4 ms·
People forget that the "evacuation" happened after (and because of) a tsunami/earthquake that killed 20000 people. That was the real root cause of all the death
by trashtester 4y ago
People forget that the "evacuation" happened after (and because of) a tsunami/earthquake that killed 20000 people. That was the real root cause of all the deaths.
The immediate cause of most off the "evacuation" deaths, was that a large number of very old people were exposed to moderate amounts of stress due to being relocated which caused them to die slighly before what they might otherwise have. (Kind of like when we count terminal cancer patients as dying "from Covid" if they had covid when dying).
For these people, there was no medical reason to relocate them in the large majority of cases. If you're 80+, a few MSv of exposure has no effect on you life expectancy, since you will die from other sources long before any cancer can develop.
In other words, very few years of expected life were lost, and those that WERE lost, was almost entirly due to a huge overraction to whatever increase in radiation there may have been. Which, I would argue, should primarily be blamed on anti-nuclear fear-mongering propaganda.
Imagine a racist couple living in a suburb when a Mexican family moves in to the next-door house, stressing them out. If the racist husband dies from a stress related illness after that, I would argue it was his racism that killed him, not the Mexican family.
Spreading excessive (as in actual misinformation) anti-nuclear propaganda is like spreading such racism or similar forms of prejudice or bigotry. It doesn't matter if it's Greenpeace or Tucker that spreads the propaganda.
The fact is that the Fukushima plants were built at a time when the only alternative was coal. Had they never been built, Japan would have built coal plants with the same capacity at the same time.
Given the amount of toxic polution caused by old coal plants over such a time span, I'm sure Nuclear Power in Japan has saved 10s if not 100s of thousands of lives to date, even before counting any damage from global warming.
And Japan is STILL building new coal plants, partly because of the anti-nuclear propaganda, which will continue to cause harm long into the future.
If anything, the vast majority of deaths that will happen as a consequence of the Fukushima incident, will be due to several countries shutting down (or failing to build) nuclear plants while still relying on large amounts of dirty fossil fuels, in many cases still including coal/lignite.
- benj111 4y agoI'm not sure it's tenable to just evacuate young people from a radiation zone. There still needs to be people to service the old people's needs. I do take your point, I interpreted the parent to mean that the reason for the evacuation was radiation. In that case I'd still maintain that the deaths should be attributable to the nuclear incident. Agreed man years lost may be a better measure. I'm not sure what the morality is Vis a vis valuing a young person's life more that an old person, as a society though, we seem to have come the conclusion that an old person's life is more valuable than it should rationally be. I don't think it's reasonable to resort to whataboutism. Yes nuclear energy has probably saved lives overall, but it still costs lives. If a plane crashed should we accept the people died due to the plane crash or should we discuss how it's much safer than driving? I suppose half the problem is that humans are bad at evaluating risks. So I'm not averse to contextualising the risk, but the contextualising cart shouldn't be put before the actual quantified risk horse.