alt Hacker News> Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.
Not even that, they simply didn’t know because they couldn’t measure, so they took a conservative approach.
Btw you can count me in to the cabal of anti-nuclear activists. Humans simply are too greedy and incompetent to manage the technology responsibly over the long term. We’ve already irreversibly altered the biosphere with the nuclear activity we’ve engaged in so far. Time for it to stop.
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The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another.
Global CO2 emissions would be drastically lower if people hadn't opposed nuclear energy so irrationally. No other technology can produce 1.2GW of zero CO2 electricity anywhere you want.
Your not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity, instead opting for less-scary-but-worse alternatives like coal, oil and gas.