fatvegan

I'm reading about nuclear fuel supplies, nuclear accidents and the consequences of Chernobyl. I'm basically opposed to nuclear energy due to doubts about its costs and the risk that such concentrated energy represents either as a fuel or as a weapon. The number of accidents in the industry make me doubt our capacity to manage very dangerous things safely, although this applies to plenty of industrial technologies besides nuclear.

So far it seems that there are few deaths attributable to nuclear accidents. Excess deaths from Chernobyl appear to be around 20,000, but this is based upon assumptions about total global radiation exposure and the increased likelihood of a deadly cancer per unit of radiation exposure. In the total context of industrial destruction even 20,000 people dying over 40 years of an industry is not very many. However, for that many people to die from one accident doesn't inspire me to support a massive expansion of that industry.

While reading a particularly pro-nuclear article, I came across this:

Bad administrative decisions made several million people believe that they were “victims of Chernobyl” although the average annual dose they received was only about one third of the average natural dose. This was the main factor responsible for the unnecessary economic losses, estimated to have reached $148 billion by 2000 for the Ukraine and to reach $235 billion by 2016 for Belarus.

His basic argument is that while there were massive side-effects from Chernobyl they all could have been avoided. Perhaps they could have, however I think these costs still need to be attributed to the industry. The uncertainty and fear about the nuclear industry is real and is largely due to the unique aspects of nuclear technology. There will never be a concentrating solar thermal accident that costs an economy $235 billion, regardless how much its effects were to be "irresponsibly exaggerated". Nobody could create or foment the same sort of fear towards the solar industry, because the technology is fundamentally more predictable and transparent. The widespread opposition to the nuclear industry is certainly not arbitrary. Economic costs due to uncertainty and fear are real costs.

There were 28 fatalities among rescue workers and employees at the power station due to very high doses of radiation, and 3 deaths due to other reasons. Otherwise, the only real adverse health consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe among approximately five million people living in the contaminated regions were the following: acquired psychosomatic afflictions that appear as diseases of the digestive and circulatory systems, and other post-traumatic stress disorders such as sleep disturbance, headache, depression, anxiety, escapism, “learned helplessness,” unwillingness to cooperate, overdependence, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicides.

Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Minimal Radiation Effects

It's hard to imagine a harsher interpretation of these health consequences. Even if you agree that they entirely attributable to "radiophobia" (a term which is very reminiscent of 1960s government pro-nuclear propaganda), they are real effects upon real people. Perhaps these effects would be less if there was another equivalent disaster, but for all we know they could be greater. Most of a continent lived under a toxic cloud for several days. Our science and statistics are not good enough to tell us how much danger it actually represented or even how toxic it was. But again, that is fundamental to the type of toxicity. It affects people over decades, which makes it incredibly hard to measure. The resulting uncertainty can't be dismissed.

I probably have much more critical things to say about the nuclear industry, but my only real point here is that you can't exclude negative impacts of something just because you hypothesise that they could have been avoided. In the case of this article he brings up these negative (and rather enormous) consequences as a criticism of the "hysteria" following the meltdown. But even if you believe there was an element of hysteria, the ultimate cause of these effects was the meltdown itself.