If we had kept up the pace of nuclear construction, we would have finished decarbonizing our electric grid by now. Instead, we've barely started. Was it worth the extra 100Gt of CO2 in the atmosphere?
People clearly prefer slow silent mass death (and messing up world for good for grandchildren) over few-per-century bigger accidents (when literally everybody in the world takes notes and massively improves).
Similar to car massive amount of death (not even going into secondary and tertiary effects) and nobody bats an eye, even if they know personally somebody who died like that. Yet every single plane crash and tons of folks are getting panic attacks.
Human psychology fascinates me, but at the same time makes me outright sad. So much potential often wasted on utter stupidities, and even worse - its trivial for skilled people to manipulate masses into literally shooting off their own feet with 12 gauge shotgun buckshot, just play the fear tune well enough for long enough.
I think you're right to be sad about it, and I would add "deeply concerned" as well. Our society is at a point where the most dangerous risks are ones that the human mind is pretty bad at reasoning about. That's a big problem, to put it mildly.
Climate change, nuclear weapons, bio threats, and runaway AI all pose immense risks, at scales that are hard to reason about intuitively. Hopefully we develop ways to better manage current and future risks before a big one blows up.
Yes. Extra CO2 and global warming is far less likely to scuttle your reelection attempts, and voter deaths don't matter if they're diffuse enough no-one will point their finger at you.
