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The anti-nuclear cause wouldn’t have nearly been bolstered as much if the Three Mile Island incident hadn’t occurred.
by Apocryphon 4y ago
The anti-nuclear cause wouldn’t have nearly been bolstered as much if the Three Mile Island incident hadn’t occurred.
- gedy 4y agoMaybe, but its effects and after effects were also blown out of proportion by nuclear power opponents.
- kergonath 4y agoI don’t know, Windscale for example did not seem to have much of an effect, and it was much worse. The way it’s spun in the media has much more weight than the actual risks in most people’s mind.
- Apocryphon 4y agoMaybe because Three Mile is actually American? Perhaps Windscale garnered less coverage because it happened in Britain.
- kergonath 4y agoI am not writing from an American perspective, this is true in European media as well. In any case, you’d think that an accident releasing radionuclides all over Europe would be a better example of the dangers of nuclear than a security system shutting down a reactor as expected in case of emergency. It’s all academic anyway, these discussions are not exactly rational.
- mc32 4y agoWhat happened at TMI was wildly exaggerated by anti-nuke activists. Obviously they took full advantage of the public's ignorance to instill fear into the public such that Nuclear was DOA in the years and decades after their agitative activism. And, so here we are.
- ncmncm 4y agoTMI has been consistently lowballed by nuke advocates. In particular, its very large "venting" of radioactive krypton gas that ran down to the river and spread out in neighborhoods on the riverbanks is never counted among its impacts.
- danny_codes 4y agoThe incredible irony being that nobody died and no evidence has been found of health problems in the affects population. Nuclear energy is about 1000 times safer than getting energy from coal. The level of ignorance in the general population is astounding.
- carapace 4y ago> The level of ignorance in the general population is astounding. In 1979? Years before the Internet? Yes, people were ignorant. Don't get me wrong, I'm the last person to defend ignorance in the general population, but you're speaking from hindsight.
- mc32 4y agoOk, but Fonda and the environmental groups that supported her and the media could have looked at facts and spoken to the experts before disseminating false information, fear, and in general FUD to scuttle the technology.
- carapace 4y agoYou're armchair-quarterbacking events of forty years ago. For the sake of discussion, let's grant your point: Jane Fonda and co. delayed clean nuclear energy by four or five decades. So what? What do we do about it today? How does that help convince the holdovers that we can actually make and run clean nuclear power plants? (Just to be clear, I'm not against nuclear energy. Especially, I'm really hopeful about molten salt reactors and (eventually) fusion power.)
- mc32 4y agoThose same actors and their heirs/replacements could agitate for Nuclear and explain how wrong they were in retarding the technology. Use the same cloud they used to scuttle the tech to revive and invigorate the technology. They should also stress people to seek facts by themselves and to not rely on mouthpieces and emotive arguments when making decisions and choices. To be critical and seek your own information.