Some of us learned some lessons thirty plus years ago, after Three Mile Island. One of the lessons we learned was that the disaster is spun throughout the media in order to minimize its effects to the gullible, non-technical public.
The default position is to downplay the severity of the crisis and its potential catastrophic loss of life.
Let's have a bit of reality, for a change. Nuclear power could not exist without the governments forcing "liability caps" onto the public and shielding operators and manufacturers from paying the real costs of a meltdown. Their costs are capped at a set amount, far below the actual damage that would result from a total failure. This is government interference in the economy, and something the so-called "conservatives" are supposedly against, but yet, in this case, they are mind-numbingly in favor of it. As are most liberal ideologues. Strange bedfellows.
How it works is: if your house is nuked and you wind up in one of those "uninhabitable areas," then oh well. That's your problem. Your insurance won't cover it. The nuclear industry will not compensate you. Go elsewhere, and good luck.
If nuclear power was forced to compete on a level playing field, it would not exist, and we would not be in such a great amount of danger as we currently are.
Back in the 1970s it was the paradigm of the day that alternative energy sources: solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydrogen, and others would be the next phase of human development. President Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House.
Then Reagan and company took over. Alternative energy development was killed in the cradle. Oil became the central focus. The solar panels were taken down.
The reason that we do not have a larger alternative energy sector and a greater amount of our energy produced that way today is political, not technical. It is a limitation of our political system, not our technology.
Centralized energy production and distribution produces billionaires, oligarchs and corrupt politicians.
Decentralized energy production (solar panels on your own house for example) produces happy people who sell clean, non-polluting energy back to the grid.
Which model do you think has been championed in the halls of government?
Which model does nuclear energy fall under?
Today photovoltaic cells are cheaper, more efficient, cleaner and safer than nuclear. They do not require liability caps, radioactive containment, cancer, corpses, military responses, mass hysteria or terror.
Of course there are alternatives. But is that what your television is talking about? Is that the discussion on talk radio? Are corporate news sites comparing our real world options as a society? As a species?
Force the issue.
Nuclear power was always an insane idea forced upon the public. Talk about your unnecessary risks, your risk assessment and your cost-benefit analyses gone awry.
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