Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Estimates not good enough? Let's try actual measurements 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 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:
Crowd: What do we want? Fry: Fry's dog! Crowd: When do we want it? Fry: Fry's dog!
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. Even for workers at the site with the highest exposures, there will likely be no observable effects. As you say, with the workers the sample size is small to start with, so that becomes factor
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/P...
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.
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.
"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.
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 get plenty of funding by certain industries. The Health Physics Society essentially became a "labor union for the nuclear industry" (as one of its own founders put it).
Instead, I suggest you try the following strategy: Try to come up with some reasonable keywords, restrict yourself to journals with high reputation (e.g.: Nature, Science, Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Radiology, etc. ), and then look at all articles which come up. As a first approximation, you can look at impact factor or google scholar metrics if you want to know what journals have a good reputation. You may learn something.