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I agree with your assessment, and I do consider coal to be more environmentally damaging than nuclear, which is why I am a proponent of nuclear power as I menti

I agree with your assessment, and I do consider coal to be more environmentally damaging than nuclear, which is why I am a proponent of nuclear power as I mentioned. However I do not like articles that make artificially low estimates of the impact of Chernobyl in particular just because long-term impact is "hard" to measure. If it is hard to measure, doesn't mean you shouldn't take it into account -- give a rough estimate, say 50-5,000 people or 50-10,000 people, but then of course a rough estimate makes it harder to produce a nice chart to ogle at. Instead what you see is articles using the lowest bound straight as reported by the Soviet headquarters, which is just ridiculous. Now measuring cancer risk, even a long term one, while painstaking, is not exactly rocket science. There are multiple large-scale medical studies that do just that very effectively, it's just they tended not to focus on Chernobyl area for whatever reason, most likely due to funding.

dalke 16y ago
I think the author brought that up to to the likely mentions of Chernobyl. I don't like his numbers though, for reasons similar to yours. The numbers are WHO numbers, and not from Soviet HQ, but the predictions by other groups are all over the map. The WHO one was before there could be solid population measurements, and I don't see evidence of newer data from anyone. One difficulty with the projection is that the author assumes that 4000 is the only number to consider regarding deaths with nuclear power. For roof installation he includes roofing accidents, but it does not include the (rather few) people who have died in industrial accidents with nuclear reactors. These are much fewer than 4,000 but he omits deaths due to mining accidents related to uranium extraction (only saying that it's less than coal) and neither does he use estimates for the deaths corresponding to steel and concrete production, like he does for wind power. To be fair, elsewhere his pages go into the differences in the amount of materials needed for each one, and I think the differences I pointed out above are small corrections to the gross numbers given.

dalke 16y ago

I think the author brought that up to to the likely mentions of Chernobyl. I don't like his numbers though, for reasons similar to yours. The numbers are WHO numbers, and not from Soviet HQ, but the predictions by other groups are all over the map. The WHO one was before there could be solid population measurements, and I don't see evidence of newer data from anyone. One difficulty with the projection is that the author assumes that 4000 is the only number to consider regarding deaths with nuclear power. For roof installation he includes roofing accidents, but it does not include the (rather few) people who have died in industrial accidents with nuclear reactors. These are much fewer than 4,000 but he omits deaths due to mining accidents related to uranium extraction (only saying that it's less than coal) and neither does he use estimates for the deaths corresponding to steel and concrete production, like he does for wind power. To be fair, elsewhere his pages go into the differences in the amount of materials needed for each one, and I think the differences I pointed out above are small corrections to the gross numbers given.