Re: Deaths or What?

[Bernard L Cohen <blc+@pitt.edu>]

On Sat, 9 Dec 2000, Jerry Cohen wrote:
> 
> Considering all of this, I am not sure what the best way of =
> quantitatively expressing  the effect of harmful exposures should be. I =
> am sure that how it is expressed has a strong impact on the perception =
> of the problem. Anyone have any good ideas on the subject???

	--The important point here is that, as long as we are giving
numbers of deaths caused by nuclear power, we must give such numbers for
the air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning, the competitor of nuclear
power. It is failure to do this that has convinced the public that nuclear
power is dangerous.
	How we do this makes little difference. Perhaps the most rational
is with lost life expectancy (LLE). In doing this, I assume that an air
pollution death reduces life expectancy by about 6 years while nuclear
induced cancers reduces it by about 16 years, so using LLE rather than
number of deaths changes the fossil/nuclear harm ratio by a factor of 2 or
3. This makes little difference since the ratio is of the order of several
thousand.

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