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by acidburnNSA 2428 days ago
HBO is not a great reference in this case. The teams of experts from the UN and WHO said "up to 4000" using conservative models after decades of study. One small Ukrainian team said 90,000, and that's the number HBO and Greenpeace use. Actually HBO said: "Between 4,000 and 90,000", which really pissed me off. The scientific consensus number is up to 4000.

https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

The crazy thing is that even if it was 90,000, nuclear wouldn't change much in how safe it is relative to other energy sources. Again, Banqiao dam killed 230,000 and fossil kills 4,200,000 every single year from air pollution.
1 comments
ozmaverick72 2426 days ago
It's pretty hard to have scientific consensus when you don't have any reliable information to base it on.
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acidburnNSA 2426 days ago
It's certainly softer science than 1900s physics. There are a few big science-related questions that require practical approaches to that aren't 100% black and white. So consensus has to allow for a few more outlier positions than usual.

Interestingly, climate change and Chernobyl health effects have a lot of parallels. They've both been broadly studied by various teams of scientists. Society has turned to using large internationally-respected UN and WHO-organized group of experts to deal with the these kinds of questions. For Chernobyl, this group is called UNSCEAR [1]. For climate change it's called the IPCC [2].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html [2] https://www.ipcc.ch/

In both Chernobyl and Climate change, there are people who passionately disagree with the international UN teams of scientists. In climate change, we call them climate-change deniers. In Chernobyl, we call them Greenpeace. In the name of the scientific method, it's worth listening to what these people have to say and testing some hypotheses. If the hypotheses turn out to be hard to support, we begin to move on with a mainstream consensus.

The odd thing is that these groups of people (climate change deniers and Greenpeace) have very little else in common.

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