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Originally Posted by Zetsubo
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They wont trust Govt officials or scientists that work in the system since apparently ... they re immune :P
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You must be careful, when you want to trust people who are biased towards a technology for various reasons. Not being immune and capitalist short term gain thinking are not mutually exclusive.
Do you trust polticians to keep their promises they made in an election campaign? Not to say, that there was the mandra, that nuclear power plants are safe. That they are never disaster fail safe is shown in Fukushima. Yet they claimed what they either did not know better, or deliberately claimed it despite knowing better.
In nuclear science too much emphazises is on the technical aspect, very little is known about health consequences in a case of disaster. Thats only natural, because statistically most scientist will say, such an incident occurs every 1,000 - 10,000 years or so. They obviously do not adequately recognize the human factor in their equations (when I read the official results of investigation of hazardous incidents in german nuclear power stations, its like 25% of the incidents were caused by people who override safety mechanisms in order to keep the power plant running or do not fix safety mechanisms in order to keep them running).
But whats even worse, there is a biased and hence a marginalizing POV regarding the dangers of the technology. There are potential risks coming from certain radioactive isotopes that go beyond the risk metrics that influence the final value of Sv, but everything is simply broken down into Sv (as if it was possible to deduce actual long term risk estimates from such data alone... the problem is, that this field of science is imo still understudied¹ - for obvious reasons - They do not even care to use man Sv for their risk estimates (which should be used when talking about long time exposure <- an even more debated and understudied field of science)).
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In a (nuclear) war, the long term cancer risk for troops who are exposed to radiation is pretty much a non issue for the war, so there will be no funding from that side to support research that deals with long term risk analysis of radiation. There is certainly not much interest from government institutions and no interest in such research in the nuclear industry... nuclear power generation is just a too precious asset...).
So, at the moment, nobody can give factual risk estimates, because there is not enough research going on in this field of science. This makes a best case estimate (usually made by the same people who benefit in one way or another from nuclear energy) equal to deciding that a certain amount of people are expendable for the merits of nuclear generated electricity.
For example take the table that was posted (again) by Vexx, there the maximum yearly dosis for US radiation workers is shown. Now most people will think, when they look at this chart, that such a dosis must be safe then. Actually if the US radiation worker was exposed to this radiation over 35 years of his/her life, the cancer risk would raise about 7%. 7%, thats 70 out of 1,000 (or 70,000 out of 1,000,000) people get cancer because of radiation. This puts the idea, that this bears almost no risk into perspective I think. The fact that there is not a 7% raised ratio of cancer for US radiation workers is because they are not exposed each year to the maximum dose. So, actually this chart is telling people what they want to read from it... but without some background knowledge it won't help the average joe to estimate a long term risk.