There's a particularly remarkable study linked to by this article (but the anchor text is misleading so the link is hard to find) to a study of the long-term health effects of Chernobyl, which was so bad that it could almost be considered a "dirty bomb". From the abstract:
Among adult populations, there is no strong evidence to suggest that risk of thyroid cancer, leukaemia, or other malignant disease has increased as a result of the Chernobyl accident.
The article also says that in a study of 120,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, some of whom were exposed to the blasts and other who were away at the time, that since 1950 there have been 822 "excess" deaths among the exposed population, or about 2% of the 42,304 people who have died during the study period.
Yes, the situation in Japan is very serious and very tragic. But can we please stop freaking out about radiation?
Among adult populations, there is no strong evidence to suggest that risk of thyroid cancer, leukaemia, or other malignant disease has increased as a result of the Chernobyl accident.
ReplyDeleteNo, but
There is good evidence to suggest that rates of thyroid cancer in children from the countries that were formally part of the Soviet Union have risen as a consequence of the Chernobyl accident.
(BTW, why didn't you cite that? Intellectual dishonesty?)
The whole argument is moot, because the type of risk from nuclear energy is a completely different type of risk than that of burning coal. You can of course design a self-consistent model of risk and come up with nuclear being safer, which is what is implicitly happening in your head. Some modifications, and nuclear ends up being way more dangerous, which is what is happening in a lot of heads right now. Both would be correct, in a sense. However, the latter seems to correspond more to how normal people assess risk.
Also:
* Nuclear waste staying a huge health hazard for millenia is a problem nobody has addressed reasonably. Coal: not the same problem. You must make a complex argument to turn that around, and you can't do that while at the same time denying man-made climate change. Nobody would believe you anyway.
* We just have been lucky. One Fukushima-type incident in a densely populated area of Europe, and those statistics of the first link may change rather drastically. Nuclear energy is (relatively) young.
* Huge areas of land end up being off limits after an accident. Coal or gas can't do that to the same extent.
> (BTW, why didn't you cite that? Intellectual dishonesty?)
ReplyDeleteNo, I didn't mention that because it's irrelevant to the point, which is that radiation, while it is dangerous, is not nearly as dangerous as people think it is.
I also didn't mention it because I'm on the road and I don't have time to find and read the whole report. The abstract only mentions elevated risk of thyroid cancer in children, but doesn't say how much. The bottom line seems to be that, yes, if you look you can identify some adverse health effects from Chernobyl. But you have to look a lot harder than you'd think given how bad the accident was.