14 ms·

This is the issue with nuclear in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries

by jasmer 4y ago

This is the issue with nuclear in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila, regions devastated. There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle nuclear technologies.

JasonFruit 4y ago
This sounds like "Great White Father" stuff to me. Are wealthy countries really so suited to telling poorer ones what they may and may not do to join the wealthy?
- jasmer 4y ago
  Yes. It's imperfect but that's the way it is, it's already in place with 'Nuclear Non Proliferation' [1] and many other things. It's a 'free world' until interests are threatened, then you see where the balance of power is, moreover, there are legitimate issues of responsibility here. Canada, Japan, Ukraine, Brazil, Cameroon - all different places in so many ways, it is what it is. That's diversity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio... EDIT: FYI I'm being a bit tounge-in-cheek with the garbage thing, I realize 'Rich Countries' don't do sewage and garbage perfectly well either, which is partly the point. The other point is that other places are objectively much worse.
ElectricalUnion 4y ago
This is the issue with fossil fuel technology in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila, regions devastated. There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle fossil fuel technologies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jrockway 4y ago
  Fossil fuel technology is easy. You dispose of the waste products into the atmosphere which is like infinitely vast! Most of the really damaging stuff will be washed out by rain, and stored in all of these previously-useless lakes and rivers. Let's be honest, what has a lake or river done for YOU lately? If those dinosaurs didn't want us to burn their decayed corpses so we could have McMansions in the suburbs and still commute to the office every day, they shouldn't have been hit by that big meteor!
- spoils19 4y ago
  This is the issue with sewage technology in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila, regions devastated. There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage garbage, you can't handle sewage technologies.
- Kon5ole 4y ago
  The kind of damage a few malicious or negligent individuals can cause in an afternoon from nuclear operations can't be matched by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have caused damage through the effort of billions of people over centuries. The history of fossil fuels also shows us that humans are negligent over time, which seems to me a good argument against building a large infrastructure of nuclear operations.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    The difference: When nuclear energy goes wrong, thousands of people die. When fossil fuels go right, millions of people die.
- jasmer 4y ago
  ? There is no analogy here. There are no existential risks from Oil. Danger is small and proportional to an installation. You have a big refinery fire and five people die? That could happen with any tech. Fukishima is unusable for generations. Chernonbyl same. Spent fuel from a nuclear reactor could feasibly make most of Manhattan unlivable in just a few hours. Oil and Nuclear don't share the same risk profile.
alerighi 4y ago
Well so nobody can handle nuclear technologies, since nobody handles garbage correctly. Just look at how many stuff that can be recycled get tossed into general waste, or how much electronic waste we send to poor countries since we can't deal with it. In reality fortunately the management of nuclear waste is completely different than everything else, it's highly regulated and controlled by international inspectors. In fact this incident doesn't prove that nuclear power is unsafe, since it didn't interest a nuclear power plant but rather a medical device with radioactive substances in them (and radiation sources are used commonly in the conventional industry, in every country, even the one that doesn't have any nuclear at all).
- jasmer 4y ago
  Where are the regulations around combat teams hiding in Nuclear Power plants? Artillery shells landing 500ft from reactors? Small quasi-accidents happening because one regime wants to 'blame it' on another? Nuclear staff being locked into the facility? Regulations exist until someone decides they don't because they don't want to pay for something, they are lazy, incompetent. Google 'Jamie Metzl' who is a very respected researcher who lays out the history of the establishment of Biolabs in China, and points at the very strong likelihood that COVID was created in a lab and is the result of a long series of regulatory, oversight, political and scientific failures. Biolabs are 'safe' until the host country decides to screw the regulators because they want to save money on construction, or some person installs substandard materials because somewhere down the long globalized value chain, someone replaced one thing with another, on purpose or by accident, and it compromises the entire system. Those are the kinds of systemic risks that exist with things like viruses and Nuclear tech that normal thinking doesn't account for. Likely we need an approach that works even if humans fail completely, or, that can be maintained in more stable systems.
barelyauser 4y ago
Demand it? From who? Countries are sovereign. This post reads very badly.
- jasmer 4y ago
  'Sovereignty' is a social construct. Most social groups do not allow children or crazy people to have guns, and they enforce a whole range of other rules as well. This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of innate thing. More specifically - the rules are already in place for Nuclear Weapons. 'Rich countries' will not allow messed up nations to get them, or rather, it will be very difficult. [1] It's the same with Nuclear technology of the same risk. Colombia can go ahead and try to make Nuclear Weapons and see what happens. [1] https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/ https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    > This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of innate thing. Ukraine and Russia unfortunately show to us all that what defines what's a 'sovereign country' and what isn't is either having youself, or being a very close ally of countries that have stockpiles and [innate?] ability to use nuclear weapons.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Spaniard here. You are deluded. There are weapons far more dangerous today than nuclear.
    - jasmer 4y ago
      Yes, and those things are extremely controlled as well. The delusion is entirely yours.
roywiggins 4y ago
Nuclear medicine in middle-income countries has almost certainly saved orders of magnitude more people than it's killed. Even the specific source in the Goiânia accident could easily have been responsible for saving more lives than it ended up taking. Of course these things have risks. But these radiotherapy sources aren't being used for fun; the benefits are substantial. That an accident that killed 4 people is significant enough to get its own name and Wikipedia article suggests to me that the risk isn't actually that high.
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
You could say the same about almost all types of industrial, chemical and medical waste.
- jasmer 4y ago
  Nuclear has a fundamentally different risk profile. Nuclear failures mean possibly a hugely disproportionate number of deaths, entire regions unusable, and very risky externalizations such as someone using waste to make most of Manhattan unlivable, which is absolutely a possibility that exist, and does not for almost all other technologies. People here are talking about 'irrational fear' (?) it's 'irrational' not to account for those things. There are possibly ways to mitigate it but there are externalizations with Nuclear that cannot be avoided.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > entire regions unusable True. > hugely disproportionate number of deaths Not really true. As a reference, the Bhopal industrial disaster killed an estimated 20-25k people, with official numbers at 7.5k, with more than 500k with non-fatal poisoning. Chernobyl, where everything that could go wrong went wrong, coupled with massive design and human flaws, resulted in around 4000 deaths as of today according to the WHO. Of course the density isn't really comparable, but it kind of is because nuclear power plants don't need a lot of employees and are usually far away from big population centers. The evacuation of the zone around Fukushima, and an oil tank fire caused more dead than the nuclear accident in the power plant, all caused by the same earthquake+tsunami.
murat124 4y ago
The issue with the nuclear power is the nuclear warhead. Mankind would be perfectly fine with nuclear power but will always be at risk as long as it is weaponized. Some folks being fatally radiated does not impose risk to our kind.
- kergonath 4y ago
  But then people don't know a thing about isotopes, fertile and fissile nuclei, or what actually goes into a bomb. The reactors that produced the plutonium used in warheads largely came from specialised reactors designed for this purpose only. You cannot get the same stuff out of civilian reactors.
- zirgs 4y ago
  I'd argue that nuclear warheads have saved millions of lives by preventing another world war. MAD prevents nuclear weapons states from waging war against each other directly.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    You realise of course that in the alternative universe in which this was not the case, you'd be unable to make this statement. That is generalisable to all global catastrophic risk: by virtue of the fact that they can occur once, and once only, means that we're effectively living in the survivorship-bias universe in which they did not occur. That thought's only recently occurred to me, though Richard Posner wrote of it. <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109712403433781694 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109712403433781694> By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false. -Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13. <https://archive.org/details/catastropheriskr00posn/page/13/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/catastropheriskr00posn/page/13/m...>
icambron 4y ago
We seem to manage nuclear very well, and one piece of evidence is how horrifying it is that four people died in this story, and the degree of concern it generated. Nuclear stuff is like airline safety; there's a good cultural and governmental stance around taking its risks seriously. But more importantly, not responsible enough compared to which alternatives? In this case, it was a device for radiation therapy. The solution here can't be that lots of people die of cancer because nuclear is too dangerous. That just doesn't add up. For nuclear tech more generally, I posit that we are far less responsible with fossil fuels, and that they have done, and will continue to do, vast amounts of damage. Using nuclear would save a lot of lives. You can't just weigh the risk of some course of action against the absence of that risk; you have to weigh it against the risks of the alternatives or the risk of not solving the problem at all. No one is using this tech just for fun. I think some of this is a psychological effect: awful things that are (or seem like) the status quo get priced into our sense of risk, while exotic-seeming tech with very-differently-shaped risks seem irresponsible. We're also bad at weighing widespread, generalized damage against the low risk of disasters, even if some simple thought experiments make it clear which is better.
- abyssin 4y ago
  You could also compare nuclear power to hydroelectric power. Hydroelectric power causes orders of magnitude more deaths.
  - Kon5ole 4y ago
    Such comparisons will also indicate that tigers are safer than dogs and guns are safer than cars.
    - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
      How so? Tigers kills at least a order of magnitude more that dogs, and so do guns kill [+8%] more people that cars - at least in the USA.
      - 4y ago
duped 4y ago
> This is the issue with nuclear in general nuclear what? chemistry?
poyu 4y ago
Boy, I have an article for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
rpastuszak 4y ago
I see where you’re coming from, but the way the western countries managed their garbage problem was to send it to those especially unprepared countries (think: sending container ships with trash from the US to China). I think you’re mixing a perceived sense of responsibility and power dynamics. A better solution would involve putting more effort in helping those poorer countries have the means to handle these problems better. It’s the 21st century, we’re much more intertwined than we’ve ever been.
- ars 4y ago
  > think: sending container ships with trash from the US to China That's not a real thing. It's a persistent myth, but it's not actually real.
  - rpastuszak 4y ago
    Of course it is. Just read up on "China Waste Import Ban". > China is the largest importer of waste plastics, accounting for 56% of the global market.[1] Meanwhile, the United States, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom are the main source countries.[1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6010324/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6010324/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil... I do wish I was wrong though. Again, we cannot afford to think only locally any more. We're much more interconnected.
kergonath 4y ago
This is the issue with people in general. Any industry is going to cause a certain number of deaths. And nuclear is far from being the worst. Particularly nuclear medicine, which has saved untold number of people.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Sadly not even enough. Formerly well-managed countries have revolutions and get into wars.
caned 4y ago
Rich countries only manage sewage and garbage to the extent that it's out of sight and out of mind. Arguably nobody is "responsible enough."
erredois 4y ago
I think statistics do not support this fear. This is in Brazil that probably has been running thousands of this equipments over decades, with this one significant incident. Also runs two nuclear power plants and enriches uranium locally without any relevant incident. I think this irrational fear of atomic poses more danger because it's something we need , oil kill much more people and renewables alone won't cut it. Even Brazil that runs a lot of hidro eventually needs to run fossil fuel thermoelectric because of low volume of rains.
mr_toad 4y ago
> In short, we are not responsible enough. You could make the same argument about fire.

by jasmer 4y ago

JasonFruit 4y ago

This sounds like "Great White Father" stuff to me. Are wealthy countries really so suited to telling poorer ones what they may and may not do to join the wealthy?

jasmer 4y ago
Yes. It's imperfect but that's the way it is, it's already in place with 'Nuclear Non Proliferation' [1] and many other things. It's a 'free world' until interests are threatened, then you see where the balance of power is, moreover, there are legitimate issues of responsibility here. Canada, Japan, Ukraine, Brazil, Cameroon - all different places in so many ways, it is what it is. That's diversity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio... EDIT: FYI I'm being a bit tounge-in-cheek with the garbage thing, I realize 'Rich Countries' don't do sewage and garbage perfectly well either, which is partly the point. The other point is that other places are objectively much worse.

ElectricalUnion 4y ago

This is the issue with fossil fuel technology in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila, regions devastated. There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle fossil fuel technologies.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jrockway 4y ago
Fossil fuel technology is easy. You dispose of the waste products into the atmosphere which is like infinitely vast! Most of the really damaging stuff will be washed out by rain, and stored in all of these previously-useless lakes and rivers. Let's be honest, what has a lake or river done for YOU lately? If those dinosaurs didn't want us to burn their decayed corpses so we could have McMansions in the suburbs and still commute to the office every day, they shouldn't have been hit by that big meteor!
spoils19 4y ago
This is the issue with sewage technology in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila, regions devastated. There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage garbage, you can't handle sewage technologies.
Kon5ole 4y ago
The kind of damage a few malicious or negligent individuals can cause in an afternoon from nuclear operations can't be matched by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have caused damage through the effort of billions of people over centuries. The history of fossil fuels also shows us that humans are negligent over time, which seems to me a good argument against building a large infrastructure of nuclear operations.
- scarmig 4y ago
  The difference: When nuclear energy goes wrong, thousands of people die. When fossil fuels go right, millions of people die.
jasmer 4y ago
? There is no analogy here. There are no existential risks from Oil. Danger is small and proportional to an installation. You have a big refinery fire and five people die? That could happen with any tech. Fukishima is unusable for generations. Chernonbyl same. Spent fuel from a nuclear reactor could feasibly make most of Manhattan unlivable in just a few hours. Oil and Nuclear don't share the same risk profile.

alerighi 4y ago

Well so nobody can handle nuclear technologies, since nobody handles garbage correctly. Just look at how many stuff that can be recycled get tossed into general waste, or how much electronic waste we send to poor countries since we can't deal with it. In reality fortunately the management of nuclear waste is completely different than everything else, it's highly regulated and controlled by international inspectors. In fact this incident doesn't prove that nuclear power is unsafe, since it didn't interest a nuclear power plant but rather a medical device with radioactive substances in them (and radiation sources are used commonly in the conventional industry, in every country, even the one that doesn't have any nuclear at all).

jasmer 4y ago
Where are the regulations around combat teams hiding in Nuclear Power plants? Artillery shells landing 500ft from reactors? Small quasi-accidents happening because one regime wants to 'blame it' on another? Nuclear staff being locked into the facility? Regulations exist until someone decides they don't because they don't want to pay for something, they are lazy, incompetent. Google 'Jamie Metzl' who is a very respected researcher who lays out the history of the establishment of Biolabs in China, and points at the very strong likelihood that COVID was created in a lab and is the result of a long series of regulatory, oversight, political and scientific failures. Biolabs are 'safe' until the host country decides to screw the regulators because they want to save money on construction, or some person installs substandard materials because somewhere down the long globalized value chain, someone replaced one thing with another, on purpose or by accident, and it compromises the entire system. Those are the kinds of systemic risks that exist with things like viruses and Nuclear tech that normal thinking doesn't account for. Likely we need an approach that works even if humans fail completely, or, that can be maintained in more stable systems.

barelyauser 4y ago

Demand it? From who? Countries are sovereign. This post reads very badly.

jasmer 4y ago
'Sovereignty' is a social construct. Most social groups do not allow children or crazy people to have guns, and they enforce a whole range of other rules as well. This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of innate thing. More specifically - the rules are already in place for Nuclear Weapons. 'Rich countries' will not allow messed up nations to get them, or rather, it will be very difficult. [1] It's the same with Nuclear technology of the same risk. Colombia can go ahead and try to make Nuclear Weapons and see what happens. [1] https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/ https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of innate thing. Ukraine and Russia unfortunately show to us all that what defines what's a 'sovereign country' and what isn't is either having youself, or being a very close ally of countries that have stockpiles and [innate?] ability to use nuclear weapons.
- anthk 4y ago
  Spaniard here. You are deluded. There are weapons far more dangerous today than nuclear.
  - jasmer 4y ago
    Yes, and those things are extremely controlled as well. The delusion is entirely yours.

roywiggins 4y ago

Nuclear medicine in middle-income countries has almost certainly saved orders of magnitude more people than it's killed. Even the specific source in the Goiânia accident could easily have been responsible for saving more lives than it ended up taking. Of course these things have risks. But these radiotherapy sources aren't being used for fun; the benefits are substantial. That an accident that killed 4 people is significant enough to get its own name and Wikipedia article suggests to me that the risk isn't actually that high.

Karawebnetwork 4y ago

You could say the same about almost all types of industrial, chemical and medical waste.

jasmer 4y ago
Nuclear has a fundamentally different risk profile. Nuclear failures mean possibly a hugely disproportionate number of deaths, entire regions unusable, and very risky externalizations such as someone using waste to make most of Manhattan unlivable, which is absolutely a possibility that exist, and does not for almost all other technologies. People here are talking about 'irrational fear' (?) it's 'irrational' not to account for those things. There are possibly ways to mitigate it but there are externalizations with Nuclear that cannot be avoided.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > entire regions unusable True. > hugely disproportionate number of deaths Not really true. As a reference, the Bhopal industrial disaster killed an estimated 20-25k people, with official numbers at 7.5k, with more than 500k with non-fatal poisoning. Chernobyl, where everything that could go wrong went wrong, coupled with massive design and human flaws, resulted in around 4000 deaths as of today according to the WHO. Of course the density isn't really comparable, but it kind of is because nuclear power plants don't need a lot of employees and are usually far away from big population centers. The evacuation of the zone around Fukushima, and an oil tank fire caused more dead than the nuclear accident in the power plant, all caused by the same earthquake+tsunami.

murat124 4y ago

The issue with the nuclear power is the nuclear warhead. Mankind would be perfectly fine with nuclear power but will always be at risk as long as it is weaponized. Some folks being fatally radiated does not impose risk to our kind.

kergonath 4y ago
But then people don't know a thing about isotopes, fertile and fissile nuclei, or what actually goes into a bomb. The reactors that produced the plutonium used in warheads largely came from specialised reactors designed for this purpose only. You cannot get the same stuff out of civilian reactors.
zirgs 4y ago
I'd argue that nuclear warheads have saved millions of lives by preventing another world war. MAD prevents nuclear weapons states from waging war against each other directly.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  You realise of course that in the alternative universe in which this was not the case, you'd be unable to make this statement. That is generalisable to all global catastrophic risk: by virtue of the fact that they can occur once, and once only, means that we're effectively living in the survivorship-bias universe in which they did not occur. That thought's only recently occurred to me, though Richard Posner wrote of it. <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109712403433781694 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109712403433781694> By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false. -Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13. <https://archive.org/details/catastropheriskr00posn/page/13/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/catastropheriskr00posn/page/13/m...>

icambron 4y ago

We seem to manage nuclear very well, and one piece of evidence is how horrifying it is that four people died in this story, and the degree of concern it generated. Nuclear stuff is like airline safety; there's a good cultural and governmental stance around taking its risks seriously. But more importantly, not responsible enough compared to which alternatives? In this case, it was a device for radiation therapy. The solution here can't be that lots of people die of cancer because nuclear is too dangerous. That just doesn't add up. For nuclear tech more generally, I posit that we are far less responsible with fossil fuels, and that they have done, and will continue to do, vast amounts of damage. Using nuclear would save a lot of lives. You can't just weigh the risk of some course of action against the absence of that risk; you have to weigh it against the risks of the alternatives or the risk of not solving the problem at all. No one is using this tech just for fun. I think some of this is a psychological effect: awful things that are (or seem like) the status quo get priced into our sense of risk, while exotic-seeming tech with very-differently-shaped risks seem irresponsible. We're also bad at weighing widespread, generalized damage against the low risk of disasters, even if some simple thought experiments make it clear which is better.

abyssin 4y ago
You could also compare nuclear power to hydroelectric power. Hydroelectric power causes orders of magnitude more deaths.
- Kon5ole 4y ago
  Such comparisons will also indicate that tigers are safer than dogs and guns are safer than cars.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    How so? Tigers kills at least a order of magnitude more that dogs, and so do guns kill [+8%] more people that cars - at least in the USA.
    - 4y ago

duped 4y ago

> This is the issue with nuclear in general nuclear what? chemistry?

poyu 4y ago

Boy, I have an article for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

rpastuszak 4y ago

I see where you’re coming from, but the way the western countries managed their garbage problem was to send it to those especially unprepared countries (think: sending container ships with trash from the US to China). I think you’re mixing a perceived sense of responsibility and power dynamics. A better solution would involve putting more effort in helping those poorer countries have the means to handle these problems better. It’s the 21st century, we’re much more intertwined than we’ve ever been.

ars 4y ago
> think: sending container ships with trash from the US to China That's not a real thing. It's a persistent myth, but it's not actually real.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  Of course it is. Just read up on "China Waste Import Ban". > China is the largest importer of waste plastics, accounting for 56% of the global market.[1] Meanwhile, the United States, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom are the main source countries.[1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6010324/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6010324/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil... I do wish I was wrong though. Again, we cannot afford to think only locally any more. We're much more interconnected.

kergonath 4y ago

This is the issue with people in general. Any industry is going to cause a certain number of deaths. And nuclear is far from being the worst. Particularly nuclear medicine, which has saved untold number of people.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Sadly not even enough. Formerly well-managed countries have revolutions and get into wars.

caned 4y ago

Rich countries only manage sewage and garbage to the extent that it's out of sight and out of mind. Arguably nobody is "responsible enough."

erredois 4y ago

I think statistics do not support this fear. This is in Brazil that probably has been running thousands of this equipments over decades, with this one significant incident. Also runs two nuclear power plants and enriches uranium locally without any relevant incident. I think this irrational fear of atomic poses more danger because it's something we need , oil kill much more people and renewables alone won't cut it. Even Brazil that runs a lot of hidro eventually needs to run fossil fuel thermoelectric because of low volume of rains.

mr_toad 4y ago

> In short, we are not responsible enough. You could make the same argument about fire.