> That is also assuming that cancer treatments won't get better with time, right? At one point I tried to research what number we had about the real impact of

> That is also assuming that cancer treatments won't get better with time, right? At one point I tried to research what number we had about the real impact of Chernobyl (living a bit close to Fukushima, I was interested personally). A "funny" thing about it is that in several places, this was a time when early cancer detection was improving a lot, and thyroid cancer (the most common one caused by radiations) prognosis benefits a lot from early detection (curable with 99% of chance if caught early on). In the region I was interested in (France and Italy), the improvement in cancer treatment was really great and much higher than the negative impact from the radioactive cloud. It would be hard to tell the difference between a small delay in updating medical practices locally compared to national level and an increased risk due to radiation. Some people even hypothesize that radiation scare may have make more people do early cancer detection test and that it could have actually lowered the number of cancer death. Which would be pretty ironic.