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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.
Does it account for the spike in sudden infant death syndrome in the areas of Japan after 2011?
http://saveie6.com/
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.
> 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.
One person saved by spending the $X relocating them matters, of course.
The two people who COULD have been saved by using that money to clean up the radiation more thoroughly instead also matter.
The 30 people who could have been saved by spending that money on traffic safety matter still more.
We have a certain amount of resources, a budget. If we have $10 billion to spend on making people safer, we then have to decide which safety projects to fund, with how much going to each project. We can't fund everything that seems like it might save some lives. Some we we wouldn't want to fund even if we had unlimited money - taking people away from their homes and communities disrupts their lives, and permanently moving people who weren't all that close to Chernobyl was worse for them than leaving them alone would have been. The strongest radioactive material released had a half-life of only eight days, so while a two-week temporary evacuation probably made sense, permanently uprooting the people in the outer perimeter was bad for them, overall.
Anway, let's consider projects that WOULD be good for people. With research, we find that some safety measures are far more effective than others, and some are far more expensive than others:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m...
To save the most lives in total we want to mostly fund projects which save a lot of lives per resource spent (we measure resources in dollars, for convenience).
The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.
For some reason I got to talking with some of my co-workers on the nuclear emergency evacuation plans that get printed in phone books and such. We live near an operating nuclear power plant so I guess plans like this are legally required or something. The area around the reactor was separated into evacuation zones, each zone is supposed to head out away from the power plant to a specified neighboring city.
One of my co-workers mentioned that where we worked was in one zone and where his children went to school was in a different zone. He said they can take their plan and shove it, he's got his own plan. I suspect that he's not unique. If someone were to actually order an evacuation then we'd have chaos as everyone does their own thing. I suspect that the police and National Guard would be called out to maintain some semblance of order but that's just wishful thinking.
We've had evacuations because of floods before and I saw some of the mayhem from a fairly local, and visible, threat. You take an invisible and widespread threat (and quite likely theoretical threat) like a radiation release then all plans will go out the window. You'll have panicked parents punching out police officers at roadblocks so they can get to their children before the school buses them off to somewhere a county away from where the parents are supposed be. That's assuming the police even show up.
But we can't have nuclear power because we have what has been proven to be a non-issue while we keep burning coal, which also creates a much more certain (and again still theoretical) threat to the safety of children.
Oh, and the lack of new nuclear power means we keep operating current nuclear power plants decades beyond their designed lifespan. Fukushima Daiichi would likely have been shutdown 20 years ago if Japan had not stopped building new nuclear power plants.
So, we can do an orderly shutdown of these old nuclear power reactors or wait until we have to do a very disorderly shutdown. We'll have people claim we can replace these nuclear power reactors with wind and solar but how much will that cost? Wind might look cheap until we figure out that all installed capacity is not equal. A nuclear power plant can have a capacity factor of 90% and wind a capacity factor of 30%. You shutdown a one gigawatt nuclear power plant then you'll need three gigawatts of wind capacity and a Tesla PowerWall big enough to run a small city for hours. Money costs lives too, raising energy prices means less money for food, medical care, and so on.
We've known that nuclear power is exceedingly safe. This study of current practice proves that nuclear is even safer than shown before. Maybe there was a good reason to stop building as many nuclear power plants as we did in the 1970s and 1980s. Not building new nuclear power reactors now is just making things worse.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
fission is not only a pointlessly dangerous scam, it's an entirely unnecessary one.
Citation needed. Here's mine that says you're full of shit.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
Nuclear fission is the safest energy source we have available today. It's also cheaper than solar, hydro, and offshore wind.
https://www.instituteforenergy...
Nuclear also has a lower carbon footprint than solar.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/u...
If there is an energy scam out there then it's solar. Onshore wind and hydro aren't too bad but they are limited in utility by geography, nuclear energy is not. About the rest of your claims, I think you have your aluminum foil helmet on too tight.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The rents are much more reasonable in a nuclear disaster fallout zone, but it's very hard to get a pint of London Pride bitter.
So it's probably best to stick with London, unless you're a Tory or UKIP nonce, in which case the nuclear disaster fallout zone is a far better choice, since you won't find as many SJWs there and you can be among your own kind. We're offering a free tube of sunscreen if you decide to move. We'll even drive you to the train.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...regurgitating talking points debunked earlier this week. Although at least this time you're not complaining about the high cost of nuclear power coming from government regulation. Maybe because it was pointed out that a couple hundred million in extra costs from regulation (higher seawall and better backup cooling power) could have saved Japan a couple hundred billion in cleanup costs?
Because the cost can never be justified. Didn't seem to pick up on that one.
Coal and nuclear are non sequiturs when wind and solar have lapped them in cost effectiveness, and thats allowing coal and nuclear to externalize most of their costs. Like offloading nuclear plant decommission and waste storage onto taxpayers.
My experience is that "wife" is used by women to denote ownership of their husband.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
> 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.
Nothing about it was "unavoidable", who to evacuate when, for how long, was all judgement calls based on both safety and PR.
It is fascinating how some slashdotters know for certain that every single thing that happened was well known at the time. That all future events went exactly to plan.
Wind direction. What exactly caused plant 1 to explode? Then plant 4. What credibility should be placed on where you get your information? You have the double whammy of a huge amount of destruction caused by the tsunami.
Then you are an official who makes the decision. You know that if you make the decision to shelter in place, and the situation gets worse and many people die because if your decision, you may end up having the rest of your life completely destroyed, if not end up in prison, or in some countries, you are executed.
Unlike random people on Slashdot, most officials in these matters have to make decisions based upon a whole lot less situational awareness than they would like. So you make a decision based on what you do know. Unfortunately, they are not know it alls.
So pissing off bean counters is a lot less of a price to pay.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.