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Comment by b2ccb2 | Hacker News Reader

Fear. I grew up when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl reached us. I didn’t grow up eating mushrooms. We still measure radioactivity here, ask any hunter. When Fukushima happened, it tore open an old wound. Is it rational? I’m not sure, but I remember my parents taking in 2 Ukrainians for a month to detox in Germany.

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We measure radioactivity in Germany because boar and deer are still contaminated. Especially in southern Bavaria. Samples exceeded the EU limit value for consumption by up to 25 times.

A study found that most of the contamination these days doesn't come from Chernobyl anymore but from nuclear weapon tests.

https://www.infranken.de/bayern/warum-wildschweine-in-bayern...

PS: hunters with contaminated boars have to pay for the disposal themselves but can get the money back from the state. So, like with everything around nuclear: in the end it's the taxpayer who has to pay for it.

https://www.bayern.landtag.de/www/ElanTextAblage_WP17/Drucks...

I think this is spot on. It is not rational, but it's deeply rooted. I vividly remember the children's TV explaining nuclear chain reactions, what happened in Chernobyl, and why kids couldn't play in sandboxes on the playground anymore for a while. Die Sendung mit der Maus had a whole segment with ping pong balls on mousetraps, setting one off, and that cascading into hundreds of mousetraps shooting the balls everywhere. Much like middle-aged American adults in 20 years are going to remember Sesame Street having very special episodes about Katrina or 9/11, middle-aged Germans remember a very fearful time around a nuclear disaster that happened close enough to home that it impacted them - fortunately not in a truly disastrous way. And that has an impact on public opinion, emotionally.

This rare events with significnt impact on many people, like nuclear accidents, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, are always good source of drama for movies.

In case of Chernobyl, the worst case estimates are 4000 excess deaths. In comparison, about the same number of excess deaths is from coal burning in Germany each year.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373512769_Environme...

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

Because coal burning is happening for decades and is not one time rare event it doesn't get the attention it deserves.

And also many organization demonizing nuclear energy do it, because they see a source of plutonium for nuclear weapons in each civilian nuclear reactor and each country running civilian nuclear reactors as a country on the brink of having nuclear weapons.

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