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.
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 Had it been replaced by a newer reactor, as it should have been, the whole incident would never have happened, but then that's another example of how the anti-nuclear guys are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.
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.'"
Yes, all zero of them have been fully counted.
See that "Preview" button?
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.
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.
They are the foremost experts on this type of analysis, and they are not a nuclear power associated body but rather work to ensure global nuclear safety for all radio logical venues, including medical, weaponry, power, industrial, etc. You can find your personal excuse to dismiss these well documented reports, and instead believe whatever you decide, but you'll have a hard time finding the data, basis, and proven methodology presented in these reports. Do you dismiss IPCC reports on global warming as well?