The only thing that makes sense is that they honestly DO believe a big pile of money will save them. Their big pile of money has been getting them out of trouble their whole lives, why would they expect it to all of a sudden stop working in this case? They’re wrong, but they don’t know that (yet).

Wow. Well fucking said, my friend. You are absolutely right.

a nature preserve with fancy radiaton-eating mushrooms, to boot! (the jury is still techinically out on whether or not they are “eating” it, but in the immortal words of Fox Mulder, I want to believe)

Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we’d be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we’d have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I’d read the heck out of it.