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Sure, if you conveniently ignore all of the children born in the Ukraine and Belarus with birth defects due to exposure, the plant workers and soldiers who were

by Duff 16y ago

Sure, if you conveniently ignore all of the children born in the Ukraine and Belarus with birth defects due to exposure, the plant workers and soldiers who were sickened or died heroically trying to shutdown the reactor, the increased incidence of cancer, the poisoning of prime agricultural land, I guess Chernobyl was no big deal. And by the way, dam-building for power generation isn't exactly a popular practice today, particularly in areas were unmaintained industrial revolution era dams burst every few years.

mistermann 16y ago
I'm certainly willing to consider all of that, is there any authoritative documentation from an unbiased source I could read on comprehensive deaths from Chernobyl?
- pmb 16y ago
  Not really. The official report used the numbers self reported by the USSR (not known for its bureaucratic honesty) and TORCH (The Other Report on CHernobyl) was funded by the environmental movement. So we can lower bound the deaths by 4,000 and upper bound them by 1,000,000, but after that you are on your own. I did my own looking and came to the conclusions that "deaths" is the wrong metric, and "expected years of life lost" is the right metric. When someone dies at age 45 instead of age 60, is that a Chernobyl-caused death? What about at age 50 instead of 60? 59 instead of 75? 2 instead of 70? The answer gets more complicated the closer you look. Ballpark: tens of thousands to even hundreds of thousands of "effective deaths" from Chernobyl, where an "effective death" is 45 years of life lost, collected from multiple affected people. Relatively few immediate deaths.
  - alextingle 16y ago
    And what would the equivalent number for coal mining/burning be?
    - pmb 16y ago
      See the link that started this whole conversation. It has pretty good data, the only questionable part was the fact that their nuclear safety data involved taking self-reported fatalities from the USSR. Coal is far worse than nuclear by every metric (environmental effects, deaths per TWh, etc etc) in any sane accounting scheme.

by Duff 16y ago

mistermann 16y ago

I'm certainly willing to consider all of that, is there any authoritative documentation from an unbiased source I could read on comprehensive deaths from Chernobyl?

pmb 16y ago
Not really. The official report used the numbers self reported by the USSR (not known for its bureaucratic honesty) and TORCH (The Other Report on CHernobyl) was funded by the environmental movement. So we can lower bound the deaths by 4,000 and upper bound them by 1,000,000, but after that you are on your own. I did my own looking and came to the conclusions that "deaths" is the wrong metric, and "expected years of life lost" is the right metric. When someone dies at age 45 instead of age 60, is that a Chernobyl-caused death? What about at age 50 instead of 60? 59 instead of 75? 2 instead of 70? The answer gets more complicated the closer you look. Ballpark: tens of thousands to even hundreds of thousands of "effective deaths" from Chernobyl, where an "effective death" is 45 years of life lost, collected from multiple affected people. Relatively few immediate deaths.
- alextingle 16y ago
  And what would the equivalent number for coal mining/burning be?
  - pmb 16y ago
    See the link that started this whole conversation. It has pretty good data, the only questionable part was the fact that their nuclear safety data involved taking self-reported fatalities from the USSR. Coal is far worse than nuclear by every metric (environmental effects, deaths per TWh, etc etc) in any sane accounting scheme.