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In what way is it not worse than Chernobyl? Fukushima is a triple meltdown and the cores are not entombed in concrete. If people die from Fukushima they will

by 2AF3 10y ago

In what way is it not worse than Chernobyl? Fukushima is a triple meltdown and the cores are not entombed in concrete. If people die from Fukushima they will die of cancer and not 'radiation' so we won't know the real mortality numbers for a long time.

jessriedel 10y ago
> If people die from Fukushima they will die of cancer and not 'radiation' so we won't know the real mortality numbers for a long time. We likely won't ever know the real numbers because they will be well within the statistical noise. This is why the linear no-threshold model is so difficult to test.
zymhan 10y ago
Because Chernobyl spread a radioactive gas cloud across Europe that likely caused tens of thousands of extra cancer cases and deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas... As another poster pointed out, so many more people died from the actual tsunami than have or will die from the Fukushima meltdown.
- 2AF3 10y ago
  The other poster doesn't know how many people will die from the meltdown especially since there's no agreement on estimating Chernobyl deaths. The pro-nuclear crowd proudly boasts the number is zero which I don't believe, the plant manager died of radiation as many of the sailors on the USS Reagan, which brings the total up from zero.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    A reasonable boundary on excess deaths can be identified by taking the number of cancers and adjust for pre-fukushima cancer rates. There's no reason to under-estimate it - even with absolute worst case estimates based on past experience from Chernobyl etc., nuclear comes favourably out in terms of health effects / deaths per unit of energy. The biggest harm that Fukushima might do would be to reduce investment in nuclear vs. more harmful power plants like coal (which incidentally releases more radioactive material every few years than every nuclear accident combined), or hydro (dam accidents have killed shocking numbers of people). Even rooftop solar (people fall off roofs, and since each installation on average produces so little, the numbers add up; larger purpose built solar installations are as far as I know far safer)
    - 2AF3 10y ago
      Not all radioactive material is created equal. I would read an article about how dangerous the coal plant radioactive material if anyone knows of one.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        Here [1]. Fly ash from coal plants tends to contain concentrated amounts of uranium and thorium. In countries with stringent enough regulation, the biggest problem is disposal of the fly ash - other place the problem also include substantial amounts being pumped into the atmosphere, and overall coal ends up killing a lot of people. Note that this is not just radiation but also heart attacks and respiratory problems. E.g. here [2] are numbers claiming deaths from US coal fired plants alone (which are by no means the worst ones) kill 13,000 people in the US every year. [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r... [2] http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plant_emissions http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan...
      - opo 10y ago
        >...A 1978 paper from Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimated that coal-fired power plants of that time may contribute a whole-body committed dose of 19 µSv/a to their immediate neighbours in a 500 m radius.[46] The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation's 1988 report estimated the committed dose 1 km away to be 20 µSv/a for older plants or 1 µSv/a for newer plants with improved fly ash capture, but was unable to confirm these numbers by test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coal_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co... But really the radioactive emissions from coal plants (and the exposure through their unmonitored waste piles) is really an insignificant danger compared to the air pollution problems where tens of thousands of people are killed each year from burning coal. The mercury emissions are also helping to poison the oceans and the CO2 emissions are also a big cause of climate change.
        Gibbon1 10y ago
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    Except we do, we know that it is likely nobody will die from the meltdown. We know that because we have 30 years of Ukrainian data and we can see that there was no measurable increase in cancers or cancer related deaths from people in the surrounding area. Human beings have grown up in a "radiation rich" environment in the form of background radiation from natural sources. We have evolved many mechanisms to deal with that. We don't have enough experience or data to precisely know how much radiation you can be exposed to before your body's natural defense mechanism is compromised but after Chernobyl and Fukishima we know that it is a lot higher than the levels experienced outside the fences of the facilities. We know that by studying people who have experienced the exposure. That is the same reason we know a lot about how quickly people can be killed by coal dust, or arsenic, or any number of heavy metals that fall out of the sky when you you live down wind (or down stream) of a coal fired power plant. We have documented the thousands of people who have died and gotten sick from unfiltered coal stacks and we have created regulations that prevent that from happening in the future. Sometimes it means that a coal fired plant has to close (because it is too expensive to retrofit scrubbers to the output) and sometimes it means the cost of your power goes up as retrofit costs are passed on to the consumers.
    - jellicle 10y ago
      > We know that because we have 30 years of Ukrainian data and we can see that there was no measurable increase in cancers or cancer related deaths from people in the surrounding area. What? There is plenty of evidence of increased cancer in the surrounding area. https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/ChernobylRadiation https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/Chern... http://chernobyl.cancer.gov http://chernobyl.cancer.gov http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html Note that many of the rosy assessments are about people who weren't really affected. If you live in France, you got a little radiation from Chernobyl, but not enough to measurably affect your health. That's good! It's reassuring to most of the population of Europe! But the health impact on people local to the event who got significantly more radiation exposure is far from zero. We should also keep in mind that the country receiving the most fallout, Belarus, is a dictatorship that is essentially a black hole of public health data and does not report radiation problems.
- andybak 10y ago
  > that likely caused tens of thousands of extra cancer cases and deaths. From a very quick reading of that (fairly complex) Wikipedia article - 'tens of thousands' needs to be caveated rather heavily. Estimates range wildly and disagreements about methodology abound. Some example quotes: > The total deaths reliably attributable by UNSCEAR to the radiation produced by the accident therefore was 62. > The full version of the WHO health effects report [...] predicted that, in total, 9000 will die from cancer among the 6.9 million most-exposed Soviet citizens. This report is not free of controversy, and has been accused of trying to minimize the consequences of the accident. > Greenpeace suggested there will be 270,000 cases of cancer attributable to Chernobyl fallout, and that 93,000 of these will probably be fatal. So - it seems estimates range from 62 to 270,000... I'm not qualified to determine which end of that range is the most plausible.
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    "considerable uncertainty ... estimates point to several thousand deaths ... will be indiscernible from the background of overall deaths in the population group. The estimate does not substantiate earlier claims that tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths will be caused by radiation exposures from the Chernobyl accident" - [1] p2 "The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem caused by the accident to date" -- [1] p95 One thing to note is that these estimates have been dropping consistently over the years as more data has become available. [1] Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programs, World Health Organization http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43447/1/9241594179_eng.pdf http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43447/1/9241594179_... (2006)
  - zymhan 10y ago
    I was purposefully being vague. 10,000 seems to me to be a lower bound on casualties.
  - Iv 10y ago
    The problem is that people (especially reporters) often replace "It caused X more cancers" with "It caused X more deaths". The thing is that the most likely cancer to happen because of radiation is the thyroid cancer, that an early detection makes curable 99% of the time. So an appropriately warned population may see 1000 more cancers, resulting in about 10 more deaths. That's why so many different numbers are waved around.
Ygg2 10y ago
In the way, it didn't happen out of the blue or didn't release radioactive cloud on other parts. Chernobyl happened during routine testing. Fukushima, took a highly destructive Tsunami to meltdown.
- 2AF3 10y ago
  Everyone knows a tsunami caused Fukushima, the question is 1) what are the health implications of it and 2) can it ever be contained? The answers seem to be 1) we can't measure (it now) and 2) no.
  - ef4 10y ago
    If "we can't measure" is true, that's extremely strong evidence that the effect is not very large.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1_2__3 10y ago
    Are you sharing an article, or an agenda?
    - 2AF3 10y ago
      I'm not the one making bad faith arguments like 'the only negative result is public distrust of nuclear plants'
- mikeash 10y ago
  Extreme nitpick: the test which caused Chernobyl to explode was unauthorized, reckless, and far from routine. But this doesn't change your point overall.
vidarh 10y ago
I grew up in Norway. While I am very positive to nuclear - even with worst case estimates for Chernobyl, nuclear is one of the safest ways we have of getting energy - it's worth realising that even today reindeer from certain parts of Norway needs to be checked for radiation before slaughter, as radioactive cesium carried into the atmosphere rained down over parts of Norway, and depending on weather etc. reindeers some years end up eating more mushrooms and other food that is contaminated. It's expected that this will continue for decades still. Fukushima did not release a similar cloud of radioactive materials over such large areas.
- 2AF3 10y ago
  The radiation is going into the Pacific and not the air, maybe that's preferable.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    It's much preferable to the extent it gets diluted. The problem in Europe after Chernobyl was not that we were radiated to any appreciable extent, but the spread of cesium and iodine dust that got into the soil. Even then the reason it had much effect at all is that things like mushrooms and certain plants will take it up and concentrate it, and become food for animals that end up in our foodchain (e.g. sheep and reindeer in Norway tend to roam freely and graze on public land). The risk from this is/was quite limited, but it is quite limited because it is managed by monitoring radiation levels of meat from affected areas.
ef4 10y ago
Geography alone makes Fukushima less bad for human health. Beyond the immediate vicinity, most of Fukushima's contamination is going into the Pacific. We have very good data on how diluted that radiation is once it gets to places people actually live, and the answer is "extremely diluted". The prevailing weather all moves to the east, directly out to sea. Whereas Chernobyl spread its contamination across a populated continent. If you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much better than the Pacific ocean. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like Bikini Atoll.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  If you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much worse than the upper atmosphere. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like high altitude atmosphere (launched from the pacific ocean). Safety may have played a role but AFAIK these nukes were exploded in this part of the world mostly because it was remote enough from the countries doing the testing. After a few decades of dumping radioactive waste in oceans, we came back from the belief that dumping radioactive waste in the ocean is mostly harmless and a ban on this practice was put up in 1993.
mikeash 10y ago
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Chernobyl_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Ch..., Fukushima released about 900PBq of radioactivity, of which the vast majority went into the Pacific Ocean where it will be essentially harmless. Chernobyl released 5200PBq of which most fell on inhabited land in Europe. What made Chernobyl so bad wasn't just that it melted down, but that the graphite moderator in the core caught fire and burned for days, which spread lots of core material far and wide.

by 2AF3 10y ago

jessriedel 10y ago

> If people die from Fukushima they will die of cancer and not 'radiation' so we won't know the real mortality numbers for a long time. We likely won't ever know the real numbers because they will be well within the statistical noise. This is why the linear no-threshold model is so difficult to test.

zymhan 10y ago

Because Chernobyl spread a radioactive gas cloud across Europe that likely caused tens of thousands of extra cancer cases and deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas... As another poster pointed out, so many more people died from the actual tsunami than have or will die from the Fukushima meltdown.

2AF3 10y ago
The other poster doesn't know how many people will die from the meltdown especially since there's no agreement on estimating Chernobyl deaths. The pro-nuclear crowd proudly boasts the number is zero which I don't believe, the plant manager died of radiation as many of the sailors on the USS Reagan, which brings the total up from zero.
- vidarh 10y ago
  A reasonable boundary on excess deaths can be identified by taking the number of cancers and adjust for pre-fukushima cancer rates. There's no reason to under-estimate it - even with absolute worst case estimates based on past experience from Chernobyl etc., nuclear comes favourably out in terms of health effects / deaths per unit of energy. The biggest harm that Fukushima might do would be to reduce investment in nuclear vs. more harmful power plants like coal (which incidentally releases more radioactive material every few years than every nuclear accident combined), or hydro (dam accidents have killed shocking numbers of people). Even rooftop solar (people fall off roofs, and since each installation on average produces so little, the numbers add up; larger purpose built solar installations are as far as I know far safer)
  - 2AF3 10y ago
    Not all radioactive material is created equal. I would read an article about how dangerous the coal plant radioactive material if anyone knows of one.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      Here [1]. Fly ash from coal plants tends to contain concentrated amounts of uranium and thorium. In countries with stringent enough regulation, the biggest problem is disposal of the fly ash - other place the problem also include substantial amounts being pumped into the atmosphere, and overall coal ends up killing a lot of people. Note that this is not just radiation but also heart attacks and respiratory problems. E.g. here [2] are numbers claiming deaths from US coal fired plants alone (which are by no means the worst ones) kill 13,000 people in the US every year. [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r... [2] http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plant_emissions http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan...
    - opo 10y ago
      >...A 1978 paper from Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimated that coal-fired power plants of that time may contribute a whole-body committed dose of 19 µSv/a to their immediate neighbours in a 500 m radius.[46] The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation's 1988 report estimated the committed dose 1 km away to be 20 µSv/a for older plants or 1 µSv/a for newer plants with improved fly ash capture, but was unable to confirm these numbers by test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coal_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co... But really the radioactive emissions from coal plants (and the exposure through their unmonitored waste piles) is really an insignificant danger compared to the air pollution problems where tens of thousands of people are killed each year from burning coal. The mercury emissions are also helping to poison the oceans and the CO2 emissions are also a big cause of climate change.
      - Gibbon1 10y ago
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Except we do, we know that it is likely nobody will die from the meltdown. We know that because we have 30 years of Ukrainian data and we can see that there was no measurable increase in cancers or cancer related deaths from people in the surrounding area. Human beings have grown up in a "radiation rich" environment in the form of background radiation from natural sources. We have evolved many mechanisms to deal with that. We don't have enough experience or data to precisely know how much radiation you can be exposed to before your body's natural defense mechanism is compromised but after Chernobyl and Fukishima we know that it is a lot higher than the levels experienced outside the fences of the facilities. We know that by studying people who have experienced the exposure. That is the same reason we know a lot about how quickly people can be killed by coal dust, or arsenic, or any number of heavy metals that fall out of the sky when you you live down wind (or down stream) of a coal fired power plant. We have documented the thousands of people who have died and gotten sick from unfiltered coal stacks and we have created regulations that prevent that from happening in the future. Sometimes it means that a coal fired plant has to close (because it is too expensive to retrofit scrubbers to the output) and sometimes it means the cost of your power goes up as retrofit costs are passed on to the consumers.
  - jellicle 10y ago
    > We know that because we have 30 years of Ukrainian data and we can see that there was no measurable increase in cancers or cancer related deaths from people in the surrounding area. What? There is plenty of evidence of increased cancer in the surrounding area. https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/ChernobylRadiation https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/Chern... http://chernobyl.cancer.gov http://chernobyl.cancer.gov http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html Note that many of the rosy assessments are about people who weren't really affected. If you live in France, you got a little radiation from Chernobyl, but not enough to measurably affect your health. That's good! It's reassuring to most of the population of Europe! But the health impact on people local to the event who got significantly more radiation exposure is far from zero. We should also keep in mind that the country receiving the most fallout, Belarus, is a dictatorship that is essentially a black hole of public health data and does not report radiation problems.
andybak 10y ago
> that likely caused tens of thousands of extra cancer cases and deaths. From a very quick reading of that (fairly complex) Wikipedia article - 'tens of thousands' needs to be caveated rather heavily. Estimates range wildly and disagreements about methodology abound. Some example quotes: > The total deaths reliably attributable by UNSCEAR to the radiation produced by the accident therefore was 62. > The full version of the WHO health effects report [...] predicted that, in total, 9000 will die from cancer among the 6.9 million most-exposed Soviet citizens. This report is not free of controversy, and has been accused of trying to minimize the consequences of the accident. > Greenpeace suggested there will be 270,000 cases of cancer attributable to Chernobyl fallout, and that 93,000 of these will probably be fatal. So - it seems estimates range from 62 to 270,000... I'm not qualified to determine which end of that range is the most plausible.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  "considerable uncertainty ... estimates point to several thousand deaths ... will be indiscernible from the background of overall deaths in the population group. The estimate does not substantiate earlier claims that tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths will be caused by radiation exposures from the Chernobyl accident" - [1] p2 "The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem caused by the accident to date" -- [1] p95 One thing to note is that these estimates have been dropping consistently over the years as more data has become available. [1] Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programs, World Health Organization http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43447/1/9241594179_eng.pdf http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/43447/1/9241594179_... (2006)
- zymhan 10y ago
  I was purposefully being vague. 10,000 seems to me to be a lower bound on casualties.
- Iv 10y ago
  The problem is that people (especially reporters) often replace "It caused X more cancers" with "It caused X more deaths". The thing is that the most likely cancer to happen because of radiation is the thyroid cancer, that an early detection makes curable 99% of the time. So an appropriately warned population may see 1000 more cancers, resulting in about 10 more deaths. That's why so many different numbers are waved around.

Ygg2 10y ago

In the way, it didn't happen out of the blue or didn't release radioactive cloud on other parts. Chernobyl happened during routine testing. Fukushima, took a highly destructive Tsunami to meltdown.

2AF3 10y ago
Everyone knows a tsunami caused Fukushima, the question is 1) what are the health implications of it and 2) can it ever be contained? The answers seem to be 1) we can't measure (it now) and 2) no.
- ef4 10y ago
  If "we can't measure" is true, that's extremely strong evidence that the effect is not very large.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  Are you sharing an article, or an agenda?
  - 2AF3 10y ago
    I'm not the one making bad faith arguments like 'the only negative result is public distrust of nuclear plants'
mikeash 10y ago
Extreme nitpick: the test which caused Chernobyl to explode was unauthorized, reckless, and far from routine. But this doesn't change your point overall.

vidarh 10y ago

I grew up in Norway. While I am very positive to nuclear - even with worst case estimates for Chernobyl, nuclear is one of the safest ways we have of getting energy - it's worth realising that even today reindeer from certain parts of Norway needs to be checked for radiation before slaughter, as radioactive cesium carried into the atmosphere rained down over parts of Norway, and depending on weather etc. reindeers some years end up eating more mushrooms and other food that is contaminated. It's expected that this will continue for decades still. Fukushima did not release a similar cloud of radioactive materials over such large areas.

2AF3 10y ago
The radiation is going into the Pacific and not the air, maybe that's preferable.
- vidarh 10y ago
  It's much preferable to the extent it gets diluted. The problem in Europe after Chernobyl was not that we were radiated to any appreciable extent, but the spread of cesium and iodine dust that got into the soil. Even then the reason it had much effect at all is that things like mushrooms and certain plants will take it up and concentrate it, and become food for animals that end up in our foodchain (e.g. sheep and reindeer in Norway tend to roam freely and graze on public land). The risk from this is/was quite limited, but it is quite limited because it is managed by monitoring radiation levels of meat from affected areas.

ef4 10y ago

Geography alone makes Fukushima less bad for human health. Beyond the immediate vicinity, most of Fukushima's contamination is going into the Pacific. We have very good data on how diluted that radiation is once it gets to places people actually live, and the answer is "extremely diluted". The prevailing weather all moves to the east, directly out to sea. Whereas Chernobyl spread its contamination across a populated continent. If you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much better than the Pacific ocean. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like Bikini Atoll.

bigbugbag 10y ago
If you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much worse than the upper atmosphere. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like high altitude atmosphere (launched from the pacific ocean). Safety may have played a role but AFAIK these nukes were exploded in this part of the world mostly because it was remote enough from the countries doing the testing. After a few decades of dumping radioactive waste in oceans, we came back from the belief that dumping radioactive waste in the ocean is mostly harmless and a ban on this practice was put up in 1993.

mikeash 10y ago

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Chernobyl_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Ch..., Fukushima released about 900PBq of radioactivity, of which the vast majority went into the Pacific Ocean where it will be essentially harmless. Chernobyl released 5200PBq of which most fell on inhabited land in Europe. What made Chernobyl so bad wasn't just that it melted down, but that the graphite moderator in the core caught fire and burned for days, which spread lots of core material far and wide.