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Comment by sago | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree. But death numbers I think gloss over the antinuclear point.

Nuclear problems have been catastrophic black swans. A nuclear plant is mostly great. Unless it's not. In a way nobody expected, (that is probably obvious in hindsight). Whereupon the cleanup is huge, requires state intervention, and possibly decades.

When someone dies because of an accident in wind power the implications are far more local.

It is not entirely unreasonable to prefer more highly-constrained danger to a smaller risk of catastrophe.

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On the other hand these black swan events usually aren't that bad. For instance the Fukushima disaster, without an evacuation, wouldn't have killed any more people than a equivalently sized coal plant operating in the same place for as long as Fukushima had operated. The difference is just that with Fukushima the deaths are relatively concentrated in time.

Now, Chernobyl was a disaster you're not going to see with the normal operation of any class of power plant. But hydroelectric dams also have the potential and sometimes do fail in ways that kill thousands of people but I don't usually hear people oppose those power plants on these grounds.

I think that the real reason people have such a fear of nuclear power plants is that we use the same terms, "radiation" and "fallout," for the dangers from a nuclear reactor failure and a nuclear war when the magnitudes are as different as a pebble and a boulder. I grew up mostly after the Cold War and always associated those terms with nuclear power and never realized that if you're a hundred kilometers downwind of a megaton scale groundburst you can die puking your guts out from fallout a couple of hours later.

That is like comparing getting killed by pollution by getting shortened your life expectancy to getting killed by getting stabbed in the heart with a knife.

It is the absurd statistician's view of life. That is not what it actually feels like to people. People would rather have a shorter life span due to say unhealthy eating than having a higher expectancy of getting stabbed to death by a maniac.

Nuclear power is more like that latter. When it happens it is terrifying and scares the shit out of people. It is easy to be a smart ass in hindsight when you know all the facts

But when a nuclear accident happens you will not have all the facts. You will not know the severity. You will have to evacuate lots of people. And it is going to have a severe mental toll on these people. These are factors entirely lost in your statistical approach to looking at this.

Not to mention the Fukushima disaster cost a FORTUNE!! 182 BILLION dollars! That is not pocket change. Who pays that? Not the nuclear power generators. It is tax payers.

In other words Nuclear power is getting a huge subsidy because they don't pay for their own clean. They don't pay for any insurance.

Had they paid for insurance, they selling nuclear power would have been impossible. It would simply have cost WAY too much.

Fukushima cleanup cost that much because they're trying to bring radiation levels back to natural background levels instead of getting them down to levels thought safe enough.

Nuclear power still saves billions in health costs by preventing air pollution deaths. Remember, air pollution from fossil fuel kills 4.2 million people every year... year after year. Chernobyl killed up to 4000 total, Fukushima will kill up to 1.

https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/

Fukishima only killed 1 person directly but the evacuation interrupted the medical care of a large number of sick and/or elderly people and ended up killing over a thousand people. But if there hadn't been an evacuation you'd be looking at more like 100 to 200 deaths related to radiation, though many by cancer long down the road. Of course really we ought to be looking at all this in terms of QALYs in which case the evacuation decision probably looks a lot better. And air pollution probably looks worse.

> Fukishima ... ended up killing over a thousand people.

Shorter version.

The radiation levels around Fukushima would not have caused prompt death. Cancer takes many years to develop. Elderly people do not have enough lifespan left to develop radiation related cancer to die from radiation.

On 4 April 2011, radiation levels of 0.06 mSv/day were recorded in Fukushima city, 65 km northwest of the plant, about 60 times higher than normal but posing no health risk according to authorities.

Would you have ordered the evacuation of thousands of sick and elderly hospitalized people if they were all going to get an X-ray? a CT scan?

The amount of radiation from one adult chest x-ray (0.1 mSv). A chest CT delivers 7 mSv — 70 times as much.

0.4 mSv from a mammogram. https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/radiation-risk-from-me...

Radiation levels were about 2 chest x-rays every day.

6-16 mSv from CT scans.

What if there was concern the levels could continue to rise to 600 or 6000 times higher than normal? You're analyzing with the benefit of hindsight.

The plant was still nowhere near under control on April 4 and needed constant attention.

> Fukishima only killed 1 person directly but the evacuation interrupted the medical care of a large number of sick and/or elderly people and ended up killing over a thousand people.

This is the product of highly naive analysis. Out of a population of 300,000 displaced people, ~1,500 died over the span of a month. This is the same as the expected natural death rate assuming a lifespan of 90-100 years. If you dig into the causes of death the overwhelming majority are elderly people and the causes are listed as "fatigue" and "exhaustion". This "study" really just measured the number of people who died of old age, and attributed it to the disaster.

> Nuclear power is more like that latter. When it happens it is terrifying and scares the shit out of people.

You mean the Tsunami is like that? Because as far as we know there is MAYBE only one death that was attributed to the Fukushima nuclear incident for example, while thousands lost their lives to the Tsunami in the matter of seconds. yet people still live next to the ocean in Japan as we speak. Completely, utterly irrational.

Just because you don't understand other peoples' value systems, that doesn't mean they're irrational.

Doesn't mean they're not, either.

On some level, anything that isn't a paperclip optimizer is irrational. People weight what's important to them, and strive for those goals.

"Everything is relative so nothing is anything" doesn't solve climate change. Everybody is wrong but some people are wronger.

> Yet people still live next to the ocean in Japan as we speak. Completely, utterly irrational.

There's entire towns that are still part of an exclusion zone people can't live in and around Fukushima. Even if you live near the coast in Japan a tsunami isn't likely to make the town you grew up in not exist anymore, there'll just be a lot of damage to deal with.

I'm generally pro-nuclear, but pretending this difference doesn't exist is disingenuous, particularly since the cost is disproportionately carried by people in rural areas living near nuclear power plants, whereas most of the benefactors of the energy production live elsewhere.

But the way nuclear power usually kills people is by increasing cancer rates…

> For instance the Fukushima disaster, without an evacuation...

But that is a pretty irrelevant comparison since there was an evacuation. Unless you are suggesting we stop evacuating people in case of nuclear disasters?

> Whereupon the cleanup is huge, requires state intervention, and possibly decades.

On today's news

> Brazilian authorities said on Monday that they have no way of knowing how much more oil will wash ashore the country’s northeastern coast, despite President Jair Bolsonaro’s ominous warning during a Sunday night TV interview that “the worst is yet to come.”

https://apnews.com/e757699344844f389d49048b15e9e0ae

That doesn't even register compared to the Fukushima and Chernobyl cleanups. That link seems to support the OP's point.

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