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by Retric 1811 days ago
Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.

The general public became scared of radiation in part because of the rapid flip flop from this stuff is safe and useful to holy shit no don’t do any of that.
1 comments
philwelch 1810 days ago
> Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.

I'm not sure that argument really works though.

When it comes to radiation, we understand the dangers of radiation a lot more now than Marie Curie did, and we can argue the merits of SMR's based on the knowledge that we've gained.

Furthermore, the argument is very overly general. Sure, it's true that people made a lot of mistakes because we didn't fully understand the dangers of radiation at first. But we're talking about SMR's to generate electricity here, and people didn't even fully understand the dangers of electricity at first, either. The same could be said about fossil fuels.

That leads us to a much different conclusion--don't invent fundamentally new things. Radiation and fission aren't fundamentally new. They're understood, and the risks are understood.

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Retric 1810 days ago
The risks of X-Rays where understood years before these where banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

For context the Radium girls won their lawsuit from 1927. By 1950 the belief was all radiation exposure resulted in increased risks, yet these things where used into the 1970’s.

Hell, the nuclear industry continued to use known inherently unsafe designs. Fukushima wasn’t really a failure due to a tidal wave, it’s a failure due to requirements for active cooling. Inherently safe means turn the lights off and come back in a year and it’s fine, not everything is fine as long as you keep doing X.

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