4% for the highest exposed, .6% for the rest.

I'm not going to suggest that this doesn't suck, but it's still minor compared to the deaths from air pollution from coal power. Heck, I think just coal mining accidents has added up to more than Chernobyl's total anticipated deaths over the years.

Slightly different numbers than the UN Study I found earlier - UN Source, 6k cases, 15 per this report, and only a 'large fraction' of the 6k from the iodine contamination.

The WHO article is from 06, the UN one is from 08, which could explain some of the different numbers.

I happen to remember the thyroid thing. Thing about radiation induced thyroid cancer is that it's one of the easiest cancers to treat.
Going to the UN Source, I find that you're wrong on several counts
1. It's not 9000 cases, it's 6000
2. It's not thyroid cancer deaths, it's thyroid cancer cases. Most survived it. 15 per this report
3. The 6000 is all cases of thyroid cancer in the area, thyroid cancer is rare otherwise, but still occurs. The UN merely attributes a 'large fraction' to the radioiodine

[...] will have effects spanning billions of years.

Explain. I was of the impression that isotopes with half-lives in the range of billions of years (K-40, U-238, Th-232) can only be considered "technically radioactive" since they're just too damn stable to give off much of any radiation. Keep in mind 99.3% of all naturally occurring Uranium is U-238 and Potassium-40 is contained not just in nuclear reactors, but bananas and brazil nuts.

The increase in background radiation [...]

During the Chernobyl disaster, an estimated 50-80 million (Russian authorities), 1 billion (Time magazine; optimistic estimate) to 9 billion (whole core; pessimistic estimate) curies were blown into the atmosphere (source). Reasonable estimates vary around 3 to 4.5 billion, or a third to half of the core. A 2006 UN report figures an average lifetime dose throughout Europe of around 1 mSv or some three to four months of (global) background radiation.

[...]people who voluntarily and knowingly engage in such employment

And people living near coal mines or plants, breathing the exhaust air from coal plants, living near hydroelectic dams, living near windmills...

Solar, wind, and hydrothermal are much safer.

Nuclear: You're the expert, please provide numbers.
Hydroelectric: Quick Googlage reveals tens of thousands evacuated and >100 casualties 2009-2011.
Wind: Old data mentions rates between 0.1 and 0.4 casualties per TWh, about twenty deaths in NAM from mid-nineties through 2011. Some more googling finds interesting data.
Geothermal: Seems safe but may cause earthquakes. Some pollution issues are to be worked out, but after that we might have ourselves a real contender.
Solar: Apparently more dangerous than wind and hydroelectricity. Who knew.

It is very interesting to see that so many people here are in favor of nuclear power. And the best are the arguments why nuclear is not such a big issue as coal or oil. The discussion in Germany is quite different. We are going to end the nuclear age in our country and have increased the output of electricity out of renewable energy up to 17% in the last decade. Based on current development in wind and solar power we believe that we can obsolete nuclear power by 2020 and meet our CO2 reduction goal as well. We think that we will reach that limit even faster with closing nuclear plant earlier.

That's really interesting actually. How are they planning on solving the base load problem (that wind and solar are intermittent)? Hydro is a good alternative, but that will drown a lot of land under several metres of water and kill a lot of wildlife in the building process. In Sweden, we shut down one nuclear power plant (Barsebäck) which was compensated by both importing coal power from Poland and upping the efficiency of the existing NPPs. Not even the Danes who have invested a *lot* of resources into wind power have managed to get rid of fossil fuels for base load.

But looking into the argument of coal kills more people than nuclear plants and their waste. This is definitely not true. It kill thousands after the Chernobyl disaster and something which is not counted in studies is the increase in cancer rates, babies born dead or deformed and the negative effects on the environment. So the argument coal kills more people is faulty.

Actually, it's not. The Chernobyl disaster didn't kill thousands, it killed 28 people. About 4000 were expected to die from different cancers (mostly thyroid) but the actual numbers seem to be a lot lower now that we're 25 years into the future. The increase in cancer rates are included in the statistics and they're low.

What's not included is the amount of radioactive substances released by coal power plants -- they're a lot higher than from nuclear power plants. Therefore, more people die from cancer caused by coal power than nuclear power every year, not to mention the other substances that's being let out into the atmosphere ...

If you're able to build a society on 100% renewable energy, then that's obiously a lot better than nuclear power. However, given the track record of renewables, I don't think it's actually doable without significant specialized natural resources (i.e. Iceland can use geothermal, Sweden has a lot of large rivers, etc.).

Both Iodine and Cesium are only dangerous if you ingest significant quantities of them. Additionally they have halflives measured in hours

No.

I-131 8 days.
Cs-137 30.2 years.

The problem at Chernobyl was release of Uranium and Plutonium in clouds, which then spread around the site, and irradiated everything.

In the long term the problem was the Cs-137.

Does it really need to be said that the Japanese lost control of exactly 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000% of their nuclear fuel.

If exposure of the rods and burning off of radioactive isotopes is zero loss of control, then stabbing someone is zero loss of blood unless they die.

Wanna bet the author of this story is a "green scientist" ?

The only thing I'd bet is that you're thoroughly annoyed that an out-of-date power plant has demonstrated that humans need to try much harder when deploying nuclear power. You're deliberately polarising it as greens vs nuclear advocates when it's really the desire for safe nuclear power vs the desire for maximising profit at inappropriate risk.

Yes, it's baloney, though I doubt..

Really? That's it?!.. This is your entire argument? Basically whatever I say is true because I said so... so there! Really, no effort at all put into any sort of coherent counter argument.

I guess the fact that nuclear fall out from Chernobyl made to it the U.S. and Canada in about 11 (ref 3) days and covered almost all of Europe totally escaped you (ref 1). Or the fact that grains of sand from the Mongolian deserts make it over to the U.S. each year even though it is much farther than the eastern coast of Japan(ref 2). But God forbid people take precautions, that would be un-American I guess.

If you're so against protecting yourself, at least do it for your children, or the people around you, don't be so self-fish.

1. http://www.unscear.org/docs/JfigXI.pdf
2. http://www.a-a-r-s.org/acrs/proceeding/ACRS2006/Papers/T-1_T3.pdf
3. http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1

"Let's count up the deaths, shall we?

Three Mile Island : 0 deaths
Chernobyl : 47 deaths (there were also 4,000 cases of Thyroid cancer that were successfully treated)"

The mortality numbers are more like 5,000 to 20,000 for TMI Unit-2 meltdown.
Besides the Xenon airborne release.. Several million curries of contaminated Cooling water were dumped in to the Susquehanna River.

Chernobyl.. death toll stands @ 500,000+ and is still increasing. Eventually it will claim the lives of several million people in the region..

Why are these numbers much higher than mentioned previously..
Because we now know a lot more about radiation exposure and the cover ups that followed each incident.

Some additional interesting facts about reactor accidents..

TMI unit-2 (commissioned 1978) was in operation for approximately three(3) months before the meltdown(1979) event..

Japan's Breeder reactor was in operation for just 5 months before
it suffered a major coolant accident, shutting it down for the last 14
years.

Fermi-1 (30 miles outside of Detroit) was in operation for just
three(3) years before it suffered from a partial core meltdown.

Chernobyl Unit # 4 reactor exploded(1986) after just three years of operation(comm 1983).
Even worse this was the SECOND Meltdown EVENT at Chernobyl!!!
Unit #1 experienced a partial core meltdown in 1982 after just four years of operation(comm 1978).

One thing about the potassium in our bodies - unless you get the levels seriously out of whack, it won't kill you.

And neither will external materials that have low-level radioactivity for 10,000 years.

Polonium 210 is an alpha emitter (you know - the kind you toss about as not being able to penetrate the dead skin on our bodies). Unfortunately 89 nanograms, ingested, is the median lethal dose.

Let's be clear for a moment: Litvinenko was poisoned. He didn't accidentally ingest 10 micrograms of Polonium 210 any more than you or I have accidentally ingested 5 mg of Pu-238. With a half-life of about 1/3yr, a temperature that easily exceeds 500C, and a heavy weight that prevents it from becoming airborne, Polonium poses little risk outside the laboratory or industrial environments where it is used. In addition, Polonium is a highly stable heavy metal that is unlikely to chemically bond to common materials and/or make it into the water or food supply like the more concerning Su-90 or I-131.

The greatest concern with Polonium-210 is that tobacco fertilizers contain the material, probably from natural Uranium decay in the soil. The tobacco plant absorbs the chemical and thus it gets into cigarettes. The quantities are miniscule, even by Polonium-210 standards (partially owing to the short half-life), but enough to eventually lead to lung cancer.

And while it is obvious to anyone versed on the subject that a coal plant belches out far more radioactive material than a properly operating coal plant, when a nuclear plant goes south, it can do it in a big way. TMI let some 40,000 curies of radioactive Krypton out. Chernobyl was far worse and directly killed a lot of people, contaminated a huge area of the Ukrane, and spewed contamination across Europe.

Let's count up the deaths, shall we?

Three Mile Island: 0 deaths
Chernobyl: 47 deaths (there were also 4,000 cases of Thyroid cancer that were successfully treated)
London Great Smog: 12,000 deaths

That last one was caused by burning coal. 12,000 deaths from a disaster caused by burning coal. Versus a maximum impact from nuclear power of ~4,050 people. (Only a small handful of who directly lost their lives.) And that's DESPITE the USSR building a sub-standard facility, DESPITE the USSR requiring untrained personal to safety test the facility, DESPITE the lousy and late evacuation job, and DESPITE the massive release of radioactive materials.

If that's not sinking in, read it again. Coal is MASSIVELY more dangerous than nuclear power plants. Period, end of story. If you have your brain even half-way engaged, you should be demanding that every one of our coal plants be ripped out.

(The 125,000 death figure, BTW, is a myth.)

I think it's pretty convenient and disingenuous that you and your other proponents of nuclear power continue to blame every accident on "bad designs".

TMI was not a "bad" design for its time. By modern standards it is, but then it was acceptable. And guess what? NOBODY DIED. Chernobyl on the other hand lacked BASIC safety measures. Like concrete for example. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that putting a solid concrete bunker around a super-heated boiler is a good idea in case it should explode. (Boiler explosions are a VERY common industrial accident, regardless of nuclear materials.) For some stupid reason, the bunker wasn't there. Furthermore, the untrained techs who performed the tests actually DISABLED the shutdown systems by cutting wires so that the reactor could not auto-sc

It is known (although ignored in strict radiation regulations) that the same dose received in short time is much more harmful than the dose received during longer times. It is probably because the cells have repair mechanism that can cope with small damage over long time while cannot efectively repair large damage in short time. There are even indications that small doses can be beneficial by "training" the repair mechanism.

You might find this interesting concerning radiation deaths/sickness and the errors in presenting such effects as a linear function of radiation:
http://www.riskworld.com/Nreports/1999/jaworowski/ NR99aa01.htm

It's written by UN radiation expert Zbigniew Jaworowski of UNSCEAR http://www.unscear.org/

If you haven't you should also read the first link in the slashdot story, it has an interview with Russell Joyner (Discipline Chief, Propulsion Systems Analysis, Pratt & Whitney) you will probably find interesting (it seems to me you are discussing something else than the Triton design).

...note that shielding can sometimes cause a net increase in dangerous radiation, as high-energy cosmic rays that would just pass through a person impact the shielding and bombard the shielded thing (like a person) with a series of lower energy radiations, which may total a lower energy overall then the cosmic ray but have a much greater effect on the person.

Also, according to a paper in materials science research titled, Cosmic-Ray Neutrons on the Ground and in the Atmosphere And a number of other papers by the same author, the measurements show that the cosmic contribution to background dose rate increases as the strength of the magnetic field decreases.

The error in logic with your argument is that the magnetic field deflects particles before they reach the atmosphere and interact. Once they reach the atmosphere, they interact with the atmosphere (not the magnetic field) to generate the "more dangerous radiation." as you call it. That said, I'm not entirely sure that this radiation is any more or less dangerous. While it is true that the quality factor is lower (what you multiply the energy deposion by to get the increased quantity that is proportional to increased probability of cancer), the energy deposition can be higher (this is true for photons, but not electrons, and I just don't know for protons and higher Z charged particles with kinetic energies in the GeV range).

What's tough is that Chernobyl-induced cancer cases amount to an increase of between 0.004% and 0.01% above the baseline rate of cancers (the exact number is subject to dispute, but is commonly agreed to lie in this range). Thyroid cancer rates are the only ones observed to have increased after Chernobyl, with an increase of 0.9% for the adult population as a whole and 5% for children under 14. Thyroid cancer is very treatable and has a mortality rate of 0.7%, so 100,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer would cause only about 700 deaths.

Some anti-nuclear activists assert that these numbers dramatically underestimate the number of deaths due to Chernobyl because they want to count as Chernobyl deaths the number of abortions (frequently estimated at 50,000-100,000) performed on frightened mothers throughout Europe in the wake Chernobyl. I hadn't seen the anti-nuke crowd join the pro-life movement before this.

According to the UNSCEAR, the only long-term effect that's been seen is an increase in thyroid cancer. They were surprised to see no increase in leukemia, whose connection to exposure to radiation is well documented and well understood.

The exact toll of the Chernobyl accident may never be known. Determining which cancers are caused by fallout and which by other causes is not possible and the numbers are so small as to be statistically uncertain. Perhaps the WHO number of 3500 deaths that I cited was low by a factor of two or three (another estimate, published in the anti-nuke Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, puts the toll at 6000 and rising as of 1996), but there's no credible estimate that puts Chernobyl't toll within a factor of five of Hiroshima.

What's tough is that Chernobyl-induced cancer cases amount to an increase of between 0.004% and 0.01% above the baseline rate of cancers (the exact number is subject to dispute, but is commonly agreed to lie in this range). Thyroid cancer rates are the only ones observed to have increased after Chernobyl, with an increase of 0.9% for the adult population as a whole and 5% for children under 14. Thyroid cancer is very treatable and has a mortality rate of 0.7%, so 100,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer would cause only about 700 deaths.

Some anti-nuclear activists assert that these numbers dramatically underestimate the number of deaths due to Chernobyl because they want to count as Chernobyl deaths the number of abortions (frequently estimated at 50,000-100,000) performed on frightened mothers throughout Europe in the wake Chernobyl. I hadn't seen the anti-nuke crowd join the pro-life movement before this.

According to the UNSCEAR, the only long-term effect that's been seen is an increase in thyroid cancer. They were surprised to see no increase in leukemia, whose connection to exposure to radiation is well documented and well understood.

The exact toll of the Chernobyl accident may never be known. Determining which cancers are caused by fallout and which by other causes is not possible and the numbers are so small as to be statistically uncertain. Perhaps the WHO number of 3500 deaths that I cited was low by a factor of two or three (another estimate, published in the anti-nuke Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, puts the toll at 6000 and rising as of 1996), but there's no credible estimate that puts Chernobyl't toll within a factor of five of Hiroshima.

It's kind of misleading to talk about Hiroshima and Chernobyl as though they were the same.

It's kind of misleading to talk about Hiroshima and Chernobyl as though they were the same.

Ignorance may be a bliss, but it can be unhealthy as well.

Check out two international studies. Unscear report and UN report. UN also has pretty clueful page on chernobyl in general. We're talking about moderate increase in occurrence of cancer with some 10000-20000 cases attributed to the accident. Fatality is pretty low, thought, so casualties are some 100s.