Choking on a Myth — Chernobyl & Fukushima

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The left has become the trend-setter for the ideological cosmetics put on by the establishment. It is to be hoped that the left, or indeed any appropriate movement, will take up the vacant position of champion of real people with real concerns, rather than transforming — in an attempt at self-preservation — a tradition of crude anti-capitalism into eschatalogical narratives far removed from and detrimental to the lives of ordinary people.

The Guardian has a highly readable article on the ideological biases of the left concerning nuclear power.  I have been vilified for years for making the very points discussed in the piece. It is only to be hoped that people on the left will eventually learn to look at "climate change" with similar sobriety, and give up that myth, too.

But for ideological opponents of nuclear power, this reality [of relatively little damage to life and health at Chernobyl] is largely ignored; a Russian non-peer-reviewed report garnered headlines with the claim 985,000 died as a result of the accident, a number subsequently exposed as baseless by the Radiation Protection Dosimetry journal. The scientific evidence also undermined Greenpeace, who had long used the spectre of Chernobyl (and more recently, Fukushima) as a prop in their anti-nuclear narrative. They and European Greens scrambled to counter this by releasing “The other report on Chernobyl (Torch)” in 2006 as a counter to the Chernobyl forum. In it, they reported that more than 200,000 deaths might be attributable to the disaster. This figure too is devoid of merit, a transparent attempt to circumvent the scientific consensus. Such empty hyperbole and stubborn insistence on projecting ideology over reality isn’t merely intellectually vapid, it’s actively damaging to the psychological health of survivors. 

[...]

Unlike the accident in the Ukraine, events at Fukushima in March 2011 were not the result of ineptitude but rather a massive natural disaster in the form of a deadly 15-metre high tsunami. The wall of rushing water flooded the Fukushima plant, water-logging the diesel generators that had been cooling the plant, resulting in the leakage of small amounts of nuclear waste product. While the world media fixated on the drama unfolding at the plant, it lost sight of the fact that around 16,000 had just been killed in a massive natural disaster. Despite the preponderance of breathless headlines since the reality is that five years later, radiobiological consequences of Fukushima are practically negligible - no one has died from the event, and is it extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will do so in future. The volume of radioactive leak from the site is so small as to be of no health concern; there is no detectable radiation from the accident in Fukushima grown-food, nor in fish caught off the coast. This of course hasn’t stopped numerous organisations employing Fukushima as an anti-nuclear argument, despite the lack of justification for doing so. 

Make sure to read the entire article.

See also IPCC and the Politically Fabricated "Scientific Consensus" on Anthropogenic Climate Change