If you looked at the press coverage, you would think it was the other way around, that there was this Tsunami but it wasn't a big deal and there was the huge "catastrophe" of Fukushima. And many people do believe, fervently, that this is the case, that it was the other way around.
But it wasn't.
In fact, in Germany Fukushima is considered a "Super-GAU", with a GAU being the "Größter Anzunehmender Unfall", the largest potential accident. So "GAU" itself is already the superlative, but no, we have to rhetorically top the superlative, make it the superest largerest.
And that's for an accident that has caused a single death (a worker recently passed and it is considered likely it was an effect, before the death toll from the accident was zero).
The only thing that's a Super-GAU is the hyperbole of the hyperventilating press coverage.
How is it that you consider only the immediate deaths from the event and neither the follow up casualties, the evacuation measures and everything else which hangs on this? Do your really think your opposite is so stupid? And yes, I did look at the press coverage a lot since I was in Tokyo at that time. But I also looked at it later on and no, I did not think it was the other way around however I'm also not that blind to ignore all the other consequences this catastrophe had for the region and the people who lived/live there.
Because I also only considered the immediate deaths from the Tsunami. And actually, the 1 death is a follow-up casualty, it wasn't immediate. So if we really only count immediate deaths, that number is 0. Zero.
--> OMG FUKUSHIMA!!! <--
What the long-term death rate is going to be is very nuclear partly because even the worst-case estimates (those that had to be continuously revised downward) show increases of the cancer rate of less then a percent, so completely lost in the noise and other effects, and completely impossible to trace.
Now to the evacuation.
"Many deaths are attributed to the evacuation and subsequent long-term displacement caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part"
The same happens to be true for Chernobyl, where the health-effects due to the evacuation far exceed the health-effects due to radiation. Whereas for example the wildlife in both exclusion zones is doing just swimmingly.
So:
Fear of nuclear is killing more people than nuclear.
This is generally true, because the use of nuclear energy has saved over a million people from premature death and will (or would) save millions more:
But somewhat surprisingly, it is also true when nuclear goes wrong, when there are accidents. Check out the decennial Chernobyl reports by the WHO, they are absolutely fascinating. Spoiler alert: with each report, so every ten years, they massively reduced their estimate of how many people would die as a result, usually by an order of magnitude.
Now that doesn't mean that there should not have been any evacuation, but it in both cases it was both to widespread and way too long.
You completely missed the message here. I wonder if it was intentional. Let me repeat it again:
It's not only deaths if it comes to say what a "safe" technology is. A technology to leads to whole regions being evacuated including every economical, social and environmental fallouts resulting from that, IS NOT SAFE.
I just don't consider some nuclear fanbois after the fact one sentence opinion a viable argument. Especially not if it's main aim is to derail and/or cloud the actual facts.
You missed the fact that "caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part" was a direct quote from the respective Wikipedia page, backed up by the data (see the WHO reports on Chernobyl etc.).
Of course, you believe that all data that contradicts your irrational beliefs must be just opinions by "fanbois", because to actually check up on the facts would mean risk shattering your strongly held but weakly backed belief system.
Neither you nor this paper considers the fact, that if the disaster would have become worse, people would complain: why didn't you evacuate. Saying AFTER THE FACT that it was unnecessary is completely useless and ignorant. It's not like it won't happen again with the next disaster.
This is like saying that the airbag or the safety belts in my last car were unnecessary since I didn't have an accident which would justify them.
That's not a "fact". That's a counterfactual which you hypothesise, without any reason or evidence whatsoever, will have horrible consequences. And an analogy that doesn't work. As we say in German: "Nicht alles was hinkt ist auch ein Vergleich".
Your seatbelt analogy, apart from being pulled out of thin air, has absolutely nothing to do with what happened. The seatbelts are preventative measures before an accident happens. These were measures after the accident happened that were way over the top. A better analogy is a doctor seeing a bruise on an arm and deciding to amputate the arm, just to be safe. And then amputating both legs as well, because "better safe than sorry".
The "cure" is far worse than the disease.
With Chernobyl there was the excuse that they didn't know better, they only found out in the decades after the accident that their initial estimates for the harm caused by the radiation were way too high, as in several orders of magnitude off. I really recommend reading the WHO reports[1], they were an actual eye opener for me, because they contradicted what I "knew" to be the case.
Again, they were not off in terms of the scale of the accident, they were off on the effects of an accident of a particular scale. Not like your seat-belt analogy at all.
Now a good question to ask is why they were off by so much. It looks like the Linear Non Threshold Model of radiation damage is simply wrong[2]. As far as I can tell, this model was never actually validated by data, it was just assumed to be the case, and if you look at the "pro" voices, they also provide no evidence for, just that they think the lack of evidence means it should be viewed as true, which is...odd.
With Fukushima, there is less of an excuse, as they could and should have known. See also J-value assessment of relocation measures following the nuclear power plant accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi [3]. Money quote:
"•Relocation was unjustified for 75% of the 335,000 people relocated after Chernobyl.
• Relocation was unjustified for the 160,000 people relocated after Fukushima."
Mandatory evacuation of residents during the Fukushima nuclear disaster: an ethical analysis[4]:
"We examine the measures from an ethical perspective and argue that if the government's aim was to avoid health risks posed by radiation exposure, then ordering compulsory expulsion of all residents cannot be ethically justified. We assert that the government may not have ordered the mandatory evacuation solely based on health risks, but rather to maintain public order."
What is catastrophic is the news reporting, particularly in Germany.
For example, Fukushima was caused by a Tsunami.
Death Toll
If you looked at the press coverage, you would think it was the other way around, that there was this Tsunami but it wasn't a big deal and there was the huge "catastrophe" of Fukushima. And many people do believe, fervently, that this is the case, that it was the other way around.But it wasn't.
In fact, in Germany Fukushima is considered a "Super-GAU", with a GAU being the "Größter Anzunehmender Unfall", the largest potential accident. So "GAU" itself is already the superlative, but no, we have to rhetorically top the superlative, make it the superest largerest.
And that's for an accident that has caused a single death (a worker recently passed and it is considered likely it was an effect, before the death toll from the accident was zero).
The only thing that's a Super-GAU is the hyperbole of the hyperventilating press coverage.