Comment Re:I call Band-Aid (Score 1) 184
Don't bring Chernobyl into this. The Chernobyl reactor design was considered unsafe fifty years and three design generations ago, and nobody in the West was building those designs even then. What caused the disaster was that the managers decided to remove multiple layers of safety devices and controls to run unscheduled and unapproved tests, and when the plant caught fire, the response teams had no protective gear, and little equipment to put the fire out. Had the same disaster occurred in the West (assuming that the NRC had approved a basically unsafe reactor design in the first place), the personnel and equipment available to the response personnel would have allowed them to put the fire out without the huge radiation dispersal that occurred at Chernobyl. Additionally, were you to visit the area today, you would see that the area has recovered from what damage was done, and that the local flora and fauna have long since returned to their original state (no more mutant trees or critters than could be statistically expected in most of the world).
If I said something empirically wrong, please provide references to research from reputable sources (such as UN science groups) based directly on data.