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Comment by hdgvhicv | Hacker News Reader

Fukushima killled a couple of people? More died that day from car crashes.

You're right but this seems difficult to estimate. From the wikipedia* article:

> ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.

> ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...

So a couple of orders of magnitude below the number of deaths caused by things like car crashes in Japan in a single year.

Per UN no deaths are recorded nor will be recorded due to the low dose.

Evacuation wasn't necessary, govt enforced it deliberately. If ppl weren't evacuated in such a rush(or not at all), they would have been fine

The low dosage claim is shady considering we have parts of the world with higher natural background radiation and in some cases cancer rates are lower there

Still, even by wildest estimations nr is fairly low

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (which also caused meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident) caused 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, 2,553 missing.

So nuclear radiation impact from Fukushima is minimal in the total loss of life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

This is incorrect and naive.

Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...

To be fair, people will say many of those deaths are due to the evacuation rather than the meltdown, and they’ll say the evacuation was overblown — too _much_ regulation. However, I think you’re right that these can still be attributed to the meltdown, since the evacuations were undertaken to avoid the difficult-to-predict impact of the meltdown. In hindsight, we can see the evacuation wasn’t needed. But the reactor meltdown made an already-bad situation even more brittle, and in a disaster scenario i think we naturally prefer the evacuation, as opposed to the (low) chance of total destruction.

The deaths are due to the evacuation, and the evacuation is due to some combination of [poor judgement] and [reactor meltdown]. If we attribute all the deaths to poor judgement, then we’re asserting we could confidently predict a reactor meltdown would pose no danger. Some people might claim that, but it seems implausible to me.

> For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50”

In 2011 4,612 died in Japan from motor vehicles. And a similar number every year since.

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