That’s the reason why more didn’t die from them meltdown.

But the evacuation wasn't an unrelated event. It was a direct result of the meltdown, so evacuation deaths can be attributed to it.

Well, to be fair. There was also that whole thing that caused the meltdown as well.

It's pretty much impossible to get an exact pulse on how many people died indirectly as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster evacuation specifically who would've lived if it were not for that. Particularly because most of the deaths attributed to the disaster were elderly to begin with.

Not trying to downplay the cost of human life, it's really terrible when preventable scenarios or mistakes lead to any cost. With that having been said, there are sometimes going to be events where evacuations are necessary, and some of them we can't prevent. No doubt there were many thousands of deaths unrelated to Fukushima Daiichi due to the massive earthquake and tsunami.

I believe it is estimated that around 1,000-2,000 people died as part of the evacuation efforts, but I am not sure what a good source is, so take that with a grain of salt. If you want to go really deep, it'd be wise to consider the burden that it may have caused psychologically too, but that's even harder to exactly ascertain, especially since it is likely nothing compared to what happened as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.

If the point of this is to compare safety though, factoring this in still would place nuclear fission power plants very low in terms of how much cost of human life they cause overall.

That's true - but it's not like the potential for such a natural disaster wasn't well known. The word we use for such devastating tidal waves kind of gives that game away.

Yes, sure. But let's not understate how unusually bad the disaster really was; a 9.0 earthquake and equally severe tsunami. That's not exactly a common event, and it probably won't be one even in a world with much more volatile weather conditions.

And yet, despite that, it is in fact possible to make nuclear fission power plants survive this kind of disaster, and especially possible to prevent the meltdown that eventually occurred; Fukushima Daiichi is not the only fission plant in Japan, and not the closest to the epicenter of the disaster either. I think it's fair to say given the evidence that the problems that need to be solved with regards to Fukushima Daiichi are the systemic issues that led to the inadequate safety measures and the unfortunate decisions made leading up to the meltdown. Whether the issues be operational complacency, corruption, etc.

It'd be nice to have a way to simply be robust to those issues, but in the end it's always going to be dangerous to human life if the people in charge of decisions that could endanger human life are not adequately responsible. That would still be the case in absence of nuclear power, natural disasters, evacuations, etc.

Why would weather have any effect on earthquakes?

It likely wouldn’t. But natural disasters, like tsunamis, on a similar scale large enough to threaten well-engineered power plants may become more common.

As I see it, this old-school PWR design has successfully passed a real life crash test under the most severe conditions possible… three times in a row.

The tsunami caused the evacuation and the meltdown.

Indeed - and it has long been known that Japan is in an earthquake zone, and can suffer Tsunamis, so...

Yeah so they should just move the island.

I would say the negligence of putting the backup generator in the basement was more the cause. That was amateur hour and easily preventable.

Only if the decision to evacuate was necessary. I wonder, but don't know

Many people here are talking like the government forced them to evacuate. Perhaps they did. But if your family was there, would you stick around?

I'd be getting my family the flying f outta there. Not logically deducing outcomes and risk factors on HN.

Hindsight is 20 20...

The government and media can also just lie to people to influence their actions.

E.g. due to propaganda, people thought that Covid is 100x as deadly as it actually is (people estimated on average that infection fatality rate was 10%, when in reality it’s ~ 0.1%)

If true ... is that a lie, or the inability to know scientific fact before it's been studied?

Applies both to Fukushima and Covid response.

I’ve tried googling this but couldn’t understand. How exactly did evacuations kill people? Was it just people being moved out of hospitals that needed to be in hospitals?

Yes, and the stress of being uprooted. There was a large surplus of deaths in the evacuated population over the next year, without any sign of a radiogenic disease. Communities being scattered suddenly, the stress of losing homes and homeland.

Do you have any reliable statistics showing that there were surplus deaths? Most of the research I've read showed ~1,500 deaths - mostly among aged 75+ people - over 6 months out of a cohort of 300,000 people. This is not a surplus over normal death rates.

The statistics is largely bunk. Out of 300k people, 1,600 died of old age. News outlets just assumed that all these people died due to the evacuation. The original research was retracted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096908

This is excellent to know! Thank you.

Impossible, they are the same event.