The trick that any right thinking person learns during the formative years is to use those accidents and see where you went wrong and ensure that you don't do what you did before. You learn from your mistakes in other words - the end result is that you are able to walk, run, talk and not bumble around making random noises while falling on your face.
With the unfolding events after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the possibility of a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant, the tree-huggers are having an emotional meltdown as well.
Earthlife Africa is 'horrified' and immediately compares this disaster to Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Paks.
Courtesy of Wikipedia we can safely say that they do not bear any relation to each other. Chernobyl in 1986 was caused by inadequate training combined with human error and an unsafe design which was recognised as being out of date at the time it was built. The Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979 was also caused by flawed design and human error, with minor effects on the surrounding area and it was mostly contained.
The two incidents at Paks in Hungary does not have any reported effects on the operators or the surrounding towns, and it is still operating as we speak, a non event it seems. We seem to have learned a few things since 1979 and the mistakes of yesterday may just be making a difference today.
What happened in Japan then, was not caused by human error or a flawed design, but the same mother nature that the tree-huggers are so in love with, fucking with us.
The design withstood the type of disaster that it was designed for, the tsunami caused additional problems which we are sure will be taken into account when building future power plants.
If we stopped designing or building or inventing each time that something bad happened which was not foreseen, there would have been very little advancement in the history of mankind.
Imagine the inventor of the internal combustion engine being 'horrified' when the first car accident happened and everyone stopped designing? We would still be traveling at 4 miles an hour with a person walking in front of the car waving a red flag to warn people.
Because of an accident we cannot say that we should not be investigating and pushing the boundaries, if we knew exactly what we were doing, would we be doing it at all?
Christiaan Barnard took huge risks when he did the first heart transplant, a procedure that is almost routine today, but he unfortunately caused the death of his test subjects before he tried the first human.
Should we not take any risks at all? Should we not push the boundaries of knowledge and science because of risks involved?
If we are too afraid of adverse results and end up doing nothing, the result would be no advancement in knowledge or humanity, and we may as well return to living in caves and eating fruit, because inventing the first flint knife may have unforeseen results.
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