Fukushima radiation did not damage health of local people, UN says
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl [1], Fukushima (cf. article) and even Hiroshima [2], it is pretty safe to say that radiation poses a much smaller risk to humans than is often propagated in the horror scenarios of many environmental groups. The theory most of these scenarios are based on, ie. that every little amount of radiation lineraly increases the risks for cancer, is pretty much debunked. So, yes, nuclear is a dangerous technology, esp. if we keep stopping reserch and progress happening on a large scale and don't replace the 50 year old reactors. But coal kills tens of thousands every year and nuclear is still one of the few relatively reliable, almost CO2 neutral power sources we have.
[1] https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/
Ever heard of the Chernobyl babies born in Poland and Ukraine? My wife happens to be in that category and safe to say she has plenty of similar issues to other people in the same 'category'. Thyroid issues are a serious problem for many young women around here and it cannot be a coincidence.
But I still do believe that nuclear is the way forward without doubt though. Just that these studies seem to be way off with the ongoing effects.
Even then there will be confounding effects. People are, generally, richer now than pre-Chernobyl. They will, generally, have better access to better healthcare.
I grew up in an impacted area; you might call it downwind of Chernobyl. My mother had thyroid cancer at a young age and now had no thyroid. Numerous female relatives as well as friends and acquaintances have experienced similar problems and those are all associated with Chernobyl.
Here’s a single scientific source. There are more, but I’m sure you’re eager to demonstrate your hypothesis that women in Eastern Europe are getting cancer not from industrial accidents but from cousin marriage.
My mum died when she was 36 because she had spent a couple of years working in a battery production factory in LT. I remember visiting her too! The amount of cancer, the locations of it and the aggressiveness of the growths found in her pointed to the simple fact that she was exposed to incredibly harsh chemicals. But it could be blamed on X, Y, Z if need be but this is the reality of it.
Cousin marriages and cancer? Wow.
Thyroid issues are super common. Might be related but also may very well not be.
(I’m not taking a position either way as I have no data, but they’re clearly not accusing Chernobyl neighbors of mating with cousins.)
There are also studies related to increased birth defect rates, but it's harder to conclude anything there, as birth defects can be caused by alcohol consumption, malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies.
https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm
Chernobyl was an exceptionally unsafe reactor, and didn't have a containment dome. Fukushima did have decent containment and didn't release nearly as much radiation.
I find this sort of thing is a reminder that I always need to find multiple sources, try to understand what the studies are and the extent they cover the topic and what the experts are saying about them to get a fair idea of what is going on.
Its also a reminder that everyone has biases, both implicit and explicit, and it reminds me that I need to constantly review my stances to ensure I'm not only going by what my own biases want to follow (instead of the facts).as well as ensure I identify why a group may support one thing, but not another when currently available and reviewed info suggests both are correct.
I also try and discourage myself from two other things I find common. The first is taking a large organization and assigning the same value to anything and everything they produce, even when its an org of many people and experts who have different internal groups that are experts in different areas. Its too easy to go "oh this group knows their stuff of X, published by doctors A, B, C. That is automatically equal to this other paper on a completely different topic published by Doctors X, Y, and Z."
Funny enough some of the very earliest parts of the movement went pro nuclear because they hoped it would prevent dams that destroy natural habitats.
But of course the modern environmental movement is more concern enforcing some sort of anti-rational neo-naturalism. They always disagree with science on things that are 'unnatural' whatever that means, being against nuclear and GMO.
Of course the repeatably also embrace and advertise the worst kind of anti-science alternative medicine, natural healing, homeopathy and all matter of utter nonsense.
That is why I hate these organizations with a passion. They are anti-human, not pro-environment.
> “On the balance of available evidence, the large increase ... in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure,” Unscear said.
“Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously detected.”
----
In order to have any confidence in that statement, wouldn't you also have to pick a representative population far away from Fukushima which could not have possibly been exposed to radiation, numbering in the many thousands of people, to conduct thyroid examinations/screenings on and determine if the extra level of scrutiny and analysis was also turning up a similar number of previously unseen abnormalities?
did they do that?
edit ohh, I think you're trying to say that missing those people would somehow contaminate the sample? They would not be in the sample group even if records were more diligently kept. The studies I'm discussing are testing something else.
The Pacific Ocean is enormous and the dilution makes the broader environmental impact of any radiation risks negligible. Locally may be a different story, of course.
The highest concentrations of Cs-137 and Cs-134 I've seen in albacore on our coast so far result in a CEDE (committed effective dose equivalent, which accounts for the type of radiation, the sensitivity of each organ, and how long any ingested Cs is retained in your body) of 18.01 nSv per kg ingested, which works out to about 330,000 kg to equal the normal annual dose in the Pacific Northwest (6 mSv, 3 mSv from natural sources, 3 mSv from mainly medical exposures). About 1/3rd of the dose from said highest Cs level albacore is from pre-Fukushima weapons fallout. The average american eats about 7 kg of albacore in a year, which puts an reasonable upper limit of about 126 uSv over the course of a year, and you'd need to live for over 47,000 years before you ate enough albacore to result in a CEDE equal to the normal annual dose. Even if your entire diet (2,000 calories per day) was nothing from albacore, and all of it was at the highest levels we've ever seen, and ignoring the fact this radioactivity is decaying and won't be around forever, we're talking 578 years before you'd eat enough albacore to reach that benchmark of 330,000 kg (and end up with a lifetime dose increase of 0.14%).
For comparison, spooning with your partner over 8 hours of sleep each night results in a dose of 13.40 nSv each month from the potassium-40 in their body exposing you to additional gamma irradiation.
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushim...
This is a complicated topic, as willfully or not a lot of the numbers that people used to throw around (contamination level of water, air, child cancer numbers etc.) have been reajusted in the last years, and health effects are not explicitely labelled as “radiation related”, making it difficult to just throw a “look, told you so” kind of press article at people in online discussions.
There’s a lot of conspiracy theories, but a lot of gov. bullshitting as well. Overall my understanding is radiations (including from the rain in the first days, and from the food/soil that has been moved) had some ambient effect, but not to tv drama proportions.
Also, I’m not sure where you get your numbers from.
Actually, it was and that’s also what the UNSCEAR report concluded.
Not to mention, the UNSEAR report did not conclude evacuation was unnecessary. Not that that matters, since, of course, the information in the UNSEAR report wasn’t available at the time the of the evacuations. Evacuation is a safety precaution. You don’t not evacuate because maybe some of it isn’t necessary.
We don't actually know what the health-effects without the evacuation would have been, though we can probably estimate it.
What we do know is that the health-effects of the evacuation were severe, with many people killed (same as for Chernobyl). The numbers are in the thousands. So the evacuation was obviously too large, the cure worse than the disease.
But by how much?
Research says: all of it. Nobody should have been evacuated.
"The present analysis provides endorsement of that study’s conclusion that the post-1990 relocation of 220,000 members of the public could not be justified on the grounds of radiological health benefit."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
That's easy to say in hindsight. How do you make a judgement about that in the hours/days after the accident?
The better-safe-than-sorry approach is probably to evacuate whenever there is a nuclear accident where the building is damaged.
But there should be efforts to set up evacuation plans that's not as panicked and doesn't lead to so many deaths.
That's the current limitation of our technology. If we could measure radiation levels in a large scale with high resolution within, say, few hrs/days, maybe we didn't have to evacuate all those people. We can't, so we should.
If you have a whole bunch of radiation sensors spread around your nuclear plant, you know the level of radiation that people are likely to be exposed to in the near future. If you know the effects of radiation on people, you can predict the health consequences of allowing them to be exposed. If you have records of increased death rates in various evacuations, you can predict the cost of evacuating in this instance. Compare the cost of the two options, go with the better one.
It would be one thing if it was the early days of nuclear power and no one knew what the effects of radiation were, and no one had ever considered the possibility of an accident, but this is a mature technology which people have spent decades studying in close detail. People knew at the time that the evacuation plan was a bad idea, and this current report comes as no surprise. By simply assuming that the better-safe-than-sorry approach was to evacuate rather than consulting models based on data, those in charge killed a lot of people.
Fukushima pref is 3rd largest prefecture in Japan and not so many people is escaped at the incident. I believe enough number of people had escaped as a result.
This was in response to someone claiming the response was correct in hindsight.
It was not.
Furthermore, there actually was information available beforehand, if nothing else than at least the data from Chernobyl, where the negative health-effects of the evacuation also vastly exceeded the negative health-effects of radiation. In fact the same study concluded that only a fraction of the evacuation was justified (though more than zero as was the case in Fukushima).
And that was with a reactor without a proper containment vessel. Last I checked, the Fukushima primary containment vessels weren't breached (the hydrogen explosions blew the roof off the secondary containment, which I think was designed to fail first in order to protect the primary containment vessel inside it from overpressure).
So the risk was far less. It was also a fairly slow-moving process.
> The better-safe-than-sorry approach [..]
...is exactly what got us into trouble, because we have a skewed, non-reality-based perception of what "safe" is in the context of nuclear power. I can't really tell, but it seems that the danger from the nuclear plant is perceived to be something akin to that from an atomic bomb: sudden/immediate, very lethal and horrible.
It's not.
Even in the (initially expected) worst case from Chernobyl, the expected health effects were an increase in cancer mortality in later life that even in that worst case would be extremely hard to detect statistically, stemming from prolonged exposure to slightly elevated levels of ionising radiation.
The actual measured health effects were far less pronounced than that initially expected worst case. The WHO did a report every 10 years after the disaster. Each time, as actual data came in, they massively downgraded the expected death toll from the accident.
> But there should be efforts to set up evacuation plans that's not as panicked and doesn't lead to so many deaths.
Yes. And those efforts need to balance the actual risk of staying in place, which is often small to negligible, against the very real consequences of the evacuation.
UPDATE:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/physician-has-studie...
from: https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/03/01/radiation-and-cancer-r...
In reality it's one of the best energy sources we have
It was not uncommon even in the 70s for 'environmentalist' anti-nuclear organization to be sponsored by fossil fuel industry.
The controversial opinion? Nuclear sucks because you lose a city every generation, even if you're the most advanced, organization nation on Earth (Japan) you can still make mistakes that have consequences for decades to centuries.
No, you don't. Fukushima had a 2010 population of 20,000. It has 17,000 today. And it dropped from 22,000 to 20,000 between 2000 and 2020 so not all of the population reduction was due to nuclear disaster.
Likewise, Pripyat was a planned town designed specifically to support the nuclear plants. When the nuclear plants closes, the town had no reason to continue existing. Like mining towns when the mines are exhausted.
"As of the end of December 2015, 51 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer in the second examina-tion conducted by Fukushima Prefecture.... As of the end of June 2015, 113 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer. Of these, 99 people underwent surgery.... the Fukushima Prefectural Citizens Health Survey Committee has not recognized these thyroid cancer cases as the result of the Fukushima accident; the Committee’s reasoning is... that some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed."[0]
[0] Katsuta T. (2019).'The Reality after Fukushima in Japan - Actual Damage to Local People'. https://web.archive.org/web/20200326151713/https://link.spri...
Some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed. Should medicine not err on the side of caution? Given the results near Chernobyl?
At any rate, there were certainly deaths as a result of the plant's failure. About 2000 people died as a consequence of disaster-related evacuation measures. Whether the radiation was directly responsible or not, the damage to the plant and very real dangers of potential exposure undeniably led to those deaths. Is the UN saying that evacuating tens of thousands was an over-reaction? Was the extreme threat posed by the highly unstable condition of Unit 4 "over-diagnosed" by most western experts?
The ongoing spin on this topic is disgusting. March of FUD.
Which means that possibly:
1)there were adverse health effects among Fukushima residents that were not documented. 2)there were adverse health effects that could not be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident. 3)adverse health effects have not manifested themselves yet
For a hyperbolic example, no adverse health effects have been documented that could be directly attributed to people reading the post you made. All three of your possibilities would still apply.
This article [3] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory REVIEW (1993 I believe, so a bit dated) states "The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants"
[1]( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...) [2]( https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html) PDF Warning: [3]( https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/ORNL%20Review%20v26...)
Fukushima cost $200B to cleanup in order for it to not wind up killing anyone.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1325/
I suspect the mental health of the local fishermen was well an truly tested and will continue to be tested by that disaster.
Fish were shown to be healthy for consumption's shortly after the event, but the media still reports on the insignificant amount of radiation in water associated to the disaster. By comparison, when is the last time you heard of the lingering effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill, where oil on the seafloor surface will cause contamination in some fish for years to come?
(Link to their report, from near the end of the Guardian article:
https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20... )
Does not mean that they are wrong. I also don't see them purposefully modifying information aka. lying. But the probability of their biases getting in the way of objective reporting is non-trivial.
For clarification, I'm mainly reacting to the headline rather than the thyroid cancer survey. I don't have an opinion either way about that without seeing much more background, and that seems more complex than I'll have time to dig into today.
All I could find was complaints that the acceptable-safe radiation limit had been raised, and that a few selected locations within the area had levels that were slightly above the previous and well below the new levels.
Nothing about actual health damage from radiation.
I haven't looked into Strontium 90 health effects specifically though, does anyone have good sources for how concerning that is?
Gotta love a lobby job of PR/damage control! This is even better than the work of the Japanese government itself. Insulting to our intelligence, but good PR work nonetheless...
In any case, up there with "Covid-19? No big deal", also in WHO greatest hits.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-loo...
2. "Preliminary investigations..." so this was not presented as a definitive conclusion, just as preliminary findings...by someone else.
3. "... have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission..." This is not "there is no transmission" or even "found evidence that there is no transmission" and it's not even "have found no evidence for", but "have found no clear evidence for"
So basically every word of your post is a mis-representation of the original tweet.
And it seems that Californian people enjoyed their tuna meals, now atom flavoured, found in San Diego since 2011 so, if everybody is happy and we can always produce more babies to replace the hundreds of crippled ones... end of the problem, "I can't see you, I can't hear you, la, la, la", etc...
Let me introduce yourself this little marvel of biology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation
"We don't found" and "does not exist" are different terms. "Report couldn't prove damage" would be a much better title, or at least closer to truth.
With bioaccumulation is the same, our knowledge of marine biology and marine ecosystems is still poor in lots of cases. Californian woman get pregnant also, as japanese women do, so this spiral goes a little deeper than the "is just like a banana so people is safe" simple claim. This is not a simple problem.
Nobody can't accurately evaluate the final effects of a process that is very complex, is still running, and is far from ending. This is plain lying in the face of people. "We are still grasping the surface of this" is not the same as "didn't happened".
You are the one who just said "Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit". Was that or was that not the case?
But the worse is that the report authors seem to be very, very carefully, circumnavigating the evidence, that is not so difficult to find in fact.
An example that fish eaters (AKA 100% of Japanese people) could find interesting:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-4-431-55...
What are you basing this claim on?
Is not a secret than Iodine-131 exceeded by 5 millions the legal limit and Cesium-137 in seawater raised from 0.1 to 100000. Consult the bibliography.
> Nobody can accurately evaluate the final effects of a process that is very complex, is still running, and is far from ending.
We face a significantly more serious global process that is very complex and has no end in sight that threatens to destabilize human civilization and result in countless deaths. Barring a miracle in energy storage technology or the invention of nuclear fusion the choice we have in decarbonizing the global energy mix is nuclear fission.