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Wish I could downvote this. Single cases, no matter how tragic, do not make a sweeping condemnation. Do we stop selling cars because a million people a year get
by saulrh 16y ago
Wish I could downvote this. Single cases, no matter how tragic, do not make a sweeping condemnation. Do we stop selling cars because a million people a year get in car accidents and die messily? No. Should we stop building nuclear power plants because, thirty years ago, some idiots built a really, really terrible one and a few thousand people died messily? No.
And, yes, I know that I'm going to get flamed for this. Go ahead. It needs to be said. If we want our species to survive the next hundred years, we need to get our heads out of our emotional rear ends.
- jshen 16y agoI don't disagree, and I wasn't trying to imply that we shouldn't use nuclear power by submitting this link. But, I think we should take a hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves how much energy we waste. Most of us treat electricity like it's free and infinite, and what I want to take away from this is that we should really be more responsible with our energy use because there are consequences.
- cantbecool 16y agoI understand your logic, but just remember, "all machines do eventually break down."
- saulrh 16y agoTrue. Banqaio dam, for example, or the USS Grandcamp in Texas City, or Deepwater Horizon. Nuclear breaks down, and when it does it causes some pretty horrific injuries, but other things break down with far greater frequency and with far more deadly (albeit less media-exploitable) consequences.
- callmevlad 16y agoWish I could downvote this. Just because we need nuclear energy to survive, doesn't mean you need to demote this massive and tragic accident to a statistical blip made up of "single cases".
- breathesalt 16y agoWho told you "we" need nuclear energy to survive?
- callmevlad 16y agoI was basically conceding that point to the parent, since that is not central to the point I'm trying to make. I personally think that we as humans have ample ingenuity to solve our future energy needs, I just don't want to see a world where accidents like Chernobyl and Bhopal (and their many unfortunate victims) are essentially swept under the rug as a cost of doing business.
- saulrh 16y agoAgreed! That's why I think that more people should realize how many deaths are attributable to fossil-fuel air pollution: millions per year.
- saulrh 16y agoAgreed. I wouldn't downvote it simply for bad science. I'd downvote it for appealing to base emotion in a situation where we must rely on reason and nothing else. Chernobyl was a tragedy. Letting it keep us on oil and coal for another fifty years, dooming tens of thousands of people a year to prolonged, painful deaths by lung cancer and asthma would be a travesty. Triage is a necessary evil.