| Because I also only considered the immediate deaths from the Tsunami. And actually, the 1 death is a follow-up casualty, it wasn't immediate. So if we really only count immediate deaths, that number is 0. Zero. --> OMG FUKUSHIMA!!! <-- What the long-term death rate is going to be is very unclear. Now to the evacuation. "Many deaths are attributed to the evacuation and subsequent long-term displacement caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... The same happens to be true for Chernobyl, where the health-effects due to the evacuation far exceed the health-effects due to radiation. Whereas for example the wildlife in both exclusion zones is doing just swimmingly. So: Fear of nuclear is killing more people than nuclear. This is generally true, because the use of nuclear energy has saved over a million people from premature death and will (or would) save millions more: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio... But somewhat surprisingly, it is also true when nuclear goes wrong, when there are accidents. Check out the decennial Chernobyl reports by the WHO, they are absolutely fascinating. Spoiler alert: with each report, so every ten years, they massively reduced their estimate of how many people would die as a result, usually by an order of magnitude. Now that doesn't mean that there should not have been any evacuation, but it in both cases it was both to widespread and way too long. |
It's not only deaths if it comes to say what a "safe" technology is. A technology to leads to whole regions being evacuated including every economical, social and environmental fallouts resulting from that, IS NOT SAFE.