• ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Three mile island isn’t comparable to Chernobyl, particularly not in the context of how it impacts a nations stability.

      Chernobyl cost around $900 billion, inflation adjusted, and the cost is rising because it’s controlled, not resolved.

      Adjusted for inflation, three mile island cost around $5 billion.

      To put it in scale, it’d be like the US having a disaster that cost around $7.5 trillion to resolve today. It’s the type of economic shock that can make nations fail.

      Bhopal, while a terrible disaster, cost the US nothing beyond the cost of not extraditing someone.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      A poof of radioactive steam got loose at Three Mile Island. To this day, no studies have found a correlation of higher cancer rates, neither among the people on the ground, nor among the people living in the area. And no one was hurt on Day 1.

      Know why the incident is top of mind for folks thinking on nuclear disasters? The China Syndrome, a movie about a catastrophic plant meltdown came out less than 3 weeks before. People shit kittens. I was only 8, but I still remember the panic.

    • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      These incidents were decades ago. Awful, but as such don’t parallel the relationship between Chernobyl and the collapse of the USSR.