UNSCEAR did not drop the LNT model completely, partly because there is nothing to replace it with, and partly because the balance of evidence is still in its favor. You might have noticed in that UN document that the phrase is “within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels”, whereas I was talking about levels more than an order of magnitude above background, and did not take into account the internal exposure (from consumption of local food and water) at all. I believe I know why UN had to write that; some environmental NGOs like Greenpeace have been prone to making extremely exaggerated estimates, based on LNT, of world total deaths from the Chernobyl accident, nuclear testing etc. in the hundreds of thousands, grabbing headlines and scaring people for no good purpose, when there is no epidemiological data to back up such estimates, and no prospect of getting any. As an aside, that UN document could not have been influenced by the data coming out of the Fukushima accident simply because not nearly enough time had elapsed (it still hasn’t and won’t have elapsed for 10-20 years). The document was accepted by UN at the end of May 2012, which means it was prepared way before that, most likely in 2011.

About the dangers of nuclear energy, yes that’s a part of it, and another part is that the danger is invisible and incomprehensible (lack of STEM PhDs again). But an even greater part is the influence of factors other than direct radiation exposure, see my comment above. Imagine for the sake of the argument that the wind had blown to the south instead of west and north-east after Chernobyl, and it had rained on Kiev instead of marginal agricultural communities in Ukrainian and Belorussian Polesye. A city of three million people would have had to be evacuated and left substantially uninhabitable for decades. Coal mining doesn’t do that. Or had the weather been slightly different after Fukushima, Fukushima city might have gotten the 50mSv/y fall-outs and would have had to be evacuated, that’s 300,000 people and 800km² of land. Japan’s total area is 340,000km² and 90% of that is unsuitable for building or cultivation. 800km² out of 40,000km² is 2% — quite a blow, especially when you can’t compensate it by colonizing the mainland.

In the immediate future, Japan is quite comfortably supplied by hydrocarbons, whether imported or their own methane hydrates (look up Chikyuu exploration).

Also, UNSCEAR appears to have dropped the LNT model, in part due to the data coming out of the Fukushima incident.

With regards to a rational weighing of the dangers of nuclear energy, I’ve always thought a big part of it has to do with how the results of nuclear incidents are concentrated tightly in time and space compared to those of other power generation options. As you know from your study of battlefield psychology, Isegoria, a unit that suffers 10 casualties in 1 hour is far more likely to break than one that suffered 10 (or even 15) casualties in 10 hours.

I’m also quite enthusiastic about space solar, and I think the exponential improvements we are presently experiencing in automation technology will make large-scale space industrialization viable far sooner than most people seem to think. However, it’s not something to depend on for the immediate (20 yr) future.

Locating and developing a reliable source of unicorns to meet our power generation needs might be problematic, though.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that cancer induction times are on the order of 10 years after radiation exposure, so the fact that there were no radiation deaths among liquidation workers only proves a modicum of competence in operation management. It’s not really that difficult to give people personal dosimeters and check them every day.

Or unicorns.

The rapid decay of most of the radioactive material (iodine-131, which reduced to a 16th of its original activity in a month) also means the evacuated area has not been permanently blighted.

Pfui. The person who wrote this is an ignoramus. The main concern is the contamination by isotopes of caesium, Cs-134 and Cs-137, having half-lives of 2 and 30 years. The evacuated area is semi-circular (on account of the sea) 10, 20 and 30km in radius, different restrictions apply to different zones, and just as in Chernobyl accident, the contamination is highly nonuniform because it is determined by the direction of the wind and by the occurrence of rainfall. In Fukushima, the main trail goes north-west from the station, that is where the most contaminated areas are. The trail extends considerably beyond the 30-km zone, and this is now reflected in evacuation/restriction designations. E.g. in the village of Iitate, the southern parts are sufficiently contaminated that a person living there would be exposed to 10-30 times the natural background. It will take 100 years to get back to something resembling normal levels. Moreover, many plants concentrate caesium and crops would be unsuitable for regular consumption for the duration.

Now about the risk from radiation. Briefly, the UNSCEAR estimates of additional dose-related cancer incidence are likely correct. Here is a good simple review of the linear no-threshold model, which is still used, despite some objections, to estimate collective doses. In Fukushima, given evacuation we cannot reasonably expect to detect any additional radiation-induced cancers because the expected number of cases will be too small to be detected by epidemiological methods — i.e. the statistical power will be insufficient. The same situation obtains in the case of Chernobyl disaster, although the lack of proper epidemiology is partly to blame. The only potential exception in both cases is child thyroid cancer, which clearly grew by more than an order of magnitude after the Chernobyl disaster.

However, concentrating solely on the death toll from radiation sickness or cancer is a serious mistake. Evacuation itself is a potent source of additional stress, with livelihoods and local communities irreparably ruined — something to consider even if you discount the medical effects. Irrational fear of radiation is another known source of stress (as a rule, few STEM PhDs live in the affected areas), and even in Japan evacuees are sometimes shunned and feared, just as if radiation were a sort of plague. Except in the worse-contaminated areas, local people may have been better off not knowing anything and staying put rather than being scared and evacuated.

And in any case, why should we continue to rely on nuclear power? It’s not particularly cheap, not particularly safe*, it has its peculiar and very difficult problem of long-term storage of nuclear waste, and the technology is 60 years old already. Let’s do something more exciting, like space solar.

* — please tell me how many people die each year in oil- and gas-drilling related accidents. The famously high coal mining figure includes accidents in China and ex-USSR, where coal is mined on the cheap and sometimes by semi-slave labor.

It was a rather brilliant political move. The source for this is a Der Spiegel graph. Luttwak himself would be so proud…

Well, those of us who are left.