The 'tragedy' is caused by irrational anti-nuclear campaigners
"The fear, confusion and conflicting information surrounding the nuclear threat has been a living hell for a lot of people in Japan."
It was obvious from the start that there was no significnat risk associated with the plant, against the background of a major disaster cause by the Tsunami it was utterly irrelevant.
The political and media response driven by anti-nuclear and enovronmental disasters are the cause of the fear confusion and worse. Unnecessary evacuation coupled to a distraction from the massive effort required to deal with the real disaster have undoubtedly have serious consequences up to death albiet consequences that will be very hard to estimate let alone measure.
What is bizarre given the accident shows the incredible safety of even very old nuclear power plants faced with massive natural catastrophes is that the focus and message portrayed throughout the media is the lack of safety of nuclear power. Chernobyl shows that even poorly designed, badly maintained, old nuclear power plants which are used to perform irresponsible unapparoved experimenst and fail catastrophically in just about the worst way possible are nowhere near as dangerous as many civil engineering and industrial installations but we still have the endless propoganda about nuclear power despite it being by far the safest and most environmentally friendly option. It completely undermines that idea that humanity is in any way rational. One crashed airliner kills far more than the worst failure of a nuclear power plant and they crash quite regularily as oppsed to the one signifcnat failure in the history of nuclear power.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
