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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Your own source says:

> No one died directly from the disaster. However, 40 to 50 people were injured as a result of physical injury from the blast, or radiation burns.

Since then one worker has died of lung cancer, and that is likely attributable. So zero or one death for the second worst civilian nuclear power incident in history.

It's very likely that area would have had to be evacuated one way or another, no? I think it's far more fair to attribute those 2313 deaths to the tsunami and earthquake.

If it was a coal plant, I don't think anyone would have been attributing 'stress deaths' to coal. Ditto any other kind of industrial or chemical plant that may or may not have been on that land.

The issue seems to have been a failure to properly safely evacuate people from an industrial zone.

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Again the evacuation zone was larger due to the nature of the plant, so yes it caused more stress, to more people than a similar incident in a coal plan would have.

It still is an exceptional incident and it is a ridiculously small death toll compared to the "normal" operation of coal plants yearly death toll... but it isn't a reason to minimize the numbers. As for the 1 direct death, I was referring to this part of my source:

> In 2018, the Japanese government reported that one worker has since died from lung cancer as a result of radiation exposure from the event.

Going by the official statement, I let them do the judging, they don't really have an interest in over-reporting as far as I know.

> Again the evacuation zone was larger due to the nature of the plant, so yes it caused more stress, to more people than a similar incident in a coal plan would have.

Do you have data for that? Or as compared to some other chemical or industrial plant?

Again, I think this just has to do with a failure to have an adequate evacuation plan, not the specific land use.

For Fukushima the evac zone was 20km around the plant. A similar scenario in the US would see a 50 miles (80km) radius evac zone recommended by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (at least the the time of it happening in Japan: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-evacuations-... ).

I don't think I have ever heard of such large zones for other industrial disasters, the estimatated maps I've seen for Bhopal, one of the if not the worst industrial chemical disaster ever, had a radius for the gas spread of about 7km (and it killed a lot more people really quickly). It is of course annecdotal, but each disaster has its own circumstances: wind, water/soil contamination, etc. that impose different measures to take... but in general nuclear disasters have a much wider radius for the fallout, that's why the security/processes for it are way more demanding and generally successfully applied.

But the main point was that we can't discount these risks and their results (deaths) when a disaster happened, as rare as they are (thankfully). They are part of it, and counting these deaths is just honest, as I said other sources of energy in the course of their "normal" operation kill way more people and destroy our environment in the process. It's a no-brainer to choose nuclear power over them.

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