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Hi Neil,
First of all, I must agree with you on the original coverage and admit that I do not have statistics on the kind of coverage the disaster received in the US then and the kind of coverage it's getting now.
I do remember the news reports at the time, but it has been virtually forgotten here in Canada.
In fact, if you talk to young people here who were either very young when it happened or born shortly after, most of them know nothing about the Chernobyl disaster.
I am not opposed to nuclear power. In fact, I'm quite a strong advocate of it, as it has a much lower environmental impact than say, damming up a river and flooding thousands of acres of wilderness for hydro, or burning coal to create power.
As long as the systems are properly designed AND the waste is properly disposed of, nuclear power is very efficient and clean.
The problem that needs to be remembered from Chernobyl was not caused by a technical flaw, but by human error. There IS no room for error with nuclear power. Chernobyl has shown us how devastating the consequences of a mistake can be. If that had happened in a more densely populated area, it is mind boggling to think about how great the disaster would have been.
We don't need to fight against nuclear power, but we must not become complacent about it. Indeed, we DO have the technology to safely and cleanly generate nuclear power, with built-in safeguards to prevent inevitable human error from causing a disaster like Chernobyl or worse.
However, we ALSO know that cheating and shortcuts are things that are all too common in the business world, today, and that COULD include nuclear power plants, unless we, the people who vote, continue to remind our political leaders that we want an uncompromised system in place to make sure that sites that have the potential to cause massive destruction ARE built the way they are supposed to be built.
God bless,
Dave
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