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.
What? There is plenty of evidence of increased cancer in the surrounding area.
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/Chern...
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.
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
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)
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...
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.
[1] We're fast reaching the tipping point where the global elites are getting scared of global warming.
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).
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.
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.