Nursing Home Explosion Kills More People than Died From Radiation at Fukushima But Not As Many As Died from Fear...

[NNadir]

...of radiation at Fukushima.

The recent explosion was not far from where I live, in a nursing home in Bucks County:

US: Pennsylvania nursing home rocked by twin explosions

Subtitle:

Deaths were reported following two explosions and fire at a nursing home outside Philadelphia, with several people still unaccounted for, officials have said.

At least two people were killed and several were missing after a pair of explosions rocked a nursing home in Bristol Township, outside the US city of Philadelphia.

The explosions on Tuesday sparked a fire and caused part of the nursing home's building to collapse, officials and police said.

The blasts at the Bristol Health and Rehab Center in Bristol Township, about 21 miles (33 kilometers) northeast of Philadelphia, are believed to have been caused by a gas leak...

...Five people were believed to be missing hours after the explosions and fire tore through the facility, Bristol Fire Marshal Kevin Dippolito told a press conference on Tuesday evening. However, some may have left the scene with family members, he added.

In addition to the two confirmed deaths, Dippolito said an unspecified number of people had sustained injuries...

...The local gas company PECO said its personnel were at the facility responding to complaints of a gas leak when the first explosion occurred.

"PECO crews shut off natural gas and electric service to the facility to ensure the safety of first responders and local residents. It is not known at this time if PECO’s equipment, or natural gas, was involved in this incident," the company said in a statement...

The evacuation of people from nursing homes, can cause deaths as nursing home residents are by definition frail, and these types of deaths notably occurred during the evacuation of Fukushima out of fear of radioactivity, a topic I often discuss. It is deaths in a nursing home here and in Fukushima that established the connection:

I have produced this link and excerpt previously here:

Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)

It's open sourced, but an excerpt is relevant:

However, in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant(FDNPP) accident, no direct health hazards due to radiation, such as acute radiation injury, were observed, while various indirect health effects were reported even in the acute phase [2, 3]. Major health effects are attributed to the initial emergency evacuation and displacement, deterioration of the shelter environment, evacuation from nursing homes, and psychological and social health effects. In addition, there were also the effects of medical collapse, where lives that could normally be saved by medical care could not be saved due to a lack of medical resources [4, 5]. It is known that these effects are particularly susceptible to the socially vulnerable [6].

.

I added the bold.

Now the rest of the cited text - some of these authors live and work in Fukushima and have always done so; their institution is Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima City, Japan - indicates that the fear of radiation killed people, but radiation itself didn't. By the way, this group has published hundreds of papers on the topic.

It's strange that we so fear radiation, which world wide exhibits a low death toll, and has, in fact, saved lives, and don't fear dangerous natural gas, which has killed vastly more people than radiation, and does so regularly.

Of course, most of the deaths associated with dangerous natural gas are not related to explosions, but from the climate effects of the combustion product of natural gas, carbon dioxide, and methane itself, which is the second largest driver of the extreme global heating we now experience.

I often muse to myself - there is I think no way to calculate this - about how much carbon dioxide and methane has been released to power the computer time for people to carry on about Fukushima on the internet and elsewhere. I suspect were it known, it would be non-trivial, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that more deaths have resulted from discussing Fukushima than were killed by radiation exposure in the event, which is apparently close to, if not, zero.

To return to the present nursing home case:

The nursing home that blew up in Pennsylvania had a long history of health violations. This may have implications for the survival of injured victims and evacuees.

Enjoy the holiday season. I wish you a happy and healthy New Year.

[biophile]

1. Good points- I also worked with nuclear materials and don't fear radiation

But that’s my familiarity and my income derived from it so I had a vested interest in not being fearful ☺️. To your point about the computer time and energy spent discussing the relative dangers of Fukushima- it applies to all topics and I wonder how much effort I spend in a year reading DU, writing, recc’ing, doom scrolling on any number of sites.
Maybe I need to make it a resolution to reduce my screen time from a purely “green” perspective- let alone mental health! Not to give up DU at all because that is actually good for my state of mind and I do learn so much from people like you!

[Ferrets are Cool]

2. Imagine America ramping up the building of nuclear plants WITHOUT guardrails (regulations).

That is what we face under this regime.

[NNadir]

3. While this may not be popular here to state, I think there are too many "guardrails" for nuclear power plants.

There are not enough "guardrails" for fossil fuel plants.

Fossil fuel plants kill people whenever they operate normally; nuclear plants generally don't kill people and when they do, it is only under extreme conditions of failure.

It is fear of radiation that kills people, specifically because people think in a rote fashion that nuclear power is "dangerous," and fossil fuel plants aren't.

The read data states otherwise.

Hence people are overly concerned - out of irrational fear - about nuclear plants and just don't give a rat's ass about fossil fuel plants.

Nuclear plants save lives:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

If follows that delaying nuclear plants under the conditions that they must prove that no one will ever be injured at any time ever by nuclear operations, a criteria not attached to fossil fuel plants, kills people. It also follows that shutting nuclear plants kills people.

In a comment in another thread, celebrating the "work" of the functional whining of the unqualified idiot Ed Lyman of the inaptly named "Union of Concerned Scientists," I wrote this:

It will be a good day when the fossil fuel industry is required to show that its waste products will never kill anyone anywhere in any century here and beyond.

One would need to understand something about what nuclear engineering is...