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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

" It will represent a piece of data is fundamentally at odds with our view of the world."

Sadly that rarely changes anyones mind.

Indeed, and that goes both ways......just as several decades of extensive use of nuc lear power generation with practically no deaths in multiple countries has done absolutely nothing to quell some people's fears.

Any guess as to who understands the science better? But then, its not about science is it? And its certainly not about facts.

Not offering an opinion one way or the other, but just noting that there really are some facts here that are motivating people.

The piece that rationalist engineers (I am one of them) tend to gloss over is that the public has historically been lied to, by experts about the dangers and difficulties of nuclear power -- all nuclear technology, really. X rays for shoe sizing. Atmospheric weapons tests. Ed Teller. The downside to accidents is large, and there's not much trust anymore. Some, but not much.

These are the facts that are perhaps engaging people's fears.

Given this history, for some people, the bank of "expert credibility" is overdrawn already. The classic nerd technique of argument from expertise is ineffective.

...and none of this says anything about the facts that have been reported (most of which, you'll note, have not been pretty for pro-nuke advocates). Are the facts that have been reported wrong? If you don't have evidence that they aren't, this is just a "hunch", and not really worth serious consideration.

If we shouldn't argue from expertise, what should we argue from? Cast members of Jersey Shore? Berry diet fad producers? PR persons? Our personal feelings? A magic 8 ball?

Seriously if they won't listen to experts (assuming that we can agree on whom the experts are), that is perhaps the best argument against democracy that I have ever heard.

In my opinion, it's not an argument against democracy.

It's an argument against lying in the first place.

"Any guess as to who understands the science better?"

Ah, the glorious ad hominem. Here's one of your recent comments.

"In terms of real disasters, when measured in human deaths, [chernobyl] are tiny footnotes in history, statistically irrelevant."

Ironic isn't it, given my previous comment?

Or this,

"just as several decades of extensive use of nuclear power generation with practically no deaths"

What is the scientific definition of "several", or better yet, "practically no deaths"?

I would bet that coal mining has resulted in far more deaths than nuclear power plants, and yet we love to burn that stuff.

There are also gas power stations, which are much much cleaner than coal. Just saying.

> several decades of extensive use of nuc lear power generation with practically no deaths in multiple countries

That actually hurt me physically to read.

Take Chernobyl. All of those kids that have developed and will develop thyroid cancer, the firefighters that knowingly sacrificed themselves to get the fire out (thereby directly saving more lives), the plant workers who killed themselves in order to minimize the effects, the liquidation workers who contracted cancer in the process of building the sarcophagus, and the babies being born -- even today! -- in the surrounding area prematurely and dying before even being able to comprehend where they are (which some doctors from that region blame on Chernobyl). Yeah, those deaths aren't practical at all. How can you be so obtuse?

Nothing wrenches my gut more than a child dying before being able to speak a single word. I'm actually tearing up that you dismiss such things as impractical statistically, in order to further your argument that us laymen have no idea what we're talking about when it comes to nuclear episodes.

You take relative figures and turn them into an absolute. In multiple comments, you have denied that nuclear power has ever had a disaster, and that "practically" anybody has died (whatever the hell that means). You might believe strongly in nuclear power, but you cannot erase or modify history.

Nuclear power is safe. It can also go horribly wrong, and we learned a lot from Chernobyl. Why does it have to be polar with you? It can be both.

> And its certainly not about facts.

Such cruel irony.

> How can you be so obtuse?

Yeah, that always gets to me, too. And it is also funny how lots of these people try to downplay the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, if that's even possible. When it comes to the number of casualties they hurry up in bringing up the 4,000 mentioned in the IAEA report, which is like asking Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld of writing up about the effects of the Iraq mess.

Just today I was reading about how in one of counties of Romania (of which I am a citizen) the number of deaths caused by cancer is double the number of deaths caused by TBC (which used to be the number one killer before 1986) or diabetes. One might argue that this may be caused by a sudden change in the the conditions of living or anything related, but I can assure you that's not the case (if anything, heart-related deaths should have been on the number one spot). Of course, you won't see these cancer-related deaths taken into account in any of IAEA's reports.

I also have some sort of personal emotional involvement in all this, as one of my childhood playmates and best-friends died of leukemia in 1990. He was 5 when Chernobyl happened, but of course no-one can link his death to that disaster, can it? It doesn't matter that I can't even remember one case of my parents telling me about kids dying of cancer in the '50s or the '60s, because that just didn't happen (although child mortality was way higher back then). It all miraculously started to happen after Chernobyl.

bringing up the 4,000 mentioned in the IAEA report, which is like asking Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld of writing up about the effects of the Iraq mess

I wouldn't liken IAEA to Dick and Bush... It is the only credible international organisation assessing effects of nuclear energy and proliferation.

I think IAEA does superb job, unfortunately Japan haven't been very cooperative with them thus far.

Without nuclear power IAEA's "raison d'être" vanishes. Without the Iraq war Cheney and Rumsfeld wouldn't have won the 2004 elections.

But the nuclear power is already here and was for last 60 years. You can't put the genie back into bottle, unless we're going to have nuclear war and humankind will be reduced to stone age level, which incidentally is one of the things IAEA tries to prevent.

So we need to have responsible, transparent and safe nuclear power, and IAEA is the only organisation that tries to ensure that on a global level, IMHO.

That's what happens when a communist country plays with stuff that it has no business playing with. They never cared about the security because they assumed they could tell their slaves (ie. the soviet population) what they wanted to and because they controlled tv and radio. They only cared about the prestige for communism.

What happen in Chernobyl, while bad, cannot happen at these plants because we build them with the security measures that the communists should have built but didn't.

As for the radiation, normal power plants produce more every year than was released here (at least until yesterday).

And the number of people who died as a result of the quake is houndred of times higher than those who may die as a result of the radiation.

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