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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

Your comment goes pretty hard against the popular opinion of what happened. It would be good if you could explain your reasoning.

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Not the OP, but 15,000 people died because of the tsunami. No one died from the radiation release at Fukushima and:

"A comprehensive assessment by international experts on the health risks associated with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP) disaster in Japan has concluded that, for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated."

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/fukushima_...

Thanks xrange.

No one dying quite glibly ignores the economic and social consequences of displacing somewhere in the neighborhoods of 120,000 people.

That aside, are we to believe that no one's medical conditions were made more severe by the stress and displacement caused by this disaster? And no one died as a result? Something of the scale of Fukushima can't be so easily dismissed by this kind of cursory analysis of radiation related health risks.

As yongjik commented elsewhere, an order of magnitude more people died as a result of the evacuation than the WHO predicts would die of additional cancer deaths. And that's assuming a linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure, when current thinking is that a threshold-based model is more accurate.

As s/he summarizes, more people died as a result of running away from the disaster than would have died if they'd stayed put.

Are those experts in any way affiliated with the nuclear industry?

I don't think there's room for many independent experts in such a space that can call a spade a spade.

(And government officials in Japan were caught again and again to downplay the incident to save safe).

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