4 ms·
I personally continue to use 4000 deaths total (acute and latent), which is what the UNSCEAR folks said up until 2006 or so. Some colleagues yell at me and tell
by acidburnNSA 7y ago
I personally continue to use 4000 deaths total (acute and latent), which is what the UNSCEAR folks said up until 2006 or so. Some colleagues yell at me and tell me that there's no basis for a number this high given what we now know about radiation dose response and about what's happened monitoring people for decades. But I use it just in case.
Fear of radiation kills thousands of people. At Fukushima, the only nuclear-related (non-tsunami) deaths were from the evacuation. (Up to 1 person did die from radiation, they say now). That's why I fight to make people understand it more and be less afraid.
We can all agree that unduly panicking people about radiation is bad.
https://aeon.co/ideas/fear-of-radiation-is-more-dangerous-than-radiation-itself https://aeon.co/ideas/fear-of-radiation-is-more-dangerous-th...
- vilhelm_s 7y agoI think it's worth noting that the UNSCEAR report also said 5000 more deaths among less exposed people (so 9000 in total), it's all rather arbitrary.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThat was in 2006. They changed their policy and stopped multiplying small dose rates by large populations to get large numbers after that because the linear-no-threshold assumption has not been shown to be applicable at very low doses. Their later reports do not give any large numbers like this.
- vilhelm_s 7y agoBut that's just even more arbitrary, right? It just means nobody knows how many deaths it caused, and there is an uncertainty of an order of magnitude based on how the effects of very low doses.