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[hunter]

26. I've experienced "nuclear" lab accidents twice.

Neither the result of my own carelessness, thankfully.

They seemed much the same as accidents with toxic chemicals or biohazardous materials, but were somewhat less worrisome because I wore a radiation badge. My negligible exposure was measurable. I never had any such reassurance with non-nuclear accidents.

The scariest thing I commonly worked with was untested blood, but as a lab worker I could protect myself against that pretty well.

Paramedics, nurses, emergency room doctors, etc., face much greater dangers from needle-sticks and the like.

It's probably much less dangerous to be a Fukushima cleanup worker than it is to be a firefighter or paramedic in the USA.

A disaster is a disaster. The earthquake and tsunami that damaged the Fukushima power plant is far more terrifying to me than the nuclear spill afterwards.

The sort of incompetence and mismanagement that caused the Chernobyl or Bhopal disasters are pretty terrifying too.

I don't see what's so exceptional about radioactive toxins when exposures to other industrial toxins are much more common and simply accepted as something either unremarkable or not cause for any strong political reaction.

It makes no sense to chain yourself to the gates of a nuclear power plant one weekend if you are not chaining yourself to the gates of a coal power plant the next.