Definitely true. But you see the blame placed on the public fearing nuclear from these events. There was some fear, but also astroturfing to make sure nuclear stayed dead.
Definitely true. But you see the blame placed on the public fearing nuclear from these events. There was some fear, but also astroturfing to make sure nuclear stayed dead.
> a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.
To be fair to past humans the deliberate lies and misinformation didn't really start until the 1970s, the oil crisis of that decade, the coming together of the UN to recognise the issue following the geophysics papers of the 1960s that nailed the CO2 problem against oil consumption, etc.
That's the period in which Koch money started flowing to think tanks and agencies that spun hard against smaller cars, public transport, integrated rail in cities, etc. The push for bigger cars as freedom.
Arrhenius' 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect didn't exactly have enough bite to kick of anti-prop in 1926, the world had other pressing issues.
Also worth noting that Three Mile Island was an earlier stain on public perception that kicked in a power station slow down well before Chernobyl.
You right. 50 years or so. I was trying going back far enough to include the discovery of man-made climate change and not necessarily starting right at the plugging our ears portion of the timeline.
Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.
Fear of nuclear weapons was backed in as part of the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction stand off doctrine - rather hard to achieve when pushing the Atoms For Peace warm fuzzy alternative.
Didn't help that nukes didn't make good civil engineering tools or help conquer space by farting out tiny bombs.
Even Carl Sagan was pushing the nuclear should not be used primal back brain reaction by over hyping (?) nuclear winter for a disarmament argument.