A question to Paul Scalise:

Assuming that all the of nuclear power plants are shut down, what do you think the economic consequences are likely to be? What I'm most interested in is not whether Japan can avoid blackouts, etc. but whether there would be a shortage of electricity that would constrain recovery of industrial production and GDP?
What would be the cost of substitute forms of electricity-generation, etc. Electricity demand is now down, but one reason is that industrial production is still down about 17% from peak 2007 levels and GDP is down about 4%. To what degree can conservation efforts (LED lights, motion sensors, etc.) ameliorate these problems. Is there a lot of low-hanging fruit in the way of near-term conservation measures?

Piers Williamson wrote:

Dr. Steve Wing
(University of North Carolina) has shown that after Three Mile Island there was a 10% increase in cancers.

With all due respect. Dr. Wing did not SHOW that there was a 10% increase in cancers. Rather, Wing ARGUED against viruallly all previous studies that there was such an increase. This was not based on any new data but on reinterpretation of existing data, as Wing et.
al. acknowledged:

Previous studies concluded that there was no evidence that the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island
(TMI) affected cancer incidence in the surrounding area; however, there were logical and methodological problems in earlier reports that led us to reconsider data previously collected.

Wing's new interpretations of past data have been heavily criticized by other scientists. See, for example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1469856/

For the prevalent view, see, for example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21855866, covering data through 1995, which says that:

The Pennsylvania Department of Health established a registry of the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant accident in 1979. Over 93% of the population present on the day of the accident within a 5-mile radius was enrolled and interviewed....Among men and women, there was no evidence of an increased risk for all malignant neoplasms among the TMI cohort exposed to higher maximum and likely γ radiation....An increased risk of leukemia was found among men exposed to higher maximum and likely γ radiation related to TMI exposure during the ten days following the accident. This relationship was not found in women.

CONCLUSION:

Increased cancer risks from low-level radiation exposure within the TMI cohort were small and mostly statistically non-significant. However, additional follow-up on this population is warranted, especially to explore the increased risk of leukemia found in men.

I interviewed Dr. Brenner, a famed biophysicist at Columbia shortly after Fukushima. He commented to me:

In most rich countries, about 40% of the population is going to get cancer anyway. Among the survivors who lived within a couple miles of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cancer rate went up about 0.3%. So, at the much lower doses of Fukushima, it will be far, far less. The rate of cancer in Tokyo might rise from 40% to shall we say 40.001% among children-about one in one million-and no increase among adults.

However, he had a big criticism of the studies and published an oped in the WSJ criticizing the budget cuts in this area. Let me give the whole interchange on this matter:

Toyo Keizai: Japan has raised the designation of the Fukushima nuclear disaster to the same level as Chernobyl. While the World Health Organization (WHO) says 6,000 died in Ukraine and Belarus, some anti-nuclear groups talk about a couple hundred thousand or even a million people dying throughout Europe. What is the actual number as far as you know?

Brenner: I wish we knew the answer to that question.
That's because the epidemiological studies needed to answer that question have not been done. The only population studies that have been done are looking at the end point of leukemia, which is a relatively rare cancer, and thyroid cancer, from which is almost nobody dies. So, among the common cancers that radiation produces-lung, breast, stomach, colon, and bladder
cancer- none of those have being studied. The reason that you see very different estimates is because they're all estimates. You can get pretty much any answer that you want because there is a great deal of uncertainty. The WHO estimate of 6,000 is what you might call the standard number using standard models, but we don't really know. The same uncertainties are almost certainly bound to happen in regard to Fukushima. Twenty years from now, we will undoubtedly see all sorts of people giving wildly different estimates of its consequences. Unfortunately, the only program in the U.S. that is explicitly trying to understand the risks of low doses of radiation looks like it's going to get the axe in the current budget cuts.

Richard Katz
The Oriental Economist Report