>> There is a swath of land in Japan you ought to buy and go live on.
Sure, that was bad; however, it goes to the big one I elected not to go into, which is an inability to weight cost vs. benefit. How bad was it when you contrast it with other feasible sources of energy and the risks they pose?
According to a June 2012 Stanford University study by John Ten Hoeve and Mark Jacobson, the radiation released could cause 130 deaths from cancer (the lower bound for the estimater being 15 and the upper bound 1100) and 180 cancer cases (the lower bound being 24 and the upper bound 1800), mostly in Japan. Radiation exposure to workers at the plant was projected to result in 2 to 12 deaths. The radiation released was an order of magnitude lower than that released from Chernobyl, and some 80% of the radioactivity from Fukushima was deposited over the Pacific Ocean; preventive actions taken by the Japanese government may have substantially reduced the health impact of the radiation release. An additional approximately 600 deaths have been reported due to non-radiological causes such as mandatory evacuations. Evacuation procedures after the accident may have potentially reduced deaths from radiation by 3 to 245 cases, the best estimate being 28; even the upper bound projection of the lives saved from the evacuation is lower than the number of deaths already caused by the evacuation itself. [363]
So, which other energy sources do you think are less problematic and would cause less land to become uninhabitable? Solar? (Rhetorical question).
The point is that many on the Left irrationally oppose nuclear power when in reality, it is among the safest of energy sources available to us.
The same mentality took over during the Gulf Spill. One liberal radio host I listened to broke down in tears, referring to it as the worst ecological disaster in the history of the world. At the time, I pointed out to him that you're talking about enough oil to fill the Superdome maybe to a height of 25 or 30 feet in the FREAKING GULF OF MEXICO. It was literally insignificant. Yet, this guy was having a meltdown on the air.
So, I would say it is a scientific issue; there seems to be some inability -- at least among some on the Left -- to consider proportionality or scale. |
