Well yeah, the radiation did not damage the health of the local people because the local people were evacuated. This reminds me of the people who said "Covid is no big deal" after the first wave because the lockdowns and other measures had been successful in keeping the number of deaths relatively low (at least in some countries)...
The evacuation probably lead to more deaths than radiation. Almost all the radiation stayed at the reactor site. That which did leave was pretty low level to begin with.
Unfortunately, some of the radiation washed out to sea as well. Hard to say what impact that has, short- or long-term, on the environment but it's not good.
I think we can quantify the impact fairly well: short term it's a big hit on the local fishermen. The local fish probably rejoiced because fewer fishermen were catching them. Long-term it will have no measurable impact at all.
Many people remember seeing a particularly startling figure claiming to show the radiation in the water post-Fukushima. That figure actually shows wave height and was used to spread FUD. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-emergency/
The Pacific Ocean is enormous and the dilution makes the broader environmental impact of any radiation risks negligible. Locally may be a different story, of course.
I interacted with some Oregon State Univ scientists about radioactive tuna. They were taking measurements and had this to say:
The highest concentrations of Cs-137 and Cs-134 I've seen in albacore on our coast so far result in a CEDE (committed effective dose equivalent, which accounts for the type of radiation, the sensitivity of each organ, and how long any ingested Cs is retained in your body) of 18.01 nSv per kg ingested, which works out to about 330,000 kg to equal the normal annual dose in the Pacific Northwest (6 mSv, 3 mSv from natural sources, 3 mSv from mainly medical exposures). About 1/3rd of the dose from said highest Cs level albacore is from pre-Fukushima weapons fallout. The average american eats about 7 kg of albacore in a year, which puts an reasonable upper limit of about 126 uSv over the course of a year, and you'd need to live for over 47,000 years before you ate enough albacore to result in a CEDE equal to the normal annual dose. Even if your entire diet (2,000 calories per day) was nothing from albacore, and all of it was at the highest levels we've ever seen, and ignoring the fact this radioactivity is decaying and won't be around forever, we're talking 578 years before you'd eat enough albacore to reach that benchmark of 330,000 kg (and end up with a lifetime dose increase of 0.14%).
For comparison, spooning with your partner over 8 hours of sleep each night results in a dose of 13.40 nSv each month from the potassium-40 in their body exposing you to additional gamma irradiation.
Primary effect of the radiation is not death though.
This is a complicated topic, as willfully or not a lot of the numbers that people used to throw around (contamination level of water, air, child cancer numbers etc.) have been reajusted in the last years, and health effects are not explicitely labelled as “radiation related”, making it difficult to just throw a “look, told you so” kind of press article at people in online discussions.
There’s a lot of conspiracy theories, but a lot of gov. bullshitting as well. Overall my understanding is radiations (including from the rain in the first days, and from the food/soil that has been moved) had some ambient effect, but not to tv drama proportions.
It’s not like not evacuating was an option. About half the 160K people self-evacuated which tells you the people were eager to evacuate whether an organized evacuation was conducted or not. Large numbers still will not return to areas free or restrictions.
Also, I’m not sure where you get your numbers from.
You’re missing my point: People were going to evacuate whether the government organized an evacuation or not.
Not to mention, the UNSEAR report did not conclude evacuation was unnecessary. Not that that matters, since, of course, the information in the UNSEAR report wasn’t available at the time the of the evacuations. Evacuation is a safety precaution. You don’t not evacuate because maybe some of it isn’t necessary.
While that's an easy, if somewhat glib, conclusion to reach, it isn't actually supported by the facts.
We don't actually know what the health-effects without the evacuation would have been, though we can probably estimate it.
What we do know is that the health-effects of the evacuation were severe, with many people killed (same as for Chernobyl). The numbers are in the thousands. So the evacuation was obviously too large, the cure worse than the disease.
But by how much?
Research says: all of it. Nobody should have been evacuated.
"The present analysis provides endorsement of that study’s conclusion that the post-1990 relocation of 220,000 members of the public could not be justified on the grounds of radiological health benefit."
Yeah, it literally took years before we can reach this conclusion, even if the conclusion is absolutely reliable. (We still need to observe like 50 more years, haha.)
That's the current limitation of our technology. If we could measure radiation levels in a large scale with high resolution within, say, few hrs/days, maybe we didn't have to evacuate all those people. We can't, so we should.
By studying past incidents which are similar and creating accurate models to predict what will happen based on the data you can rapidly access.
If you have a whole bunch of radiation sensors spread around your nuclear plant, you know the level of radiation that people are likely to be exposed to in the near future. If you know the effects of radiation on people, you can predict the health consequences of allowing them to be exposed. If you have records of increased death rates in various evacuations, you can predict the cost of evacuating in this instance. Compare the cost of the two options, go with the better one.
It would be one thing if it was the early days of nuclear power and no one knew what the effects of radiation were, and no one had ever considered the possibility of an accident, but this is a mature technology which people have spent decades studying in close detail. People knew at the time that the evacuation plan was a bad idea, and this current report comes as no surprise. By simply assuming that the better-safe-than-sorry approach was to evacuate rather than consulting models based on data, those in charge killed a lot of people.
It's impossible to estimate future max radiation when the plant is not under control.
Fukushima pref is 3rd largest prefecture in Japan and not so many people is escaped at the incident. I believe enough number of people had escaped as a result.
Hogwash. This wasn't some rapid emergency where they lost control of the plant, the reactors shut down properly during the earth quake and most systems were fine. The problem was the tsunami took out several of the backup generators which needed to power the cooling pumps when the reactors weren't producing power and there was no connection to the grid (actually several generators had been moved in 1990 to higher ground and survived the tsunami, but their switching station was kept in the old, unprotected building so they still couldn't provide power). It took days for the reactors to overheat. Radiation levels were being monitored both on the ground and by aircraft, the problem was this data was ignored - in many cases people were evacuated into areas with more intense radiation. Of course when dealing with unknowns your predictions have error bars, but you can most certainly still make valid estimates, and there is no excuse for not doing so.
This was in response to someone claiming the response was correct in hindsight.
It was not.
Furthermore, there actually was information available beforehand, if nothing else than at least the data from Chernobyl, where the negative health-effects of the evacuation also vastly exceeded the negative health-effects of radiation. In fact the same study concluded that only a fraction of the evacuation was justified (though more than zero as was the case in Fukushima).
And that was with a reactor without a proper containment vessel. Last I checked, the Fukushima primary containment vessels weren't breached (the hydrogen explosions blew the roof off the secondary containment, which I think was designed to fail first in order to protect the primary containment vessel inside it from overpressure).
So the risk was far less. It was also a fairly slow-moving process.
> The better-safe-than-sorry approach [..]
...is exactly what got us into trouble, because we have a skewed, non-reality-based perception of what "safe" is in the context of nuclear power. I can't really tell, but it seems that the danger from the nuclear plant is perceived to be something akin to that from an atomic bomb: sudden/immediate, very lethal and horrible.
It's not.
Even in the (initially expected) worst case from Chernobyl, the expected health effects were an increase in cancer mortality in later life that even in that worst case would be extremely hard to detect statistically, stemming from prolonged exposure to slightly elevated levels of ionising radiation.
The actual measured health effects were far less pronounced than that initially expected worst case. The WHO did a report every 10 years after the disaster. Each time, as actual data came in, they massively downgraded the expected death toll from the accident.
> But there should be efforts to set up evacuation plans that's not as panicked and doesn't lead to so many deaths.
Yes. And those efforts need to balance the actual risk of staying in place, which is often small to negligible, against the very real consequences of the evacuation.
Ah far as I can tell the radiation levels in the places people were evacuated from are comparable to those from living somewhere with a naturally high background level. This image compares the dose with some other areas: https://thoughtscapism.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Radiation...
Greenpeace isn't exactly a trustworthy entity on this topic. Their anti-nuclear position is, first and foremost, ideological (as is with the entirety of the green movement).
Does not mean that they are wrong. I also don't see them purposefully modifying information aka. lying. But the probability of their biases getting in the way of objective reporting is non-trivial.
Well expressed, and I largely agree with your assessment.
But certain Japanese politicians/authorities/corporations aren't exactly neutral, disinterested parties in this matter either, so I think some adversarial discourse is helpful here, and at least the best we'll get.
For clarification, I'm mainly reacting to the headline rather than the thyroid cancer survey. I don't have an opinion either way about that without seeing much more background, and that seems more complex than I'll have time to dig into today.
Can you point me to the place in the article where it actually talks about radiation impacting the health of locals?
All I could find was complaints that the acceptable-safe radiation limit had been raised, and that a few selected locations within the area had levels that were slightly above the previous and well below the new levels.
Nothing about actual health damage from radiation.
As far as I can tell they are just saying the same things about radiation exposure as everyone else, but making them sound scary. I didn't see any evidence of health damage, though I didn't read too closely.
I haven't looked into Strontium 90 health effects specifically though, does anyone have good sources for how concerning that is?
Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit. I assume that this just made the life of the local people more interesting
And it seems that Californian people enjoyed their tuna meals, now atom flavoured, found in San Diego since 2011 so, if everybody is happy and we can always produce more babies to replace the hundreds of crippled ones... end of the problem, "I can't see you, I can't hear you, la, la, la", etc...
What? Any radio-isotopes that made into the ocean would be spread so thin that eating banana is gonna give you more radiation than you get in San Diego. Even the radiation levels in the surrounding areas of the reactors was quite low. Almost all the radiation stayed on the reactor site.
"We don't found" and "does not exist" are different terms. "Report couldn't prove damage" would be a much better title, or at least closer to truth.
With bioaccumulation is the same, our knowledge of marine biology and marine ecosystems is still poor in lots of cases. Californian woman get pregnant also, as japanese women do, so this spiral goes a little deeper than the "is just like a banana so people is safe" simple claim. This is not a simple problem.
Nobody can't accurately evaluate the final effects of a process that is very complex, is still running, and is far from ending. This is plain lying in the face of people. "We are still grasping the surface of this" is not the same as "didn't happened".
> "We don't found" and "does not exist" are different terms. "Report couldn't prove damage" would be a much better title, or at least closer to truth.
You are the one who just said "Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit". Was that or was that not the case?
Radiation in the sea can be positively measured. What the report claims is like somebody claiming that there is not radiation in the sea because they couldn't found it in a sample. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But the worse is that the report authors seem to be very, very carefully, circumnavigating the evidence, that is not so difficult to find in fact.
An example that fish eaters (AKA 100% of Japanese people) could find interesting:
You made a specific claim, "Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit". That is a lot stronger than "Radiation in the sea can be positively measured".
International Atomic Energy Agency. NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Woods Hole Oceanographic, Japanese Fisheries agency, Japanese Ministry of Technology MEXT, Fukushima prefecture, etc etc... and the own TEPCO reports.
Is not a secret than Iodine-131 exceeded by 5 millions the legal limit and Cesium-137 in seawater raised from 0.1 to 100000. Consult the bibliography.
Claiming that study results you don't like are simply lies without providing any counterevidence doesn't make for a convincing position.
> Nobody can accurately evaluate the final effects of a process that is very complex, is still running, and is far from ending.
We face a significantly more serious global process that is very complex and has no end in sight that threatens to destabilize human civilization and result in countless deaths. Barring a miracle in energy storage technology or the invention of nuclear fusion the choice we have in decarbonizing the global energy mix is nuclear fission.
Interesting article, which shows quite clearly that the trouble the fishermen have is not with the effects of radiation, but with the perceptions of the effects of radiation.
Yes, because of the constant barrage of fear mongering articles that have been printed about the event.
Fish were shown to be healthy for consumption's shortly after the event, but the media still reports on the insignificant amount of radiation in water associated to the disaster. By comparison, when is the last time you heard of the lingering effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill, where oil on the seafloor surface will cause contamination in some fish for years to come?
1. "by the Chinese authorities". So UN is not "saying" this, they are just relaying information and clearly marking it as such.
2. "Preliminary investigations..." so this was not presented as a definitive conclusion, just as preliminary findings...by someone else.
3. "... have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission..." This is not "there is no transmission" or even "found evidence that there is no transmission" and it's not even "have found no evidence for", but "have found no clear evidence for"
So basically every word of your post is a mis-representation of the original tweet.
> “On the balance of available evidence, the large increase ... in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure,” Unscear said.
“Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously detected.”
----
In order to have any confidence in that statement, wouldn't you also have to pick a representative population far away from Fukushima which could not have possibly been exposed to radiation, numbering in the many thousands of people, to conduct thyroid examinations/screenings on and determine if the extra level of scrutiny and analysis was also turning up a similar number of previously unseen abnormalities?
This is not the first time studying such effects, which is why they can be confident that is the cause. Similar results were found in some post Chernobyl studies, and the risk/reward of regular screening for many ailments is a constant debate in medicine.
But aren't the Chernobyl studies hindered by the fact that a large portion of the liquidators aren't tracked at all? That is my understanding, for what's it worth.
Yes, an increase in testing results in both an increase of false positives and an increase in treatment for non detrimental cases. I don't see what that has to do with anything else you've mentioned.
edit ohh, I think you're trying to say that missing those people would somehow contaminate the sample? They would not be in the sample group even if records were more diligently kept. The studies I'm discussing are testing something else.
I find it always fascinating, that the same groups (Greenpeace, etc.) are always quick to point to UN reports about climate change (like the IPCC report) as if they were gospel but all the reports of the UN about Chernobyl and Fukushima are supposedly fake. I personally believe both are correct.
After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl [1], Fukushima (cf. article) and even Hiroshima [2], it is pretty safe to say that radiation poses a much smaller risk to humans than is often propagated in the horror scenarios of many environmental groups. The theory most of these scenarios are based on, ie. that every little amount of radiation lineraly increases the risks for cancer, is pretty much debunked. So, yes, nuclear is a dangerous technology, esp. if we keep stopping reserch and progress happening on a large scale and don't replace the 50 year old reactors. But coal kills tens of thousands every year and nuclear is still one of the few relatively reliable, almost CO2 neutral power sources we have.
> After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl
Ever heard of the Chernobyl babies born in Poland and Ukraine? My wife happens to be in that category and safe to say she has plenty of similar issues to other people in the same 'category'. Thyroid issues are a serious problem for many young women around here and it cannot be a coincidence.
But I still do believe that nuclear is the way forward without doubt though. Just that these studies seem to be way off with the ongoing effects.
I have no doubt, that in the over 30 years after Chernobly hundreds of thousands of children were born with birth defects in Poland and Ukraine, many of them severe. Which is tragic. And has nothing to do with Chernobyl. Because roughly 6% of all babies born around the world have birth defects (https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/birth-defects-caus...). As a parent, I can understand the impulse to attribute such a senseless act of nature to some outside, "evil" force. But the statistics just don't show any meaningful connection.
This isn’t a meaningful comparison unless the pre Chernobyl birth defect rate in Poland and Ukraine was at least as high as the global one. I doubt that, because among other reasons there are high population countries with a long history of close cousin marriages that almost certainly have significantly higher birth defect rates than Eastern Europe pulling the global rate up.
>This isn’t a meaningful comparison unless the pre Chernobyl birth defect rate in Poland and Ukraine was at least as high as the global one.
Even then there will be confounding effects. People are, generally, richer now than pre-Chernobyl. They will, generally, have better access to better healthcare.
Citations and figures immediately, please, specifically relating to cousin marriage in those countries together with evidence that they “cause significantly higher birth defect rates...pulling the global rate up.”
I grew up in an impacted area; you might call it downwind of Chernobyl. My mother had thyroid cancer at a young age and now had no thyroid. Numerous female relatives as well as friends and acquaintances have experienced similar problems and those are all associated with Chernobyl.
Here’s a single scientific source. There are more, but I’m sure you’re eager to demonstrate your hypothesis that women in Eastern Europe are getting cancer not from industrial accidents but from cousin marriage.
Exactly! I can cite 5+ women here in Poland who I know that all have thyroid related issues. Not blood related to each other but born close to each other. As far as I can tell no one is humping their cousin...
My mum died when she was 36 because she had spent a couple of years working in a battery production factory in LT. I remember visiting her too! The amount of cancer, the locations of it and the aggressiveness of the growths found in her pointed to the simple fact that she was exposed to incredibly harsh chemicals. But it could be blamed on X, Y, Z if need be but this is the reality of it.
yeah but I also know about 4 or 5 women in australia that all have thyroid issues. and none have been anywhere near any known major sources of radiation.
Thyroid issues are super common. Might be related but also may very well not be.
They’re suggesting that other areas (not near Chernobyl) have higher than typical rates from more close-relative interbreeding, which pulls the global average up relative to the more distant breeding pairing near Chernobyl.
(I’m not taking a position either way as I have no data, but they’re clearly not accusing Chernobyl neighbors of mating with cousins.)
The comment was about thyroid diseases, not birth defects.
Thyroid carcinoma is linked to radiation exposure.
There are also studies related to increased birth defect rates, but it's harder to conclude anything there, as birth defects can be caused by alcohol consumption, malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies.
The UN says 4000 cases of childhood thyroid cancer, out of which nine died. They also estimate 4000 eventual cancer deaths among the most-exposed population, an increase of 3%.
Chernobyl was an exceptionally unsafe reactor, and didn't have a containment dome. Fukushima did have decent containment and didn't release nearly as much radiation.
I did not claim, that it's causing a lot of deaths, I said that it's been linked to the radiation.
Thyroid cancer is not fun, even if you survive it.
The treatment and followup is a financial burden (on the person or the society, if there is public healthcare), not to mention the big scar that you will have on your throat.
Chernobyl was also unique in producing a shit load of dirty, radioactive fall out. This is still lingering in our soil, e.g. in Bavaria wild boar has to be checked for radiation. They are eating enough mushrooms to accumulate radiation levels basically turning them into radioactive, hazardous waste. Other regions are not at all affected by this.
An increase in thyroid cancer is the main single cause of fatalities (of people not involved in the cleanup) in the Chernobyl Forum report and don't get me wrong: The last thing I wish on anyone is to experience to go through cancer or have a child diagnosed with cancer, even if it is one with 99% survival rate. As I said: nuclear power is dangerous, its just by far not as dangerous as its made out to be. And the hysteria itself can have dire consequences. In Western Europe there were an estimated 100 - 200 thousand excess abortions due to fear of birth defects in the aftermath of Chernobyl. That's by orders of magnituds more than the fatalities actually caused by the incident (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1248180/?page=1).
Hindsight is 20/20.
There was conflicting data and false rumours all around, I suspect that in May 1986 a lot of doctors were not so confident either about the consequences.
A factor to consider is the radiation from mining and pollution of coal, the primary energy fuel used by Poland as a replacement for nuclear. Radon and coal ash is directly linked with thyroid carcinoma.
I remember reading that areas around coal-fired plants would fail nuclear plant radiation standards, as radioactive soot settles around them. Can’t find the source but can well believe it.
>I find it always fascinating, that the same groups (Greenpeace, etc.) are always quick to point to UN reports about climate change (like the IPCC report) as if they were gospel but all the reports of the UN about Chernobyl and Fukushima are supposedly fake. I personally believe both are correct.
I find this sort of thing is a reminder that I always need to find multiple sources, try to understand what the studies are and the extent they cover the topic and what the experts are saying about them to get a fair idea of what is going on.
Its also a reminder that everyone has biases, both implicit and explicit, and it reminds me that I need to constantly review my stances to ensure I'm not only going by what my own biases want to follow (instead of the facts).as well as ensure I identify why a group may support one thing, but not another when currently available and reviewed info suggests both are correct.
I also try and discourage myself from two other things I find common. The first is taking a large organization and assigning the same value to anything and everything they produce, even when its an org of many people and experts who have different internal groups that are experts in different areas. Its too easy to go "oh this group knows their stuff of X, published by doctors A, B, C. That is automatically equal to this other paper on a completely different topic published by Doctors X, Y, and Z."
Seriously though, no one has context for radiation vs chemical disasters. Don’t agree? Ask 10 randoms what Chernobyl and what Bhopal is... which was worse and how they differed.
Bhopal had more of everything including : heritable effects, premature births / premature deaths, cancers, short term death tolls, long term impairment of life[1]. Compare by any metric to Chernobyl, you’ll find it’s similar in the type of ailment / outcome but at least two orders more severe in Bhopal.
The institutional green movement from almost its earliest years was fundamentally against nuclear and they have literally spend the last 60 years fighting against it, consistently going again all scientific evidence.
Funny enough some of the very earliest parts of the movement went pro nuclear because they hoped it would prevent dams that destroy natural habitats.
But of course the modern environmental movement is more concern enforcing some sort of anti-rational neo-naturalism. They always disagree with science on things that are 'unnatural' whatever that means, being against nuclear and GMO.
Of course the repeatably also embrace and advertise the worst kind of anti-science alternative medicine, natural healing, homeopathy and all matter of utter nonsense.
That is why I hate these organizations with a passion. They are anti-human, not pro-environment.
Quote from the report:
“no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that could be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident”
Which means that possibly:
1)there were adverse health effects among Fukushima residents that were not documented.
2)there were adverse health effects that could not be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident.
3)adverse health effects have not manifested themselves yet
Asbestos was being used from the 1800's and I can see that all of a sudden there's plenty of impact that has been caused by it. Fukushima was 10 years ago, come back again in another 10 years time, then another and see what the damage is.
The same three things apply to basically everything.
For a hyperbolic example, no adverse health effects have been documented that could be directly attributed to people reading the post you made. All three of your possibilities would still apply.
Not true. As Japan pulled back from nuclear due to fears stemming from Fukushima accident, they increased coal reliance which has a direct impact on health of thousands of people.
Might not be what they meant, but under normal operations a coal plant can release significantly more radiation into the environment than a nuclear plant, via isotopes in the ash [1][3]. It’s still less than normal medical sources but it is much higher than a normal nuclear plant where radiological releases of any kind are actively watched for. (The source of the coal will determine the isotopes involved and the initial amount. [2])
This article [3] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory REVIEW (1993 I believe, so a bit dated) states "The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants"
Wind and solar were not really a option for much of the time since nuclear was invented. And we have very clear evidence that the coal and gas industry have been fighting against nuclear since its inception.
It was not uncommon even in the 70s for 'environmentalist' anti-nuclear organization to be sponsored by fossil fuel industry.
The controversial opinion? Nuclear sucks because you lose a city every generation, even if you're the most advanced, organization nation on Earth (Japan) you can still make mistakes that have consequences for decades to centuries.
No, you don't. Fukushima had a 2010 population of 20,000. It has 17,000 today. And it dropped from 22,000 to 20,000 between 2000 and 2020 so not all of the population reduction was due to nuclear disaster.
Likewise, Pripyat was a planned town designed specifically to support the nuclear plants. When the nuclear plants closes, the town had no reason to continue existing. Like mining towns when the mines are exhausted.
>The first round of tests, conducted between 2011 and 2015, identified 116 cases of actual or suspected thyroid cancer among more than 300,000 people aged 18. “On the balance of available evidence, the large increase ... in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure,” Unscear said. “Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously detected.”
Gotta love a lobby job of PR/damage control! This is even better than the work of the Japanese government itself. Insulting to our intelligence, but good PR work nonetheless...
In any case, up there with "Covid-19? No big deal", also in WHO greatest hits.
'radiation did not damage health of local people' is interesting language here.
"As of the end of December 2015, 51 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer in the second examina-tion conducted by Fukushima Prefecture.... As of the end of June 2015, 113 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer. Of these, 99 people underwent surgery.... the Fukushima Prefectural Citizens Health Survey Committee has not recognized these thyroid cancer cases as the result of the Fukushima accident; the Committee’s reasoning is... that some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed."[0]
Some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed. Should medicine not err on the side of caution? Given the results near Chernobyl?
At any rate, there were certainly deaths as a result of the plant's failure. About 2000 people died as a consequence of disaster-related evacuation measures. Whether the radiation was directly responsible or not, the damage to the plant and very real dangers of potential exposure undeniably led to those deaths. Is the UN saying that evacuating tens of thousands was an over-reaction? Was the extreme threat posed by the highly unstable condition of Unit 4 "over-diagnosed" by most western experts?
The ongoing spin on this topic is disgusting. March of FUD.
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[ 9.6 ms ] story [ 510 ms ] threadI suggest you re-read what you wrote.
250,000 people lived a chunk of their lives in school gyms. We're talking millions of man-years lost.
The Pacific Ocean is enormous and the dilution makes the broader environmental impact of any radiation risks negligible. Locally may be a different story, of course.
The highest concentrations of Cs-137 and Cs-134 I've seen in albacore on our coast so far result in a CEDE (committed effective dose equivalent, which accounts for the type of radiation, the sensitivity of each organ, and how long any ingested Cs is retained in your body) of 18.01 nSv per kg ingested, which works out to about 330,000 kg to equal the normal annual dose in the Pacific Northwest (6 mSv, 3 mSv from natural sources, 3 mSv from mainly medical exposures). About 1/3rd of the dose from said highest Cs level albacore is from pre-Fukushima weapons fallout. The average american eats about 7 kg of albacore in a year, which puts an reasonable upper limit of about 126 uSv over the course of a year, and you'd need to live for over 47,000 years before you ate enough albacore to result in a CEDE equal to the normal annual dose. Even if your entire diet (2,000 calories per day) was nothing from albacore, and all of it was at the highest levels we've ever seen, and ignoring the fact this radioactivity is decaying and won't be around forever, we're talking 578 years before you'd eat enough albacore to reach that benchmark of 330,000 kg (and end up with a lifetime dose increase of 0.14%).
For comparison, spooning with your partner over 8 hours of sleep each night results in a dose of 13.40 nSv each month from the potassium-40 in their body exposing you to additional gamma irradiation.
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2015-04-25-fish-from-fukushim...
This is a complicated topic, as willfully or not a lot of the numbers that people used to throw around (contamination level of water, air, child cancer numbers etc.) have been reajusted in the last years, and health effects are not explicitely labelled as “radiation related”, making it difficult to just throw a “look, told you so” kind of press article at people in online discussions.
There’s a lot of conspiracy theories, but a lot of gov. bullshitting as well. Overall my understanding is radiations (including from the rain in the first days, and from the food/soil that has been moved) had some ambient effect, but not to tv drama proportions.
Also, I’m not sure where you get your numbers from.
Actually, it was and that’s also what the UNSCEAR report concluded.
Not to mention, the UNSEAR report did not conclude evacuation was unnecessary. Not that that matters, since, of course, the information in the UNSEAR report wasn’t available at the time the of the evacuations. Evacuation is a safety precaution. You don’t not evacuate because maybe some of it isn’t necessary.
We don't actually know what the health-effects without the evacuation would have been, though we can probably estimate it.
What we do know is that the health-effects of the evacuation were severe, with many people killed (same as for Chernobyl). The numbers are in the thousands. So the evacuation was obviously too large, the cure worse than the disease.
But by how much?
Research says: all of it. Nobody should have been evacuated.
"The present analysis provides endorsement of that study’s conclusion that the post-1990 relocation of 220,000 members of the public could not be justified on the grounds of radiological health benefit."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
That's easy to say in hindsight. How do you make a judgement about that in the hours/days after the accident?
The better-safe-than-sorry approach is probably to evacuate whenever there is a nuclear accident where the building is damaged.
But there should be efforts to set up evacuation plans that's not as panicked and doesn't lead to so many deaths.
That's the current limitation of our technology. If we could measure radiation levels in a large scale with high resolution within, say, few hrs/days, maybe we didn't have to evacuate all those people. We can't, so we should.
If you have a whole bunch of radiation sensors spread around your nuclear plant, you know the level of radiation that people are likely to be exposed to in the near future. If you know the effects of radiation on people, you can predict the health consequences of allowing them to be exposed. If you have records of increased death rates in various evacuations, you can predict the cost of evacuating in this instance. Compare the cost of the two options, go with the better one.
It would be one thing if it was the early days of nuclear power and no one knew what the effects of radiation were, and no one had ever considered the possibility of an accident, but this is a mature technology which people have spent decades studying in close detail. People knew at the time that the evacuation plan was a bad idea, and this current report comes as no surprise. By simply assuming that the better-safe-than-sorry approach was to evacuate rather than consulting models based on data, those in charge killed a lot of people.
Fukushima pref is 3rd largest prefecture in Japan and not so many people is escaped at the incident. I believe enough number of people had escaped as a result.
This was in response to someone claiming the response was correct in hindsight.
It was not.
Furthermore, there actually was information available beforehand, if nothing else than at least the data from Chernobyl, where the negative health-effects of the evacuation also vastly exceeded the negative health-effects of radiation. In fact the same study concluded that only a fraction of the evacuation was justified (though more than zero as was the case in Fukushima).
And that was with a reactor without a proper containment vessel. Last I checked, the Fukushima primary containment vessels weren't breached (the hydrogen explosions blew the roof off the secondary containment, which I think was designed to fail first in order to protect the primary containment vessel inside it from overpressure).
So the risk was far less. It was also a fairly slow-moving process.
> The better-safe-than-sorry approach [..]
...is exactly what got us into trouble, because we have a skewed, non-reality-based perception of what "safe" is in the context of nuclear power. I can't really tell, but it seems that the danger from the nuclear plant is perceived to be something akin to that from an atomic bomb: sudden/immediate, very lethal and horrible.
It's not.
Even in the (initially expected) worst case from Chernobyl, the expected health effects were an increase in cancer mortality in later life that even in that worst case would be extremely hard to detect statistically, stemming from prolonged exposure to slightly elevated levels of ionising radiation.
The actual measured health effects were far less pronounced than that initially expected worst case. The WHO did a report every 10 years after the disaster. Each time, as actual data came in, they massively downgraded the expected death toll from the accident.
> But there should be efforts to set up evacuation plans that's not as panicked and doesn't lead to so many deaths.
Yes. And those efforts need to balance the actual risk of staying in place, which is often small to negligible, against the very real consequences of the evacuation.
UPDATE:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/physician-has-studie...
from: https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/03/01/radiation-and-cancer-r...
(Link to their report, from near the end of the Guardian article:
https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20... )
Does not mean that they are wrong. I also don't see them purposefully modifying information aka. lying. But the probability of their biases getting in the way of objective reporting is non-trivial.
For clarification, I'm mainly reacting to the headline rather than the thyroid cancer survey. I don't have an opinion either way about that without seeing much more background, and that seems more complex than I'll have time to dig into today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Greenpeace
All I could find was complaints that the acceptable-safe radiation limit had been raised, and that a few selected locations within the area had levels that were slightly above the previous and well below the new levels.
Nothing about actual health damage from radiation.
I haven't looked into Strontium 90 health effects specifically though, does anyone have good sources for how concerning that is?
And it seems that Californian people enjoyed their tuna meals, now atom flavoured, found in San Diego since 2011 so, if everybody is happy and we can always produce more babies to replace the hundreds of crippled ones... end of the problem, "I can't see you, I can't hear you, la, la, la", etc...
Let me introduce yourself this little marvel of biology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation
"We don't found" and "does not exist" are different terms. "Report couldn't prove damage" would be a much better title, or at least closer to truth.
With bioaccumulation is the same, our knowledge of marine biology and marine ecosystems is still poor in lots of cases. Californian woman get pregnant also, as japanese women do, so this spiral goes a little deeper than the "is just like a banana so people is safe" simple claim. This is not a simple problem.
Nobody can't accurately evaluate the final effects of a process that is very complex, is still running, and is far from ending. This is plain lying in the face of people. "We are still grasping the surface of this" is not the same as "didn't happened".
You are the one who just said "Waters radiation near the plant was measured at several million times the legal limit". Was that or was that not the case?
But the worse is that the report authors seem to be very, very carefully, circumnavigating the evidence, that is not so difficult to find in fact.
An example that fish eaters (AKA 100% of Japanese people) could find interesting:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-4-431-55...
What are you basing this claim on?
Is not a secret than Iodine-131 exceeded by 5 millions the legal limit and Cesium-137 in seawater raised from 0.1 to 100000. Consult the bibliography.
> Nobody can accurately evaluate the final effects of a process that is very complex, is still running, and is far from ending.
We face a significantly more serious global process that is very complex and has no end in sight that threatens to destabilize human civilization and result in countless deaths. Barring a miracle in energy storage technology or the invention of nuclear fusion the choice we have in decarbonizing the global energy mix is nuclear fission.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1325/
I suspect the mental health of the local fishermen was well an truly tested and will continue to be tested by that disaster.
Fish were shown to be healthy for consumption's shortly after the event, but the media still reports on the insignificant amount of radiation in water associated to the disaster. By comparison, when is the last time you heard of the lingering effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill, where oil on the seafloor surface will cause contamination in some fish for years to come?
That would have to be an INSANE worldwide propaganda effort to pull this off. Or maybe, the propaganda is not where you think it is.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
2. "Preliminary investigations..." so this was not presented as a definitive conclusion, just as preliminary findings...by someone else.
3. "... have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission..." This is not "there is no transmission" or even "found evidence that there is no transmission" and it's not even "have found no evidence for", but "have found no clear evidence for"
So basically every word of your post is a mis-representation of the original tweet.
> “On the balance of available evidence, the large increase ... in the number of thyroid cancers detected among exposed children is not the result of radiation exposure,” Unscear said.
“Rather, they are the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously detected.”
----
In order to have any confidence in that statement, wouldn't you also have to pick a representative population far away from Fukushima which could not have possibly been exposed to radiation, numbering in the many thousands of people, to conduct thyroid examinations/screenings on and determine if the extra level of scrutiny and analysis was also turning up a similar number of previously unseen abnormalities?
did they do that?
edit ohh, I think you're trying to say that missing those people would somehow contaminate the sample? They would not be in the sample group even if records were more diligently kept. The studies I'm discussing are testing something else.
After extensive, long-term, high-quality studies of the effects of (mid- to low-level) radiation on populations after Chernobyl [1], Fukushima (cf. article) and even Hiroshima [2], it is pretty safe to say that radiation poses a much smaller risk to humans than is often propagated in the horror scenarios of many environmental groups. The theory most of these scenarios are based on, ie. that every little amount of radiation lineraly increases the risks for cancer, is pretty much debunked. So, yes, nuclear is a dangerous technology, esp. if we keep stopping reserch and progress happening on a large scale and don't replace the 50 year old reactors. But coal kills tens of thousands every year and nuclear is still one of the few relatively reliable, almost CO2 neutral power sources we have.
[1] https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/
Ever heard of the Chernobyl babies born in Poland and Ukraine? My wife happens to be in that category and safe to say she has plenty of similar issues to other people in the same 'category'. Thyroid issues are a serious problem for many young women around here and it cannot be a coincidence.
But I still do believe that nuclear is the way forward without doubt though. Just that these studies seem to be way off with the ongoing effects.
Even then there will be confounding effects. People are, generally, richer now than pre-Chernobyl. They will, generally, have better access to better healthcare.
I grew up in an impacted area; you might call it downwind of Chernobyl. My mother had thyroid cancer at a young age and now had no thyroid. Numerous female relatives as well as friends and acquaintances have experienced similar problems and those are all associated with Chernobyl.
Here’s a single scientific source. There are more, but I’m sure you’re eager to demonstrate your hypothesis that women in Eastern Europe are getting cancer not from industrial accidents but from cousin marriage.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6535271/
My mum died when she was 36 because she had spent a couple of years working in a battery production factory in LT. I remember visiting her too! The amount of cancer, the locations of it and the aggressiveness of the growths found in her pointed to the simple fact that she was exposed to incredibly harsh chemicals. But it could be blamed on X, Y, Z if need be but this is the reality of it.
Cousin marriages and cancer? Wow.
Thyroid issues are super common. Might be related but also may very well not be.
(I’m not taking a position either way as I have no data, but they’re clearly not accusing Chernobyl neighbors of mating with cousins.)
There are also studies related to increased birth defect rates, but it's harder to conclude anything there, as birth defects can be caused by alcohol consumption, malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies.
https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm
Chernobyl was an exceptionally unsafe reactor, and didn't have a containment dome. Fukushima did have decent containment and didn't release nearly as much radiation.
I find this sort of thing is a reminder that I always need to find multiple sources, try to understand what the studies are and the extent they cover the topic and what the experts are saying about them to get a fair idea of what is going on.
Its also a reminder that everyone has biases, both implicit and explicit, and it reminds me that I need to constantly review my stances to ensure I'm not only going by what my own biases want to follow (instead of the facts).as well as ensure I identify why a group may support one thing, but not another when currently available and reviewed info suggests both are correct.
I also try and discourage myself from two other things I find common. The first is taking a large organization and assigning the same value to anything and everything they produce, even when its an org of many people and experts who have different internal groups that are experts in different areas. Its too easy to go "oh this group knows their stuff of X, published by doctors A, B, C. That is automatically equal to this other paper on a completely different topic published by Doctors X, Y, and Z."
Bhopal had more of everything including : heritable effects, premature births / premature deaths, cancers, short term death tolls, long term impairment of life[1]. Compare by any metric to Chernobyl, you’ll find it’s similar in the type of ailment / outcome but at least two orders more severe in Bhopal.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Edit: for those who want to also compare the subterfuge and gas-lighting elements in the two, they are also similar.
Funny enough some of the very earliest parts of the movement went pro nuclear because they hoped it would prevent dams that destroy natural habitats.
But of course the modern environmental movement is more concern enforcing some sort of anti-rational neo-naturalism. They always disagree with science on things that are 'unnatural' whatever that means, being against nuclear and GMO.
Of course the repeatably also embrace and advertise the worst kind of anti-science alternative medicine, natural healing, homeopathy and all matter of utter nonsense.
That is why I hate these organizations with a passion. They are anti-human, not pro-environment.
Which means that possibly:
1)there were adverse health effects among Fukushima residents that were not documented. 2)there were adverse health effects that could not be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the accident. 3)adverse health effects have not manifested themselves yet
For a hyperbolic example, no adverse health effects have been documented that could be directly attributed to people reading the post you made. All three of your possibilities would still apply.
This article [3] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory REVIEW (1993 I believe, so a bit dated) states "The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants"
[1]( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...) [2]( https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html) PDF Warning: [3]( https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/ORNL%20Review%20v26...)
In reality it's one of the best energy sources we have
It was not uncommon even in the 70s for 'environmentalist' anti-nuclear organization to be sponsored by fossil fuel industry.
The controversial opinion? Nuclear sucks because you lose a city every generation, even if you're the most advanced, organization nation on Earth (Japan) you can still make mistakes that have consequences for decades to centuries.
No, you don't. Fukushima had a 2010 population of 20,000. It has 17,000 today. And it dropped from 22,000 to 20,000 between 2000 and 2020 so not all of the population reduction was due to nuclear disaster.
Likewise, Pripyat was a planned town designed specifically to support the nuclear plants. When the nuclear plants closes, the town had no reason to continue existing. Like mining towns when the mines are exhausted.
Gotta love a lobby job of PR/damage control! This is even better than the work of the Japanese government itself. Insulting to our intelligence, but good PR work nonetheless...
In any case, up there with "Covid-19? No big deal", also in WHO greatest hits.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-loo...
Fukushima cost $200B to cleanup in order for it to not wind up killing anyone.
"As of the end of December 2015, 51 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer in the second examina-tion conducted by Fukushima Prefecture.... As of the end of June 2015, 113 people were diagnosed with malignant or suspected malignant thyroid cancer. Of these, 99 people underwent surgery.... the Fukushima Prefectural Citizens Health Survey Committee has not recognized these thyroid cancer cases as the result of the Fukushima accident; the Committee’s reasoning is... that some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed."[0]
[0] Katsuta T. (2019).'The Reality after Fukushima in Japan - Actual Damage to Local People'. https://web.archive.org/web/20200326151713/https://link.spri...
Some of the subjects may have been over-diagnosed. Should medicine not err on the side of caution? Given the results near Chernobyl?
At any rate, there were certainly deaths as a result of the plant's failure. About 2000 people died as a consequence of disaster-related evacuation measures. Whether the radiation was directly responsible or not, the damage to the plant and very real dangers of potential exposure undeniably led to those deaths. Is the UN saying that evacuating tens of thousands was an over-reaction? Was the extreme threat posed by the highly unstable condition of Unit 4 "over-diagnosed" by most western experts?
The ongoing spin on this topic is disgusting. March of FUD.