Your point seems to be that if you handle radioactivity irresponsibly like the soviets did many people will die.
You can make the same point regarding just about any human activities - burning coal, wood, oil, driving cars, dams, overeating, etc, etc.
My point is you handle any new technology with the appropriate level of responsibility and you weigh the costs and benefits and if the benefits outweigh the cost you do it. You’ll make mistakes along the way and learn from them.
My opinion regarding nuclear energy is that the benefits outweigh the costs - definitely in terms of life and also economically. There is a strong political agenda against nuclear - which is the same that’s against coal, oil, hydro and just about any other form of energy that actually works (including solar and wind - now that they’re actually getting to the threshold of being feasible).
“Your point seems to be that if you handle radioactivity irresponsibly like the soviets did many people will die.”
Hmmm...a bit of an over simplification here but I’d like to get something out of it. I would say for example, that if you handle radioactivity irresponsibly you can always lie about it and ridicule anyone who disagrees with you, portray them as backward tree huggers etc. You can deny outright the existence of life altering disaster that break a country financially (according to Gorbachev) and decide to further conceal information from the public having declared them incapable of decision making etc. And then you’d have a situation like Japan were people are told it’s is/isn’t safe to drink the water depending on what day it is, and those in the exclusion zone may be abandoned without supplies because you don’t want to say what’s going on and alarm anyone until when you do speak, the public doesn’t believe you because they know your history of withholding information from them. And as long as denial is in force, you don’t have to face the issues of management that pop up in any culture using this technology.
“My point is you handle any new technology with the appropriate level of responsibility and you weigh the costs and benefits and if the benefits outweigh the cost you do it. You’ll make mistakes along the way and learn from them.”
This is where we, and other cultures are failing. We can’t possibly weigh the costs if we deny actual radiation levels, fatality rates etc. and the square miles of uninhabitable land. We can’t learn from mistakes along the way (management issues, confidence issues - the need to deny it happened, the need to ignore all public concern by declaring it’s existence as proof of ignorance) if we declare that only full speed ahead supporters should be listened to as all others are too childish to think and reason. I really thought, way back when, that by now, we’d have that tackled and be on to better challenges but it remains a problem and even more so because people insist the problem only exists in fevered imaginations.