Reply To: turn heat into electricity

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Brian H wrote:

Chernobyl and Fukushima were not terrible at all.

Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. The economic costs were in the tens of billions of dollars. Huge swathes of once-productive land now lies unused. How is that not “terrible”?

Displaced mostly because of misplaced fear and the tsunami. And “terrible” is death and destruction. D*** little of that, in reality.

Exactly. The exclusion zone in Fukishima is 20 mSV, while Chernobyl’s is 1 mSv, which is lower than flying regularly and is below background radiation levels in most places. The occupational limit is 50 mSV. There is no evidence at all that anything under 100 mSv is dangerous, and it is doubtful that radiation has any effect until it is 300 mSv+, as some places have this as background radiation with no higher amount of cancer incidences.

Radiation effects on humans have been studied on Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. Many of these people were exposed to radiation levels well above 1 Sv. It was found that at very high radiation levels, the amount of deaths increased in a linear fashion as the dosage went up. This is the basis for the linear no threshold (LNT) model. This model extended down to lower levels of radiation under 1 Sv, even though there was not as much proof about radiation effects at these levels. The LNT model just assumes that any amount of radiation is bad, even though there is no evidence of this. This is why you get death tolls in the thousands from Chernobyl, even though it is known that only 50 people have died from the effects of Chernobyl. It’s just like anything really. If you have too much of certain vitamins it is bad for you, but if you have it in low amounts it is good. Radiation is no different. Even those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were exposed to very high amounts of radiation above 1 Sv, if you didn’t die within the first few weeks, very few developed any long term effects from radiation exposure.