Last edited Tue May 6, 2025, 07:58 AM - Edit history (1)
We have had major reactor failures, the worst being Chernobyl which burned for weeks in a graphite fire. The relatively small death toll from Chernobyl helped change me from a rote mindless antinuke into a pronuclear person.
The area has become something of a tourist attraction, mostly because of the wildlife living in the exclusion zone.
The number of people who died from radiation exposure at the big bogey man at Fukushima is either zero or close to zero. The number of people killed by living in a coastal city inundated by seawater is 20,000, although nobody gives a rat's ass about the danger of coastal cities.
It turns out that fear of radiation killed more people than radiation itself did. In fact, if one looks at air pollution's annual death toll of around 7 million people per year, air pollution that could have been prevented were it not for irrational fear of nuclear energy, that condition exists on a scale of tens of millions of people every decade.
The cited paper in the text below open sourced. I keep the excerpt handy for claims like this.
Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)
...However, in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant(FDNPP) accident, no direct health hazards due to radiation, such as acute radiation injury, were observed, while various indirect health effects were reported even in the acute phase [2, 3]. Major health effects are attributed to the initial emergency evacuation and displacement, deterioration of the shelter environment, evacuation from nursing homes, and psychological and social health effects. In addition, there were also the effects of medical collapse, where lives that could normally be saved by medical care could not be saved due to a lack of medical resources [4, 5]. It is known that these effects are particularly susceptible to the socially vulnerable [6].
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I added the bold.
Now the rest of the cited text - some of these authors live and work in Fukushima and have always done so; their institution is Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima City, Japan - indicates that the
fear of radiation killed people, but radiation itself didn't. By the way, this group has published hundreds of papers on the topic.
I note that fossil fuel waste is making the entire planet increasingly risky. With the extreme global heating there will be tens of thousands of square miles that will be uninhabitable, perhaps more. We can expect famines, floods, fires, and inundated cities.
I have zero use for selective attention.
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