Would that have involved killing as many people as will die in the next two hours from air pollution from the normal operations of fossil fuel plants or would it have involved five hours?
Not one moral idiot who cheered for shutting Japan's reactors to see if they were "safe" gave a rat's ass about the number of air pollution deaths that occurred as a result, nor the permanent effects on the climate. Zero. Zilch. None.
As pointed out by Nobel Laureate Burton Richter in a paper (Energy Environ. Sci., 2012,5, 8758-8759) criticizing the work of Stanford's resident idiot anti-nuke Mark Z. Jacobson, even if Jacobson's calculation for the loss of life at Fukushima were correct, the Fukushima reactors saved lives compared to what would have occurred were the reactor not built in the first place.
What struck me first on reading the Ten Hoeve–Jacobson (T–J) paper was how small the consequences of the radiation release from the Fukushima reactor accident are projected to be compared to the devastation wrought by the giant earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011. The quake and tsunami left 20 000 people dead, over a million buildings damaged and a huge number of homeless. This paper concludes that there will eventually be a 15-130-1100 fatalities (130 is the mean value and the other numbers are upper and lower bounds) from the radiation released from reactor failures in what is regarded as the second worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear power. It made me wonder what the consequences might have been had Japan never used any nuclear power. My rough analysis finds that health effects, including mortality, would have been much worse with fossil fuel used to generate the same amount of electricity as was nuclear generated. This conclusion will surely draw fire since it flies in the face of what many believe, and of new policy directions some propose for Japan and Germany.
To answer my question requires an analysis of health effects from electricity generation using other fuels...
As Richter noted, the
tsunami killed 20,000 people.
And I remind you that just 8 years before that, another tsunami in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean killed 250,000.
Tsunami 2004
And yet...and yet the people who carry on mindlessly about radiation have no interest in calling for the banning of
coastal cities , even they are obviously far more dangerous than reactors struck by tsunamis, albeit not as dangerous as the air pollution killing seven million people a year. But if they can convince themselves that something "could have happened" involving a nuclear plant - even if it didn't - well they're perfectly happy to burn coal and gas to power computers and servers so everyone can share in their fantasy.
And of course, the 20,000 Japanese who died in 2011 from, um,
living in a coastal city don't matter compared to someone eating a few hundred bequerels of cesium-137. The latter is as sexy as hell, and the 20,000 dead Japanese aren't sexy at all, as unsexy as the 19,000 people who died
today from air pollution.
The fact is that the anti-nuke community, a group who my opinion are destroying the planet by appeals to fear and ignorance, often value their imaginations - they use the word "could" everywhere they can but have no interest in the word "is" - over the realities that are as clear as day to anyone willing to think.
But these people are unwilling to think. They're weak minded, poorly informed, badly educated, and are unable to engage in even a modicum of focus.
Have a wonderful weekend.
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