This is really said, but what choice did they have other than to evacuate?
Several months following the disaster, people of Japan were extremely skeptical of how their government handled the situation. The task of convincing people to stay put would've been insurmountable and would've been viewed as gross negligence.
"In retrospect, the evacuation looks excessive. Less clear is whether those in charge at the time could have acted any other way."
I like the idea of real-time monitoring and info that was suggested. Evacuate temporarily until cooling is back in place and then put sensors around measuring dose rate that you can look at online: "At the current dose rate, a conservative radiation/health model suggests you will die 2.3 days earlier then if you stayed gone."
It'd be a bit complex because some people evacuated to places where the natural dose rate is higher than where their contaminated home was.
FTA:
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"The first thing to realise is that relocation is probably going to be a bad idea," he says, suggesting that nuclear companies start providing real-time health information on the risks of living around their plants. “This is what your loss of life expectancy is from the current level of contamination,” he says. If people realise it would only be a few days, they can make an informed decision to stay.
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The biggest problem is that we really don't know all that much about how it would affect people. Data from Chernobyl if anything demonstrates that our estimates have continuously overestimated the danger, and have continued doing so as the estimates of harm from Chernobyl has kept being adjusted downwards.
But that's complicated by the lack of extensive screening of the few people who remained in the exclusion zone, and unusual shift patterns for chose who continued to work at the Chernobyl reactors after the accident (the other reactors continued to operate for years).
Everything is indicating it's not as dangerous as we used to think, but we don't really know what that means precisely in terms of larger scale more sustained exposure.
Surely life expectancy is an average across a population. So that some people may die much earlier whilst the majority live to an old age. I would rather know the specifics of what may kill me, and decide from that.
I mean you will die 3 days earlier basically means that from a pool of like 1000 people one will die 3000 days earlier because of cancer.
which is really not a good way to die.
Several months following the disaster, people of Japan were extremely skeptical of how their government handled the situation. The task of convincing people to stay put would've been insurmountable and would've been viewed as gross negligence.
"In retrospect, the evacuation looks excessive. Less clear is whether those in charge at the time could have acted any other way."