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Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

This article comes across as fairly exploitative to me. It's full of constant self promotion, hyperbolic parallels being drawn, and leading questions. The photographs are certainly fantastic, but the idea that Fukushima is anything like Chernobyl just isn't even remotely scientific.

It's hard to believe the author's claims that this is done for the people that have suffered through this when you juxtapose those claims against the repeated mentions of just how popular his work has been and how many people have seen it and how important it is.

Am I the only one that feels this way?

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Fairly? It is hugely exploitive. The author has an editorial point of view which is "nuclear energy is not worth this sort of disaster." It is not a well researched point of view (as there is ample objective direct evidence to the contrary) but it is an emotional one.

It is additionally funny because the number of deaths in Poland attributed to mining and coal power plant accidents a year comes very close to the figure for Fukushima. (per MWh is higher in fact)

When France made the switch from oil to nuclear as main way of producing electricity, this question was raised and researched. The chosen solution was to sweep it under a rug and hope no one will notice.

At the same time, the choice of getting into nuclear was on conditions, one being that we had to find a way to deal with nuclear waste asap. Decades later this is still an issue but this point went off radar and is drowned in falsified reports or recycling nuclear fuel (an investigation turned out that nuclear waste is sent undercover in eastern europe to be stored indefinitely, still better than the previous "use it as a land filler for roads and schools").

I'd be happy to learn about this ample objective direct evidence, but AFAIK in the most developed nuclear energy country in the world, word is that it is not worth it and this has been known for decades, just don't let the people know and hope nothing happens during our lifetime / stay in office.

"At the same time, the choice of getting into nuclear was on conditions, one being that we had to find a way to deal with nuclear waste asap. Decades later this is still an issue"

The only reason it's still an issue is because of anti-nuclear politicking deliberately blocking any efforts to resolve the issue. See, for example, Yucca Mountain in the United States.

OK.

1. The most catastrophic power plant disaster in France was the barrage de Malpasset, a hydroelectric dam, killing 423. Hydro power is, globally, the most directly lethal energy. Indirectly, I think oil and coal fight for the claim: coal mines claimed a lot of lives and oil caused a lot of geopolitical conflicts. Nuclear is better in terms both of direct and indirect deaths.

2. Nuclear byproducts are not wastes, they are fuels we are not using yet. Superphénix was a power plant that used plutonium as a fuel. It was part of the "plutonium economy" plan envisioned by France when it dared to dream big. If we had followed it through, it would have resulted in France being paid to receive nuclear fuel that other countries count as waste.

It failed because ecologists attacked superphénix with RPG (yes, really) and made it a negotiation token to join Jospin's government. They also routinely attack nuclear recycling plants as they do not want a clean nuclear infrastructure, they want this infrastructure to not exist.

3. "nuclear waste" is a very broad category. Most of the media reports about it being used or stored in various ways is usually hyped up for fearmongering. Check the radiation levels of "waste" mentioned in the news. Sometimes (dare I say, very often?) it is on the scale of background radiation level.

4. I bet that in a few decades we will mine up back our geological waste storage to use the wastes as fuel.

In what way is it not worse than Chernobyl? Fukushima is a triple meltdown and the cores are not entombed in concrete. If people die from Fukushima they will die of cancer and not 'radiation' so we won't know the real mortality numbers for a long time.

> If people die from Fukushima they will die of cancer and not 'radiation' so we won't know the real mortality numbers for a long time.

We likely won't ever know the real numbers because they will be well within the statistical noise. This is why the linear no-threshold model is so difficult to test.

Because Chernobyl spread a radioactive gas cloud across Europe that likely caused tens of thousands of extra cancer cases and deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...

As another poster pointed out, so many more people died from the actual tsunami than have or will die from the Fukushima meltdown.

The other poster doesn't know how many people will die from the meltdown especially since there's no agreement on estimating Chernobyl deaths. The pro-nuclear crowd proudly boasts the number is zero which I don't believe, the plant manager died of radiation as many of the sailors on the USS Reagan, which brings the total up from zero.

A reasonable boundary on excess deaths can be identified by taking the number of cancers and adjust for pre-fukushima cancer rates.

There's no reason to under-estimate it - even with absolute worst case estimates based on past experience from Chernobyl etc., nuclear comes favourably out in terms of health effects / deaths per unit of energy.

The biggest harm that Fukushima might do would be to reduce investment in nuclear vs. more harmful power plants like coal (which incidentally releases more radioactive material every few years than every nuclear accident combined), or hydro (dam accidents have killed shocking numbers of people). Even rooftop solar (people fall off roofs, and since each installation on average produces so little, the numbers add up; larger purpose built solar installations are as far as I know far safer)

Not all radioactive material is created equal. I would read an article about how dangerous the coal plant radioactive material if anyone knows of one.

Here [1]. Fly ash from coal plants tends to contain concentrated amounts of uranium and thorium. In countries with stringent enough regulation, the biggest problem is disposal of the fly ash - other place the problem also include substantial amounts being pumped into the atmosphere, and overall coal ends up killing a lot of people. Note that this is not just radiation but also heart attacks and respiratory problems.

E.g. here [2] are numbers claiming deaths from US coal fired plants alone (which are by no means the worst ones) kill 13,000 people in the US every year.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

[2] http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan...

>...A 1978 paper from Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimated that coal-fired power plants of that time may contribute a whole-body committed dose of 19 µSv/a to their immediate neighbours in a 500 m radius.[46] The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation's 1988 report estimated the committed dose 1 km away to be 20 µSv/a for older plants or 1 µSv/a for newer plants with improved fly ash capture, but was unable to confirm these numbers by test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co...

But really the radioactive emissions from coal plants (and the exposure through their unmonitored waste piles) is really an insignificant danger compared to the air pollution problems where tens of thousands of people are killed each year from burning coal. The mercury emissions are also helping to poison the oceans and the CO2 emissions are also a big cause of climate change.

Problem citing a 1978 paper on coal power plant emissions is the emissions controls that have been added over the last 40 years. And of course the ancient plants that have been closed down. Bonus, coal is going away and soon[1].

[1] We're fast reaching the tipping point where the global elites are getting scared of global warming.

>Problem citing a 1978 paper on coal power plant emissions is the emissions controls that have been added over the last 40 years. And of course the ancient plants that have been closed down.

The transuranic elements in coal will either by emitted through the stack or kept in unmonitored piles of waste which might leach not water supplies. The reason there likely isn't much research into doses from radiation from coal plants is that it is the very least of the problems with using coal as an energy source. The deaths from air pollution alone will be orders of magnitude greater than any possible deaths from radiation exposure.

>... Bonus, coal is going away and soon[1].

Well I guess that depends on how one defines "soon". Hopefully someday coal will be priced to cover its externalities since stopping the use of coal would literally save millions of lives. Unfortunately that hasn't happened yet - whether the use of coal ends soon enough to stop environmental catastrophe isn't clear yet. Currently coal provides about 40% of world power and it is actually still slowly increasing:

>...With government policies and incentives promoting the use of nonfossil energy sources in many countries, renewable energy is the world’s fastest-growing source of energy, at an average rate of 2.6%/year, while nuclear energy use increases by 2.3%/year, and natural gas use increases by 1.9%/year (Figure 1-5). Coal is the world’s slowest growing form of energy in the Reference case, at an average rate of 0.6%/year (compared with an average increase of 1.4%/year in total world energy demand).

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm

Truth though is fly ash isn't really that much more radioactive than any common sample of soil (1 to 10X). And uranium and thorium aren't particularly problematic. Neither is particularly radioactive and bio-accumulation is nil. And there is no escaping them in any event.

As your link shows coal isn't growing very fast as a source of energy. Key thing about coal fired plants is the pay off time is long. Right now taking a 30 risk on a coal fired plant vs a 5 year risk on a natural gas plant, the choice is pretty obvious.

Coal going away soon, really depends on how freaked out governments and the people that control them get. My thought, they get freaked out none of our opinions will matter.

>Truth though is fly ash isn't really that much more radioactive than any common sample of soil (1 to 10X). And uranium and thorium aren't particularly problematic.

Radium is an issue here. But like I said, the air pollution from burning coal is orders of magnitude greater than the risk from radiation exposure from coal. The only interesting thing about this is that the anti-science crowd that is afraid of nuclear power doesn't realize that if the NRC regulated coal plants, they would immediately be shut down due to excessive releases of radiation.

>...As your link shows coal isn't growing very fast as a source of energy.

yes, but your original comment was: >... Bonus, coal is going away and soon[1].

Most people wouldn't consider a slowing of the growth rate to be "going away and soon". Hopefully they will be gone before they cause an environmental catastrophe.

>..R.ight now taking a 30 risk on a coal fired plant vs a 5 year risk on a natural gas plant, the choice is pretty obvious.

Replacing a horrible fossil fuel with a less bad fossil fuel is not a huge improvement when there are safer non CO2 emitting power sources - nuclear for base load power and solar/wind as intermittent power.

Except we do, we know that it is likely nobody will die from the meltdown. We know that because we have 30 years of Ukrainian data and we can see that there was no measurable increase in cancers or cancer related deaths from people in the surrounding area.

Human beings have grown up in a "radiation rich" environment in the form of background radiation from natural sources. We have evolved many mechanisms to deal with that. We don't have enough experience or data to precisely know how much radiation you can be exposed to before your body's natural defense mechanism is compromised but after Chernobyl and Fukishima we know that it is a lot higher than the levels experienced outside the fences of the facilities. We know that by studying people who have experienced the exposure.

That is the same reason we know a lot about how quickly people can be killed by coal dust, or arsenic, or any number of heavy metals that fall out of the sky when you you live down wind (or down stream) of a coal fired power plant. We have documented the thousands of people who have died and gotten sick from unfiltered coal stacks and we have created regulations that prevent that from happening in the future. Sometimes it means that a coal fired plant has to close (because it is too expensive to retrofit scrubbers to the output) and sometimes it means the cost of your power goes up as retrofit costs are passed on to the consumers.

> We know that because we have 30 years of Ukrainian data and we can see that there was no measurable increase in cancers or cancer related deaths from people in the surrounding area.

What? There is plenty of evidence of increased cancer in the surrounding area.

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/Chern...

http://chernobyl.cancer.gov

http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

Note that many of the rosy assessments are about people who weren't really affected. If you live in France, you got a little radiation from Chernobyl, but not enough to measurably affect your health. That's good! It's reassuring to most of the population of Europe! But the health impact on people local to the event who got significantly more radiation exposure is far from zero.

We should also keep in mind that the country receiving the most fallout, Belarus, is a dictatorship that is essentially a black hole of public health data and does not report radiation problems.

The cancer research is developed from the absorption of I-131 (iodine is taken up by the body and accumulates in the thyroid). There is a really fabulous look at I-131 levels post Fukishima and post Chernobyl here: http://hps.ne.uiuc.edu/rets-remp/PastWorkshops/2011/presenta... and of particular interest to readers of these comments will be Slide #70 (overlaying the two) showing that Fukishima sent nearly an order of magnitude less I-131 into the environment than Chernobyl did. Further you generally have to eat or drink I-131 to get it inside your body[1] and as all of Japan was undergoing the tsunami disaster at the time, many of the crops were destroyed.

Credible sources such as the CDC[2] and the IAEA have been studying this risk with obviously limited data sets and have concluded that unless you are on site and hit with a high dose of radiation, you are going to be fine.

[1] "Human exposure to I-131 released from nuclear power plant accidents comes mainly from consuming contaminated water, milk, or foods. People may also be exposed by breathing dust particles in the air that are contaminated with I-131." -- https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...

[2] "The long-term recovery process after a radiation emergency can lead to increased emotion and psychological distress. In addition, people who receive high doses of radiation could have a greater risk of developing cancer later in life, depending on the level of radiation exposure. For people who receive low doses of radiation, the risk of cancer from radiation exposure is so small that is cannot be separated from exposure to chemicals, genetics, smoking or diet. Health officials will monitor people affected by radiation emergencies for any long-term health effects." -- https://emergency.cdc.gov/radiation/emergencyfaq.asp#24

> that likely caused tens of thousands of extra cancer cases and deaths.

From a very quick reading of that (fairly complex) Wikipedia article - 'tens of thousands' needs to be caveated rather heavily. Estimates range wildly and disagreements about methodology abound.

Some example quotes:

> The total deaths reliably attributable by UNSCEAR to the radiation produced by the accident therefore was 62.

> The full version of the WHO health effects report [...] predicted that, in total, 9000 will die from cancer among the 6.9 million most-exposed Soviet citizens. This report is not free of controversy, and has been accused of trying to minimize the consequences of the accident.

> Greenpeace suggested there will be 270,000 cases of cancer attributable to Chernobyl fallout, and that 93,000 of these will probably be fatal.

So - it seems estimates range from 62 to 270,000...

I'm not qualified to determine which end of that range is the most plausible.

"considerable uncertainty ... estimates point to several thousand deaths ... will be indiscernible from the background of overall deaths in the population group. The estimate does not substantiate earlier claims that tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths will be caused by radiation exposures from the Chernobyl accident" - [1] p2

"The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem caused by the accident to date" -- [1] p95

One thing to note is that these estimates have been dropping consistently over the years as more data has become available.

[1] Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programs, World Health Organization http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43447/1/9241594179_... (2006)

I was purposefully being vague. 10,000 seems to me to be a lower bound on casualties.

The problem is that people (especially reporters) often replace "It caused X more cancers" with "It caused X more deaths". The thing is that the most likely cancer to happen because of radiation is the thyroid cancer, that an early detection makes curable 99% of the time. So an appropriately warned population may see 1000 more cancers, resulting in about 10 more deaths. That's why so many different numbers are waved around.

Well, given that the larger figure originates with Greenpeace, you can pretty safely rule it out.

In the way, it didn't happen out of the blue or didn't release radioactive cloud on other parts. Chernobyl happened during routine testing. Fukushima, took a highly destructive Tsunami to meltdown.

Everyone knows a tsunami caused Fukushima, the question is 1) what are the health implications of it and 2) can it ever be contained? The answers seem to be 1) we can't measure (it now) and 2) no.

If "we can't measure" is true, that's extremely strong evidence that the effect is not very large.

Are you sharing an article, or an agenda?

I'm not the one making bad faith arguments like 'the only negative result is public distrust of nuclear plants'

Extreme nitpick: the test which caused Chernobyl to explode was unauthorized, reckless, and far from routine. But this doesn't change your point overall.

I grew up in Norway. While I am very positive to nuclear - even with worst case estimates for Chernobyl, nuclear is one of the safest ways we have of getting energy - it's worth realising that even today reindeer from certain parts of Norway needs to be checked for radiation before slaughter, as radioactive cesium carried into the atmosphere rained down over parts of Norway, and depending on weather etc. reindeers some years end up eating more mushrooms and other food that is contaminated.

It's expected that this will continue for decades still.

Fukushima did not release a similar cloud of radioactive materials over such large areas.

The radiation is going into the Pacific and not the air, maybe that's preferable.

It's much preferable to the extent it gets diluted.

The problem in Europe after Chernobyl was not that we were radiated to any appreciable extent, but the spread of cesium and iodine dust that got into the soil.

Even then the reason it had much effect at all is that things like mushrooms and certain plants will take it up and concentrate it, and become food for animals that end up in our foodchain (e.g. sheep and reindeer in Norway tend to roam freely and graze on public land). The risk from this is/was quite limited, but it is quite limited because it is managed by monitoring radiation levels of meat from affected areas.

Geography alone makes Fukushima less bad for human health.

Beyond the immediate vicinity, most of Fukushima's contamination is going into the Pacific. We have very good data on how diluted that radiation is once it gets to places people actually live, and the answer is "extremely diluted". The prevailing weather all moves to the east, directly out to sea.

Whereas Chernobyl spread its contamination across a populated continent.

If you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much better than the Pacific ocean. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like Bikini Atoll.

If you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much worse than the upper atmosphere. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like high altitude atmosphere (launched from the pacific ocean).

Safety may have played a role but AFAIK these nukes were exploded in this part of the world mostly because it was remote enough from the countries doing the testing.

After a few decades of dumping radioactive waste in oceans, we came back from the belief that dumping radioactive waste in the ocean is mostly harmless and a ban on this practice was put up in 1993.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Ch..., Fukushima released about 900PBq of radioactivity, of which the vast majority went into the Pacific Ocean where it will be essentially harmless. Chernobyl released 5200PBq of which most fell on inhabited land in Europe.

What made Chernobyl so bad wasn't just that it melted down, but that the graphite moderator in the core caught fire and burned for days, which spread lots of core material far and wide.

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