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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

HN has been quite pro-nuclear because despite these accidents, the effect is limited. You could crush the radioactive material in that reactor and pump all of it into the atmosphere, and nuclear would still be one of the safer methods of generating power.

Compare it to e.g. the vast on-going death toll caused by pollution from coal, and decommission nuclear power plants becomes outright immoral if it is replaced by coal. If you can replace it by e.g. concentrated solar or wind, then fine, but even hydro is likely to cause more deaths of time (dam accidents - construction, maintenance and failures - kill a lot of people).

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Focusing on deaths is one of the favorite moves by nuclear proponents. It works because nuclear creates long term problems that aren't people getting crushed in a coal mine or drowned when they fall off a dam, and both coal and hydro have been around a lot longer than nuclear and as a result have some really major disasters in their history.

Additionally dams are fairly simple to build and construction of them is not as well regulated during its history as nuclear has been for most of its life because of its very obvious risks. If anything the mortality statistic is an argument for more regulation of mining and dam construction practices, not for more nuclear power.

The reality is that while not that many people died in Chernobyl, Fukushima and other nuclear disasters relative to other disasters we have had, they are still some of the worst disasters in human history and downplaying that to push nuclear is either being very cynical or naive.

I grew up in Norway when Chernobyl hit and we had to deal with monitoring of reindeer uptake of Cesium-polluted moss etc. for years. Norway was one of the worst hit due to a combination of the prevailing winds and a lot of animal-rearing that depends on sheep and reindeer feeding on moss and other plants that would aggregate those pollutants.

It's still an issue now and again in some areas, but it was still a minor inconvenience compared to the huge amounts of deaths caused on an ongoing basis by some of the alternatives.

> Additionally dams are fairly simple to build and construction of them is not as well regulated during its history as nuclear has been for most of its life because of its very obvious risks. If anything the mortality statistic is an argument for more regulation of mining and dam construction practices, not for more nuclear power.

Great, but until that happens, they are still far more lethal. In the case of coal, by at least an order of magnitude, probable 2-3 orders.

> It works because nuclear creates long term problems that aren't people getting crushed in a coal mine or drowned when they fall off a dam, and both coal and hydro have been around a lot longer than nuclear and as a result have some really major disasters in their history.

For coal, coal kills more people per year due to respiratory illnesses etc. than nuclear has done in its entire history. For dams, feel free to ignore the largest ever (Ban Qiao - 171,000 people dead) which was an extreme outlier (so far - there are a number of dams, like e.g. the Mosul dam, that are in disrepair and has the potential to be worse if they fail) and it's still worse on average than nuclear.

> they are still some of the worst disasters in human history and downplaying that to push nuclear is either being very cynical or naive.

Exaggerating it is worse: It leads to policies enacted out of fear that kills and harms far more people. It's immoral.

One Chernobyl a decade would have less global impact than fossil fuels are having. A much higher local impact, sure, but that is the failure case while the problems with fossil fuels is the expected case. We're doing much better than that and technology is getting even safer as time goes on.

Have you ever hunted wild boar in Germany? The global impact of "one Chernobyl a decade" is enormous. Each event takes thousands of years to recover from. After a century or two, most countries would be significantly uninhabitable, with indirect consequences affecting entire continents.

> After a century or two, most countries would be significantly uninhabitable

It's bad, I know, but this seems off by a few orders of magnitude. This appears to be a general problem when reasoning about radiation.

No, the numbers are realistic... after a few centuries of a Chernobyl every ten years... significant areas within nuclear countries uninhabitable... affecting fauna migrations and neighboring countries... they're definitely not off by a few orders of magnitude.

I can understand why nuclear advocates would want to challenge basic reasoning. This appears to be a general problem when government tenders are at stake.

> after a few centuries of a Chernobyl every ten years... significant areas within nuclear countries uninhabitable...

Ater 1000 years of a Chernobyl every ten years - and a Chernobyl every 10 years is completely unrealistic, given that it took a totally obsolete generator design and ridiculous levels of human error for us to get one, 30 years ago - the uninhabitable area based on the widest Chernobyl exclusion zone, would be 0.05% about 1/2000th of the surface of the Earth.

That assumes no contraction of the exclusion zones as radioactivity tapers off, which is highly unrealistic as there's already a push to start making use of parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone (or for that matter that Chernobyl itself continued to produce electricity until 2000 before the last reactor was shut down) - the issue is less regular radioactive levels in normal conditions as risks involved in releasing sequested radioactive material (e.g. forest fires will throw radioactive material into the air for many of the same reasons why coal is so nasty).

> affecting fauna migrations and neighboring countries

Overall effect on fauna of Chernobyl has been positive: As it happens humans are much worse for the fauna than the radiation. Obviously there are issues, but they're dwarfed by the incursion of humans on animal habitats - the area surrounding Chernobyl has seen rapid increases in populations of a wide range of fauna as human activity ceased.

There is an impact on humans from contamination of fauna that does not kill the animals but makes them unsafe for consumption in some circumstances, as I've addressed elsewhere, and that's not non-trivial but it's a far more short-lived issue than the contamination of the site itself. That is also the main effect on neighboring countries (spread of Cesium etc.)

What about the wild boar? People hunt them in Poland, closer to Chernobyl than Germany.

How long does it take to recover from fossil fuel-based economy, including massive emission of radioactive material contained in coal?

Animals like wild boar that sometimes eat slow growing plant life that accumulate Cesium are sometimes unsafe, or at least undesirable, to eat.

As I mentioned elsewhere, this affects reindeer and sheep in Norway some years, and that was a much larger scale issue as this was/is commercial level food supply. Not so much any more, but the effect varies from year to year as various animals will often prefer faster growing food (foliage, berries etc.) but may resort to other food that may be more likely to still be a reservoir of cesium or other contaminants if they are short on their preferred foods.

It's still trivial compared to coal in particular.

What about the negative impacts that the coal ash spill has had on my state? What about the coal ash spill in the state adjacent to mine? You can go oh what's a little ash, the sludge had enough volume to fill a football stadium nearly a half-mile high. Coal has environmental impacts, but continuously. A nonstop stream of toxins just flowing right into our local water tables. Nothing compares to the continuous destruction of human lives and environment like coal does.

> A nonstop stream of toxins just flowing right into our local water tables

I thought that sounded familiar. The following is about the Midnight Mine uranium mine in eastern Washington.

"The exposed surfaces of rock in the ore piles, waste rock piles, and forming pit walls generate acid rock drainage in the groundwater, seeps, and surface water. The surface water from the mine's drainage basin flows to three drainages which empty into Blue Creek. Blue Creek, which flows into Lake Roosevelt, is home to several fish species of special concern that have been found to contain heavy metals that many link to the contamination from the mine. The U.S. Bureau of Mines and the U.S. Geological Survey indicated that seeps, ground water and pit water at Midnite Mine are contained with heavy metals and radionuclides. In April 1998, the EPA also found elevated levels of metals and radionuclides in numerous on-site sources. Several contaminated ground water seeps were observed to be flowing into nearby surface water drainages."[1]

[1] http://toxipedia.org/display/wanmec/Midnite+uranium+mine%2C+...

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

http://www.webcitation.org/6JeqbINGL

Edit:formatting

Indeed, have there been any deaths yet recorded as related to Fukushima?

Directly: 6. None from radiation.

For example, 2 died because they were smoking a cigarette outside of the wall when the tsunami hit.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/05/25/news/radiation-d...

The worst exposure outside of the plant was 10 millisievert, or about the same as a CAT scan.

Inside the plant one worker got close to 500 millisievert exposure, or about what an astronaut can expect to receive during a 6 month stay in low earth orbit, or what you receive every 2 years living in Ramsar, Iran (a city where humans have lived -normally as far as is known- for thousands of years).

TLDR: nobody died. Maybe 150 people will die a year or two sooner compared to if there was no incident. 4-5 people may experience more effects. For comparison, solar power (the next safest source of power) has killed more people even during the Fukushima disaster itself. Coal has killed over 100 people in the same time period.

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