Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeamaize | Hacker News Reader

But Fukushima was a minor incident...

Your comment goes pretty hard against the popular opinion of what happened. It would be good if you could explain your reasoning.

Not the OP, but 15,000 people died because of the tsunami. No one died from the radiation release at Fukushima and:

"A comprehensive assessment by international experts on the health risks associated with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP) disaster in Japan has concluded that, for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated."

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/fukushima_...

Are those experts in any way affiliated with the nuclear industry?

I don't think there's room for many independent experts in such a space that can call a spade a spade.

(And government officials in Japan were caught again and again to downplay the incident to save safe).

Thanks xrange.

No one dying quite glibly ignores the economic and social consequences of displacing somewhere in the neighborhoods of 120,000 people.

That aside, are we to believe that no one's medical conditions were made more severe by the stress and displacement caused by this disaster? And no one died as a result? Something of the scale of Fukushima can't be so easily dismissed by this kind of cursory analysis of radiation related health risks.

As yongjik commented elsewhere, an order of magnitude more people died as a result of the evacuation than the WHO predicts would die of additional cancer deaths. And that's assuming a linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure, when current thinking is that a threshold-based model is more accurate.

As s/he summarizes, more people died as a result of running away from the disaster than would have died if they'd stayed put.

Not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...

Fukushima and Chernobyl are both classed as 7s, but the amount of radiation released at Fukushima was at least an order of magnitude less than Chernobyl, with 80% of that falling on the ocean.

Fukushima caused half as many people as Chernobyl to evacuate.

No one died as a direct result of Fukushima, as opposed to 2 immediate + 28 cleanup deaths from Chernobyl.

Fukushima definitely deserves to be taken seriously, and it belongs in the same class as Chernobyl, but at the other end of that class.

Another difference is that Fukushima was just one result (and by far not the worst result) of a huge natural disaster.

If Fukushima is a major event, with no fatalities, what does one consider the Banqiao Dam event, with 170,000 fatalities?

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

A sign that we should shut down every single hydroelectric power-plant in the world.

Or, we could be reasonable about these things, and understand that power generation at an industrial scale will kill people.

"That's different!"

Also a major event, but in a category that is almost completely irrelevant to the current discussion.

Thousands of families have forced out of their homes and displaced by a radiation-polluted landscape, which the conservative government is trying to pass off as safe so they can pull their disaster relief subsidies:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/10/japan-fukushim...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/fukushima-nucl...

I pray that nothing similar happens to you or that you have to suffer the indignity of people glibly dismissing your misfortune.

I wonder how much atmospheric carbon dioxide has been avoided by the use of nuclear power over the last 70 years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com