Fear may be more dangerous than radiation | Hacker News Reader

Fear may be more dangerous than radiation

washingtonpost.com

71 pointsyummyfajitas74 comments

According to this (pretty amazing) UCSB lecture:

http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/plecture/bmonreal11/rm/fl...

... fear and lack of communication did grave damage at Chernobyl as well. For example: because the authorities could not get their stories straight, they were unable to advise local farmers to dispose of contaminated cow's milk,w which may have been the vector that dispersed the majority of the radioactive iodine to children in the affected area; elevated thyroid cancer among children is one of the clearly indicated aftereffects of that disaster.

Fear may be rampant in Japan right now (who could blame them?) but my understanding is that they are, for the most part, doing everything right: monitoring mSv exposures, watching the food and water supply, liberally evacuating the surrounding areas. This stuff sounds simple but is almost literally the laundry list of things the Chernobyl authorities did wrong.

Indeed...

The thing is that I doubt one can blame the fear evoked by radiation and things-nuclear on the anti-nuclear movement - its the opposite really. The event of the atomic bomb, the invisible and long-term qualities of radiation damage and so-forth have pretty much seared the fear of radiation into the psychies of modern people.

The anti-nuclear movement is a result of this rather than a cause.

But the thing is, unless there's a magic wand to make the fear go away, the anti-nuke folks have a point. Something that evokes this kind of fear in people will have a certain danger.

Human beings aren't rational. In some circumstances, they are less rational than others. Sometimes just avoiding the situations where we are less rational is more cost-effective than imposing the "most rational" course of action (Especially since it is only "what would be the most rational course of action if it weren't for these unfortunate irrational behaviors").

Oil and coal and nitroglycerin have caused similar destruction, yet you don't see comments like yours about them, so I find it specious to suggest that nuclear acquired its stigma honestly. At any rate, we have no better long-term option for power than nuclear AFAIK.

Of all peoples in the world, honestly I would cut the Japanese the most slack for being fearful of nuclear. We did drop two nuclear bombs on their cities, after all.

That's a very good observation. If the fear of nuclear power came about because of the harm it had done, the Japanese should have hated it like crazy. And yet AFAIK they're generally much less cowardly than we are.

"Oil and coal and nitroglycerin have caused similar destruction, yet you don't see comments like yours about them.."

Well, perhaps because my comment did not concern the very real dangers of these things but rather concerned the very real and irrational fear evoked by nuclear power.

What does "honestly" mean in these circumstances???

---> However nuclear power acquired it's stigma, the question is whether any proponents of it has a plan for removing that stigma.

"Honestly" means "without a strong effort to incite fear." People fear nuclear because they are told nuclear is scary, not because it has caused a relatively small amount of destruction.

Really? Is it just a matter of media mismanagement or something?

People have "been told" to fear radiation AND people have been told not to fear radiation.

Somehow the fear "stuck"?

Why?

And how do you propose changing that?

He is (very reasonably) expressing frustration at your attempt to reify an irrational fear. If measurable increases in carcinogenesis merit public policy discussions, it is reasonable --- probably imperative, in fact --- that we begin our discussions with things that actually cause cancer. Before you get to talk about the cost/benefit of producing electricity without nuclear power, we have to ban red meat.

In my mind there is a significant gap between someone who get's cancer from choosing to eat red meat, and someone who get's cancer from a coal power plant 200 miles away. Each coal power plant in the US kills a little over 1 person per day yet because you can't track the death to a specific power plant nobody get's sued etc.

PS: Economics suggest the appropriate action in such situation is to tax the Externality and let the market decide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Radiation is tailor made to be scary.

The negative outcome for someone outside the nuclear industry has a name: cancer. The negative outcome for someone outside the coal industry (respiratory illness) is less well-defined, less likely to be attributed to coal, and less likely to cause someone to die unusually young. That last is important - old people and people with asthma die from air pollution. Otherwise healthy people can contract radiation-induced cancer.

The mechanism by which nuclear plants produce negative outcomes (radiation) is also poorly understood and imperceptible, whereas one can see smog and kinda tell when it's a code red day out.

It's not just that there's some destruction - it's that the destruction can't be understood, perceived, or planned for until it's too late.

People's fear of nuclear power is irrational, but it doesn't necessarily depend entirely on propaganda.

You can say exactly the same set of things about smog, the soot that blackens a grilled hamburger, the hamburger itself, and the breakdown products of the oil that fries the french fries that go with the burger.

Do you mean in so far as those things are carcinogens?

They are not only carcinogens, but carcinogens that (from what I can tell) are almost by definition worse than 100msv radiological exposures, in that radiological exposure is one of the purer sources of carcinogenesis we can measure, and 100msv is the floor of our ability to measure it.

Compare that to eating four or more serving of red meat in a week (hardly a crazy amount in the US or Argentina); that corresponds to a lifetime cancer risk comparable to having been a former longtime active smoker. Smoking will reliably give you cancer. 100msv of radiation will give one out of some huge number of people like you cancer. Probably.

> Smoking will reliably give you cancer.

I'm having a hard time digging up the figures, but last time I looked, only about 5% of smokers die from lung cancer, and much smaller numbers from a few other smoking-related cancers. Another chunk get cancer but don't die from it. Unless I'm badly misremembering, though, the majority of smokers — more than 50% — never get cancer from smoking.

I don't think that a mechanism that fails more than half the time, or even, say, 1% of the time, should be considered reliable.

I concur that people should worry more about smoking, red meat, and browned oils than about 100mSv exposures to radioactivity. Outside the US, I would add automotive exhaust and indoor wood fires as major causes of cancer.

It puts a lot of stress on the heart, too, and I think a fair number of them die with smoking as a contributing cause to that.

Anyhow, if you do get cancer from smoking, it's pretty ugly. My grandfather had it, in spite of quitting immediately once it was generally known that smoking was a Bad Thing (TM). He had to use Prednisone and it weakened his bones until they started breaking all the time. He was very upset with Grandma for calling the paramedics once, too, because he was just ready to die :( It made for a really miserable way to spend his last ten+ years of life.

Sometimes just avoiding the situations where we are less rational is more cost-effective than imposing the "most rational" course of action

Examples, please?

Alcoholics are often better off avoiding alcohol than trying to maintain a light buzz when partying. It's also easier to setup and use safe transpiration before people start drinking.

It takes less willpower to avoid buying soda/chocolate/candy/etc at the supermarket than it does to keep some in the refrigerator but drink it in moderation. It's easier to avoid driving recklessly in a normal car than a sports car. People are more rational when shopping for a car online than in showrooms.

The entire risk in alcoholism is that you won't be able to stop drinking once you start. It isn't a disease where a single glass of wine damages you. Avoiding the wine isn't an irrational act; it's the most sensible form of risk mitigation available.

Is the video getting hammered by traffic, or is it just me?

EDIT: Works now, 50+ minutes after this comment was posted.

It's crawling for me :\ Set up a burnbit, but it's taking a while: http://burnbit.com/torrent/165578/BMonreal11_PublicLecture_K...

At least radioactive milk isn't likely to cause harm this time. Quite a lot of people there are lactose intolerant, and they have very meticulous food safety inspectors to boot.

Timely chart about the relative levels of radiation dosage involved in every day living, medical procedures and exposure to nuclear power plants vs. what's harmful for you from XKCD:

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/19/graphic-chart-showin.ht...

The chart seems to indicate that radiation 50km away from Fukushima was high enough to get into the "clearly linked to increased cancer risk" zone within 20 days. That's scary enough for me.

Now that I look at the chart again, I'm a little confused. It says ~3.5 micro sievert 'extra dose from one day in average town near the Fukushima plant as of March 17th, varies quite a bit' in the blue squares, but also 'one day dose (~3.6 milli sievert) at two sites 50 km NW of Fukushima on 3/16, seen again on 3/17' in the green ones.

Even factoring in the variation they mention, that's a 1000x difference. I know the dosage drops off exponentially, but first example must be a lot further away than 50km, which is no longer 'near' in my book. Perhaps the latter measurements were extreme cases caused by wind patterns.

Lies, damn lies and statistics... :-)

In the green area, it says that doses where as high in some places, but much lower in other places. So presumably on average they were low, which doesn't help much if you accidentally live in one of the places where radiation is/was high.

Can we be more careful with the words "high" and "radiation"? Firefighters at the plant were exposed to high levels of radiation. Their exposure to damaging radiation is measured cumulatively in many hundreds or even thousands of millisieverts. We can legitimately talk about their health being endangered by high radiation.

People living 50km from the plant have not been exposed to high radiation. They have, in the very worst possible interpretation of the numbers we have now, been exposed to multiple cross-country flights worth of radiation. If you want to call that "high radiation", I think in all fairness you must also advocate for flight attendants to be issued lead-lined suits.

That is not what the XKCD chart seems to imply. It implies that in some spots the daily radiation was a twentieth of a level linked to increased cancer risk. So presumably after 20 days you would have reached a level that increased your cancer risk - if you live there, it seems likely that you'll be there 20 days.

Yes, maybe the higher levels did not persist in one spot for for twenty days (we don't know). I don't find that very comforting, it still seems like a russian roulette style of living (there may be 20 days of higher exposure or not - you can not know unless you start carrying a radiation meter at all times).

Btw according to the chart, a cross country flight is only a 150th fraction of the radiation at those spots 50km from Fukushima. Few people fly that often.

A single cross-country flight is a 40usv exposure; flight attendants make the equivalent of 20 of those flights on average every month. An hour maximally exposed to the highest recorded level of outdoor radiation 50km away from the plant is roughly equivalent to two round trips between LA and New York.

If you want to call this "Russian Roulette", that's fine, as long as you're also never going to get into a car, never going to eat red meat, and never going to ride a bike down a city street. All three of those things are demonstrably more dangerous than standing at the gates of the Fukushima plant.

I want to point out that we are talking about you misunderstanding risks at two different points:

(1) You appear to perceive a spot outdoor measurement of 170usv as a significant amount of radiological exposure, when it is in fact a very minor exposure, equivalent to an amount of air travel common in western culture --- and this, despite a concomitant spent fuel pond fire at a nuclear reactor.

(2) You appear to perceive a cumulative 100msv (note unit) exposure as a significant carcinogenic risk, when it is in fact the lowest level of exposure you can endure at which there is any measurable impact on cancer; the behaviors (such as eating red meat) that I am hammering you with produce what appear to be much higher levels of carcinogenesis.

"A single cross-country flight is a 40usv exposure; ... An hour maximally exposed to the highest recorded level of outdoor radiation 50km away from the plant is roughly equivalent to two round trips between LA and New York."

Well that is not what the XKCD chart says. I was merely counting blocks (not converting units). According to XKCD, one flight is two green blocks. So two round trips LA/NY would be 8 green blocks. According to XKCD the 50km radiation was 180 green blocks, or 22 times the round trip (in a shorter amount of time).

Blame XKCD if his chart is wrong, not me.

Also XKCD says "CLEARLY linked to increased risk in cancer". Again maybe blame XKCD if his chart is misleading.

If Fukushima is so harmless, why did they evacuate a 50km radius? Because of the media?

Because all else being equal if you can avoid an exposure of 10's of msv, you do, just like if you are getting over a bad cold you avoid driving if you can because you might get lightheaded and run off the road, but you almost certainly won't. And because in the very epicenter of a crisis, you can't predict exactly what's going to happen next and so you act conservatively.

The funny thing about your logic is, it's how the people in charge of Chernobyl thought too. They couldn't simply work out the likely exposures and take action accordingly --- at least, not at first. So they spent zillions of dollars on cleanup and mitigation but didn't tell farmers not to pass unchecked milk on to children, who subsequently contracted thyroid cancer because of the uptake of radioactive iodine. You are illustrating the point. "If they evacuate", you think, "there must be some gigantic risk they aren't telling us about".

Oh, now I get it - radiation does not kill people. Anti nuclear power people kill people.

Your example shows one aspect of why people dislike nuclear power: it's easy to see how to avoid getting into a car accident, but apparently less easy to see how to react in case of a nuclear disaster. Normal people wouldn't know that they should check the milk.

Also I don't want to live in a world where I have to check everything for radiation before I consume it.

As for your other question: so now I am a troll, just because I disagree with you? Or because the comments are indented more than x levels? And yes, I have several issues with this discussion. Not the least I dislike emotional argumentation, and I think in this case it is the pro nuclear power people who are actually emotional: they feel that the other side is emotional, and react emotionally to that. I also dislike mindless herds "oh it is XKCD, so it must be cool. I want to be on the side of XKCD" (not that I accuse you of this, but if you remember, I merely took issue with the XKCD chart).

What I get from HN is that nuclear power is also a thing for elitist people, who look down on the stupid people who can't understand physics well enough.

I hope you're not a troll. But asking things like "so why don't we evacuate a 50km radius around cigarettes" is trollish. And you should read more. This stuff isn't that complicated. Watch the video at the top of the thread (you clearly haven't, or you wouldn't be talking about plutonium exposure in Japan).

Radiation is not a static. If a particle happens to decay at your detector when it is detecting, you'll get a massive spike. As the radiation changes between hours, places and the specific isotopes decaying, it's near impossible to get fast and accurate results for average dose recieved.

The way they monitored people during the human plutonium injection trials[1] for the WW2 nuclear program was monitoring the radioactive content of the human excrement and urine, not sure how practical that is. They injected people that had terminal illnesses and short life expectancies with ~5 micrograms of plutonium(and other elements) to ascertain the effects, so the dangers to nuclear scientists working on the program would be known. The study didn't find much in the way of damage (i.e not fatal or cancerous) to those studied, but the isotope injected seems to be of high importance as some isotopes are more radioactive than others.

[1]http://inpp.ohiou.edu/~massey/pdf/10_human_Pu.pdf

    If a particle happens to decay at your detector when it is detecting, you'll get a massive spike.

This is not true. The energy deposited by a single quantum of radiation is negligible, and at this point most of the activity is from long-lived isotopes and so shouldn't change from day to day.

I would guess that wind patterns are responsible for the variability in measurements, not nuclear physics.

I would think one decaying event is one blip, and higher readings indicate more decaying events. A single particle can not decay very often and hence can not result in a spike.

The prevailing winds are to the NW. Presumably the smaller doses are for towns in other directions, but that would be a rather biased average.

Living downwind from certain coal plants is worse.

It's as the article said: we're looking at increase of a few percentage points risks and shitting ourselves without regard to the wide variety of things like cigarette smoke that cause four-fold increases in cancer rates.

The article did not say that at all. It says that fear harms people, it did not say that radiation does not harm people.

The cigarette comparison is extremely silly, as most people actually choose to not smoke cigarettes out of concern for their health.

>it did not say that radiation does not harm people.

Neither did I.

The article did not even mention radiation levels at Fukushima, yet you quoted it as radiation being not worse than cigarettes.

The radiation levels at the plant gate at Fukushima are quite probably much less carcinogenic than a cigarette habit.

So why don't they evacuate 50km radius around everybody who lights up a cigarette?

Don't get me wrong, I want to believe you, and I am actually hopeful that no lasting damage has been done at Fukushima. But somehow all the optimism does not seem to add up 100%.

Because standing 50km away from someone who lights up a cigarette produces no measurable elevation in cancer risk.

Next question?

Do most people avoid fried food out of a fear of the breakdown of polyunsaturated fats in heat? Do they avoid more than one serving of dairy in a day? Do they avoid red meat? Do they take pains to eat kale and chard and spinach to avoid cancer risks? Do they measure their basements for radon? Do they refuse to live downwind from coal-powered nuclear plants? Do they avoid breathing the fumes at gas stations? Do they keep their car ventilation on internal-circulation-only on congested highways? If they fail to do any of these things, they are in all likelihood far more exposed to cancer than anyone who does them and sustains a 100msv exposure to radiation.

Your attempt to swat away the cigarette point isn't going to succeed. Radiation simply isn't as significant a cancer risk as you're portraying it to be.

So you claim that cigarettes are worse than radiation? I think that is bullshit, sorry (obviously it depends on the level of radiation, and I assume average cigarette consumption - of course you can consume a lethal dose of nicotine, I think). And you are constructing a lot of strawmen. I am simply calling for precise arguments. Maybe those things you quote are true, but then cite the correct sources, not XKCD charts and articles that do NOT contain the information you claim they do.

Btw some people actually worry about the stuff they eat.

Cigarettes are far worse for you than radioactive contamination. Cigarettes will almost reliably give you fatal cancer, no matter who you are.

I wonder why they even bothered to build containments for those reactors.

Because if they didn't build containment for the reactors, the fuel itself could oxidize and ignite, dispersing massive quantities of radioactive material over one of the most populated areas on the earth with virtually no time for anybody to react and mitigate the disaster.

Any other questions, I'm happy to take a crack at!

So is radioactivity harmless or not? Would it have been a problem if the containment had broken?

Radioactivity is not harmless. You would for a variety of reasons prefer that the primary containment at the reactor not be broken.

Small doses of radiation are very likely harmless. We assume that they're not (linear no-threashhold model) just to be overly-cautious.

The evacuation was in case something unpredictable happened and things went very, very bad. The cancer risk for the firefighters is probably similar to if a cigarette factory had caught fire. The hydrogen explosions have always been the primary danger, though, both to the people and to the containment.

If containment had failed explosively (i.e. if they had not deliberately allowed some hydrogen explosions via venting, causing the containment to fail in one giant kaboom instead of the slight damage they think it might have), then we would be looking at troubling amounts of contamination over a moderately sized area.

We would never be in any danger in the USA, though. We just wouldn't. Also, the "kaboom" I was talking about was an ordinary explosive (hydrogen), not a nuclear one. You just can't hit criticality and get a nuclear explosion. The designers make sure it's impossible. Even back when we knew nothing and a few people died from criticality accidents (which were seriously scary in retrospect), they didn't cause a nuclear explosion. It's not that easy. You have to try pretty hard, or Iran would have managed one by now.

First, they evacuated the area you're talking about.

Second, the measurement you're referring to (170usv, btw, not 208msv) was taken outdoors.

Third, the leaked fission products likely to have produced those measurements have short half lives. We're not talking about the Pripyat Zone of Alienation. The area hasn't been rendered unsafe for habitation.

Fourth, you're talking about a spot measurement heavily dependent on the weather; it's not as if an entire 50km radius of the plant is irradiated (though I believe they evacuated the entire area).

Fifth, while consumption of hundreds of bananas an hour is linked to a measurable increase in cancer, it is a microsopic increase observed across large populations.

You are in effect talking about standing outdoors in the worst possible location 50km away from the plant, maximally exposing yourself to radiation leaked at a continuous level sufficient to maintain that exposure despite the half life of the fission products causing it, for TWENTY STRAIGHT DAYS, 24/7, to achieve an increase in cancer that is very probably significantly lower than consumption of red meat, consumption of refined flour, failure to consume enough green leafy vegetables, eating more than one serving of dairy daily, OR eating anything fried in polyunsaturated oil.

All I did was interpret the XKCD chart. Your relativations are pretty irrelevant, if by accident I happen to stand in that highly radiated spot. It seems significant to me that such spots existed 50km away from the plant. The XKCD chart does not say anything about the isotopes involved, so you seem to have some additional information that was not in the XKCD chart. Then I have to say sorry, but maybe the XKCD chart is not as convincing as the wannabe-geeks would like to believe.

Likewise with the "link to cancer risk" - the XKCD chart does not say anything about eating bananas or whatever. It says "dosis x was linked to increased cancer risk" and "50km away the radiation was a twentieth of that dosis".

Outdoors/indoors - yeah, so what if I talk a walk with my dog every day? I don't see your point? It isn't so bad because we can always find ways around it? If mushrooms are poisoned, we just don't eat mushrooms? If radiation is outside, we just don't go outside? If water is poisoned, we just buy bottled water from elsewhere? I don't want to live like that - I strive to live in a relatively carefree environment, thank you very much.

Where I live, I don't run danger to accidentally run into a highly toxic spot on the map. Maybe we have chemical plants, but there are fences and warning signals around them. There are no warning signals for leaked poison from a nuclear accident.

I agree that all you did was interpret XKCD.

You should read more (than XKCD) about the Japanese nuclear event and radiological exposure in general. I think you may be unduly alarmed.

Simply setting foot outdoors with your dog doesn't instantly expose you to an hour's worth of radiation. If you walk your dog for an hour every day, then it will take 480 days for you to achieve the 100msv exposure you're concerned about.

But that's also vanishingly unlikely, because the fission products that produced the 170usv (note units) measurement you are fretting about are short-lived. The few radioactive nuclides produced by the reactor that aren't that short lived aren't simply aspirated out of the air. For 480 days of dog walking to produce this cancer risk you're concerned about (which, again, appears to be significantly lower than the risk you get from eating steaks), the reactor would have to continue leaking radiation at a level comparable to that produced by a spent fuel pond fire, which is the most likely proximate cause of that measurement.

I'm criticizing you for not reasoning through this stuff. It's not a huge mystery. It works in fairly predictable ways. You can measure it and count it and add the risks up. The risks are very, very low.

"I'm criticizing you for not reasoning through this stuff."

I did not even say that I was alarmed, so I criticize you for lumping me in with an imaginary enemy you seem to perceive (the anti-nuclear, global warming warming kind presumably). I just said the XKCD chart is not as comforting as it seems. I don't know what a spent fuel pond is, btw. How did they even measure the increased cancer risk of radiation anyway, if any other daily activity seems to increase the cancer risk much more? I mean how did they isolate the radiation effect among the noise of all the cancer causing things? And what if you eat steaks AND are exposed to radiation? Does the effect of the steak cancel out the radiation effects? I think not.

Do you have a chart about the cancer risk induced by steaks, preferably drawn by XKCD because he makes it so pretty and soothing? And he is a geek, so I must believe hime?

I could point out that I don't eat steaks, but it is not really relevant...

I've read the "Fukushima is a triumph for nuclear power" articles, and I HOPE they are right. I don't think we have all the information yet, though. We don't know what things have leaked exactly. Those articles tend to not mention the cooling pools that don't have enclosings. They say Chernobyl was a cloud of ash that spread very far, but why shouldn't other clouds also spread far? In any case, if those articles are right, the media should be blamed for unnecessarily causing a panic.

If at one measurement point there was 20th of radiation for increased cancer, who says that was even the highest concentration to be found? What if by random chance there are dirt particles from the explosion that radiate more, and I swallow them while I walk my dog?

Btw. I don't like having to breathe the pollution of cars and fossile fuel plants every day either, so it doesn't really comfort me if they are also toxic. I think most cars are superfluous, but that is for another discussion.

Could you link to the source for the nature of the fission products that were being measured?

Watch the video I posted at the top of this thread; they actually break down on the periodic table how the decay produced by the fission at reactors is produced, and the different types and half-lives of the nuclides involved.

The reason "other clouds of ash" (presumably you mean Fukushima's) won't be as damaging as Chernobyl is that Chernobyl was an unshielded graphite fire that raged, producing a gigantic plume of radioactive ash, while Chernobyl was still critical and fissioning. Chernobyl was like a gigantic generator of radioactive contamination; it would have taken engineering effort to make it more damaging.

The things that have caught fire at Fukushima are 100x less radioactive than fissioning reactor fuel, and the fires themselves were much smaller (because, unlike Chernobyl, they aren't essentially being fed by a fuel source almost as flammable as anthracite coal).

I don't think Fukushima was a triumph for nuclear power, by the way (and, because for whatever reason you brought it up, I believe in global warming and support policy initiatives to curb it). There are (more expensive) plant designs that handle loss of cooling power better. Fukushima is a disaster, and it may end up killing many volunteers at the plant itself. But that doesn't mean it's giving everybody --- or even anybody --- within a 50km radius cancer.

"But that doesn't mean it's giving everybody --- or even anybody --- within a 50km radius cancer."

No, just the twentieth of an increased risk for cancer.

As for the isotopes, I thought I heard that Cesium was released, which lasts several years? (no time for watching movies sorry). Some reactors apparently also used Plutonium, though maybe not in the blocks that exploded.

Cesium has a longer half life than most of the radionuclides in vented steam, but it also settles out of the air and doesn't travel as far. Cesium was detectably elevated, but the region isn't blanketed in cesium soot.

The fact that the reactors use MOX fuel doesn't mean plutonium is getting into the atmosphere! That's not how it works. The reactors also don't use cesium as fuel.

Finally, please stop waving the words "increased risk of cancer" around like a voodoo totem. Everything increases your risk of cancer in some way. The notion of cancer risk is only meaningful in relation to something else. More cancer than what? The risk to the general population that you are referring to is, according the published evidence, so low as to be unmeasurable.

Because, you're talking about this situation as if the alternative was "simply not using nuclear power". The cost to human health of not using nuclear power is higher than using it, in two ways. First, the fossil fuel sources which are the only scalable alternative cause demonstrably more harm, both to the environment and to carcinogenesis, than xenon radionuclides detected 50km from Fukushima. Secondly, the malaria and dysentery pathogens that ride alongside lack of electrical power infrastructure reliably kill 1.7 million people every year.

"The notion of cancer risk is only meaningful in relation to something else."

I thought it would be obvious from the context in this thread that the relation is to "not being exposed to radiation".

"as if the alternative was "simply not using nuclear power"."

I never said anything about what I imagine the alternative to be. I don't think I even said nuclear power should be abandoned (although I would like to see it go, true). Just signs for me that you use me as "the imaginary enemy" and don't even look at what I say.

"First, the fossil fuel sources which are the only scalable alternative"

Now you start to make very broad claims. Obviously a lot would have to change, but I heard that humans actually survived for millenia without any electricity at all (no idea how, but still). Not saying we should abandon electricity, but a lot of things could be changed. For example I would not miss cars - I think abandoning the majority of cars would actually enhance our quality of life, not reduce it. Just one example - but I don't claim to have "the" or even "a" solution. One aspect, though: I think fossile fuels and nuclear power are both limited resources (or is nuclear power a perpeteum mobile?). Even if we take it as a "free gift of capital from earth", perhaps we should use that energy to prepare for a time when it is not available anymore, rather than blow it on entertainment. That is, use it to build infrastructure that is less power hungry.

As for the malaria, sorry, but that is bullshit. I know it used to be a problem in areas where it is not now, but I don't think every area without electricity gets a malaria problem. Is there malaria at the north pole??

Isn't malaria far more likely to be caused by politics (and/or population growth), namely groups of people being left in poverty and forced to move into unhealthy regions (swamps) because of that?

Tichy, I've been here for a long time and you've been here for a long time, and I never figured you for a troll. Is this just one of your issues?

What on earth does malaria have to do with electrical power? Dysentery, maybe, since it's clearly easier to run chlorination and sewer plants on a power grid, but malaria? I mean, you can import your bed nets, window screens, doxycycline, and cypermethrin from Iceland if need be, but I don't think they're actually that energy-intensive to produce.

I agree with your overall point, but I think that if you make it in such a non-credible fashion, it makes it harder for the rest of us who agree with you.

I think malaria is correlated with poverty, and poverty is correlated with poor infrastructure. But I also think you're right, and mentioning malaria hurt the point I was trying to make.

I like the chart, but it's a pet peeve of mine to see one-time, daily, monthly, yearly doses all mixed together on the same infographic. Getting 3.6 mSv in 2 days is very much not the same as getting getting 3.6 mSv in one year.

It should also be kept in mind that the sievert is a radiation dose unit used for a variety of arbitrarily defined dose quantities. Grays and sieverts are both J/kg, but you get sieverts by using weighting factors depending on the radiation type, tissue type, organ, and which dose quantity you are calculating.

Most of the dose values reported are referring to "effective dose", which attempts to sort of normalize all exposures in terms of full body exposures, e.g. comparing a hand exposure with a chest exposure. This has a number of issues, but as you can imagine, in radiation protection situations, the exact site of exposure is not always well defined.

What many seem to be missing is that the potential downside of a black swan nuclear catastrophe is many orders of magnitude worse than anything that could occur at a coal plant and includes such lovely scenes as giant radioactive clouds circling the earth. Clearly the Japanese disaster has come nowhere close to this severity, but what would have happened if another larger earthquake and tsunami had struck in the midst of the containment operations? How about five more? Yes, these scenarios are extremely extremely unlikely, but if the possible results include worldwide radiation poisoning, it still could be worth considering, so I think these fears do have some rational basis. Comparisons to x-ray output or air pollution are completely missing the point.

"if the possible results include worldwide radiation poisoning"

Well, they don't. We've blown up dozens upon dozens of nuclear bombs, actual factual nuclear bombs, each of which is far far worse than even the worst possible multi-plant catastrophe that could possibly strike, and all we got was a measurable but as far as I know impact-free increase in radioactive cesium levels in people's bones. (Which is even less impressive than it sounds because it's really easy to measure radiation. "Measurable" is orders of magnitude below "dangerous".) "Some plants melt down and everybody in the world gets radiation poisoning" is not a "Black Swan", that's "The laws of physics have been rewritten" event. We can't plan for those at all.

(No, please do not trot out anything about how we "may not" fully understand the science. Again, if there is some weird circumstance under which some uranium can suddenly become conscious and declare its undying hatred of the human race in magnificent Elizabethan English shortly before completely converting all its mass to energy, rendering the planet sterile in the resulting explosion, it still doesn't matter, because we can't plan for such low-probability events regardless. We understand radioactivity matters well more than we need to to run reactors.)

I am all for rational analysis of the risks, but if you're including actual doomsday scenarios in your analysis, you haven't even started rational analysis yet.

Misleading title - fear affects more people and hence, by some kind of measuring, might do more damage in some cases. It doesn't imply that if you are exposed to both radiation and fear, fear does more damage.

Besides, the fear is a real consequence of such disasters.

As for the calculations of "only 500 people died of radiation" after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I am not sure I trust those. All kinds of stories seem to float around (also for Chernobyl), I would like to see some serious studies determining who died of what. Since radiation might kill slowly, it could be difficult to study.

Also the comparison to other toxins is plain silly and betrays the article as a propaganda piece.

> Besides, the fear is a real consequence of such disasters.

I was thinking the same thing. Fear/anxiety/depression/despair are predictable, measurable and likely unavoidable.

The basic fear may be unavoidable, but the current media coverage is ridiculously overblown (there is one casualty so far at Fukushima---due to a fallen crane, not any kind of radiation).

This is fearmongering, and this _is_ avoidable.

Media trying to cause a panic, news at 11.

This was my conclusion as well. It was somewhat true at Chernobyl, definitely true at Three Mile Island and it's going to be exponentially more true at Fukushima.

In addition, irrational fears will devastate Japan food exports for years - Kobe beef and sushi industries better look to diversify.

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