Fwiw, I did mention that the animal lives are possibly lower quality and definitely shorter lived. So I'm not quite sure what you're rebutting from my comment. It appears that you're just rephrasing part of it but without any source and clear suppositions from a misunderstanding of the data in the first paragraph I wrote.
Mostly what I take issue to is that you're saying people need to stop being concerned about something, but the reasons you gave didn't really support that conclusion. I dunno if there's a problem here or not really, but I don't think we should dismiss it in this manner. It's sort of like the inverse of fear mongering, though fear mongering is probably more dangerous, so I only mean that directionally and not proportionally (eg I don't take issue nearly as strongly as I would a fear mongering comment, I think your comment is largely fine, but that's what I find objectionable).
The dose rate near Chernobyl has fallen 2 orders of magnitude. Further, now the vast majority of the activity is Cs-137, which is excreted pretty quickly. Further, the waste is getting buried and further removed from the food chain (though Russia recently stirred up soil there, which isn't ideal).
We have decades of living with the results (event was 1986), decades of scientific research (not just reactors, but medicine and space), and high political motivation to demonstrate harm (as it shows the failure of the USSR and communism). That in all this time and with all this money and motivation, we have not gathered data that conclusively says that the bioaccumulation is a problem. That is the basis of my claim: almost 40 years of analysis of the exact event and 80 years of health physics (the study of radiation on humans).
Mostly what I take issue to is that you're saying science doesn't matter. At least this is how it comes off. I actually agree that point a and b are orthogonal. The second paragraph is written to address a second point. I have a complaint about a common false fear mongering claim by the article and I also add some information that is about the article's main topic. They don't become a singular argument due to proximity. Paragraph 2's only mention of humans is that they probably shouldn't live there, which is difficult to confuse with "it is safe to live in Chernobyl because bavarian boar, hunted a thousand kilometers away, is safe to eat despite their radiation levels." Forgive me, but it is difficult to not feel frustrated and interpret you as not actually reading what I wrote. Definitely not in good faith.
I have nothing but sympathy for that, it's bullshit. And if I had any role in causing it to happen by being the first person to reply to you, I apologize. All I have to say on it, and this is from a place of being a hypocrite who struggles with this myself, is that he who fights monsters must take care he does not become one - don't let the internet poison your ideas about how conversation works, and put you on the defensive in every interaction. It's so difficult to find common ground and explore disagreement from that position.
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Sorry it's taken me a while to respond, I got busy.
I think you should recalibrate your sense of what it means for something to be in good or bad faith. You deemed both of the subthreads[1] here to be bad faith, but in my reading, neither of them are. The other subthread was snarky, which is different from being in bad faith.
If you don't feel I read you as closely as I should have it wasn't sufficiently respectful, I can understand that being frustrating, but that isn't actually what bad faith is - I didn't misrepresent your views or the facts, I didn't employ manipulative language or sophistry to try and trap you in a rhetorical cage, et cetera.
If you don't feel sufficiently respected, well, you don't owe us anything, you don't have to engage, but throwing around accusations of bad faith because you don't feel like people are reading you closely enough is - well, not great faith.
What I took issue with is you closing the book on something and telling people the debate was over, not even because you had new evidence but because you didn't personally feel moved by the evidence. It's kinda rich for you to then lecture me about being unscientific.
My contributions to science have thus far been negligible (the company I was going to continue my lab tech career with froze hiring during the pandemic, so I had to change lanes to software engineering, c'est la vie), but when I was a lab technician, I actively practiced being comfortable with ambiguity, acknowledging what I do and don't know, and separating observation from interpretation. If I had told my PI that we didn't need to look into boars for the reasons you gave, I would have gotten clowned on.
That's not to say every discussion needs to be scientifically rigorous (I consider myself an empiricist but not a scientist because I don't regular use the scientific method, I operate with a fairly loose level of rigor as software engineer), but I rolled my eyes pretty hard when you tried to come at me for being unscientific.
[1] Oh boy, this thread got a lot bigger. I meant this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36205287
The only party that did push against Nuclear were the Greens. And it took them over 20 years to finally get a nuclear exit through in Germany.
And as far as thresholds are concerned: we have those for everything, from lead to small dust. Being above it doesn't outright kill people, but it defenitely doesn't improve longterm health. And yes, Bavarian boar has a tendency, in some regions, to be above radiation thresholds. That can be dorectly traced back to Chernobyl. You are trying to deny that by attacking the validity of those thresholds, thresholds that are coming from a ruling party in Bavaria that is in power sonce the 50s, is as pro-nuclear power as they come. I call that a straw man argument if there ever was one.
What that means for the safety of the exclusive zone is a different stroy, isn't it?
And no, as pointed out above, the health impact of Chernobyl, on everyone from Minsk and Pripyat to the liquidators and half of Western Europe was never really studied.
