11 ms·

Fukushima radiation did not damage health of local people, UN says

121 points by ericdanielski 6y ago

rob74 6y ago
Well yeah, the radiation did not damage the health of the local people because the local people were evacuated. This reminds me of the people who said "Covid is no big deal" after the first wave because the lockdowns and other measures had been successful in keeping the number of deaths relatively low (at least in some countries)...
- anfilt 6y ago
  The evacuation probably lead to more deaths than radiation. Almost all the radiation stayed at the reactor site. That which did leave was pretty low level to begin with.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > The evacuation probably lead to more deaths than radiation. I suggest you re-read what you wrote. 250,000 people lived a chunk of their lives in school gyms. We're talking millions of man-years lost.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Unfortunately, some of the radiation washed out to sea as well. Hard to say what impact that has, short- or long-term, on the environment but it's not good.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      I think we can quantify the impact fairly well: short term it's a big hit on the local fishermen. The local fish probably rejoiced because fewer fishermen were catching them. Long-term it will have no measurable impact at all.
    - evanb 6y ago
      Many people remember seeing a particularly startling figure claiming to show the radiation in the water post-Fukushima. That figure actually shows wave height and was used to spread FUD. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-emergency/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-emergency/ The Pacific Ocean is enormous and the dilution makes the broader environmental impact of any radiation risks negligible. Locally may be a different story, of course.
      - acidburnNSA 6y ago
        I interacted with some Oregon State Univ scientists about radioactive tuna. They were taking measurements and had this to say: The highest concentrations of Cs-137 and Cs-134 I've seen in albacore on our coast so far result in a CEDE (committed effective dose equivalent, which accounts for the type of radiation, the sensitivity of each organ, and how long any ingested Cs is retained in your body) of 18.01 nSv per kg ingested, which works out to about 330,000 kg to equal the normal annual dose in the Pacific Northwest (6 mSv, 3 mSv from natural sources, 3 mSv from mainly medical exposures). About 1/3rd of the dose from said highest Cs level albacore is from pre-Fukushima weapons fallout. The average american eats about 7 kg of albacore in a year, which puts an reasonable upper limit of about 126 uSv over the course of a year, and you'd need to live for over 47,000 years before you ate enough albacore to result in a CEDE equal to the normal annual dose. Even if your entire diet (2,000 calories per day) was nothing from albacore, and all of it was at the highest levels we've ever seen, and ignoring the fact this radioactivity is decaying and won't be around forever, we're talking 578 years before you'd eat enough albacore to reach that benchmark of 330,000 kg (and end up with a lifetime dose increase of 0.14%). For comparison, spooning with your partner over 8 hours of sleep each night results in a dose of 13.40 nSv each month from the potassium-40 in their body exposing you to additional gamma irradiation. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushima.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushim...
  - hrktb 6y ago
    Primary effect of the radiation is not death though. This is a complicated topic, as willfully or not a lot of the numbers that people used to throw around (contamination level of water, air, child cancer numbers etc.) have been reajusted in the last years, and health effects are not explicitely labelled as “radiation related”, making it difficult to just throw a “look, told you so” kind of press article at people in online discussions. There’s a lot of conspiracy theories, but a lot of gov. bullshitting as well. Overall my understanding is radiations (including from the rain in the first days, and from the food/soil that has been moved) had some ambient effect, but not to tv drama proportions.
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      The report in question was written by an independent UN organization, not the Japanese government.
  - jmull 6y ago
    It’s not like not evacuating was an option. About half the 160K people self-evacuated which tells you the people were eager to evacuate whether an organized evacuation was conducted or not. Large numbers still will not return to areas free or restrictions. Also, I’m not sure where you get your numbers from.
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      > It’s not like not evacuating was an option. Actually, it was and that’s also what the UNSCEAR report concluded.
      - jmull 6y ago
        You’re missing my point: People were going to evacuate whether the government organized an evacuation or not. Not to mention, the UNSEAR report did not conclude evacuation was unnecessary. Not that that matters, since, of course, the information in the UNSEAR report wasn’t available at the time the of the evacuations. Evacuation is a safety precaution. You don’t not evacuate because maybe some of it isn’t necessary.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  While that's an easy, if somewhat glib, conclusion to reach, it isn't actually supported by the facts. We don't actually know what the health-effects without the evacuation would have been, though we can probably estimate it. What we do know is that the health-effects of the evacuation were severe, with many people killed (same as for Chernobyl). The numbers are in the thousands. So the evacuation was obviously too large, the cure worse than the disease. But by how much? Research says: all of it. Nobody should have been evacuated. "The present analysis provides endorsement of that study’s conclusion that the post-1990 relocation of 220,000 members of the public could not be justified on the grounds of radiological health benefit." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957582017300782 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
  - audunw 6y ago
    > Research says: all of it. Nobody should have been evacuated. That's easy to say in hindsight. How do you make a judgement about that in the hours/days after the accident? The better-safe-than-sorry approach is probably to evacuate whenever there is a nuclear accident where the building is damaged. But there should be efforts to set up evacuation plans that's not as panicked and doesn't lead to so many deaths.
    - esjeon 6y ago
      Yeah, it literally took years before we can reach this conclusion, even if the conclusion is absolutely reliable. (We still need to observe like 50 more years, haha.) That's the current limitation of our technology. If we could measure radiation levels in a large scale with high resolution within, say, few hrs/days, maybe we didn't have to evacuate all those people. We can't, so we should.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      By studying past incidents which are similar and creating accurate models to predict what will happen based on the data you can rapidly access. If you have a whole bunch of radiation sensors spread around your nuclear plant, you know the level of radiation that people are likely to be exposed to in the near future. If you know the effects of radiation on people, you can predict the health consequences of allowing them to be exposed. If you have records of increased death rates in various evacuations, you can predict the cost of evacuating in this instance. Compare the cost of the two options, go with the better one. It would be one thing if it was the early days of nuclear power and no one knew what the effects of radiation were, and no one had ever considered the possibility of an accident, but this is a mature technology which people have spent decades studying in close detail. People knew at the time that the evacuation plan was a bad idea, and this current report comes as no surprise. By simply assuming that the better-safe-than-sorry approach was to evacuate rather than consulting models based on data, those in charge killed a lot of people.
- liminvorous 6y ago
  Ah far as I can tell the radiation levels in the places people were evacuated from are comparable to those from living somewhere with a naturally high background level. This image compares the dose with some other areas: https://thoughtscapism.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Radiation-exposures-squared-2.png https://thoughtscapism.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Radiation... from: https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/03/01/radiation-and-cancer-risk-what-do-we-know/ https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/03/01/radiation-and-cancer-r...
etiam 6y ago
'Did too' says Greenpeace. (Link to their report, from near the end of the Guardian article: https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/2021/03/ff71ab0b-finalfukushima2011-2020_web.pdf https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20... )
- sputr 6y ago
  Greenpeace isn't exactly a trustworthy entity on this topic. Their anti-nuclear position is, first and foremost, ideological (as is with the entirety of the green movement). Does not mean that they are wrong. I also don't see them purposefully modifying information aka. lying. But the probability of their biases getting in the way of objective reporting is non-trivial.
  - etiam 6y ago
    Well expressed, and I largely agree with your assessment. But certain Japanese politicians/authorities/corporations aren't exactly neutral, disinterested parties in this matter either, so I think some adversarial discourse is helpful here, and at least the best we'll get. For clarification, I'm mainly reacting to the headline rather than the thyroid cancer survey. I don't have an opinion either way about that without seeing much more background, and that seems more complex than I'll have time to dig into today.
    - bart_spoon 6y ago
      This report isn't from Japanese authorities, its from the UN.
  - willis936 6y ago
    You don’t have to accuse Greenpeace of lying; their lies are already well documented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Greenpeace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Greenpeace
- mpweiher 6y ago
  Can you point me to the place in the article where it actually talks about radiation impacting the health of locals? All I could find was complaints that the acceptable-safe radiation limit had been raised, and that a few selected locations within the area had levels that were slightly above the previous and well below the new levels. Nothing about actual health damage from radiation.
pvaldes 6y ago
Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit. I assume that this just made the life of the local people more interesting And it seems that Californian people enjoyed their tuna meals, now atom flavoured, found in San Diego since 2011 so, if everybody is happy and we can always produce more babies to replace the hundreds of crippled ones... end of the problem, "I can't see you, I can't hear you, la, la, la", etc...
- anfilt 6y ago
  What? Any radio-isotopes that made into the ocean would be spread so thin that eating banana is gonna give you more radiation than you get in San Diego. Even the radiation levels in the surrounding areas of the reactors was quite low. Almost all the radiation stayed on the reactor site.
  - pvaldes 6y ago
    > Any radio-isotopes that made into the ocean would be spread so thin that eating banana is gonna give you more radiation Let me introduce yourself this little marvel of biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation "We don't found" and "does not exist" are different terms. "Report couldn't prove damage" would be a much better title, or at least closer to truth. With bioaccumulation is the same, our knowledge of marine biology and marine ecosystems is still poor in lots of cases. Californian woman get pregnant also, as japanese women do, so this spiral goes a little deeper than the "is just like a banana so people is safe" simple claim. This is not a simple problem. Nobody can't accurately evaluate the final effects of a process that is very complex, is still running, and is far from ending. This is plain lying in the face of people. "We are still grasping the surface of this" is not the same as "didn't happened".
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      > "We don't found" and "does not exist" are different terms. "Report couldn't prove damage" would be a much better title, or at least closer to truth. You are the one who just said "Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit". Was that or was that not the case?
jussij 6y ago
To this day that disaster continues to cause trouble for the local fishing industry: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1325/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1325/ I suspect the mental health of the local fishermen was well an truly tested and will continue to be tested by that disaster.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  Interesting article, which shows quite clearly that the trouble the fishermen have is not with the effects of radiation, but with the perceptions of the effects of radiation.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Yes, because of the constant barrage of fear mongering articles that have been printed about the event. Fish were shown to be healthy for consumption's shortly after the event, but the media still reports on the insignificant amount of radiation in water associated to the disaster. By comparison, when is the last time you heard of the lingering effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill, where oil on the seafloor surface will cause contamination in some fish for years to come?
JimWestergren 6y ago
Mandatory Link to the Radiation Dose Chart from XKCD: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- number6 6y ago
  If your basing radiation safety procedures on an internet png and things go wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself.
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    https://xkcd.com/radiation/sources.html https://xkcd.com/radiation/sources.html you're free to read the sources yourself
  - joh6nn 6y ago
    For people down-voting this comment, note that it is a direct quote from the xkcd chart itself
    - number6 6y ago
      <3
simonCGN 6y ago
Another propaganda article
- chpill 6y ago
  The World Health Organisation agrees with the UNSCEAR about the impact of radiation https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/health-consequences-of-fukushima-nuclear-accident https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/health-consequences... That would have to be an INSANE worldwide propaganda effort to pull this off. Or maybe, the propaganda is not where you think it is.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  You think the UN is deceptively publishing pro nuclear propoganda?
haunter 6y ago
UN also said there is no human to human transmission of Covid https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
- mpweiher 6y ago
  1. "by the Chinese authorities". So UN is not "saying" this, they are just relaying information and clearly marking it as such. 2. "Preliminary investigations..." so this was not presented as a definitive conclusion, just as preliminary findings...by someone else. 3. "... have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission..." This is not "there is no transmission" or even "found evidence that there is no transmission" and it's not even "have found no evidence for", but "have found no clear evidence for" So basically every word of your post is a mis-representation of the original tweet.
walrus01 6y ago
This part seems weird to me: > “On the balance of available evidence, the large increase ... in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure,” Unscear said. “Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously detected.” ---- In order to have any confidence in that statement, wouldn't you also have to pick a representative population far away from Fukushima which could not have possibly been exposed to radiation, numbering in the many thousands of people, to conduct thyroid examinations/screenings on and determine if the extra level of scrutiny and analysis was also turning up a similar number of previously unseen abnormalities? did they do that?
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  This is not the first time studying such effects, which is why they can be confident that is the cause. Similar results were found in some post Chernobyl studies, and the risk/reward of regular screening for many ailments is a constant debate in medicine.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    But aren't the Chernobyl studies hindered by the fact that a large portion of the liquidators aren't tracked at all? That is my understanding, for what's it worth.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Those would not be relevant to such tests, where the samples would be something like "every grade four student in a region."
      - hef19898 6y ago
        But they would be relevant in determining the total health impact of the accident, wouldn't it?
dr_faustus 6y ago
I find it always fascinating, that the same groups (Greenpeace, etc.) are always quick to point to UN reports about climate change (like the IPCC report) as if they were gospel but all the reports of the UN about Chernobyl and Fukushima are supposedly fake. I personally believe both are correct. After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl [1], Fukushima (cf. article) and even Hiroshima [2], it is pretty safe to say that radiation poses a much smaller risk to humans than is often propagated in the horror scenarios of many environmental groups. The theory most of these scenarios are based on, ie. that every little amount of radiation lineraly increases the risks for cancer, is pretty much debunked. So, yes, nuclear is a dangerous technology, esp. if we keep stopping reserch and progress happening on a large scale and don't replace the 50 year old reactors. But coal kills tens of thousands every year and nuclear is still one of the few relatively reliable, almost CO2 neutral power sources we have. [1] https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/
- melomal 6y ago
  > After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl Ever heard of the Chernobyl babies born in Poland and Ukraine? My wife happens to be in that category and safe to say she has plenty of similar issues to other people in the same 'category'. Thyroid issues are a serious problem for many young women around here and it cannot be a coincidence. But I still do believe that nuclear is the way forward without doubt though. Just that these studies seem to be way off with the ongoing effects.
  - dr_faustus 6y ago
    I have no doubt, that in the over 30 years after Chernobly hundreds of thousands of children were born with birth defects in Poland and Ukraine, many of them severe. Which is tragic. And has nothing to do with Chernobyl. Because roughly 6% of all babies born around the world have birth defects (https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/birth-defects-causes-and-statistics-863/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/birth-defects-caus...). As a parent, I can understand the impulse to attribute such a senseless act of nature to some outside, "evil" force. But the statistics just don't show any meaningful connection.
antattack 6y ago
Quote from the report: “no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that could be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident” Which means that possibly: 1)there were adverse health effects among Fukushima residents that were not documented. 2)there were adverse health effects that could not be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident. 3)adverse health effects have not manifested themselves yet
- rwj 6y ago
  Or, that any impact is too small to measure, and so not meaningful.
  - melomal 6y ago
    Asbestos was being used from the 1800's and I can see that all of a sudden there's plenty of impact that has been caused by it. Fukushima was 10 years ago, come back again in another 10 years time, then another and see what the damage is.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  The same three things apply to basically everything. For a hyperbolic example, no adverse health effects have been documented that could be directly attributed to people reading the post you made. All three of your possibilities would still apply.
macspoofing 6y ago
Not true. As Japan pulled back from nuclear due to fears stemming from Fukushima accident, they increased coal reliance which has a direct impact on health of thousands of people.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  What does that have to do with radiation?
  - lupire 6y ago
    It's an indirect effect, described slyly.
  - RandomChance 6y ago
    Might not be what they meant, but under normal operations a coal plant can release significantly more radiation into the environment than a nuclear plant, via isotopes in the ash [1][3]. It’s still less than normal medical sources but it is much higher than a normal nuclear plant where radiological releases of any kind are actively watched for. (The source of the coal will determine the isotopes involved and the initial amount. [2]) This article [3] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory REVIEW (1993 I believe, so a bit dated) states "The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants" [1]( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...) [2]( https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html) PDF Warning: [3]( https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/ORNL%20Review%20v26n3-4%201993.pdf#page=26 https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/ORNL%20Review%20v26...)
amarant 6y ago
Controversial opinion: nuclear has a bad reputation because the coal industry wants it to have a bad reputation. In reality it's one of the best energy sources we have
- unanswered 6y ago
  This fails to take into account the complicity of bad actors hawking other non-solutions like wind and solar.
  - nickik 6y ago
    Wind and solar were not really a option for much of the time since nuclear was invented. And we have very clear evidence that the coal and gas industry have been fighting against nuclear since its inception. It was not uncommon even in the 70s for 'environmentalist' anti-nuclear organization to be sponsored by fossil fuel industry.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  This is the mainstream HN opinion. The controversial opinion? Nuclear sucks because you lose a city every generation, even if you're the most advanced, organization nation on Earth (Japan) you can still make mistakes that have consequences for decades to centuries.
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    > you lose a city every generation No, you don't. Fukushima had a 2010 population of 20,000. It has 17,000 today. And it dropped from 22,000 to 20,000 between 2000 and 2020 so not all of the population reduction was due to nuclear disaster. Likewise, Pripyat was a planned town designed specifically to support the nuclear plants. When the nuclear plants closes, the town had no reason to continue existing. Like mining towns when the mines are exhausted.
coldtea 6y ago
>The first round of tests, conducted between 2011 and 2015, identified 116 cases of actual or suspected thyroid cancer among more than 300,000 people aged 18. “On the balance of available evidence, the large increase ... in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure,” Unscear said. “Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously detected.” Gotta love a lobby job of PR/damage control! This is even better than the work of the Japanese government itself. Insulting to our intelligence, but good PR work nonetheless... In any case, up there with "Covid-19? No big deal", also in WHO greatest hits.
- coldtea 6y ago
  And for those that missed the context: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-looks-to-regain-its-footing-10-years-after-fukushima/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-loo...
lamontcg 6y ago
Nuclear is way too expensive. It'll never happen. Fukushima cost $200B to cleanup in order for it to not wind up killing anyone.
8bitsrule 6y ago
'radiation did not damage health of local people' is interesting language here. "As of the end of December 2015, 51 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer in the second examina-tion conducted by Fukushima Prefecture.... As of the end of June 2015, 113 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer. Of these, 99 people underwent surgery.... the Fukushima Prefectural Citizens Health Survey Committee has not recognized these thyroid cancer cases as the result of the Fukushima accident; the Committee’s reasoning is... that some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed."[0] [0] Katsuta T. (2019).'The Reality after Fukushima in Japan - Actual Damage to Local People'. https://web.archive.org/web/20200326151713/https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-658-25987-7_16.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20200326151713/https://link.spri... Some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed. Should medicine not err on the side of caution? Given the results near Chernobyl? At any rate, there were certainly deaths as a result of the plant's failure. About 2000 people died as a consequence of disaster-related evacuation measures. Whether the radiation was directly responsible or not, the damage to the plant and very real dangers of potential exposure undeniably led to those deaths. Is the UN saying that evacuating tens of thousands was an over-reaction? Was the extreme threat posed by the highly unstable condition of Unit 4 "over-diagnosed" by most western experts? The ongoing spin on this topic is disgusting. March of FUD.

121 points by ericdanielski 6y ago

Well yeah, the radiation did not damage the health of the local people because the local people were evacuated. This reminds me of the people who said "Covid is no big deal" after the first wave because the lockdowns and other measures had been successful in keeping the number of deaths relatively low (at least in some countries)...

anfilt 6y ago
The evacuation probably lead to more deaths than radiation. Almost all the radiation stayed at the reactor site. That which did leave was pretty low level to begin with.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > The evacuation probably lead to more deaths than radiation. I suggest you re-read what you wrote. 250,000 people lived a chunk of their lives in school gyms. We're talking millions of man-years lost.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Unfortunately, some of the radiation washed out to sea as well. Hard to say what impact that has, short- or long-term, on the environment but it's not good.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I think we can quantify the impact fairly well: short term it's a big hit on the local fishermen. The local fish probably rejoiced because fewer fishermen were catching them. Long-term it will have no measurable impact at all.
  - evanb 6y ago
    Many people remember seeing a particularly startling figure claiming to show the radiation in the water post-Fukushima. That figure actually shows wave height and was used to spread FUD. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-emergency/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-emergency/ The Pacific Ocean is enormous and the dilution makes the broader environmental impact of any radiation risks negligible. Locally may be a different story, of course.
    - acidburnNSA 6y ago
      I interacted with some Oregon State Univ scientists about radioactive tuna. They were taking measurements and had this to say: The highest concentrations of Cs-137 and Cs-134 I've seen in albacore on our coast so far result in a CEDE (committed effective dose equivalent, which accounts for the type of radiation, the sensitivity of each organ, and how long any ingested Cs is retained in your body) of 18.01 nSv per kg ingested, which works out to about 330,000 kg to equal the normal annual dose in the Pacific Northwest (6 mSv, 3 mSv from natural sources, 3 mSv from mainly medical exposures). About 1/3rd of the dose from said highest Cs level albacore is from pre-Fukushima weapons fallout. The average american eats about 7 kg of albacore in a year, which puts an reasonable upper limit of about 126 uSv over the course of a year, and you'd need to live for over 47,000 years before you ate enough albacore to result in a CEDE equal to the normal annual dose. Even if your entire diet (2,000 calories per day) was nothing from albacore, and all of it was at the highest levels we've ever seen, and ignoring the fact this radioactivity is decaying and won't be around forever, we're talking 578 years before you'd eat enough albacore to reach that benchmark of 330,000 kg (and end up with a lifetime dose increase of 0.14%). For comparison, spooning with your partner over 8 hours of sleep each night results in a dose of 13.40 nSv each month from the potassium-40 in their body exposing you to additional gamma irradiation. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushima.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushim...
- hrktb 6y ago
  Primary effect of the radiation is not death though. This is a complicated topic, as willfully or not a lot of the numbers that people used to throw around (contamination level of water, air, child cancer numbers etc.) have been reajusted in the last years, and health effects are not explicitely labelled as “radiation related”, making it difficult to just throw a “look, told you so” kind of press article at people in online discussions. There’s a lot of conspiracy theories, but a lot of gov. bullshitting as well. Overall my understanding is radiations (including from the rain in the first days, and from the food/soil that has been moved) had some ambient effect, but not to tv drama proportions.
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    The report in question was written by an independent UN organization, not the Japanese government.
- jmull 6y ago
  It’s not like not evacuating was an option. About half the 160K people self-evacuated which tells you the people were eager to evacuate whether an organized evacuation was conducted or not. Large numbers still will not return to areas free or restrictions. Also, I’m not sure where you get your numbers from.
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    > It’s not like not evacuating was an option. Actually, it was and that’s also what the UNSCEAR report concluded.
    - jmull 6y ago
      You’re missing my point: People were going to evacuate whether the government organized an evacuation or not. Not to mention, the UNSEAR report did not conclude evacuation was unnecessary. Not that that matters, since, of course, the information in the UNSEAR report wasn’t available at the time the of the evacuations. Evacuation is a safety precaution. You don’t not evacuate because maybe some of it isn’t necessary.
mpweiher 6y ago
While that's an easy, if somewhat glib, conclusion to reach, it isn't actually supported by the facts. We don't actually know what the health-effects without the evacuation would have been, though we can probably estimate it. What we do know is that the health-effects of the evacuation were severe, with many people killed (same as for Chernobyl). The numbers are in the thousands. So the evacuation was obviously too large, the cure worse than the disease. But by how much? Research says: all of it. Nobody should have been evacuated. "The present analysis provides endorsement of that study’s conclusion that the post-1990 relocation of 220,000 members of the public could not be justified on the grounds of radiological health benefit." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957582017300782 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
- audunw 6y ago
  > Research says: all of it. Nobody should have been evacuated. That's easy to say in hindsight. How do you make a judgement about that in the hours/days after the accident? The better-safe-than-sorry approach is probably to evacuate whenever there is a nuclear accident where the building is damaged. But there should be efforts to set up evacuation plans that's not as panicked and doesn't lead to so many deaths.
  - esjeon 6y ago
    Yeah, it literally took years before we can reach this conclusion, even if the conclusion is absolutely reliable. (We still need to observe like 50 more years, haha.) That's the current limitation of our technology. If we could measure radiation levels in a large scale with high resolution within, say, few hrs/days, maybe we didn't have to evacuate all those people. We can't, so we should.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    By studying past incidents which are similar and creating accurate models to predict what will happen based on the data you can rapidly access. If you have a whole bunch of radiation sensors spread around your nuclear plant, you know the level of radiation that people are likely to be exposed to in the near future. If you know the effects of radiation on people, you can predict the health consequences of allowing them to be exposed. If you have records of increased death rates in various evacuations, you can predict the cost of evacuating in this instance. Compare the cost of the two options, go with the better one. It would be one thing if it was the early days of nuclear power and no one knew what the effects of radiation were, and no one had ever considered the possibility of an accident, but this is a mature technology which people have spent decades studying in close detail. People knew at the time that the evacuation plan was a bad idea, and this current report comes as no surprise. By simply assuming that the better-safe-than-sorry approach was to evacuate rather than consulting models based on data, those in charge killed a lot of people.
liminvorous 6y ago
Ah far as I can tell the radiation levels in the places people were evacuated from are comparable to those from living somewhere with a naturally high background level. This image compares the dose with some other areas: https://thoughtscapism.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Radiation-exposures-squared-2.png https://thoughtscapism.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Radiation... from: https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/03/01/radiation-and-cancer-risk-what-do-we-know/ https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/03/01/radiation-and-cancer-r...

etiam 6y ago

'Did too' says Greenpeace. (Link to their report, from near the end of the Guardian article: https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/2021/03/ff71ab0b-finalfukushima2011-2020_web.pdf https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20... )

sputr 6y ago
Greenpeace isn't exactly a trustworthy entity on this topic. Their anti-nuclear position is, first and foremost, ideological (as is with the entirety of the green movement). Does not mean that they are wrong. I also don't see them purposefully modifying information aka. lying. But the probability of their biases getting in the way of objective reporting is non-trivial.
- etiam 6y ago
  Well expressed, and I largely agree with your assessment. But certain Japanese politicians/authorities/corporations aren't exactly neutral, disinterested parties in this matter either, so I think some adversarial discourse is helpful here, and at least the best we'll get. For clarification, I'm mainly reacting to the headline rather than the thyroid cancer survey. I don't have an opinion either way about that without seeing much more background, and that seems more complex than I'll have time to dig into today.
  - bart_spoon 6y ago
    This report isn't from Japanese authorities, its from the UN.
- willis936 6y ago
  You don’t have to accuse Greenpeace of lying; their lies are already well documented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Greenpeace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Greenpeace
mpweiher 6y ago
Can you point me to the place in the article where it actually talks about radiation impacting the health of locals? All I could find was complaints that the acceptable-safe radiation limit had been raised, and that a few selected locations within the area had levels that were slightly above the previous and well below the new levels. Nothing about actual health damage from radiation.

pvaldes 6y ago

Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit. I assume that this just made the life of the local people more interesting And it seems that Californian people enjoyed their tuna meals, now atom flavoured, found in San Diego since 2011 so, if everybody is happy and we can always produce more babies to replace the hundreds of crippled ones... end of the problem, "I can't see you, I can't hear you, la, la, la", etc...

anfilt 6y ago
What? Any radio-isotopes that made into the ocean would be spread so thin that eating banana is gonna give you more radiation than you get in San Diego. Even the radiation levels in the surrounding areas of the reactors was quite low. Almost all the radiation stayed on the reactor site.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  > Any radio-isotopes that made into the ocean would be spread so thin that eating banana is gonna give you more radiation Let me introduce yourself this little marvel of biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation "We don't found" and "does not exist" are different terms. "Report couldn't prove damage" would be a much better title, or at least closer to truth. With bioaccumulation is the same, our knowledge of marine biology and marine ecosystems is still poor in lots of cases. Californian woman get pregnant also, as japanese women do, so this spiral goes a little deeper than the "is just like a banana so people is safe" simple claim. This is not a simple problem. Nobody can't accurately evaluate the final effects of a process that is very complex, is still running, and is far from ending. This is plain lying in the face of people. "We are still grasping the surface of this" is not the same as "didn't happened".
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    > "We don't found" and "does not exist" are different terms. "Report couldn't prove damage" would be a much better title, or at least closer to truth. You are the one who just said "Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit". Was that or was that not the case?

jussij 6y ago

To this day that disaster continues to cause trouble for the local fishing industry: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1325/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1325/ I suspect the mental health of the local fishermen was well an truly tested and will continue to be tested by that disaster.

mpweiher 6y ago
Interesting article, which shows quite clearly that the trouble the fishermen have is not with the effects of radiation, but with the perceptions of the effects of radiation.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
Yes, because of the constant barrage of fear mongering articles that have been printed about the event. Fish were shown to be healthy for consumption's shortly after the event, but the media still reports on the insignificant amount of radiation in water associated to the disaster. By comparison, when is the last time you heard of the lingering effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill, where oil on the seafloor surface will cause contamination in some fish for years to come?

JimWestergren 6y ago

Mandatory Link to the Radiation Dose Chart from XKCD: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/

number6 6y ago
If your basing radiation safety procedures on an internet png and things go wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/radiation/sources.html https://xkcd.com/radiation/sources.html you're free to read the sources yourself
- joh6nn 6y ago
  For people down-voting this comment, note that it is a direct quote from the xkcd chart itself
  - number6 6y ago
    <3

simonCGN 6y ago

Another propaganda article

chpill 6y ago
The World Health Organisation agrees with the UNSCEAR about the impact of radiation https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/health-consequences-of-fukushima-nuclear-accident https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/health-consequences... That would have to be an INSANE worldwide propaganda effort to pull this off. Or maybe, the propaganda is not where you think it is.
Hammershaft 6y ago
You think the UN is deceptively publishing pro nuclear propoganda?

haunter 6y ago

UN also said there is no human to human transmission of Covid https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en

mpweiher 6y ago
1. "by the Chinese authorities". So UN is not "saying" this, they are just relaying information and clearly marking it as such. 2. "Preliminary investigations..." so this was not presented as a definitive conclusion, just as preliminary findings...by someone else. 3. "... have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission..." This is not "there is no transmission" or even "found evidence that there is no transmission" and it's not even "have found no evidence for", but "have found no clear evidence for" So basically every word of your post is a mis-representation of the original tweet.

walrus01 6y ago

This part seems weird to me: > “On the balance of available evidence, the large increase ... in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure,” Unscear said. “Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously detected.” ---- In order to have any confidence in that statement, wouldn't you also have to pick a representative population far away from Fukushima which could not have possibly been exposed to radiation, numbering in the many thousands of people, to conduct thyroid examinations/screenings on and determine if the extra level of scrutiny and analysis was also turning up a similar number of previously unseen abnormalities? did they do that?

boomboomsubban 6y ago
This is not the first time studying such effects, which is why they can be confident that is the cause. Similar results were found in some post Chernobyl studies, and the risk/reward of regular screening for many ailments is a constant debate in medicine.
- hef19898 6y ago
  But aren't the Chernobyl studies hindered by the fact that a large portion of the liquidators aren't tracked at all? That is my understanding, for what's it worth.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Those would not be relevant to such tests, where the samples would be something like "every grade four student in a region."
    - hef19898 6y ago
      But they would be relevant in determining the total health impact of the accident, wouldn't it?

dr_faustus 6y ago

I find it always fascinating, that the same groups (Greenpeace, etc.) are always quick to point to UN reports about climate change (like the IPCC report) as if they were gospel but all the reports of the UN about Chernobyl and Fukushima are supposedly fake. I personally believe both are correct. After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl [1], Fukushima (cf. article) and even Hiroshima [2], it is pretty safe to say that radiation poses a much smaller risk to humans than is often propagated in the horror scenarios of many environmental groups. The theory most of these scenarios are based on, ie. that every little amount of radiation lineraly increases the risks for cancer, is pretty much debunked. So, yes, nuclear is a dangerous technology, esp. if we keep stopping reserch and progress happening on a large scale and don't replace the 50 year old reactors. But coal kills tens of thousands every year and nuclear is still one of the few relatively reliable, almost CO2 neutral power sources we have. [1] https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/

melomal 6y ago
> After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl Ever heard of the Chernobyl babies born in Poland and Ukraine? My wife happens to be in that category and safe to say she has plenty of similar issues to other people in the same 'category'. Thyroid issues are a serious problem for many young women around here and it cannot be a coincidence. But I still do believe that nuclear is the way forward without doubt though. Just that these studies seem to be way off with the ongoing effects.
- dr_faustus 6y ago
  I have no doubt, that in the over 30 years after Chernobly hundreds of thousands of children were born with birth defects in Poland and Ukraine, many of them severe. Which is tragic. And has nothing to do with Chernobyl. Because roughly 6% of all babies born around the world have birth defects (https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/birth-defects-causes-and-statistics-863/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/birth-defects-caus...). As a parent, I can understand the impulse to attribute such a senseless act of nature to some outside, "evil" force. But the statistics just don't show any meaningful connection.

antattack 6y ago

Quote from the report: “no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that could be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident” Which means that possibly: 1)there were adverse health effects among Fukushima residents that were not documented. 2)there were adverse health effects that could not be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident. 3)adverse health effects have not manifested themselves yet

rwj 6y ago
Or, that any impact is too small to measure, and so not meaningful.
- melomal 6y ago
  Asbestos was being used from the 1800's and I can see that all of a sudden there's plenty of impact that has been caused by it. Fukushima was 10 years ago, come back again in another 10 years time, then another and see what the damage is.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
The same three things apply to basically everything. For a hyperbolic example, no adverse health effects have been documented that could be directly attributed to people reading the post you made. All three of your possibilities would still apply.

macspoofing 6y ago

Not true. As Japan pulled back from nuclear due to fears stemming from Fukushima accident, they increased coal reliance which has a direct impact on health of thousands of people.

xiphias2 6y ago
What does that have to do with radiation?
- lupire 6y ago
  It's an indirect effect, described slyly.
- RandomChance 6y ago
  Might not be what they meant, but under normal operations a coal plant can release significantly more radiation into the environment than a nuclear plant, via isotopes in the ash [1][3]. It’s still less than normal medical sources but it is much higher than a normal nuclear plant where radiological releases of any kind are actively watched for. (The source of the coal will determine the isotopes involved and the initial amount. [2]) This article [3] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory REVIEW (1993 I believe, so a bit dated) states "The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants" [1]( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...) [2]( https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html) PDF Warning: [3]( https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/ORNL%20Review%20v26n3-4%201993.pdf#page=26 https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/ORNL%20Review%20v26...)

amarant 6y ago

Controversial opinion: nuclear has a bad reputation because the coal industry wants it to have a bad reputation. In reality it's one of the best energy sources we have

unanswered 6y ago
This fails to take into account the complicity of bad actors hawking other non-solutions like wind and solar.
- nickik 6y ago
  Wind and solar were not really a option for much of the time since nuclear was invented. And we have very clear evidence that the coal and gas industry have been fighting against nuclear since its inception. It was not uncommon even in the 70s for 'environmentalist' anti-nuclear organization to be sponsored by fossil fuel industry.
thehappypm 6y ago
This is the mainstream HN opinion. The controversial opinion? Nuclear sucks because you lose a city every generation, even if you're the most advanced, organization nation on Earth (Japan) you can still make mistakes that have consequences for decades to centuries.
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  > you lose a city every generation No, you don't. Fukushima had a 2010 population of 20,000. It has 17,000 today. And it dropped from 22,000 to 20,000 between 2000 and 2020 so not all of the population reduction was due to nuclear disaster. Likewise, Pripyat was a planned town designed specifically to support the nuclear plants. When the nuclear plants closes, the town had no reason to continue existing. Like mining towns when the mines are exhausted.

coldtea 6y ago

>The first round of tests, conducted between 2011 and 2015, identified 116 cases of actual or suspected thyroid cancer among more than 300,000 people aged 18. “On the balance of available evidence, the large increase ... in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure,” Unscear said. “Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously detected.” Gotta love a lobby job of PR/damage control! This is even better than the work of the Japanese government itself. Insulting to our intelligence, but good PR work nonetheless... In any case, up there with "Covid-19? No big deal", also in WHO greatest hits.

coldtea 6y ago
And for those that missed the context: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-looks-to-regain-its-footing-10-years-after-fukushima/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-loo...

lamontcg 6y ago

Nuclear is way too expensive. It'll never happen. Fukushima cost $200B to cleanup in order for it to not wind up killing anyone.

8bitsrule 6y ago

'radiation did not damage health of local people' is interesting language here. "As of the end of December 2015, 51 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer in the second examina-tion conducted by Fukushima Prefecture.... As of the end of June 2015, 113 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer. Of these, 99 people underwent surgery.... the Fukushima Prefectural Citizens Health Survey Committee has not recognized these thyroid cancer cases as the result of the Fukushima accident; the Committee’s reasoning is... that some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed."[0] [0] Katsuta T. (2019).'The Reality after Fukushima in Japan - Actual Damage to Local People'. https://web.archive.org/web/20200326151713/https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-658-25987-7_16.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20200326151713/https://link.spri... Some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed. Should medicine not err on the side of caution? Given the results near Chernobyl? At any rate, there were certainly deaths as a result of the plant's failure. About 2000 people died as a consequence of disaster-related evacuation measures. Whether the radiation was directly responsible or not, the damage to the plant and very real dangers of potential exposure undeniably led to those deaths. Is the UN saying that evacuating tens of thousands was an over-reaction? Was the extreme threat posed by the highly unstable condition of Unit 4 "over-diagnosed" by most western experts? The ongoing spin on this topic is disgusting. March of FUD.