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> It’s one of the least threatening issues facing our country, the one with the lowest risk factors of any environmental threat. It’s safer to work at a nuclear

> It’s one of the least threatening issues facing our country, the one with the lowest risk factors of any environmental threat. It’s safer to work at a nuclear site than to sit at a desk trading stocks The relative safety is often brought up in this debate. It's technically correct, but fails to account for just how much damage a single incident can do. Chernobyl had 31 "direct" deaths and several hundred more due to radiation poisoning. That looks good on paper, but does not account for the radioactive plume that has spread all over Europe. To this day I can find contaminated mushrooms and areas of increased radioactivity in Germany, about 1500km away from the reactor site. 30km around Pripyat are considered uninhabitable for 20000 years and cancer rates in Belarus and Ukraine are still way higher than elsewhere. The Dniepr is contaminated and the flow went all the way to the black sea. It looks similar in Fukushima: Few direct deaths, a small exclusion zone, but the effects can be measured in the entire Pacific. We must realize that even if nuclear power works out well w.r.t. Co2 and direct death count, it is fundamentally impossible to rule out the occurance of a catastrophe on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima. If something like that occurred in central Europe, mainland China or one of the US coasts, highly developped regions would be rendered partially uninhabitable and largely undesirable. This kind of damage is not accounted for in these kinds of articles.

justicezyx 9y ago
Sure. However, you are exactly falling victim of the illusion. When you say "contaminated mushrooms and areas of increased radioactivity", do you have any idea how much damage such radio activity can cause? Is it really that serious at all? When you say "catastrophe on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima", what exactly is the catastrophe? How can you quantify it? Is there any informed discussion? Then go back to the point of the article: Talk to an expert... Stop acting like a manipulated mindless person...
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guscost 9y ago
With comments here, I try to maintain an assumption of good faith as often as possible. Meaning I have to allow and even assume that you're sharing these concerns because you honestly think that the risks are serious enough to justify discouraging any use of this technology. But even though I will assume this, I still think that your information comes from a pipeline with a bad actor somewhere. The omissions and the hyperbole are just too consistent. A while ago I realized that these bad actors have (consciously or unconsciously) stopped arguing as engineers, and that this might be because the "fission answer" is simply one that they do not want to hear. It's a classic case of begging the question - either the answer is a combination of windmills and solar panels, or it can't possibly be an answer. Seeing the same reaction to a random post about an idea for super-tall chimneys really cemented this idea for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14933317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14933317

justicezyx 9y ago

Sure. However, you are exactly falling victim of the illusion. When you say "contaminated mushrooms and areas of increased radioactivity", do you have any idea how much damage such radio activity can cause? Is it really that serious at all? When you say "catastrophe on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima", what exactly is the catastrophe? How can you quantify it? Is there any informed discussion? Then go back to the point of the article: Talk to an expert... Stop acting like a manipulated mindless person...

deleted 9y ago
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guscost 9y ago

With comments here, I try to maintain an assumption of good faith as often as possible. Meaning I have to allow and even assume that you're sharing these concerns because you honestly think that the risks are serious enough to justify discouraging any use of this technology. But even though I will assume this, I still think that your information comes from a pipeline with a bad actor somewhere. The omissions and the hyperbole are just too consistent. A while ago I realized that these bad actors have (consciously or unconsciously) stopped arguing as engineers, and that this might be because the "fission answer" is simply one that they do not want to hear. It's a classic case of begging the question - either the answer is a combination of windmills and solar panels, or it can't possibly be an answer. Seeing the same reaction to a random post about an idea for super-tall chimneys really cemented this idea for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14933317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14933317