Climate-Change Fight Dies (Again) in Zaporizhzhia

The consequences of nuclear accidents are bad, but not as bad as the public has been told 

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"In a little-noticed fact, coal plants are estimated to emit 5,000 tons of uranium and 15,000 tons of thorium a year, about 100 times the amount of radiation that escapes into the environment from the world’s 440 nuclear reactors. If coal plants were made to follow the same rules as nuclear plants or even hospital radiation labs, we’d have no coal plants. The rules deliberately exaggerate the health risks from low-level radiation while requiring certain facilities (but not others) to spare no expense in reducing exposures to the lowest “reasonably achievable” level.

One consequence, after the contained meltdown of three Japanese reactors in 2011 caused by a large earthquake and tsunami, no deaths from radiation exposure were recorded or expected, and yet a minimum of 32 deaths and as many as 2,000 were attributed to the forced evacuation of 150,000 people against an exposure risk equivalent to half a CT scan. Even more absurd, the underlying risk standard that produced this result not only was known to lack scientific backing, it increasingly appears to have been the product of scientific fraud in the 1940s."

"But it’s also worth noting that the thousands of cancer deaths expected from Chernobyl based on low-level radiation risk haven’t materialized, including lung cancer and leukemia deaths.

The recognized death toll consists of 60 (mostly firefighters) from acute radiation exposure, plus a likely 50 or so from preventable and usually curable thyroid cancer among millions who were exposed as children to radioactive iodine-131."

"the U.S. government tells us that U.S. power plants, in normal peacetime operation, kill nearly 3,000 people annually with fine-particle pollution. The estimate is contentious but almost certainly more die in coal-mining accidents every year, especially in China, than the proven deaths from all nuclear accidents combined."