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> It now looks like a smaller evacuation zone would have been beneficial in the case of Chernobyl, and the same probably goes for Fukushima.

BIG TIME citation needed. See my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13829400

Again, I'm going on about Chernobyl, not Fukushima. A lot of people received pretty high doses in the former case, and the results have been pretty terrible.




Hmm...I did give citations, the WHO reports among many others. Where are yours?

> I'm going on about Chernobyl, not Fukushima.

Yes, and the WHO reports clearly state in unequivocal terms that the mental health effects were the most serious effects.

Note that this does not mean "there were no effects and people were just imagining things". No, it means that there were significant effects, just the the most significant effects were mental health related, which then caused other negative outcomes.

And I'd agree with you that Chernobyl was much more significant than Fukushima, which means that the relationship between actual radiation effects and other (mental health etc.) effects is going to be even more lopsided in Fukushima.


> citations ... among many others.

I must have missed non-WHO citations about how the mental health impact of the Chernobyl disaster was greater than the actual physical affect.

For many people in Belarus, Chernobyl was a very real, very physical health disaster.

> Where are yours?

Linked in the article I linked. Google trivially returns all kinds of well-documented health impacts in Belarus and neighboring areas.

Also, as reported, an eye-witness account of the suffering that Chernobyl brought to so many people.


> Linked in the article I linked.

Except the article says nothing of the sort. In fact, it explicitly states in the first paragraph that we don't know what the cause of those birth defects is.

> eye-witness account of the suffering that Chernobyl brought

Once again, you seem to miss the point: the point is not whether or not there was suffering, but what the biggest causes of the suffering was. And once again, the WHO concludes that the biggest cause of suffering were (sometimes severe) mental health effects (which can cause physical suffering).

Also there were external effects such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the consequences of that. For example, life expectancy of Russian men dropped by ~10 years in the late 1980s and 1990s. Not due to radiation, but mostly due to alcohol (due to psycho-social/mental health effects).




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