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Comment by iujyhgtfhj | Hacker News Reader

Depends on their surface reflectivity.

A few 10s of European people die at chernobyl = crisis, ban nuclear now. A few 10,000s of Indians die at Bhopal = so what.

Of course sometimes you have to be a little more discriminating. A damn breaks in China killing poor yellow people = so what. A reactor accident in Japan affecting rich yellow people = crisis.

Strangely 1800 people being killed on trains in a Tsunami doesn't seem to matter. Germany hasn't decided to cancel ICE services between Munich and Wien until the track can be made Tsunami proof.

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"A few 10s of European"... I think you should correct Wikipedia. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chernobyl_dis... "Estimates of the total number of deaths attributable to the accident vary enormously, from possibly 4,000 to close to a million".

That's including 0.01% lifetime extra cancer risk * 100M people

If you are going to do that then a single cigarette ad on a formula 1 car kills more people than Hiroshima.

then how are you counting?

If you are going to do that then a single cigarette ad on a formula 1 car kills more people than Hiroshima.

Maybe not a single ad, but certainly cigarettes do, and it is a valid way to count.

Forget wikipedia and go the site of the World Health Organisation. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2006/9241594179_eng.pd... http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/chernobyl_di...

The reports range from 4000 extra cancer deaths (of 100 000 deaths) to 10 000 deaths out of a million. While 10000 isn't small, it represents a 1% increase in cancer related deaths. Stricter smoking laws can save more people than a nuclear stop.

Probably because they were safer on the trains than they would have been in cars? You'd still have people in transit, and I'm not a mechanical engineer or physicist but I'd think it was obvious that trains hold up a little better to giant waves than the typical japanese car.

There is less radiation risk from normally operating German nuclear power stations than there is from all the radionuclides the extra coal burning stations will emit.

Although since Germany hit on the idea of exporting it's dirty coal to Poland, burning it there and importing the power they will be east europeans getting the cancer.

Well, I was talking about being hit by tsunamis, not radiation.

I prefer nuclear power to coal myself but I must clarify that "normally operating nuclear power stations" aren't what people worry about with nuclear power.

Yes, but people don't give a flying fuck about coal or coal seam fires when globally coal seam fires release 40 tons of mercury into the atmosphere, 3% of the worlds annual CO2 emissions. Not to mention they're releasing a crap-load of radioactive materials on their own.

People are idiots. They worry about nuclear power going "wrong", but don't worry about all the other far more dangerous power technologies working "right" and being more deadly.

Nuclear power is like a rubber bullet. When it goes wrong, it can kill someone but 99.9% of the time it's phenomenally safe. Coal and Oil are essentially like lead bullets. They can kill someone each and every time they're fired, but people are used to it so they don't care.

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