Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

Nothing against Moxie, but this stated fact is clearly nonsense. It certainly would have been terrible for a large volume of water to reach the burning core, but you're not going to get a 5MT blast from a reactor accident. It takes a LOT of things working perfectly to make a nuclear bomb explode correctly. Lots of bad things happen when reactors go critical, a nuclear blast is generally not one of them. It's the spread of contaminated matter that makes reactor accidents bad. Also, sure, explosions can happen with rapid temperature changes like one encounters in these situations, but nothing like an actual nuclear bomb.

Agreed, it's brilliant and imho the best series in years. The last TV episode that left me as speechless and uneasy as the first episode of Chernobyl (the shift worker looking down into the open reactor from the roof!) was the now legendary Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad.

> * Rates of smoking in Belarus are also high.

Russia and Poland have higher rates of smoking. Anyway, it would be mostly about lung cancer which isn't the main component here.

> * The indirect impact of Chernobyl includes a lack of health care facilities in the (rural) regions most impacted.

Lack of healthcare facilities doesn't really impact cancer incidence rate.

>If the stat you're working from was breast cancer mortality, I'd push back harder, but I don't think that's what you're saying.

Breast cancer incidence rate is the main component here. It shows the largest increase in absolute terms. Thyroid cancer shows largest percentage increase, though it is "just" a 1K of cases. Geographically correlates with fallout too.

So far i really fail to see how any argument you've put forward can explain such a significant and regionally (Mogilev and Gomel are large regions, so it is not some local effect) regionally correlated increase in the cancer rate. Especially given that those regions received several Hiroshimas worth of fallout which explains that increase perfectly.

So your explanation need to be at least as good as the Chernobyl fallout provides. Specifically any such explanation has to account for the observed size of the rate increase as well as its geographical distribution, i.e. it should clearly answer - "why Gomel and Mogilev?"

The 7.3 million figure is like the “12 years left” figure, that is to say it requires a little work to understand where it came from and what it means.

“Ambient air pollution was responsible for 4.3 million deaths” and “3.8 million deaths every year as a result of household exposure to smoke from dirty cookstoves and fuels”.

I haven’t dug into the indoor figures but a quick reading suggests that attributing the death toll to fossil fuels in general is misreading the report.

For example, ”91% of those premature deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries” so the bigger problem is how the fuel is used - since richer countries actually use more fuel per capita.

Cooking with coal on an open stove in an unventilated room will slowly kill you from the carbon particulate. Apparently this is a large percentage of the indoor pollution death statistic. The problem here is coal stoves specifically not fossil fuels in general.

The outdoor statistic is a bit more interesting. The Model they use to calculate the number [1] basically takes a curve of PM exposure level across populations around the world, multiplied by an integrated exposure-response (IER) function.

Over the last few years they have lowered the counterfactual concentration (the point below which PM has no efffect) and steepened the IER.

Through this methodology they can arrive at a death rate of nearly 5 million without a single death certificate ever actually stating “air pollution”.

They do this by trying to tease out the damage done by PM by observing places where PM has changed and then looking at how mortality rate due to cancers and such also changed.

It’s an interesting figure, but in a sense misses the forest for the trees.

Particulate matter definitely has adverse heath effects. One study said an average shortening of life expectancy in Europe of 9 months. But the overall “industry” that creates PM (everything from cars kicking up dust on the road to smokestacks) also is responsible for the modern world where ~8 billion people can survive. Is PM shortening lifespans? Or is PM drastically extending lifespans (e.g. preventing mass starvation) while simultaneously also somewhat shortening an idealized life that could have magically gotten everything it needed to survive except without any PM.

If you are going to publish a number of the harm of PM by extrapolating from an IER and PM levels, it would also be useful to consider the net effect, which would be staggeringly positive in terms of lives saved and lengthened not shortened.

[1] - https://www.who.int/airpollution/data/AAP_BoD_methods_March2...

Smoking is closely linked to some forms of breast cancer.

I'm not trying to push hard on a particular argument here.