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Comment by drdeadringer | Hacker News Reader

I remember "older" // "elderly" Japanese folks volunteering themselves as available to help deal with Fukushima, along the lines of "What to I care of radiation, I'm old and have already had children? I want to still contribute, call me up". I wonder about this as a source of labor for demolition.

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Chance of cancer and/or sterility isn't the limit of the problem. Acute radiation sickness would put a damper on their enthusiasm real quick.

Until you have this jumbled mess of radioactive debris thoroughly mapped, you don't want to send anyone in there, and once you do, there are going to be a lot of places they just can't go. Cleanup workers lying on the ground vomiting their guts out aren't helping anyone.

I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human health, yet. Certainly, if one person could sacrifice themselves to save 100,000,000 from certain doom, then it's an easy calculation. (Not me or my family, though, please.) The current situation is more like "this is expensive to keep cool". No need to kill anyone else.

>I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human health, yet.

Yet? The odds it ever will be are infinitesimal.

There are nuclear engineers, doctors, highly trained technicians, government agencies and regulatory bodies who handle cleaning up nuclear accidents. Untrained elderly people would not help at all.

Remember the tsunami killed 20,000 people that day and Fukushima never killed anyone. Might be some cancers years down the road but the idea of sacrificing the elderly to save the world from some nuclear disaster belongs in a comic book, not reality.

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