[_ea1k]

That's exactly my point, though. Lots of people die from coal mining as an industry. That is largely invisible.

The health effects on the population at large are also significant, but largely invisible. Radiation? Also measurable, but largely invisible.

But often the same people who are fine with coal will tell me how terrible three mile island was and that it is evidence that we shouldn't expand nuclear.

Radiation is somehow scarier.

[lazide]

Coal mining deaths are very, very visible. Coal mining is also clearly filthy and dangerous. If you don’t see it, it’s only because you’ve never seen coal mining or been to a coal mining town.

No one who mined coal - ever - was unclear on how bad for them it was. Even long before we had x-rays or modern medical anything.

Mining uranium kills people in ways that aren’t so obvious, and in proportions that didn’t make any sense even based on radiation models.

It turns out radon gets easily carried in on dust, and miners were getting 300x the radiation exposure that their Geiger counters or dosimeters showed was possible.

They also were ingesting/breathing in trace amounts of things like Polonium, which also weren’t showing up.

Radiation is scarier because it’s not obvious when it’s there, or how bad it’s going to be for someone until way after it’s too late. And it’s hard to figure out - like you really need a solid physics degree AND a medical degree to understand becquerels (or curies) vs rads vs rem, and what that actually means for a random human somewhere in a mine.

The unknown is always scarier.

Coal dust is not confusing anyone, and requires zero degrees to understand how shitty it is to breath.