Emissons mean 2,220 deaths and 18B per year

Thanks for posting, smog is a bit ignored in all these discussions. although you can easily smell it in a city, and that it is less at night. I'm wondering if this study covers all the effects in smog-heavy cities like LA.

Well, a tip 'o the hat (and glass) to all of us...we're proud to be not contributing to this... :smile:

vfx said:

Study blames 2,200 deaths on traffic emissions - USATODAY.com

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So traffic emissions kill many, many times the number of people every year than three cores melting down.... not surprising, but too bad people don't get more upset about emissions-related deaths. I guess we are just too conditioned in our society to think that it's okay to choke on fumes.

The study seems to be specific to traffic congestion (as opposed to traffic in general) and limited to 83 urban areas (apparently without extrapolation to the rest of the US)....

Doug_G said:

Curiously, now that they finally admitted that all three reactors did a full meltdown, the international media seems to have pretty much lost interest in the story.

Of course then they might be forced to admit that the design of the reactors prevented a massive catastrophe, even in a worst-case accident. That wouldn't play well.

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Yes, what it seems to indicate at least so far is that even in the case of a meltdown most of the radiation is contained locally as long as there is a decent enclosure around the core which I imagine is the case for every nuclear power station in operation in world today. Other than the days when the buildings exploded radiation levels in Tokyo have been lower than most other cities in the world. Everything went wrong during this disaster, and yet still the few casulties were those who were actually inside the plant. During the disaster many people who had the means escaped from Toyko to other cities in Asia such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, etc. only to get a much higher dose of radiation on the plane ride out, and finally to end up in another city where they could choke on fumes.