The triumph of coal marketing
sethgodin.typepad.com
sethgodin.typepad.com
"there have been 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, but that except for nine deaths, all of them have recovered."
Yes, let's ignore birth defects, any long-term increased risk, hugely increased cancer prevalence, and the fact that some 2500-3000 square kilometers of land will be unavailable for any serious development for like a thousand of years. Out of the three people I knew who were relocated from the exclusion zone, one died from cancer nine years after the event, at 40 years of age. While this is anecdotal evidence on my part, most of the reports I have heard were similar.
For example, some 5,700 square kilometers of land have been changed because of mountain removal mining, with "serious environmental impacts that mitigation practices cannot successfully address" says an article in _Science_ magazine. Wastes from coal production poison some waterways.
How does one weigh, say, the present day cancers of the Navajo who worked as uranium miners in the 1950s against the more immediate diseases and disasters of the coal mine industries?
I was told that 1/2 of the particulate matter in the air above Hawaii comes from volcanoes, and the rest come from coal burning in Asia. At that sort of global scale and with such loose coupling between cause and effect, it becomes hard to assign meaningful direct numbers.
Now measuring cancer risk, even a long term one, while painstaking, is not exactly rocket science. There are multiple large-scale medical studies that do just that very effectively, it's just they tended not to focus on Chernobyl area for whatever reason, most likely due to funding.
One difficulty with the projection is that the author assumes that 4000 is the only number to consider regarding deaths with nuclear power. For roof installation he includes roofing accidents, but it does not include the (rather few) people who have died in industrial accidents with nuclear reactors. These are much fewer than 4,000 but he omits deaths due to mining accidents related to uranium extraction (only saying that it's less than coal) and neither does he use estimates for the deaths corresponding to steel and concrete production, like he does for wind power.
To be fair, elsewhere his pages go into the differences in the amount of materials needed for each one, and I think the differences I pointed out above are small corrections to the gross numbers given.