Fukishima only killed 1 person directly but the evacuation interrupted the medical care of a large number of sick and/or elderly people and ended up killing over a thousand people. But if there hadn't been an evacuation you'd be looking at more like 100 to 200 deaths related to radiation, though many by cancer long down the road. Of course really we ought to be looking at all this in terms of QALYs in which case the evacuation decision probably looks a lot better. And air pollution probably looks worse.
> Fukishima only killed 1 person directly but the evacuation interrupted the medical care of a large number of sick and/or elderly people and ended up killing over a thousand people.
This is the product of highly naive analysis. Out of a population of 300,000 displaced people, ~1,500 died over the span of a month. This is the same as the expected natural death rate assuming a lifespan of 90-100 years. If you dig into the causes of death the overwhelming majority are elderly people and the causes are listed as "fatigue" and "exhaustion". This "study" really just measured the number of people who died of old age, and attributed it to the disaster.
The radiation levels around Fukushima would not have caused prompt death. Cancer takes many years to develop. Elderly people do not have enough lifespan left to develop radiation related cancer to die from radiation.
On 4 April 2011, radiation levels of 0.06 mSv/day were recorded in Fukushima city, 65 km northwest of the plant, about 60 times higher than normal but posing no health risk according to authorities.
Would you have ordered the evacuation of thousands of sick and elderly hospitalized people if they were all going to get an X-ray? a CT scan?
The amount of radiation from one adult chest x-ray (0.1 mSv). A chest CT delivers 7 mSv — 70 times as much.
