| > It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things. Because risk is relative, and not as you seem to think, absolute and binary. The risks are being dismissed because they're so tiny, that they're irrelevant. You may as well start planning your life around the assumption you'll win the lottery. That's why nuclear waste storage is such a common fear mongering tactic, it exploits the human liability of not understanding long-term statistics very well. Even solar power is more dangerous due to people falling off roofs and such. Same with wind power. And don't get me started on dams. When those fail, people die. And that's renewables. We're stil mostly burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere we all breathe. Yes, we are literally, as we speak, doing that. And you're talking about the massive problem of storing some barrels of solid waste. You're off base in your perception of risk by several orders of magnitude. |
However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.