Humanity's relationship with nuclear power is perfectly analogised in Game of Thrones, and Danaerys Targaryen's relationship with her dragon; it's a potentially game-changing force once you harness it's power, but prone to really messing things up on a massive scale if left unchecked. When nuclear power works, it works nicely, producing virtually no carbon emissions, more energy than the more common coal or natural gas plants, and only a handful of waste, which gets placed in radiation-proof containers and hidden away (somewhere safe, we're told). Of course, things can go very wrong with nuclear reactors. As we witnessed with Chernobyl and Fukushima, large-scale leaks of nuclear waste can create widespread, long-term damage to people - we still don't know the total number of people affected by Chernobyl back in 1986. In the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humanity appeared to come to a mutual understanding that it's not cool to drop weapons of this sort on people (napalm, apparently, was fair enough). Its way of achieving this? Make hundreds upon hundreds of nuclear weapons, because if everyone's pointing them at each other, then no one will want to fire them. And so we arrive in today's global political climate of today, in which any interaction between world powers is underlaid with the threat of nuclear apocalypse. Great though nuclear power may be, the margin for error with it isn't terribly wide. And if there's one thing we're learning from this list it's that humanity's pretty error-prone...
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
