I guess you are right, but it's just as dishonest to present the situation as completely out of control and use Fukushima as an excuse to paint nuclear power as completely unsafe and dangerous. Which is what mainstream media has been mostly doing.
50 people sacrificing their lives so that anything even shittier would not happen "is safe and not dangerous"? I fail to imagine what you really find "unsafe and dangerous".
Are you suggesting that because ignorant people think something is unsafe, that means that it actually is unsafe?
> Are you suggesting that because ignorant people think something is unsafe, that means that it actually is unsafe?
Yeah, this is what I'm saying, but isn't this what web 2.0 people were calling "wisdom of the crowds"? I guess back then it sounded cool, now it's just "return to technocracy" once more.
Regarding this "wisdom of the crowds" crap, does the presence of a lynch mob indicate that someone was actually guilty? If masses of people swear by a medical treatment, does that magically mean it's not a placebo?
Crowds are dumb. The only time you want to follow the "wisdom of the crowd" is when the crowd is your marketable commodity.
We're settled, then, because this is where we disagree :) I believe in the power of the people of taking decisions for themselves (even if the decisions are dumb), while you suggest than an informed elite should have the upper hand (if I read you correctly). I could go on and on about why I believe in what I said above (maybe the fact that I grew up under an authoritarian regime), but that doesn't belong in here, and I'm pretty sure you have your good reasons for believing in what you said.
I guess history will decide.
If you're saying this is the way things ought to be, I'm not sure if I agree but I think you have a valid point about the democratic form of government.
If you're saying a dumb herd of people's panicky reactions to a scary situation actually mean nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms, you're dead wrong.
I don't think other people here understand which of these arguments you're making, either.
Reguarding this
> If you're saying a dumb herd of people's panicky reactions to a scary situation actually mean nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms, you're dead wrong.
I didn't say that people's reaction to nuclear power changes it into something "dangerous", I was only saying that if people decide not to fund nuclear development anymore (say, by not allowing their Governments to subsidize said industry) then its voice should be listened to, even if to some it may sound "dumb" or "panicky". This is why I said that if the voice of the majority isn't listened to we're back to Technocracy, i.e. a small group of informed elite taking vital decisions for the rest of us.
The reason you don't leave any serious decisions in the hands of the masses is because it leads to instability, which is the worst thing that can happen to a government.
In every form of government, you have a minority bloc which makes the most important decisions unilaterally. The remaining decisions are, depending on the visible form of government, passed on to various degrees to the public so that they may feel they are participating in the running of their country's affairs.
There is, of course, some give-and-take when a special interest group gains too much power, but those can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Look at Japan, right now 10,000 people are dead from a tsunamai/earthquake double punch and you are worried about the nuclear reactor? The one person killed in the reactor was killed by a crane falling, that could have happened at any industrial complex in an earthquake. There have been a few cases of radiation exposure, but I gaurentee you there where also some guys killed in the refineries that blew up. Not to mention only a few months ago we had a dozen guys die when an oil rig blew up. You need to put it in perspective and get a sense of scale.
In a country like this, with smoking power plants nearby: http://krajina.venku.cz/exkur2a/ex2a-01a.htm
Or rather just tolerate this: http://www.vyletnik.cz/images/profily/users/1969/jaderna-ele...
(Please note that these images are very real, and we're going to need to extend either the mines or build some new nuclear plants, at least locally, in the Czech republic.)
I'm not trying to blame radiation for everything. Just pointing out it's likely that these statistics do not convey the complete picture.
These: http://streaming.tepco.co.jp/tepco_people/index-j.html
From here: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/g3zel/breaking_ex...
But more to the point, there is no indication of "people sacrificing their lives" unless you count the extremely hyperbolic assumption that everybody working at the site is automatically doomed.
A day after the reddit comment the NyTimes had a front-page article on them: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16workers.html . The general tone of the article and of the people commenting on the article was that of "sacrifice", i.e. people putting their lives on the line for the benefits of the greater community.
Updated:
More about it from here (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/japan-tsunami/news/article.cfm?c_i...):
> David Richardson, a professor of epidemiology at the university of North Carolina who has studied the long-term health risks for nuclear plant workers, told the BBC those at Fukushima would receive in an hour the same amount of radiation a US nuclear worker is exposed over an entire career.
To a non-specialist like me that sounds like "sacrifice".