And not a single death nor even the likelihood of a single death in the years to come:
Tokyo Electric Power Co. confirmed a meltdown of fuel rods in two more reactors at its Fukushima nuclear plant, which has been emitting radiation since an earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and cooling systems.
Fuel rods in the No. 3 unit started melting on March 13 and those in the No. 2 reactor on March 14, Junichi Matsumoto, a spokesman at the company known as Tepco, told reporters in Tokyo today. The fuel dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel after melting although the damage to the vessel is “limited,” he said.
This nuclear power stuff\’s pretty damn shit hot safe, innit?
Aboslutely everything that could go wrong did: the 5 th largest earthquake of the century, a 30 foot tsunami roaring in at 500 mph, the inevitable human errors, and nuclear power, qua nuclear power, killed fewer people than die falling off roofs installing solar panels of the kind championed by Mr. Leggett.
We\’ll obviously have to ban solar power then because of the dangers it poses, eh?
Off topic but interesting to see garbage collection & recycling moving up in the list of dangerous employment. More dangerous than mining.
Makes sense. Less you f**k around with large masses of unpredictable substances & heavy machinery the better but we all have to make sacrifices for the environment. Don’t we?
Right about everything except the 500 mph tsunami–they can go that fast mid-ocean but slow way down on approach to land–a tsunami at 500 mph would have left nothing standing
I bet a while back a year’s supply of lollipops that this would be the outcome.
Will it ever be admitted if it is?
Course not!
Nuclear is dangerous, the science is settled.
Will it be 30,000 dead? And not a single one due to radiation? But, what is the public perception?
Even if (big if, eh!) in 50 years time we can say that 50 people might have died from cancer due to this, where does that leave the 30,000, their destroyed families, the wiping out of everything to do with the immediate survivors lives???
A couple of days ago I heard a BBC presenter talking about the Fukushima ‘disaster’. Funny how an earthquake, tsunami and 25,000 dead is soon forgotten but the resulting nuclear plant breakdown that has killed 1 person is a disaster. I suppose to a media studies graduate nuclear power is a kind of scary weird sorcery.
Falling off ladders whilst professionally installing solar panels only happens to the working class.
But if nuclear disasters actually did kill people, it could happen to anyone – even journalists.
Hence the greater fear of the latter remote possibility than the former common occurrence. It’s actually perfectly rational.