Proud Mary wrote ...

Ebay UK is having a nuclear panic bonanza, with the usual load of old military and civil defence rubbish going for three or more times the usual prices paid for GM detectors.

radhoo wrote ...

and ebay uk is not the only website affected.

Proud Mary wrote ...

Some of the claims made by the author are at odds with the prevailing Linear No-Threshold Hypothesis (LNT) and go back to the safe level doctrine beloved of reactor owners and atomic testers.

Phrases like "Lowest one year dose clearly linked to cancer risk: 100mSv" invite us to ask what 'clearly' means, and recall the evasions of the tobacco industry when confronted with the statistical association between smoking and lung cancer.

Dr. Spark wrote ...

Again, what a messy way to make power. Poor Japan, just poor sand over the entire island and come back in a few thousand years. Sad thing is the children will start popping up with cancer in 10 years and know not why.

wrote ...

Burning more coal to produce electricity poses a greater threat to your health than the radiation released by all the nuclear accidents combined. It’s estimated by some risk analysts that for nuclear power to be as dangerous as burning coal, you’d need 25 meltdowns a year.

Premature deaths as a result of exposure to radiation released during the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor 25 years ago are now predicted for just over 200 people a year. That totals 16,000 deaths by 2065. This looks like a scary figure until you compare it to the premature deaths caused by inhaling fine particulate matter released during the burning of fossil fuels, of which coal is the worst.

Over the same period of time, the number of people dying prematurely from exposure to fossil-fuel pollution will be 108 million. So, for every person killed by radiation from the Chernobyl accident, 6,750 will be killed by coal-fired electrical generating stations, household furnaces, fireplaces, barbecue briquettes, mowing the lawn and, of course, driving to the drugstore to pick up those potassium iodide pills.

And that’s just the fossil fuels. Another 32.4 million will be killed as a consequence of breathing second-hand tobacco smoke. In Canada, smoking alone will cause almost 120 deaths for every victim who dies prematurely as a result of exposure to radiation from the Chernobyl accident. In fact, for every radiation victim, 27 people will die prematurely from exposure to particles emitted in the upper atmosphere by passenger aircraft flying at 35,000 feet. So people flying home from Tokyo posed a bigger risk here than radiation for Fukushima.

One should also, I suppose, add in the 63-million premature deaths that will occur between now and 2065 because of traffic accidents — one more consequence of burning fossil fuels.

So let’s add them up. It turns out that for every person expected to die prematurely because of exposure to radiation from the worst nuclear accident in history, 12,741 will die before their time thanks to exposure to fossil-fuel emissions.

Put another way, the calculation of premature deaths per terawatt hour of energy production comes to this conclusion: for coal, 161; for oil, 36; for biofuels, 12; for natural gas, four; for nuclear, 0.04.