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Okay, that's DIY rooftop installations and though I'm usually against atomic fear-mongering I have to say that it's difficult to accurately gauge the effects of
by Udo 16y ago
Okay, that's DIY rooftop installations and though I'm usually against atomic fear-mongering I have to say that it's difficult to accurately gauge the effects of the Chernobyl incident. And to be fair, we also need to count birth defects and other permanent injuries. So I don't know if this is a valid comparison. By the way, without having the facts to support it, I'd wager that fossil fuels cost the most lives of all energy sources, but again, that's also impossible to ever measure accurately and in islolation.
- dublinclontarf 16y agoActually the effects of Chernobyl have been very accurately gauged by a number of international organisations and take into account birth defects and other permanent injuries. See these two posts for for more details including links to reports. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326672 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326672 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326129
- lemming 16y agoYeah, sorry, I had to edit the title to get it into 80 characters, and I cut out "Rooftop". I still thought the comparison was interesting. Edited: title to be a little less alarmist.
- Udo 16y agoIt is interesting, don't get me wrong! The larger message for me is that we have a lot of strange causes of death, simply because of the large population size. Of course every death is a tragedy to be avoided, but it follows - somewhat counterintuitively - that sometimes a few thousand highly linked and direct casualties drown out an even larger number of people who die routinely without anyone questioning why. The same issue became apparent when we started looking at the number of deaths resulting from terrorism compared to ...pretty much any other cause of death.