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Living In Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone Would Be No Worse Than Living In London, Research Suggests (bristol.ac.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from University of Bristol, England: New research suggests that few people, if any, should be asked to leave their homes after a big nuclear accident, which is what happened in March 2011 following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Professor Thomas's team used the Judgement or J-value to balance the cost of a safety measure against the increase in life expectancy it achieves. The J-value is a new method pioneered by Professor Thomas that assesses how much should be spent to protect human life and the environment. The researchers found that it was difficult to justify relocating anyone from Fukushima Daiichi, where four and a half years after the accident around 85,000 of the 111,000 people who were moved out by the Japanese government had still not returned. After the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, in what was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union (USSR), the J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining. Using the J-value method, 31,000 people would have needed to be moved, with the number rising to 72,000 if the whole community was evacuated when five per cent of its residents were calculated to lose nine months of life or more.
Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol, said: "Mass relocation is expensive and disruptive. But it is in danger of becoming established as the prime policy choice after a big nuclear accident. It should not be. Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation." For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The results are published in a special issue of Process Safety and Environmental Protection, a journal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
Philip Thomas, Professor of Risk Management in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol, said: "Mass relocation is expensive and disruptive. But it is in danger of becoming established as the prime policy choice after a big nuclear accident. It should not be. Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation." For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The results are published in a special issue of Process Safety and Environmental Protection, a journal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
Does it account for the spike in sudden infant death syndrome in the areas of Japan after 2011?
http://saveie6.com/
I don't know if anyone noticed, but London was a war zone during Ramadan.
I'm waiting with interest to see what London is like from May 15 -> June 15 of next year. I predict it will be much worse, and there will have to be enormous outcry from the British people before something gets done.
Probably a bunch of populist ministers be elected on this very point (over the next year to three years), and eventually a re-formed government will step in with a heavy hand to stop it.
Interesting times.
Is living in London worse than living in a nuclear disaster fallout zone?
Is it that not all nuclear disaster fallout zones are equivalently bad places to live?
J-value method supported relocation when nine months' or more life expectancy would be lost due to radiation exposure by remaining
The Life Expectancy is a statistical quantity. Reducing the average life expectancy by 8 months doesn't mean there won't be data outliers, or individuals affected with undue severity, E.G. Individuals whom will die much earlier because of the incident.
This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.
My spouse was born and raised in NYC. After Hurricane Irma came through, we were driving by a small forest with a few downed trees mixed in and they asked, very seriously, "who is going to clean up all of that mess?" I've also heard "why doesn't someone cut that" when driving by grassland and comments about how much better the area will look when a forest is taken down to put in homes or businesses.
I guess all of that goes to explain my understanding of why people choose to live in cities. There are people that just don't get it.
And you know, perhaps we can just combine the two so that we waste less land on it. We could have a policy that all nuclear facilities should be placed near the upwind side of our biggest cities so that most of the fallout will be confined to an area where it won't harm anyone any more than their existing environment already has. This should produce many additional advantages including reduced transmission costs and a reduction in the total area that anti-terrorism teams have to worry about.
> This is the problem with using life expectancy or other statistical summary averages ---- SOME people still die, and nobody wants that person to be themselves or one of their friends or loved ones; that might be 1 death out of 1000, but it STILL MATTERS to that person and to their community.
One person saved by spending the $X relocating them matters, of course.
The two people who COULD have been saved by using that money to clean up the radiation more thoroughly instead also matter.
The 30 people who could have been saved by spending that money on traffic safety matter still more.
We have a certain amount of resources, a budget. If we have $10 billion to spend on making people safer, we then have to decide which safety projects to fund, with how much going to each project. We can't fund everything that seems like it might save some lives. Some we we wouldn't want to fund even if we had unlimited money - taking people away from their homes and communities disrupts their lives, and permanently moving people who weren't all that close to Chernobyl was worse for them than leaving them alone would have been. The strongest radioactive material released had a half-life of only eight days, so while a two-week temporary evacuation probably made sense, permanently uprooting the people in the outer perimeter was bad for them, overall.
Anway, let's consider projects that WOULD be good for people. With research, we find that some safety measures are far more effective than others, and some are far more expensive than others:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m...
To save the most lives in total we want to mostly fund projects which save a lot of lives per resource spent (we measure resources in dollars, for convenience).
The J-value used in the nuclear paper takes it a step further by also considering *quality* of life. At Chernobyl, fourteen years after the accident thousands of people were still awaiting the new homes they were promised. Many people would have been better off staying put rather than being forced to leave their communities and spend a decade or more as refugees.
If you want to join the latest American fad and become a mass shooter, you really ought to target a hospice.
None of these people were going to live more than 9 months anyway, so it's no big deal. The authorities should let you off with just a warning.
pittsburgh is looking better all the time
What are you trying to sell us timeshares in Fukushima
For some reason I got to talking with some of my co-workers on the nuclear emergency evacuation plans that get printed in phone books and such. We live near an operating nuclear power plant so I guess plans like this are legally required or something. The area around the reactor was separated into evacuation zones, each zone is supposed to head out away from the power plant to a specified neighboring city.
One of my co-workers mentioned that where we worked was in one zone and where his children went to school was in a different zone. He said they can take their plan and shove it, he's got his own plan. I suspect that he's not unique. If someone were to actually order an evacuation then we'd have chaos as everyone does their own thing. I suspect that the police and National Guard would be called out to maintain some semblance of order but that's just wishful thinking.
We've had evacuations because of floods before and I saw some of the mayhem from a fairly local, and visible, threat. You take an invisible and widespread threat (and quite likely theoretical threat) like a radiation release then all plans will go out the window. You'll have panicked parents punching out police officers at roadblocks so they can get to their children before the school buses them off to somewhere a county away from where the parents are supposed be. That's assuming the police even show up.
But we can't have nuclear power because we have what has been proven to be a non-issue while we keep burning coal, which also creates a much more certain (and again still theoretical) threat to the safety of children.
Oh, and the lack of new nuclear power means we keep operating current nuclear power plants decades beyond their designed lifespan. Fukushima Daiichi would likely have been shutdown 20 years ago if Japan had not stopped building new nuclear power plants.
So, we can do an orderly shutdown of these old nuclear power reactors or wait until we have to do a very disorderly shutdown. We'll have people claim we can replace these nuclear power reactors with wind and solar but how much will that cost? Wind might look cheap until we figure out that all installed capacity is not equal. A nuclear power plant can have a capacity factor of 90% and wind a capacity factor of 30%. You shutdown a one gigawatt nuclear power plant then you'll need three gigawatts of wind capacity and a Tesla PowerWall big enough to run a small city for hours. Money costs lives too, raising energy prices means less money for food, medical care, and so on.
We've known that nuclear power is exceedingly safe. This study of current practice proves that nuclear is even safer than shown before. Maybe there was a good reason to stop building as many nuclear power plants as we did in the 1970s and 1980s. Not building new nuclear power reactors now is just making things worse.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I wonder if there are a lot of moving vehicles within the NFz (Nuclear Fallout Zone)?
In London, as in several other cities, the danger of pedestrians being plowed down by vehicles is real
Jee wis mister wizard, the glorious as holes that built a nuclear site to minimum specâ(TM)s should have their heads hanging the 30 foot wall where 60 foot waves pass by. As for the soulless but whole from Bristol. I thought it was harder to become a professor in the U.K..
I love it when here, on Slashdot, we get these self-serving "anonymous submissions" where some obscure academic pushes their own pet ideas on something or other. It seems to happen once or twice a month anymore.
#DeleteChrome
I'm ordinarily okay with scams preying on ignorance of basic mathematics. Most of them are cons where most of the participants get what their irrational greed has earned them, and the state-run affairs like the lottery at least pour money into schools and -- one hopes -- more people who understand simple statistics. Nuclear accidents, on the other hand, affect those who know better as much as those who don't. Gamma rays will be gamma rays, after all.
When someone says that a population of 30,000 people will lose an average of 9 months of life, that doesn't mean everyone loses 9 months of life evenly. This is an average, and injuries from radiation follow a Gaussian distribution. Half of the population will lose less than 9 months, and half the population will lose more. Some will lose a *lot* more than 9 months of their lives. Many may live out their pre-accident life expectancies but do so with various impairments.
The only reason we're talking about nuclear at this point is that there is a shit ton of money invested in uranium extraction and processing and a handful of companies that stand to make billions off of building and running the plants, never mind the enormous sums that the arms industry makes off of the great powers with their wars to secure supply lines.
It's not because wind and solar aren't well on their way to supplying our needs or that we don't already have current and near-future energy storage technologies to avoid shortfalls. It's because a small number of institutional investors can make an insane amount of money from maintaining the current highly-centralized power generation business model, and there's no danger of fed up consumers cutting some or all of their profits by installing their own household nuclear reactors like there is with solar.
This changes the moment we have practical fusion power, but fission is not only a pointlessly dangerous scam, it's an entirely unnecessary one.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The fact that they are saying nuclear fallout isn't a big deal while air pollution is. I can't laugh hard enough.
Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation.
Performing a life-saving (or avoiding life-shortening) relocation simply on the basis of whether it is "cost-effective" is a disgraceful way for a government or corporation to behave.
Apart from anything else, who would trust a government (even less: a company) to perform that life-long remediation? To keep investing in an area long after the voters have forgotten what happened there. And who is to say that the remediation would not have effects: either inconvenience, suffering or grief for those concerned.
And in any case. We are told that prevention is better then cure
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This report is bullshit, or perhaps the summary of the report failed to summarize it accurately.
Compared to what?
The last time I looked, Harrow, Kensington and Chelsea were all part of London. Perhaps the reason people born in these districts is related to economic circumstances of their lives, not environmental.
But do people in London live longer (more than Blackpool or Manchester) or shorter (4 and a half months) lives?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
So how many feral ghouls are there in London now then?
Researchers themselves, and their families, would of course stay in the zone.
evacuate London as soon as possible.
Never leave home without your radiation suit.
The rents are much more reasonable in a nuclear disaster fallout zone, but it's very hard to get a pint of London Pride bitter.
So it's probably best to stick with London, unless you're a Tory or UKIP nonce, in which case the nuclear disaster fallout zone is a far better choice, since you won't find as many SJWs there and you can be among your own kind. We're offering a free tube of sunscreen if you decide to move. We'll even drive you to the train.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Please stand by while we evaluate if evacuating you from this nuclear disaster area would cost you more or less of your remaining life span.
...regurgitating talking points debunked earlier this week. Although at least this time you're not complaining about the high cost of nuclear power coming from government regulation. Maybe because it was pointed out that a couple hundred million in extra costs from regulation (higher seawall and better backup cooling power) could have saved Japan a couple hundred billion in cleanup costs?
Because the cost can never be justified. Didn't seem to pick up on that one.
Coal and nuclear are non sequiturs when wind and solar have lapped them in cost effectiveness, and thats allowing coal and nuclear to externalize most of their costs. Like offloading nuclear plant decommission and waste storage onto taxpayers.
Living In London As Bad As Living In Nuclear Fallout Zone
Where is the sensationalism when you want it? ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So you might die, and it would cost somebody his bonus to prevent that.
It's the Ford Edsel all over again.
At the bottom of the
At least until cold fusion. Which may never come.
Learn to love Alaska
London is no fit place for humans to live.
Real estate prices would be way lower than London.
I definintely don't trust the official Fukushima radiation numbers, especially as they have been revised upwards, and dramatically, many times. Measurements were being taken at the scale limits of some of the equipment, and some of the radiation monitoring equipment was actually damaged by the radiation, rendering the measutrements inaccurate. Pools of radioactive black dust were found in Tokyo, but officially dismissed. Blue beams resulting from ongoing uncontrolled fission were also sometimes seen by eyewitnesses, but again officially, it never happened. The exposure numbers being referenced for mortality estimates are inevitably for external exposures, and thus greatly underrepresent the effects from actual ingestion of radiation sources. Also even if the official numbers were somehow hypothetically correct, and even if they could have been known at the time, the decision to relocate would have been a necessary precaution anyway, as the uncertainty was still high regarding the possibility of stabilizing the reactors & holding ponds.
I mean I know London is fucked with brexit.... but I didnâ(TM)t know it was THIS FUCKED!
When nuclear power competed against oil and coal, it had an advantage. But now it competes against wind and sun, and costs many times what those other and newer technologies cost. It has lost any advantage it may once have had and no offers only danger on a huge scale. No thanks.
~_~ Not tonight, dear, I have a modem.
But it didn't. So I don't get why you whine about what regulation removal would do to make nuclear cheaper. Oh, hang on, I do. Party politics hippies and lefties like renewables so you hate them.
> The most dangerous material around Chernobyl is Plutonium.
> If it gets into your organism, you most certainly die due to it.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Plutonium is dangerous, and as far as we know it's never killed anyone. It seems that inhaling plutonium dust is more dangerous than ingesting it, because it's suspected that inhaling plutonium increases the risk of lung cancer. Without any known deaths from either it's hard to quantify that, though. There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s. There has not been a single lung cancer among them. Albert Stevens had the highest dose of plutonium ever, having been injected with it in the 1940s. He lived to 79 years old, when he died of heart failure.
> Before someone says it, the initial evacuation could not have been avoided. There was no way to know how bad the situation was going to get.
Did they have to evacuate the entire continent immediately? Obviously no. Was it unavoidable that they evacuate everyone with 500 miles, within 24 hours? Nope, they didn't do that either. 50 miles? 5 miles? 1 mile? It was prudent to temporarily evacuate the people within 2 miles of the plant fairly quickly. Nothing about it was "unavoidable", who to evacuate when, for how long, was all judgement calls based on both safety and PR.
If the answer is no, then I suggest we eject him from the planet to see if he survives in space as statistically long as predicted.
And nope, it's not labelled toxic, it's a pollutant, same as your shit which some bacteria and other microorganisms DO consider food. And which you're full of. retard.
We need a conversation about the value of ONE human life
Or with living under a solar panel. So when you moving to chernobyl, fuckstain?
(oh, by the way, unless you're being told to live in a uranium mine, why the fuck do you demand solar panel proponents live in mines, shitforbrains?)
Perhaps he's getting confused with Polonium?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I believe Professor Thomas would get the heck out of the radiation zone as quickly as possible!
Duh...
People with permanent radiation poisoning can actually get pretty old. It is just not fun at all. If the primary metric is age at time of death, then that metric is spectacularly unsuitable. This looks far more like just one more attempts of the nuclear apologists to demonstrate that nuclear is actually very safe. It is not, at least not as practiced by the greedy scum currently in control of that industry.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Could we compromise and nuke London?
If you never turn on an old diesel generator except when the grid is down and you need lights, it has 100% CF, yet only runs a couple of times a year for a few hours. The USA gets 90% CF from nuclear because they shut them down regularly and do maintenance then, or if there's a non-critical problem, they keep running with the problem until the next downtime schedule, therefore where other countries get 60% CF because they shut down and count that shutdown as unavailable for 20% of the time and don't count scheduled outage as not available. When the USA uses new designs, they don't know when it will need to be taken offline and will take it offline for longer to fix because they don't know how best to fix it, and their CF drops to the 60-70% mark too.
Statistically speaking, we could solve a big part of the climate change problem if we just killed off half of the world's population.
Policies and decision making cannot be based on statistics alone professor.
> The most dangerous material around Chernobyl is Plutonium. > If it gets into your organism, you most certainly die due to it.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Plutonium is dangerous, and as far as we know it's never killed anyone.
The Japanese might not agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Most people don't seem to realize that, but coal plants put out a lot more radiation that operating nuclear plants!
Because natural coal contains quite a few radioactive isotopes, which then goes out the chimneys.
You can literally map cancer rates to the distance from coal plants, most of the time!
Yes, if nuclear plants go bad, they fuck up everything. That's still true.
But coal plants slowly fuck up everything in normal operation!
Alpha radiation exposure from radon gas seeping into apartements and houses is much bigger issue than any other radiation related problem in Finland. Relocation within the country would change the background radiation exposure levels from uranium bearing minerals. Somehow this does not seem to be an issue at al. Any mention of nuclear energy related radiation is a valid reason for panic, at least according to local Green party.
The author of the paper makes sure to mention that up front - it's not meant to be critical of officials at the time. It intended to provide another piece of information that officials can use when considering whether to order an evacuation when something happens in the future. During Hurricane Irma, for example, officials in Florida ordered mandatory evacuations only for the coast, which was the most dangerous place to be. Most of Florida was not evacuated because officials had learned that evacuation orders themselves cause problems and should not be made unnecessarily.
The J-value is a new method pioneered by Professor Thomas that assesses how much should be spent to protect human life and the environment.
The environment is probably a better long term investment than human stupidity. We should split them into two values and weight the environment heavier.
We'll make great pets
I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Of course you don't know everything ahead of time, decision makers make judgement calls based on the available information (and hopefully contingency plans made ahead o time). Judgement calls. Unlike what GP claims, over-reacting is neither required nor particularly frequent. "Limited information" does not mean you must evacuate the whole country, or any specific geographic area.
What we teach mayors, city managers, and other decision makers is that *because* there is limited information available when an incident occurs, and limited time for discussion and deliberation, you'll likely be far better off if you have some template contingency plans in place ahead of, and in many cases it's good for those plans to have degrees or stages. If you're an official in Florida, or anywhere along the east coast, you should have hurricane plans ready BEFORE hurricane season, when you have time to discuss and plan carefully. Those plans should have triggers assigned ahead of time "when a category 3 storm is 300 miles away, activate chapter 4 of this plan". All cities, states, and countries should have generic "evacuate an area" plans, because all may have something happen that requires an evacuation. (We teach disaster preparedness to government officials at TEEX). In our courses, we have the responsible parties practice the plans, then watch themselves on the video and phone recordings and see what they could improve. Most think they passed along information that they never actually said, that's a very common error.
Ten years after Chernobyl, thousands of people who had been forcibly evacuated still didn't have new homes. That's a failure of planning. The government should have had in place plans to be able to house people affected by some sort of emergency.
That some sort of evacuation might be needed in some part of the country was entirely predictable. The failure wasn't caused by lack of information during the event. They had years before and after to figure out how to house people affected by some sort of disaster.
The author is correct if one doesn't take ANY humanity into account. I'm sure it is less disruptive to society for a few families to watch their children slowly die of radiation poisoning. However, I doubt any of those families would agree with the author. Perhaps they should try it themselves?
London Determined to be Just as Bad as Nuclear Disaster Fallout Zone
Has the author ever been to Paris? Now that is a real shit hole.
I wholeheartedly agree, but these are both part and parcel of living in Londinistan.
Go ahead. Give me yet another reason not to visit London. I dare you!
There are stories that Trump doesn't understand nuclear capabilities and actually wanted America do have the biggest and classiest nuclear arsenal ever.
Stories like this would seem to be PR to prep people for possible nuclear devices used on battlefields or even a missile strike.
"Oh, I read on the Slashdot's that nukes aren't any worse than herpes".
And yes, there are people who think "what good are nukes if we don't use them", including, according to reports, Trump.
Most of the radioisotopes from a coal plant are in the bottom ash. Which is only not toxic waste by act of congress. Bottom ash is technically uranium ore, it could be economic to extract.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Based on your post, I don't think you can read.
For comparison, the average Londoner loses four and a half months to air pollution, while the average resident of Manchester lives 3.3 years less than his/her counterpart in Harrow, North London. Meanwhile, boys born in Blackpool lose 8.6 years of life on average compared with those born in London's borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
These comparison statistics are probably largely irrelevant to the main point of the article. They're much more likely to just be a reflection of how decades of London-centric central government policies have resulted in prolonged neglect of the already-poorer provinces of the UK. This neglect has led to increased poverty, poorer public education, health and healthcare standards.
It may indeed be possible to make a case that such environmental and cultural differences are of much greater comparative significance than local radioactive fallout. However, the way they're used in the summary is almost certainly misleading to those unfamiliar with the wealth gap between London and much of the rest of the UK (particularly Scotland and the north of England). A US analogy would be something like directly comparing (e.g.) Detroit to Manhattan.
Just a note about how life expectancy calculations work. I'm 47, my life expectancy now is +9 years higher than it was when I was 10 because of the mass of young men who die young. I've got a fairly simple rule for this sort of guff, does it sound like a good idea? Radiation leak = dangerous = reduce danger by moving people away. Yeah, makes sense vs some guy in the UK came up with an equation that quantifies how many people we should move and places a $ value of life. A whole heap of issues with this.
I'm struck by a couple of points.
1). There's the "Of course this won't affect me" implication by the good Professor;
2). You cannot control where people live in a free society. Are we declaring Martial Law to enforce these J-values now?
3). Living in an urban center has benefits for the citizen, benefits that may make accepting pollution an acceptable tradeoff. I won't address the matter of the citizen shortening their life because I don't think that the average citizen will think in those terms. Now let's get to the real issue here. What, exactly, are the benefits of living in a nuclear contamination zone? Gee, now that we put that on the table, nothing comes to mind;
4). How can the Professor say "Remediation should be the watchword..." without quantifying the radiation exposure? Which depends on the size of the spill, the weather patterns, and the specific radioactive contaminants?
Yeah, how about you stay in the contamination zone, Professor! Anyone who has a choice might decide that their control over their circumstances is more important than your J-values.
The real problem is not how to manage life expectancy in the event of an accident. The real problem is the fact that living in post modern industrialized cities is killing us.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
"We don't want to relocate poor people who live in areas we screwed up." Film at 11.
Your assertion is blatantly false.
https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/atomic-accidents
Living in London is no better than living in a nuclear disaster fallout zone?
This is one of the most infuriating topics for me...
I have always felt that to choose the lesser of two evils is truly akin to simply choosing evil; This is a perfect example of a lack of creativity.
Its sheer madness to say "Oh hey, its going to be too much work to deal with moving people out of an unsafe place because it is now contaminated with radiologicals so lets just clean up while people live there, it'll be fiiiiiine"
I mean, how about just not with the nuclear stuff already... If its deadly and it takes thousands of years in some cases to neutralize itself and the for-profit organizations that run them cut corners.... .... The whole thing is a recipe for catastrophe of truly biblical proportions!
If you have a solution for a problem which requires a relatively huge amount of planning and then ongoing oversight just to ensure it cant see open air, let alone the rest of it all... and then have this be maintained by a system which by its very operation creates potential for catastrophic failure, in some cases on a global scale. I would say you were a psychopath.
So if you're asking the question "Should we evacuate people in the face of toxic radiological fallout... think of the stress it will cause them..... And the cost... Ahem" Perhaps we should be thinking about a solution which doesn't present the risk for annihilating the planet as a side effect.
How about a solution which helps to promote and foster life on this planet as a side effect?
We are not simply individuals, we are members of a species. Our species exists within a window in time wherein we have the unprecedented capability of deciding when said window will close. Presently we have institutional systems on a global scale which work against not only our survival but that of every species on this planet. Like the mouse who chooses heroin over food until it starves to death we are misguided in our global efforts.