From Wasteland to Fund-Maker: A Contrarian Bet in Nuclear Waste Cleanup

Thanks for the link, it directly contradicts the Yuricon depiction of events. I can easily see impacts in wildlife populations, especially over time. Cesium gets in the plants, bugs eat the plants and concentrate it, birds eat the bugs and get an even larger dose. Similar effects observed in Salmon and Tuna where there is mercury in the water. But the notion that just after the event it was so radioactive outside the containment vessels that it caused immediate fatalities would suggest 10s of Sieverts of exposure and that was not recorded or measured anywhere outside of the buildings AFAIK.

Not that I'm not glad that Yuricon is trying to commercialize vitrification. It is a solid strategy for safely entombing waste for millennia, but the "story" as told in the original article does not install confidence in their claims.

That article already explains:

    They offer no good controls, because we aren’t
    working with data from before the accident.

It's rough Geiger counter reading without any effort to determine if those readings are normal, or if there is an increase then which isotopes are causing the reading and where they came from.

That last point is especially important, because when Japan shut down the nuclear reactors after the tsunami, they increased their use of coal, which can be a larger source of radioactive pollution.

Also, while the article doesn't really have enough details to say for certain, using only Geiger readings suggests an analysis based on the incorrect "linear no-threshold" model. The lack of concern for a control suggests they are assuming that any radiation is must be dangerous.

After skimming the paper[1]... I'll have to defer to someone with a better background in statistics. Their modeling seems strange and there seems to be too much focus on P values, but that may be my misunderstanding.

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10336-015-1197-2/f...