Homes should not be abandoned after a big nuclear accident
bristol.ac.uk
bristol.ac.uk
Maybe we should shortcut that whole issue. Unlike most instances of pollution, we have a case where a single entity is clearly responsible for the contamination. That entity should be required to offer a buy-out of all property in the affected area at pre-accident market prices. They can then resell at whatever price they can obtain. If the damage caused by the contamination is small, the difference between the prices will be small, and their loss will be small. If their victims don’t think it’s worth moving at all, the loss will be zero since nobody will accept the offer.
Something tells me that this idea will be rejected as being too expensive, which should be quite telling.
The point of scientific study into this kind of thing is exactly what we need to be objective as a society, and this should be encouraged.
If people overestimate the damage caused by the contamination, they'll take the buyout. People who think the damage is less important will then be able to buy that property. The net effect will be a migration of people scared of contamination away from the contaminated areas, and of people who don't care about it toward the contaminated areas, which seems fine.
In the event that everyone is overly scared of it, then the region will depopulate and the owner of the nuclear plant will be on the hook. They'll owe much more than the damage they actually caused, but I don't see a problem with this. There's no inherent right to damage someone else's health without their consent and then insist that they're wrong about how much the damage is worth.
I'm all for objective scientific study into the actual dangers of this stuff. But the cited study goes well beyond that and makes a normative claim that relocation is bad policy.
By all means, let's educate everyone on the true dangers of this stuff. Then let's allow them to decide for themselves whether it's worth staying or going. If the argument is that the populace is too ignorant to correctly make that decision, then fix that.
I'm very much in favor of nuclear power, but stuff like this doesn't help at all. It's true that people are ignorant of the true dangers, but this isn't going to convince them. "Don't evacuate, it won't kill THAT many of you" doesn't sound like someone making decisions in your own best interests.
Right. I don't think there will be enough people in the region interested in repopulating.
> They'll owe much more than the damage they actually caused, but I don't see a problem with this. There's no inherent right to damage someone else's health without their consent and then insist that they're wrong about how much the damage is worth.
I disagree with you here. You're relying on some subjective assessment of what the damage is worth, which I think is uncontroversially an irrational overestimate.
Instead, I think it is entirely appropriate for studies to attempt to quantify, objectively, the real value of the damage.
We have to put a dollar value on lives in many cases because it's impractical to let each person choose individually. Normal pollution regulations are a good example of this. You'll look at the economic value of lives saved versus economic value of the pollution controls and see which one wins.
But I don't see that a nuclear accident requires this. The affected area is relatively small, the damage is already done and can't be reversed, and there's a single responsible party. It becomes practical to handle it economically rather than having the government dictate a solution.
The requirement is that society reaches an agreement on what that estimate is. Relying solely on the estimate of the victims [and other local people] is not reasonable. There needs to be an equitable way of determining a value. Dismissing studies trying to establish an approach to this is not the way.
Sure, it still has to be subjective. But the line between subjectivity and objectivity is a spectrum. More objectivity is possible, and dismissing this out of hand because complete objectivity is not possible is not reasonable.
Imagine if I dumped a bunch of toxic waste into your carpet. Would you accept it if I said, well, it would cost $X to completely remove the toxic waste, and the economic value of the DALYs lost by members of your household is $Y < $X, therefore I don't have to do anything?
I'm pretty sure such a thing would get laughed out of court. I'd be required to clean it up regardless, or if the value of the cleanup exceeds the value of the house, to buy you out. I'm not allowed to keep poisoning you just because it's too expensive for me to stop. Why should a nuclear accident be handled any differently?
The answer to that semi-rhertorical question for other types of pollution is often, "Because there are N polluters and M victims and it's not practical to handle N x M transactions to settle the damages." That doesn't apply here, where there's only one polluter.
So, for example, if I destroy your car, I have to give the money it would take to buy another one. I can't argue that you didn't use the car much and so its value to you was less, so I only need to pay that much.
It's also standard to look at the less tangible losses suffered by the victim (like health damage or pain and suffering) and come up with a fair monetary amount based on that. But my understanding is that this is only done when it's necessary. Without a time machine, it's not always possible to put the victim back in the exact same state they were in before the damage. When it is possible, that's what you do. Otherwise you do the best you can to compensate them.
In the case of pollution, you'd have to come up with a monetary equivalent to the health damages done to the victims if that damage was already done and couldn't be reversed. If the damage hasn't been done yet (e.g. because I just polluted your property very recently) and can be prevented (e.g. because I can clean it up, or buy your property so you can move to a house that isn't polluted) then I can still restore you to your pre-damage state.
Another problem is that $Y is highly probabilistic, whereas $X is not. Calculating DALYs lost due to some contamination works on populations, but not individuals. You, personally, might die from that pollution tomorrow, or you might live to the age of 120 regardless. Compensating you based on the expected amount you'll lose, when the real amount might be much different, means the amount is likely to be incorrect. If we can instead ensure that the pollution doesn't impact the individual, either by removing it or removing the individual, we avoid that problem.
The whole point of my post is to illustrate why compensating someone based on the health risks incurred is ridiculous if you can instead fix the problem or buy them out. In my example, do you think it would be fair for me to compensate you only the value of the DALYs lost in your household if you continue to live there, rather than the cost of cleanup or the cost of your property?
That's the imperfect information problem.
I would expect a rather large premium to be associated with a forced sale of any kind. Remember, if they where willing to sell at market rates they would have been sold. I am of the opinion that forced sales like this should provide ~2-3x market rates to reduce the need for such sales, and provide for the loss of property like cars which need to be abandoned if contaminated.
Nah, it'll be rejected because you will be interpreted as saying that it's okay for poor people to be exposed to dangerous radiation.
People view health as a "sacred" value that no one should be forced to trade for money, even if they want to.
EDIT: See what I mean.
When only the rich can afford to live the sacredness of this value starts to become apparent.
1) Someone needs to assess pre-accident prices of every house. That isn't as easy as it sounds, it is a massive logistic challenge (and open to corruption from all angles).
2) This links a nuclear company's performance (after a disaster) to the property market, where they have no inherent expertise. That isn't fair or sensible.
3) If the company has to pay some sort of transactions tax on housing (eg, as is the case in Australia) then they are facing enormous costs even if the market value doesn't change.
4) The vast sums of money involved would probably bankrupt them for cash flow reasons even if the whole transaction were notionally profitable.
5) All of this doesn't even incentivise good behavior. May as well pass a law that if things go wrong the company gets wound up - same basic result (this is not a good idea either imo).
Also, the people who are concerned about trading dollars for lives probably don't want to become regulators [1]. We don't know how to run a 0-death society and there are decisions that must be made in practice. Valuing life with money is a great way of doing that.
[1] https://www.theglobalist.com/the-cost-of-a-human-life-statis...
2) It's absolutely sensible that the financial performance of a company that could cause massive damage to surrounding property would be linked to the value of that surrounding property, unless you don't think people should pay for the damage they cause.
3) So, don't do that? If we're talking about a potential change in the legal framework, "but the law would make it impractical" isn't a sensible objection. Exempt this stuff from the transaction tax if needed.
4/5) If the cost would potentially exceed what the company can pay, then require them to carry liability insurance. That's what we do for cars, and it works out pretty well both in terms of incentivizing good behavior and ensuring that victims can be compensated even when the damages exceed the perpetrator's ability to pay.
I'm not against trading dollars for lives. I just want the people who own the lives in question to be the ones making the decision whenever possible. That's not always feasible, but this is a case where it looks quite feasible.
> This is a tiny problem compared to the damage caused by the accident.
For many people, the land and house they own is pretty much the total sum of their wealth. (Or even more, if they took mortgage.) If you think this is a "tiny problem", you underestimate the lengths people will go to protect the values of their properties.
I've seen news of people committing suicide over a high-power voltage line going over their town. You visit a town struck by a nuclear disaster and claim you will assess the "fair market value" of every house, you'd better bring in riot gears.
If you don't see why, imagine you own a home and the assessor says "Really? But your house is not any better than your neighbor's, and they have agreed to the price of $1M. Don't be so unreasonable."
The article doesn't help fudging it by highlighting life expectancy differentials which are down to socioeconomic status and patterns of higher risk behaviour. Blackpool's lower life expectancy isn't random like background radiation; you can live in Blackpool without experiencing a significant threat to your health provided you avoid the alcohol consumption problems more prevalent amongst people that live there.
The comparison in the article is death from radiation vs death from evacuation. Being compulsorily and unexpectedly evacuated from your home is catastrophic. My memory of Fukashima is that experience of living as an evacuee looked very woeful.
If people lose 12 months to stress and whatnot from an evacuation, is losing 9 months to cancer really that much worse? I've lost a relative to cancer, the quality of his life was actually quite high until the last month. I've seen chronic depression do much more damage. I'm not advocating either, but if there is a choice to be made I don't think it is clear.
In the case of Fukishima, the people being evacuated because of radiation were only a small portion of the casualties from the Tsunami, and so the emergency services were seriously stressed. I'd imagine that evacuating those people would have gone much more smoothly if it hadn't been for all of the other Tsunami damage.
I'm not saying those effects can or cannot be ignored because I'm not an expert. But I'm skeptical because the analysis does not address human reproduction.
While I don't know if there is or not, these studies of the results of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs[0] shows that the effects were limited to those currently pregnant, and without 1200 meters of ground zero of the blast. With no effect on the future children born to parents exposed to ionizing radiation of those levels.
[0] - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/yapa2/
"The many studies that were conducted after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki determined that some of the risks that the public perceives to be associated with radiation exposure are non-existent, while others are in fact matters of concern. The cancer risk for children who were in-utero when their mothers were exposed is higher than it would be for others without this exposure, but children who were conceived after their parents were exposed to radiation had no increased cancer risk. Similarly for both birth defects and mental retardation, it was found that in-utero exposure possibly increased the rate of incidence of these conditions, but results from all studies are inconclusive, except for the case of pregnant mothers within 1200m of the hypocenter. All of the in-utero children born to these mothers experienced mental retardation. All three of these cases found that there is no increased risk of these conditions if the parents of the child were exposed to the ionizing radiation of the atomic bomb (child was not conceived at the time of the exposure)."
The amount of radioactive material involved in the 1945 events is several orders of magnitude smaller than at Fukishima. Perhaps there are robust cross examined theories indicating that the events are comparable. I am skeptical that the events are similar enough in important ways (i.e. ways other than occurring in Japan) that a single anecdote is sufficient basis to claim support for the proposed policy.
(I'm assuming a 1-dimensional scale here, which may be a mistake)
Why would the total radiation of the event matter at all? All the radiation that an individual may receive beyond "fatal in hours" will not be relevant to their reproductive future.
(Except in the contrived scenario in which a male receives enough radiation to kill him in hours, but still conceives a child in these hours)
The scale of radioactive materials are orders of magnitude different.
[1]: http://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-basics/how-is-uranium-o...
[2]: Fukushima 3 where the failure occurred used MOX fuel containing Plutonium as well as Uranium.
[3]: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...
Yeah, no. At Fukushima, the civil authorities didn't know what had even happened for awhile.
Academic analysis of risk falls apart on the ground. What happened in places like the World Trade Center and Grenfell tower, and minor high rise disasters that I've experienced first hand have taught a clear lesson: know your surroundings, know all of the egress routes, proceed with caution, and get the hell out.
Sure, you shouldn't be forced to stay. But by the same token the government shouldn't be able to force you to leave your perfectly safe home and possessions just for the sake of giving them some "caring" PR.
The reality is a nuclear accident causes massive asset destruction, it touches people who had absolutely no say in the economic transaction, and probably no meaningful political say either.
Pretty much the only fair solution, is equal unfairness. Part of the "not in my backyard" is because the track record is, local residents are disproportionately impacted, and there is no where near enough support for them, while people far away are minimally impacted. This is trust damaging, and incentivizes people to vote against nuclear power: not in my backyard = I do not trust you to make me whole in the unlikely event there is an accident.
After nuclear accidents, governments are compulsorily ejecting people from their homes.
This isn't the end of the world, but it is clearly an extreme action. There should be some standard of evidence that they are held to before they do this. Maybe most of the people would leave anyway.
The question needs to b asked. The bloke in the article is making a point that evacuations might be worse than radiation. This is a point that seemed likely to me after reading about Fukashima.
It is possible we are facing a scenario where: * Governments are ejecting people from their homes * This is leading to worse outcomes than if they where allowed to live there peacefully or leave at their own speed
If this is the case, we really need clearer standards to stop governments acting this way.
Anyone doing agriculture there will face difficulties selling the produce elsewhere in the country. Anyone depending on tourism is going to struggle.
People are going to mistrust governmental assurances that it's safe to be somewhere, suspecting various political motivations.
How about the simple question of development: investment in the area is going to be very cool.
Different agencies price the cost of a single life ("statistical live value") differently. For instance the US department of transportation won't install a highway guard rail that would save one life per year if the installation costs more than $9.6M. FAA $5.8M. (and TSA clearly 0 while for DoD it's clearly enormous).
º Even people who stay will suffer psychological problems, in part due to poor understanding of physics, and that isn't taken account of in the summary. Then again some people near phone towers suffer imaginary fears too. The original article is paywalled so sorry to the authors if these topics are discussed.
Thanks, but no, Mr Scientist.