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Comment by panta | Hacker News Reader

I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, but reading the related wikipedia page [1], and in particular the section about liquidator mortality, leaves me skeptic about the <100 numbers. And there are also deaths which are more loosely related, but still related. See for example the abortions: "an estimated excess of about 150,000 elective abortions may have been performed on otherwise healthy pregnancies out of fears of radiation from Chernobyl" [3]. Even if you consider most if not all of these ill-advised, these are nonetheless lives lost due to the disaster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Abortions

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I personally continue to use 4000 deaths total (acute and latent), which is what the UNSCEAR folks said up until 2006 or so. Some colleagues yell at me and tell me that there's no basis for a number this high given what we now know about radiation dose response and about what's happened monitoring people for decades. But I use it just in case.

Fear of radiation kills thousands of people. At Fukushima, the only nuclear-related (non-tsunami) deaths were from the evacuation. (Up to 1 person did die from radiation, they say now). That's why I fight to make people understand it more and be less afraid.

We can all agree that unduly panicking people about radiation is bad.

https://aeon.co/ideas/fear-of-radiation-is-more-dangerous-th...

I think it's worth noting that the UNSCEAR report also said 5000 more deaths among less exposed people (so 9000 in total), it's all rather arbitrary.

That was in 2006. They changed their policy and stopped multiplying small dose rates by large populations to get large numbers after that because the linear-no-threshold assumption has not been shown to be applicable at very low doses. Their later reports do not give any large numbers like this.

But that's just even more arbitrary, right? It just means nobody knows how many deaths it caused, and there is an uncertainty of an order of magnitude based on how the effects of very low doses.

> See for example the abortions... are nonetheless lives lost due to the disaster.

Unless you have some additional evidence of euthanizing newborns or otherwise near-term pregnancies, abortions do not count as lives lost to the disaster to anyone but political reactionaries.

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