I do refuse to. I understand the statistics favor fission's overall safety record, but I've read
Voices from Chernobyl[0] and I'm not okay with the costs of what happens when control is lost / the facility is subjected to violence. I'm not okay with how long an area is uninhabitable after a major contamination, and how food grown around Chernobyl continued(s?) to poison unknowing people around Europe for many years and this contamination is covered up by Putin's henchman in Belarus[0]. I do understand that it's better than coal after factoring in all effects of air pollution. But I don't believe that's the dichotomy when we have other options to invest in wind and solar, which carry infinitely less risk.
0: https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=EA979C3CF64D8EF8C12613A...
> He was producing stool 25 to 30 times a day. With blood and mucous. His skin started cracking on his arms and legs. He became covered with boils. When he turned his head, there'd be a clump of hair left on the pillow. I tried joking: "It's convenient, you don't need a comb." Soon they cut all their hair. I did it for him myself. While I was there with him, they wouldn't, but when I left—they photographed him. Without any clothes. Naked. One thin little sheet on top of him. I changed that little sheet every day, and every day by evening it was covered in blood. I pick him up, and there are pieces of his skin on my hand, they stick to my hands. I ask him: "Love. Help me. Prop yourself up on your arm, your elbow, as much as you can, I'll smooth out your bedding, get the knots and folds out." Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. [After he died] They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all—wounds. The last two days in the hospital—I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love. They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.
...
After that, in the maternity ward, the skin started coming off my hands. My veins swelled up. And I was so indifferent to everything. I didn't want to get out of bed. [Cries] I'd get to the hospital and then turn around. By then I was pregnant myself.
N.B.: The baby she was pregnant with, due to extremely rapid cellular growth, saved her from the radiation she received from performing bedside hospital care for her late husband, because the baby absorbed most of the radioactive elements. After his birth, the child Andrei died as a young schoolboy, essentially sacrificing his life for his mother, after spending half his life sick, reportedly very ill two weeks every month.
> In Belarus, very little has changed since these interviews were conducted. Back in 1996, Aleksandr Lukashenka was the lesser-known of Europe's "last two dictators." Now Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague and Lukashenka has pride of place. He stifles any attempt at free speech and his political opponents continue to "disappear." On the Chernobyl front, Lukashenka has encouraged studies arguing that the land is increasingly safe and that more and more of it should be brought back into agricultural rotation. In 1999, the physicist Yuri Bandazhevsky, a friend and colleague of Vasily Borisovich Nesterenko (interviewed on page 210), authored a report criticizing this tendency in government policy and suggesting that Belarus was knowingly exporting contaminated food. Yuri has been in jail ever since.