"Fukushima taught the cynical lesson that overreaction to and media-fueled mindless panic about nuclear incidents causes more damage and death than nuclear incidents themselves."
Yes, but did we really take that lesson to heart? Because one can react to that in different ways. Currently I'm leaning to towards, that yes, maybe I can be confident nuclear can be engineered to (for the money we have) acceptably safe. But I'm not convinced we can manage the social cost and education effort and corruption mitigation needed. Damage and death caused by panic is still damage and death.
People forget that the real tragedy with "fukushima" was the tsunami, the nuclear thing is a minor part of that. Seriously, over 20 000 people died from the tsunami and countless more doesn't even have a home anymore. But the fact that some people will not be able to move back to their homes are the real tragedy?
Tsunamis mankind didn't create, so I think the feel is a bit different. Even though deaths from that is also our own responsibility in as far as we could have prevented them. (Building codes, zoning, early warning systems etc.)
But there is a lot of suffering involved with whole communities being erased and ghost towns - sometimes for no great reason. Some places didn't receive much of any radiation but are now dead. Even places where it's allowed now to move back to, people don't want to. Some are afraid, and some don't want to move back to an empty ghost town.
Yes, it is different. But the losses or direct consequences are not.
We are literally about to turn the whole planet into something equivalent to what people are afraid of just because of fear loosing some small communities. It is that absurd.
But then I found my answer - it doesn't matter. The Christian dogma for instance is, no we don't but God wants us to survive despite that we don't deserve it.
If you don't care for that, we will survive or not survive and either of these outcomes will be completely orthogonal to whether we deserve to survive or not.
Alternative for those not subscribing to any particular religion: we prove we're worthy of survival by surviving. If we actually figure our way out of this conundrum, go us!
Yes, but did we really take that lesson to heart? Because one can react to that in different ways. Currently I'm leaning to towards, that yes, maybe I can be confident nuclear can be engineered to (for the money we have) acceptably safe. But I'm not convinced we can manage the social cost and education effort and corruption mitigation needed. Damage and death caused by panic is still damage and death.