At Chernobyl, there was massive radiation leakage & many people died.
In the recent Japanese one, the only deaths were due to the earthquake effects & none from radiation.
If you start looking at long-term effects, you then have to consider deaths from both forms of power station - and I'd bet just about anything there have been many times more deaths due to pollution from fossil fuels (creating smoke & smog etc.) than radiation leaks.
Europe may have cleaned up a lot, but worldwide, smog is still a major killer. It's just about impossible to breathe outdoors in some cities.
Just remember that Radioactive fuels are mined from the earth & purified - Atomic power is a natural resource.
We only exist because of atomic power (in the Sun), and the Earth - and all planets in the universe - only exists because of heavy elements created in massive nuclear explosions (Supernovas).
To begin with, the direct short term deaths from Chernobyl were deliberately underplayed. The initial reports given by Russia to the Atomic Energy Agency were 40,000. Russia asked the Atomic Agency for financial and technical help to clean up the area and a condition of giving this help was that Russia reduce the official figures of deaths to 4,000. These figures were then doctored to reduce them even further, such that I have heard some people say only about 40 or 50 people died.
The long term deaths based on increased cancers in areas exposed to the radiation has been estimated recently by Alexey V. Yablokov at 900,000 .... and counting, because those deaths are continuing today - the radioactivity from Chernobyl will last thousands of years. If we add up the deaths over those thousands of years, I have no doubt they will be in the millions. The nuclear lobby wants us to think it is much less in order to enable them to continue their activities without people being too concerned.
Chernobyl has such a high death rate (17) because of the lack of preventative measures taken at the time.
In the 1970s some students studied sites in UK that had been possible locations for Nuclear plants and had never been used and found the amazing result that they all suffered higher than normal clusters of Cancer.
And there are many studies following up people who have moved away from Nuclear plant areas and they all draw the same conclusion, that there is no link.
Mainly the detracters are the so called green parties, who for some reason (which seems to be just against science for whatever reasons they may be) and Nuclear (for the time being until Fusion energy) answers lots of these problems.
I don't buy the idea that nuclear power is safe all of a sudden.
Look if I am diagnosed with cancer tomorrow; prove that it was caused by nuclear discharge?
It might. Or it mightn't. However it would be very difficult to show a clear cause and effect link between my cancer and a nuclear powerplant or accident of some sort, but that doesn't mean it wasn't caused by radiation.
The only way of showing long term damage due to radiation, I think, is to look for relationships between cancers and illnesses and radiation.
Do you live in the same area? did nuclear fallout fall in that area in the past? Did you eat contaminated food?
Then these have to be generalized across entire populations, statistically.
Is the cancer rate higher in an area that had a nuclear accident? New types of cancer? Compare the cancer rates in regions, look at regions near plants and those not near plants of similar population, is there a difference? etc etc.
This is the kind of research that needs to be done, and it hasn't been done, so it hasn't been proven that nuclear power is safe, and I think it highly unlikely that it is safe.
It's nice how the supporters forget the most important word, no 'scientifically provable' deaths, and that's because we had lives to live while getting exposed to radiation.
It's the same tactic as tobacco companies used to use, if you can bury enough evidence, nothing is ever proven, so there's always plausible deniability.
And that's because there's a big ECONOMIC upside to nuclear power, it's cheap to make, and you can sell it at a high-price.
If you apply even the slightest bit of logic though, like you said, you can see it has devastating effects, and nuclear power simply isn't safe(there's still an unusually high number of kids with cancer being born in Chernobyl, but again, that's not 'scientifically provable', because these people didn't live in a lab), no matter how good the precautions, or security measures.
So it's like tobacco, it's unproven, but everybody knows it's dangerous deep down.
From what I know, it seems like we are doing an ok job in keeping health related accidents from nuclear plants pretty low. I think we learned a lot from Chernobyl and took more precautions. But I think the long term effects from nuclear accidents seem pretty bad. Like contamination of water supply that can go down a long river, water from the river that cows could drink, and cows that can be cut up and distributed all over the world, eventually nuclear contaminating people who live on the other side of the world.
its pretty risky. but hopefully we will not have to worry about nuclear power too much in the future. im sure technology will be made that can harness and store natural power from the sun or earth. i just find it hard to believe that we can create things like the internet but not find ways to store clean energy. i think it will large scale happen one day. hopefully sooner than later.
Just wanted to know your opinion. I've heard nuclear supporters saying that there have been little deaths in nuclear related accidents. However rather than measuring short term deaths, shouldn't long term related illness, environmental and economic impacts associated with nuclear contamination be the best measure?
I think the death rates are so low is because we now know what to do in case of an emergency meltdown. Basically people don't die because we can move them to a safe area. we tell the citizens not to eat or drink from the area. And the authorities try to contain it as much as possible. But at what cost? rendering large areas of land useless. The destruction of natural life within the area. Economic losses. There may be some cases of radiation illness as well.
What do you think?
