There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle nuclear technologies.
Even the specific source in the Goiânia accident could easily have been responsible for saving more lives than it ended up taking.
Of course these things have risks. But these radiotherapy sources aren't being used for fun; the benefits are substantial. That an accident that killed 4 people is significant enough to get its own name and Wikipedia article suggests to me that the risk isn't actually that high.
But more importantly, not responsible enough compared to which alternatives? In this case, it was a device for radiation therapy. The solution here can't be that lots of people die of cancer because nuclear is too dangerous. That just doesn't add up. For nuclear tech more generally, I posit that we are far less responsible with fossil fuels, and that they have done, and will continue to do, vast amounts of damage. Using nuclear would save a lot of lives. You can't just weigh the risk of some course of action against the absence of that risk; you have to weigh it against the risks of the alternatives or the risk of not solving the problem at all. No one is using this tech just for fun.
I think some of this is a psychological effect: awful things that are (or seem like) the status quo get priced into our sense of risk, while exotic-seeming tech with very-differently-shaped risks seem irresponsible. We're also bad at weighing widespread, generalized damage against the low risk of disasters, even if some simple thought experiments make it clear which is better.
(https://www.statista.com/statistics/448169/deadliest-creatur...)
But the examples are not the point.
The point is that things that are relatively harmless but common and handled carelessly (dogs, cars and hydro) easily cause more deaths than something that is very, very dangerous but rare and handled carefully (tigers, guns and nuclear).
Oil accidents are limited and proportional.
Nuclear accidents have massive externalizations.
Fukishima and Chernobyl are unlivable. Waste from Nuclear can do such damage in other places.
Other forms of energy do not have this kind of risk, Nuclear is completely different.
the chernobyl exclusion zone is not a barren wasteland full of dead. the flora and fauna are living. while i wouldn't move there myself or eat any thing from there, life is not dead there. life, uh, finds a way, as it has been said.
Fukushima has barely any exclusion zone left, the last inhabited area was reopened around the beginning of last year.
There's pages worth of military-related incidents, including things like reactor fires that ejected huge plumes of highly radioactive fallout.
There have been numerous incidents in nuclear processing. One resulted in the murder of a journalist to cover it up. Hanford took decades to clean up (I think they've finally finished?)
We spent decades blowing up nuclear weapons for giggles, causing so much fallout to spread worldwide that almost all steel these days has radioactive fallout in it, and many things can be dated by the decay of fallout in them because it's so widespread.
The US alone has lost several functional nuclear weapons.
The policy around nuclear waste in much of the US and elsewhere was, and often still is, "stick it in a hole. In containers that can rust. In water."
Strange definition of "managed very well."
There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle fossil fuel technologies.
If those dinosaurs didn't want us to burn their decayed corpses so we could have McMansions in the suburbs and still commute to the office every day, they shouldn't have been hit by that big meteor!
There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage garbage, you can't handle sewage technologies.
The history of fossil fuels also shows us that humans are negligent over time, which seems to me a good argument against building a large infrastructure of nuclear operations.
When nuclear energy goes wrong, thousands of people die.
When fossil fuels go right, millions of people die.
There are no existential risks from Oil. Danger is small and proportional to an installation. You have a big refinery fire and five people die? That could happen with any tech.
Fukishima is unusable for generations. Chernonbyl same.
Spent fuel from a nuclear reactor could feasibly make most of Manhattan unlivable in just a few hours.
Oil and Nuclear don't share the same risk profile.
You uh, sure about that one?
Nuclear accident deaths, all time: around 300.
Nuclear bomb deaths, all time: around 150,000.
Fossil fuels deaths: 8.7M people dead, per year. It's not even close.
I know this is sarcastic but the UK is in the middle of an absolutely massive scandal with raw sewage being continuously discharged in rivers and the sea for many years now:
https://theriverstrust.org/key-issues/sewage-in-rivers
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-62631320
Why is raw sewage pumped into the sea?
>> Pollution warnings for dozens of beaches in England and Wales were issued after water companies discharged untreated sewage and wastewater into the sea.
>> Raw sewage was pumped into rivers and seas about 375,000 times in 2021, the Environment Agency says.
>> In 2022, Ofwat, the water regulator for England and Wales, launched cases against six water companies over discharging sewage at times when this should not have happened.
And of course there's the little-known matter of anthropogenic climate changed caused by CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. I know it's hard to believe, but it is starting to become a bit of a problem.
In Ireland, it's actually even worse. Only 50% of Irish sewage is treated to EU standards!
Many towns dump raw sewage onto rivers continuously, and lots of areas like Cork do so whenever it rains a bit. Disgusting.
In Brazil, it's actually even worse. Only around 35% of Brazil sewage is treated to Brazil standards!
Many towns dump raw sewage onto rivers/ocean continuously, and as a result around 15% of the population don't even have access to basic water sources due to this. Disgusting.
I think there are lots of cases where we definitely rushed to market way too soon in several situations. The realistic thing about it is that you can only test things as far as someone can think of crazy situations to test against. Even if we tested against every crazy combination and permutation of situations, something in real life will always come along and provide an even crazier situation. Sure, you add that to the list for the next time.
However, we are smart enough to know that certain things will have similar results just based on experience. We know that burning of anything will release things into the air, so we can test the results of burning $newThing. If $newThing is made from very similar processes and materials of $knownThing, we can look to see what issues may have been learned and test with those in mind. At some point, based on experience up until now, you make conclusions that it might just be safe enough which is good enough for corps looking to recoup R&D
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
EDIT: FYI I'm being a bit tounge-in-cheek with the garbage thing, I realize 'Rich Countries' don't do sewage and garbage perfectly well either, which is partly the point. The other point is that other places are objectively much worse.
In reality fortunately the management of nuclear waste is completely different than everything else, it's highly regulated and controlled by international inspectors. In fact this incident doesn't prove that nuclear power is unsafe, since it didn't interest a nuclear power plant but rather a medical device with radioactive substances in them (and radiation sources are used commonly in the conventional industry, in every country, even the one that doesn't have any nuclear at all).
Regulations exist until someone decides they don't because they don't want to pay for something, they are lazy, incompetent.
Google 'Jamie Metzl' who is a very respected researcher who lays out the history of the establishment of Biolabs in China, and points at the very strong likelihood that COVID was created in a lab and is the result of a long series of regulatory, oversight, political and scientific failures.
Biolabs are 'safe' until the host country decides to screw the regulators because they want to save money on construction, or some person installs substandard materials because somewhere down the long globalized value chain, someone replaced one thing with another, on purpose or by accident, and it compromises the entire system.
Those are the kinds of systemic risks that exist with things like viruses and Nuclear tech that normal thinking doesn't account for.
Likely we need an approach that works even if humans fail completely, or, that can be maintained in more stable systems.
Most social groups do not allow children or crazy people to have guns, and they enforce a whole range of other rules as well.
This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of innate thing.
More specifically - the rules are already in place for Nuclear Weapons. 'Rich countries' will not allow messed up nations to get them, or rather, it will be very difficult. [1]
It's the same with Nuclear technology of the same risk.
Colombia can go ahead and try to make Nuclear Weapons and see what happens.
There are weapons far more dangerous today than nuclear.
The delusion is entirely yours.
Ukraine and Russia unfortunately show to us all that what defines what's a 'sovereign country' and what isn't is either having youself, or being a very close ally of countries that have stockpiles and [innate?] ability to use nuclear weapons.
People here are talking about 'irrational fear' (?) it's 'irrational' not to account for those things. There are possibly ways to mitigate it but there are externalizations with Nuclear that cannot be avoided.
True.
> hugely disproportionate number of deaths
Not really true. As a reference, the Bhopal industrial disaster killed an estimated 20-25k people, with official numbers at 7.5k, with more than 500k with non-fatal poisoning. Chernobyl, where everything that could go wrong went wrong, coupled with massive design and human flaws, resulted in around 4000 deaths as of today according to the WHO. Of course the density isn't really comparable, but it kind of is because nuclear power plants don't need a lot of employees and are usually far away from big population centers.
The evacuation of the zone around Fukushima, and an oil tank fire caused more dead than the nuclear accident in the power plant, all caused by the same earthquake+tsunami.
You could make the same argument about fire.
I think you’re mixing a perceived sense of responsibility and power dynamics.
A better solution would involve putting more effort in helping those poorer countries have the means to handle these problems better. It’s the 21st century, we’re much more intertwined than we’ve ever been.
That's not a real thing. It's a persistent myth, but it's not actually real.
> China is the largest importer of waste plastics, accounting for 56% of the global market.[1] Meanwhile, the United States, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom are the main source countries.[1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6010324/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...
I do wish I was wrong though. Again, we cannot afford to think only locally any more. We're much more interconnected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
That is generalisable to all global catastrophic risk: by virtue of the fact that they can occur once, and once only, means that we're effectively living in the survivorship-bias universe in which they did not occur.
That thought's only recently occurred to me, though Richard Posner wrote of it.
<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109712403433781694>
By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false.
-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13.
<https://archive.org/details/catastropheriskr00posn/page/13/m...>
nuclear what? chemistry?