| There are two fallacies people are often susceptible to: 1) They don't factor in the value of "background" material and over-emphasize the foreground. 2) They feel that in a "natural" state, they are in control of their fate (Azimov had much to say on this one, and the ending of "I, Robot" is quite illuminating). Fukushima did not go as well as it hypothetically could. And yes, the nuclear contamination is a disaster. But let's look at what happened because Fukushima was there: - electricity was supplied to drive the devices that informed the public about the earthquake risk and how to escape it. - electricity was generated (prior to the loss of the plant's capacity) that drove the infrastructure that people relied upon to escape the tsunami wave I think that the question of how the Fukushima prefecture would have fared sans plant is a reasonable question. Because the absence of the dangerous technologies we rely upon is not a state of safety; it's a state of nature, and we build devices to escape the pure state of nature because we know by experience it's inherently somewhat hostile to human life. Future plants on coastlines should be built with the lessons learned from Fukushima's failure-mode in mind. Saying Fukushima itself was a failure is actually a larger step than it appears. How many lives were saved prior to and leading up to the tsunami by the power the plant generated? |