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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 Had it been replaced by a newer reactor, as it should have been, the whole incident would never have happened, but then that's another example of how the anti-nuclear guys are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.
Imagine the media fallout if those 1,600 people were killed by radiation.
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.'"
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.
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. So, all this FUD about multi-generational effects has proven to be just that.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've read those articles about the beneficial effects of low exposures, it is interesting stuff. There seems to be some evidence, but just as in the attempts to show negative effects of exposures, there is not enough statistical evidence to have any certainty. The one thing that we can conclude is that in either case the effects are so small it is very hard to statistically observe them.
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.
"Nobody wants to respond to your comment"
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.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
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.
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...
No one is responding to the content of your post. That's the lesson here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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 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.
What about you don't start comments in the subject line, kid?
y?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
For comparison, here is a chart of deaths per kwh of electricity generated.
Coal – U.S. 15,000
Hydro 1,400
Solar (rooftop) 440
Nuclear – global average 90
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
With that said, the storage problem for solar and wind is absolutely not solved, nor will it be cheap. The amount of installed wind and solar is still so small that existing hydro dams can handle the storage, but wind and solar are growing fast enough that hydro dams will be completely insufficient.
There are experimental ideas about using excess power to make hydrogen, or methane or other hydrocarbons, but those are highly experimental and it is doubtful whether it will ever make economic sense. There are some very promising developments in turning sunlight directly into hydrogen or hydrocarbons, which will probably make a lot more sense economically. The problem is that none of this is available off the shelf, nor will it be in the next 5-10 years, and when it finally does become available it will take several decades to ramp up production to a level needed to supply 10+ billion people with energy storage.
Energy distribution has been making slow but steady progress over the last 150 or so years. We can easily transmit power 1000-2000 km today. Some day we'll be able to transmit it 3000 km and in the distant future 4000 km and 5000 km, which will be enough that we'll barely need storage. But again we're talking about decades into the future.
The nice ting about nuclear power is that we can build it now. You can call GE and order a plant on Monday, assuming you have the $5 billion (or $10 billion after the usual cost overrun) that they want for one of those and in 10-15 years you, your kids, grandkids and great-grandkids will have a clean and safe power plant. Throw in a few hundred millions for a decent sea wall if you decide put it next to the ocean.
If you are concerned about what future generations will do with your nuclear waste storage sites, you should probably be more concerned about what they will do (or rather what they will fail to do) with your hydro dams. I wouldn't trust a government that fails to repair bridges before they collaps to maintain a hydro dam upstream from where I live.
...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!
Burning the people would be more efficient. Check your numbers/units.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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 common across the globe. Some of you know the reason for that (the others are Republicans.) Yet we inevitably make predications based on past events.
Japan should really keep it's distance from anything nuclear.
All of those numbers seem extremely high. I routinely use about 300kwh/month.
Yeah, it should be PWh, not kWh. My mistake
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
And reality has proven that that worse weather is not the case http://www.climatechangedispat...
So the real two groups of people are Republicans and those who are ignoring proven science.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes but the real irony is that radiation is scary because its invisible - but the pollution from burning coal is also invisible. As for danger burning coal is estimated to kill 750,000 a year in China alone, and coal is statistically something like 1,000 times more dangerous than nuclear.. This creates the fascinating statistic that 5 to 10 million extra people have been indirectly killed by the anti-nuclear protest crowd - by coal pollution..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
The accident at Fukushima has also indirectly caused some 10,000 to 50,000 deaths from coal pollution because Japan in fear switched from nuclear to burning coal. ~The blame for that of course should go directly to the Japanese anti-nuclear protestors..
(The total kill from nuclear power is 0.0 to 0.2 million - whereas the total kill form anti-nuclear protest is some 5 to 10 million, again from coal pollution.)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
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 ]
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 post-war fling with communism) Hitler was against socialist parties.
Once Hitler took power, he cooperated with the big capitalists. All unions were abolished, replaced by a state-run union that basically existed as lubricant for the capitalists to screw the workers.
It's ironic that people take words seriously when Hitler used them. Hitler was very happy to lie as long as it served his purposes, more so than most politicians today.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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:
It might be overcast and windless in Jerkwater, Kansas, but that's not going to be the case all over a 2000 km radius. It's going to be sunny or windy somewhere. As for storing the energy, get some molten salt batteries - or just build more water towers into your grid and use excess energy to pump up water. If you need power, just let it out into a tank or retaining pond and use gravity to generate electricity. It's going to have some up-front costs, but it's still going to be cheaper than coal or nuclear, and the infrastructure should last a long time - we have hydro plants that are over 100 years old that are still producing electricity. For the rare areas where neither wind or solar would never work - build a plant that burns ethanol (cane or switch grass based, not that corn corporate pork) or wood, and you'd still be carbon-neutral.
You can build a lot of green energy for $5 billion (more when you include all the costs, not just the up-front government subsidies) over 10-15 years. Take the $1 trillion plus imperial budget - most of which is focused around guarding the world's gas station, the middle east - and spend it on green energy, and not only could you have us carbon-free within a decade. You'd have an economic boom that would make the post-WWII era look like a recession, from the number of jobs created.
Every hydro dam in the world could collapse tomorrow, and the loss of life would be huge. But rebuilding could start as soon as the floodwaters receded, and it would be a historical footnote hundreds of years from now - as opposed to the nuclear waste facilities that will still need to be maintained in 2515, A.D.