Astral Codex Ten

Chernobyl

4 min read

Chernobyl

Article

Chernobyl is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 07, 2023 and July 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Start smoking and move to Chernobyl?”; “terrifying meltdowns like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl”; “one or two more Chernobyls”. It most often appears alongside Congress, Three Mile Island, United States.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 07, 2023
  • Last seen: July 01, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero
February 07, 2023 · Original source
I think a philosophical argument here would have to go through the idea that we try to achieve the same things as our role models. If the best way to be remembered after your death is to discover new fundamental theories of the universe, kids might study hard, think big, and focus on important problems. If the best way to be remembered after your death is to get a really weird cancer, kids might - what? Start smoking and move to Chernobyl? Sounds bad.
Kelly Bets On Civilization
March 07, 2023 · Original source
Here’s an example I think about constantly: activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s felt absolutely sure that they were doing the right thing to battle nuclear power. At least, I’ve never read about any of them having a smidgen of doubt. Why would they? They were standing against nuclear weapons proliferation, and terrifying meltdowns like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and radioactive waste poisoning the water and soil and causing three-eyed fish. They were saving the world. Of course the greedy nuclear executives, the C. Montgomery Burnses, claimed that their good atom-smashing was different from the bad atom-smashing, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Science and technology are great bets. Their benefits are much greater than their harms. Whenever you get a chance to bet something significantly less than everything in the world on science or technology, you should take it. Your occasional losses will be dwarfed by your frequent and colossal gains. If we’d gone full-speed-ahead on nuclear power, we might have had one or two more Chernobyls - but we’d save the tens of thousands of people who die each year from fossil-fuel-pollution-related diseases, end global warming, and have unlimited cheap energy.
Your Book Review: Safe Enough?
July 01, 2023 · Original source
I was eight when the Three Mile Island nuclear plant had its 'loss of containment' event. I was 15 when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. I understood these events in the same terms an adolescent understands anything: The adults are lying to us. To a teenager, there was no point in entertaining a defense of the industry. The entire enterprise dripped with poison.
Nuclear energy was quite popular in the early 1970s, with support in the US in the range of 70-80%. That changed after Three Mile Island, when support plummeted below 40%. But then, weirdly, in the 1990s support stabilized. Despite Davis-Besse, despite Chernobyl and Fukushima, in the US support for nuclear has stayed roughly in the bound of about 40-60% in the three decades since. Nuclear energy is perhaps unique as a technology, in that no amount of experience seems to change society’s comfort with it. The topic is forever radioactive.
Wellock's book is big on stories yet short on raw data. But a dive into the academic literature shows that, on implementing the teachings of Probabilistic Risk Assessment after Three Mile Island and (especially) Chernobyl, the rate of nuclear 'events' dropped by over a factor of 4.
Inline links: dropped by over a factor of 4