"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 14:16:40 -0500, the infamous "Ed Huntress"
scrawled the following:

I'm looking forward to seeing if my prediction made 20 years ago comes to
pass. I predicted then that more nuclear fission was inevitable, that it
would eventually dominate our electricity generation, with wind and/or
solar
being mostly of local application in a few areas. My heart sunk when Three
Mile Island put the final nail in fission's coffin for at least a
generation. I hope I live long enough to see something happen.

TMI was the next to last nail. Chernobyl was the last.

Of the 4,000 children who developed thyroid cancer in the USSR after
Chernobyl, only 10 died, and they died only because Russian medical
people weren't prepared for it. Adding the soldiers and firefighters
who went into the known extremely radioactive areas to put out fires,
the total number of dead is still benign compared to the global
reaction to the accident: generational paranoia. But both of these
proved that the China Syndrome could never happen. The meltdowns were
self-limiting.

Well, there are several arguments implicit in that paragraph, and they
aren't necessarily compatible.

They boil down to this: You know as well as anyone that there are bad ways
to die, and there are scary ways to die. Dying because you hit a garbage
truck in your car is a bad way to die. Dying because of something you can't
see, that you know is penetrating your body and that you can't escape it,
that you don't know IF or WHEN it's penetrating your body, and whether it's
triggering a cancer or just passing through on its way to the center of the
Earth, is a scary way to die. Rather, I should say it's a scary way to
*think* about dying.

It's something like the gun-control argument. You aren't going to settle
that argument by means of rational statistics. You're dealing with a scary,
mysterious and evil thing that comes right out of a horror movie -- while
you're celebrating Christmas dinner with your family.

I don't know what it will take to change attitudes. Dismissive arguments,
though, aren't it.

--
Ed Huntress

"We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in
Nevada need something else to do." John Cochrane, Univ. of Chicago professor
of economics, Nov. 2008