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> Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. https://en.

> Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. *One*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change. Which likely numbers thousands if not tens of thousands of people per day. > Contrary to the cynical takes so far here, this is both good news and logical. My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future because of the two elephants in the room - China, and to a lesser extent, Russia. China might one day blockage Japan. Then again it might not. Ukraine might never have been invaded. Taiwan, might not get invaded.

jvanderbot 4y ago
More people died from the Fukushima area evacuations than the meltdown.
- idontwantthis 4y ago
  That’s the reason why more didn’t die from them meltdown.
- taylorius 4y ago
  But the evacuation wasn't an unrelated event. It was a direct result of the meltdown, so evacuation deaths can be attributed to it.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    The tsunami caused the evacuation and the meltdown.
    - taylorius 4y ago
      Indeed - and it has long been known that Japan is in an earthquake zone, and can suffer Tsunamis, so...
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Yeah so they should just move the island.
    - SyzygistSix 4y ago
      I would say the negligence of putting the backup generator in the basement was more the cause. That was amateur hour and easily preventable.
  - jchw 4y ago
    Well, to be fair. There was also that whole thing that caused the meltdown as well. It's pretty much impossible to get an exact pulse on how many people died indirectly as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster evacuation specifically who would've lived if it were not for that. Particularly because most of the deaths attributed to the disaster were elderly to begin with. Not trying to downplay the cost of human life, it's really terrible when preventable scenarios or mistakes lead to any cost. With that having been said, there are sometimes going to be events where evacuations are necessary, and some of them we can't prevent. No doubt there were many thousands of deaths unrelated to Fukushima Daiichi due to the massive earthquake and tsunami. I believe it is estimated that around 1,000-2,000 people died as part of the evacuation efforts, but I am not sure what a good source is, so take that with a grain of salt. If you want to go really deep, it'd be wise to consider the burden that it may have caused psychologically too, but that's even harder to exactly ascertain, especially since it is likely nothing compared to what happened as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. If the point of this is to compare safety though, factoring this in still would place nuclear fission power plants very low in terms of how much cost of human life they cause overall.
    - taylorius 4y ago
      That's true - but it's not like the potential for such a natural disaster wasn't well known. The word we use for such devastating tidal waves kind of gives that game away.
      - jchw 4y ago
        Yes, sure. But let's not understate how unusually bad the disaster really was; a 9.0 earthquake and equally severe tsunami. That's not exactly a common event, and it probably won't be one even in a world with much more volatile weather conditions. And yet, despite that, it is in fact possible to make nuclear fission power plants survive this kind of disaster, and especially possible to prevent the meltdown that eventually occurred; Fukushima Daiichi is not the only fission plant in Japan, and not the closest to the epicenter of the disaster either. I think it's fair to say given the evidence that the problems that need to be solved with regards to Fukushima Daiichi are the systemic issues that led to the inadequate safety measures and the unfortunate decisions made leading up to the meltdown. Whether the issues be operational complacency, corruption, etc. It'd be nice to have a way to simply be robust to those issues, but in the end it's always going to be dangerous to human life if the people in charge of decisions that could endanger human life are not adequately responsible. That would still be the case in absence of nuclear power, natural disasters, evacuations, etc.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    Only if the decision to evacuate was necessary. I wonder, but don't know
    - LightG 4y ago
      Many people here are talking like the government forced them to evacuate. Perhaps they did. But if your family was there, would you stick around? I'd be getting my family the flying f outta there. Not logically deducing outcomes and risk factors on HN. Hindsight is 20 20...
      - tomp 4y ago
        The government and media can also just lie to people to influence their actions. E.g. due to propaganda, people thought that Covid is 100x as deadly as it actually is (people estimated on average that infection fatality rate was 10%, when in reality it’s ~ 0.1%)
        LightG 4y ago
        If true ... is that a lie, or the inability to know scientific fact before it's been studied? Applies both to Fukushima and Covid response.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I’ve tried googling this but couldn’t understand. How exactly did evacuations kill people? Was it just people being moved out of hospitals that needed to be in hospitals?
  - grozzle 4y ago
    Yes, and the stress of being uprooted. There was a large surplus of deaths in the evacuated population over the next year, without any sign of a radiogenic disease. Communities being scattered suddenly, the stress of losing homes and homeland.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Do you have any reliable statistics showing that there were surplus deaths? Most of the research I've read showed ~1,500 deaths - mostly among aged 75+ people - over 6 months out of a cohort of 300,000 people. This is not a surplus over normal death rates.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    The statistics is largely bunk. Out of 300k people, 1,600 died of old age. News outlets just assumed that all these people died due to the evacuation. The original research was retracted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096908
    - jvanderbot 4y ago
      This is excellent to know! Thank you.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Impossible, they are the same event.
absentmoon 4y ago
Not saying one is better than the other but there were other costs too. Like the people displaced from their homes, the environmental clean up costs, etc.
hutzlibu 4y ago
"Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One." Especially compared to the 19.700 deaths the tsunami took all in all. But it is still not so simple. There are long term effects of radiation, many people likely will get cancer sooner and the whole mess is still not cleaned up. And here where I live in germany, it is still advised against regulary eating mushrooms from the wood, because of one incident that took place 36 years ago. But yes, the coal plants around here contributed worse, so I also believe it is wiser to not replace fission with coal.
- Herz 4y ago
  In the same report compiled by a WHO body, it is also said that there is no statistical evidence in the increase of cancers in the area. This is science and statistics, everything else is speculation based on nothing, fantasy stories. I am an Italian living in Germany. The German approach to nuclear power is totally propagandistic and anti-scientific, a very un-German approach to the subject. https://www.unscear.org/unscear/uploads/documents/unscear-reports/UNSCEAR_2020_21_Report_Vol.II.pdf https://www.unscear.org/unscear/uploads/documents/unscear-re...
- varajelle 4y ago
  I mean, there might be effect, but do you have a quantification of these. Like maybe you get 0.1% more likely to catch cancer if you eat these mushroom, but when you compare that to the 300% more likely if you smoke then I think you're safe. Why do we allow smoking but are scared of low dose radiations?
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "Why do we allow smoking but are scared of low dose radiations? " Because smoking is not mandatory for everyone, but a individual choice and you can sue people, whose smoking effects other people. Radiation effects everyone. And no one is scared of low dose radiation, but it is a symptom of what can happen. Chernobyl was just one incident. Going 100% nuclear and with people still being people, this would mean more accidents, more radiation, more cancer.
cturner 4y ago
Australia is a gas supplier to Japan and has headed down the road towards nationalising its gas sector recently, indirectly through local supply mandates and price fixing. Exploration projects have been canceled and frozen there in the last week. Japan may feel uncertain about its ability to source gas on the open market.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Supply mandates and price fixing. Good ole' central economic planning. What's the inevitable result? Shortages.
  - defrost 4y ago
    Errr, in this instance you're exactly arse backwards. The gas supply shortages in the eastern states of Australia arose precisely because of a lack of local supply mandate and price capping baked into the original licenses. Western Australia has such things and had no shortages. The inevitable result (in the West) was a transnational being limited in its ability to price gouge in a global supply crisis.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Then there's something else at work here that is not in evidence. For example, were they granted a legal monopoly?
      - defrost 4y ago
        > were they granted a legal monopoly? Err, by "they" do you mean Apache, BHP, BP, Chevron, KufPec, Mitsubishi Motors, Mitsui & Co, Quadrant Energy, Santos, Shell and Woodside Energy ? (ie Australian LNG producers) and by "legal monopoloy" do you mean "A market structure characterized by a single seller" ?
- rgmerk 4y ago
  This is hyperbole. The Australian government is bringing in a price cap of $12 per gigajoule (well above historical gas prices, and well above long-term contract prices for Australian LNG in Japan) for domestic customers. Whatever the merits of this action, it’s a very very very long way from “nationalising the sector”. The Western Australian gas industry (on the other side of the country on a completely separate grid) has long had a regulation mandating a minimum proportion of WA’s gas must be sold to domestic customers, meaning local gas prices there are unaffected by the global shifts in prices. Heck, that bastion of capitalism, the United States of America, completely banned the export of natural gas and oil until 2015.
ericbarrett 4y ago
1 death, but also 110,000 permanently evacuated and their homes lost as if burned to the ground, and many billions already spent, with more to come, on a multi-generational clean-up project. I'm generally pro-nuclear but let's not understate the impact of Fukushima.
- Herz 4y ago
  You are right, but these are political reasons that have to do with the fear of nuclear power in people, not an inherent problem with nuclear power. The Fukushima plant was one of the oldest plants in the world, and not up to modern standards. If this is what can happen in the worst case scenario.... Then it's our problem that we can't accept it. https://rchoetzlein.com/theory/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/radiation.jpg https://rchoetzlein.com/theory/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ra...
- concordDance 4y ago
  Thing is, they don't actually need to still be evacuated. Check out the radiation map of Japan: https://jciv.iidj.net/map/ https://jciv.iidj.net/map/ Look up where the evacuation zone is and the pre evacuation population numbers. Then plug those numbers into the linear no threshold model (which is thought to overestimate risk). I'm away from my computer for the holidays, but when I did the numbers you're looking at QALY losses an order of magnitude lower than that caused by the loss of home. In general people (govs included) drastically overreact to radiation deaths. It makes no sense to spend a billion dollars to avoid one nuclear accident death when you can spend a billion dollars to avoid 100 prostate cancer deaths. Its literally not worth doing the remaining cleanup by any metric.
  - mplanchard 4y ago
    According to farmers who live in the area and do their own scans, the government's radiation maps are not always correct: https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-our-contaminated-future?utm_source=rss-feed https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-o...
- Manuel_D 4y ago
est31 4y ago
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. The price in terms of deaths was low thankfully, but not because the released material was not dangerous, but because they have done an unprecedented cleaning project. 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. Hundreds of people died during the evacuation, but if they had not been evacuated that death toll of one would have been higher too. Also, cancer can show up years/decades later, and linking it to radiation exposure might not be easy. Basically the dying with vs from covid discussion :). This entire cleanup project is estimated to cost in the high three digit range of USD billions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Costs_of_the_cleanup_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... Nuclear is safe if done right, but the Fukushima accident was definitely a big catastrophy, even if the death toll wasn't large.
- jchw 4y ago
  To be fair, estimations of future cancer deaths are near zero. Some estimations are literally zero, particularly from the WHO and Tokyo University. This is very fortunate of course. The truth is, the trauma from the evacuations is a much bigger concern, or at least it should be, in my opinion.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    The evacuations were largely unnecessary in retrospect. That’s not to say they shouldn’t have happened though, given what we knew at the time. But there was almost certainly more evacuations than were strictly necessary.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  >150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe Because overly cautious governments told them so.
- varajelle 4y ago
  > 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. The fact that they were not safe is disputed. There are claim that there was some over-reaction and that the evacuation was actually counter-productive.
jchw 4y ago
Yes, it is probably important to highlight the fact that it was not an event that led to much loss of human life, unlike the normal operation of coal and even natural gas. I agree. I don't think too many people realize this, because the deaths resulting from pollution are both normalized and indirect. However, when I said costs, I meant it more literally. Aside from the obvious cost of relocating all of those people, cleanup efforts, and so forth, it's also only fair to include the psychological toll as well. It certainly didn't help atop the massive tragedy that was already sweeping away lives and homes.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  > when I said costs Sure :) I probably came across as a bit argumentative. I also meant to add that this was caused by a natural disaster as well, unlike Chernobyl. So nuclear is arguably even safer. Again, drawing a parallel with fossil fuels - when a hurricane strikes the Gulf of Mexico and causes some sort of oil slick and kills wildlife, it barely hits the news. Also, whilst writing this, I wondered what the fossil fuel toll was for the Japanese tsunami, and the Boxing Day one, for that matter. It's not something that seems to have concerned people despite the sheer number of cars, bikes, lorries etc. that contained oil, and were destroyed. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind. Oil refineries on the Asian coasts must have been hit. What happened there? I guess my rambling point is, we really need to compare nuclear to fossil fuels, like-for-like. And "we", in particular the media, don't do that, because it's hard work to tally up a distributed fossil fuel infrastructure versus one big nuclear power station that was very visibly destroyed.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    And not even one natural disaster, TWO. First an earthquake, then a tsunami. Both at record levels. Fukushima was an ancient nuclear plant, WAY over its projected lifetime. And still we only got one direct death.
analyte123 4y ago
The global policy impact of Fukushima would have been so much less if it just didn’t have “-shima” in the name.
- glhaynes 4y ago
  That’s an interesting point, and I’m not disputing it, but I don’t recall ever having noticed that similarity.
- kortex 4y ago
  "-shima" is just 島 'island'. See also Ōshima, Mishima, Fujishima, Furushima, Hiroshima, and even Iwo Jima (硫黄島, "Shima" is sometimes pronounced "Jima" in Japanese for some reason). Note that Fukushima isn't a "true" island, though some think it might come from a block of land isolated by rivers.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  I never once noticed that until now, huh.
blablabla123 4y ago
Uranium also needs to be mined actually and there are also fatalities. > Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'
- simondotau 4y ago
  > Uranium also needs to be mined actually and there are also fatalities. Rooftop solar needs to be installed on roofs and there are also fatalities. Hydroelectric dams can fail and there can be thousands of fatalities. Pretty much every method of energy generation needs mine-sourced minerals, where mining has fatalities.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Even the most pessimistic predictions are dwarfed by the missions of people who die from pollution by fossil fuel plants every year. It's less of a headline grabbing shock accident and human psychology is not good at rationally comparing the two. Rare catastrophic events are given disproportionate relevance by our minds.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  This nonsense again. Literally everything humans build need mining. And nuclear needs less mining then literally every other form of energy. Uranium mining is mostly not open pit and has very little impact on people or society. Also the quantities need are vanishingly small. In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough. Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still. Also blaming all old people dying on the nuclear stuff is just nonsense.
korroziya 4y ago
>Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change Oh go join Greenpeace already. I really get fatigued seeing people bash oil and gas as if it has zero value. The human population wouldn't have hit 8 billion but for natgas feedstock for nitrogen* fertilizer. People would still be heating their homes with dried animal feces and wood but for propane. We'd still be hunting whales but for kerosene. And damn sure, the ability to enjoy a high quality of life with a relatively modest cost would be all but impossible but for the myriad of uses for petroleum products in general. But you didn't feel the need to point any of that out, and instead parroted the tired, cliched stance of a stereotypical progressive.
- woah 4y ago
  Wow thanks for opening my eyes. I'm now ready to get out there and start enjoying all the myriad ways that petroleum makes our lives better.
- darth_aardvark 4y ago
  They never said oil and gas had zero value. They never advocated for going back to wood and poo and whalefat. They actually didn't say any of the stuff you're mad at them for saying, and the stuff you're mad at them for not saying isn't really relevant to their point. I think most people reading these comments know oil and gas provide lots of energy we couldn't get from wood/poo/whalefat. If you see gas and oil as an improvement to w/p/w, why can't nuclear be an improvement on oil gas?
  - korroziya 4y ago
    You can tell from their wording that they have a "renewables good, oil bad" mantra. Like I said, they're happy to mention deaths stemming from fossil fuels, but not mention the lives that were helped by that form of energy. It's a tired narrative of people who are too lazy and/or uneducated to discuss the complicated issue of the pros/cons for fossil fuels.
cryptonector 4y ago
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. The economic cost, however, is huge. > My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future Why is this a cynical take? What's so bad about that about Japan wanting to secure their energy supply?
- ben_w 4y ago
  Averaged over all nuclear power, it (even combined with Chernobyl) is a surprisingly small extra cost. I'm not sure world governments will be able to coordinate a mutual insurance policy between each other over this, which is an important factor at this scale, but IMO the economic cost for nuclear is that it's now kinda meh vs. using LiIon to balance PV.
  - cryptonector 4y ago
    Small cost for the whole world, heap big cost for one country.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Exactly. Hence mutual insurance.
Kon5ole 4y ago
>Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. Also USD 82 billion and counting. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193#:~:text=Around%2012.1%20trillion%20yen%20(%24,Board%20of%20Audit%20of%20Japan https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193#:~:text=Around%2....
mplanchard 4y ago
I'd encourage you to read this recent piece about the people trying to live in a still significantly irradiated Fukushima: https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-our-contaminated-future?utm_source=rss-feed https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-o...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

> Japan already paid the price of one costly lesson with the Fukushima Daiichi incident Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. *One*. https://en.

jvanderbot 4y ago

More people died from the Fukushima area evacuations than the meltdown.

idontwantthis 4y ago
That’s the reason why more didn’t die from them meltdown.
taylorius 4y ago
But the evacuation wasn't an unrelated event. It was a direct result of the meltdown, so evacuation deaths can be attributed to it.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  The tsunami caused the evacuation and the meltdown.
  - taylorius 4y ago
    Indeed - and it has long been known that Japan is in an earthquake zone, and can suffer Tsunamis, so...
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Yeah so they should just move the island.
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    I would say the negligence of putting the backup generator in the basement was more the cause. That was amateur hour and easily preventable.
- jchw 4y ago
  Well, to be fair. There was also that whole thing that caused the meltdown as well. It's pretty much impossible to get an exact pulse on how many people died indirectly as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster evacuation specifically who would've lived if it were not for that. Particularly because most of the deaths attributed to the disaster were elderly to begin with. Not trying to downplay the cost of human life, it's really terrible when preventable scenarios or mistakes lead to any cost. With that having been said, there are sometimes going to be events where evacuations are necessary, and some of them we can't prevent. No doubt there were many thousands of deaths unrelated to Fukushima Daiichi due to the massive earthquake and tsunami. I believe it is estimated that around 1,000-2,000 people died as part of the evacuation efforts, but I am not sure what a good source is, so take that with a grain of salt. If you want to go really deep, it'd be wise to consider the burden that it may have caused psychologically too, but that's even harder to exactly ascertain, especially since it is likely nothing compared to what happened as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. If the point of this is to compare safety though, factoring this in still would place nuclear fission power plants very low in terms of how much cost of human life they cause overall.
  - taylorius 4y ago
    That's true - but it's not like the potential for such a natural disaster wasn't well known. The word we use for such devastating tidal waves kind of gives that game away.
    - jchw 4y ago
      Yes, sure. But let's not understate how unusually bad the disaster really was; a 9.0 earthquake and equally severe tsunami. That's not exactly a common event, and it probably won't be one even in a world with much more volatile weather conditions. And yet, despite that, it is in fact possible to make nuclear fission power plants survive this kind of disaster, and especially possible to prevent the meltdown that eventually occurred; Fukushima Daiichi is not the only fission plant in Japan, and not the closest to the epicenter of the disaster either. I think it's fair to say given the evidence that the problems that need to be solved with regards to Fukushima Daiichi are the systemic issues that led to the inadequate safety measures and the unfortunate decisions made leading up to the meltdown. Whether the issues be operational complacency, corruption, etc. It'd be nice to have a way to simply be robust to those issues, but in the end it's always going to be dangerous to human life if the people in charge of decisions that could endanger human life are not adequately responsible. That would still be the case in absence of nuclear power, natural disasters, evacuations, etc.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Only if the decision to evacuate was necessary. I wonder, but don't know
  - LightG 4y ago
    Many people here are talking like the government forced them to evacuate. Perhaps they did. But if your family was there, would you stick around? I'd be getting my family the flying f outta there. Not logically deducing outcomes and risk factors on HN. Hindsight is 20 20...
    - tomp 4y ago
      The government and media can also just lie to people to influence their actions. E.g. due to propaganda, people thought that Covid is 100x as deadly as it actually is (people estimated on average that infection fatality rate was 10%, when in reality it’s ~ 0.1%)
      - LightG 4y ago
        If true ... is that a lie, or the inability to know scientific fact before it's been studied? Applies both to Fukushima and Covid response.
oneoff786 4y ago
I’ve tried googling this but couldn’t understand. How exactly did evacuations kill people? Was it just people being moved out of hospitals that needed to be in hospitals?
- grozzle 4y ago
  Yes, and the stress of being uprooted. There was a large surplus of deaths in the evacuated population over the next year, without any sign of a radiogenic disease. Communities being scattered suddenly, the stress of losing homes and homeland.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Do you have any reliable statistics showing that there were surplus deaths? Most of the research I've read showed ~1,500 deaths - mostly among aged 75+ people - over 6 months out of a cohort of 300,000 people. This is not a surplus over normal death rates.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  The statistics is largely bunk. Out of 300k people, 1,600 died of old age. News outlets just assumed that all these people died due to the evacuation. The original research was retracted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096908
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    This is excellent to know! Thank you.
edgyquant 4y ago
Impossible, they are the same event.

absentmoon 4y ago

Not saying one is better than the other but there were other costs too. Like the people displaced from their homes, the environmental clean up costs, etc.

hutzlibu 4y ago

"Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One." Especially compared to the 19.700 deaths the tsunami took all in all. But it is still not so simple. There are long term effects of radiation, many people likely will get cancer sooner and the whole mess is still not cleaned up. And here where I live in germany, it is still advised against regulary eating mushrooms from the wood, because of one incident that took place 36 years ago. But yes, the coal plants around here contributed worse, so I also believe it is wiser to not replace fission with coal.

Herz 4y ago
In the same report compiled by a WHO body, it is also said that there is no statistical evidence in the increase of cancers in the area. This is science and statistics, everything else is speculation based on nothing, fantasy stories. I am an Italian living in Germany. The German approach to nuclear power is totally propagandistic and anti-scientific, a very un-German approach to the subject. https://www.unscear.org/unscear/uploads/documents/unscear-reports/UNSCEAR_2020_21_Report_Vol.II.pdf https://www.unscear.org/unscear/uploads/documents/unscear-re...
varajelle 4y ago
I mean, there might be effect, but do you have a quantification of these. Like maybe you get 0.1% more likely to catch cancer if you eat these mushroom, but when you compare that to the 300% more likely if you smoke then I think you're safe. Why do we allow smoking but are scared of low dose radiations?
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "Why do we allow smoking but are scared of low dose radiations? " Because smoking is not mandatory for everyone, but a individual choice and you can sue people, whose smoking effects other people. Radiation effects everyone. And no one is scared of low dose radiation, but it is a symptom of what can happen. Chernobyl was just one incident. Going 100% nuclear and with people still being people, this would mean more accidents, more radiation, more cancer.

cturner 4y ago

Australia is a gas supplier to Japan and has headed down the road towards nationalising its gas sector recently, indirectly through local supply mandates and price fixing. Exploration projects have been canceled and frozen there in the last week. Japan may feel uncertain about its ability to source gas on the open market.

WalterBright 4y ago
Supply mandates and price fixing. Good ole' central economic planning. What's the inevitable result? Shortages.
- defrost 4y ago
  Errr, in this instance you're exactly arse backwards. The gas supply shortages in the eastern states of Australia arose precisely because of a lack of local supply mandate and price capping baked into the original licenses. Western Australia has such things and had no shortages. The inevitable result (in the West) was a transnational being limited in its ability to price gouge in a global supply crisis.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Then there's something else at work here that is not in evidence. For example, were they granted a legal monopoly?
    - defrost 4y ago
      > were they granted a legal monopoly? Err, by "they" do you mean Apache, BHP, BP, Chevron, KufPec, Mitsubishi Motors, Mitsui & Co, Quadrant Energy, Santos, Shell and Woodside Energy ? (ie Australian LNG producers) and by "legal monopoloy" do you mean "A market structure characterized by a single seller" ?
rgmerk 4y ago
This is hyperbole. The Australian government is bringing in a price cap of $12 per gigajoule (well above historical gas prices, and well above long-term contract prices for Australian LNG in Japan) for domestic customers. Whatever the merits of this action, it’s a very very very long way from “nationalising the sector”. The Western Australian gas industry (on the other side of the country on a completely separate grid) has long had a regulation mandating a minimum proportion of WA’s gas must be sold to domestic customers, meaning local gas prices there are unaffected by the global shifts in prices. Heck, that bastion of capitalism, the United States of America, completely banned the export of natural gas and oil until 2015.

ericbarrett 4y ago

1 death, but also 110,000 permanently evacuated and their homes lost as if burned to the ground, and many billions already spent, with more to come, on a multi-generational clean-up project. I'm generally pro-nuclear but let's not understate the impact of Fukushima.

Herz 4y ago
You are right, but these are political reasons that have to do with the fear of nuclear power in people, not an inherent problem with nuclear power. The Fukushima plant was one of the oldest plants in the world, and not up to modern standards. If this is what can happen in the worst case scenario.... Then it's our problem that we can't accept it. https://rchoetzlein.com/theory/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/radiation.jpg https://rchoetzlein.com/theory/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ra...
concordDance 4y ago
Thing is, they don't actually need to still be evacuated. Check out the radiation map of Japan: https://jciv.iidj.net/map/ https://jciv.iidj.net/map/ Look up where the evacuation zone is and the pre evacuation population numbers. Then plug those numbers into the linear no threshold model (which is thought to overestimate risk). I'm away from my computer for the holidays, but when I did the numbers you're looking at QALY losses an order of magnitude lower than that caused by the loss of home. In general people (govs included) drastically overreact to radiation deaths. It makes no sense to spend a billion dollars to avoid one nuclear accident death when you can spend a billion dollars to avoid 100 prostate cancer deaths. Its literally not worth doing the remaining cleanup by any metric.
- mplanchard 4y ago
  According to farmers who live in the area and do their own scans, the government's radiation maps are not always correct: https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-our-contaminated-future?utm_source=rss-feed https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-o...
Manuel_D 4y ago

est31 4y ago

> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. The price in terms of deaths was low thankfully, but not because the released material was not dangerous, but because they have done an unprecedented cleaning project. 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. Hundreds of people died during the evacuation, but if they had not been evacuated that death toll of one would have been higher too. Also, cancer can show up years/decades later, and linking it to radiation exposure might not be easy. Basically the dying with vs from covid discussion :). This entire cleanup project is estimated to cost in the high three digit range of USD billions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Costs_of_the_cleanup_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... Nuclear is safe if done right, but the Fukushima accident was definitely a big catastrophy, even if the death toll wasn't large.

jchw 4y ago
To be fair, estimations of future cancer deaths are near zero. Some estimations are literally zero, particularly from the WHO and Tokyo University. This is very fortunate of course. The truth is, the trauma from the evacuations is a much bigger concern, or at least it should be, in my opinion.
- adastra22 4y ago
  The evacuations were largely unnecessary in retrospect. That’s not to say they shouldn’t have happened though, given what we knew at the time. But there was almost certainly more evacuations than were strictly necessary.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
>150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe Because overly cautious governments told them so.
varajelle 4y ago
> 150k people had to leave their homes because they were not safe. The fact that they were not safe is disputed. There are claim that there was some over-reaction and that the evacuation was actually counter-productive.

jchw 4y ago

Yes, it is probably important to highlight the fact that it was not an event that led to much loss of human life, unlike the normal operation of coal and even natural gas. I agree. I don't think too many people realize this, because the deaths resulting from pollution are both normalized and indirect. However, when I said costs, I meant it more literally. Aside from the obvious cost of relocating all of those people, cleanup efforts, and so forth, it's also only fair to include the psychological toll as well. It certainly didn't help atop the massive tragedy that was already sweeping away lives and homes.

DrBazza 4y ago
> when I said costs Sure :) I probably came across as a bit argumentative. I also meant to add that this was caused by a natural disaster as well, unlike Chernobyl. So nuclear is arguably even safer. Again, drawing a parallel with fossil fuels - when a hurricane strikes the Gulf of Mexico and causes some sort of oil slick and kills wildlife, it barely hits the news. Also, whilst writing this, I wondered what the fossil fuel toll was for the Japanese tsunami, and the Boxing Day one, for that matter. It's not something that seems to have concerned people despite the sheer number of cars, bikes, lorries etc. that contained oil, and were destroyed. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind. Oil refineries on the Asian coasts must have been hit. What happened there? I guess my rambling point is, we really need to compare nuclear to fossil fuels, like-for-like. And "we", in particular the media, don't do that, because it's hard work to tally up a distributed fossil fuel infrastructure versus one big nuclear power station that was very visibly destroyed.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  And not even one natural disaster, TWO. First an earthquake, then a tsunami. Both at record levels. Fukushima was an ancient nuclear plant, WAY over its projected lifetime. And still we only got one direct death.

analyte123 4y ago

The global policy impact of Fukushima would have been so much less if it just didn’t have “-shima” in the name.

glhaynes 4y ago
That’s an interesting point, and I’m not disputing it, but I don’t recall ever having noticed that similarity.
kortex 4y ago
"-shima" is just 島 'island'. See also Ōshima, Mishima, Fujishima, Furushima, Hiroshima, and even Iwo Jima (硫黄島, "Shima" is sometimes pronounced "Jima" in Japanese for some reason). Note that Fukushima isn't a "true" island, though some think it might come from a block of land isolated by rivers.
dghlsakjg 4y ago
I never once noticed that until now, huh.

blablabla123 4y ago

Uranium also needs to be mined actually and there are also fatalities. > Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'

simondotau 4y ago
> Uranium also needs to be mined actually and there are also fatalities. Rooftop solar needs to be installed on roofs and there are also fatalities. Hydroelectric dams can fail and there can be thousands of fatalities. Pretty much every method of energy generation needs mine-sourced minerals, where mining has fatalities.
jupp0r 4y ago
Even the most pessimistic predictions are dwarfed by the missions of people who die from pollution by fossil fuel plants every year. It's less of a headline grabbing shock accident and human psychology is not good at rationally comparing the two. Rare catastrophic events are given disproportionate relevance by our minds.
panick21_ 4y ago
This nonsense again. Literally everything humans build need mining. And nuclear needs less mining then literally every other form of energy. Uranium mining is mostly not open pit and has very little impact on people or society. Also the quantities need are vanishingly small. In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough. Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still. Also blaming all old people dying on the nuclear stuff is just nonsense.

korroziya 4y ago

>Compare that to the daily deaths due to mining coal, extracting gas, shipping those to the fossil fuels to power stations, and the deaths due to fossil fuel pollution including those from climate change Oh go join Greenpeace already. I really get fatigued seeing people bash oil and gas as if it has zero value. The human population wouldn't have hit 8 billion but for natgas feedstock for nitrogen* fertilizer. People would still be heating their homes with dried animal feces and wood but for propane. We'd still be hunting whales but for kerosene. And damn sure, the ability to enjoy a high quality of life with a relatively modest cost would be all but impossible but for the myriad of uses for petroleum products in general. But you didn't feel the need to point any of that out, and instead parroted the tired, cliched stance of a stereotypical progressive.

woah 4y ago
Wow thanks for opening my eyes. I'm now ready to get out there and start enjoying all the myriad ways that petroleum makes our lives better.
darth_aardvark 4y ago
They never said oil and gas had zero value. They never advocated for going back to wood and poo and whalefat. They actually didn't say any of the stuff you're mad at them for saying, and the stuff you're mad at them for not saying isn't really relevant to their point. I think most people reading these comments know oil and gas provide lots of energy we couldn't get from wood/poo/whalefat. If you see gas and oil as an improvement to w/p/w, why can't nuclear be an improvement on oil gas?
- korroziya 4y ago
  You can tell from their wording that they have a "renewables good, oil bad" mantra. Like I said, they're happy to mention deaths stemming from fossil fuels, but not mention the lives that were helped by that form of energy. It's a tired narrative of people who are too lazy and/or uneducated to discuss the complicated issue of the pros/cons for fossil fuels.

cryptonector 4y ago

> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. The economic cost, however, is huge. > My slightly cynical take on this is that they're also securing their energy future Why is this a cynical take? What's so bad about that about Japan wanting to secure their energy supply?

ben_w 4y ago
Averaged over all nuclear power, it (even combined with Chernobyl) is a surprisingly small extra cost. I'm not sure world governments will be able to coordinate a mutual insurance policy between each other over this, which is an important factor at this scale, but IMO the economic cost for nuclear is that it's now kinda meh vs. using LiIon to balance PV.
- cryptonector 4y ago
  Small cost for the whole world, heap big cost for one country.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Exactly. Hence mutual insurance.

Kon5ole 4y ago

>Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One. Also USD 82 billion and counting. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193#:~:text=Around%2012.1%20trillion%20yen%20(%24,Board%20of%20Audit%20of%20Japan https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193#:~:text=Around%2....

mplanchard 4y ago

I'd encourage you to read this recent piece about the people trying to live in a still significantly irradiated Fukushima: https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-our-contaminated-future?utm_source=rss-feed https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-o...

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