Environment & Energy
In reply to the discussion: We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet’s future [View all]NNadir
(33,518 posts)All of the nuclear operations, including Chernoybl and Fukushima - events which people who know very little science burn coal & gas to generate electricity to complain about endlessly - for the last half a century won't kill as many people as will die today and tomorrow from air pollution.
That would be 38,000 people, more or less, half of whom will be under the age of 5 when they die.
The experimental risk of nuclear power is vanishingly small, which is not to say that people who don't know anything about the topic don't keep inventing imaginary events that they value over the real event: More people dying every seven years than died from all causes, genocide, civilian bombing, combat deaths, and starvation, in World War II.
Your fear of "unique risks" trumps 50 million deaths every seven years how, exactly?
The paper was scientific not political. It's point is that nuclear energy saves lives.
My attachment to Bernie Sanders campaign - which has nothing to do with science, since for all intensive purposes Sanders is uninterested in science, as are, apparently most of his supporters - can be found on the Senator's "Energy" page, with which I'm sure his supporters, with their questionable views on climate change, are familiar.
Nuclear has prevented 1.8 million deaths, and potentially could have saved millions more, were it not for "nuclear exceptionalism," the notion that all other forms of energy can kill at will unless nuclear energy is perfect.
Nuclear energy need not be perfect, to be vastly superior to everything else. It merely needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
Since Bernie Sanders doesn't get that, I sincerely hope that he is not accorded the Democratic nomination. If I am forced to vote for him because his opponent is either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, I will probably have to take a good stiff drink to do it, since it would violate my deepest moral views to have to vote for such a person as Senator Sanders represents. It will be the worst "lesser of two evils" moment I have faced since George H.W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis.
Have a nice evening.