>50 direct fatalities

This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives.

Just saying that only 50 people died is pretty messed up in my opinion.

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mpweiher 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's actually not, as it correctly states 50 direct fatalities.

What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.

The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.

One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.

And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...

Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.

Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

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arcane23 2 days ago | parent [-]

I will use the "rabid" replies I got as evidence towards interests of minimizing the scare for nuclear because there's many other interests behind it and I doubt it would get a fair shake. A lot of political and economic interests are known to muddy the truth.

And this isn't the first time this happened, had a few debates before and out of nowhere quite a few people insist going as hard as possible, to no end, to dispel "misinformation", like that is what normal people do. I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose".

>Radiophobia

I do not have this issue, I am not scared of a bit higher radiation, I understand the body can deal with quite a lot (compared to normal background).

I am scared of what could happen when humans and their politics get involved. There's more dangers than proper implementation, there can also be sabotage fears, as recent events have shown. I really don't understand why you'd accuse me of such a thing unless you're trying to smear me, which again...makes your rabid responses rather suspicious.

	▲	mpweiher 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I will use the "rabid" replies I got... All the replies other than yours have politely pointed out that you were incorrect. > >Radiophobia > I do not have this issue, The definition says: "...leading to overestimating the health risks of radiation compared to other risks." That looks exactly like what you are doing. > I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose". Nobody here has done that...with possibly one exception. You are denying the pain and suffering of the people who suffer due to us not adopting more nuclear power. For what "higher purpose" this should be I can't fathom. The adoption of nuclear power had saved an estimated 1.8 million lives by 2011. https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html Conversely, the turning off of nuclear power plants or delaying/cancelling of new builds post Chernobyl has cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the U.S., 33 in the U.K. and 318 million globally https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/sites/science... A more compact read: Coal Pollution Likely Kills More People Annually Than Will Ever Die from Chernobyl Radiation https://reason.com/2016/04/26/more-deaths-from-coal-pollutio...

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abenga 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short.

Not that many, according to long term studies.

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seec 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not many unlike what you want to believe. And there is no mechanism to directly link them to the nuclear meltdown. Since they are suspiciously clustered in specific places, it is more likely that there are other environmental and genetic problems that have more influence than the result of secondary radiation.

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whatevertrevor 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

In addition to what other comments have said below, it's also important to state that the indirect impacts of the alternatives aren't widely studied, so it's practically impossible to compare. How do we figure out how many people have a significant impact on their life because of the fossil fuel we burn and put all sorts of crap into the atmosphere?