Time marches on after Fukushima, and still no fatalities or hospitalizations

In Season Two, Steven Wright recounts to Dr. Katz his fear, when he was nine, of reaching his tenth birthday. At age ten, Wright tells Katz, he would have reached double digits, “and most people die in double digits.”

In the 4394 days since the meltdowns at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant on Japan’s northeast coast, anti-nuclear activists have told every media vehicle who would print or broadcast their words that there will be casualties from this event.

If we wait long enough, every single one of those predictions will come true. But that’s because humans have a finite life span. Wright was right, but I’ll be more precise. Most people die between the ages of zero and 100. If you want, you can attribute cause of death to pretty much anything, including oxygen and vegetables.

Therefore, when the first Fukushima resident or nuclear emergency worker succumbs to the inevitable, no matter when that is, some anti-nuclear activist somewhere will attribute the cause of death to the meltdown. But should we take them seriously?

It is intuitively obvious, 4394 days on, that the meltdowns have been a consequence-free event in terms of damage to humans or the environment. That is what I and others predicted on the day the meltdowns began.

However, there has been incredible damage done during the last 4394 days of scaremongering by the anti-nuclear crowd. Around 100,000 people were evacuated from the Fukushima prefecture in the early panic over the meltdowns. Very few at the time questioned the wisdom of evacuating this many relatively safe people in the conditions that prevailed in the country when the meltdowns began. Prior to evacuation, those people were safe in their homes. Let’s not forget the meltdowns were caused by a tsunami that knocked out the nuclear plant’s emergency backup power. The same tsunami killed tens of thousands of people along Japan’s northeast coast and made hundreds of thousands homeless. The homeless were in dire circumstances, and that is something that is difficult for us unaffected people here in North America to comprehend. Walk out thinly dressed into a blizzard some day, hungry and thirsty, and see what it’s like if you just stay outside without food or water or shelter or heat.

In that circumstance, the Japanese authorities, led by the anti-nuclear then-prime minister Naoto Kan and cheered on by anti-nuclear activists in North America, decided to inject a further 100,000 refugees into the the overwhelming chaos of the the tsumani aftermath. All on the basis of a trumped-up fear of nuclear radiation that every credible expert said from very early on would cause little if any harm.

Geoff Russell, writing at Brave New Climate, cannot contain his disgust with the anti-nuclear “greens” who have over the past 4394 days since the meltdowns deliberately fanned the flames of irrational fear post-Fukushima. In his own words:

It’s time the global political Green movement showed some compassion and took steps to try to reduce the distress and panic. I’d like to see Christine Milne contact the Japanese Government and tell them she supports turning on the reactors. I’d like to see her apologise to the Japanese people and call on other global Green leaders to do the same. The last thing the Japanese people needed after the 2011 quake and tsunami was a trumped up radiation death cloud fear campaign, but that’s exactly what the anti-nuclear movement gave them.