Re:California's Last Nuclear Power Plant to Be Shut Down
by _ph_ on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @03:58AM
(#11952214)
If the damage done by Chernobyl was limited to the restricted area around the town, that wouldn't be so bad. But in fact, as I wrote in my other comment, large parts of western Europe have been contaminated too. Not to the level where one cannot live there any more, but to the level, where it makes it dangerous to eat wild mushrooms and game (which has to be checked for radioactivity before being considered edible). And this will be an issue for many decades to come.
We could make movies about dams that collapse, too and we have. I'm not even sure there are more about nuclear accidents (nuclear war, yes, but accidents?). Even if there are, I think the movies are a symptom of the problem, not its cause. The invisible danger of radiation being held back by walls of concrete just looks more dangerous to us than the visible danger of a wall of water being held back by walls of concrete.
And Chernobyl? A nature reserve. I can see someone writing a SF story about cultures that protect existing nature by the controlled disposal of radio-active material.