NEI Nuclear Notes

Or maybe pusillanimous. --- Gizmodo takes a quick look at 1979: the Year We Wussed Out of Nuclear: The timing of the movie coming out tying in with Three Mile Island may have been lucky for the producers, who suddenly had a huge blockbuster hit on their hands, but it was less lucky for boosters of safe nuclear energy. Since that meltdown, the production of nuclear power plants has gone down significantly despite the fact that there were no deaths or even recorded cases of cancer caused by Three Mile Island—the amount of radiation that the people near the plant were exposed to is said to be similar to that of getting an X-ray. Too short to really make an argument, the post seems to want to blame The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island equally for the hibernation in building new nuclear plants. We’d likely stress the movie less – movie alarmism usually has a brief half-life – and Chernobyl and the No Nukes movement (that also spawned a movie, in 1980) that arose from TMI. ...