what was the mother screaming get the kids for frightening facts or hints for terrorists?? A terrorist strike on Sellafield's storage tanks of radioactive waste in west Cumbria could kill over 2 million people.
That is a totally stupid argument. I wonder what the odds of them dying in the car on the way to the beach were compared to that.
perfectly valid argument? why? andy - how many car accidents kill into the millions, maim and radioactively contaminate into the tens of millions and would render virtually every extremity of the UK uninhabitable through ground water and topsoil contamination for the next X hundred years?
Risk is all comparative and perceptive - everyone bricks getting onto a plane, yet never thinks about the car they drive to the airport in - even though it's been shown that they're 300x more likely to die in the car. A plane hitting a nuclear power station wouldn't kill millions - probably hundreds at worst in the short term, and maybe thousands in the long term due to cancer. Power plants are just not ike nuclear bombs, you could do what you like to it, and woudn't get a nuclear explosion, just a very hot lump of metal and radioactive leakage. However, I agree terrorism is a risk, albeit comparatively slim, and they need to be well protected, as do planes in the first place. And preferably armoured to withstand a plane strike - but Greenpeace are playing on peoples (statistically unfouunded) 9/11 and nuclear fears with this, to pursue their own agenda. Personally I believe the risk of continuing to pump our atmosphere full of CO2 is greater - but its all subjective, and there isn't an ideal solution.
I'm not Joe and I haven't got time to list all the facts, but do some research on the scale of indirect deaths (think the Bohpal disaster but add the far more diverse meterological systems of north west Europe) and environmental catastrophe when a nuclear reactor melts down, then imagine a plane full with 227,600 litres of highly flammable aviation fuel hitting it at around 5-600 mph... about 600,000 where injured and about 14,000 died in bohpal, that was just from a toxic gas leak.. environmetal pollution of this size would easily kill into the millions in the long term (I'm talking well into the next century at least), simply because of the radiation innvolved and the high population density of the UK (the highest density of any sizeable developed nation in the world)... not to mention the 280 million+ europeans... to show you what I mean... the physical devastation and loss of life of the 9/11 attacks is insignificant in comparison to the death cause by envrionmental pollution through the lung ripping levels of Corrosive Dust, PCBs (mmm lead), Agent Orange (jungle remover) Asbestos, Vanadium, Sulphur, Benzine etc. and best of all, if it reached the water supply, enough Mercury from the light bulbs to destroy every trace of life in 500,000 acres of water... they estimate the indirect death toll in new york will reach the hundreds of thousands within a decade and thats just the begining of a legacy... out of the men employed to work full time where they buried the rubble, all but one are dead, and that was from 2002... Nuclear power is far from 'clean' a hot lump of metal would be the least of our worries... The only extreme theory involved in this is if there was a concerted effort to wipe out several power plants in attempt to black out.. the environmentally catastrophic reality of this slightly OTT dramatisation is very real. All this and no ones even mentioned the economic devastation...
