6 ms·

> This risk is hard to quantify, it can materialize in unexpected ways (just like nobody expected Chernobyl or Fukushima) and it will cost such rich and densely

> This risk is hard to quantify, it can materialize in unexpected ways (just like nobody expected Chernobyl or Fukushima) and it will cost such rich and densely populated country as Germany trillions. You know everyone who died from Fukushima died from the evacuation not radiation, right? You know more people are killed in Germany every year from coal pollution than have died as a result of Chernobyl in total?

pvaldes 5y ago
Not matter how much will be repeated, both claims are still false. Had been debunked here extensively before.
cycomanic 5y ago
So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation. I find this argument mind-boggling, because people didn't die directly of radiation exposure it is somehow ok that Japan had to evacuate a significant population? If this would happen e.g. to Krümmel you'd have to evacuate the second largest city in Germany, that's 2 million people.
- barney54 5y ago
  The point is that the people didn’t need to be evacuated.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Some of them likely would have been completely fine and completely unexposed to dangerous levels of radiation.. but not all of them.. and it was impossible to know which were which until weeks and months later when they did more thorough testing. Many local areas were reporting over radiation of >500 millisieverts/year, which is ~150x the typical background dose. The famous XKCD Radiation chart shows a bunch of Fukushima related doses -- it was actually pretty dangerous for people close to the exclusion zone! https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    Why do you think so? To me the argument sounds like: > no one died of radiation, since they were evacuated. The people who did die, because of the evacuation, shouldn’t count because they didn’t die from the radiation. The evacuation wasn’t necessary, which is proven since no one died from radiation. And the notion that more people would have died from the radiation if they didn’t evacuate is just ignored. Well, no one died in the fire. The only people that died did because they jumped from windows. But that no one died in the fire proves that the fire wasn’t dangerous and they didn’t need to jump in the first place.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      The downside of nuclear power is, potentially & in rare circumstances, a large number of people have to move. I don't want to trivialise that - it is a big cost. But it isn't exactly like we're talking a threat to anyone's health and well-being. And when I say "rare" I mean once, globally, every 25 years with 1970s plant designs. It is quite a bit safer now with the absurd safety standards people make nuclear keep. Basically, although costly, it is a tiny risk once we estimate [danger x likelihood = risk].
      - Ma8ee 5y ago
        The biggest downside right now is that it is to slow and to expensive to build new plants to make any meaningful impact in either gas deliveries from Russia or climate disaster.
      - _0w8t 5y ago
        The problem with nuclear plants is the risk is really unknown. One cannot say it is small. For example, nobody considered that Russia would fire artillery against nuclear reactors. And now a threat of attacks with powerful conventional weapons against nuclear reactors and waste processing/storage has to be considered very seriously. Similarly we cannot assume that technological progress would not allow a single terrorist with right equipment to trigger another Chernobyl.
        roenxi 5y ago
- godelski 5y ago
  > So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation. I wasn't aware that the nuclear accident caused massive flooding (the person you're responding to is saying that everyone died from the tsunami, not the radiation). Your point still stands about large economic costs to exclusion zones, but I don't feel you responded in good faith. As per the article (and as someone who actually did study nuclear physics), the risk of creating an exclusion zone in Germany is extremely small. Last I checked German doesn't have many earthquakes nor large bodies of water that could lead to danger from tsunamis. Germany seems fairly stable from an environmental standpoint, so the only real causes for a nuclear disaster would be from a freak accident. Considering we've learned a lot about safety in the last decade (and way more since Chernobyl), this risk is pretty small.
  - nl 5y ago
    In Ukraine a nuclear power station was recently shelled with artillery. If a power station was shelled in Germany what measures would avoid an exclusion zone? And to be clear, there are plenty of groups that would deliberately cause an issue exclusion zone.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      How is it different than shelling a water dam? I would wager it is much easier to do huge harm that way than to shell a concrete hull made to withstand two planes simultaneously hitting it, or even cutting the main pipe in half, which will still safely shut down the plant. The only real (and exceptionally tiny) risk with modern nuclear plants is some contamination, but it needs several several fuckups to happen even with a goddamn tsunami hitting it
      - nl 5y ago
        No exclusion zone is needed after a dam breach. A reactor rupture causes widespread contamination even with modern reactors. There is nothing at all in modern designs that stops that.
- belorn 5y ago
  A few years after Fukushima we had a even large evacuation done in California, 180,000 people (and the relocation of a fish hatchery) compared to 150,000 people in Japan. It did not make international news, the death toll was not estimated, and things went back to normal fairly fast. Large evacuations are rare but they aren't that uncommon. It just doesn't get the news attention. It is a bit like traffic deaths, which might also be a significant portion of the deaths caused by the evacuation. Force 180,000 to take to the road and some will not return back alive. Living downstream of a hydro power dam is actually more dangerous than living near a nuclear plant. The destructive forces of a dam is barely being maintained by a thin layer of concrete, and it only takes a bit of human mistakes and bad weather to cause mayhem and death.
  - ivan_gammel 5y ago
    Disasters like flood or fire don’t usually render large areas uninhabitable - people can return home, rebuild and live as usual. Nuclear incidents on the contrary have long term economic effects and public health dangers. My Russian grandfather died from cancer after unknowingly spending some time in unrestricted area of radioactive fallout 15 years after the incident (see Mayak plant [1] and Techa river [2]). The local population of Muslumovo there was resettled long after the catastrophe when the details of the incident were made known. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techa
    - belorn 5y ago
      The discussion around Fukushima is not about the loss of land that got rendered uninhabitable, it is exclusively focused on the loss of life. If you want to change the discussion into be about the loss of land we also need to consider how an hydro power dam changes the landscape, turning habitable land into uninhabitable lakes or turning arid land into deserts by changing water flows. For the amount of energy that nuclear power produce, I am uncertain if land usage that can't be used for housing/farming is something that should be argued as an point against it. It sad that your Russian grandfather died because the government was dishonest and didn't protect their citizens. I know similar stories from mining towns where especially radon tend to be of such high levels that people end up getting cancer and die. Most nations have regulations to prevent that but it took many lives before those regulations where in place. Fossil fuels are particular guilty in creating large uninhabitable areas because of increase radiation risks, but basically any mining has been guilty. Cut into the ground and significant amount of radioactive material will end up in the air and water.
hedora 5y ago
Also, Chernobyl was due to a completely incompetent plant manager. They intentionally disabled many fail safes in order to get the plant into a vulnerable state.
- freemint 5y ago
  I've yet to see an insurance that would insure against human incompetence.
- kelnos 5y ago
  I think human error is one of the kinds of error it's really hard to work around. You are always going to have people who make mistakes or even intentionally cut corners or do unsafe things, depending on the circumstances. Would I expect a German plant to be run in a safer manner in the 2020s than a Soviet Ukrainian plant in the 1980s? Sure, absolutely. Both because of the design of the plants, and because of the different safety cultures. But I don't think we can just hand-wave a disaster away and claim that it only happened because of X or Y or Z, without being certain X, Y, and Z have been eliminated. And I don't think we can say that with certainty.
  - dzikimarian 5y ago
    Chernobyl was no error per se. It was conscious decision with political background, possible, because entire system of values in USSR was upside down. In normal country there would be no reason to do any of that.
    - nl 5y ago
      And Germany has never had any odd political issues?
      - dzikimarian 5y ago
        This type of issues? No. I assume you mean nazis, but while it's hard to find words to describe their crimes, they had pretty robust approach to engineering. On the east side from the other hand ideology always beat logic. Also, if we're going to assume, that everything we build will be foundation for the next Hitler, then there's hardly point in doing anything.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bayesian_horse 5y ago
If nobody provably died because of the Fukushima accident, it was because of expansive and costly evacuations. The Japanese minstry of trade estimates the cost of the cleanup to $187 billion, though I'm not sure if that really includes everything. And that number is certainly not the upper bound on what could happen when other plants have similar or worse accidents. It's a very small risk with a huge downside. The fact that scientists have consistently underestimated the likelihood of these events - even though so far there has never been one caused by ill intent - is not reassuring.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Is the cleanup related to nuclear, or the whole tsunami? Also, how is it underestimated? There was an exceptionally huge tsunami there, and even with that there would have been no trouble given the backup-generators would work well and even then, only a slight radiation exposure happened. There have been orders of magnitude more failures in other power plants causing much bigger damage (not even counting the environmental effect of them!).
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    Can you name such accidents specifically? I just stated a figure from the Japanese Ministry of trade, and that seems to be the radioactive cleanup and paying of benefits etc.. while there is another figure that decommissioning the plant will cost about 750 billion US Dollars. A particular problem are millions of square meters of radio-active top-soil and where to store it. Yes, those problems have not been solved yet, and most evacuees have not yet returned and will probably never return. No amount of propaganda will convince them that the site is safe after the "safe" reactor blew up and contaminated everything. Meanwhile nuclear power has become really unpopular in Japan. People like you will dismiss this as irrational fear. Or is it irrational that you think that the future risk is a) actually quantifiable and b) tolerable? Because neither of these is scientific consensus.
ivan_gammel 5y ago
The number of deaths from a nuclear incident will be significant in Germany in any case, either as a result of evacuation or from radiation. The economic damage overall will be much higher than in any incident of the past, due to environmental impact, destroyed or de-valued property, disrupted businesses etc. Half of German GDP will be the lowest estimate.
hef19898 5y ago
And you know that there is no reliable casualty count from Chernobyl? The Soviets didn't count and follow up, nobody else wanted to do that neither. And long term effects, e.g. highe cancer rates, are extremely hard to quabtify and correlate woth a singluar event.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > According to the official, internationally recognised death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Official =|= reliable The USSR, and successor states, lost track of the liquidators, completely. It helped in not paying them. The West was fine with it, it made it easier to sell nuclear as save. It also meant that any Liquidator who died of conplications after Chernobyl was most likely not included in official figures, because nobody officially counted him as having been there in the first place.

pvaldes 5y ago

Not matter how much will be repeated, both claims are still false. Had been debunked here extensively before.

cycomanic 5y ago

So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation. I find this argument mind-boggling, because people didn't die directly of radiation exposure it is somehow ok that Japan had to evacuate a significant population? If this would happen e.g. to Krümmel you'd have to evacuate the second largest city in Germany, that's 2 million people.

barney54 5y ago
The point is that the people didn’t need to be evacuated.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  Some of them likely would have been completely fine and completely unexposed to dangerous levels of radiation.. but not all of them.. and it was impossible to know which were which until weeks and months later when they did more thorough testing. Many local areas were reporting over radiation of >500 millisieverts/year, which is ~150x the typical background dose. The famous XKCD Radiation chart shows a bunch of Fukushima related doses -- it was actually pretty dangerous for people close to the exclusion zone! https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  Why do you think so? To me the argument sounds like: > no one died of radiation, since they were evacuated. The people who did die, because of the evacuation, shouldn’t count because they didn’t die from the radiation. The evacuation wasn’t necessary, which is proven since no one died from radiation. And the notion that more people would have died from the radiation if they didn’t evacuate is just ignored. Well, no one died in the fire. The only people that died did because they jumped from windows. But that no one died in the fire proves that the fire wasn’t dangerous and they didn’t need to jump in the first place.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    The downside of nuclear power is, potentially & in rare circumstances, a large number of people have to move. I don't want to trivialise that - it is a big cost. But it isn't exactly like we're talking a threat to anyone's health and well-being. And when I say "rare" I mean once, globally, every 25 years with 1970s plant designs. It is quite a bit safer now with the absurd safety standards people make nuclear keep. Basically, although costly, it is a tiny risk once we estimate [danger x likelihood = risk].
    - Ma8ee 5y ago
      The biggest downside right now is that it is to slow and to expensive to build new plants to make any meaningful impact in either gas deliveries from Russia or climate disaster.
    - _0w8t 5y ago
      The problem with nuclear plants is the risk is really unknown. One cannot say it is small. For example, nobody considered that Russia would fire artillery against nuclear reactors. And now a threat of attacks with powerful conventional weapons against nuclear reactors and waste processing/storage has to be considered very seriously. Similarly we cannot assume that technological progress would not allow a single terrorist with right equipment to trigger another Chernobyl.
      - roenxi 5y ago
godelski 5y ago
> So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation. I wasn't aware that the nuclear accident caused massive flooding (the person you're responding to is saying that everyone died from the tsunami, not the radiation). Your point still stands about large economic costs to exclusion zones, but I don't feel you responded in good faith. As per the article (and as someone who actually did study nuclear physics), the risk of creating an exclusion zone in Germany is extremely small. Last I checked German doesn't have many earthquakes nor large bodies of water that could lead to danger from tsunamis. Germany seems fairly stable from an environmental standpoint, so the only real causes for a nuclear disaster would be from a freak accident. Considering we've learned a lot about safety in the last decade (and way more since Chernobyl), this risk is pretty small.
- nl 5y ago
  In Ukraine a nuclear power station was recently shelled with artillery. If a power station was shelled in Germany what measures would avoid an exclusion zone? And to be clear, there are plenty of groups that would deliberately cause an issue exclusion zone.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    How is it different than shelling a water dam? I would wager it is much easier to do huge harm that way than to shell a concrete hull made to withstand two planes simultaneously hitting it, or even cutting the main pipe in half, which will still safely shut down the plant. The only real (and exceptionally tiny) risk with modern nuclear plants is some contamination, but it needs several several fuckups to happen even with a goddamn tsunami hitting it
    - nl 5y ago
      No exclusion zone is needed after a dam breach. A reactor rupture causes widespread contamination even with modern reactors. There is nothing at all in modern designs that stops that.
belorn 5y ago
A few years after Fukushima we had a even large evacuation done in California, 180,000 people (and the relocation of a fish hatchery) compared to 150,000 people in Japan. It did not make international news, the death toll was not estimated, and things went back to normal fairly fast. Large evacuations are rare but they aren't that uncommon. It just doesn't get the news attention. It is a bit like traffic deaths, which might also be a significant portion of the deaths caused by the evacuation. Force 180,000 to take to the road and some will not return back alive. Living downstream of a hydro power dam is actually more dangerous than living near a nuclear plant. The destructive forces of a dam is barely being maintained by a thin layer of concrete, and it only takes a bit of human mistakes and bad weather to cause mayhem and death.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  Disasters like flood or fire don’t usually render large areas uninhabitable - people can return home, rebuild and live as usual. Nuclear incidents on the contrary have long term economic effects and public health dangers. My Russian grandfather died from cancer after unknowingly spending some time in unrestricted area of radioactive fallout 15 years after the incident (see Mayak plant [1] and Techa river [2]). The local population of Muslumovo there was resettled long after the catastrophe when the details of the incident were made known. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techa
  - belorn 5y ago
    The discussion around Fukushima is not about the loss of land that got rendered uninhabitable, it is exclusively focused on the loss of life. If you want to change the discussion into be about the loss of land we also need to consider how an hydro power dam changes the landscape, turning habitable land into uninhabitable lakes or turning arid land into deserts by changing water flows. For the amount of energy that nuclear power produce, I am uncertain if land usage that can't be used for housing/farming is something that should be argued as an point against it. It sad that your Russian grandfather died because the government was dishonest and didn't protect their citizens. I know similar stories from mining towns where especially radon tend to be of such high levels that people end up getting cancer and die. Most nations have regulations to prevent that but it took many lives before those regulations where in place. Fossil fuels are particular guilty in creating large uninhabitable areas because of increase radiation risks, but basically any mining has been guilty. Cut into the ground and significant amount of radioactive material will end up in the air and water.

hedora 5y ago

Also, Chernobyl was due to a completely incompetent plant manager. They intentionally disabled many fail safes in order to get the plant into a vulnerable state.

freemint 5y ago
I've yet to see an insurance that would insure against human incompetence.
kelnos 5y ago
I think human error is one of the kinds of error it's really hard to work around. You are always going to have people who make mistakes or even intentionally cut corners or do unsafe things, depending on the circumstances. Would I expect a German plant to be run in a safer manner in the 2020s than a Soviet Ukrainian plant in the 1980s? Sure, absolutely. Both because of the design of the plants, and because of the different safety cultures. But I don't think we can just hand-wave a disaster away and claim that it only happened because of X or Y or Z, without being certain X, Y, and Z have been eliminated. And I don't think we can say that with certainty.
- dzikimarian 5y ago
  Chernobyl was no error per se. It was conscious decision with political background, possible, because entire system of values in USSR was upside down. In normal country there would be no reason to do any of that.
  - nl 5y ago
    And Germany has never had any odd political issues?
    - dzikimarian 5y ago
      This type of issues? No. I assume you mean nazis, but while it's hard to find words to describe their crimes, they had pretty robust approach to engineering. On the east side from the other hand ideology always beat logic. Also, if we're going to assume, that everything we build will be foundation for the next Hitler, then there's hardly point in doing anything.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bayesian_horse 5y ago

If nobody provably died because of the Fukushima accident, it was because of expansive and costly evacuations. The Japanese minstry of trade estimates the cost of the cleanup to $187 billion, though I'm not sure if that really includes everything. And that number is certainly not the upper bound on what could happen when other plants have similar or worse accidents. It's a very small risk with a huge downside. The fact that scientists have consistently underestimated the likelihood of these events - even though so far there has never been one caused by ill intent - is not reassuring.

kaba0 5y ago
Is the cleanup related to nuclear, or the whole tsunami? Also, how is it underestimated? There was an exceptionally huge tsunami there, and even with that there would have been no trouble given the backup-generators would work well and even then, only a slight radiation exposure happened. There have been orders of magnitude more failures in other power plants causing much bigger damage (not even counting the environmental effect of them!).
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  Can you name such accidents specifically? I just stated a figure from the Japanese Ministry of trade, and that seems to be the radioactive cleanup and paying of benefits etc.. while there is another figure that decommissioning the plant will cost about 750 billion US Dollars. A particular problem are millions of square meters of radio-active top-soil and where to store it. Yes, those problems have not been solved yet, and most evacuees have not yet returned and will probably never return. No amount of propaganda will convince them that the site is safe after the "safe" reactor blew up and contaminated everything. Meanwhile nuclear power has become really unpopular in Japan. People like you will dismiss this as irrational fear. Or is it irrational that you think that the future risk is a) actually quantifiable and b) tolerable? Because neither of these is scientific consensus.

ivan_gammel 5y ago

The number of deaths from a nuclear incident will be significant in Germany in any case, either as a result of evacuation or from radiation. The economic damage overall will be much higher than in any incident of the past, due to environmental impact, destroyed or de-valued property, disrupted businesses etc. Half of German GDP will be the lowest estimate.

hef19898 5y ago

And you know that there is no reliable casualty count from Chernobyl? The Soviets didn't count and follow up, nobody else wanted to do that neither. And long term effects, e.g. highe cancer rates, are extremely hard to quabtify and correlate woth a singluar event.

barry-cotter 5y ago
> According to the official, internationally recognised death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
- hef19898 5y ago
  Official =|= reliable The USSR, and successor states, lost track of the liquidators, completely. It helped in not paying them. The West was fine with it, it made it easier to sell nuclear as save. It also meant that any Liquidator who died of conplications after Chernobyl was most likely not included in official figures, because nobody officially counted him as having been there in the first place.