Last edited Sat Feb 11, 2017, 07:14 PM - Edit history (2)
This is because Fukushima and Chernobyl are the only two reactor failures in the history of more than half a century of nuclear operations to release significant amounts of radioactive materials to the environment.
We now have many thousands of reactor-years of experience and that's it, two major failures on the entire planet. We accumulate 1000 reactor years about every two and a half years, and we've been running with more than 400 reactors on the planet for more than three decades.
Therefore we have an experimental failure rate, an observed failure rate. I note also that from these failures we can make engineering decisions that will prevent their recurrence, much as we do when aircraft fail.
Secondly, the Nobel Laureate Burton Richter called out the tiresome anti-nuke moron Mark Z. Jacobson on exactly this point, a comparison of Fukushima with the what the death toll would have been in Japan if Japan had used dangerous fossil fuels rather than nuclear energy, including the event at Fukushima in comparison.
Richter's paper is here: Opinion on “Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident” by J. E. Ten Hoeve and M. Z. Jacobson, Energy Environ. Sci., 2012, 5, DOI: 10.1039/c2ee22019a (Energy Environ. Sci., 2012,5, 8758-8759)
The paper may behind a firewall, and so I will quote the introductory text here.
What struck me first on reading the TenHoeve–Jacobson (T–J) paper was how small the consequences of the radiation release from the Fukushima reactor accident are projected to be compared to the devastation wrought by the giant earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011. The quake and tsunami left 20 000 people dead, over a million buildings damaged and a huge number of homeless. This paper concludes that there will eventually be a 15-130-1100 fatalities(130 is the mean value and the other numbers are upper and lower bounds)from the radiation released from reactor failures in what is regarded as the second worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear power. It made me wonder what the consequences might have been had Japan never used any nuclear power. My rough analysis finds that health effects, including mortality, would have been much worse with fossil fuel used to generate the same amount of electricity as was nuclear generated. This conclusion will surely draw fire since it flies in the face of what many believe, and of new policy directions some propose for Japan and Germany.
He notes that in this event,
living in a coastal city - with nothing about reactors being involved was
more dangerous than the reactors, even accepting the upper bound figures used by the dullard anti-nuke Jacobson, was much worse when one looks at the factors that
didn't involve the reactor than the putative outcome (according to Jacobson) that
did involve the reactor.
It's pretty funny that none of the people, including Jacobson, who want to ban nuclear energy - which in my view would a crime against humanity - are even remotely interested in the deaths related to living in coastal cities, neither in the Fukushima event nor in the much larger case of the Indonesian tsunami of 2004, which killed 250,000 people. This is equivalent to the fact that they don't give a rat's ass that 70 million people die every decade from air pollution.
I note that even using the upper bound for the figures estimated by the anti-nuke idiot Jacobson, 1100 people dying prematurely from radiation, given that 13-14 people die every minute from air pollution, assuming 7 million deaths worldwide every year, the maximum total deaths attributed to radiation from Fukushima by a prominent, if mindless, anti-nuke amounts to about 80 minutes of air pollution deaths.
Now, if we had a Fukushima type event once a week somewhere on the planet, the death toll
still would be minor, again using the fool Jacobson's figures, compared to air pollution.
But we
don't have a Fukushima event every week.
As it happens, there are many papers in the primary scientific literature that state that there may be some additional cancer deaths from Fukushima, but that they will probably not be detectable since they will be overwhelmed by the statistical noise of
normal cancer deaths, many of which in fact derive from air pollution. In fact, it is reasonable to argue that any such signal might be equally well attributed to the fact that Japan foolishly shut its reactors and began burning far more dangerous fossil fuels after the Fukushima event.
The case has been made in many ways that the
fear of radiation, encouraged and whipped up by blithering idiots who lack any kind of scientific training whatsoever, was worse than the radiation itself.
Here is one such paper from the open source peer reviewed journal PLoS:
Was the Risk from Nursing-Home Evacuation after the Fukushima Accident Higher than the Radiation Risk?
As far as I'm concerned, as stated earlier, the anti-nuke community on this planet are the intellectual equivalents of creationists, except that creationists generally aren't responsible for 70 million deaths every ten years.
It's, um, criminal. Their ignorance kills people.
Have a nice weekend.
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