Guest Post by Craig Schumacher. Craig has been commenting on nuclear power themed websites for about five years and has published his own blog, Channelling the Strong Force, since 2008. He formed the nuclear power advocacy organisation, Nucleus 92 Inc., in 2009. He is a regular commenter on this and other pro-nuclear sites under the nom de plume of Finrod.
Terror stalks the nation. Death; mysterious, invisible, and ineluctable to any who ignore the warning to flee from this killer haunts the suburbs and the villages, the apartment blocks and farmhouses, cowing folk high or humble, man, woman and child. All are fearful but the very young, so parents drill the message into children as soon as they are able to understand. No loving parent wants their child’s life cut short by misuse of this perilous technology.
Bar diagram for comparing risks. Length of bar is LLE. Asterisk designates average risk spread over total U.S. population; others refer to risks of those exposed or participating.
It was introduced recently, in historical terms. It was just one of a number of new technologies to arrive after the war when the great modernisation of all aspects of life began under the guidance of the government. No-one knew at first what a cuckoo had been put in the nest, what a deadly threat had been unknowingly foisted onto the people in this heedless rush into the future, but it emerged soon enough, and the terror began. Now the nation is fully aware of the danger. The trouble is the technology is just so darned useful that people won’t give it up, even though it holds such risk. Lets face it. Summers are hot, and who wants be without their electric fan? Not everyone has air-conditioning, and electric fans are cheap when you need to cool down.
I am referring, of course, to the well-known phenomenon of fan death. According to some, death will often ensue when an electric fan has been left running in a sealed room in which people are sleeping. This peculiar belief is widespread in the nation of South Korea, and nowhere else. The South Korean media occasionally runs stories about people who have been found dead in their bedrooms or apartments when an electric fan has been left running during hot weather. In any other nation in the world, those deaths would likely be listed as resulting from heat exhaustion, or indirectly from heat stress on an elderly person. In South Korea, however, no-one is in any doubt that insidious fan death has struck again.
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