OT: Its official - fear of nuclear kills more people

[The Natural Philosopher]

"One of the main lessons drawn is that the impact of a nuclear accident goes well beyond direct radiation effects and includes considerable psychological, social and economic consequences," Shamisen said. "Another major lesson is that some decisions taken to protect the populations can in fact cause collateral damage."

Shamisen notes there were no deaths related to radiation exposure reported in Fukushima, but the evacuation caused more than 600 premature deaths, particularly among the elderly and the critically ill patients who were evacuated under inadequate conditions.

[Brian Gaff]

This is always going to be a tough call of course as at the time nobody could be expected to know how the situation would pan out. Luck was on their side here, but it could easily have gone the otherway and gone bang in which case, leaving people behind would have been the wrong thing.

Sometimes you just cannot decide and have to follow your guts, so to speak. Brian

[alan_m]

And the lesson to be learnt is to stop any future nuclear construction thus eliminating the fear and subsequent deaths.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Good heavens.

Do you consider yourself a sane, objective sort of chap?

[newshound]

There was a great deal of mis-information in the Japanese media at the time, including statements that the radioiodine level in Tokyo water was above safe limits. These limits being ones which are "safe" for lifetime consumption, whereas even with multiple reactors affected, the levels were only going to be high for a few weeks (8 day half life).

In the UK (and the rest of Europe, I believe) we learned a lot of lessons on how to brief the media from Three Mile Island in 1979. The Japanese appeared to have learned nothing.

[Brian Gaff]

The problem with the media of course is also still true in that USA. They are still very much thinking its a cover up and want to scare the people. The Japanese of course have a bit of a problem with having to save face in certain situations and this makes generally, nobody believe the official line on things. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Oh yes lets chuck the baby out with the bathwater. If you recall all power sources have had disasters, look at Abafan, which killed a whole lot of children when a coal slag heap had a catastrophic failure and buried a school.

As I see it we now should know enough about the risks in standard Nuclear to be able to design safe installations, and not shove emergency power plants at ground level in places where it might flood.

Also and several countries are still not doing this, construct them anywhere near fault lines where earthquakes can cause havoc, or at least mitigate the risks in some way if you do. Brian

[Chris Hogg]

With the consequence that even more elderly and critically ill people will die of cold over the winter months because windmills and solar won't be up to it. You have curious priorities!

[Tim Streater]

Quite right. It's why I don't get out of bed in the morning or indeed at all.

[Tim Streater]

Three Mile Island. Another "disaster" during which no one died, no one was injured.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If a reactor spread one percent of the radioctivity that was dumped into the air in the cold war nuclear test program we would never hear the end of it. And yet all those tests did nothing to cancer rates.

[newshound]

Nothing detectable, but IIRC the doses were high enough to cause a large number of "theoretical" cancers. I suspected at the time that the relative speed with which air testing was banned might have been because a Russian scientist threatened the Kremlin with releasing the (relatively simple) calculations. I now realise that another reason might have been that the superpowers were worried that atmospheric sampling would give away some of the secrets of thermonuclear devices.

[me]

I would imagine that if said scientist did make that threat, he would become very intimately associated with the next test. I doubt the Kremlin of the day would tolerate being blackmailed like that.

I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sherlock Holmes in 'A Scandal in Bohemia'; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

[Chris Hogg]

Oops! Just trying to set up a new sig. Obviously haven't got it right yet!

[newshound]

Glad to have provoked a response!

But there are data, even if tenuous.

Results for the increase over background radiation levels were in the public domain by the early 1960's, as were "dose-cancer" relationships firstly from luminous paint and then from Hiroshima/Nagasaki. In spite of the cold war rhetoric at the time, the USSR was starting to engage with the international scientific community, and was very keen on holding the "high moral ground" where possible. I'm sure the Soviets were playing hard-ball with the USA at the political level, but their scientists had much better access to the leaders than in the USA. You wouldn't even have to threaten to leak, you could just say "Here are the figures, someone is going to work it out soon".

America hadn't discovered "the environment" in 1960; Silent Spring didn't come out until 1962 and even then it was quite slow to influence mainstream thinking.

[me]

Calculations presumably based on the rapidly-becoming-discredited LNT hypothesis.

(Sig is getting there!)

[Vir Campestris]

More people die in bed than anywhere else :P

Andy

[Vir Campestris]

dash dash space then the sig

[Chris Hogg]

Yes, thanks. Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind I knew that, but not having changed or added a sig for many years, I'd forgotten.

[Tim Streater]

You're still missing the space after the --, otherwise your sig wouldn't be part of the quoted text. Could lose some of the blank lines too.