> Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time.

> Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time. Waste from fission plants and incidents is hard to estimate for a variety of reasons. It tends to be incredibly long-lived. Small non-lethal (even non-harmful) amounts can accumulate in animals and plants to the point where there's still an impact from Chernobyl on widespread populations decades later [1]: > The German boars roam in forests nearly 950 miles (1,500 kilometers ) from Chernobyl. Yet, the amount of radioactive cesium-137 within their tissue often registers dozens of times beyond the recommended limit for consumption and thousands of times above normal. It's worth noting that not all toxic byproducts are radioactive. Cesium is toxic on its own. The Uranium and Plutonium decay chains include a lot of metals that even if you ignore the radioactive element, they're toxic, sometimes incredibly so. > ... 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion. [citation needed] This study [2] argues 1M/year, most of those concentrated in SE Asia (due to lack of regulation combined with coal use) and it's predominantly coal. For the US it's around 20,000. It's also not clear to me if this study includes emissions from automobiles. > ... nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel. The Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone, decades later, still stands at (literally) a thousand square miles. Nuclear advocates always bring up coal (as a false dichotomy and it paints nuclear in the best light) and deaths because it's in many ways the least impactful dimension for nuclear. Likewise, they always talk about operational costs while brushing over capital costs (and thus the total cost of ownership) and the costs of waste handling and storage and ultimately the site cleanup costs. As the article notes here the current estimate for this one site sits at 121 billion pounds and will likely rise and take a century or more. [1]: https://phys.org/news/2011-04-germany-radioactive-boars-legacy-chernobyl.html https://phys.org/news/2011-04-germany-radioactive-boars-lega... [2]: https://www.healtheffects.org/publication/global-burden-disease-major-air-pollution-sources-gbd-maps-global-approach https://www.healtheffects.org/publication/global-burden-dise...