19 ms·
I read the article and just thought about the big tobacco "merchants of doubt" strategy... causality is pretty hard in general; ascribing certain causality to a
by pdorje 7y ago
I read the article and just thought about the big tobacco "merchants of doubt" strategy... causality is pretty hard in general; ascribing certain causality to a disease 20 years after radiation exposure is way harder.
And I think one point the series makes that he tries to make the opposite, is that people at Chernobyl and adjacencies had "the friendly atom", they didn't had much fear of radiation. Even someone as Akimov, who had a lifetime exposure in another accident before Chernobyl, were "chasing the dragon tail" of radiation. Vodka clears it up, right?
The thing is, like quantum behavior in general, chance is pretty much high when we talk radiation. The chance of DNA or cellular damage being significant and leading to something, when you just perchance aspire a few particles of some isotope "grows" with time and how strong and the type of the source. Up to acute exposure it is just a very hard multi-causal probabilistic situation.
Normally we understand that a few times background radiation wouldn't harm you, when even the sun and background radiation are in fact always harming us, mostly, of course, in ways our body can USUALLY cope with. So, any increase in magnitude, is an increase in probable suffering, and we are talking millennia here, with some isotopes.
So, nuclear energy may have its uses, sure. Particularly, we have a lot of reactors working now, and perhaps we should let them take their course. But not to fear radiation with extreme prejudice is just to be careless about it. This is an industry tied with the defense department. The dejects are strategic and must be guarded and watched -- and don't come with thorium and new ways of recycling... it might be less so, but it is always a pretty dirty business, with the military and defense, and human errors, and "acts of god".
I believe when the Chernobyl series guy said "it couldn't have happened in the US", well... that exact way, not. But capitalism has, as we all so painfully know now, it's own incentives for disinformation and lies. Also, I live in Brazil, where they are always trying to revive some dated German project to build reactors. And if the Japanese had "issues", anyone can.
We in Brazil can't even contain common dirt, so it doesn't come upon us and kill hundreds... don't believe engineers will save us, believe human incompetence and greed may take longer, but always find a crack and blow the whole thing up -- no matter the economic system.
edit: tried to fix convoluted sentence in the third paragraph, and a few misspellings.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoFellow Brazilian here. Many if not most of our energy comes from hydroelectricity. We just had two catastrophic dam failures in the last few years, causing hundreds of deaths. (mining residue dams unrelated to hydroelectricity). The worldwide death toll record for dam failure is in the hundreds of thousands, long ago in China. The risks of nuclear power are large on themselves, but they have to be compared with the risks of other types of energy. A rooftop solar panel installer that falls and dies will make the local news if as much. And don't even get me started on coal.
- CyanBird 7y agoI live in Uruguay and a shudder runs by my spine to even think of what might happen if Brazil government and companies where to get their hands in a working reactor/plant. Brazilian companies can't be trusted to handle measly mining residue pools, what makes you even dream that the government and companies would be able to handle nuclear plants? Brazil is the absolute perfect example of a country where corruption is so high that it shouldn't be allowed to own nuclear plants.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoBrazil has had a working nuclear plant since the 80's, with no issues of note. It's state-run and far from any borders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angra_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angra_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- pdorje 7y agoThe Brazilian dictatorship government planned to have ~100 reactors going by 2000. Thankfully, Brazilian incompetence and the Goiania accident helped us a lot here. Many Brazilians still use things like electric showers, at 5000w. So you are there, cleaning your body everyday, or more than once a day -- Brazilians are crazy about showers, for some reason --, even in hot dry climate, and you still have the water heated. Then you create nuclear residue for thousands of years just to keep the Brazilians taste for dry skin and the fervent attachment to the cleanliness of soap. Any discussion on energy has to take into consideration Limits of Growth and similar studies. The idea is always to have a bigger economy e more energy, and more data centers to foster the next big addictive social network. The reflection should be in alternatives to very polluting energy, sure, but also to drop the focus on growth and economic indicators. The fellow Brazilian there talks about deaths. Deaths, and horrible deaths, and deaths of pets, are to be considered. But also drops in quality of life, dead zones, geopolitical defense, economics (as well, because, everything added, nuclear is quite a bit more expensive than anything else), and long-term thinking (more than 100 or 200 years). Mostly, countries like Brazil wish to have nuclear power for the technology, for when it is needed for geopolitical advance. Even if we have non-belic agreements, in the long run, sovereignty depends on such technology. But Angra is enough, plenty and too much already.