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United Kingdom Medicine Science

Living In Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone Would Be No Worse Than Living In London, Research Suggests (bristol.ac.uk) 278

Posted by BeauHD from the cost-effective dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from University of Bristol, England: New research suggests that few people, if any, should be asked to leave their homes after a big nuclear accident, which is what happened in March 2011 following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Professor Thomas's team used the Judgement or J-value to balance the cost of a safety measure against the increase in life expectancy it achieves. The J-value is a new method pioneered by Professor Thomas that assesses how much should be spent to protect human life and the environment. The researchers found that it was difficult to justify relocating anyone from Fukushima Daiichi, where four and a half years after the accident around 85,000 of the 111,000 people who were moved out by the Japanese government had still not returned. After the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, in what was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union (USSR), the J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining. Using the J-value method, 31,000 people would have needed to be moved, with the number rising to 72,000 if the whole community was evacuated when five per cent of its residents were calculated to lose nine months of life or more.

Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol, said: "Mass relocation is expensive and disruptive. But it is in danger of becoming established as the prime policy choice after a big nuclear accident. It should not be. Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation." For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The results are published in a special issue of Process Safety and Environmental Protection, a journal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
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Living In Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone Would Be No Worse Than Living In London, Research Suggests More

Living In Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone Would Be No Worse Than Living In London, Research Suggests

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  • Premature baby deaths (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Friday November 24, 2017 @11:36PM (#55618509) Journal

    Does it account for the spike in sudden infant death syndrome in the areas of Japan after 2011?

    • Re: Premature baby deaths (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 24, 2017 @11:48PM (#55618553)

      The stress caused by the panic and the relocation makes for a better hypothesis

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        It is also a good hypothesis that this stress would have been even higher if no relocation had been done.

    • You mean the same as the almost identical rise in the USA a few weeks later, right around the time that Fox and Friends were reporting massive nuclear fallout was hitting the United States from Fukushima? Also the spike was 1.8% above normal SIDS level in Japan.

      I think our species will endure.

  • How utterly inhuman (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Friday November 24, 2017 @11:48PM (#55618555)

    J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining

    The Life Expectancy is a statistical quantity. Reducing the average life expectancy by 8 months doesn't mean there won't be data outliers, or individuals affected with undue severity, E.G. Individuals whom will die much earlier because of the incident.

    This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.

    • Two lives matter more than one (on average) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @12:35AM (#55618669) Journal

      > This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.

      One person saved by spending the $X relocating them matters, of course.
      The two people who COULD have been saved by using that money to clean up the radiation more thoroughly instead also matter.
      The 30 people who could have been saved by spending that money on traffic safety matter still more.

      We have a certain amount of resources, a budget. If we have $10 billion to spend on making people safer, we then have to decide which safety projects to fund, with how much going to each project. We can't fund everything that seems like it might save some lives. Some we we wouldn't want to fund even if we had unlimited money - taking people away from their homes and communities disrupts their lives, and permanently moving people who weren't all that close to Chernobyl was worse for them than leaving them alone would have been. The strongest radioactive material released had a half-life of only eight days, so while a two-week temporary evacuation probably made sense, permanently uprooting the people in the outer perimeter was bad for them, overall.

      Anway, let's consider projects that WOULD be good for people. With research, we find that some safety measures are far more effective than others, and some are far more expensive than others:

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m... [nih.gov]

      To save the most lives in total we want to mostly fund projects which save a lot of lives per resource spent (we measure resources in dollars, for convenience).

      The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.

      • The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.

        This part is the really, really important thing. One of the things that's been found out is that a lot of people will take a shorter but distinctly nicer life--and things like 'being a refugee' or 'stress & strain of being evacuated' have their own costs in life expectancy, too. Having a rough idea what your actual benefits and costs are help you make a good decision...and at the very least, it might be a Good Idea to not evacuate when the cost in life expectancy is more than that of staying put.

        • This part is the really, really important thing. One of the things that's been found out is that a lot of people will take a shorter but distinctly nicer life--and things like 'being a refugee' or 'stress & strain of being evacuated' have their own costs in life expectancy, too. Having a rough idea what your actual benefits and costs are help you make a good decision...and at the very least, it might be a Good Idea to not evacuate when the cost in life expectancy is more than that of staying put.

          The good news is you don't have to reduce life expectancy if you choose to live in the Fukushima zone. You might live longer where you want to be, as long as you are not stressed due to unnecessary fear of very low dose exposure.

        • Having a rough idea what your actual benefits and costs are help you make a good decision...and at the very least, it might be a Good Idea to not evacuate when the cost in life expectancy is more than that of staying put.

          Having a rough idea is the problem. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima, and even TMI, experienced the "Fog of War", which of course is that situational awareness only barely exists.

          It is criminally easy for us to declare that there was no need to evacuate after the main disaster passes. we know what happened, the authorities did not know what would happen, they just had burning or exploding reactor buildings.

          Authorities have to make decisions based upon what they know when they have to make those decisions.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Many of the people who want to go back are elderly and in poor health anyway. Some have young children. Those groups will be worse affected, so you are not going to convince them to return just by looking at averages. They want to know the effect on themselves and their children.

        In any case, so many people have moved on now that the communities they go back to won't be viable. They need to rebuild the population by attracting younger people who will want to start families, in an area that is still contamina

        • > Before someone says it, the initial evacuation could not have been avoided. There was no way to know how bad the situation was going to get.

          Did they have to evacuate the entire continent immediately? Obviously no. Was it unavoidable that they evacuate everyone with 500 miles, within 24 hours? Nope, they didn't do that either. 50 miles? 5 miles? 1 mile? It was prudent to temporarily evacuate the people within 2 miles of the plant fairly quickly. Nothing about it was "unavoidable", who to evacuate wh

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            If the wind had blown in the other direction then the evacuation would have been inadequate. They were lucky.

          • Re:They had to evacuate the entire continent? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @11:07AM (#55620089)

            Nothing about it was "unavoidable", who to evacuate when, for how long, was all judgement calls based on both safety and PR.

            It is fascinating how some slashdotters know for certain that every single thing that happened was well known at the time. That all future events went exactly to plan.

            Wind direction. What exactly caused plant 1 to explode? Then plant 4. What credibility should be placed on where you get your information? You have the double whammy of a huge amount of destruction caused by the tsunami.

            Then you are an official who makes the decision. You know that if you make the decision to shelter in place, and the situation gets worse and many people die because if your decision, you may end up having the rest of your life completely destroyed, if not end up in prison, or in some countries, you are executed.

            Unlike random people on Slashdot, most officials in these matters have to make decisions based upon a whole lot less situational awareness than they would like. So you make a decision based on what you do know. Unfortunately, they are not know it alls.

            So pissing off bean counters is a lot less of a price to pay.

            • I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Of course you don't know everything ahead of time, decision makers make judgement calls based on the available information (and hopefully contingency plans made ahead o time). Judgement calls. Unlike what GP claims, over-reacting is neither required nor particularly frequent. "Limited information" does not mean you must evacuate the whole country, or any specific geographic area.

              What we teach mayors, city managers, and other decision makers is that *bec

              • I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Of course you don't know everything ahead of time, decision makers make judgement calls based on the available information (and hopefully contingency plans made ahead o time). Judgement calls. Unlike what GP claims, over-reacting is neither required nor particularly frequent. "Limited information" does not mean you must evacuate the whole country, or any specific geographic area.

                That's a fine slippery slope we have here. The people making decisions almost certainly don't have evacuation of the entire country in mind - I mean, how would that even be done?

                Regardless here is the assessment from another group http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... [world-nuclear.org]

                They estimate possibly 1000 deaths had the area not been evacuated. Slashdotters can either declare this fake news or believe that 1000 deaths were worth the savings in money.

                But how would one even tell? Being that the whole thing is conjec

        • Many of the people who want to go back are elderly and in poor health anyway. Some have young children. Those groups will be worse affected, so you are not going to convince them to return just by looking at averages. They want to know the effect on themselves and their children.

          In any case, so many people have moved on now that the communities they go back to won't be viable. They need to rebuild the population by attracting younger people who will want to start families, in an area that is still contaminated.

          Before someone says it, the initial evacuation could not have been avoided. There was no way to know how bad the situation was going to get.

          Its also important to note that there are still many people displaced from their homes due to the earthquake and tsunami alone;

          https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]

          and many people died in those evacuations as well;

          https://reliefweb.int/report/j... [reliefweb.int]

          Ten years after Katrina, there were still thousands who did not have permanent homes, and many homes that will never be re-built.

        • Before someone says it, the initial evacuation could not have been avoided. There was no way to know how bad the situation was going to get.

          Oh, on Slashdot, they know - somehow they know.

      • To save the most lives in total we want to mostly fund projects which save a lot of lives per resource spent (we measure resources in dollars, for convenience).

        The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.

        The problem of course, is that the whole shelter in place because it's cheaper assumes that the outcome of the disaster is known at the very beginning of it.

        Was the final situation at Chernobyl known in detail the second the reactor took it's excursion? Did the authorities know the exact future condition of the reactors the second the tsunami breached the seawalls at Fukushima?

        Exposure to radioactive materials is a localized thing. 50 feet away, or even 10 feet away isn't a big deal unless the radiati

        • The author of the paper makes sure to mention that up front - it's not meant to be critical of officials at the time. It intended to provide another piece of information that officials can use when considering whether to order an evacuation when something happens in the future. During Hurricane Irma, for example, officials in Florida ordered mandatory evacuations only for the coast, which was the most dangerous place to be. Most of Florida was not evacuated because officials had learned that evacuation or

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nasch ( 598556 )

      If there is no standard, then any time there is any kind of potentially toxic accident, you would evacuate everyone in the area "just to be safe". If there is a standard of some kind, then yes it's possible someone will die early due to exposure, no matter what the standard is. Asking the government to keep everyone safe all the time no matter what is not practical and a bad idea.

      • When I eat hard boiled eggs, kimchi and drink PBR they SHOULD evacuate the whole office 'just to be safe'.

    • Science and maths, ruining people's silly conceptions of themselves for thousands of years.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kohath ( 38547 )

      Involuntary relocation is also very stressful. That stress also results is earlier deaths for some people.

    • Not to mention that cause of death matters. Cancer from radiation exposure isn't exactly the best way to go, and I suspect a lot of the early deaths that bring down the average will be just that (not from acute effects but by increasing the long term risk, like with the 9/11 first responders). I thought for sure my father would face a death from painful cancer after a lifetime of heavy smoking, instead he went painlessly in his sleep from heart failure. My uncle on the other hand... terrible. We definitely
      • It could be argued that people in the Fukushima zone are at reduced risk of dying or suffering from cancer. Why? Because they are all screened much more carefully and often than the general population. Finding cancer early is the greatest single factor in successful treatment. It increases cure and survival odds tremendously, whereas the increased risk of actually getting cancer from living in these areas is extremely low.

    • Re:How utterly inhuman (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mr D from 63 ( 3395377 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @08:40AM (#55619653)

      J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining

      The Life Expectancy is a statistical quantity. Reducing the average life expectancy by 8 months doesn't mean there won't be data outliers, or individuals affected with undue severity, E.G. Individuals whom will die much earlier because of the incident.

      This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.

      Statistics is the only way the evaluations can be performed. For Fukushima, the UNSCEAR 2013 concluded essentially no statistical loss in life expectancy and no deaths. Since then, studies have shown that actual exposures were lower than used int he report. The methodology in that report is the same as used to estimate Chernobyl health impacts, and studies have shown a much smaller health impact than estimated. So the science is clearly good and conservative.

      Every life matters, but that is not how we evaluate overall safety. We evaluated it in terms of risk. We have statistics on car deaths, and use that to evaluate the risks and also improve safety. Every one of those deaths still matters, of course.

      As for radiation zones, the very low risk should not surprise anybody who has attempted to objectively asses the information available. Of course, if one reads headlines, then they might not get it.

      • ^"Statistics is"... uhgggg. embarrassed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        All those nice diseases that make your life hell but do not kill you, that long-term exposure to radiation causes, are conveniently swept under the carpet.

        • All those nice diseases that make your life hell but do not kill you, that long-term exposure to radiation causes, are conveniently swept under the carpet.

          No, they are not swept under the rug. Please show us exactly which ones you are talking about. The 2013 UNSCEAR report specifically addresses risk of radiation associated illnesses of all know kinds. Science shows these estimates are valid and conservative. You can deny the science, just like a climate change denier, or you can simply throw out statements that are not supported by science if you like, but that is just a contribution to ignorance.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            "Bla bla bla, I am right until you prove in extreme detail what you just said"

            Are you demented? Or just so full of yourself that you have no effective intelligence left?

          • "They're not swept under the rug, please point to the rug and show me where on the rug they are!" derp!

            If you understood the issue, you'd agree that lots doesn't get measured because it isn't practicable. If it is well known that lots of the deaths wouldn't be counted, then there is no need to demand evidence.

            Go and look at a list of illnesses associated with radiation exposure, and then consider if there are any for which it would not be detected that radiation was involved. If you can't think of anything,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Also, you quality of life can get much, much worse (and long-term radiation exposure does cause that), without your time of death being affected much.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      It's always important to question what kinds of experiences make up the composite average.

      Here's another thing to consider: even if we just go by *average*, what do we do to compensate people for their lost months of life expectancy? If the answer is nothing, it is in effect a wealth transfer from a large number of people to the owners of the power plant.

  • If you want to join the latest American fad and become a mass shooter, you really ought to target a hospice.

    None of these people were going to live more than 9 months anyway, so it's no big deal. The authorities should let you off with just a warning.

  • Nuclear emergency plans are wishful thinking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer.earthlink@net> on Saturday November 25, 2017 @01:27AM (#55618819)

    For some reason I got to talking with some of my co-workers on the nuclear emergency evacuation plans that get printed in phone books and such. We live near an operating nuclear power plant so I guess plans like this are legally required or something. The area around the reactor was separated into evacuation zones, each zone is supposed to head out away from the power plant to a specified neighboring city.

    One of my co-workers mentioned that where we worked was in one zone and where his children went to school was in a different zone. He said they can take their plan and shove it, he's got his own plan. I suspect that he's not unique. If someone were to actually order an evacuation then we'd have chaos as everyone does their own thing. I suspect that the police and National Guard would be called out to maintain some semblance of order but that's just wishful thinking.

    We've had evacuations because of floods before and I saw some of the mayhem from a fairly local, and visible, threat. You take an invisible and widespread threat (and quite likely theoretical threat) like a radiation release then all plans will go out the window. You'll have panicked parents punching out police officers at roadblocks so they can get to their children before the school buses them off to somewhere a county away from where the parents are supposed be. That's assuming the police even show up.

    But we can't have nuclear power because we have what has been proven to be a non-issue while we keep burning coal, which also creates a much more certain (and again still theoretical) threat to the safety of children.

    Oh, and the lack of new nuclear power means we keep operating current nuclear power plants decades beyond their designed lifespan. Fukushima Daiichi would likely have been shutdown 20 years ago if Japan had not stopped building new nuclear power plants.

    So, we can do an orderly shutdown of these old nuclear power reactors or wait until we have to do a very disorderly shutdown. We'll have people claim we can replace these nuclear power reactors with wind and solar but how much will that cost? Wind might look cheap until we figure out that all installed capacity is not equal. A nuclear power plant can have a capacity factor of 90% and wind a capacity factor of 30%. You shutdown a one gigawatt nuclear power plant then you'll need three gigawatts of wind capacity and a Tesla PowerWall big enough to run a small city for hours. Money costs lives too, raising energy prices means less money for food, medical care, and so on.

    We've known that nuclear power is exceedingly safe. This study of current practice proves that nuclear is even safer than shown before. Maybe there was a good reason to stop building as many nuclear power plants as we did in the 1970s and 1980s. Not building new nuclear power reactors now is just making things worse.

    • There you go again (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Uberbah ( 647458 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @03:42AM (#55619089)

      ...regurgitating talking points debunked earlier this week [slashdot.org]. Although at least this time you're not complaining about the high cost of nuclear power coming from government regulation. Maybe because it was pointed out that a couple hundred million in extra costs from regulation (higher seawall and better backup cooling power) could have saved Japan a couple hundred billion in cleanup costs?

      But we can't have nuclear power because

      Because the cost can never be justified. Didn't seem to pick up on that one.

      But we can't have nuclear power because we have what has been proven to be a non-issue while we keep burning coal

      Coal and nuclear are non sequiturs when wind and solar have lapped them in cost effectiveness, and thats allowing coal and nuclear to externalize most of their costs. Like offloading nuclear plant decommission and waste storage onto taxpayers.

      • Re:There you go again (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @04:52AM (#55619211)
        $5000 could have saved billions in Japan.

        The fuel tank and generator were on the ground level. If they had put them on the roof, there wouldn't have been a meltdown.

        seawall, millions. Designing a safer reactor billions. Putting the generator on the roof of an earthquake hardened building? Cheap.

        It was a full on case of stupid, it wasn't an issue of money, it was a case of hubris. The design has a 100% chance of meltdown in a flood. That wasn't cost. That was pure stupid.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Mr D from 63 ( 3395377 )

          $5000 could have saved billions in Japan. The fuel tank and generator were on the ground level. If they had put them on the roof, there wouldn't have been a meltdown. seawall, millions. Designing a safer reactor billions. Putting the generator on the roof of an earthquake hardened building? Cheap. It was a full on case of stupid, it wasn't an issue of money, it was a case of hubris. The design has a 100% chance of meltdown in a flood. That wasn't cost. That was pure stupid.

          You completely misunderstand the fundamentals of nuclear safety. Having elevated tanks would NOT have guaranteed safety. Patches are not acceptable in nuclear.

          The plant should never have been located where it could be hit by a tsunami as it was never designed to withstand a tsunami. Not placing it in that location would have guaranteed safety.

      • regurgitating talking points debunked earlier this week [slashdot.org]

        Having a different opinion does not a debunking make.

        Read a dictionary.

      • Maybe because it was pointed out that a couple hundred million in extra costs from regulation (higher seawall and better backup cooling power) could have saved Japan a couple hundred billion in cleanup costs?
        Likely not, as later it became published that the pipes in the cooling system were to much damaged by the quake. AmoJ, /. reader, mentioned that a few days/weeks in other nuclear related threats.

        Here is an article about it: http://www.independent.co.uk/n... [independent.co.uk]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      They would not have shut the old ones down, why throw away a valuable asset if you don't have to? Shareholders demand you get maximum value from that multi-billion dollar plant and keep it going as long as possible. They demand you lobby the regulator to let you do it.

  • Jee wis mister wizard, the glorious as holes that built a nuclear site to minimum specâ(TM)s should have their heads hanging the 30 foot wall where 60 foot waves pass by. As for the soulless but whole from Bristol. I thought it was harder to become a professor in the U.K..

  • I love it when here, on Slashdot, we get these self-serving "anonymous submissions" where some obscure academic pushes their own pet ideas on something or other. It seems to happen once or twice a month anymore.

  • I'm ordinarily okay with scams preying on ignorance of basic mathematics. Most of them are cons where most of the participants get what their irrational greed has earned them, and the state-run affairs like the lottery at least pour money into schools and -- one hopes -- more people who understand simple statistics. Nuclear accidents, on the other hand, affect those who know better as much as those who don't. Gamma rays will be gamma rays, after all.

    When someone says that a population of 30,000 people will

    • Re:This is some really slimy propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)

      by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer.earthlink@net> on Saturday November 25, 2017 @03:07AM (#55618997)

      fission is not only a pointlessly dangerous scam, it's an entirely unnecessary one.

      Citation needed. Here's mine that says you're full of shit.
      https://www.nextbigfuture.com/... [nextbigfuture.com]

      Nuclear fission is the safest energy source we have available today. It's also cheaper than solar, hydro, and offshore wind.
      https://www.instituteforenergy... [institutef...search.org]

      Nuclear also has a lower carbon footprint than solar.
      http://www.world-nuclear.org/u... [world-nuclear.org]

      If there is an energy scam out there then it's solar. Onshore wind and hydro aren't too bad but they are limited in utility by geography, nuclear energy is not. About the rest of your claims, I think you have your aluminum foil helmet on too tight.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        Rooftop solar could power the planet, at a lower cost than nuclear. Nuclear is cheaper only when the government gives the land for free and waives liability.

        • Rooftop solar could power the planet, at a lower cost than nuclear.

          Citation needed. How does that work in northern latitudes? Even where I live in the Midwest we're getting barely 9.5 hours between sunrise and sunset, not actual usable daylight on a stationary solar panel, and days are getting shorter.

          Nuclear is cheaper only when the government gives the land for free and waives liability.

          Solar gets subsidies too. Let's do away with all these energy subsidies and see who wins out. Even Japan is building new nuclear now. Do you want to tell them how much nuclear energy costs? I'm pretty sure they are fully aware of the costs.

          • Let's do away with all these energy subsidies and see who wins out.
            No one wins out.
            We - as in humans - all lose.

            Without an active policy done by "the political arm" changes are much to slow. If there would not be politicians and citizens demanding it, no one would quit from nuclear or quit from coal, until he really needs: because the citizens need the power and have no control from where they get their power.
            30 years ago electric power simply came out of the power plug, that was it.

            OTOH if there had not be

      • world-nuclear.org is a pro nuclear anti "everything else" FUD site.

        • The paper I cited was a compilation of multiple studies, they collected no data themselves they just put a bunch of independent studies together in one place. If you have a better source then please provide it, I'm curious where you get your ideas.

          You seem to do that over and over again, make claims with nothing to back it up. That "anti everything else" site shows where they get their data, you did not, why should I believe anything you wrote?

      • Looking at those links, and not clicking them, they don't really appear as "citations" to me. They appear to be positions.

        Instead of clicking your "citations," I looked at the meta-data to see what you're shilling as "citations."

        nextbigfuture.com is the blog of a guy named Brian L. Wang. From their about page:

        Brian L. Wang, M.B.A. is a long time futurist. A lecturer at the Singularity University and Nextbigfuture.com author. He worked on the most recent ten year plan for the Institute for the Future and at

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. And while you life may only be shortened moderately, the quality of that life may be dramatically worse. Radiation causes a nice selection of really unpleasant diseases on long-term exposure, many of which do not kill you.

  • Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation.

    Performing a life-saving (or avoiding life-shortening) relocation simply on the basis of whether it is "cost-effective" is a disgraceful way for a government or corporation to behave.

    Apart from anything else, who would trust a government (even less: a company) to perform that life-long remediation? To keep investing in an area long after the voters have forgotten what happened there. And who is to say that the remediation would not have effects: either inconvenience, suffering or grief for those concerned

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      There is also the little side-issue of quality-of-life. You can actually get quite old with permanent radiation poisoning if it is not too severe. It is just a life most people would rather not have, with a host of bizarre and very unpleasant illnesses.

      I think we should let these "researchers" stay behind and evacuate everybody else. When they have figured out their error after a few years, we can evacuate them as well.

  • Economic circumstances, not environmental (Score:3)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @02:42AM (#55618957) Journal

    This report is bullshit, or perhaps the summary of the report failed to summarize it accurately.

    For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution,

    Compared to what?

    while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

    The last time I looked, Harrow, Kensington and Chelsea were all part of London. Perhaps the reason people born in these districts is related to economic circumstances of their lives, not environmental.

    But do people in London live longer (more than Blackpool or Manchester) or shorter (4 and a half months) lives?

    • But do people in London live longer (more than Blackpool or Manchester) or shorter (4 and a half months) lives?

      Yes. Yes they do.

  • Heartache By The Numbers (Score:4, Funny)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @03:34AM (#55619057) Journal

    The rents are much more reasonable in a nuclear disaster fallout zone, but it's very hard to get a pint of London Pride bitter.

    So it's probably best to stick with London, unless you're a Tory or UKIP nonce, in which case the nuclear disaster fallout zone is a far better choice, since you won't find as many SJWs there and you can be among your own kind. We're offering a free tube of sunscreen if you decide to move. We'll even drive you to the train.

  • Living In London As Bad As Living In Nuclear Fallout Zone

    Where is the sensationalism when you want it? ;)

  • So you might die, and it would cost somebody his bonus to prevent that.

    It's the Ford Edsel all over again.

  • Real estate prices would be way lower than London.

  • People with permanent radiation poisoning can actually get pretty old. It is just not fun at all. If the primary metric is age at time of death, then that metric is spectacularly unsuitable. This looks far more like just one more attempts of the nuclear apologists to demonstrate that nuclear is actually very safe. It is not, at least not as practiced by the greedy scum currently in control of that industry.

  • Could we compromise and nuke London?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zifn4b ( 1040588 )

      Could we compromise and nuke London?

      I'd start with North Korea but that's just me I guess

  • Statistically speaking, we could solve a big part of the climate change problem if we just killed off half of the world's population.

    Policies and decision making cannot be based on statistics alone professor.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zifn4b ( 1040588 )

      Statistically speaking, we could solve a big part of the climate change problem if we just killed off half of the world's population.

      Starting with all the religious warmongers. Peace on Earth and Good will towards men might be an actual possibility then.

  • The J-value is a new method pioneered by Professor Thomas that assesses how much should be spent to protect human life and the environment.

    The environment is probably a better long term investment than human stupidity. We should split them into two values and weight the environment heavier.

  • idiot (Score:2)

    by guygo ( 894298 )
    The author is correct if one doesn't take ANY humanity into account. I'm sure it is less disruptive to society for a few families to watch their children slowly die of radiation poisoning. However, I doubt any of those families would agree with the author. Perhaps they should try it themselves?
  • London Determined to be Just as Bad as Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone

  • For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

    These comparison statistics are probably largely irrelevant to the main point of the article. They're much more likely to just be a reflection of how decades of London-centric central government policies have resulted in prolonged neglect of the already-poorer provinces of the UK. This neglect has led to increased poverty, poorer public education, health and healthcare standards.

    It may indeed be possible to make a case that such environmental and cultural differences are of much greater comparative signific

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