>>213107849
>>213107890
There's also a fair bit of misanthropy behind some of the earliest anti-nuclear proponents. Groups like the Sierra Club that opposed nuclear power early on did so because they were afraid that the theoretically limitless energy provided by nuclear would lead to a human population explosion. Malthusianism was very popular among the intelligentsia, as evidenced by things like the Georgia Guidestones. Additionally, the timidity and stupidity of our elected officials made things worse. The death knell for American nuclear power was Three Mile Island, about a few years before Chernobyl. The meltdown was nothing. The amount of radiation released was less than the radiation emitted by the average house over a period of a year.
The problem was that the officials at the federal, state, and local levels failed to coordinate and failed to assuage public fears. Even worse, President Carter, himself a former nuclear specialist in the Navy, was so utterly beholden to party interests that he refused to assure the public that Three Mile Island was, to paraphrase from his own comments, "barely an incident". Hollywood also helped to fuel nuclear paranoia with movies like "China Syndrome" about meltdowns threatening all life on Earth. The general public, unable and unwilling to separate fiction from reality, bought movies like the above hook, line, and sinker. Many people still think that a nuclear reactor can detonate like an atom bomb, something that is impossible. If a reactor explodes, it does so because of pressure buildup in the chamber, as is what happened with the RBMK reactor no. 4 at the Lenin Power Station.
Chernobyl is another can of worms entirely. Combine the incompetence and secrecy of the Soviet Union led to a disaster that could have been easily avoided if, as communism is theoretically supposed to encourage, there was criticism of the systems in place.
