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Comment by Supermancho | Hacker News Reader

> The only deaths from the Fukushima disaster were caused by the unnecessary evacuation of 160,000 people, including seniors in nursing homes.)

This kind of revisionist statement is why people are suspect of people saying "it's bad, but not all that bad". They are usually lying about lots of things, when they supposedly have the facts on their side.

https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste... https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect... etc

Many of the barriers are due to simple game theory. If a project mischaracterizes or has an unlikely event that results in a leak, you cannot take it back. The damage is done and likely is out of the project's control, to some degree.

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If you read your own links you'll note that literally nobody can directly attribute any negative consequences in humans from radiation.

It's all conjecture. The only direct cause of harm is the 1600 that died in the evacuation.

> It's all conjecture.

That's incorrect. It's about timing and managing public opinion. Saying they haven't died yet (or deaths not being attributeed), is a matter of PR. Splitting hairs is hand wringing of the highest order. I hand you a pellet that emits 30rads and you throw it away, but have blood disorders and hemorrhages in 6 months that ultimately kill you...was that not an attributable death?

The radiation has had a measurable effect, eg http://www2.ans.org/misc/FukushimaSpecialSession-Caracappa.p... which will not be attributed because of a lack of ability to directly correlate individuals and cancer sources via modern methods (most importantly, for liability purposes), not because there is an uncertainty about the result of such exposure in a population. It's not 0-1 deaths.

I do agree that the sentence is misleading and likely wrong (you can't be certain about how many people died of radiation, simply because the effect is so low that it's lost in noise).

On the other hand, it's not that far from the truth: Wikipedia states one(!) confirmed death from radiation and 2,202 from evacuation. In terms of objectivity, it's less terrible than anything we get from Greenpeace.

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