Get the latest tech news

Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

Nuclear is expensive, but it should be cheap

The nuclear bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki The effects of radon gas Animal experiments in beagles and mice UK radiologists (tracked over 100 years) Radiation workers across fifteen countries Nuclear shipyard workers (using a closely matched control group of non-nuclear workers in the same yards) Areas with naturally high levels of background radiation from sources such as thorium-containing sand or radon: Finland; Ramsar, Iran; Guarapari, Brazil; Yangjiang, China; and Kerala, India The population of Washington County, Utah, 200 miles downwind of a nuclear test site in Nevada that was used in the 1950s The Chernobyl cleanup crew, including the guys who had to shovel chunks of core graphite off the roof of one of the buildings and toss them into the gaping hole from the explosion An incident in Taipei in which an apartment was accidentally built with rebar containing radioactive cobalt-60 The women who hand-painted radium onto watch dials in the early 20th century (some of whom would lick the brushes to form a point) A 1950 trial that violated every conceivable standard of medical ethics by injecting unknowing and non-consenting patients with plutonium It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained. However, this method suffers from all the problems of any highly complex model based on little empirical data: it‘s impossible to predict all the things that might go wrong, or to assign anything like accurate probabilities even to the scenarios you do dream up:

Get the Android app