so statistically speaking it might result in 100 deaths. Are 100 deaths significant? Of course they are, especially if it's you or someone in your family.
Are they as significant as the roughly 40,000 people who have died since Fukushima, in the United States alone, due to coal smoke? Not even close. Are they as significant as the 25-30,000 who die every year from the effects of climate change, which nuclear energy has a unique potential for addressing?
What's missing from the nuclear energy debate is perspective, largely as a result of misinformation promulgated by those with a poor understanding of the real risks involved.
Btw, people don't die from cancer any quicker if a bomb is dropped than if they're exposed in other ways (except for leukemia, radiation-induced cancer will take roughly ten years to develop regardless of the source). Most Hiroshima casualties were the result of radiation sickness or flash effects (burns, etc). What percentage of Hiroshima survivors went on to develop cancers from the bomb?
Given RERF's fearful origins and the study's scale, its findings can seem confounding in their modesty, especially this central result: Out of the atomic survivors tracked by RERF -- nearly 100,000 people -- only 853 cases of cancerous tumors, so far, can be attributed to the bombs.
With its youngest members about 66 years old -- A-bomb survivors exposed in the womb are part of a separate study -- the survivors have developed plenty of tumors, about 17,448 cases. But 5 percent of these are attributable to radiation, according to RERF. The number rises to 11 percent when limited to those receiving more than 5 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation, using a common standard. Typically, these survivors received significantly higher doses, with a mean average of 210 mSv; lower, notably, than the total dose allowed to Fukushima's radiation workers.
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/04/11/11greenwire-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-cast-long-shadows-over-99849.html?pagewanted=all
Perspective.
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