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.

Comments

Re:Unintended consequences

[Uberbah]

Nuclear power has been a disaster and widespread adoption of clean, renewable energy can't come soon enough.

There have been multiple individual coal mining accidents that have killed more people than the entire nuclear industry has ever killed.

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?

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.

My favorite is when nuke fans include dam collapses from decades before the first nuclear power plant was ever built. Nevermind that if we had nuclear power in 1900, we would have had some more Chernobyl's and Fukishimas.

Every decision ever made to invest in nuclear instead of coal has been a life saving decision.

Fukishima was a once-in-a-thousand years disaster. If you replace thousands of coal plants around the word with nuclear power plants, you're going to see a lot more Fukishima's because more plants will be hit by once-in-a-thousand-years disasters just based on statistics.

but wind and solar will need to be paired with energy storage or long-range low-loss power distribution

Which can be done for a fraction of the cost of nuclear power, which costs billions to develop and maintain, and then store the waste for hundreds to thousands of years.