this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
360 points (95.0% liked)

Not The Onion

11929 readers
2 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Yeah it's also people using those incidents for fear mongering. Especially when coal and oil have killed way more people than every nuclear incident combined, including nuclear weapons.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The psychological impact of a meltdown versus slow poisoning is important. Similar to how fire bombings were more deadly and destructive than the nuclear bombs were, but the nukes have a bigger impact on us mentally

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Familiarity also. People are more afraid of dying in a very rare plane crash than dying in a car accident. Same with terrorism vs regular crime.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah we firebomed Tokyo to cinders. Hardly any of the original buildings remain and the ones that did are all landmarks.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've heard people say shit like "after Chernobyl, two fishermen were instantly vaporized and only boots left on the bank!" Like, no, that never happened since it wasn't an atomic bomb.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

The closest to that were the people on the bridge who were looking at the radiation that died a couple of days after.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Chernobyl showed that an accident could make an entire region unlivable indefinitely, Three Mile Island showed that an accident could happen in the US too

Nuclear accidents became real. People could no longer trust that all the safeguards and safety culture could prevent it. And the impact of how serious an accident could get outweighs the rarity.

Or a more objective and dispassionate way to look at it, is the seriousness of any potential accidents caused enough process safeguard to make nuclear power too expensive to be worthwhile