Tsunami advisory in northern Japan after 7.1 magnitude earthquake off coast

Just so HN readers know… this ^ quote is total bullshit.

--[TL;DR Response]-- The USSR did not take responsibility or implement good clean up from day 0; at all. They lied/covered up as much as they could, for as long as they could, endangering their own land, people, and economy. Chernobyl is historically regarded as a propaganda clusterfuck and a major economic, civic, and political failure of modern history.

--[Full Response]-- I could argue a number of this guy’s points, but the specific claim that the USSR excelled at “taking responsibility” and implementing an institutional clean up/response “from day 0”, is the polar opposite of all existing historical and scientific fact.

The historical fact here is that the USSR’s response to Chernobyl was horribly botched, heavily manipulated by propaganda, and that the public was extremely uninformed of the context, causes, and consequences (both immediate and future), of the disaster.

The response was swift, yes, but dangerous, uninformed, and unorganized. Even the military/emergency crews and government employees/engineers first sent in to respond to the disaster, were lied to about the specifics and risks of the incident. For civilians in the USSR, there was a total information black out for the first 2 days. Most citizens gleaned only limited facts/information, days and weeks later, largely via rumor or from international media. Effective institutional response (from inside the USSR) and more accurate reporting only arrived after much international pressure and media attention. The major civilian backlash at the falsehoods and failures of Chernobyl, and the extreme financial expense of the disaster, was one of the final blows in exposing and crippling the Gorbachev regime.

[Source: I'm an environmental historian and science teacher]

The cleanup operation wasn't much better - men cleaning nearby reactor roofs in 45 second shifts and heavy lead aprons because the radiation was too bad for a fleet of robots to function.

Future cancer deaths from accumulated radiation exposures [...] are predicted to be extremely low to none. Yes, but I find the paragraph in the source [1]

    Even the worse case scenario — a dose of 50 mSv — poses a fairly minimal risk. 
    However, the models showed that infants living in Namie could have got a higher
    dose to their thyroid, of 100–200 mSv. That higher dose would be due mainly to 
    radioactive iodine-131 blowing from the plant immediately after the accident. Brenner 
    says a dose of 200 mSv to a female infant under a year old might mean a 1% risk of 
    developing thyroid cancer over her lifetime (by comparison, the lifetime risk in the 
    United States is 0.02%).

So I think that a argument can be made for nuclear energy, but this argument should not be "no one will ever know we killed her. " The argument should include sentences like [3]:

    [...] My offers were such as to give me a risk equivalent to that faced by an American soldier
    in World War II, according to my calculations of plutonium toxicity which followed all generally 
    accepted procedures. These offers were made to all three major TV networks, requesting a few 
    minutes to explain why I was doing it. I feel that I am engaged in a battle for my country's 
    future, and hence should be willing to take as much risk as other soldiers.