Comment by ba1afd89f34cb23
12 hours ago
I think this is spot on. It is not rational, but it's deeply rooted. I vividly remember the children's TV explaining nuclear chain reactions, what happened in Chernobyl, and why kids couldn't play in sandboxes on the playground anymore for a while. Die Sendung mit der Maus had a whole segment with ping pong balls on mousetraps, setting one off, and that cascading into hundreds of mousetraps shooting the balls everywhere. Much like middle-aged American adults in 20 years are going to remember Sesame Street having very special episodes about Katrina or 9/11, middle-aged Germans remember a very fearful time around a nuclear disaster that happened close enough to home that it impacted them - fortunately not in a truly disastrous way. And that has an impact on public opinion, emotionally.
This rare events with significnt impact on many people, like nuclear accidents, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, are always good source of drama for movies.
In case of Chernobyl, the worst case estimates are 4000 excess deaths. In comparison, about the same number of excess deaths is from coal burning in Germany each year.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373512769_Environme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Because coal burning is happening for decades and is not one time rare event it doesn't get the attention it deserves.
And also many organization demonizing nuclear energy do it, because they see a source of plutonium for nuclear weapons in each civilian nuclear reactor and each country running civilian nuclear reactors as a country on the brink of having nuclear weapons.