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Comment by cholantesh | Hacker News Reader

A Greenpeace report is simply a propaganda piece. For an accurate appraisal, we'd need systematic reviews of the various areas of study in this report, published in a reputable journal. And comparing this incident to Chernobyl is inane.

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> comparing this incident to Chernobyl is inane.

Absolutely. I would even suspect intent to deceive, as is so common with anti-nuclear propaganda. People have not been harmed to an alarming extent by this event, as they certainly were with Chernobyl. The reactor is a completely different passive-safe design. In all probability long-term damage will be limited to some hard-to-attribute secondary effects (changes to the land use patterns in the region will confound statistical analysis), and of course, massive psychological devastation due to all the panic and misinformation. Sadly this is by far the greatest threat posed by modern nuclear power (or rather the cultural context in which it is placed).

If the Japanese government would legally allow me to live next to the reactor I would take them up on it tomorrow.

> People have not been harmed to an alarming extent by this event,

160,000 people were displaced and will live in school gyms for the rest of their lives. Most have lost their livelihoods.

I suggest you talk to them before saying they have "not been harmed."

I'm volunteering to live next to the reactor, because I think the risk of doing so is negligible. I am legally prohibited from doing so, and these people were legally prohibited from staying. If there is in fact no ongoing physical health risk as I am claiming, the harm caused to them is part of the psychological damage from (the cultural context around) nuclear power that I mentioned. It doesn't lessen what these people have been through of course.

This is a circular argument:

1. people might get harmed by the radiation (true)

2. evacuate them (still arguably sensible)

3. radiations caused harm because people were evacuated

Here's what the press release says concerning Chernobyl:

> The Fukushima disaster is the single largest release of radioactivity into the ocean and one of only two Level 7 nuclear disasters in world history - the other being Chernobyl.

So, can you explain what is so wrong or inane about this statement? I think it's rather informative and to the point, tbh.

It would help if they included the definition of a "level 7" disaster.

I guess many people like myself disagree with the use of this seemingly arbitrary category. Maybe it is based on an estimate of total long-term and predicted impact on the immediate environment compared to some threshold? And what probability does it use for future containment leakage?

As far as I can tell, so far the "Level 7" category is useful mainly to cite in this very argument. Surely we can do better, are there at least some individual score factors?

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the INES just specifies that the accident required countermeasures to ensure public safety. That's pretty terrible; agreed.

Thanks for finding this documentation. And yeah, the grouping tells us how likely different authorities were to use countermeasures as much as anything.

The IAEA maintains the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, under which a level 7 incident is one that requires the implementation of countermeasures to protect the public[1]. The details of those countermeasures and the scope of the accident is not significant - all that matters is that _some_ plan to counteract the effects of radiation was undertaken. The IAEA even cautions against using the scale as a means of comparison between facilities and incidents. In this context, the Chernobyl incident involved the release of 10x the radiation [2]. The effects on human and animal health also appear to be orders of magnitude different. So really, grouping the two incidents together is counterproductive. Doing so, to me, reflects a misunderstanding of the INES - one that I suspect is deliberate on Greenpeace's part.

1 - http://www-ns.iaea.org/tech-areas/emergency/ines.asp [2] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969713... (2014, but I'm not aware of revised figures from the past two years)

Yes, Chernobyl area was much less densely populated.

I'm sure Greenpeace reports are biased but probably not more than studies by people who want to stuff nuclear power plants into private homes.

Luckily, there are plenty of researchers in the field who fall into neither category.

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