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Philae's Lost Seven Months Were Completely Unnecessary
StartsWithABang writes: This past weekend, the Philae lander reawakened after seven dormant months, the best outcome that mission scientists could've hoped for with the way the mission unfolded. But the first probe to softly land on a comet ever would never have needed to hibernate at all if we had simply built it with the nuclear power capabilities it should've had. The seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.
Yeah, Fukushima felt no ill effects from that reactor whatsoever.
How about Pripyat? I hear they turned that into a sprawling downtown now - it's bigger than NYC.
Oh wait, no. Back in reality both of those places are ghost towns and they're going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. The people that used to live there? Yeah, some of them may or may not have died from cancer - there's no clear way to know in a cancer case that the cause was Fukushima, or Chernobyl, or even just a hot particle from a nuclear reprocessing plant that got stuck in their A/C vent. Regardless of whether those people died or not they still can't go home. Everything they spent their lives building is permanently destroyed and unsalvageable.
So, no, when you say it "didn't kill anyone" you're just excluding all the deaths that no-one cares to track after the event. You're excluding everything the whole industry and society will try its level-best to dissociate from the event for fear of legal repercussions, compensation claims, or to avoid the uncomfortable truth. Even if you're not willing to consider any physical harm those people are still out a whole life they had built - so something died, maybe it wasn't a person though if that helps you get through the day.
What a load of shit the premise of the story is. No its NOT worth it to risk a nuclear accident and the release of dangerous nucleotides into the environment, and some people on Earth are capable of making the correct and precautionary decision to be safe. Trying to weight the practice of precaution against "7 months of data" is utter and complete bullshit.