A number of people did die because of the Fukushima evacuation, though, through things like interruption of medical care. And if there hand't been an evacuation there would have been a few radiation deaths. The total is still only 10x the number of air pollution deaths you'd expect from a coal plant providing the same number of megawatt-years and very few nuclear plants melt down but lets be accurate.
How does one disentangle interruption of medical care due to nuclear emergency from interruption of medical care due to tsunami?
Re:Ultra Safe Nuclear
by Manfredo_1 on Thursday September 17, 2020 @05:00PM
(#24509896)
The attribution of deaths as being due to evacuation lies on shaky ground. Many of these deaths are attributed to ambiguous causes like "exhaustion". Many of the counts for deaths supposedly due to evacuation are in fact just presenting deaths due to natural causes that occurred in the evacuation time frame. Remember, out of a population of 300,000 people, 3,000 people will naturally die each year assuming everyone lives to 100.
Certainly, if someone was tied to life support and had to be taken off to evacuate then that's a death attributable to evacuation. But most of the figures I've seen have counted people who died of natural causes during the evacuation time frame and attributed it to evacuation.
The total number of victims was unknown for Chernobyl. We didn't know what the impact on cancer rates would be. But it isn't the 1980s anymore. We can compare the rates of cancer and other radiation related illnesses among the people who experienced Chernobyl and the general population. The radiation exposure due to Fukushima and 3 Mile Island was insufficient to cause adverse health effects. Yes, we do know the impact of these failures.
3 Mile Island took $1 billion to clean up not 10 billion. The exclusion zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima represent greater economic tolls, but the latter has since been lifted. By comparison, what is your cost estimate to build 3 weeks of energy storage in the US?
Sure, wind and solar could work if there's a scientific breakthrough that makes energy storage extremely cheap and scalable by several orders of magnitude. But until that scientific breakthrough in storage happens, nuclear and renewables aren't even playing the same game.