On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Eugene Salamin wrote:
This little chuckle pales in comparison to the damage done by the pervasive belief that nuclear power is unsafe, or that human activity is casusing global temperatures increases. Explain this last point to the people in Quebec City. It's -50 and the laughter may help warm them.
I well remember being in England about 20 years ago when the whole of Western Europe was suddenly very much concerned at the rapid rise in radioactivity that we later learned was the result of an accident at Chernobyl in Russia (but now Ukraine once again). The concern was amply justified, since many thousands of people in the Ukraine have died as a consequence, and very many more, all over Europe, would have done so had a few dozen volunteers (unwittingly) sacrificed their lives in order to save us. Conservatives usually pride themselves on being hard-headed, but surely the hard-headed view here is that cock-ups will always be with us, since what's not impossible will, with probability one, ultimately happen, So we are assured that such accidents will happen again, and some of them will be worse than the Chernobyl one. You don't have to get much worse for it to become pretty awful! John Conway