[LMB] OT: Sad link of the day

[James Nicoll]

On Tue, 1 Jan 2008, Bear Master wrote:

> On Dec 31, 2007 4:29 PM, Marilyn Traber <mtraber251 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGLRrQEBqAs
>>
>> Cherynobyl.
>>
>> I have no words.
>
> Wow.
>
> Thank you for sharing that.
>
SNIP

> Chernobyl was a warning shot, and somehow by some miracle we, as a 
> species, listened for once!  We owe a debt to those who died or became 
> refugees, and to the Ukrainians still living in its shadow.

 	Not to encourage the wanton use of nuclear weapons but while I 
think we all learned an important lesson about not getting drunken 
engineers to build reactors from flammable materials [1] before allowing 
bureaucrats to run extremely poorly thought-out safety tests from 
Chernobyl, the death toll so far has been comparatively low: United 
Nations Scientific Committee of the Effects of Atomic Radiation puts the 
total so far at about 57.

 	To put this in perspective, the WHO estimates that something like 
three million people die each year from air pollution.

1: Although I would have said that Windscale taught us much the same 
lesson and yet people still used massive amounts of graphite in reactors 
built after the Windscale fire.