Where do we put the waste from fossil fuels? Remember, a lot of those byproducts are toxic or carcinogenic, too. But we just pump them into the atmosphere.

Fossil fuels make a lot of moderately deadly waste that just goes everywhere. Nuclear power makes a little waste, which is admittedly very deadly, but we know exactly where it is. So far as storing it, the only reason it's a problem at all is that we're so scared of radioactive waste that we end initiatives to safely store it. How sick is that? If we had Yucca Mountain, we could stop storing nuclear waste at the plants and put it out in the middle of Fuckall Nevada under a mountain! How much safer can you get?

Wikipedia says that an estimated 520 tons of radioactive water were dumped into the sea. That rounds out to a shade under 60,000 gallons of water. Compare that to the volume of the whole Pacific Ocean (174400000000000000000 gallons) and you start to see just how minor the release was in the grand scheme of things. Just to really show the difference, if we use the same ratio in terms of distance and make the Fukushima release as the height of a common housefly, then the Pacific Ocean is a trip to Pluto, halfway back, and a bit more besides.

Hey, now there's an idea- the workers at backbone stations take a global week-long break and let the chips fall as they will. See if they figure out the real owners then.

Better for smartphones, honestly. God, that was an absolute mess on my Droid3. Couldn't fit all five fingers on there at once, and even then, it didn't like multitouch at all. Still, I liked it a lot.

Oh yeah, the CSB has some great videos. I haven't watched "Half Hour to Tragedy", though. The CSB site is full of accidents people should have seen coming.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9W164GvlYs

I'm not even around guns, and I want to buy one of these now.

True. However, consider the potential negative effects of improper laboratory sterilization procedures. Ebola Reston, anyone?

We shouldn't rely on accidents to get work done. If it happens, great. But more often than not, the most good that'll come out of an accident is your smoldering corpse being used as a case study in industrial safety.

You missed the point. Yes, there are accidents, but there are no freak accidents. Phobos-Grunt falling out of the sky, Columbia, Challenger, the Mars Climate Orbiter- all of these can be traced back to a human either screwing up or missing a screw-up. In other words, all preventable. In the case of Columbia and Challenger, we knew that the orbiters suffered from these problems and knew they could cause exactly what happened to each of them- and yet, we ignored it.

Perhaps, but NASA did know about the foam strike within 2 hours of launch. They didn't know the extent of the damage, but they did now that a piece of foam had struck the orbiter. Quoth Wikipedia:

Not every accident has lethal or even serious consequences. Those that do, however, should be accounted for. Should we launch rockets without any QA because hey, shit happens?

The ultimate test of safety: Knowing everything you know about it, would you ride it? If not, why?

If your vehicle fails this test and you let it fly, you should be held accountable for whatever human and material costs are incurred as a result of it.

No, it's not an accident. Both you and I were distracted while we should have been focused on walking. Every failure can be traced back to a human at some point in the line.

When the complaint is theoretical, yeah sure. When your engineers are complaining about frozen O-rings and are showing you video of O-rings spitting fire, or when your engineers are complaining about foam shedding from the fuel tank and have numerous videos of that exact occurrence happening, that's different.

There's no such thing as an accident. Everything has a cause. Unshielded electronics that shorts out in LEO? Not an accident. Mistake kilometers for miles and crash your probe into Mars? Not an accident. Lightning strike on takeoff? Not an accident- weather guy should have done his job. Launching your vehicle when it's so cold your O-rings get brittle and burn through the supports for your SRB? Not an accident. Foam-strike on liftoff that punches through the wing and causes the vehicle to break up on re-entry, when such foam strikes had been documented before? Not an accident.

The blame falls on the engineers- until the engineers raise a fuss and the management ignores it. Someone is always accountable. Always.

Maybe not an outright apology, but not saying "HE WAS A SODOMITE HE DESERVED EVERYTHING HE GOT". They admit that he was treated cruelly, but he was guilty of the crime he was accused of. They didn't pardon him so it would stay there, to show them that yes, they did do things like this, and to remind them not to do it again.

Plus, the Prime Minister said this:

So there's your apology.