> The point is that any humane evacuation plan should have been based on
> _the distinct possibility of the worst case scenario, from Day 1,
> whether or not it will come true_. Those who said that wasn't
> necessary were committing a crime of exposing people to great risk,
> the risk to which they do not -- nor would they ever willingly --
> subject themselves.
On the off chance that my earlier reference to the half-life of U-235 was mis-taken as cheap hystericizing or dopey moralizing, let me elaborate and sharpen the point. I submit that there is no honest way to "calculate" risks associated with time frames of even thousands of years, let alone 10s or 100s of millions; to suppose that one even knows how to coherently formulate the question with any concrete content, let alone answer it, seems delusional. Even the notion of "worst case" simply falls away as meaningless. Note that I'm talking about *real years*, not an abstract mathematical quantity: real, historical years, in each passing moment of which the course of the future - including the outcomes of biological adaptation, let alone fleeting little things like social forms - becomes geometrically more uncertain and unpredictable. Actuarial my ass. 700 million fucking years. You can't even count that in any meaningful sense, let alone "take it into account" in order to know whose future you're condemning, and in what ways.
You can, of course, go ahead and extract nuclear power from the Earth, try to dodge the consequences for yourself and your family, cobble together some pretty tables, and craft some talking points that enough people might find plausible enough for long enough that they don't come and gut you like a fish for turning their children into diseased, miserable mutants. But don't think for a second that you've actually provided a *justification* of something for the potential consequences of which you can't even formulate categories - at least not with any confidence that they have intercourse with reality.