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In 1979, there was a partial meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. I was a young newspaper editor at the time, and I was caught up in coverage of the resulting debate about whether nuclear power could ever be safe. I have long forgotten the details of that episode, except for one troubling thought that occurred to me in the middle of it: The experts we relied on to tell us whether a given design was safe, or indeed whether nuclear power generally was safe, were people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and experience running nuclear plants. That is, we were relying on people who made their living from nuclear power to tell us if nuclear power was safe. If they started saying out loud that anything about the nuclear enterprise was iffy, they risked putting themselves out of business.
I mention this not because I think the engineers lied to the public. I don't. Nor do I think nuclear power is so dangerous it should be rejected as an energy source. I mention it because it shows how hard it can be to make sense of information from experts.
Trust in institutions and expertise has taken a lot of knocks in the last decade. Can society recover it? Are we all called to a higher effort to vet the information we are given, or is there another, better remedy?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Z-A,z-a,01234 on Tuesday August 29 2017, @11:52AM (3 children)
Whoever wrote that article has no understanding of science, nor of statistics.
Regarding nuclear energy, there are 450 nuclear plants running right now world wide. The number of individual reactors tops 1000. There were reactors in use for more than 50 years and only a handful accidents. This technology is safe, but one cannot say that nothing can go wrong under any circumstances.
A problem with the "experts" is that we cannot independently verify that someone is indeed an expert in some field and that that person has no monetary interest in supporting a particular theme.
There are other confounding factors as well: politics and special interests. These actors try to influence the public's opinion to fit their agenda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @02:06PM (1 child)
Yes, it is safe, but when something goes wrong, it can go real bad. It's like saying, yes we can provide you unlimited wealth, food, housing, peace over the world and even teleportation or whatnot, but once every millennium, the whole planet may blow up. Cool, no?
(Score: 2) by TK on Tuesday August 29 2017, @05:40PM
Depends, can we teleport to other planets?
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @09:21PM
The first awareness of Chernobyl by The West was IN SWEDEN (hundreds of miles away and hours afterward).
They evacuated a big part of Fukushima Prefecture because of the contaminations due to the explosions.
USA's corporate friendly "regulators" didn't do their actual fucking jobs and didn't clear out that part of eastern Pennsylvania when Three Mile Island spewed radioactivity (because of the plant's badly designed systems and poorly trained personnel).
...which resulted in increased cancer rates, premature deaths, miscarriages, and birth defects.
Cancer and Infant Mortality at Three Mile Island [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [counterpunch.org]
The problem with nukes is that when they go bad it affects large areas.
Yes, Cancer Rates DID Increase Around Three Mile Island After The Incident [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [stanford.edu]
The thing about nukes is that when they go bad they affect large areas.
...but what would you expect from an industry that was started in order to produce bomb material?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]