5 ms·

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

by 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...

by rob74 6y ago

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...