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Comment by abeld | Hacker News Reader

but that kind of hubristic "we can calculate the probabilities of all failure modes" thinking is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of nuclear.

Would you be more comfortable with "we can't estimate the probabilities of all failure modes"? I am sure that all engineers involved in planning the failure-handling systems know that those "calculations of probabilities" are only estimates based on some assumptions.

I think nuclear often gets bad press because you can measure and calculate a lot of risks to a much higher precision than in other industries. Like "x amount of radiation released" where x is actually a very small number but the fact that you can measure it and make an estimate as to how many cancer cases will be caused by it makes it scary, while people don't care much about the risks of, say, coal-mining because thats harder to measure/estimate.

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Doesn't seem to extend beyond energy production. For instance, tell people all about the dangers in chicken mcnuggets, or smoking, or a sedentery lifestyle, and they don't get very excited at all. Even if you quote statistics.

Certainly they never go as far as voting against chicken farms.

Its got to be the theoretical nature of nuclear power generation that has something to do with it. Its invisible, unfathomable and secretive, so folks distrust it?

Chicken mcnuggets, tobacco smoke, and sedentery lifestyles are not members of the set of "things that can cause arable land to become permanently uninhabitable". Nuclear accidents are in that set and that is why the public is (rightly) concerned about them.

Nuclear accidents are not members of the set of "things that are at all likely to actually hurt you or anybody you know". Sedentary lifestyles and tobacco smoke are in that set, but they lack the novelty and sensationalism that gives nuclear accidents their cachet.

I think that people (self included) are generally more accepting of risk if it's control is within their own hands. Dying of tobacco related illnesses or obesity is mostly within my own control. Dying because a a nuclear reactor leak is pretty much 100% out of my control.

Even then, people's estimates of danger are crazy. A nuclear accident is far less likely to kill you than any number of other things that are outside your control. A drunk driver running into you, for example, or a natural gas explosion.

Arable land gets people excited? Really? I can't say I don't know anybody that gets excited over arable land, I know one guy, but he's a soil and water commissioner.

That's still too intellectual to make most folks even notice. California farmland is getting poisoned by selenium from groundwater wells, but not a lot of folks picketing about that.

They might not care all that much about the "arable" part, but I don't think the "permanently uninhabitable" part is too intellectual for the average person to grok.

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