We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Getting things in proportion How dangerous is nuclear power? Think about Chernobyl, all those people who have died from radiation as a result of that huge disaster…. A total of 59 over 20 years, it turns out.
The world’s worst nuclear accident is significantly less dangerous to the general public of the continent of Europe than, say, Metropolitan Police drivers, never mind the continent’s public transport systems and its oil refineries. I am unaware of any casualties caused by wind farms, but it is hard to build tall things without someone managing to fall off, or some heavy bits dropping off occasionally.
Buses kill. Ban them now!
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I like it! I have thought as much for a long time in response to those who claim that nuclear is the LAST place we want to go for energy.
I don’t think most people understand that the true heart of the environmentalist wacko is a belief that NO energy source can sustain our lifestyles, therefore the ONLY solution is to scale back the evolution of our society and live pre-industrial lives. If people understood that, perhaps the environmentalist wackos wouldn’t get as much press.
Of course, Chernobyl also forced a very large area to be permanently evacuated, and if that hadn’t happened the death toll would be considerably higher.
Buses would probably kill a lot fewer people if London were evacuated, don’t you think?
Does anyone happen to know whether there are still fields in Wales where shepherds aren’t allowed to graze their sheep? And was that level of precaution ever really necessary?
Bernard Ingham is very prominent among supporters of nuclear power and I remember being quite incredulous when he first quoted these figures, but it turns out he was right.
Not that you’ll ever convince the swampies.
In the real world, 100s of firemen were sent to their deaths by…Gorbachev
For the prospects of future nuclear power generation it doesn’t matter whether 50 or 50,000 lost their lives at Chernobyl.
As the price of oil soars more and more nuclear power stations are going to be build. The environmental whackos are sometimes listened to when they aren’t causing us to give up much, but as soon as the energy crunch comes they will be pushed aside.
Needless to say, we are already behind the curve. A couple of Nulabourites have made a few tentative comments in support of nuclear power, whereas China has commissioned 32 plants to be built over the next 16 years.
Steven’s point about evacuation mitigating the problems may be valid, though much of that continuing evacuation may be merely precautionary, rather than of continuing relevance. It doesn’t undermine the main thrust which is about trying to compare actual costs rather than virtual risk.
I’m not sure what “real world” 50 Cents is talking about. The 59 deaths attributed to Chernobyl’s radiation by WHO include 50 among firemen and other rescue workers due to acute exposure, and 9 cases of childhood leukemia.
100s of firemen may have been sent in at high personal risk, but isn’t that what firemen do everywhere, and why they are highly admired everywhere? If any specifically Communist wickedness was involved it was in the slack management of the plant that gave rise to the fire in the first place, not in the response to the disaster.
Guy:
You forgot about wind farms killing birds, which is why a small subset of the enviro community (the animal lovers) dislike wind farms.
Well, the ones who don’t want a blighted landscape don’t particularly like them either.
My favorite part:
“Alongside radiation-induced deaths and diseases, the report labels the mental health impact of Chernobyl as “the largest public health problem created by the accident” and partially attributes this damaging psychological impact to a lack of accurate information. These problems manifest as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state.”
So the biggest impact is the mental effects of people being afraid based on exaggerated fears. In other words, anti-nuke hysteria kills people and degrades their quality of life.
They found the same effect at Three Mile Island. Anxiety and stress caused by irrational fear of radiation exposure triggered deaths and illness in the area far above anything that the radiation could have done. People died of stress related illnesses in areas that received no increased radiation.
In the US, 300 workers a year are killed mining coal. All of those people would be saved if we had nuclear power instead.
Guy,
You didn’t mention the death rates of other sources of energy – hundreds if not thousands yearly in coal mines let alone casualties on oil rigs, refineries, gas explosions etc etc.
There are probably more people killed or badly injured in a week in normal energy production than have been killed in the enitire history of nuclear energy.
I should also be interested in a complete audit of energy for wind farms. I suspect that when you calculate all the energy used in making the cement and other parts (high use of energy) transport of components etc, the total energy generated in the mill’s lifetime is probably less than used in its construction.
Jake –
Just to nitpick a bit: the US Department of Labor puts the number at just under a hundred deaths each year for all areas of mining combined (i.e. not just coal).
Still much more dangerous than nuclear power, of course.
If you want the death toll for windfarms, you have to add up the deaths caused by making the steel, transporting it, assembling the turbines, etc., etc.
Chinese mines seem to be horrendously dangerous. It seems that not a month goes by without hearing of dozens killed in some collapse or explosion.
Renewable,clean,power sources are not,with current technology,going to provide for the needs of the population sizes at current levels,
Environmentalists have an implicit subtext that a lot of us are going to die younger and many more are not going to survive infancy.
It is also doudtful whether,without draconian enforcement,people will be restrained from burning stuff to keep warm.It might be a nice pre BC dream to sit round a smokeless cow-shit fire,eating organic tofu and singing praises to Gaia,but history tells us that someone bigger and nastier comes and takes it off you.
Shannon quoted from the UN report, “the mental health impact of Chernobyl…….caused dependency on assistance from the state.”
So that’s what causes socialism, I’ve often wondered. Maybe this explains the location of labour heartlands in Wales and Scotland, and Liberals in Cornwall, radon from the local granite. I think I might withdraw my support for nuclear power in the light of this new evidence.
Joshua:
I am also including those who get lung disease from coal.
It would appear that the shit and the fan are approaching each other inexorably
There used, and still flickers a debate on wether smoking kills. using the argument that car smoke kills even more.
I’ve seen at our cinemateque films on the long term effects – streams poisened, earth dead.
In the first chapter of my Once She Was a Child, published in translation aat the Archipelago excellent e-zine, you might get an insider understanding, not to be counted in number of body bags:
http://www.archipelago.org/vol6-1/hasofferet.htm
Enjoy…
Sounds like a real page-turner, Corinna. Perhaps a little too exciting for me, though.
From Wikipedia…
According to reports from Soviet scientists, 28,000 km² (10,800 mile²) were contaminated by caesium-137 to levels greater than 185 kBq/m². Roughly 830,000 people lived in this area. About 10,500 km ² (4,000 mile²) were contaminated by caesium-137 to levels greater than 555 kBq/m². Of this total, roughly 7,000 km² (2,700 square miles) lie in Belarus, 2,000 km² (800 square miles) in the Russian Federation and 1,500 km² (580 square miles) in Ukraine. About 250,000 people lived in this area.
That is quite the disaster, and an enormous economic disruption. I dont’ think it can be so easily brushed under the carpet as that.
On the other hand it seems to me that with new technologies nuclear power is much safer than it was. And an old Soviet nuclear power station is not exactly a good role model.
Still, no one has really addressed Steve’s point: how many people would have died has the area not been evacuated, and left mostly unpopulated (please correct me if I am wrong here) over the years?
No idea. Not being a nuclear physicist I can’t really interpret those figures above unfortunately.
Just how bad is 555 kBq/m2?
Steven is very knowledgeable in technical matters, maybe he could shed some light, as 250,000 would be exposed to that level of radioactivity if they were not evacuated.
It’s not as simple as a particular figure being bad, which is why Wikipedia quotes the contamination by caesium-137 specifically. What determines danger to health is a combination of physical and chemical factors: what elements are in the contamination in what proportions, and whether they are biologically absorbed, the sort of decay they undergo, and the activity. (Bequerels measure the shear quantity of decay.) The reason Cs-137 is mentioned is that it is readily assayed and used as a marker for more general contamination.
I was myself mistaken in the remark above about childhood leukemia, even though I had only recently read the paper cited. That how under seige our rationality is from received wisdom, since children with leukemia are always held forth as victims as the modern workd in moral panics, and I slipped into that prefrbricated idea. What has killed people from Chernobyl who weren’t acutely exposed at he incident site has been thyroid cancer, presumably caused by the absorbtion of radioactive iodine.
Guy, the only thing you are proving is that we are indeed operating under received wisdom. You do not prove, however, that this wisdom has no scientific basis. I am not saying that it necessarily does, I am just saying that the average lay person like myself simply does not know. The key question in my view is: was the evacuation of the surrounding area (how large was it, BTW?) warranted, and how soon could it be safely re-populated. We know from prior experience the answer to this question regarding other disasters (natural and man-made), but as far as a nuclear power plant disaster, we only have Chernobyl to learn from (again, correct me if I am wrong).
I didn’t set out to prove anything about the scientific basis at all. My point was that policy makers and the media are not really interested in facts at all, and that their anticipation of public apprehension informs those apprehensions.
I know radiation exposure is very tricky to work out, depending on a whole range of factors, so yes a simple number doesn’t really mean a whole lot.
I’d agree with you that nuclear power is safe and the dangers overhyped, I think quoting the low number of deaths caused by Chernobyl does understate what happened quite significantly though. Like any statistic one taken in isolation is quite misleading.
Reading about these nuclear disasters you get the impression that gross incompetence and/or glaring engineering errors are to blame, usually for political reasons. I seem to recall that Windscale was unsafe because the government was eager to get nuclear weapons, ASAFP, and so corners were cut.
Now the technology is mature and theres no need to race about it, I would assume it’s safe. I used to work for an engineering company and far more die on oil rigs every year than in the nuclear industry, I am sure. Oil rigs seem to be deathtraps, but nobody complains about those.
Guy: policy makers and the media are not really interested in facts at all. You certainly got that right.
Toryboy: oil rigs are death traps only for those who actually work there. The same is true for coal miners. This, it seems to me, is the big difference between those industries and the nuclear power industry.
No-one’s died in an accident on a North Sea oil-rig for a couple of years. Elfansafey bureaucracy may be pointless official bullying for shops and small commercial premises but in the genuinely hazardous industrial settings it was originally devised for it may have done some good. (Or perhaps the technology is getting better.)
Probably both.
What other choice do we have?
The oil is running out and the “alternatives”, wind, wave etc are not up to speed enough to take up the slack.
The world demands more energy not less, especially with the rise of China and India.
So Nuclear it is then. But keep working on new technologies.
John mentioned above that wind turbines may consume more energy in their construction than they ever produce.
Surely not! Our Government wouldn’t sponser something that doesn’t work would it?
Look at the Channel Tunnel ! Ah perhaps not. The Millenium Dome then!! Er no.Look I’ll have a word with Polly Toynbee and get back to you.