Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift

Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by ericbarrett on Thursday December 22, 2022 @10:08AM (#34094004)

1 death, but also 110,000 permanently evacuated and their homes lost as if burned to the ground, and many billions already spent, with more to come, on a multi-generational clean-up project. I'm generally pro-nuclear but let's not understate the impact of Fukushima.

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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by concordDance on Thursday December 22, 2022 @12:20PM (#34095819)

Thing is, they don't actually need to still be evacuated.

Check out the radiation map of Japan: https://jciv.iidj.net/map/

Look up where the evacuation zone is and the pre evacuation population numbers.

Then plug those numbers into the linear no threshold model (which is thought to overestimate risk).

I'm away from my computer for the holidays, but when I did the numbers you're looking at QALY losses an order of magnitude lower than that caused by the loss of home.

In general people (govs included) drastically overreact to radiation deaths. It makes no sense to spend a billion dollars to avoid one nuclear accident death when you can spend a billion dollars to avoid 100 prostate cancer deaths. Its literally not worth doing the remaining cleanup by any metric.

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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by mplanchard on Thursday December 22, 2022 @08:27PM (#34101278)

According to farmers who live in the area and do their own scans, the government's radiation maps are not always correct: https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-o...

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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by Manuel_D on Thursday December 22, 2022 @01:52PM (#34096942)

The cleanup is actually done, I am routinely impressed that people think it's going to be cordoned off for generations: https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/06/cdd1d2ce1e47-evac...

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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by mplanchard on Thursday December 22, 2022 @08:29PM (#34101285)

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101272

It seems like while the official cleanup is done, actually repopulating fukushima and living there is a different matter.

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Re:Japan to invest on nuclear energy in major policy shift by Manuel_D on Thursday December 22, 2022 @09:55PM (#34101863)

The piece has a lot of anecdotes and personal stories and very little in the way of actual quantitative claims about contamination. Mushrooms allegedly tasting weird isn't exactly someone one would base industrial policy on.

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