GRA
Well-known member
LeftieBiker said:Thanks for the above. As I skimmed down I was gritting my teeth preparing to have to respond. You did it for me. I will add that I'll take extra human deaths - even extra nonhuman deaths - from air pollution over the Russian Roulette style chance of ruining whole regions for millennia. Best, though, is to not burn coal OR roll the dice with nuclear power.
Who's ruined whole regions for millenia? Small areas, sure - you definitely don't want to linger in the (former) town of Pripyat.
We differ on our willingness to subject millions of people to early deaths annually, versus a few thousand over the entire life of a single plant 'accident' that was a textbook case of incompetence and malfeasance, of an unsafe design that would never have been accepted in any country with a government that had to answer to its citizens. In fact, Chernobyl's additional deaths (outside of those who died of acute radiation sickness, who were mainly those involved in trying to put out the fire) were so small that they were in the noise of total cancer deaths over the same period. The FSU, in particular, was a toxic sewer of all kinds with little or no regard for safety, while unhealthy lifestyles simply added to the existing high cancer rates. In addition to Chernobyl there was Chelyabinsk-40 aka Kyshtym, which was a reactor serving the same purpose as Hanford did in the U.S., producing plutonium for the Soviet nuclear weapons program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
I first read about Kyshtym in an article in "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" by one of the chief soviet weapons designers, shortly after the end of the cold war briefly opened up access to their side, and then did some further research on it. We almost had a similar accident at Hanford, but we took steps to prevent it. I remember that even before the accident, it was stated that standing on the shore of Lake Kyzyltash back when untreated waste was being dumped into it, you could get a lethal dose of radiation in 1 hour.