> “I estimate that 10 000 people have already perished as a result of Chernobyl, and that is only about a third of the eventual death toll”, says Grodzinsky. “But, we are dealing with a very prolonged process which is spread through several generations and it's far too early to start saying we have worked it all out and now we can move on.”
That statement was made by Dmytro Grodzinsky, chairman of the National Commission on Radiological Protection of the Population of Ukraine. That sounds like a relevant expert opinion to me.
Regardless, when I combine "10 000" and "a very prolonged process which is spread through several generations" we are talking small change. We face extremely tolerable threats that kill more than 10 000 people spread through several generations; like ladders.
That’s my bad, that quote from this Lancet article[0].
Is it a small change, though? That expert estimated 30k total deaths, which is almost half the American death toll in Vietnam, and where the US COVID will be around Wednesday or Thursday.
When you’re talking tens of thousands of deaths over a completely preventable nuclear accident, which by the way, has created a permanent exclusion zone that is deemed uninhabitable.
> like ladders
300 people die per year due to ladders in the US[1]. If you accept the Ukrainian expert’s estimation as at least plausible, then it would take 100 years for ladder deaths to equal his estimated Chernobyl death toll. All because one power-hungry chief engineer decided not to follow safety protocols, hardly seems like a fair comparison. One human was directly responsible for as many deaths that we’re comparing to 100 years worth of random ladder accidents? Regardless of the time-scale that is incredibly significant.
> If you accept the Ukrainian expert’s estimation as at least plausible, then it would take 100 years for ladder deaths to equal his estimated Chernobyl death toll
How many years do you hear when someone says "several generations"? I hear 120 years, 40 years a generation after overlaps. I suppose he might mean several generations all alive at the time of the accident, but we're talking timespans of 20-40 years.
Maybe we can agree Chernobyl was much worse than I thought, and is potentially 2-10x more deadly than persistent use of ladders?
It doesn't make as much sense to talk about it being one incident when it is in context of what would happen if, eg, they had used coal for those 40 years. Coal is much worse than ladders too.
> “I estimate that 10 000 people have already perished as a result of Chernobyl, and that is only about a third of the eventual death toll”, says Grodzinsky. “But, we are dealing with a very prolonged process which is spread through several generations and it's far too early to start saying we have worked it all out and now we can move on.”
That statement was made by Dmytro Grodzinsky, chairman of the National Commission on Radiological Protection of the Population of Ukraine. That sounds like a relevant expert opinion to me.