Chernobyl's Tragic Legacy | Hacker News Reader

Chernobyl's Tragic Legacy

inmotion.magnumphotos.com

9 pointsjshen16 comments

Wish I could downvote this. Single cases, no matter how tragic, do not make a sweeping condemnation. Do we stop selling cars because a million people a year get in car accidents and die messily? No. Should we stop building nuclear power plants because, thirty years ago, some idiots built a really, really terrible one and a few thousand people died messily? No.

And, yes, I know that I'm going to get flamed for this. Go ahead. It needs to be said. If we want our species to survive the next hundred years, we need to get our heads out of our emotional rear ends.

I don't disagree, and I wasn't trying to imply that we shouldn't use nuclear power by submitting this link. But, I think we should take a hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves how much energy we waste. Most of us treat electricity like it's free and infinite, and what I want to take away from this is that we should really be more responsible with our energy use because there are consequences.

I understand your logic, but just remember, "all machines do eventually break down."

True. Banqaio dam, for example, or the USS Grandcamp in Texas City, or Deepwater Horizon. Nuclear breaks down, and when it does it causes some pretty horrific injuries, but other things break down with far greater frequency and with far more deadly (albeit less media-exploitable) consequences.

Wish I could downvote this. Just because we need nuclear energy to survive, doesn't mean you need to demote this massive and tragic accident to a statistical blip made up of "single cases".

Who told you "we" need nuclear energy to survive?

I was basically conceding that point to the parent, since that is not central to the point I'm trying to make. I personally think that we as humans have ample ingenuity to solve our future energy needs, I just don't want to see a world where accidents like Chernobyl and Bhopal (and their many unfortunate victims) are essentially swept under the rug as a cost of doing business.

Agreed! That's why I think that more people should realize how many deaths are attributable to fossil-fuel air pollution: millions per year.

Agreed. I wouldn't downvote it simply for bad science. I'd downvote it for appealing to base emotion in a situation where we must rely on reason and nothing else. Chernobyl was a tragedy. Letting it keep us on oil and coal for another fifty years, dooming tens of thousands of people a year to prolonged, painful deaths by lung cancer and asthma would be a travesty. Triage is a necessary evil.

A UNSCEAR report places the total confirmed deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008

Probably because they would not know where to start if they had to count genetic deformaties, cancer, and other psychological and physical defects. It is a mess all around.

why cherry pick one report?

To add some perspective http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

This is not to belittle Chernobyl. But to provoke thought and discussion on why a disaster of this scale has such a negligible mind-share.

Key word there is confirmed. Don't forget this happened in Soviet Ukraine, and the USSR collapsed shortly thereafter, undoubtedly destroying large amounts of records with it.

Besides, this essay seems to focus on the debilitating effect of life after radiation, not necessarily deaths that can be directly attributed to the Chernobyl event.

"But other reputable scientists researching the most radiation-contaminated areas of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are not convinced. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, another UN agency, predicts 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; an assessment by the Russian academy of sciences says there have been 60,000 deaths so far in Russia and an estimated 140,000 in Ukraine and Belarus. Meanwhile, the Belarus national academy of sciences estimates 93,000 deaths so far and 270,000 cancers, and the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far."

Relevant conversation on a previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2374194

Reply on news.ycombinator.com