When things go really wrong they go really really wrong, but that doesn’t change the statistical risk. Radiation is viscerally scary because you can’t see it, but you’re way more likely to get hit by a bus or die in a cloud of anhydrous ammonia or something similarly nasty.
Plus things have only gone really wrong once, and that’s Chernobyl. Fukushima Daiichi got hit by an earthquake, and then a tsunami, and lost auxiliary power. The plant’s containment held. Estimates for cancer rates were something like 100 additional cases globally. Nobody got acute radiation poisoning, nobody got sick. The panic killed more people than the disaster. Which is kind of a microcosm of our broader relationship to nuclear power: the fear of what could go wrong caused us to stick with technologies that we know kill people. The Keystone coal power plant kills more people than the Fukushima disaster did, and that’s for normal operation of the plant after they installed scrubbers
anyway if you’re still reading I love your work keep it up
Yeah but things really go wrong, all the time, all over the world. Feel free to live next door to a nuclear plant, no problem on my side. I’ll just be chilin outside of the 20 mile exclusion zone myself.
anyway if you’re still reading I love your work keep it up
When things go really wrong they go really really wrong, but that doesn’t change the statistical risk. Radiation is viscerally scary because you can’t see it, but you’re way more likely to get hit by a bus or die in a cloud of anhydrous ammonia or something similarly nasty.
Plus things have only gone really wrong once, and that’s Chernobyl. Fukushima Daiichi got hit by an earthquake, and then a tsunami, and lost auxiliary power. The plant’s containment held. Estimates for cancer rates were something like 100 additional cases globally. Nobody got acute radiation poisoning, nobody got sick. The panic killed more people than the disaster. Which is kind of a microcosm of our broader relationship to nuclear power: the fear of what could go wrong caused us to stick with technologies that we know kill people. The Keystone coal power plant kills more people than the Fukushima disaster did, and that’s for normal operation of the plant after they installed scrubbers
anyway if you’re still reading I love your work keep it up
Yeah but things really go wrong, all the time, all over the world. Feel free to live next door to a nuclear plant, no problem on my side. I’ll just be chilin outside of the 20 mile exclusion zone myself.
Thanks!