You know why so many people are concerned about the Fukushima radioactive wastewater release and how it could affect seafood, despite governments claiming it's all perfectly safe?
Why??? Because since the dawn of the nuclear industry, governments have routinely minimized and outright lied about risks to people from nuclear operations and waste. Governments in the East. Governments in the West. Russia. USA. Everywhere.
It's their own fault that so many people don't trust them about this now, and with damned good reason.
@lauren None of this is true, at least not in the sense that you think it is.
Spent fuel from power plants has never harmed a single person. Of the three critical nuclear power plant failures in history (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima-Daiichi), only one (Chernobyl) was a high-casualty event where there was a major government cover-up. /1
@lauren Fukushima-Daiichi involved a lot of government incompetence too, but in the sense that the government ordered a completely unnecessary evacuation which *did* result in civilian deaths, whereas the explosion of the plant and subsequent cleanup resulted in, verifiably, 3 deaths.
There were also claims that the original explosion and release of radioactive material contaminated the whole Pacific Ocean but it turned out to be untrue. /2
@lauren So I do not totally trust the people making claims about what’s in the treated water being released, what effects it’s going to have, etc. because they already made similar baseless claims after the initial Fukushima-Daiichi disaster and seem to have very little idea generally about how nuclear power works generally and what the actual risks are. My two cents. /end
@MisuseCase so perhaps that gets into people believing false information about government giving false information about nuclear safety because others actors, whether honest or dishonest, made those false claims.
Or to rephrase the original point, people don't believe the official line about the safety of the water because they *perceive* that governments have routinely lied.
Insert that word and the original post might stand.
