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Living In Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone Would Be No Worse Than Living In London, Research Suggests (bristol.ac.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from University of Bristol, England: New research suggests that few people, if any, should be asked to leave their homes after a big nuclear accident, which is what happened in March 2011 following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Professor Thomas's team used the Judgement or J-value to balance the cost of a safety measure against the increase in life expectancy it achieves. The J-value is a new method pioneered by Professor Thomas that assesses how much should be spent to protect human life and the environment. The researchers found that it was difficult to justify relocating anyone from Fukushima Daiichi, where four and a half years after the accident around 85,000 of the 111,000 people who were moved out by the Japanese government had still not returned. After the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, in what was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union (USSR), the J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining. Using the J-value method, 31,000 people would have needed to be moved, with the number rising to 72,000 if the whole community was evacuated when five per cent of its residents were calculated to lose nine months of life or more.
Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol, said: "Mass relocation is expensive and disruptive. But it is in danger of becoming established as the prime policy choice after a big nuclear accident. It should not be. Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation." For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The results are published in a special issue of Process Safety and Environmental Protection, a journal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol, said: "Mass relocation is expensive and disruptive. But it is in danger of becoming established as the prime policy choice after a big nuclear accident. It should not be. Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation." For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The results are published in a special issue of Process Safety and Environmental Protection, a journal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
Why would they suddenly start caring?
They didn't care about the betrayal of 1,400 children. Why would they care now?
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining
The Life Expectancy is a statistical quantity. Reducing the average life expectancy by 8 months doesn't mean there won't be data outliers, or individuals affected with undue severity, E.G. Individuals whom will die much earlier because of the incident.
This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.
Statistics is the only way the evaluations can be performed. For Fukushima, the UNSCEAR 2013 concluded essentially no statistical loss in life expectancy and no deaths. Since then, studies have shown that actual exposures were lower than used int he report. The methodology in that report is the same as used to estimate Chernobyl health impacts, and studies have shown a much smaller health impact than estimated. So the science is clearly good and conservative.
Every life matters, but that is not how we evaluate overall safety. We evaluated it in terms of risk. We have statistics on car deaths, and use that to evaluate the risks and also improve safety. Every one of those deaths still matters, of course.
As for radiation zones, the very low risk should not surprise anybody who has attempted to objectively asses the information available. Of course, if one reads headlines, then they might not get it.
> The most dangerous material around Chernobyl is Plutonium.
> If it gets into your organism, you most certainly die due to it.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Plutonium is dangerous, and as far as we know it's never killed anyone. It seems that inhaling plutonium dust is more dangerous than ingesting it, because it's suspected that inhaling plutonium increases the risk of lung cancer. Without any known deaths from either it's hard to quantify that, though. There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s. There has not been a single lung cancer among them. Albert Stevens had the highest dose of plutonium ever, having been injected with it in the 1940s. He lived to 79 years old, when he died of heart failure.