I can understand that nuclear has risks. But people seem to evaluate nuclear in a vacuum, rather than against the carbon sources which currently replace it.
“What do we do with the waste” is a better question when applied to coal.
East block countries trying to sell their contaminated food for consumption and it ending up in GDR school kitchens.
Additionally having two superpowers stationing a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs in your country. While at the same time beeing sure that you'd die first in a new world war that would almost surely start in your country and would probably devastate your whole continent beyond beeing suited for human surival.
Then the whole argument that its cleaner and cheaper energy. While you pay for transport, storage and security with your tax money and the company keeps the profits. By storage i mean temporar storage, because no one worldwide has figured out how to safely store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years (Pyramids are 4500 years old and we don't even know how they are build). Thats why most of this waste from the 80s and 90s lies a few km off our coasts in the sea where the UK, Russia and Italian mafia dumped it.
Tschernobyl was almost forgotten, at least by the politicians in power, but then Fukushima happend.
In addition I might add that we are sourrounded by countries that we don't trust to be able to feed their citizes reliably. Less so when it comes to reactor security.
I beg your pardon?
Chernobyl is the defining moment of the anti-nuclear movement (and I'm not only talking about active protestors like in Lüchow-Dannenberg, most Germens have some of it inside themselves, even if they don't actively march on the streets).
It is really hard to overestimate the effect of the word "Chernobyl" in Germany.
The movement is much older. I remember, that the anti-nuclear movement was already very active and in heat around 1980-82 (Biblis). The broad public, the mainstream, started accepting this threat with Chernobyl.
;D
Countries like France and Japan didn't have an alternative, they had to go all in on nuclear reactors. I think nuclear is a lazy cop out. Until every roof in Europe has solar cells we should not even be thinking about building new reactors.
On the French and Belgian side of its borders Germany got some very old reactors that had some serious security related incidents within the last few years. [1] In the city of Aachen the government even distributed iodine tablets if it gets worse.
Additionally Germany doesn't have locations to store radioactive waste indefinitely. The current location for intermediate storage, called "Asse", is known to be leaking contaminated water into all kinds of directions and nobody is really sure how to stop it. [2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#...
Chernobyl, Asse, Aachen, Gorleben all didn't change anything in our politics. But Fukushima did. Immediately.
The Merkel government was on its way to change that, against protests (2010). Shortly after that Fukushima happened (2011), and Merkel had to return to the Atomausstieg (also 2011).
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053.600-fossil-f...
The death toll from coal is staggering compared to nuclear. It is not even close.
Alternatively there are studies that correlate various pollutants with respiratory issues, and then compare that with the pollution emitted by coal plants.
Ideally one would make many such estimates, yielding a range that one could have high confidence is close to the truth, similar to how we use multiple methods of dating fossils, and then know something is wrong if there is a large disparity.
The number basically tells you that according to a specific model, that is hopefully a good approximation of our understanding of the risks, a certain percentage of the death rate should be due to that factor. However I think these numbers carry not much more information than 32 other bits of the same sentence and to really use them you have to look at the specific model and you need to develop an opinion if the model reflects the relevant arguments well.
Humans seem to almost universally do poorly at judging those two pools of risk against one another.
People are terrified of being murdered or crashing in an airplane (both sudden death), yet they die by the droves at 10x, 100x or 1000x the rate from poor lifestyle habits (food, smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, etc). The fear of sharks is likewise similar (sudden violent death, and extremely rare).
With some of these there is also the control aspect that comes into play (having control, not having control, or having an illusion of control). For example with sharks, you're in their environment, heavily lacking control, almost helpless by comparison to their ability. With passenger airplane crashes, it's kiss your ass goodbye, you have basically zero control over the situation (not even the ability to pretend you do). People die by the millions driving cars, yet they don't seem to fear that nearly so much as dying in a plane crash. I chalk that up to the partial illusion that drivers have a very large amount of control as to whether they die in a car crash or not.
I believe coal generates the same fear response as the gradual lifestyle threats do, it's perceived as a gradual threat/risk. Nuclear is perceived as a sudden dramatic death threat (decades of miseducation, propaganda, and of course generalized fears over all things nuclear derived from the bomb).
Most physical violence (assault, murder, rape, ..) is between people who know each-other, but typically people are more afraid of different-looking strangers.
I think it has more to do with fear of unusual situations than suddenness or drama.
That's offset by the illusion that people believe they're in a very high degree of control over the situation. It enables the brain to create an illusion and say to itself: I won't make that mistake, my actions dictate the outcome, I'm a good driver (as the comical studies always demonstrate, people tend to dramatically over-estimate their driving skill).
> Most physical violence ... is between people who know each-other
You don't actually think that's going to happen, that's the issue. If you told someone their pal is about to rape or murder them, they would not believe it, they'd be far more afraid of the menacing looking stranger. That's where ignorance of risk - as with sharks - comes into action. I would guarantee a low percentage would believe they're more likely to be murdered by someone they're close to than a stranger. If a person doesn't have a meaningful comprehension of the risk (as with nuclear), the risk context inherently can't be judged properly. I suspect there's a big illusion of control that is involved between two known relations as well, you think you have some influence over whether a friend will murder you (surely they like you, surely you could talk them down from a violent confrontation, etc.); versus that almost entirely missing from the menacing stranger scenario.
Which is not even to mention the daily occurrence in the USA of young children accidentally shooting other children (typically siblings or friends) or themselves to death.
Having a gun in your house is one of the biggest possible risks you can bring to your own life and the lives of people in your family.
For the purposes of comparing evaluating people's fear of things that could kill them that they don't have control over suicides (60% +/- some depending on which party's sand you bury your head in) and intentional non-criminal (defensive) gun deaths should not be counted because they are not something people do not have complete control over. Don't try to kill yourself and don't try and commit a crime against someone who's armed and you have basically nothing to worry about.
People are afraid of gun accidents in the same manner in which they are afraid of other forms accidents that they have some degree of control over (like car accidents). They take steps to reduce their likelihood and encourage (through various means) others to do the same (i.e. social disapproval of people who do unnecessarily dangerous things).
For the purposes of discussing public perception of the risks of nuclear power "gun deaths" as a lump sum is not useful and the effort to pick it apart and analyze the components is not worth the risk of derailing any useful discussion with politics.
Right. But nobody is talking about reducing that number, or reducing our reliance on cars. Drivers kill over a million people every single year, but that is acceptable death.
There exist countries where automobile deaths are not considered acceptable, or where not all policy planning takes an ironclad need for automobiles as the exclusive mode of transportation as a basic premise.
That (the belief that this is an error) is itself a statistical fallacy, one that's isomorphic to "most traffic accidents happens near your home" (most of your driving is near your home). But the relevant danger metric is "risk per mile driven". That's lower near your home. You are right to use less caution there.
Likewise: most of your conflict is with people you know, but most of your interaction is likewise with acquaintances! The relevant danger metric is "crimes committed against you per unit of interaction time". On that measure, strangers are in fact more dangerous.
Raising your guard around acquaintances will lead to costly false negatives. Raising your guard around strangers will lead to a small number of false negatives and save you from costly false positives. Do you deliberately go by yourself down dark alleys filled with strangers, since "if I'm going to be a crime victim at all, it'll be from someone I know"? Then you understand the basic fallacy there.
(Before you make the point about the coat check, ask how much prefiltering you do before you give someone your coat.)
Your model, by contrast, doesn’t seem to represent why that dark alley is dangerous. Because you only care about the raw crime count rather than the crime count per time interacted with. It would equally imply that the stranger in the alley is no risk to you, because “if a crime happens at all, it will be from a family member”. That is not good statistical reasoning.
When we see that most crime comes from acquaintances, that’s after applying significantly more countermeasures to strangers and after getting into more conflicts with acquaintances after we’ve focused our interactions on them.
If strangers really are safer per unit of interaction, then start saving your seat by leaving your wallet.
Actually that's not my model; I'm not the OP. I was just pointing out what I saw as a flaw in your presentation. Y
You keep talking about things like "unit of interaction" - which is a handy thing to talk about in the abstract, but gives the impression that you've actually quantified human interaction - a concept I am highly skeptical of.
I can see that there is a reasoning flaw in looking at crime that has happened and seeing that it mostly happens between people who know each other and concluding that the greatest risk to yourself is from people you know.
One possible explanation that has nothing to do with "interaction time" is simply the fact that you apply more countermeasures to strangers than you do to people you know. Perhaps the real cause is a matter of trust, not time.
A precise quantification is not necessary to recognize the core point, that however you define interaction, you are in fact interacting with acquaintances much more than strangers. You don't need to put numbers on eye contact or anything like that. It's enough to go by e.g. physical unbarriered proximity.
>One possible explanation that has nothing to do with "interaction time" is simply the fact that you apply more countermeasures to strangers than you do to people you know. Perhaps the real cause is a matter of trust, not time.
That's saying the same thing: people apply more countermeasures to strangers because they (correctly!) recognize them as being more dangerous in the practically-relevant sense. After that filter is applied, and after swamping your interactions with acquaintances, the end result is a relatively low proportion of crimes from stranger-in-the-bushes. That doesn't mean predators in bushes aren't dangerous!
And, once someone has become trusted, they're no longer a stranger and likewise are less dangerous because they have more to lose from hurting you. Either way, by the appropriate metric, acquaintances/friends/family are less dangerous. The greater incidence comes from being around them more and from not using the same countermeasures.
Either way, it simply doesn't follow (as the OP suggested) that the rational thing to do is to be less wary of strangers!
Lots of people won’t let their 10- or 12-year-old kids walk around town by themselves, because the parents are afraid they will be abducted or assaulted or something. But such tragedies are extremely rare. If anything, if they are really worried about child abuse the parents should be carefully examining their priest, sports coaches, teachers, family members, friends’ relatives, etc.
Obviously if you take the random strangers off the street and invite them to your home, have a deep personal conversation, lend them money, ask them to take care of your kids, start kissing them, or whatever your definition is for a “close interaction”, they sort of stop being strangers at that point, and you are more likely to get into some altercation.
In other words, you agree that you shouldn't lower your defenses for a random stranger, you only disagree about where the stranger/acquaintance boundary exists.
As for the other point: do you actually know that the risk is lower conditional on you not using standard countermeasures (that probably exist because of the legit risk)? Have you stopped locking your car, and started leaving your wallet out where it's easy to get to? Walked home alone through dangerous neighborhoods? If not, why not?
Don't equate the post-countermeasure crime rate with safety.
I think it's more about the association with nuclear weapons, plus the fact that we've known fire and water for as long as modern humans have existed, while radiation is a new danger that's invisible and spooky.
And nuclear accidents tend to be widely covered and sensationalized, even ones without casualties, but fires or accidents at coal plants that actually kill people are not.
If you ask someone where nuclear power can damage the environment, they say yes it can. They understand the damage from fallout because it is local.
But the same person may not believe that coal can damage the environment globally. There is a huge cognitive bias against effects we can't physically see, and understanding the scale of the planet.
This is the same reason we have some people who still believe in the flat earth conspiracy.
The only answer real is education. If educators had a way to help children better create visual models of these things inside their heads, maybe we could all agree on these issues we can't see with our eyes. Maybe VR will help? I don't know. But I would definitely donate to any think tank that was A/B testing educators lessons on global warming.
For the record, I was thinking of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
... the false belief that the belief in a flat Earth was common in the past.
Is the rapper B.O.B. trolling with his GoFundMe Campaign to build a satellite and find the truth?
Maybe they are media savvy ploys to generate free attention, but they have thousands of fans that aren't in on the joke.
I used to think exactly what you do, but that is the definition of liberal bias. I couldn't imagine a world where someone would be so stupid enough to think the world was flat.
I also couldn't imagine a world where people were stupid enough to elect Donald Trump. But the divide in this country is real, and beliefs like ours are making it worse. Some people's scientific literacy really is limited to what they can see in front of them.
Apparently this "movement" is really small though and shut down entirely for long periods throughout history. The most recent resurrection being only a few years ago and the Flat Earth Society claims its membership grows by a couple hundred people a year. Well, there are millions of people who believe in Noah's flood despite there being no evidence it ever happened and lots that it didn't, so I can well believe a few hundred people believe in a flat earth. The world is a big place.
I don't think you can compare flat earthers to Trump voters though. Lots of people voted for Trump because they have different priorities to you (e.g. hating political correctness, hating Clinton, really wanting immigration controls), not because they disagree on basic laws of physics.