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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/

by 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
        Problem citing a 1978 paper on coal power plant emissions is the emissions controls that have been added over the last 40 years. And of course the ancient plants that have been closed down. Bonus, coal is going away and soon[1]. [1] We're fast reaching the tipping point where the global elites are getting scared of global warming.
- 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.

by zymhan 10y ago

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
      Problem citing a 1978 paper on coal power plant emissions is the emissions controls that have been added over the last 40 years. And of course the ancient plants that have been closed down. Bonus, coal is going away and soon[1]. [1] We're fast reaching the tipping point where the global elites are getting scared of global warming.
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.