[link:http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197|]First of all, we're talking science vs. anecdote.
Here is the scientific publication, authored by an international consortium of academic physicians, epidemiologists, and statisticians on risk factors and human health:
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)
Note that this paper is not merely devoted to questions of air pollution, but to the 67 major causes of mortality as represented risk factors.
Nowhere, absolutely nowhere in this presentation is exposure to so called "nuclear exclusion zones" mentioned, but the millions of deaths each year from air pollution are mentioned, among many other risk factors, obesity, poor nutrition, accidents, suicide, all kinds of things that are clearly and unambiguously more important that "nuclear exclusion zones," that one hears endlessly about from people who hold science in clear contempt. These are often, in my experience, quite willing and able to display openly that contempt for science arising from a lack of familiarity of the contents of any scientific literature whatsoever, with the possible exception of poorly written accounts written by scientifically illiterate journalists.
The figure for outdoor air pollution, each year that caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the out venting of so called "renewable" biomass burning is given as a most probable value of 3.22 million human lives per year, with a range at a 95% uncertainty range of between 2.83 million and 3.63 million. The deaths from indoor air pollution are reported to by the international consortium of authors as 3.48 million human beings per year, with a range, again at a 95% uncertainty range of between 2.68 million to 4.63 million, each year.
The data for outdoor air pollution has been also discussed in a more recent paper in one of the world's most important and preeminent scientific journals in the world Nature.
I actually wrote a post here in this space pointing to this dire report: Nature: China's annual air pollution deaths now stand at 1.4 million per year.
The number of anti-nukes who showed up in this post - and I am familiar with many of the most ignorant examples of this class of people who write dangerous anti-nuke nonsense here is zero.
Zero.
In the cases of these scientifically illiterate anti-nukes to whom I have endured exposure, they clearly couldn't care less about these roughly seven million deaths each year, seventy million each decade.
How many people is 70 million? It's roughly twice the population of Canada. Every decade, air pollution wipes out the equivalent of twice the population of Canada.
And when I raise these points, it is typical of the responses that I get that someone reports some anecdotal trash that they know someone who knows someone who got cancer and lived near some real or imagined nuclear tragedy. In general these people have no scientific training and no statistical training, and cannot actually identify an observed health effect as a definite causal relationship. Actually the establishment of causal relationships is the province of a type of statistics known as Bayesian statistics. The number of anti-nukes who I personally encounter who show any evidence of ever having opened a math book of any kind is uncomfortably close to zero.
Zero.
Of course there are millions of people who don't live near any nuclear facility at all but get cancer. Pretty much every reference to cancer, with few exceptions, in the Lancet paper involves either smoke or alcohol, smoke being the main source of the toxicity of um, air pollution.
The statement that "there's not much we as individuals can do about air pollution" is nonsense, appalling nonsense of the worst sort.
Education cures ignorance. Any individual can do something by resisting ignorance, by educating oneself. It is what I did. I used to be an anti-nuke, until shortly after Chernobyl. I deeply regret the criminal ignorance by which I lived up until that time.
What any individual can do about air pollution is to educate themselves and to stop spewing formulaic rote nonsense, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and decade after decade while tens of millions of people die from said ignorance.
For the record China is doing something about air pollution: They are the world's most active builders of nuclear power plants.
The famous climate scientist Jim Hansen wrote a paper in 2013 that for a while was on the top ten list of most read papers in the important environmental journal Environmental Science and Technology.
It is here: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute, 2880 Broadway, New York, New York 10025, United States
Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
The paper is open access and any damned fool - as well as any educated person - can read it. In it, by appeal to the data above and similar data, as well as fairly exhaustive analyses of the effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima, the events anti-nukes burn so much oil and gas and coal to power the computers to tell us all about on the internet, he and his corresponding coauthor show that nuclear energy has saved 1.8 million lives. It might have saved vastly more lives, tens of millions of lives, were it not for fear and ignorance foisted by clueless anti-nukes.
Over the last five years, every two weeks, I have downloaded the entire contents of Environmental Science and Technology, one of the world's preeminent scientific journals devoted to environmental issues. I have read in fairly high detail many hundreds, if not thousands of papers in this and other environmental journals on a wide range of environmental topics. The environment is my personal obsession, particularly with respect to climate change which is clearly, and unambiguously, the most important issue before humanity whether the bulk of humanity knows it or not.
I really, really, really, really object to people in the anti-nuke sets, most of whom display a clear lack of education, who identify themselves as "environmentalists," when they clearly have no idea whatsoever what an "environmentalist" actually is.
So how do I know that anti-nukes don't give a shit about air pollution deaths? To my mind, the responses are self-evident. Q.E.D.
Enjoy the weekend.
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