paulsol wrote:
Quote:
You write about dying alone while you lungs melt, but you're not making an appeal to emotion?
No. Its a reality. Its REAL.
Which does not change the fact that you're making an appeal to emotion. When you start talking about children born without limbs, and brains outside their heads, and dying lonely and alone from having your lungs melt, you are making an appeal to emotion.
If you want to make a non-emotional argument, try comparing the health costs of nuclear power per unit of energy generated over the last half century to the other predominant alternative: coal. How many people die every year from direct coal related illnesses? How many people have their health adversely affected in less direct ways from coal use (air pollution is kinda always there, right)? How many people die in various accidents? Compare the numbers.
The unemotional assessment would show you that people only die from nuclear power as a result of some form of accident. They die from normal coal power all the time. A statistical percentage of coal miners die every year, not just from accidents, but simply from the environment they work in. A statistical percentage of people working at or near the plants die of various lung illnesses every year. Again, not just in accidents but from the materials and environment they work in. A statistically measurable increase in a number of illnesses is introduced into the population every year as a result of coal power generation.
Want to compare the rate of illness among workers at nuclear plants to coal plants? Want to compare the rates at the mines? Want to compare the rates along both their respective process paths from raw ore to power generation? Because that's what you'd do if you were making a non-emotional assessment of the two power types. And just to remind you again, the population as a whole is absolutely not affected at all by nuclear power, while they are constantly being poisoned a tiny bit each day from coal.
Edited, Mar 15th 2011 7:24pm by gbaji