My friend who's a Probabilistic Risk Assessment guy in the nuclear industry swears that the problem with nuclear is that there haven't been enough accidents. If there were more stories where something happened and no one died and no one got enough dose for a cancer, it'd lose its novelty and end up like natural gas plant explosions that kill a few dozen; 4th page news. I haven't fully agreed with him yet but I think there's at least some truth to this.
Antinuclear groups to this very day are blaming decreased fertility rates on Three Mile Island from 1979. The story has comical staying power as is.
That feels so wrong. I don't know much but probability of extreme event is a field of study already. Instead of waiting for more accident why he can't use those models?
The PRA methods that have been developed by the nuclear industry are now used to study low probability events in other fields. My friend uses these professionally to help guide decisions in nuclear reactor designs.
But what I'm saying is that one of the issues in public perception of nuclear energy is that events are extremely rare, so when they do happen, they are huge stories in the media that everyone cares about. Even if something small happens at a nuclear plant, there's a media frenzy about it because of the nature of people's understanding of radiation. He says, mostly jokingly, that if accidents at nuclear plants were as common as they are during other industrial activities, maybe people would get used to the incidents and not worry about them as much.
Very few people understand the nuance of background radiation, sensitivity of detectors, dose units, danger as a function of dose, linear no-threshold, etc.
Antinuclear groups to this very day are blaming decreased fertility rates on Three Mile Island from 1979. The story has comical staying power as is.