As Zenstar already pointed out in his hawsome blog, today is the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl incident, but I already knew that. Earlier today I was lucky enough to witness a protest march organised by Earthlife Africa. It was a rather comical to see a bunch of hippies, with absolutely no understanding of the actual science involved campaigning, to stop a new nuclear reactor planned by Eskom. Their placards (not Picards) were emblazoned with slogans like "Remember Chernobyl" and "3,5 million are still suffering". That reminded me of an article about how well mother nature had recovered from the incident and that the area is now thriving due to the lack of human interference. Admittedly the article did come out of the ex-world champion propaganda state, they are now totally out-matched by the Bush administration.
The hippies are so amusing, yet all fanatics are dangerous. I have no idea how they arrived at the 3,5 million number, but even Green Peace only estimates that 270 000 cases of cancer will have been caused worldwide by the incident, of which 93 000 will prove fatal. Yet people still believe the erroneously scary numbers and are galvanized against the most efficient form energy known to man. At the extreme of this alternative kind of thinking you'll find people who can justify sabotaging a reactor to cause an incident in order to prove that it can be dangerous. Hell yeah the stuff is dangerous, but it's not particularly difficult to take measures that mitigate most of the risk. If these freaks were opposed to a reactor because they felt that South Africans were too incompetent to reliably manage one I might start to listen. If they claimed that the local industry to too incompetent but put forward a plan to rectify the situation I'd even go as far as saying that they were doing a good thing. However merely protesting for the sake of creating hysteria is very dangerous.
By the way, sabotage has nothing to do with French workers throwing their wooden shoes into the machines, Data had it wrong.
I promise we'll return to our regular format soon.
schpat out
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4 comments:
Of course Data didn't say that, he's not even in that movie!
But what do you expect, if Data can make mistakes, so can I.
*blank stare*
lol.
trekkies :)
about the nuclear power: there are countries that are trying to switch to nuclear because its cleaner and more eco-friendly than oil and coal.
wtf do the hippies want? safe, clean power or safe, smoke spewing, bird killing, fish killing, eco destructive power?
btw: apparently the abandoned area around chernobyl is doing quite well (eco wise) except for the levels of radiation... but then i don't think soil or plantlife cares that much. forests still grow quite happily
hell, the mutations are probably providing us with more evidence for evolution ;)
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