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One person officially died from Fukushima radiation, and it was a person who worked in the plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disas

One person officially died from Fukushima radiation, and it was a person who worked in the plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

totetsu 7y ago
Is it just the number of people that have died that matters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...
- roenxi 7y ago
  Even using the No-Threshold model the numbers are tiny (130 globally). And as Wikipedia notes in the opening paragraphs the December 2012 UNSCEAR statement uses polite language to remind everyone that No-Threshold linear is a really stupid model.
  - totetsu 7y ago
    For me, I don't think the huge impact to the lives of the people displaced from the lands that was home to their culture and communities for generations should be overlooked in any discussion of what is acceptable costs of a power generation accident.
  - Retric 7y ago
    No-Threshold linear may actually underestimate the number of cancers produced. Looking at the amount of skin cancer in Australia it’s best modeled as different people have different prior exposure which shifts the individual odds around quite a bit.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      The sun is dosing us with so much energy I can feel my skin getting warm and collect the energy to get useful work out of a small solar panel. It'll burn skin in as few as 15 minutes (ie, skin starts to redden and die) in the Australian summer. I'm unconvinced that is a low dose. Exposure to direct sunlight would be an unacceptable risk in a work environment except we can't figure out how to ban it while still being taken seriously. NTLM is dealing with doses that are far below OH&S limits.
      - Retric 7y ago
        It’s a question of received dose. Sitting in an cave you’re getting a lot of thermal energy, but that’s harmless. Where if you’re receiving that same energy in day x-ray’s it’s quickly lethal.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      It bemuses me that some pro-nuclear people want to do away with the LNT assumption, not realizing that a replacement could be even harder on nuclear. If the actual dose/response curve has a steeper slope at very low radiation levels (too low to directly measure the effects) then the health consequences of nuclear accidents could become much worse. And ruling this out would be very difficult.
      - simloo 7y ago
        Wait, how did you arrive at that conclusion? All nuclear accidents so far have resulted in very low doses to the average individual. Of course this doesn't apply to plant workers in the direct vicinity of e.g. the Chernobyl accident, but since those are very few compared to the population of a country, the number of estimated cancer cases should go down.
        Retric 7y ago
        It’s the linear model which suggests those low doses are mostly safe, it may be a more accurate model means average adults are at say 1/2 the risk of linear models. But, say children are at 10x risk, babies are at 100x risk, and Fedus are at 1,000x higher risk than those linear models suggest. Thus because of a high risk to a significant population it’s even more dangerous. It’s very easy to find some way a specific model is wrong in one direction, but hard to say if that’s the only adjustment you need to make. Ex: Counting better cancer treatments making nuclear safer while ignoring longer lifespans making it more dangerous.
        simloo 7y ago
        That's true, but I think most other models assume there's a lowest dosage which is totally safe? For very low doses, even if LNT predicts a very low rate, it still a lot of cancer cases for a population of several million. Even if there would be very vulnerable groups, it's hard to imagine a model that predicts more cases than LNT for very low doses.
        7y ago

totetsu 7y ago

Is it just the number of people that have died that matters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...

roenxi 7y ago
Even using the No-Threshold model the numbers are tiny (130 globally). And as Wikipedia notes in the opening paragraphs the December 2012 UNSCEAR statement uses polite language to remind everyone that No-Threshold linear is a really stupid model.
- totetsu 7y ago
  For me, I don't think the huge impact to the lives of the people displaced from the lands that was home to their culture and communities for generations should be overlooked in any discussion of what is acceptable costs of a power generation accident.
- Retric 7y ago
  No-Threshold linear may actually underestimate the number of cancers produced. Looking at the amount of skin cancer in Australia it’s best modeled as different people have different prior exposure which shifts the individual odds around quite a bit.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    The sun is dosing us with so much energy I can feel my skin getting warm and collect the energy to get useful work out of a small solar panel. It'll burn skin in as few as 15 minutes (ie, skin starts to redden and die) in the Australian summer. I'm unconvinced that is a low dose. Exposure to direct sunlight would be an unacceptable risk in a work environment except we can't figure out how to ban it while still being taken seriously. NTLM is dealing with doses that are far below OH&S limits.
    - Retric 7y ago
      It’s a question of received dose. Sitting in an cave you’re getting a lot of thermal energy, but that’s harmless. Where if you’re receiving that same energy in day x-ray’s it’s quickly lethal.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    It bemuses me that some pro-nuclear people want to do away with the LNT assumption, not realizing that a replacement could be even harder on nuclear. If the actual dose/response curve has a steeper slope at very low radiation levels (too low to directly measure the effects) then the health consequences of nuclear accidents could become much worse. And ruling this out would be very difficult.
    - simloo 7y ago
      Wait, how did you arrive at that conclusion? All nuclear accidents so far have resulted in very low doses to the average individual. Of course this doesn't apply to plant workers in the direct vicinity of e.g. the Chernobyl accident, but since those are very few compared to the population of a country, the number of estimated cancer cases should go down.
      - Retric 7y ago
        It’s the linear model which suggests those low doses are mostly safe, it may be a more accurate model means average adults are at say 1/2 the risk of linear models. But, say children are at 10x risk, babies are at 100x risk, and Fedus are at 1,000x higher risk than those linear models suggest. Thus because of a high risk to a significant population it’s even more dangerous. It’s very easy to find some way a specific model is wrong in one direction, but hard to say if that’s the only adjustment you need to make. Ex: Counting better cancer treatments making nuclear safer while ignoring longer lifespans making it more dangerous.
        simloo 7y ago
        That's true, but I think most other models assume there's a lowest dosage which is totally safe? For very low doses, even if LNT predicts a very low rate, it still a lot of cancer cases for a population of several million. Even if there would be very vulnerable groups, it's hard to imagine a model that predicts more cases than LNT for very low doses.
        7y ago