| That's not a "fact". That's a counterfactual which you hypothesise, without any reason or evidence whatsoever, will have horrible consequences. And an analogy that doesn't work. As we say in German: "Nicht alles was hinkt ist auch ein Vergleich". Your seatbelt analogy, apart from being pulled out of thin air, has absolutely nothing to do with what happened. The seatbelts are preventative measures before an accident happens. These were measures after the accident happened that were way over the top. A better analogy is a doctor seeing a bruise on an arm and deciding to amputate the arm, just to be safe. And then amputating both legs as well, because "better safe than sorry". The "cure" is far worse than the disease. With Chernobyl there was the excuse that they didn't know better, they only found out in the decades after the accident that their initial estimates for the harm caused by the radiation were way too high, as in several orders of magnitude off. I really recommend reading the WHO reports[1], they were an actual eye opener for me, because they contradicted what I "knew" to be the case. Again, they were not off in terms of the scale of the accident, they were off on the effects of an accident of a particular scale. Not like your seat-belt analogy at all. Now a good question to ask is why they were off by so much. It looks like the Linear Non Threshold Model of radiation damage is simply wrong[2]. As far as I can tell, this model was never actually validated by data, it was just assumed to be the case, and if you look at the "pro" voices, they also provide no evidence for, just that they think the lack of evidence means it should be viewed as true, which is...odd. With Fukushima, there is less of an excuse, as they could and should have known. See also J-value assessment of relocation measures following the nuclear power plant accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi [3]. Money quote: "•Relocation was unjustified for 75% of the 335,000 people relocated after Chernobyl. • Relocation was unjustified for the 160,000 people relocated after Fukushima." Mandatory evacuation of residents during the Fukushima nuclear disaster: an ethical analysis[4]: "We examine the measures from an ethical perspective and argue that if the government's aim was to avoid health risks posed by radiation exposure, then ordering compulsory expulsion of all residents cannot be ethically justified. We assert that the government may not have ordered the mandatory evacuation solely based on health risks, but rather to maintain public order." [1] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9241594179 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#Cont... [3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957582017... [4] https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/34/3/348/1557028 |