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From: Cracked.com - http://www.cracked.com/article_18849_6-statistically-full-s2321t-dangers-media-loves-to-hype_p2.html

What's More Dangerous Than Nuclear Power Plants? Every Other Kind of Power Plant.

 

It's hard to believe now, but nuclear energy was once a pretty promising and popular form of power. For a while in the 1950s, the design world was smitten with the atomic aesthetic, and everything kind of took on this spacey, futuristic look. Even toys got in on atomic energy fever:

 

Nuclear energy was literally all fun and games until a few meltdowns burst our atomic dream bubble. By the time Three Mile Island had its partial meltdown, most of the American public was terrified of powering even a toaster with something so insanely dangerous. From Three Mile on, it became so difficult to sell the public on nuclear energy that no new power plants have been built in the U.S. in 30 years.

Here's the thing, though. No one died as a result of the Three Mile Island disaster. No one even got injured or sick. The radiation released was the equivalent of one-sixth of a chest X-ray. In fact, even with nuclear power plants still in operation in the United States today, you and everyone who works in them still effectively have a 0 percent chance of dying from radiation poisoning.
While people did die at Chernobyl, and many people got sick, poor design and safety violations were so egregious and numerous that the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group published a 148-page report in 1993 detailing every possible thing that went wrong and how it could have been easily fixed. That doesn't change the fact that everyone around the accident got massively screwed in a big way, of course, but it seems that our initial estimates of the long-term damage of a nuclear event may have been exaggerated.

 

You call that a meltdown?

What You Should be Afraid of:
Every other source of energy.
For example, coal kills more miners every few years than the initial blast at Chernobyl. This, of course, doesn't take into account air pollution from coal, which dwarfs those numbers yearly. But come on, that's not really surprising, is it? We know coal is bad for us -- that's why we're developing all these great green forms of energy. They're renewable and better for the environment.
Unfortunately, they're actually not necessarily safer than nuclear energy for those involved in producing them. A study found that in Europe alone, wind energy has killed more people than nuclear energy and, worldwide, hydroelectric energy has, too.
The leading cause of accidents involving wind energy farms is "blade failure," which is when a turbine blade breaks, sending shrapnel flying through the air.

 

With hydroelectric, of course, you get disasters and floods related to the dams.
Are we saying nuclear energy is the end-all, be-all next great power source? Is this article sponsored by a nuclear power conglomerate? Not as far as we know. We're just saying that sometimes it seems like we decide what we are going to be afraid of by drawing randomly from a hat.


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