...Radioactive Wolves, ironically produced in the same year as the ballyhooed disaster at Fukushima, where 20,000 people were killed by seawater and collapsing buildings and zero (or close to zero) from radiation exposure.
The documentary gives a marvelous overview of the natural environment of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It's part of the PBS Nature series.
There was, as a result of the Fukushima natural disaster no effort to ban coastal cities, but by contrast a huge worldwide effort to ban nuclear power. The rationality of this outcome escapes me. One can still find people, right here at DU, who I personally regard as poorly educated and/or easily mislead who carry on about Fukushima but don't give a rat's ass about the vast death toll associated with fossil fuels.
The question of opposition to nuclear power is driven by a number of factors, including but not limited to selective attention exacerbated by bad science driving bad policy. Specifically the bad science is driven by rote acceptance of the LNT hypothesis, the linear no threshold hypothesis. This hypothesis was driven by work conducted in the 1930s and 1940s, a time at which the science of molecular biology was unimaginably primitive. It has been argued, prominently by the health physicist Ed Calabrese, that some of the basic work on the LNT may have involved scientific fraud.
Most people don't realize that they would die without being radioactive since potassium is an essential element and it has been mildly radioactive for the entire history of life on Earth. That's just the tip of the melting iceberg of course.
When I consider public attitudes to nuclear energy, I am often struck by the absurdity, until I consider that there is case where in a once powerful large prominent nation in North America has placed its future in the hands of an uneducated, ignorant pedophile painted a the rather ugly shade of orange. That explains a lot to me.
Nuclear energy is not risk free, but it doesn't need to be so to be vastly superior to all other forms of energy in terms of risk. It only needs to be vastly superior to all others, which it is.
We lost about three decades of nuclear development to the ignorance of antinukes including the "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes who stalk this space. Much of the losses resulting from these pernicious whiners is now irretreivable. That said, we have re-entered an era of remarkable nuclear creativity not seen since the 1950s and 1960s. It is clearly in the realm of "too little, too late," but it's all that we have going forward.
Expecting public wisdom is a rather dubious enterprise.
History will not forgive us nor should it.
Thanks for your expression of bemusement. I share it.
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