God Save Us from 2012!! Explosion at French nuclear site

[Nalano]

holy crap. that's pretty hardcore.

So, seriously, why worry?

[QuantaCat]

Should I bring up the radiation chart again?

[Donjonson]

Maybe because it's extremely unlikely that I'm going to be killed by an irradiated piece of sushi or a terrorist attack or a steam pipe bursting under Sixth Avenue, and so taking excessive action to protect myself from these outlier contingencies is a waste of my time and a tax on my mental fortitude.

Saying "I don't think the Fukushima disaster is going to have much of an effect on me" is not the same as "I'm going to eat this rancid meat and damn the consequences."

I was replying hyperbole with hyperbole... it makes sense to try to prevent nuclear disasters and minimise the negative effects of fallout and irradiation but not to worry too much about another galaxy crashing into ours... is what I was getting at :) It seems like the OP is coming at the thing from a weird angle but it's probably fair to say that the scale of the Fukushima disaster is probably a lot worse than governments and authorities are letting on.

[Lukasz]

but it's probably fair to say that the scale of the Fukushima disaster is probably a lot worse than governments and authorities are letting on.

it probably is not fair.

simple reason. There are thousands of people from all parts of the world in that area. Sure, they might have been able to lie in the beginning but not now. Too many people outside direct control of government to hide any true discrepancy between official reports and reality of the situation. Different interpretations of the data do happen of course and governments always tend to favour more convenient interpratation but saying that situation is 'a lot worse' is definitely unfair.

Japan is not soviet union, you know... which did fail to hide true scale of the catastrophe in Chernobyl anyway.

[Donjonson]

By "fair" I mean "in my ill informed opinion".