As with most nuclear accidents so far, the health risks from fear of radiation exceed the actual health risks from the radiation itself.
The boars don't know about the radiation and therefore do not fear it.
The boars don't know about the radiation and therefore do not fear it.
See the WHO evaluation of the the Chernobyl disaster, which states that the largest public health problem of the disaster has been the mental health impact (link in other response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13829192).
Again, that doesn't mean that there weren't other impacts, but the mental health impact was larger. I also remember seeing video footage of all the animals that died after Fukushima. They didn't die of radiation, they died of neglect.
Also, the health impact of fairly low radiation dosages is effectively unknown to date, but data from the Chernobyl incident keeps correcting the effect downward every 10 years.
The idea that "there is no safe dosage" was created artificially, because after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the exposure effects were simply linearly extrapolated to zero. There was no actual data there.
My wife lived near Chojniki, Belarus, for a number of months in 1996.
I skimmed the WHO evaluation you linked, and, unless it has some context I'm not aware of, it just doesn't jive with the actual impact, on the ground, near Chernobyl.
A quick link: http://www.businessinsider.com/birth-defects-related-to-cher...
From that article: "A study by UNICEF suggested that more than 20% of adolescent children in Belarus suffer from disabilities caused by birth defects."
In her time there, 10 years after the disaster, she witnessed many gross birth defects in children, and very many cancers in children and adults.
I hesitate to bring anecdotes up as anything like a refutation to a formal and proper report from the WHO, but it's clear that something is missing.
I'd like to note that, in terms of acute human exposure, there's no comparison between Fukushima and Chernobyl.
> Also, the health impact of fairly low radiation dosages is effectively unknown to date, but data from the Chernobyl incident keeps correcting the effect downward every 10 years.
Citation needed, though you did mention 'low radiation doses'. That's the thing: a whole lot of people received a pretty stiff dose from Chernobyl. Perhaps the health impact of low doses isn't well understood, but that's not the case with much higher doses.
Hmm...so you think the WHO report is lying? Or did you misread it?
> Business-insider
Hmm...this is the first paragraph of that Business Insider article: "The scientific debate is ongoing over whether congenital birth defects can be linked to radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that happened 30 years ago this month."
So on the one hand you have the WHO saying something backed by 30 years of observation and analysis of the data, and you contradict that with a Business Insider article saying "we don't know".
I think that one thing you are missing is that radiation is not the only or even primary cause of birth defects or cancer. This is one of the things the WHO reports dig into. For example, roughly and from memory, the economic/psycho-social situation brought on a strong increase in alcoholism, which increases the chance of cancer and birth defects.
So once again, saying that the mental health problems exceed the (direct) radiation problems is no way of saying that there are no problem. It is saying that the mental health problems were sometimes severe and in any case exceeded the problems directly attributable to radiation.
> Citation needed, though you did mention 'low radiation doses'.
The WHO site has reports roughly every ten years after the accident. Each time they downgrade the estimate for radiation effects. Once again, that does not mean there are no radiation effects. I have other references in my other comments.
Also, yes, this is for low dosages. If you were in the crew that went into the reactor core you were a walking corpse, immediately.
That boars are living in the area means nothing. It doesn't mean in the slightest that it is safe for humans. With Chernobyl and Fukushima we are talking about serious levels of radiation, high enough to kill people very fast. See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/03/fukushim... of how high the radiation in Fukushima still is today.
To act like "Ah, nothing really happened, see the wild pigs flocking around" is not even close to an appropriate judgment of the situation.
We all would like to have safe and cheap energy. We won't reach that goal by trivializing the dangers of nuclear energy, which isn't even cheap to begin with.
Except that's not the case, other forms of power generation not only have far higher death tolls overall, but also more terrible catastrophes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
edit: No, it's not out of wack, it's just that one uses trillion kilowatt hours and one uses terawatt hours. Oops.
It's also hugely out of wack with this article:
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energ...
Do we trust that article and it's many sources or the basically unsourced Forbes article Wikipedia relies on (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... )
It doesn't matter a great deal for the comparison, both articles point to many less deaths from nuclear.
The only thing that rates as catastrophe is Chernobyl, so singular. And that was 56 direct deaths. Fifty-six. Fukushima, which is widely regarded as a "catastrophe" has zero direct deaths and so far it looks unlikely that effects on mortality will be statistically detectable.
What was the worst energy-generation catastrophe? Banqiao Dam, 1973[1]. 170,000 direct deaths. Or that coal explosion with >1000 direct deaths. On those types of scales, even Chernobyl doesn't actually register.
And when you take into account long term effects, there simply is no comparison. 100K deaths per T-kWH for coal, 90 for nuclear. So for every death due to nuclear power, there are 1000 deaths due to coal.
As dark as it is to argue about something like that, but Chernobyl caused many more deaths. Even the WHO predicted 4000, and that is one of the lower figures. This is heavily debated, but to say it was 56 is not even a base for discussion. The cleanup crews alone died in higher numbers.
Second: If you look at coal like that, you have to factor in all the deaths caused by nuclear energy, including uran production. That number raises fast as well.
Third: I never mentioned coal. Bashing against coal is a typical defence strategy of the nuclear industry, and something I see again and again repeated on HN. It's a very weak strategy imo: It is an obvious strawman, and many people who are against nuclear energy are also against coal.
Edit
Four: No, it is no case consistent logic. Something does not become not a catastrophe only because another thing is a catastrophe. It might become a lesser evil (that is not the case here), but that's as far as it goes.
The WHO number is number of people expected to die prematurely as a result of Chernobyl. The deathcount he gave is an estimate of direct deaths. They mean very different things. The WHO number includes anyone who can be expected to die sooner, whether their life expectancy has been cut by a decade or a year. It's an important consideration, but it's not in any way directly comparable to the direct deaths numbers.
> Second: If you look at coal like that, you have to factor in all the deaths caused by nuclear energy, including uran production. That number raises fast as well.
Uranium mines used to be bad. In most present mines the amount of radon miners inhale is no higher than you risk in residential housing in areas with high natural occurence of radon. Even if you went back to unventilated mines to kill miners on purpose, it would still cause fewer radiation deaths than fly ash from coal plants, before even factoring in the other major causes of death from coal plants.
> Third: I never mentioned coal. Bashing against coal is a typical defence strategy of the nuclear industry, and something I see again and again repeated on HN. It's a very weak strategy imo: It is an obvious strawman, and many people who are against nuclear energy are also against coal.
It is relevant because power plants do not exist in isolation. If you shut down nuclear, it needs to be replaced. None of the alternative we currently have for base load are as safe as nuclear. So if you shut down nuclear plants over fears about them, odds are your replacement generation load will kill far more people. And a lot of places the goto replacement is still coal or oil/gas, which are some of the worst.
Stoking fears over nuclear is outright immoral, given the consequences such fears have already had. E.g. the nuclear phaseout in Germany has resulted in continued use of coal at much higher levels than otherwise, to the extent that assuming lethality quivalent to US levels, the phaseout has likely already killed several magnitudes as many as all nuclear accidents combined, on top of the environmental effects.
Sucks for the cities and energy companies that backed them, but is a win for society as a whole.
The death toll from Germany's shutdown is likely to be in the tens of thousands before the baseload capacity is fully replaced by safer alternativs.
No, the numbers are correct.
> but Chernobyl caused many more deaths.
No, 56 direct deaths. Check the Wikipedia article.
"56 direct deaths (47 accident workers and nine children with thyroid cancer) and it is estimated that there may eventually be 4,000 extra cancer deaths among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed people."
> Even the WHO predicted 4000
(a) that is an estimate and (b) those are classified as indirect deaths, not least because they are estimated to occur over a span of 30-40 years. Also, these estimates are hard because cancer rates in the area have significant fluctuation due to other causes. And these are the estimates that were revised downward with every iteration of the report (every 10 years AFAICT).
So 4000 is the best number we have and, given the history of these projections, still likely to be on the high side.
> that is one of the lower figures.
It is likely to be the most accurate one, and they have been revising that estimate down with each report they publish. The other figures are generally from organizations with agendas to push and usually without any actual evidence.
> to say it was 56 is not even a base for discussion
Actually, that is the correct number of direct deaths, and the only ones where we can be certain of the causation.
> all the deaths caused by nuclear energy...including uran production
Please read the other linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
Or these:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
http://www.theenergycollective.com/willem-post/191326/deaths...
So nuclear is safer not just than coal (which is the main alternative), but also than oil, natural gas, biofuel/biomass, Peat, solar rooftop, wind and hydro.
And yes, it is logically consistent to say there are no "catastrophes" (plural) when there is only one event that rates as a catastrophe (singular). And yes, scale matters. When you are talking about catastrophes that take thousands or hundreds of thousands of direct casualties, events that have 56 direct casualties are probably not properly rated as catastrophes.
And when you include long-term effects, it is somewhat hard to rate as "catastrophic" something that's significantly safer than rooftop solar.
Besides, why is the coal thing used as an argument? That's a good point to make when discussing with someone who wants to replace nuclear energy with coal. But I doubt anyone here has that goal.
Something like the dam does not compare, it is not one or the other, and it is not long-lasting damage.
The point is that if you're going to worry about risks, the moral thing to do would be to get rid off coal even if your alternative is massive increases in nuclear.
> Something like the dam does not compare, it is not one or the other, and it is not long-lasting damage.
No it does not, it is several magnitudes more deaths and millions of homeless.
As for long-lasting damage, hydro projects are amongst the most devastating power plant projects we have, routinely displacing millions of people from their homes forever, submerging entire cities, destroying vast forest areas and animal habitats, and setting off ticking environmental disasters in the form of rotting vegetation releasing vast amounts of CO2.
So, no, dams do not compare - they are some of the least environmentally friendly options we have, and have killed a lot more people (even excluding Banqiao), and made far larger areas uninhabitable.
If you are against coal and therefor for nuclear, that's your choice to make. I'm against both, and thus the whole "but coal kill people too" does not apply at all to my thinking.
The death rates of coal are so incredibly high that it is immoral and irresponsible to switch off nuclear plants - the way e.g. Germany is doing - as long as coal is being used. The same applies to fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent to well maintained hydro (the caveat being "well maintained" - build a dam and you sign up for eternal maintenance or putting towns downstream at risk of destruction), though the far bigger problem with hydro is environmental impacts and displacement of people.
The point is that these debates do not happen in isolation. It's not a matter of disliking one so we turn it off, and that's it. It's a matter of relative risk and relative damage. When you argue against nuclear, without giving another option, the reality is that today you argue for more dangerous, more lethal, more environmentally damaging options, because we are unable to build out sufficient replacement capacity of safer renewables, and lack sufficient storage capacity for them to be suitable for base load.
The number of dead from the panicked early decommissioning in Germany due to their dependence on coal, for example, will measure in the thousands, not just in Germany but across Europe - they can't contain their air. The decision was a staggering display of ignorance of the relative risks, and part of the reason why some of us get really upset about these debates. It's not hypotheticals - peoples fears are literally killing people.
So what do you want to do? Die? Because without ready access to energy the vast majority of humans will die.
That's wrong.
Fatalities per trillion kWh:
Solar (rooftop): 440 Wind: 150 Wind(UK): <1000 Nuclear: 90 Nuclear(US): 0.01
Last I checked, 90 is smaller than 440 or 150, and 0.01 is vastly smaller than 440 or 150.
But maybe math works differently on your planet.
That table is not a valid source. That goes into the bigger pcuture of you deciding for yourself what fact is and what not, and starting to insult people from your "superior" position. I mean, I'm happy about that, it disqualifies everything you write, and I despise your position.
That tables only source is a Forbes Article which has no further direct reference for it. It is coming form the head of one single man. But somehow for you it becomes objective truth.
Also, it does not hold up even when just looking at it. There are no big explosions killing people for solar and wind energy. That means the deaths counted there include numbers like people falling from roofs during installation (even then, it's improbable high). However, the number for nuclear energy is that low that it is evident that deaths like "people having an accident on way to work" are obviously not included. And it does not show which numbers are taken for the accidents in three miles, the radiation leaks we had in Germany and France, Chernobyl and Fukushima. I would not be surprised if it were 0, 0, 56 and 0, which is ridiculous. It's one thing to criticize current medical radiation models, it is another to assume radiation is completely harmless.
To play devil's advocate...so do cars. Tens of thousands of people die every year in the USA from car crashes, and millions more are injured. These numbers are greater than similar numbers from nuclear power.
The nuclear catastrophes which have occurred have largely been predicted. And were preventable. Both for Chernobyl and for Fukushima. Just like most car deaths and injuries in the 1950s were preventable.
And... coal plants put out more radiation and pollution than do nuclear plants. And the pollution from coal plants kills or injures more people.
No one is saying nuclear power is safe. But if you're going to claim it's terrible, you have to admit that there are many things we live with every day which are much more terrible than nuclear power.
I'm pro nuclear, but obviously I support prohibiting (and shutting down!) power plants in danger zones as well as procedures that make stupid experiments impossible.
Good to know that you were just trolling.
> I told them what they were doing wrong that
You do realize that just because you say something is wrong doesn't actually make it so. Right?
Who is "them", by the way?
> argument ineffective
Nope, the nuclear industry's existing strategy, which closely follows your ridiculous suggestion of admitting things that aren't true, has been extremely ineffective and has backfired. They thought that if they created standards that mandated extreme, one could say ridiculous levels of safety, the public would accept nuclear power as safe. The opposite happened: the high safety standards were taken as evidence of how terrible all this was.
And they backfired even worse in that the standards were so high that "keeping the public safe" using those standards actually exposed them to worse danger than looser standards would have. Oh the irony!
And yes, I also used to believe your take that, well, every once in a while there are horrible accidents. And unlike you I used to believe that those accidents, even if rare, were horrible enough to rule out nuclear power.
That is, until I looked at the actual numbers (and later the WHO reports on Chernobyl). And found out that not only are the amortized numbers ridulously better than anything else. Even the "catastrophes" were (a) both much less catastrophic than I thought and (b) other power sources had much worse catastrophes than I knew (because those aren't reported) and (c) most of the catastrophic effects were actually indirect and due not to radiation but to fear of radiation.
Did I mention the irony?
So I came around to the view (expressed very well by others in this thread) that not using a power source that is (a) safer than any other available on the planet and (b) >1000 times safer then the most widely used and readily available alternative is morally/ethically completely indefensible, downright repugnant.
The anti-nuclear hysteria is in a class together with the anti-vaccine movement when it comes to potential public harm.
[0] Nuclear power is never the best option, no matter what criteria is used. It's always more expensive, it always produces more dangerous waste, and it always poses more risk to the community than numerous competing options. Whatever lives you thought you might save with a nuclear plant, save billions of dollars and decades of development and just put in some wind or solar farms or natural gas turbines or some combination of those.
> [0] Nuclear power is never the best option, no matter what criteria is used. It's always more expensive, it always produces more dangerous waste,
Irrelevant; the waste does far less damage than the alternatives.
> and it always poses more risk to the community than numerous competing options.
The death tolls shows clearly that this is false for every solution we have for base loads. When battery/storage technology gets far enough this may change, but as long as a single coal, oil or gas plant is active, reducing nuclear is a far greater risk to the community.
> Whatever lives you thought you might save with a nuclear plant, save billions of dollars and decades of development and just put in some wind or solar farms or natural gas turbines or some combination of those.
Wind or solar farms can not provide baseload without billions in investments in storage. Once we have that infrastructure, sure, then we can consider reducing dependence on nuclear. In the meantime they can not replace nuclear.
Natural gas kills more.
[0] You are citing yourself as a reliable source. That's pretty nifty.
> it always produces more dangerous waste,
False.
> it always poses more risk to the community
False.
> It's always more expensive
That one is closest to the truth, but also not really true:
"Some independent reviews keep repeating that nuclear power plants are necessarily very expensive,[26][27] and anti-nuclear groups frequently produce reports that say the costs of nuclear energy are prohibitively high.[28][29][30][31] This is despite the fact that in 2015 the cost of electricity in nuclear France is approximately the same as in Denmark and two-thirds of that in Germany.[32][33]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
If you stand inside the containment vessel your probably going to have a bad time.
That doesn't tell you much about how long you'd survive in a nearby town... and in fact there are individuals who have refused to leave, who are currently ok:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2016/03/11/c...
> Even if a 30-percent margin of error is taken into account, the recent reading, described by some experts as “unimaginable”, is far higher than the previous record of 73 sieverts an hour detected by sensors in 2012.
But it is talking about the reactor. That does not immediately translate into a high radiation level outside, but it shows the potential radiation level we are dealing with. At least in the beginning that radiation leaked, and that might happen again.
Also in Chernobyl there are people living in the zone. If they are old enough that they will die before the radiation will cause cancer, and they are never unlucky enough to step into a pocket of escaping reactor radiation, that's probably not too bad.
A better description of the readings can be found here:
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2017/02/07/radiation-levels-not-so...
Even if attacking the reading itself: The numbers might be wrong, the radiation is undisputed high.
Suggesting that levels are increasing implies that new material might be leaving the reactor or that the reactor is becoming less stable. That further implies that you need to re-evaluate the radiation levels in your region and if it's safe to stay there.
It was also an estimate made based on the amount of noise seen on CCD camera images. That's a really awful way to measure radiation.
http://www.cringely.com/2017/02/16/no-fracking-way-fukushima...
Complete with appeal to authority and failure to read the source he uses properly...
I was a big fan of Triumph of the Nerds [1] and his other documentaries and books. :(
> If one links "There are boars" with "humans have higher fear of radiation than there is actual danger", there are only so many messages such a comment can transport.
The message I took was "boars are different from humans because they aren't susceptible to disproportionate fear". It's meant to highlight the fact that although the abstract reasoning of humans usually gives them great advantage over animals, it can backfire.
Likewise, my dog successfully avoids homeopathic medicine, which is ironic given that people who are taken in by that stuff have more advanced brains than him. But, even though my dog also doesn't want to ever go to the vet, this is not an endorsement of never going to the doctor.
Exactly, that's how I understood it as well. And here the implications is that human reasoning backfired because we judged the impact of nuclear accident wrong. It is combined with a "the boar lives there well because it has no fear, we can live there as well". That comes from the first sentence, that health risks from fear of radiation exceed the actual health risks from the radiation.
That's typical pro-nuclear propaganda.
Yes, that is what he claimed.
> It is combined with a "the boar lives there well because it has no fear, we can live there as well".
No, he did not claim that.
> That comes from the first sentence, that health risks from fear of radiation exceed the actual health risks from the radiation.
The existence of boars is not being used to support the claim that fear of radiation exceed the actual health risks. Rather, that claim is being asserted independently.
No, it's a simple matter of fact statement. That doesn't mean that radiation is not dangerous. Especially in high-doses it is extremely dangerous. But so is almost anything energy related (heat of a gas turbine, fall from a dam, etc.). In terms of public health, so far fear of radiation has had worse health outcomes than radiation.
I'm pro nuclear power, but I agree with you. Boars running around doesn't mean jack squat.
We need to look objectively about all of the many aspects of nuclear power production, including its dangers and financial costs.
Honestly, the way solar generation and battery technology is taking off, even the most optimistic nuclear technology might become irrelevant.
We are overcautious as to the effects of the radiation, and undercautious as to the effects of the evacuation etc., as the data gathered over the decades around Chernobyl shows. Look at the WHO reports over the decades, each one downgrades the previous estimate of the radiation effects.
> the accepted safety levels are based on reasonable research.
That's apparently not the case. As others have suggested look up the LNT model and its criticism in light of (a) how it was derived and (b) data that strongly contradicts it.
BIG TIME citation needed. See my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13829400
Again, I'm going on about Chernobyl, not Fukushima. A lot of people received pretty high doses in the former case, and the results have been pretty terrible.
> I'm going on about Chernobyl, not Fukushima.
Yes, and the WHO reports clearly state in unequivocal terms that the mental health effects were the most serious effects.
Note that this does not mean "there were no effects and people were just imagining things". No, it means that there were significant effects, just the the most significant effects were mental health related, which then caused other negative outcomes.
And I'd agree with you that Chernobyl was much more significant than Fukushima, which means that the relationship between actual radiation effects and other (mental health etc.) effects is going to be even more lopsided in Fukushima.
I must have missed non-WHO citations about how the mental health impact of the Chernobyl disaster was greater than the actual physical affect.
For many people in Belarus, Chernobyl was a very real, very physical health disaster.
> Where are yours?
Linked in the article I linked. Google trivially returns all kinds of well-documented health impacts in Belarus and neighboring areas.
Also, as reported, an eye-witness account of the suffering that Chernobyl brought to so many people.
Except the article says nothing of the sort. In fact, it explicitly states in the first paragraph that we don't know what the cause of those birth defects is.
> eye-witness account of the suffering that Chernobyl brought
Once again, you seem to miss the point: the point is not whether or not there was suffering, but what the biggest causes of the suffering was. And once again, the WHO concludes that the biggest cause of suffering were (sometimes severe) mental health effects (which can cause physical suffering).
Also there were external effects such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the consequences of that. For example, life expectancy of Russian men dropped by ~10 years in the late 1980s and 1990s. Not due to radiation, but mostly due to alcohol (due to psycho-social/mental health effects).
Consider that even the Chernobyl plant itself continued generating electricity until 2000 - the remaining generators were shut down one after the other, but people were working at Chernobyl all the way through. Several thousand people work in the exclusion zone at any time, and several thousand more worked at the plant in the 14 years from the accident until its closure.
That's not to say none of them will suffer health risks, but the exclusion zone was set as large as it was largely because we didn't know how to manage it, and didn't know how to clean it up, and didn't know what the long term effects would be. We know a lot more now, and the indications are a lot less scary than the initial reactions.
It's now to the point where there are even proposals for agricultural use in the zone.
Is this an assumption on your part, or can you back this up with data?
I haven't done research on this myself, but I would assume that the exclusion zones have been set up according to the accepted standards for radiation safety levels.
We live in a world where the available data allows credible scientists to observe a hormetic effect in animal models exposed to low-dose radiation, and where longitudinal studies of people who live in areas with naturally higher background radiation (higher than large areas of the exclusion zone), such as Colorado experience lower than average cancer rates.[1]
Furthermore, the death toll from nuclear power generation, should be considered in comparison to the death toll of other power technologies. While it is arguable that many renewable tech are comparable and possibly have become better than nuclear in terms of safety, the deaths caused even just by radioactive particles spewed into the environment from coal plants is much higher than nuclear. It is a classic case of seen vs. unseen effects.[2]
The unstated argument in this thread is whether the precautionary principle should be applied to public health policy with regards to human-caused radiation. It's perfectly reasonable to argue that it should based on unknowns, but it doesn't help to make overly certain assumptions that have weak scientific support.
[1] a decent jumping off point on this stuff is the Wikipedia article on radiation hormesis - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
[2] Another quick jumping off point, with a myriad of links and charts from credible government and international organizations. http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energ...
There was also a documentary film a while ago, I'll see if I can find it. It mentions this apartment complex in Taiwan that was contaminated, and the health of the residents turned out to be better than average, not worse.
Ahh, found it[2]. Seem like fairly reputable sources.
[1] http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/nuclear.html
[2] http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/low-dose-Cob...
And yet, a bunch of old people live in the Chernobyl Exclusion zone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone#Popul...
But some of it is happening even here in Germany. Some of the Bavarian forests are still contaminated by the Chernobyl incident such that it is not completely safe to east mushrooms from them. Having a few dishes of those mushrooms per year is most likely safe, but the authorities are having warnings (but no bans) out. And the mushroom eating wild boars have to be checked for radiation before their meat can be eaten.
Consensus
The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem caused by the accident to date"
-- Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident, page 95, World Health Organization [1]
But what do they know?
[1] http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43447/1/9241594179_...
The magnitude and scope of the disaster, the size of the affected population, and the long-term consequences make it, by far, the worst industrial disaster on record. Chernobyl unleashed a complex web of events and long-term difficulties, such as massive relocation, loss of economic stability, and long-term threatds to health in current and, possibly, future generations, that resulted in an increased sense of anomie and diminished sense of physical and emotional balance.
In terms of directly attributable health effects, including deaths, it's nowhere near the worst industrial disaster on record. It's a curious claim.
We'll likely never know whether that was due to the evacuation or simply that the risk were overstated. E.g. consider the Bhopal disaster [1] for comparison - 2259 official immediate deaths in Bhopal vs. 56, and nearly 4000 confirmed dead due to the disaster and 16k+ estimated total deaths, vs. a WHO estimate of 4000 eventual shortened lifespans after Chernobyl (e.g. people whose life expectancy over a period of decades is shortened due to increased cancer risks). Bhopal further caused an estimated 558,000 injuries.
For comparison, the Chernobyl exclusion zone used to be home to 120,000 people. Far more people were actually harmed in Bhopal than even lived near Chernobyl.
Chernobyl is only worse than Bhopal on a single measure: It will take longer before the area is fully safe to use again (but much shorter than people initially thought - as mentioned elsewhere, there is already pressure to open it up to more activity, as background radiation is already down to relatively safe levels).
However, a larger consideration is the economic damage from Chernobyl caused a even more indirect harm. Now, some of this was arguably an overreaction. But again, the cleanup effort is a large part of why the direct harm has been so small. Without that it's a very different situation.
Exactly. The biggest (general-population) health effect was almost certainly overreaction.
Consensus
The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem caused by the accident to date"
-- Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident, page 95, World Health Organization [1]
That's the direct quote. But you can continue to pretend/imagine that it says what you want it to say.
You can't save someone's life unless they where first put at risk. So, there where clearly problems now you can talk about the largest outstanding problem after mitigation, but that's different.
Who said that there had been no risk?
> there where clearly problems
Who said there were no problems? I don't see how people turn "A is greater than B" into "B is zero".
If I had written "there was obviously no risk at all from radiation" you might have a point, I but I did not write that and would never write that, because it is clearly ridiculous.
Both well justified and poorly justified evacuations come with mental health impacts. If our house burns down while we're in it and we get out in time, the mental health impact would be the largest health concert; that doesn't mean we should stay in it.
You can argue that the Chernobyl evacuation was an overreaction, but not using that paragraph or the enclosing section in that report. Yet you persist in doing so.
> But what do they know?
I'm sure that they know a lot about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that every report they produce is accurate.
It's just that those impacts are not primarily due to direct effects radiation. The biggest impact appears to have been over-reaction to the fear of the effects of radiation. Again, those effects due to the overreaction were very real and very significant.
I love travel photography, so it's always been something that's high up on my todo list, though I'd prefer to go with friends (hard to understate the awkward silence that follows "Want to visit Chernobyl with me?") at some point. Tours avoid the problematic areas, and there were obviously a ton of workers going in and out to work on the New Safe Containment building recently so it's not like it's a complete dead zone. If you look at this chart of recorded radiation levels[1] at interesting Pripyat/Chernobyl landmarks from 2009, you'll note that while you'll want to stay the hell away from some landmarks, the uSv/hour recordings at the places tours visit are comparable to daily exposure to natural background radiation in various regions or a transatlantic flight.[2][3] Thousands visit each year, though I'd probably suggest screening your tour options carefully.
Of course, I mentioned the plan to my mother back when I was 18 and I still hear about it from her when we disagree nine years later :). Some people just have an odd sense of risk aversion.
0. https://500px.com/search?q=pripyat+ukraine&type=photos&sort=...
1. http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-lev...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(radiation...
3. http://greentourua.com/chernobyl-today-all-you-need-to-know-...
If there was no exclusion zone at all the impact from fear would likely still be larger. That measurement wouldn't help the people getting large radiation exposures inside the zone.
And Boars will travel in and out of Fukushima of course.