Have any people died or been seriously injured because of nuclear power plants?

Answer 1

Well the biggest number was at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm not sure of actual numbers but it must be well documented.

If you discount that, the next biggest must be Chernobyl. This occurred during the Soviet era when the Russians were still very secretive. But I think there were a number of direct deaths among firemen, and others very near at the time. Subsequently more long term radiation effects have continued, and more must have died.

I'm not aware of any deaths in the US, Canada, UK, or Europe, due to nuclear energy. There has never been a serious accident like Chernobyl, and operating staff are monitored carefully, especially those involved in fuel handling.

If anyone has evidence I'd like to hear it.

Answer 2

In any country with a distribution system for electricity, it is not really possible to say where the power comes from, since all the operating plants feed into the system. However any consumer in the US, Canada, France, Spain, India, China, Russia, Ukraine, and other countries with nuclear power, will use nuclear power some of the time.

Answer 3

It really is not possible to answer this question. Available data is usually tainted with some agenda, and the data that is not tainted is not easy to identify.

The problem is partly that the some of the most important causes of death resulting from nuclear power are indirect; when a person dies as a result of radiation poisoning, the immediate cause of death is not the radioactivity itself, but typically a cancer it has caused. Such a cancer could have been caused by other things, including natural radiation, exposure to chemicals, or disease resulting from bacteria or viruses. So it is hard to know which deaths have been caused by nuclear power and which have not.

We can take estimates related to Chernobyl as a case in point. In fact, the numbers for the Chernobyl related deaths are particularly important, because they probably represent the great majority of deaths that have happened so far resulting from nuclear power.

Antinuclear groups have sometimes used very high figures, in some cases approaching a million early deaths due to the Chernobyl accident. While some of these figures are not supported by research methods acceptable to scientists, others appear to be. The New York Academy of Sciences, which is well respected, published a translation of a heavily documented Russian publication, in which the estimate for Chernobyl deaths is 985,000.

Pronuclear groups, including the nuclear industry, seem to stray in the opposite direction. I recently read a statement from a pronuclear group to the effect that there has never been a single death resulting from nuclear power. More typically, pronuclear groups sometimes say a certain specific number of people died as a result of Chernobyl. A typical number for the Chernobyl disaster from such a source is in the range of something less than 40 people to a bit more than 70.

A number often cited for the number who died early as a result of the Chernobyl Disaster is 4000, which was an early prediction from the UN. That figure was later revised to 27000 by the UNSCEAR, an organization in the UN. The IAEA, another organization in the UN, still maintains the earlier figure of 4000.

I would guess it is probable that something over 95% of deaths from nuclear power are reflected in the Chernobyl figures. If this is correct, then the figure for nuclear power would probably be somewhere between 42 and 1,036,842. But that is just a guess.

Answer 4

The only case of direct death from nuclear reactor accidents known to me is that of Chernobyl in the Ukraine, 1986. This was certainly the worst ever reactor disaster. About 50 deaths occurred within a few weeks or sooner, these were staff on the plant or firefighters who came to the site from elsewhere, and these deaths were due to very high radiation exposures, in many cases well over what is known to cause death. Subsequently over a longer period I believe there were some cases of children developing thyroid cancers in the surrounding population, though these had been evacuated after the accident. The long term health of the local population will have to be analysed carefully, it is easy to produce emotive headlines, but you need to compare what happens to a large group of these people and what you would expect in a similar group in normal life.

I don't have data, but expect there have been some cases of what are normal industrial accidents, like failures of steam pipes or electrocution, but these unfortunately do occur on any type of power plant and should not be attributed to nuclear causes.

Answer 5

There have been accidents in nuclear power plants that have resulted in deaths and serious injuries, notably the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents. However, statistically, the number of fatalities and injuries from nuclear power plants is much lower compared to other energy sources like fossil fuels. Stringent safety regulations and advancements in technology continue to improve the safety of nuclear power plants.

Answer 6

12% people who work with nuclear energy eventuallly catch a disese or die.

Answer 7

about 6% of the world uses nuclear energy