5 ms·

That is like comparing getting killed by pollution by getting shortened your life expectancy to getting killed by getting stabbed in the heart with a knife. It

That is like comparing getting killed by pollution by getting shortened your life expectancy to getting killed by getting stabbed in the heart with a knife. It is the absurd statistician's view of life. That is not what it actually feels like to people. People would rather have a shorter life span due to say unhealthy eating than having a higher expectancy of getting stabbed to death by a maniac. Nuclear power is more like that latter. When it happens it is terrifying and scares the shit out of people. It is easy to be a smart ass in hindsight when you know all the facts But when a nuclear accident happens you will not have all the facts. You will not know the severity. You will have to evacuate lots of people. And it is going to have a severe mental toll on these people. These are factors entirely lost in your statistical approach to looking at this. Not to mention the Fukushima disaster cost a FORTUNE!! 182 BILLION dollars! That is not pocket change. Who pays that? Not the nuclear power generators. It is tax payers. In other words Nuclear power is getting a huge subsidy because they don't pay for their own clean. They don't pay for any insurance. Had they paid for insurance, they selling nuclear power would have been impossible. It would simply have cost WAY too much.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Fukushima cleanup cost that much because they're trying to bring radiation levels back to natural background levels instead of getting them down to levels thought safe enough. Nuclear power still saves billions in health costs by preventing air pollution deaths. Remember, air pollution from fossil fuel kills 4.2 million people every year... year after year. Chernobyl killed up to 4000 total, Fukushima will kill up to 1. https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/ https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/
- Symmetry 7y ago
  Fukishima only killed 1 person directly but the evacuation interrupted the medical care of a large number of sick and/or elderly people and ended up killing over a thousand people. But if there hadn't been an evacuation you'd be looking at more like 100 to 200 deaths related to radiation, though many by cancer long down the road. Of course really we ought to be looking at all this in terms of QALYs in which case the evacuation decision probably looks a lot better. And air pollution probably looks worse.
  - brutt 7y ago
    > Fukishima ... ended up killing over a thousand people. Shorter version.
  - briwang2050 7y ago
    The radiation levels around Fukushima would not have caused prompt death. Cancer takes many years to develop. Elderly people do not have enough lifespan left to develop radiation related cancer to die from radiation. On 4 April 2011, radiation levels of 0.06 mSv/day were recorded in Fukushima city, 65 km northwest of the plant, about 60 times higher than normal but posing no health risk according to authorities. Would you have ordered the evacuation of thousands of sick and elderly hospitalized people if they were all going to get an X-ray? a CT scan? The amount of radiation from one adult chest x-ray (0.1 mSv). A chest CT delivers 7 mSv — 70 times as much. 0.4 mSv from a mammogram. https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/radiation-risk-from-medical-imaging https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/radiation-risk-from-me... Radiation levels were about 2 chest x-rays every day. 6-16 mSv from CT scans.
    - Klinky 7y ago
      What if there was concern the levels could continue to rise to 600 or 6000 times higher than normal? You're analyzing with the benefit of hindsight. The plant was still nowhere near under control on April 4 and needed constant attention.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    > Fukishima only killed 1 person directly but the evacuation interrupted the medical care of a large number of sick and/or elderly people and ended up killing over a thousand people. This is the product of highly naive analysis. Out of a population of 300,000 displaced people, ~1,500 died over the span of a month. This is the same as the expected natural death rate assuming a lifespan of 90-100 years. If you dig into the causes of death the overwhelming majority are elderly people and the causes are listed as "fatigue" and "exhaustion". This "study" really just measured the number of people who died of old age, and attributed it to the disaster.
ekianjo 7y ago
> Nuclear power is more like that latter. When it happens it is terrifying and scares the shit out of people. You mean the Tsunami is like that? Because as far as we know there is MAYBE only one death that was attributed to the Fukushima nuclear incident for example, while thousands lost their lives to the Tsunami in the matter of seconds. yet people still live next to the ocean in Japan as we speak. Completely, utterly irrational.
- bronson 7y ago
  Just because you don't understand other peoples' value systems, that doesn't mean they're irrational.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    Doesn't mean they're not, either.
    - mlyle 7y ago
      On some level, anything that isn't a paperclip optimizer is irrational. People weight what's important to them, and strive for those goals.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        "Everything is relative so nothing is anything" doesn't solve climate change. Everybody is wrong but some people are wronger.
- avar 7y ago
  > Yet people still live next to the ocean in Japan as we speak. Completely, utterly irrational. There's entire towns that are still part of an exclusion zone people can't live in and around Fukushima. Even if you live near the coast in Japan a tsunami isn't likely to make the town you grew up in not exist anymore, there'll just be a lot of damage to deal with. I'm generally pro-nuclear, but pretending this difference doesn't exist is disingenuous, particularly since the cost is disproportionately carried by people in rural areas living near nuclear power plants, whereas most of the benefactors of the energy production live elsewhere.
saagarjha 7y ago
But the way nuclear power usually kills people is by increasing cancer rates…

acidburnNSA 7y ago

Fukushima cleanup cost that much because they're trying to bring radiation levels back to natural background levels instead of getting them down to levels thought safe enough. Nuclear power still saves billions in health costs by preventing air pollution deaths. Remember, air pollution from fossil fuel kills 4.2 million people every year... year after year. Chernobyl killed up to 4000 total, Fukushima will kill up to 1. https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/ https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/

Symmetry 7y ago
Fukishima only killed 1 person directly but the evacuation interrupted the medical care of a large number of sick and/or elderly people and ended up killing over a thousand people. But if there hadn't been an evacuation you'd be looking at more like 100 to 200 deaths related to radiation, though many by cancer long down the road. Of course really we ought to be looking at all this in terms of QALYs in which case the evacuation decision probably looks a lot better. And air pollution probably looks worse.
- brutt 7y ago
  > Fukishima ... ended up killing over a thousand people. Shorter version.
- briwang2050 7y ago
  The radiation levels around Fukushima would not have caused prompt death. Cancer takes many years to develop. Elderly people do not have enough lifespan left to develop radiation related cancer to die from radiation. On 4 April 2011, radiation levels of 0.06 mSv/day were recorded in Fukushima city, 65 km northwest of the plant, about 60 times higher than normal but posing no health risk according to authorities. Would you have ordered the evacuation of thousands of sick and elderly hospitalized people if they were all going to get an X-ray? a CT scan? The amount of radiation from one adult chest x-ray (0.1 mSv). A chest CT delivers 7 mSv — 70 times as much. 0.4 mSv from a mammogram. https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/radiation-risk-from-medical-imaging https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/radiation-risk-from-me... Radiation levels were about 2 chest x-rays every day. 6-16 mSv from CT scans.
  - Klinky 7y ago
    What if there was concern the levels could continue to rise to 600 or 6000 times higher than normal? You're analyzing with the benefit of hindsight. The plant was still nowhere near under control on April 4 and needed constant attention.
- manfredo 7y ago
  > Fukishima only killed 1 person directly but the evacuation interrupted the medical care of a large number of sick and/or elderly people and ended up killing over a thousand people. This is the product of highly naive analysis. Out of a population of 300,000 displaced people, ~1,500 died over the span of a month. This is the same as the expected natural death rate assuming a lifespan of 90-100 years. If you dig into the causes of death the overwhelming majority are elderly people and the causes are listed as "fatigue" and "exhaustion". This "study" really just measured the number of people who died of old age, and attributed it to the disaster.

ekianjo 7y ago

> Nuclear power is more like that latter. When it happens it is terrifying and scares the shit out of people. You mean the Tsunami is like that? Because as far as we know there is MAYBE only one death that was attributed to the Fukushima nuclear incident for example, while thousands lost their lives to the Tsunami in the matter of seconds. yet people still live next to the ocean in Japan as we speak. Completely, utterly irrational.

bronson 7y ago
Just because you don't understand other peoples' value systems, that doesn't mean they're irrational.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  Doesn't mean they're not, either.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    On some level, anything that isn't a paperclip optimizer is irrational. People weight what's important to them, and strive for those goals.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      "Everything is relative so nothing is anything" doesn't solve climate change. Everybody is wrong but some people are wronger.
avar 7y ago
> Yet people still live next to the ocean in Japan as we speak. Completely, utterly irrational. There's entire towns that are still part of an exclusion zone people can't live in and around Fukushima. Even if you live near the coast in Japan a tsunami isn't likely to make the town you grew up in not exist anymore, there'll just be a lot of damage to deal with. I'm generally pro-nuclear, but pretending this difference doesn't exist is disingenuous, particularly since the cost is disproportionately carried by people in rural areas living near nuclear power plants, whereas most of the benefactors of the energy production live elsewhere.

saagarjha 7y ago

But the way nuclear power usually kills people is by increasing cancer rates…