In a message dated 4/7/2009 1:44:16 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
hhaskell@mindspring.com writes:
It is also important to realize that the oft-heard statement that "no
one died at TMI" is simply myth. No one was killed outright by what
happened, but the radiation released (both intentional and
unintentional) was larger than was ever made public (see "A
Reevaluation of Cancer Incidence Near the Three Mile Island Nuclear
Plant: The Collision of Evidence and Assumptions," by Steve Wing,
David Richardson, Donna Armstrong and Douglas Crawford-Brown,
published in "Environmental Health Perspectives," January 1997. All
four are with the School of Public Health at the University of NC,
Chapel Hill), and as a result there have been and will continue to be
deaths from radiation induced cancer among those living in the area
at the time. The problem is, of course, that we don't know who those
people are, because cancers don't leave a fingerprint behind
indicating what caused them, but we do know that cancer incidence nd
death rates among the population in the vicinity of TMI in 1979 are
and will continue to be higher than they would be had TMI not
occurred.
Have similar studies been done for populations around coal plants which emit
lots of cancer causing radiation due to the presence of radioactive isotopes
in coal not to mention the cancer causing chemicals? The difference between
Nuclear energy and coal is that there might be a release from a nuclear plant
with associated health risks but for coal its an ironclad guarantee. Also
its coal that threatens our future on this planet, not Nuclear power, since
Coal is a Carbon rich fuel.
It's a no brainer that the best options , if they can be made to work
economically, are solar and wind, but if the alternatives are coal or nuclear, I
would suggest Coal is the one to crusade against.
I also rather doubt the claim of the reports you mention. Given that about
40 percent or so (I think this is the right number but its ballpark in any
case) die from cancer its easy to generate data which make claims like this. I
suspect using the same logic a study around coal plants could produce the same
claim.
The accident in the former Soviet Union is an altogether different case,
here the health effects are not in question, that accident released a very large
amount of fission products and transuranic isotopes to the environment. This
did not happen at TMI.