Radiation and long term consequences of radioactive contamination is very specifically terrifying to the general public because you can neither see nor feel it happening and the consequences may not happen until much later. Both of those effects create an outsized defensive response that is not irrational at all but just most people are unable to modulate their perceptions of the size of threats like that.
It's not irrational, but it's a similar concern to things like lead poisoning (similar because you cannot see it, and the effects are long term).
Like with any risk, there should be appropriate and proportional risk mitigation strategies put in place. Current strategies are outsized compared to the risk.
The anti-nuclear environmental movement will go down in history as one of the biggest own goals. If nuclear power had have had continued investment into engineering improvements, the world would be in a much better place WRT climate change.
> If nuclear power had have had continued investment into engineering improvements, the world would be in a much better place WRT climate change.
Thats the thing though, its already been the titanic. People have seen the ship sink, and the promised engineering improvements didn't make up for the fact that it was not only an engineering problem but a human one. Some human somewhere is going to fail the system catastrophically, inevitably. If not an operator, then perhaps some day in the future someone else will gain control of it, or damage it, or make something happen that is out of the range of possibility with even moderately responsible engineering. Maybe its all solved now, I heard nice things about thorium reactors properties, but thats the echo of the fear of nuclear power. Be interesting to see what the generational breakdown is there.
What's super interesting along this line of thought are the events that happened in Flint, Michigan circa 2014 when the local government (who were unelected emergency managers) decided to switch the water source of Flint. This water reacted with the lead pipes causing lead levels to spike in the water supply.
It's not the outsized risk of lead levels people are necessarily worried about. It's the outsized risk of some health risk that gets covered up, lied about, or dismissed by those in charge. There appears to be a high correlation between nuclear accidents and government and political coverups.
But also the highest potential for mass disaster. Even the so-called "safe" designs like pebble bed reactors have had issues with dust from the pebbles grinding against each other.
