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Fukushima: 1,600 Dead From Evacuation Stress
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.
We can't let this happen again, we must ban all nuclear related evacuations.
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 Had it been replaced by a newer reactor, as it should have been, the whole incident would never have happened, but then that's another example of how the anti-nuclear guys are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.
They didn't draw a conclusion from Chernobyl disaster, where the evacuation was also too broad.
Japan over reacted. \/[ ._. ]\/
Imagine the media fallout if those 1,600 people were killed by radiation.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of unintended consequences of nuclear power, which seems to leave suffering in its wake for generations when something goes wrong. The bombings in Japan, Chernobyl, TMI, and now Fukushima. The children of the victims' children and the environment will continue to suffer the effects of a power that is just too great for humans to be in control of. Nuclear power has been a disaster and widespread adoption of clean, renewable energy can't come soon enough.
An ex-colleague of mine, a scientist, is the technical lead in a now nearly-ended EU-financed R & D project, named CRISMA: http://www.crismaproject.eu/. They delivered and tested a series of tools that show actors such as fire-brigade commanders, higher-ranking police officials etc. etc. what the consequences of their actions are in case of an emergency. For example: a city has 30 ambulances. Sending 20 of them to the first place with heavy reported casualties after an earthquake leaves 10 to deal with anything else. Now repeat the simulation while sending over only 15, or 10 ambulances. Learn about what good and bad scenarios are. Such stuff would have been great if it had been at the disposal of Japanese emergency coordinators before Fukushima...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
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?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And four dead in Ohio. 1600 div by 4 make is 400 times to the negative.
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.
You'll find that there were many deaths also associated with the indirect effect of the tsunami and earthquake across Japan. A high number of suicides,stress on the elderly were part of it. And the depression of many who lost loved ones or lost their homes and all their belongings.
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.
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.
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.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
This is something that cannot be measured. It is a statistic that is based on estimates, read wild ass guesses, based on assumptions that are usually outlandish. They died of hearth failure. You can't prove, or even reasonably infer, that their heart failure was from the Fukushima stress.
This is no different that new agencies inflating hurricane deaths by counting heart attack victims.
This statistic is straight outa someone's ass.
Something similar happened in 2005 when Barry Meier at the NYT made a big production about a young guy who died when his implanted defibrillator glitched - while he was competing in a mountain bike race.
Thousands of elderly patients had unnecessary surgery to replace their implants; hundreds died.
Yes, the manufacturer kept quiet about the glitch, but that was the only responsible thing to do.
Let's look at reality for a second. Humans need massive amounts of energy in order to expand. Humans will steal this energy from others. Humans will waste energy so others can't use it. Humans are still in the early stages of evolution. Nuclear power is a way to produce massive amounts of energy then make the future generations clean up the mess. We may not be an intelligent species... Until we solve the problem of storing nuclear waste, we are only stealing energy from the next generations to pump up our fake egos...
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...
How many millions will the environmentalists kill?
Have gnu, will travel.
It was an emergency, they had no idea how it would turn out as they were evacuating the area. And it is not just the patients. Sure, for many patients the risk of moving them will always outweigh the risk of anything else. But still the healthy and mobile doctors and nurses are still going to want to evacuate instead of putting their lives n danger. And these patients will definitely die without medical supervision, so the choice is between leaving them to die or taking the risk and taking them with you.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The level of wankery in that comment just blew up the meter.
What about you don't start comments in the subject line, kid?
y?
...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...
Founders were right again. Expansive nanny state constructs, such as our own democrat party's new york / Los Angeles propaganda streams, can be every bit as deadly as a handgun. Monsters!
I'm guessing you're not going to vote for Bernie Sanders.
Fear of nuclear power, generally, has been used to drive reliance on other energy sources that proven historically to be far more deadly. We feat the potential deaths from a Fukishima or Chernobyl or 3-Mile Island, so we have used coal, oil, and natural gas etc each of which claim the actual lives of people who produce it, handle it, use it, and are exposed to its byproducts.
About 200 workers killed in the nuclear industry, globally, in its entire lifetime, even including Chernobyl and Russian nuclear sub emergencies. There are estimates that thousands of civilians may have their lives shortened by Chernobyl and Fukishima. These related civilian deaths are linked to specific one-time events and are therefore limited.
About 2000 workers are killed EVERY YEAR year in the petroleum industry. It is known than millions have their lived shortened by inhaling the combustion by-products of coal and oil (and burning wood, etc) which are on-going activities. These related civilian deaths happen every year even without a disaster, and are therefore unlimited
Obviously, these are different industries in substance, scope, etc so the numbers are not directly comparable but it should also be remembered that, very-rare-disasters aside, in day-to-day operation nuclear kills NOBODY while providing very concentrated sources of completely clean energy that can power ANYTHING directly (heating, lights, appliances, trains, cars...). Power from various forms of combustion can be used the same way in power plants, but is most-often distributed throughout society where most of the population is exposed to some of the pollutants and byproducts and risk of handling the materials and waste. Only a tiny percent of the population handles nuclear fuel. Much of the population personally handles gasoline or diesel or propane. Every time a person handles a fuel, he or she is doing something risky. The people who handle a fuel in quantities, like the guys transporting fuel to gas stations in semi trucks are at higher risk. The statistics bear this out.
Nuclear is easy to demonize. It is mysterious to most people, where burning things is familiar. Its method of killing (radiation) is invisible and cannot be detected without a science-y gadget that clicks or beeps, whereas fires and explosions and pools of spilled oozes and volatile vapors are easy to see and we can imagine ourselves side-stepping them.
Japan should really keep it's distance from anything nuclear.
keep this psedudoscience propaganda off slashdot pls
At least when it's an accident somewhere else. Then it's all "There have been NO deaths due to radiation!". Rather carefully tiptoeing around the fact that immediately lethal doses of radiation outside of a nuclear bomb ground zero don't happen, it takes years or decades to die from an *eventually* fatal dose, and many are just handicapped by cancer and die from other causes.
Often the same ones who scream and cry about terrorism threats or ISIS threats to the USA, Islamic ffundamentalists in the USA, UN or climate change being a cover for a NWO, the US armed forces invading Texas or some other weird shit like that.
Because these are risks that they feel they are living under, therefore not overblown.
I have to ask: if they hadn't moved these people, how many would have had complications due to radiactive damage, such as Iodine poisoning?
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.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
The nuclear PR machine established this psychology at the dawn of nuclear power with slogans like 'too cheap to meter' and 'lightning striking twice in the same place'. Your assessment of risk is influenced by your understanding of the facts. The more facts you have about the nuclear industry the more you increase your ability to understand it's inherent risks.
The accusation that the arguments against nuclear power come down to the things you claim about risk perception is another manifestation of social proof and the mechanisms the brain employs to reduce the amount of effort it takes to assimilate information, which in the case of the complexity of the nuclear industry, is really hard.
Case in point, ask yourself if you know what bio-accumulation is and how radionuclides propagate in the food chain. Ask yourself if you know what a LER or BDI is and what their relationship to nuclear accidents are. If you don't then you are not really looking at the complex stuff and you are not really educating yourself on the actual risks. What you are doing is making judgement calls on the amount of mental effort others have made to draw their conclusions based on your own.
I can assure you, the nuclear industry is far more complex than your wiki link.
The right wing brought us nut jobs like Hitler, you are the source of fascism and torture around the world as you drag the world further into poverty so you can have more.
You are the demise of democracy everywhere.
when the FUCK was the last time you were stressed out and died? im not saying it couldnt happen, but it's certainly not more likely than dying from a NUCLEAR MELTDOWN.
don't believe the paid hype, dice is trying to sell you out
Hitler was a NATIONAL SOCIALIST. His party's actual name was "National Socialist German Workers' Party", the 1st word of which is pronounced "Nahtzeeonahl" by German-speakers (hence the nick-name "NAZI"). If you look on the old newsreels or read the actual captured Nazi documents, you will see the initials N.S.D.A.P. all over the place; the German initials for National Socialist Deutsch Arbeit Partie (Deutsch=German and Arbeit=work/workers).
Now that you have been given more history than you apparently accumulated in years of propaganda from left-leaning unionized school teachers who want you to think everything "left" is good and everything "right" is bad, you ought to think about just how ignorant and foolish you look when you pretend that Nazi has anything to do with the end of the political spectrum that HATES socialism. Your "Nazi == right wing" drivel makes as much sense as claiming the Pope is the world's biggest abortion advocate... you could not be more wrong, except in modern academia where tenured insanity rules.
There are some humans I fully trust with nuclear power, there are others however who should never be left unattended with pointy objects.
This continual left-wing drumbeat that all people are equal (in all way, nut just equal in value as human beings) and that all belief systems are equal, and that we therefore must keep all people away from some technologies because SOME people might abuse them is rather tiresome and ignorant.
Ideologies matter. Beliefs matter. Philosophies matter. Different ideologies ARE of different value and people with some beliefs and philosophies can be trusted while people with some other philosophies cannot. If you disagree, then presumably you'd be FINE being ruled by Nazis or maniacal cannibals (since apparently all beliefs and ideologies are equal...)
People who have some beliefs and are reasonably competent can be trusted with even the most-dangerous technologies; they will strive to use them (or not use them) as safely as possible, taking all necessary precautions. Others will turn boxcutters and airliners into weapons if you give them a chance.
Cesium-137 supposedly has a 30 year half life(10 yrs X 30 = 300 yrs). Normal radiation detectors DO NOT detect it, you need a 'Cesium Detector'.
It takes at least 10 half-lifes to get close to inert...I would suggest 20 half-lifes is more accurate. Even with 10 half-lifes X 30 years = 300 Years MINIMUM. So if you and I live to 100, that is 3 generations that will be affected by this Nuclear Power disaster. Your granchildren's children at a minimum.
Some say more Cesium-137 was released in Fukushima than in Chernobyl. While I do not know about that, I do know about this (and you should as well)
Chernobyl, scientists returned approx 26 years later (close to 30 years or one half-life), the amount of Cesium-137 should have reduced by 1/2. The amounts measured were GREATER than reported. This means:
1. More Cesium-137 was released than the Government reported (easily believable) OR
2. Cesium-137 does not break down in nature the same in a labortory, i.e. 1 half life for Cesium-137 is greater than 30 years (hope not3.
We will not know the truth about Chernobyl for another 30 years as the only Cesium-137 readings we can rely on were taken by those scientists 25 - 27 years after the event.
There was an increase in heart defects in the Ohio Valley through to Pennsylvania shortly after the event. The few baby doctors reporting this were ignored. Some suggest that Cesium-137 can get into the jet stream without the need for an explosion. Regardless its in the water table, in the ocean, and will be for the next 300+ years.
Each spring, when pollen is released at altitude by the Pine Tree's Pine Cones, laden with Cesium-137 sucked up into the tree already, areas within reach of those winds will be re-contaminated, at least for the next 300 years.
Radioactive debris from the Tsunami was reported on the West Coast of the USA and Canada many months ago, so only a fool would think that Cesium-137 is not already in the food chain.
I could go on an on...all true, all facts, nothing misleading. But too many insane fools have their head somewhere else when it comes to Nuclear power.
...they say its cheaper...NOT. Casking costs allot of money and the casks only last for 100 years...start to crack at 50 years...Cesium-137 only has a half life of 30 years (300 years of casking)...There are radioactive isotopes that have a half life of 24,000 years... How much will it cost to re-cask that every 100 years. No wonder the industry wants to dump it in the ocean or have a facility like Yucca Mtns where its out of site and out of mind. ITS NOT CHEAPER based on this fact alone. Much less the reality that it takes government funding to build one and they do not last that long anywya.
...they say its safe...NOT. If you ignore 3 mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, I would direct you to read the weekly reports for the industry and see all the various trace amounts that leak into the waterways every week...some plant somewhere is leaking something. And these plants are not built for an 'unlimited' lifetime. They were to be moth-balled after about 30 years. So take your costs + the casking of the waste radiation for hundreds of thousands of years and explain exactly how its cheaper than ANY other source of energy? Yea right, ITS NOT.
..they say we can not live without it. In Japan, when all the plants were off, they did experience rolling brownouts in some areas initially, but before they quickly brought some of the plants online, they were no longer having brownouts. Proving they did not need it. Can't have the public thinking that can we, boy they started those plants back up again real fast...pathetic.
...When you seriously think about it, AND FOLLOW THE MONEY, you would have to be insane to be for Nuclear power. Unless you look at weapons. How much does it cost to create a shell tipped with armor piercing shells? And that is not the most costly weapons produced with this technology.
When it comes right down to it, the only reason for NUCLEAR POWER is WEAPONS! Nothing else makes sense.
Remember, this was in the middle of a disaster, that caused several other disasters. There was the earthquake and aftershocks. There were the tsunamis. And there was the damage to the nuclear power plants. And there were fires. Earthquakes can cause fires. Large earthquakes affecting man made structures will cause fires.
Earthquakes of this magnitude, heck even a 5.5 mag. is not a single event, but continues with aftershocks for weeks. Often aftershocks in a local area can be close or bigger in effect than the first main quake. (I've lived through a bunch in Southern Calif.)
Then there was the possibility of more tsunamis. If there were, I hadn't heard of any causing any damage, but if you were there near the ocean you probably moved to higher ground just in case.
Then there was the continuing issue of the damage to the nuclear power plants.
It such a situation people are faced with making decisions of what to do, or not do. Hours, days, months, or years later, we sometimes find out if the best decision was made.
Had the spent fuel in the cooling ponds at Fukushima caught fire, then everyone would be hailing the wise decision to evacuate. Not knowing with any kind of precision, only the possibility of that happening--2%? 87%? what would you do?
Ah, you plan for disasters ahead of time, so you already have a pre-planed, rational plane of action, that will precisely tell you exactly how many people if any to evacuate so the number of deaths from the evacuation and the number of deaths from the disaster add up to the perfect number that is the lowest number of deaths.
Except of the 100 people in the government ministry who wrote the disaster plan, only 11 can get to work that day, and there is no electricity in the building, and besides, glass is falling off the building making it too dangerous to try to get it, and you never planned for this exact disaster...etc., etc.
I also notice that no one seems to be criticizing anyone moving to higher ground, even though as far as I know tsunamis stopped after the first group. Sometimes the best precautionary decision to evacuate is being overly cautious. The nuclear plant situation had the potential to kill a lot of people. Fortunately it didn't, although many of the plant workers are at risk of cancers.
Several hours after the 1971 Sylmar, renamed the San Fernando Earthquake, in the northern area of Los Angeles, there was a risk of the Van Norman Damn, a large reservoir collapsing:
http://articles.latimes.com/1996-02-04/news/mn-32287_1_san-fernando-quake
From the article: "Later, a UCLA study estimated that collapse of the dam would have brought flooding that could have killed between 71,600 and 123,400 people." A large area and 80,000 people were evacuated. It didn't collapse.
My neighborhood was in the evacuation zone for about an hour, then we were not. It happened at 6 AM. I went outside with the terrified family dog. We were less than 10 miles from the epicenter. Aftershocks made it hard to stand at times. This was a 5.7 magnitude earthquake lasting 12 seconds. The Japanese quake lasted 6 minutes, and I can assure you mother earth was ringing like a bell for a longer than than. Aftershocks are occurring several times a minute. I had the dog in my lap on a patio lounge chair, maybe 10 minutes after the initial shock, when another aftershock came. I could hear it coming like a freight train as it shook things, and could see waves in the soil as it came, brick walls crashing down, the upper branches of 30-40 foot tall trees in our backyard jerking back and forth 10 feet in a less than a second. Having climbed those trees as a boy, I knew if you were up there you would have been flung off 10, 20, 50 feet; no way you could hang on. In every direction I looked I could see smoke from fires near and far. Every now and them a blue flash from a power transformer exploding.
Faced with the situation I was in, again, do you stay? do you leave? You don't have enough information to do anything other than make a gut decision. Electricit
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 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 shit, diluted into the atmosphere (hey, no single waste storage place to be bickering about !) and eventually stored into the lungs of the general population.
Nuclear power == corporate pork and fluffing Tom Swift fanboys.
Coal/Gaz/etc. power == using general population's lungs as sewer system.
Yup. Nuclear energy isn't perfect. Indeed it does have its problems. I agree we could do better (hydroelectric, solar, wind, etc.).
But compared to what is currently used in lots of place, nuclear is *definitely less worse*.
You always need to thing about *what other technologie* one specific energy is competing.
What is the alternative.
As much as you would like the alternative to be wind farms, and solar panels, the reality is that the alternative against which nuclear power is competing is mainly burning fossil fuel and filling the atmosphere with its waste. On a scale that is order of magnitude more polluting and problematic than nuclear for a given amount of output energy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]