Most radiation kills are due to slow secondary effects, so it's relatively easy to get out of the way. I don't think anyone really argues that if people would move back before deconamination they would all be fine.
Just for reference, the number of people worldwide who died due to contamination from atmospheric atom bomb testing is estimated to be 430 000 by the end of last century:
"Radioactive Heaven and Earth, The health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing in, on, and above the earth", pages 163-165
Gah -- reminds me of the press at the time talking about detectable radiation on the West Coast of the US. Yeah -- you know what else is detectable radiation? Stars from light-years away. I was shocked to see Germany respond so strongly to Fukushima. I think fortunately for the world solar and wind have become so cheap we can give up on making the world more rational about nuclear power.
Go and live there if you think that it is really harmless.
I would rather not honestly after it took them 6 years just to get the first image of the corium after endless attempts.
Well, just note that after Chernobyl, Western Europe did live there. The size of the smoke plume (1000s km), radioactive material released (6000kg), and wind/weather during the event affected almost every country including Spain, England, and Norway. Those 300M people arguably recieved higher doses than you would living in the evacuated Fukushima area.
Been near there just like a week ago (Tomioka town). Opened up for resettlement this year. Lots of damage from tsunami, but new buildings are being constructed and there are several functioning hotels and convenience stores. There's massive work going on to decontaminate the remaining areas by 2020. As long as you don't go inside of the nuclear station it should be ok.
Personnel had an insufficiently detailed understanding of technical procedures involved with the nuclear reactor, and knowingly ignored regulations to speed test completion
Before beginning construction, Tohoku Electric conducted surveys and simulations aimed at predicting tsunami levels. The initial predictions showed that tsunamis in the region historically had an average height of about 3 meters. Based on that, the company constructed its plant at 14.7 meters above sea level, almost five times that height. As more research was done, the estimated tsunami levels climbed higher, and Tohoku Electric conducted periodic checkups based on the new estimate.
There's just no good reason for either Chernobyl or Fukushima. Both were preventable by following simple safety procedures.
Yes, and rightly so. Engineers must design around human fallibility. They don't get to blame human error and claim the whole system is otherwise perfectly safe. Either the system is safe under conditions of human fallibility, or it is unsafe.
>> There's just no good reason for either Chernobyl or Fukushima
Of course there is reason. Humans are part of the system and a relatively weak part at that.
> reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes
Stupid comment. Would you relocated near Fukushima or Chernobyl? Maybe you should. You would educate yourself and change your mind. And you would have to life with the related health issues. (The same for evil greedy owners of such energy companies)
I work in a big city. It is polluted by cars, trucks, heating. That pollution kills 2 or 3 hundreds of people every year in that town. That scares me a lot more than the hypothetical explosion of the nuclear plant which I live 40km close...
I’m not worried about how many people nuclear power kills every year. I’m worried about how many people it kills every hundred years. A major nuclear disaster, however unlikely, has the potential to kill millions of people and leave a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries. Just because we haven’t seen one on that scale yet, doesn’t mean we never will.
Estimates on the number of deaths related to coal generation vary from around 13,00 to 30,000 per year in the US [1] and 500,000 per year in China [2]. The current world population is 7.6 billion, of which the US and China account for approximately 1.8 billion people. Let's round the coal-related death rate way down for easy math: 10,000 per year in the US and 100,000 per year in China. Then, multiply that rate by the world's population, and you have, let's say 450,000 coal-related deaths per year worldwide. This is a really squishy number, but we only need approximations here.
You were concerned about how many people would die every hundred years from nuclear disasters, so let's see if we can work today's 450,000 per year estimated deaths backwards for the last hundred years.
The world population was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.8 billion people in 1917. Assuming linear growth (I know, I know) and a strong r-value correlation for population vs. coal-related deaths (arguable, but again, Fermi estimate), we have to sum .00006 * population from 1.8 billion -> 7.6 billion, and we end up with approximately 28 million people.
Which is to say, if we could gather up all the deaths, worldwide, from coal, over the last hundred years, and convert it into a single disaster, it would kill the entire city of Shanghai, and New York for the apple on top.
That would have to be one hell of a nuclear disaster.
Now, there are arguments to be made that the energy we've received from coal has also powered hospitals and technology which have saved or improved people's lives. There are also arguments to be made that the side-effects of coal (hospitalization, environmental disasters) cause the death toll to absolutely pale by comparison.
And again, I've rounded these numbers down at every stage of the calculation.
Sure, but even natural gas and rooftop solar have higher rates of death per year than nuclear. (In my second link above.)
In a world in which we must choose the lesser of evils for energy, nuclear is among the least evils, yet faces the greatest overall public resistance to new installations.
I dunno - even that source itself says that the death rates from solar would fall using better construction methods. It also notes (in the case of wind) that increased take up is associated with lower death rates ("Wind power proponent and author Paul Gipe estimated in Wind Energy Comes of Age that the mortality rate for wind power from 1980–1994 was 0.4 deaths per terawatt-hour. Paul Gipe’s estimate as of end 2000 was 0.15 deaths per TWh, a decline attributed to greater total cumulative generation.")
I'd also note that the very low rates of death from nuclear power do not appear to include construction deaths, which are the only source of death measured from wind and solar.
>even natural gas and rooftop solar have higher rates of death per year than nuclear.
the difference here is that no event can significantly change the death rate from gas or solar whereis one wrong cough by nuclear power plant worker and we have Chernobyl with thousands of deaths (in particular in Belarus which took the majority of the Chernobyl hit - about 5000 extra thyroid cancer cases (normally a rare cancer) in the people who were children at the time plus doubling (and in some areas tripling) of the rate of the most frequent cancer - breast cancer (typically 1 in 7 women would get it during lifetime, so doubling means additional 15% of all the women in the affected area would get it) in the areas close to Chernobyl like the Gomel and Mogilev regions plus very significant increase in other frequent cancers of internal organs like colon,etc.)
Or counting it the other way - Russia and Ukraine both have the same - 0.0034 - incidence rate of cancer per year (despite the war and economic differences it is the same people with the same behavior/habits :), while Belarus where people are basically the same as in Ukraine and Russia and drink and smoke and eat the same - has 0.0052 incidence rate, ie. 50000 new cases per year instead of 34000 if they were to have the same incidence as Russia and Ukraine. 16000 extra cancer cases per year for several decades with mortality higher than 50% ...
>nuclear is among the least evils,
hardly so, giving the numbers i referenced above (compare it to coal - the coal's 700K/year deaths means "only" 1K/year for Belarus) and potential of any nuclear power plant to repeat Chernobyl - i'm aware about technical improvements of modern reactors, yet "stupidity will find a way"...
> yet faces the greatest overall public resistance to new installations.
Being anti-nuclear is pretty much accepting the status quo though. Modern nuclear power is much, much more sustainable than coal, scales very well, and is very safe. If you believe in a quick solution for energy issues then you shouldn't halt all nuclear development and leave fossil fuels for the next couple decades.
Being anti-nuclear is pretty much accepting the status quo though.
Elon Musk would disagree.
If you believe in a quick solution for energy issues then you shouldn't halt all nuclear development and leave fossil fuels for the next couple decades.
Nuclear plants take 30 years at least to get through planning and building. Gas fired plants or pump solar can be deployed within a year, Wind + Solar in even less time.
Nuclear will never be able to compete with renewables on cost or deployment speed. It’s dead tech for anything other than space probes and military uses.
How? Nuclear tech is already much more developed than other renewables and it's incredibly efficient. The cost of solar is much higher than the cost of nuclear. Hydroelectric and wind are both lower, but they also require certain geography and can't be used anywhere. Nuclear is not dead tech at all, most of France's power comes from nuclear.
I've seen it before, but trying to trace it down is... troubling.
There's this report[1], where they only count accidents where more than 5 people were killed. This coincidentally manages to avoid counting all accidents in nuclear plants, where in the US alone there were 8 deaths[2]. I assume other energy sources would see a jump too, but that doesn't give me great confidence. The number from that report is different anwyay.
This is where probabilities bite us. If the probability is small enough then the expected death toll will drop to almost zero which merits little worry, despite how horrific said event mightt be. It sounds like you're doing the natural, intuitive thing of picturing a very scary scenerio and then wanting to avoid said scenerio at all costs.
The problem is, while you're busy avoiding some almost-zero probability event, you're also nuking your ability to mitigate events with actual high expected deaths and loses.
Fossil fuels already kill on the order of millions per century [citation needed], so if you think nuclear power does the same, it means we should expect several Chernobyl level events in the next few decades. Are you sure your probabilities are well-calibrated here?
Also, some of the rough skimming I've done has me believing that cycles without possibility of medown can be built, cf. liquid salt reactors. IIRC, some of these even have really nice waste profiles with the worst stuff only having half lives in the decades and very low volume at that [citation badly needed].
Anyway, fear of nuclear power reads to me like a fear of planes over cars. Chernobyl and Fukushima were single, isolated events making them visible and viscerally scary like plane crashes. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, pick us off one by one, relentlessly, but never so loudly as to evoke that gut-level fear.
Every year it kills 100 times less than every hundred years, that’s how average works, no matter what exact period you’re worried about. Also, no nuclear disaster ever killed millions — it is barely possible even with nuclear weapons. Relocation and financial risks, yes.
Likelihood of such disaster is estimated to be too minor to not care about, say, “an asteroid kills the planet” movie scenario.
By nuclear disaster do you mean weapons use or just a power generation accident? I've never heard of a power plant accident potentially leaving a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries, but if there is something please enlighten me!
Just for reference, the number of people worldwide who died due to contamination from atmospheric atom bomb testing is estimated to be 430 000 by the end of last century:
"Radioactive Heaven and Earth, The health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing in, on, and above the earth", pages 163-165