A lot of the response focuses on the questionable morality of making this decision for the people who will be affected, and trading dollars for lives.
Maybe we should shortcut that whole issue. Unlike most instances of pollution, we have a case where a single entity is clearly responsible for the contamination. That entity should be required to offer a buy-out of all property in the affected area at pre-accident market prices. They can then resell at whatever price they can obtain. If the damage caused by the contamination is small, the difference between the prices will be small, and their loss will be small. If their victims don’t think it’s worth moving at all, the loss will be zero since nobody will accept the offer.
Something tells me that this idea will be rejected as being too expensive, which should be quite telling.
I would expect a rather large premium to be associated with a forced sale of any kind. Remember, if they where willing to sell at market rates they would have been sold. I am of the opinion that forced sales like this should provide ~2-3x market rates to reduce the need for such sales, and provide for the loss of property like cars which need to be abandoned if contaminated.
I had a similar thought. I think the important point is offering some sort of equitable buyout rather than just deciding for everybody. The details of exactly how much an equitable buyout would consist of are somewhat less important.
Yes, but also this scheme is best rejected as being too convoluted.
1) Someone needs to assess pre-accident prices of every house. That isn't as easy as it sounds, it is a massive logistic challenge (and open to corruption from all angles).
2) This links a nuclear company's performance (after a disaster) to the property market, where they have no inherent expertise. That isn't fair or sensible.
3) If the company has to pay some sort of transactions tax on housing (eg, as is the case in Australia) then they are facing enormous costs even if the market value doesn't change.
4) The vast sums of money involved would probably bankrupt them for cash flow reasons even if the whole transaction were notionally profitable.
5) All of this doesn't even incentivise good behavior. May as well pass a law that if things go wrong the company gets wound up - same basic result (this is not a good idea either imo).
Also, the people who are concerned about trading dollars for lives probably don't want to become regulators [1]. We don't know how to run a 0-death society and there are decisions that must be made in practice. Valuing life with money is a great way of doing that.
1) This is a tiny problem compared to the damage caused by the accident.
2) It's absolutely sensible that the financial performance of a company that could cause massive damage to surrounding property would be linked to the value of that surrounding property, unless you don't think people should pay for the damage they cause.
3) So, don't do that? If we're talking about a potential change in the legal framework, "but the law would make it impractical" isn't a sensible objection. Exempt this stuff from the transaction tax if needed.
4/5) If the cost would potentially exceed what the company can pay, then require them to carry liability insurance. That's what we do for cars, and it works out pretty well both in terms of incentivizing good behavior and ensuring that victims can be compensated even when the damages exceed the perpetrator's ability to pay.
I'm not against trading dollars for lives. I just want the people who own the lives in question to be the ones making the decision whenever possible. That's not always feasible, but this is a case where it looks quite feasible.
>> 1) Someone needs to assess pre-accident prices of every house. That isn't as easy as it sounds, it is a massive logistic challenge (and open to corruption from all angles).
> This is a tiny problem compared to the damage caused by the accident.
For many people, the land and house they own is pretty much the total sum of their wealth. (Or even more, if they took mortgage.) If you think this is a "tiny problem", you underestimate the lengths people will go to protect the values of their properties.
I've seen news of people committing suicide over a high-power voltage line going over their town. You visit a town struck by a nuclear disaster and claim you will assess the "fair market value" of every house, you'd better bring in riot gears.
And making everyone evacuate, or telling everyone to stay put and accept some compensation for the chance of dying from some horrible radiation-induced disease, would go better?
Yes, because when people are hit by a nuclear disaster, the last thing they need is to get drawn into a bitter, decade-long feud between two halves of the town, the "sellers" and the "remainers". And that's what your policy will bring about.
If you don't see why, imagine you own a home and the assessor says "Really? But your house is not any better than your neighbor's, and they have agreed to the price of $1M. Don't be so unreasonable."
Imagine being told “We have calculated that this accident will subtract 9 months of life from everyone in this house, which according to our guidelines is worth $300,000. Here’s your check, enjoy your cancer.”
This will only work in a market with perfect information. When it comes to anything nuclear, I don't think it is controversial to state that this most definitely is not the case.
The point of scientific study into this kind of thing is exactly what we need to be objective as a society, and this should be encouraged.
I don't think imperfect information would be an insurmountable obstacle for this.
If people overestimate the damage caused by the contamination, they'll take the buyout. People who think the damage is less important will then be able to buy that property. The net effect will be a migration of people scared of contamination away from the contaminated areas, and of people who don't care about it toward the contaminated areas, which seems fine.
In the event that everyone is overly scared of it, then the region will depopulate and the owner of the nuclear plant will be on the hook. They'll owe much more than the damage they actually caused, but I don't see a problem with this. There's no inherent right to damage someone else's health without their consent and then insist that they're wrong about how much the damage is worth.
I'm all for objective scientific study into the actual dangers of this stuff. But the cited study goes well beyond that and makes a normative claim that relocation is bad policy.
By all means, let's educate everyone on the true dangers of this stuff. Then let's allow them to decide for themselves whether it's worth staying or going. If the argument is that the populace is too ignorant to correctly make that decision, then fix that.
I'm very much in favor of nuclear power, but stuff like this doesn't help at all. It's true that people are ignorant of the true dangers, but this isn't going to convince them. "Don't evacuate, it won't kill THAT many of you" doesn't sound like someone making decisions in your own best interests.
> In the event that everyone is overly scared of it, then the region will depopulate and the owner of the nuclear plant will be on the hook.
Right. I don't think there will be enough people in the region interested in repopulating.
> They'll owe much more than the damage they actually caused, but I don't see a problem with this. There's no inherent right to damage someone else's health without their consent and then insist that they're wrong about how much the damage is worth.
I disagree with you here. You're relying on some subjective assessment of what the damage is worth, which I think is uncontroversially an irrational overestimate.
Instead, I think it is entirely appropriate for studies to attempt to quantify, objectively, the real value of the damage.
Can there be anything but a subjective estimate of what someone's health and life are worth?
We have to put a dollar value on lives in many cases because it's impractical to let each person choose individually. Normal pollution regulations are a good example of this. You'll look at the economic value of lives saved versus economic value of the pollution controls and see which one wins.
But I don't see that a nuclear accident requires this. The affected area is relatively small, the damage is already done and can't be reversed, and there's a single responsible party. It becomes practical to handle it economically rather than having the government dictate a solution.
> Can there be anything but a subjective estimate of what someone's health and life are worth?
The requirement is that society reaches an agreement on what that estimate is. Relying solely on the estimate of the victims [and other local people] is not reasonable. There needs to be an equitable way of determining a value. Dismissing studies trying to establish an approach to this is not the way.
Sure, it still has to be subjective. But the line between subjectivity and objectivity is a spectrum. More objectivity is possible, and dismissing this out of hand because complete objectivity is not possible is not reasonable.
We take that approach as a last resort, when direct compensation is not possible.
Imagine if I dumped a bunch of toxic waste into your carpet. Would you accept it if I said, well, it would cost $X to completely remove the toxic waste, and the economic value of the DALYs lost by members of your household is $Y < $X, therefore I don't have to do anything?
I'm pretty sure such a thing would get laughed out of court. I'd be required to clean it up regardless, or if the value of the cleanup exceeds the value of the house, to buy you out. I'm not allowed to keep poisoning you just because it's too expensive for me to stop. Why should a nuclear accident be handled any differently?
The answer to that semi-rhertorical question for other types of pollution is often, "Because there are N polluters and M victims and it's not practical to handle N x M transactions to settle the damages." That doesn't apply here, where there's only one polluter.
I don't understand your point. I agree that compensation is due. I'm saying that calculation of the losses needs to be as objective as possible, that your market-driven approach is flawed, and that therefore it is reasonable to consider scientific methods that try to come up with as objective an answer as possible.
How can you get more objective than looking at either the cost of removing the pollution or the value of the property contaminated by it? That's a lot more precise than trying to apply DALYs in an entire population to individual households.
The whole point of my post is to illustrate why compensating someone based on the health risks incurred is ridiculous if you can instead fix the problem or buy them out. In my example, do you think it would be fair for me to compensate you only the value of the DALYs lost in your household if you continue to live there, rather than the cost of cleanup or the cost of your property?
My understanding is that the standard legal remedy is for the perpetrator to be required to make the victim whole, i.e. to restore them to the state where they were before the damage.
So, for example, if I destroy your car, I have to give the money it would take to buy another one. I can't argue that you didn't use the car much and so its value to you was less, so I only need to pay that much.
It's also standard to look at the less tangible losses suffered by the victim (like health damage or pain and suffering) and come up with a fair monetary amount based on that. But my understanding is that this is only done when it's necessary. Without a time machine, it's not always possible to put the victim back in the exact same state they were in before the damage. When it is possible, that's what you do. Otherwise you do the best you can to compensate them.
In the case of pollution, you'd have to come up with a monetary equivalent to the health damages done to the victims if that damage was already done and couldn't be reversed. If the damage hasn't been done yet (e.g. because I just polluted your property very recently) and can be prevented (e.g. because I can clean it up, or buy your property so you can move to a house that isn't polluted) then I can still restore you to your pre-damage state.
Another problem is that $Y is highly probabilistic, whereas $X is not. Calculating DALYs lost due to some contamination works on populations, but not individuals. You, personally, might die from that pollution tomorrow, or you might live to the age of 120 regardless. Compensating you based on the expected amount you'll lose, when the real amount might be much different, means the amount is likely to be incorrect. If we can instead ensure that the pollution doesn't impact the individual, either by removing it or removing the individual, we avoid that problem.
If most people are insufficiently scared of it, the company with the most accurate information about the extent of the damage and the most ability to withhold or misleadingly present information stands to benefit (or lose less) financially.
That's true, but it's a completely unrealistic hypothetical given the popular view of nuclear power right now. If that popular view ever shifts too far the other way then we should figure out how to handle that, but for now it's not worth considering unless you want to do it for fun.
That is because it is inherently exploitative to ask poorer people to trade their health for money, as they simply will only have so much money to pay.
When only the rich can afford to live the sacredness of this value starts to become apparent.
I don’t think this analysis is helpful to nuclear. As a big nuclear supporter and someone in general agreement that there was an over evacuation at Fukushima, setting a nine month life expectancy standard is way too high. At that rate, very large numbers of people, maybe 10% are going to be getting cancer, not to mention birth defects. On average, about 2 people live in a housing unit, so you're trading off 18 months of life, substantial suffering from cancer, substantial stress and worry, and reproductive effects for a single housing unit. This unreasonableness masks an underlying reasonableness if the number were more like a few weeks or a month.
The critical bit is that people aren't being expected to shave a few months off their life dying peacefully in their sleep in their late eighties in return for retaining their own home, they're trading a significant proportional increase in some very unpleasant cancers curtailing their life much earlier.
The article doesn't help fudging it by highlighting life expectancy differentials which are down to socioeconomic status and patterns of higher risk behaviour. Blackpool's lower life expectancy isn't random like background radiation; you can live in Blackpool without experiencing a significant threat to your health provided you avoid the alcohol consumption problems more prevalent amongst people that live there.
There are two parts to the analysis though; this chain sounds like it is comparing death from radiation to completely normal life.
The comparison in the article is death from radiation vs death from evacuation. Being compulsorily and unexpectedly evacuated from your home is catastrophic. My memory of Fukashima is that experience of living as an evacuee looked very woeful.
If people lose 12 months to stress and whatnot from an evacuation, is losing 9 months to cancer really that much worse? I've lost a relative to cancer, the quality of his life was actually quite high until the last month. I've seen chronic depression do much more damage. I'm not advocating either, but if there is a choice to be made I don't think it is clear.
Fukishima was (maybe) unusual though in that the nuclear accident was in the context of a much larger disaster. The original Japanese advice to stay put and turn off the HVAC was generally pretty good. Radiation from a nuclear reaction decays very rapidly once the reaction stops, and so the worst part of the exposure is going to be in the first days after the accident. Depending on the structure you're in, it's generally healthier to wait a few days before moving and exposing yourself to radiation in transit. For people in a hospital, that goes double, as long as the power is on, and it's possible to filter the air intake. Hospitals are generally big concrete buildings, so staying in one is pretty safe.
In the case of Fukishima, the people being evacuated because of radiation were only a small portion of the casualties from the Tsunami, and so the emergency services were seriously stressed. I'd imagine that evacuating those people would have gone much more smoothly if it hadn't been for all of the other Tsunami damage.
People have children. The "think about the children" argument I'm making here is that the description of the calculation does not mention the effects of radiation on the life expectancy of future generations and does not describe a rationale for ignoring these effects in its calculus.
I'm not saying those effects can or cannot be ignored because I'm not an expert. But I'm skeptical because the analysis does not address human reproduction.
Is there any evidence of reduced "life expectancy of future generations" for radiation exposure at the levels discussed? If not, then that may be why it was not addressed.
While I don't know if there is or not, these studies of the results of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs[0] shows that the effects were limited to those currently pregnant, and without 1200 meters of ground zero of the blast. With no effect on the future children born to parents exposed to ionizing radiation of those levels.
"The many studies that were conducted after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki determined that some of the risks that the public perceives to be associated with radiation exposure are non-existent, while others are in fact matters of concern. The cancer risk for children who were in-utero when their mothers were exposed is higher than it would be for others without this exposure, but children who were conceived after their parents were exposed to radiation had no increased cancer risk. Similarly for both birth defects and mental retardation, it was found that in-utero exposure possibly increased the rate of incidence of these conditions, but results from all studies are inconclusive, except for the case of pregnant mothers within 1200m of the hypocenter. All of the in-utero children born to these mothers experienced mental retardation. All three of these cases found that there is no increased risk of these conditions if the parents of the child were exposed to the ionizing radiation of the atomic bomb (child was not conceived at the time of the exposure)."
The US atomic bombing of Japan used 64kg of Uranium (Little Boy and 6.2kg of Plutonium (Fat Man). Each nuclear reactor at Fukishima used tons of Uranium or Plutonium fuel. Each reactor generated tons of radioactive waste each year it was in operation.
The amount of radioactive material involved in the 1945 events is several orders of magnitude smaller than at Fukishima. Perhaps there are robust cross examined theories indicating that the events are comparable. I am skeptical that the events are similar enough in important ways (i.e. ways other than occurring in Japan) that a single anecdote is sufficient basis to claim support for the proposed policy.
Not an expert, but I'd think the A-bombed cities provided numerous examples of all the range of possible radiation contamination in humans, from "negligible" to "fatal in hours" and possibly beyond.
(I'm assuming a 1-dimensional scale here, which may be a mistake)
Why would the total radiation of the event matter at all? All the radiation that an individual may receive beyond "fatal in hours" will not be relevant to their reproductive future.
(Except in the contrived scenario in which a male receives enough radiation to kill him in hours, but still conceives a child in these hours)
Nuclear fuel is typically 3.5% to 5% U235 [1],[2] Fukushima had six reactors of 1100 MW each. A 1000 MW reactor uses approximately 27 tonnes of fresh fuel per year [1] equating to 945 kg of U235/reactor/year. Fukushima has six reactors and was commissioned in 1971 (forty years prior to the 2011 event). For comparison Little Boy used 64kg of U235.[4]
The scale of radioactive materials are orders of magnitude different.
Yes, but as long as nuclear reactors operate properly, and with more modern safety features, providing power to a single household will produce a more manageable amount of nuclear waste compared to CO2 (kilograms to tonnes). No source of energy is without risk.
The Fukushima reactors are not being operated properly. The policy proposed in the article is applicable to Fukushima because its scope is cases when the reactors are not operating properly.
So, after some authority fucks up and explodes a nuclear reactor complex, I'm expected to trust that everything is perfectly fine?
Yeah, no. At Fukushima, the civil authorities didn't know what had even happened for awhile.
Academic analysis of risk falls apart on the ground. What happened in places like the World Trade Center and Grenfell tower, and minor high rise disasters that I've experienced first hand have taught a clear lesson: know your surroundings, know all of the egress routes, proceed with caution, and get the hell out.
>I'm expected to trust that everything is perfectly fine.
Sure, you shouldn't be forced to stay. But by the same token the government shouldn't be able to force you to leave your perfectly safe home and possessions just for the sake of giving them some "caring" PR.
Since they seem to be happy to put a price on months of human lives that are not their own, how about instead they just factor the expected costs of accidents and relocations into the cost of nuclear power and tax the utility accordingly. Why is it always the little guy who has to get fucked when shit goes wrong?
Was not aware of that! I was being partly sarcastic. The problem with any such system is that there will be people whose job is to deny claims. Of course there would also be some people trying to make unjustified claims too.
No matter what the public policy is, some percentage of people will leave. And that will shrink the local economies, and that will act as an incentive for even more people to leave. To make things right for those who stay, the government would have to subsidize the local economies, and even that would be a fraction of what things were like before the disaster.
The reality is a nuclear accident causes massive asset destruction, it touches people who had absolutely no say in the economic transaction, and probably no meaningful political say either.
Pretty much the only fair solution, is equal unfairness. Part of the "not in my backyard" is because the track record is, local residents are disproportionately impacted, and there is no where near enough support for them, while people far away are minimally impacted. This is trust damaging, and incentivizes people to vote against nuclear power: not in my backyard = I do not trust you to make me whole in the unlikely event there is an accident.
A lot of the responses drift away from the article to broader issues of nuclear power - cool. But it would be wise to focus on this point:
After nuclear accidents, governments are compulsorily ejecting people from their homes.
This isn't the end of the world, but it is clearly an extreme action. There should be some standard of evidence that they are held to before they do this. Maybe most of the people would leave anyway.
The question needs to b asked. The bloke in the article is making a point that evacuations might be worse than radiation. This is a point that seemed likely to me after reading about Fukashima.
It is possible we are facing a scenario where:
* Governments are ejecting people from their homes
* This is leading to worse outcomes than if they where allowed to live there peacefully or leave at their own speed
If this is the case, we really need clearer standards to stop governments acting this way.
Does this take into account the social stigma of living in the affected zone? It could easily turn to family-registry (koseki tohon) based discrimination. For instance, it's not difficult to imagine someone's parents being opposed to marriage with someone living in that zone, reminiscent of the historic discrimination against the burakumin.
Anyone doing agriculture there will face difficulties selling the produce elsewhere in the country. Anyone depending on tourism is going to struggle.
People are going to mistrust governmental assurances that it's safe to be somewhere, suspecting various political motivations.
How about the simple question of development: investment in the area is going to be very cool.
It would be interesting to see this vs cost of relocation, which I believe has been enormously high (as has the emotional cost).º
Different agencies price the cost of a single life ("statistical live value") differently. For instance the US department of transportation won't install a highway guard rail that would save one life per year if the installation costs more than $9.6M. FAA $5.8M. (and TSA clearly 0 while for DoD it's clearly enormous).
º Even people who stay will suffer psychological problems, in part due to poor understanding of physics, and that isn't taken account of in the summary. Then again some people near phone towers suffer imaginary fears too. The original article is paywalled so sorry to the authors if these topics are discussed.
20 years later a child has some sort of disability and you are ready to kill yourself, even if the disability is not from radiation. Never mention cancers or even coughs--"it might be from radiation, I'm probably gonna die."
And that's if he's right, a big if, especially when dealing with lives.
Maybe we should shortcut that whole issue. Unlike most instances of pollution, we have a case where a single entity is clearly responsible for the contamination. That entity should be required to offer a buy-out of all property in the affected area at pre-accident market prices. They can then resell at whatever price they can obtain. If the damage caused by the contamination is small, the difference between the prices will be small, and their loss will be small. If their victims don’t think it’s worth moving at all, the loss will be zero since nobody will accept the offer.
Something tells me that this idea will be rejected as being too expensive, which should be quite telling.