Jimmy Carter was unjustly shit on for years.

[NNadir]

25. Everybody seems to have a huge misunderstanding of his role...

...in nuclear technology.

My least favorite exaggeration is how he "saved Ontario" (or even "Saved Canada and "saved Detroit" ) from the Chalk River CRX meltdown.

What he did was to work with a team to briefly go into the core for a few seconds to loosen a bolt so the reactor could be repaired and restarted. He was very honest about what he did. The reactor was restarted and ran for years afterwards. He did get exposure to radiation but obviously not enough to impair his health.

I note he was physically present at two reactor meltdowns, CRX and TMI. It should tell people something that he lived to 100. I note that his family apparently had a rare genetic mutation that led all three of his siblings as well his father to dying young of pancreatic cancer. His mother died late in life from the same disease. The mutation is unusual in that it is dominant so heterzygous holders of that genome get the cancer. It is possible that he was homozygous for the recessive nonpathogenic gene, which is more likely than his survival being from radiation hormesis, which is an area under active investigation. A sample size of N=1 is meaningless but the fact that he was exposed to more radiation than most of us certainly is interesting in light of his long and productive life.

His nuclear policies in particular as well as his general energy policies as President, while often praised were unwise in my view.