There are usually people who do, but they will be labelled anti-progress and anti-science because there is no scientific background for their worries (yet).
Because they are anti-progress and anti-science. For every horrific story of "we didn't know the dangers involved until it was too late," there are dozens of other new technologies that give people "bad feelings" that lead to great advancements.
Just imagine if the anti-vaccine hysteria of today was present in the the past. Polio and small pox could still be rampant today.
Look at what the anti-nuclear power activists achieved during the 1970s - a greater reliance on fossil fuels for generating electricity.
Now today we are dealing with unfounded fears of GMOs. You and I can probably comfortably live with higher food prices, but millions around the world can not wait for 30 years of study "just in case."
And then you have fearmonging pushed for political reasons, such as this new opposition to building the Keystone pipeline, created to be a political wedge issue. The result? More oil transported by railcar, which uses more energy and causes more oil spills. The rail yard near me now had to expand into swamp on the Mississippi river[1] to accommodate for all the extra oil railcars.
Net necessarily. Being against something regardless of evidence is an anti-progress position, but asking for safety protocols to be established or longitudinal studies to be carried out is quite reasonable.
In this case the scientists and companies knew about the risks and had stringent safety protocols for some people but not for others. If it ain't safe for the CEO, it ain't safe for the janitor.
Chernobyl and Fukushima killed fewer people than many individual coal mining disasters, let alone the deaths caused by coal's air pollution (which includes vastly more radiation than nuclear accidents have generated).
Coal doesn't have the capability for a cost cutting corporation to have a little oops and kill hundreds of thousands, or irradiate chunks of a state.
We've been lucky so far. There have been multiple nuclear accidents -- including 3 mile island -- that could have been far worse and weren't because of luck. Luck is not a viable strategy for dealing with nuclear power.
Nuclear doesn't really have the ability to kill hundreds of thousands - even Chernobyl's verified deaths (Greenpeace estimates aside) are under 100, and Fukushima didn't kill a single person. It's never going to go off like a nuke.
Chernobyl did serve as a pretty decent area-denial weapon, but advances in both process and reactor design make such a thing extraordinarily unlikely today. The theoretical, worst-case scenarios for nuclear are still better than the every-day reality of coal and oil.
> Indeed, eating 29 pounds' worth of the radioactive creatures would result in radioactivity exposure equivalent to that of a transatlantic plane ride.
> Because something hasn't happened yet it can't is your claim?
I could be wrong, but I think the claim is more "the fact that some people, even a large number of people, feel uncomfortable is not scientific evidence that something is dangerous." Or, "the ability to tell a story about some possible disaster doesn't actually make that disaster likely or possible."
I went to high school in Riverside, California. UC Riverside has an incredible entomology department ( http://www.entomology.ucr.edu/ ). I'm glad that UCR is able to largely escape notice when it wants to study all kinds of invasive species, even if people who have no understanding of how the lab works can come up with nightmare scenarios involving escaped insects or lab workers infected with rare, deadly and contagious diseases. My opinion isn't based on the fact that none of those nightmare scenarios has happened yet; it's based on the fact that the people who know what they're talking about say that those scenarios are literally impossible.
If your claim is that a severe nuclear meltdown with widescale radiation release is literally impossible -- a claim you couldn't even get the NRC to make -- then I'm going to point to actual experience, starting with 3 mile island, fukushima, chernobyl, etc, and a series of very close near misses with widespread radiation release. So it turns out to be quite possible.
I think our biggest disagreement is what counts as a nightmare scenario. For instance, while 3 Mile Island did involve a radiation release, it was very small. I don't consider another 3 Mile Island to be a nightmare scenario. And I believe that we learned from 3 Mile Island, so something that bad is highly unlikely, although within the realm of possibility.
Fukushima involved a major earthquake, a tsunami, a lack of power, and a plant that had reached its end of life. Even with that combination of bad luck, less radiation was released than Chernobyl. I don't worry about a similar disaster in the United States because we simply don't have many nuclear plants in areas that can actually be hit by tsunamis. Clearly we have reactors in earthquake-prone areas (and others in tornado-prone and hurricane-prone areas), but the plants were designed with those dangers in mind. While it is possible to have a similar disaster in the US, the chance of it happening is small enough that I don't lose sleep over the risk.
Chernobyl is the worst nuclear power plant accident ever. Chernobyl's design was below Western standards of the time, and well below current Western standards. There is no plant in operation in the US that could have a disaster as large as Chernobyl. And there is certainly no chance of a disaster larger than Chernobyl. It is literally impossible (for a larger disaster to occur).
If you'd said "very, very unlikely," I'd be fine, but in practice not much of anything is actually impossible. So now I have to worry about "people who know what they're talking about" throwing around unjustified assertions.
It's one thing when the guys running the Large Hadron Collider say that it's very very unlikely that they'll accidentally destroy the universe. (I'm OK with running the LHC).
It's another when scientists say that widespread concern for nightmare scenarios is based entirely on misunderstanding and scientific illiteracy. For instance, I don't worry about nuclear power plants turning into nuclear bombs -- even in the face of terrorism -- not because it's never happened but because the plants are designed to make that scenario impossible. I don't worry about a meltdown that melts through the power plant and the Earth's crust creating a new volcano because scientists say that's not possible.
Yes, there are nightmare scenarios that actually are possible. But when the two sides are "real experts who say the risk is too small to worry about" and "uncomfortable scientifically illiterate public," I put my money on the experts.
> Because something hasn't happened yet it can't is your claim?
Nuclear reactors physically cannot generate a nuclear explosion of the sort you'd get from a bomb.
They've been in use for 60 years. More people per unit of energy die from solar and hydro accidents than from nuclear power, and coal is many, many times more deadly. Turkey's coal mining accident this year killed 3x what Chernobyl - the world's worst nuclear disaster - did, and such mining disasters are routine.
I never claimed they can generate a nuclear detonation, but consider your strawman thoroughly refuted. They can, as demonstrated, leak radioactive particles.
You continue to claim that because something hasn't happened yet, it won't. Flight happened for 60 years before the SR-71. Just to pick one obvious example.
301 people dying in Turkey is irrelevant (though obviously my condolences to their families). Coal doesn't have the ability to, for example, leak radioactive particles over the entirety of nyc. Which we have no practical method to evacuate.
http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan... indicates 13,000 deaths a year attributable to coal. In the extraordinarily unlikely (given better reactor design and regulation) event of a Chernobyl-level incident near NYC, in the extraordinarily unlikely (given that Chernobyl killed 100) event it kills 10% of New York City, nuclear power's death toll would still only match coal's during that time.
Incidentally, Chernobyl's exclusion zone is ~30km radius. There aren't any plants that close to NYC - they're generally carefully placed and have extensive evacuation plans in place for the surrounding areas.
Dude, you're the one arguing that nuclear plants don't detonate like bombs, a point contested solely in your head.
Your facts about chernobyl are misleading. Pripyat -- population roughly 50k -- was evacuated. Hence few direct deaths. What can't we possibly do in nyc? Evacuate it. And it's not like there's a magical air filter 30km outside nuclear plants. Indian Point has 15 million living within 50 miles at most. Hope Creek is 40 miles from Philly. And those two are just off the top of my head. Unless your strategy in the case of a meltdown is to hope that the winds blow the right direction -- in which case I reiterate my point about luck.
There are usually people who do, but they will be labelled anti-progress and anti-science because there is no scientific background for their worries (yet).