Reply #3: I think time was beginning to provide some perspective.

[phantom power]

With a few decades of hindsight, it's possible to stand back and observe that TMI, Chernobyl, etc, were industrial accidents. Like industrial accidents of any kind, they involved potential danger to people (and wildlife) in their vicinity. In the case of Chernobyl, that danger played out as actual loss of life.

I think the distance of time has shown that these accidents were not out of proportion to any other variety of industrial accident.

As I mentioned to somebody else the other day, there is an unspoken "conventional wisdom" that leaks of radioactive materials somehow embody a risk to life and health that is outside the realm of the risks posed by other industries. What we've seen through experience is that it isn't true.

All these dreadful headlines are right out the Lovecraft theory of energy reporting. Just throw that word "radiation" out there, and let it hang, Lovecraftian-wise. Let the reader imagine their own private horrors. It's one of the most effective horror techniques. Because in the end, who can scare us more than our own imaginations?

If the press wanted to provide an actual public service, they would get a toxicologist to provide a probability distribution that expresses the actual likelihoods of various health consequences of the leaked materials from those reactors. But they don't. They just say "radioactive materials were leaked." Lovecraft would be proud.