Love this part

“It’s almost unbelievable that we entrust ourselves - squishy, sometimes hapless bags of water, meat, and bones - to navigate protocols of such profound complexity needed to safely take advantage of radioactive materials.”

Maybe it’s just me but I feel like that all the time, not specifically about radioactive stuff, but about other highly complex and regulated environments where a simple mistake can have catastrophic consequences. As an example, just look at how the aerospace industry operates, there are so many talented scientists and engineers working in every aspect and yet many incidents take place every year due to trivial human errors, from pilots misunderstanding something to technicians not tightening a bolt enough.

Of course it’s not like we can trust anything (anyone?) else other than other humans to do this stuff, but it blows my mind how easily we forget about it.