Nuclear hysteria kills people

I have posted how the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster was a worst-case scenario, and yet it did not kill anyone. Now George Johnson reports in the NY Times:

No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation — a point confirmed last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise.

But about 1,600 people died from the stress of the evacuation — one that some scientists believe was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels at the Japanese nuclear plant. ...

“The government basically panicked,” said Dr. Mohan Doss, a medical physicist who spoke at the Tokyo meeting, when I called him at his office at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “When you evacuate a hospital intensive care unit, you cannot take patients to a high school and expect them to survive.”

Among other victims were residents of nursing homes. And there were the suicides. “It was the fear of radiation that ended up killing people,” he said.

In the USA, one of the main accomplishment of the leftist environmental movement has been for us to rely on coal power plants instead of nuclear, thereby causing thousands of excess deaths.

Update: By comparison, the NY Times estimates that the excess pollution from Volkswagen diesel cars in the last 7 years may cause 40 to 100 deaths.