Hacker News Reader

Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

And yet, earlier this year, 200,000 had to be evacuated because a dam in California nearly broke.

If 200,000 people in the US had to be evacuated because a nuclear reactor nearly went critical, every single nuclear plant in the country would have been shut down.

View on HN

Those aren't equivalent events though. There's no risk to being somewhere a flood happened a billion years ago.

There's no risk to being somewhere a nuclear reactor melted down a billion years ago, either. The vast majority of radioactivity comes from short lived isotopes - Iodine, Caesium, and Strontium mostly.

We are living on a planet which was produced by a nuclear explosion of cataclysmic proportions, a few billion years ago.

Where else do elements heavier then hydrogen (Or, if you want to split hairs, iron) come from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_nucleosynthesis

Or, for that matter, fifty miles from where a flood is happening now.

It's a lot easier to see, understand and avoid a flood than it to detect and avoid fallout.

And what precisely do you mean by "seeing and avoiding"? Ugo the caveman sees a slowly rising river, Ugo runs to the village, village safely runs away? Erm, no. When you see a flood wave several stories in height, you may have a few split seconds to start videorecording on your phone, maybe the phone will be found afterwards and handed over to your surviving out-of-town relatives, it will make a nice clip in evening news...

With floods, you rely on authorities and early warning systems just as much as in radioactivity, actually you can buy a cheap dosimeters/Geiger counters and there are enthusiast networked detectors - but did you put a webcam with trained CV model on all surrounding flood paths? Did you put chemical sensors around all railway tracks in the neighborhood or do you just as well rely on "seeing, understanding and avoiding" a chlorine gas cloud?

It is just the prehistorical evolutionary parts of the brain speaking - we see flood, radioactivity we don't, danger, quickly bash it with a stick!

Eighty years ago that was the case. Fifty years ago that was the case in many places. Today that is no longer the case. There are very robust and effective sensor networks in any and every location where there exists any possibility of a radioactive concern.

The point stands - for the individual it is very reassuring to be able perceive a danger. And not all radiation sources have masses of alarms near them. Hospitals for example don't put detectors everywhere and they have some very nasty radiation sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com