I have a personal theory, that I haven't really been able to confirm or deny. Here it is.
After Hiroshima and during the cold war nuclear energy was associated with death and destruction. Hiroshima for obvious reasons, and the cold war because the population of the western world was constantly reminded how The Soviet Union had thousands of missiles with nuclear bombs pointing at us, ready to go. Western governments used nuclear weapons to picture the threat and to terrify populations into spending more on defense against the Soviets. There were scary videos of mushroom clouds, scary instructions on how to survive a nuclear blast, and scary stories of how a nuclear winter would pan out.
This, obviously, made people scared of nuclear bombs, and nuclear energy in general. Through decades the population was told by the government that nuclear radiation was the evil silent killer.
The byproduct of all this cold war propoganda was that people are now irrationally scared of nuclear radiation from power plants.
If you look at the numbers you'll see that nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest scalable energy source we've got. It's the energy source that has the fewest deaths per MWH produced, it doesn't produce CO2, etc. etc. Yet we think of it as getting power from the devil.
I blame the cold war propoganda for our irrational fear of nuclear energy.
> Through decades the population was told by the government that nuclear radiation was the evil silent killer.
Well, two out of three's not bad: it is silent, and it can kill.
> people are now irrationally scared of nuclear radiation from power plants
You may not fear nuclear energy, but it's not irrational to do so.
Even the current generation of reactors rely on active safety systems, and can't just be shut down. Even with multiple redundant systems of this sort, things will go wrong, since making these systems truly independent — including in the face of floods, earthquakes, human error, etc. — is effectively impossible.
So plants will continue to melt down from time to time, irradiating large areas of land. Bad luck if those areas are near you: in the best case, you'll have to leave your home and neighbourhood for decades.
Sure, it's a low probability event for each of us, but in my opinion those consequences are unacceptable for essentially any probability of occurrence.
> Sure, it's a low probability event for each of us, but in my opinion those consequences are unacceptable for essentially any probability of occurrence.
This is not rational fear. The non-nuclear energy industry is not perfectly safe. Coal mining results in many deaths both from the dangers of mining and the pollution caused. Oil mining results in some deaths and a fair few major ecological disasters. Solar power and wind power kill people as well (falling from a roof or having a turbine fall on you are both potentially life-ending).
According to this site (http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...), Nuclear is the safest in terms of human death by far. This is just a blog post, so grain of salt, but it illustrates that your "unacceptable for essentially any probability" claim is not rational.
I find it similar to the risk of an airplane death. Both of those are deemed by 'rationalists' as irrational fears, as airplanes are by and large, safer than driving cars. However, considering the outcomes the fear is not as irrational; there are a significant chance of surviving a car accident, but almost none at all of a plane one. It also comes with a bonus of a few minutes of horrifying fall into your inevitable doom, too.
Nuclear plants can be safe, but when they fail the results are often catastrophic. People prefer to live with many small dangers rather than one giant but very unlikely one, and while it may be called out as irrational in the strictest definition of reason, it's perfectly human.
there are a significant chance of surviving a car accident, but almost none at all of a plane one.
I think this demonstrates the overarching point well because the chances of surviving an air related accident are surprisingly high.
The NTSB figures for people involved in commercial airline accidents between 1983-2000 show that 95.7% of people survived: http://boingboing.net/2012/11/05/surviving-a-plane-crash-is-... .. even narrowed down to only the "worst accidents", the overall rate was 76.6%.
Which highlights the problem with fear - when you look down the list of leading causes of death, you basically have a million terrible diseases (cancer, heart disease, alzheimer's etc.)... but once you get out of the "disease" territory, the big killer? Cars.
Probably the most avoidable, most pointless way to die... but we think nothing of driving everywhere, of putting our kids in cars (children don't get much in the way of heart disease or alzheimers, so automotive accidents are pretty close to the top for them).
So yeah, I have trouble respecting the public's perception of danger.
I'm old enough to remember chernobyl. at the time, we were assured it was a dodgy old design, and that they future models would be foolproof. Then fukushima, and we started hearing the same soothing stories of fantasy designs that could never cause such havoc.
Ever since day one, this industry has over-promised and under-delivered. Remember "power too cheap to meter"?
It's right and appropriate that we make decisions based on the realities of the industry's present day detriments, not their promises for tomorrow.
Well 4 nuclear plants were affected at Fukushima, 3 of which had been operational and melted down, the 4th had used fuel cells right near exploding gantries... and zero deaths, zero illnesses.
This is a stark, stark constrast to Chernobyl (which was a Soviet weapons production design quickly converted for power generation use with very little, if any, regard for passive safety principles) and should if anything reinforce what people were saying about the uniqueness of Chernobyl.
The Fukushima plants were the "dodgy old designs", by the way. Fukushima Dai-Ni's 2 operational reactors were hit by the same tsunami, only a few km down the same shoreline from the afflicted reactors, and both achieved safe shutdown... they were of a slightly less old dodgy design.
The design improvements are not fantasy. They've already happened, have been around for years, but no one builds them but India and China.
Better designs aren't "just around the corner". They're 25 year in the past.
We aren't building them because people are too afraid to build new plants. We're keeping plants based on 50 year old designs around because we need the power. These plants require weapons grade uranium. They are inefficient. They are expensive to run. They are physically able to melt down. They produce more waste than needed. Their waste can be used to make weapons.
These are all solved problems. They were solved decades ago. It's about time that they werer implemented.
and, whats the bet the industry's supporters will be offering that same unhelpful rationalisation, come the next reactor failure.
I don't accept that the significant disqualifications you raise are all 'solved problems'. some are solved. some mitigated. I do accept the scenario I think you're describing: the US[a] is choosing to extend licenses to old plants instead of building safer ones.
But beyond the US[a], I'm concerned we're illogically facilitating development of more conventional reactors that offer none of these benefits, in part under the cover of promises that the industry is moving in the right direction. That's the disconnect I see between promises and realities.
It's likely more than that. Chernobyl had a great impact on people's idea of nuclear. Also its damage, when occurring, is done in a spectacular way by something invisible. Radiation poisoning is dramatic, horrific and you can't see, smell or feel. That scares the living hell out of most people and the fact that is statistically unlikely becomes irrelevant as soon as it becomes an irrational fear.
There are things that cause more deaths by cancer, slowly and steadily, that don't (or didn't) scare anyone - tobacco was an example. Junk food may be another.
unlike some of the other risks to life listed,
ionizing radiation can cause genetic damage.
An impact that is passed on to future generations.
I propose that's a factor for the special place the nuclear industry has in so many hearts.
how's that nonsense?
That is a theoretical possibility, and a highly unlikely and unobserved possibility at that. Real life mutations aren't like in children's cartoons. Most of the genetic material in a multicellular organism do not belong to germ cells, and most mutations caused by ionizing radiation either cause death of the cell or no effect at all, especially in eukaryotic chromosomes. Cancer, highly unlikely itself, is many orders of magnitude more likely than any inheritable effect.
Studies of the Chernobyl disaster have not found evidence of teratogenic effects in humans [1], and neither have studies of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings [2].
The malevolent-sounding yet meaningless phrase "fades your genes" is nothing short of nonsense, especially in reference to inheritable teratogenic effects. The number of special places in hearts can do nothing to alter that judgement.
Good thing no life forms are exposed to radiation such as UV, cosmic rays, or naturally-occuring radioactive elements such as Carbon-14, Potassium-40, or Uranium then, we'd be screwed after only a few generations! Oh, wait...
what's your point? people do get old and sick.
the fact that radiation exists naturally in the environment doesn't mean its good for you, and doesnt mean that more won't pose an increased health hazard
On the other hand, it does mean that we were evolved to at least be able to procreate in the presence of a constant radiation flux.
There's such a wide gulf in possible levels of radiation exposure that radiation health physicists are to this very day still unsure whether constant exposure to low levels of radiation is actually harmful at all. They haven't even been able to rule out that it's not beneficial.
But either way, if you're worried about exposure to radiation you should be more worried about coal plants than nuclear plants; coal plants emit so much radioactivity to the environment that their exhaust would generate more power in a nuke plant, if it could be harvested properly.
yes we can procreate in the presence of some radiation:
could you set a lower compliance bar for any pollutant?
beneficial impacts are pretty much fringe science.
FWIW, there has been experimental demonstration of minimal ionizing radiation causing mutation in a single cell.
and most regulatory standards around the world continue to reduce 'acceptable limits'. I think the most recent example is the reduction in exposure to radon exposure that has been recognised in a number of national standards. I read that as showing that people who understand the science more than myself are still, decades later, finding more cause for caution.
Radiation hormesis is not "fringe science". As only one example, consider http://www.jpands.org/vol13no3/cohen.pdf which is an overview from 2008 of some of the issues raised against the linear no-threshold dose model. You'll note that it was not published in some 'quack journal', and draws its references from many other non-quack entities.
In addition you're assuming that changes in regulatory setpoints are purely based on proven safety effects, but that's not the case here. Indeed, regulatory changes happen frequently that are not based on safety (e.g. yellow light timings).
What is true is that if you assume, as most health physics societies and regulatory organization do, that radiation exposure should be kept ALARA ("as low as reasonably achievable") then you should reduce regulatory thresholds for no better reason than that it becomes possible to do at all.
In other words even if you find a 'safe' level below which you can't appreciably detect an increase in cancer risk, you'd still set the regulatory threshold far below that if you could (and keep dropping it as technology improves), because regulatory commissions are operating under the assumption that any exposure to radiation represents some additional risk of later cancer.
But it's important to keep in mind that it is an assumption, a convenient and conservative model that is used for ease of regulation, work planning, etc.
That doesn't mean the model is accurate, and the actual biological response to radiation of different types and exposures continues to remain debated at low levels of exposure.
After all, if what you claim is true then frequent flyers, air crew, and pilots should be dying at a ponderously higher rate of cancer incidence, as should residents of high-altitude areas who are exposed to higher cosmic ray flux, as should residents of Ramsar Iran who are exposed to high levels of background radiation from uranics in the soil and water.
But none of these people seem to be as effected by radiation as they should be. The question is why and yes, it's still a question.
It sounds like you're at least interested in the topic so I'd highly recommending researching further. For instance if you do so you would find out why mutation in a single cell is not at all the crisis you think it is, or even that surprising, because you would know how the body handles such cells (which occur all the time from multiple different sources).
fair call re status of the hormesis theory.
what I get from this is that the LNT theory holds more sway; regulators choose precautionary adherance to ALARA. Let's not ignore the obvious fact that there is a powerful industry tugging in the other direction ...
The nuclear industry honestly couldn't give one shit about whether regulators choose LNT/ALARA or "hormesis". If anything hormesis would make their work planning more difficult as then they'd possibly have to worry about ensuring their workers have enough exposure. ALARA is simple and easy and would remain used for work planning.
But either way, nuclear emits less radiation than coal, so if you're worried about public health effects then we're again in the situation that the power company doesn't really have to care either way; if they want less radiation overall they should build a nuke, if they believe in hormesis then coal would probably be preferred, but even assuming a Fukushima-style triple meltdown would not be a large public health disaster.
they don't care? so you may say,
my experience is that the industry includes some players who duck and weave to try to evade application of existing regulatory radiation limits.
and again the coal/nukes false dichotomy.
the fact that this is fundamentally flawed thinking is highlighted by your conclusion that more nuclear plants reduce public radiation exposure.
The only people who think thermal power generation is a false dichotomy are those who haven't tried to spec out power generation schemes that rely completely on unreliable renewables. Specifically, renewables have a much different capacity factor than thermal power designs (like coal or nuclear) and therefore require a very heavy investment in energy storage schemes, especially if the plan is to go 100% renewable.
Even in Germany, which is the example everyone points to, 80% of the shift away from nuclear has been towards coal. Even natural gas would be better than shifting to coal! And despite only shifting 20% of that generation to renewables there have been increasing problems with frequency variation and brief power interruptions on the grid due to the much higher variability in power output from renewable.
I have a much simpler theory. Everytime an "event" occurs, nuclear scientists tell us, everything is ok, it is all handled, and then shortly thereafter, leaks are discovered to be worse than reported, handling of waste is done very poorly, or things just implode, as they did in Fukishama.
But the thing is, this is no worse than how "events" in other areas are handled. I don't trust reports of nuclear accidents any less than I trust reports of refinery or offshore oil-well or chemical plant or ... accidents.
>It's the energy source that has the fewest deaths per MWH produced
Source?
I want to remind that the nuclear material needs to be mined somewhere. I never worked in a Uranium mine but it's probably not the healthiest job in the world. Then the material needs to be transported, transported a long way. During this way it gets enriched, used, cooled down. Maybe even re-enriched, used, some part get stuck in walls, pipes ("contamination") etc. At some point it gets stored, somewhere in the ground. During this long way radiation and material gets emitted. Nuclear dust is cancerogenous for the lungs, radiation in general is suspected of boosting leucemia rates.
But the worst part in my opinion is this: NO insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear power plant.
> NO insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear power plant.
This is hardly a meaningful claim. Insurance companies in the US won't write flood insurance policies, either. This doesn't mean that your house is very likely to get washed away in a flood. It means that the business is not profitable because no one wants to pay the premiums required to insure for the worst-case, nor do insurance companies want to sit on the piles of cash necessary to insure these sorts of events.
As a counter-point, hydroelectric power plants are also not insured for worst-case scenarios. And when hydroelectric dams fail, the results can be orders of magnitude worse than Nuclear meltdown. e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Note that nuclear is significantly safer than even hydro and solar.
I think your fear of uranium mines is overblown, as these numbers are included in the calculations. Many more people die in coalmines.
Did you know that a coal plant emits significantly more radiation than a nuclear plant because coal is radioactive and isn't shielded like nuclear power plants?
What about nuclear waste though? You end up with some tons of radioactive material which you have to store in high-security underground facilities with the hope that in some time in the future humanity will find a way to dispose it in a safer way.
G'day mate,
here in australia we're leading the world in nuclear waste storage. After giving our best scientists 30 years to spend on the question, we've finally brought it to a head, and are in the process of unveiling a state of the art solution.
here's what we've done:
found a remote and isolated spot of land in the middle of a 3000km long highway. we've paid a pittance and reminded the small local indigenous community who actually own the land that they don't have any political, economic or social power. Their economic disempowerment was exacerbated a couple of years after they were targetted, when new apartheid-style laws quarantined welfare to natives. Their political disempowerment was reinforced by unprecedented laws that negate their rights as land owners and remove any possible legal obstacle to the dump plan.
Right, so with the social engineering out of the way, let's get into the nuts and bolts:
we're gonna grade a dirt road onto a dry patch of land, and build a barbed wire shed. to hold the most highly radioactive nuclear wastes we produce.
I'm sure before too long the rest of the world will get on side to endorse the engineering, and of course site selection.
"The idea that the best way to promote economic advancement in the Northern Territory is to post six of the loneliest security guards in the country to guard against people tampering with radioactive waste for the next three centuries absolutely beggars belief. They waved around a $12 million cheque in the community, north of Tennant Creek, which wanted a decent road and some community education support for their kids. That $12 million cheque was dangled in their faces in exchange for hosting what they thought was going to be a rubbish dump."
In exchange for clean, constant, domestically sourced, almost unlimited energy for an entire year, each person must dispose of or store their waste, which is the size of...
A pill of aspirin.
You could just put it in a little lead jar. That's all the waste. The alternative is fossil fuel waste, which would be...
10 tons of CO2 (volume = 5 American houses) which floats into the atmosphere, plus 2 tons of coal ash.
Of course, everyone can just pool their resources and put all the radioactive waste together. I don't consider it to be a very serious or unsolvable problem.
For baseload power? There effectively isn't. Renewable energy generation requires a substantial investment in energy storage systems if you don't have thermal power generation (such as nuclear or fossil-fueled plants), as having rolling blackouts just because the wind unexpectedly isn't blowing as hard is not good for business.
The thing is that nuclear isn't really good at this. Nuclear plants don't have much in the way of a throttle - they're just "on" or "complete shut-down and it will take substantial measures to start it up again". Fossil fuels or some sort of capacitive system (even just using the peak surpluses to pump water into a reservoir above a turbine) would do that task better.
The panicky nay-sayers of nuclear power are too obsessed with the risks of radiation, but there are a lot of other legitimate reasons that it might not have a place in our future. Uranium just isn't that plentiful, for example.
> Nuclear plants don't have much in the way of a throttle - they're just "on" or "complete shut-down and it will take substantial measures to start it up again".
Well, this is exactly what we need. Power demand is fluctuating, but mostly averages out to something constant. It's easier to throw in a little buffering to compensate demand fluctuations than to wake up with half the power in the grid because it suddenly got cloudy. You'd have to store very large amounts of power, which is this "substantial investment in energy storage systems" GP was writing about.
> The thing is that nuclear isn't really good at this. Nuclear plants don't have much in the way of a throttle - they're just "on" or "complete shut-down and it will take substantial measures to start it up again".
Nuclear can certainly be designed to ramp power output up or down in response to demand. After all there are many applications of nuclear technology in fields that require rapid and immediate changes in power output.
Nuclear power generation plants are not typically designed to do this, but it's not because nuclear can't, it's because nuclear doesn't have to. The plants are built by the utility companies to act as baseload power generation and can normally afford to take hours to change power output if they wish. But if utility plants wanted a nuke plant that would change power output quicker, that could be arranged as well.
It's likely that baseload and renewables will meet half way. Supposedly, adding a small amount of battery capacity to wind turbines dramatically increases their power output predictability.
Well, the really radioactive parts of the waste will decay after a fairly short number of years. With regards to the less radioactive, slower decaying part I'm not sure why we worry about it so much more than naturally occurring radioactive substances. There are streams in Colorado that are measurably radioactive because they interact with natural Uranium deposits but the levels are low enough to not pose a real public health hazard. I don't see why buried man-made radioactive substances are unacceptable when buried natural radioactive substances aren't.
Because for example plutonium has that nasty tendency to go boom once you amass a kilo or so, so safe storage is required to keep all lunatics at bay. It's also a very potent poison. It's also not found in natural deposits.
Nuclear waste is stored very, very deep and secure. I cannot imagine future humans having the technology to open these up, without knowing what is in there. Either we lose all of our knowledge and no soul will ever see that site, or we stay an advanced civilization and we are warned of the dangers before opening the nuclear waste facilities.
Don't forget that uranium is found naturally in the ground, in geologically vastly more unstable regions, with water flowing through it. What we're doing is concentrating the radioactivity, and putting it deeper and safer. If you're afraid of mankind finding these waste sites in the future, are you not afraid of them finding uranium in their drinking water?
> Nuclear waste is stored very, very deep and secure.
Ideally it would be. But in many cases in practice, that isn't the case, because those facilities have either not been built, or not opened. In the U.S., since the long-planned Yucca Mountain facility has never opened, most nuclear waste is stored on-site at the reactor complex, in above-ground facilities. For the first few years it's immersed in cooling pools [1], and then subsequently is parked in metal/concrete cylinders [2]. This is considered interim storage awaiting final burial in geologically stable vaults, but without Yucca Mountain the "interim" storage has become de-facto permanent.
In Germany half is currently stored in an old salt mine which is at risk of water breaking in (in a region with seismic activity) ... the other half sits in bright daylight under tin roofs (not my definition of very very deep ... :)
Even worse - the risk is not water breaking in, since that's already happening. The risk is total collapse and contamination of the ground water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
So now the plan is to retrieve all the waste and store it - this time better at an estimated cost of at least 4 - 6 billion Euro.
The general problem I have with nuclear power is that it's all fine and dandy as long as everything goes as planned. If not, then everything goes boom in a big way. And where humans and profits are involved, plans tend not to involve all failure modes: The explosions in fukushima could have been avoided using catalytic recombinators which are for example mandatory in germany [1].
You can't make this argument in a vacuum. You need to compare it to the alternatives - most energy today is generated by burning fossil fuels, which might be the way to a global environmental apocalypse. An old mine containing dangerous chemicals seems pretty mild compared to depopulating Mexico.
Now obviously 100% clean means like wind and solar are preferred, but are those really viable at a global level?
> If you look at the numbers you'll see that nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest scalable energy source we've got. It's the energy source that has the fewest deaths per MWH produced, it doesn't produce CO2, etc. etc.
How about nuclear waste though? Where do we put that? I'm with you, it seems like humanity at large is hysterical beyond reasonable levels about radiation. However, it's not like it's completely harmless or unproblematic either.
Maybe - just maybe - we should just use less energy, so that the renewables suffice. Just a crazy idea.
Nuclear power really is a darn good solution to our energy problems, and is more feasible and entirely more humane than using less energy. Our growing energy demands are not just a result of us being spoiled, they are a direct result of our need to sustain more and more people. Cut down on the energy, and you quickly fund yourself cutting down on progress and on the welfare of the poor.
Progress has created a lot of problems, but we can't really slow down in any significant way. Our only hope is to use our momentum to find solutions.
That surprised me, but I didn't mean to say that fossil fuel power plants are a great alternative.
> Progress has created a lot of problems, but we can't really slow down in any significant way. Our only hope is to use our momentum to find solutions.
I'm not saying we should go back to not having energy at all. But it seems like there's quite a bit of potential for saving energy without seriously lowering anyone's quality of life.
For instance, does 50% of the population have to commute in a big car every day? That doesn't sound like progress to me.
The US's per capita energy consumption is more than twice that of the UK [1], is there really no way to save some of that?
Related to your link, Not propaganda, but a weird pseudo-documentary drama about nuclear devastation over Sheffield: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
It's a "fun" watch, probably the most frightening piece of film I've ever seen.
There is a lot of sense in this. From youth we've been trained that nuclear radiation is associated with cancer, Godzilla and mutant fish. My own irrational hate of Nuclear Fission plants comes from the hard learned lessons of Civilization 3; which teaches one to avoid building Nuclear plants due to the incredible rate of meltdowns and the subsequent massive death count and many turn loss of productive tiles. And global warming. Given all that, the level of trepidation around them should not come as a surprise. And if that isn't bad enough, fission plants are like airplanes. Crashes I mean.
People are afraid of Airplanes despite their incredible safety record because failure is spectacular and newsworthy. Consequence is concentrated and easily compartmentalized vs the more background event of the relatively near constant death from cars/coal (I wonder if this is leakage due to the brain reusing the smell cancellation modules on abstract frequencies like death rate). Similarly, the impact of meltdowns can be more viscerally felt in terms of relocation and ghost towning - even if they lead to little to no measured cancers or ill health (the worst case of incompetency in the form of Chernobyl is a fraction of the time integral health/death/radiative burden of coal plants to locals and workers). And to top it off, damage can be easily visualized in terms of three eyed fish, Godzilla and those ugly, ugly orange tiles. Shiver. Availability Heuristic at work.
At the same time I believe there is some cause for apprehension. It has to do with what the state current US infrastructure suggests on the real risks of a plant; failure of which might trigger an AI Winter type event at the worst possible time. The risk of Fission Plants is mainly in human competency and complacency. Will there be any corners cut in design and will operators become complacent due to extended runs of non-events? Will vital maintenance be done? I have not seen evidence that much of the world is ready for that kind of thing. The west is yes, mostly, but as the rest of the world comes online it would be preferable to have clean energy that doesn't jump to 50% chance of meltdown during revolts. So looking at alternative replacements at the same time as - instead of just focusing on -Nuclear is worthwhile.
A single large failure and human reaction to that kind of thing will lead to cascading moving away from Nuclear at just the time when it is most needed. It is thus in my opinion, better to do limited roll outs on newer incompetency resistant designs before any universal switching. Education on the nature of different types of radiation and their effects (focus on neutron vs bio, halflives vs waste), drastically reduced dangers to workers of nuclear vs coal plants, unloading the weighting on the bomb aspect of nuclear, probability theory, and shining a clarifying light on the stellar safety record of nuclear plants; will all go a long way towards solving the world's future energy problems.
As for me, while (I think) Civ 5 doesn't have that stupid penalty, the damage is already done. I will always recommend Solar and Hydro in place of Nuclear.
"Many technologies and materials associated with the creation of a nuclear power program have a dual-use capability, in that they can be used to make nuclear weapons if a country chooses to do so. "
"I blame the cold war propoganda for our irrational fear of nuclear energy."
That's interesting, certainly very complicated, but consider an occams razor explanation like "Dumb people almost always viciously hate whatever they don't understand, and (intentionally?) not too many people understand nukes, so ... "
After Hiroshima and during the cold war nuclear energy was associated with death and destruction. Hiroshima for obvious reasons, and the cold war because the population of the western world was constantly reminded how The Soviet Union had thousands of missiles with nuclear bombs pointing at us, ready to go. Western governments used nuclear weapons to picture the threat and to terrify populations into spending more on defense against the Soviets. There were scary videos of mushroom clouds, scary instructions on how to survive a nuclear blast, and scary stories of how a nuclear winter would pan out.
This, obviously, made people scared of nuclear bombs, and nuclear energy in general. Through decades the population was told by the government that nuclear radiation was the evil silent killer.
The byproduct of all this cold war propoganda was that people are now irrationally scared of nuclear radiation from power plants.
If you look at the numbers you'll see that nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest scalable energy source we've got. It's the energy source that has the fewest deaths per MWH produced, it doesn't produce CO2, etc. etc. Yet we think of it as getting power from the devil.
I blame the cold war propoganda for our irrational fear of nuclear energy.
Here's one of the old propaganda videos from the US, "Duck and cover" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4MVJIU0gFk