If you don't believe that as part of the tragedy, and the misinfluenced public's opinion over nuclear industry, then you probably did not get what the parent really means...
You are moving the goal post. This is what OP said:
> Mr Burns was the most environmentally responsible Simpson's character and likely a real scientific expert.
And it's clearly wrong.
Now:
> * Portrait nuclear energy tycoon as the only villain is sad. Because it reflects a unconscious strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful.
From the top of my head the show had a corrupt and inept chief of police, a corrupt mayor, a crazy homicidal clown, a fat tony hanging around freely and an unstable clown. Burns was not the only villain.
He was not a villain because of being a nuclear energy tycoon. He was a villain because of his actions (greed and arrogance and grandeur disillusions).
Now of course by association you could defend the idea that's it's a full blown attack on nuclear. And yes there is a strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful in the US but I'd argue it has more to do with real life events and... I don't know.. cold war era craze for home bunkers to survive an nuclear winter than a cartoon that started at the end of the 80's and uses a badly managed nuclear plant as a laughing device (humor device ?) not even present in every episode.
> * The show can portrait coal miner. Instead of hiding nuclear waste in the tree. Coal miner can pollute the sky as some form of "sky painting".
Are you trying to build the argument that being against nuclear means being for coal ?
Anyway, apart from that three eye fish I don't recall the springfield nuclear plant had incidents that had lasting consequences like Chernobyl or Fukushima had. So apart from being comical...
I don't see where in the show it transpires that the depiction of the springfield nuclear plant reflects a " strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful".
Indeed. But let's be clear that those practices are on the bad actors themselves. Let's not paint these tragedies as some form of inherent flaws of nuclear energy.
One thing I cannot fully communicate with posts like this, is that it's not clear what the intention is. By these posts, I refer to posts which uses emotional summary, backed by human loss that has the subject involved. Then leave no trace of the actual rational conclusion from the facts.
It looks just like an intentional emotional manipulation, which plagued most US news reports. This type of approach, makes rational discussion very difficult to progress.
Edit:
Look at the child reply. See what emotion brings to a discussion. From nuclear energy to illegal disposal of nuclear waste, then to holocaust. The emotion is increasing, but the subject of the discussion is dissolved in the process without any trace of respect to the other parties in the discussion.
Emotion sucks the rationality from the discussion, and literally deprive the common grounds between people. In the end, achieve nothing.
It is a common argumentation method of self-called "rationalists" that the opponent is not rational. It is extremely disingenuous for two reasons:
You go away from arguing about the topic on hand and instead proclaim that all your opponents arguments are not valid. It is basically a "You are stupid and I do not have to listen to your points".
Further true rationality does not define any goals, because it is just about using reason to come to conclusions or for deducting how to best get to a goal. People that claim to be ideology-free are very dangerous, as they are not ideology free, but cannot accept people seeing different goals.
You can see this romantic view of science in a lot of nuclear power advocates. Nuclear power has, standing for progress and a representative of science, become the goal in itself that is needed to be protected.
To come back to the dumping of nuclear waste: For a while that practice was not even illegal, contrary to what you claim. Nuclear power leads to nuclear waste, which has to be handled properly. Because that is expensive, there exists a high probability for improper handling to happen. Given how often improper handling of nuclear waste has happened, it seems like a systematic problem that is also very likely to happen again, as nuclear waste is an issue that stays for a very long time, which probably also means different political systems.
Your argument that improper handling is only the fault of the bad actors that in the end acted out the dumping is invalid. It ignores on one hand, that the responsibility for toxic waste lies with the producers. If they did not take care for a proper disposal it is their fault. On the other hand it ignores the reasoning of the people that do the toxic waste dumping. Usually that happens in poorer regions and people do it simply because they have no alternative way of earning money.
I was saying the post has little context, and based on relatively mainstream mental response, it's reasonable to assume that the OP intends to arouse emotional response through association, instead of lay out it's argument.
> You are stupid and I do not have to listen to your points
...
I was saying that the OP did not provide context and concrete meaning. How is that not listening?
If someone refuses to talk, then it must be the others is "not listening"?!...
> Further true rationality does not define any goals, because it is just about using reason to come to conclusions or for deducting how to best get to a goal. People that claim to be ideology-free are very dangerous, as they are not ideology free, but cannot accept people seeing different goals.
I guess this applies to the grand parent post more than mine?
> You can see this romantic view of science in a lot of nuclear power advocates. Nuclear power has, standing for progress and a representative of science, become the goal in itself that is needed to be protected.
Hah?!
Me and every post I saw uses climate change as the main driving force.
I have never seen anyone claim that nuclear is just plainly noble or something.
Everyone is claiming that tech advanced and nuclear is safer and should be acceptable, if it were to be assessed relatively evenly with alternatives...
> Your argument that improper handling is only the fault of the bad actors that in the end acted out the dumping is invalid
I never argued this
Or I never intended to argue this. But human language is complicated, I blame myself equally as anyone who misunderstood.
Back to bad actor.
No, bad actor in large scale is just interests misaligned. I never doubt there is fundamental issues with nuclear that caused dumping. But let's discuss in current context: emotional public are under skewed image of nuclear.
In this part of your post I believe. It leads people to that conclusion:
>> Edit: Look at the child reply. See what emotion brings to a discussion. From nuclear energy to illegal disposal of nuclear waste, then to holocaust. The emotion is increasing, but the subject of the discussion is dissolved in the process without any trace of respect to the other parties in the discussion.
>> Emotion sucks the rationality from the discussion, and literally deprive the common grounds between people. In the end, achieve nothing.
Frankly, I don't know what to make of it. Sometimes people build arguments with enough cruft to fog their main points and intentionally mislead people and sometimes it's not intentional and they don't realize it. HN also loves to play the definition game sometimes.
I'd just say this:
> But let's discuss in current context: emotional public are under skewed image of nuclear.
Do we have a poll or something to assess where people stand regarding nuclear ?
> Intentions don't mean much when someone somewhere has cut one corner too many and you and your family is in the fallout zone and can't leave the house, open the windows, trust your food or water safety, and that's AFTER the weeks go by before the "general population" finds out about it at all, while the people at the top of the power pyramid know within minutes or hours...
> Then, years later, you read HN comments downplaying the effects and the affected with the same types of arguments as Holocaust deniers.
> It's emotional, but it's not manipulation. It is the reality how it happened.
Of course the writing style is not the same as the one used in a study abstract and probably the poster has some emotions about it but he's not writing irrational or emotional things. I do agree making a comparison with holocaust deniers approaches the Godwin threshold though. I'd have used climate change deniers instead.
Also, one can write rational things while still being driven by emotions.
It is not purely emotional though. There currently are no permanent storages worldwide. The first might soon come online in Sweden, most waste us still in wet storage. Part of it in the ocean too...
Well, but surely the posts are fully emotional, right? The point is not that the facts behind the emotion are meaningless, it's the orientation of the discussion.
Of course one can reach a destination by heading in the opposite direction, because earth is round; but it would be awfully wasteful.
One can also influence people and make things happen by being super emotional/ideological, in other words, being with super little rationality (not that they are incapable, they just orient in that direction naturally). But that would be awfully ineffective.
Intentions don't mean much when someone somewhere has cut one corner too many and you and your family is in the fallout zone and can't leave the house, open the windows, trust your food or water safety, and that's AFTER the weeks go by before the "general population" finds out about it at all, while the people at the top of the power pyramid know within minutes or hours...
Then, years later, you read HN comments downplaying the effects and the affected with the same types of arguments as Holocaust deniers.
It's emotional, but it's not manipulation. It is the reality how it happened.
Dig a hole and dump it in the hole. Then worry about real problems.
I promise you no mutant monster will arise from the earth to destroy civilization.
The hysteria over where we store this waste is really silly. Even if spray it into the air all over the planet, we'd still release 1/100 the amount of thorium and uranium than is currently being released into the air by the world's coal plants. Therefore even if we spray the waste into the air, it's still safer than coal. Burying it in the ground is much, much safer.
A lot has been written on it, and we've been told by many reputable people that it's not a big problem. If climate change really is a dire threat, nuclear waste is just a non-issue relatively speaking. Anyone promoting that we should block nuclear because of waste is some kind of bad faith actor.
I think not a bad faith actor, but an emotionally dominated actor. Most of the anti-nuclear opposition is about gut level emotion. This is why the bar is raised so much higher for nuclear than anything else. The reason boils down to "but this is nuclear!!
Indeed, I have thought about this "deeply". But not hysterically, which is why you seem to be so troubled about a calm assessment of risk that takes into account other risks we already accept and things like opportunity costs.
FWIW, there's nothing super-unique about the Finnish solution. Most countries have suitable geology. AFAICS, the main reason for the success of the project is that various hysterical anti-nuclear activists weren't allowed to dominate the discussion.
