Risk?
Chernobyl, which was a stone-age design with no containment managed by incompetent bureaucrats, is estimated to have produced 17,000 excess cancer deaths above the expected 123 million deaths in the affected population, and wildlife is thriving in the exclusion zone.
Civilized life comes with risk. When you are in a non-totalitarian society, you can take steps to minimize that risk such as designing reactors that produce less and less heat the hotter they get.
In the wake of the Chicago Fire of 1871, would it have been argued that using fire wasn’t worth the risk? Probably. But instead they took steps to correct the problems, and Chicago’s electrical and fire codes are some of the most stringent in the world.
Far more deadly and disastrous incidents than this reactor pepper the annals of history - in Bhopal thousands of people died for the sake of rubber, glue, or pesticides. People are sickening and dying right now in China from the toxic waste products from solar panel production, and millions are being displaced, their homed destroyed, for the sake of hydro power. But no one is yet reported to have died at this reactor from nuclear effects, as far as I know.
The uranium and thorium in fly ash left over from burning coal contains more energy potential than the coal that was burned to produce it.
If our human civilization is to prosper for the next 100,000 years or more; if we are to feed, clothe, and shelter all of humanity, then the virtually unlimited energy available from splitting atoms will continue to be a part of our civilization, just as fire has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Post of the year. Thank you for this little island of sanity amongst all the posts from panicking retards.