• @rtxn
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    823 months ago

    I know certain sentiments are coming, so I’ll put this here: Three Mile Island wasn’t the unmitigated disaster that fearmongers would have you believe. It was an ultimately harmless accident that was highly publicized because of poor communication and irresponsible sensationalist journalism.

    More on the topic: https://youtu.be/cL9PsCLJpAA

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      It was actually a success story. It failed safe, as designed.

      Unfortunately “The China Syndrome” really pumped up anti-nuclesr sentiment.

      TMI was the opposite of Chernobyl.

      • @shalafi
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        33 months ago

        Heh, you see my posts? That movie came out not 2-weeks ahead of 3-Mile. Freaky isn’t it?

    • @ilinamorato
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      353 months ago

      Yep. And underscoring that more than almost anything else is the fact that the TMI facility continued to operate without incident for forty years after that accident.

    • @shalafi
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      3 months ago

      Posted this earlier:

      A poof of radioactive steam let loose. That’s it, the whole incident. People freaked out on March 28, 1979.

      In totally unrelated news, The China Syndrome, a popular movie about a reactor meltdown, came out March 16, 1979.

    • @[email protected]
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      173 months ago

      “Nuclear” sounds scary but it doesn’t have to be and generally isn’t. There are currently 94 active nuclear reactors in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States

      IMHO, the correct take on “<blank> uses enormous amounts of energy” is “yes, we do need to invest more in renewable and clean energy”. Anyone who didn’t have their head in the sand could have known that last century. This is only a problem now because our political leaders have failed us, year after year, decade after decade.

        • @Maggoty
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          73 months ago

          And then there’s like 80 reactors moving around the world, docking in our ports.

      • @rtxn
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        3 months ago

        “Nuclear” sounds scary

        Related, unfun fact: MRI used to be called NMRI, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, because it used the nuclear magnetic resonance phenomenon (literally a nuclear vibe check), but people were so afraid of the word “nuclear” that it was dropped.

    • @Maggoty
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      53 months ago

      I thought the Netflix show was pretty clear it wasn’t as bad as popular history made it out to be.