I had a similar take, but most around me didn't. Most around me took away that nuclear is dangerous and shouldn't be used. Never mind that every country (USSR included) knew that a positive void reactor was a dumb idea.
But as to the fear, most people I know thought the three men that went into the reactor died of horrible deaths. Despite the show even mentioning that they survived (I believe only one is dead now and died of a heart attack at old age. Could be radiation related, could be old, probably both, but it wasn't an abnormal death IIRC).
There's even a lot of misinformation about how many people Chernobyl killed. We say "thousands of deaths" but it is hard to put that in perspective. If we say a thousand people dead in front of us, that's a lot. But if we're talking <30k deaths from 1986 - 2065, that's not that many people[0]. That total number is less than the average flu kills in just the US PER YEAR. It is about 380 people/year. A lot, but this pales in comparison to what our usage of coal does in a single country per year. As in some estimates of coal pollution kill more people in the US per year than all will from the worst nuclear disaster in the history of mankind ever will [1].
It is hard to compare our energy sources because we do not do them one to one. Nuclear's deaths have been caused from 3 disasters, one of which killed nobody, and one of which accounts for 99%[2] of those deaths. I think the thing about nuclear is that when things go wrong it is temporally and geographically localized. This is easy to see the damage. But it is hard to say that coal in the US kills more a year than all the world's nuclear power plants combined. If you bring stats in you generally get called inhumane, even if you are trying to use stats to save lives. It is a complicated and tricky subject. It is just hard to compare because the coal deaths are not temporally and geographically localized. Our brains weren't designed to easily reason about information like that, whereas they were designed to reason about the former.
You're definitely right about a lot of what you've said. But my inclination is that while people did take a political message from the Chernobyl show (which I did love), they also took away an anti-nuclear sentiment. I think this is unfortunate because I believe there is overwhelming evidence that the technology directly saves hundreds of thousands of human lives and significantly help our environment.
The Oroville Dam near-failure necessitated the evacuation of more people than the Fukushima failure.
In actual fact, hydroelectric power has been far deadlier and more destructive than nuclear power (especially when scaled to a per-MW basis), yet it's the latter that's seen as too dangerous.
But as to the fear, most people I know thought the three men that went into the reactor died of horrible deaths. Despite the show even mentioning that they survived (I believe only one is dead now and died of a heart attack at old age. Could be radiation related, could be old, probably both, but it wasn't an abnormal death IIRC).
There's even a lot of misinformation about how many people Chernobyl killed. We say "thousands of deaths" but it is hard to put that in perspective. If we say a thousand people dead in front of us, that's a lot. But if we're talking <30k deaths from 1986 - 2065, that's not that many people[0]. That total number is less than the average flu kills in just the US PER YEAR. It is about 380 people/year. A lot, but this pales in comparison to what our usage of coal does in a single country per year. As in some estimates of coal pollution kill more people in the US per year than all will from the worst nuclear disaster in the history of mankind ever will [1].
It is hard to compare our energy sources because we do not do them one to one. Nuclear's deaths have been caused from 3 disasters, one of which killed nobody, and one of which accounts for 99%[2] of those deaths. I think the thing about nuclear is that when things go wrong it is temporally and geographically localized. This is easy to see the damage. But it is hard to say that coal in the US kills more a year than all the world's nuclear power plants combined. If you bring stats in you generally get called inhumane, even if you are trying to use stats to save lives. It is a complicated and tricky subject. It is just hard to compare because the coal deaths are not temporally and geographically localized. Our brains weren't designed to easily reason about information like that, whereas they were designed to reason about the former.
You're definitely right about a lot of what you've said. But my inclination is that while people did take a political message from the Chernobyl show (which I did love), they also took away an anti-nuclear sentiment. I think this is unfortunate because I believe there is overwhelming evidence that the technology directly saves hundreds of thousands of human lives and significantly help our environment.
[0] https://science.time.com/2011/04/22/how-many-did-chernobyl-k...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...
[2] I'm not joking. 99% is concervative. Fukushima has only a single recorded radiation death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...